Approaching the airport in Treviso, I already saw the completely melted glaciers in the Alps and had read about severe drought in northern Italy, the worst in 70 years, which emptied out the riverbed of Po. I was also aware of the inevitable irony of the fact that I’m worrying about it sitting on a plane from Kraków to Treviso – a distance which, however, would take at least 2 days to cross for someone like me, who does not possess a private car (and has never possessed it). I was also coming almost straight from our permaculture garden, which proves more resilient to a structural drought we’ve been experiencing in our region for at least the last 7-8 years than the average food producing plots in our area, but where acute imbalances in water management are felt dramatically. I was born and raised in the mountains, and when I compare what I’m seeing around with what I remember from 30 years ago (especially in our mountainous coniferous forests), I’m almost shivering with the whole range of emotions.

Venice Art Biennial like no other

So entering 2022 Venice Art Biennial I was still under impressions left by the images seen from the above and all the news about drought emergency in the basin of the Po river. It certainly has influenced my perception of the massive art exhibition that for the last decade is a staple on my calendar (along with, since recently, Architecture Biennial). The reviews I’ve read were all very favourable, albeit they seemed slightly repetitive in almost univocal appreciation of Cecilia Alemani’s curatorial concept, based on the title of the book by Leonora Carrington and venturing into the phantasmagoric and magical world of imagination, as conveyed by the broadly defined surrealism. This year, however, I wanted to appreciate both the city (so dear to anyone who looks for the alternatives to a car-based culture) and the lagoon (to me Venice is never separate from the lagoon), and the biennial itself. Not an easy feat though, considering how massive the event usually is and how tempting the wild beaches on the Isola di Pellestrina proved to be in the past.

One of the most precious lessons that covid taught me is: take it easy and don’t rush. I was late on a bandwagon, having succumbed to it a couple of weeks ago for the full 7 days when I was completely unable to do anything else than just completely give in. So this year’s Art Biennial experience was radically different – rather than striving to see as much as I was able, I was picking and choosing (which is why I didn’t see neither one of other stellar shows on a display at the time: Anish Kapoor at Gallerie di Academia and Pallazzo Manfrin nor Anselm Kiefer at Palazzo Ducale. The latter presented considerable scheduling challenges, being displayed at THE Venice landmark venue and I was visiting during a peak season. Luckily, I’ve already seen a major (and really captivating) Bruce Nauman’s retrospective at Punta Della Dogana while visiting for the Architecture Biennial in 2021. Neither was I aiming at visiting all the national pavilions in Giardini or Arsenale. I also closely monitored any signs of being mentally, cognitively or emotionally exhausted, even though I must at the same admit that I often seek to enter this special, trance-like state of mind induced by experiencing the art for 7-8 hours a day, a couple of days in a row. But this year my energy resources seemed depleted and fragile.

I’m offering such a broad context for my draft impressions below to better ground my particular perspective, far from seemingly univocal appreciation and delight. I couldn’t escape a considerable doubts in regard to the curatorial concept offered in the times of major upheavals, social and ecological disasters, all the trauma brought by almost 3 years of the pandemic and almost half a year of Russian aggression that spilled over to other countries of the region, where we feel all the dread of the cruelty of war on a daily basis, with every post in a numerous Facebook groups asking for help and support to Ukrainian war refugees (more than 2 million in Poland). Is seeking the (safe) heaven in the imaginary a proper gesture in such challenging times? Does it really offer relief or does it rather taste like an ultimate act of major hypocrisy of the artworld? I couldn’t shake off similar questions popping now and then, while I was coursing the Biennial premises.

And I don’t have any clear answers. For being able to walk for hours among artworks produced by overwhelmingly women-identifying artists was such a treat in itself; especially when seeing the latest (and last) works by a late Portuguese artist Paula Rego, who didn’t live to see her contribution. Her series Seven Deadly Sins (2019) is particularly touching in the times when women’s reproductive rights seem to be under constant attack on a daily basis, pretty much everywhere in the world. The combination of the pandemic, Brexit, and flight cancellations barred me from seeing her major retrospective at Tate Britain last year. An artist whose series of 10 paintings, Untitled: The Abortion Panels (July 1998 – February 1999), is credited with influencing the public opinion in Portugal to the extent that legalizing abortion became possible. After the referendum in 2007 had decided on liberalisation of abortion law, women’s reproductive rights have been finally secured in Portugal. So it is within such a broader context that I see Rego’s dark and at times even grotesque imagery as a sign of hope – much needed these days when women’s rights (especially the right to safe abortion) are under assault worldwide and on a daily basis.

I would like to start nevertheless with all the delights, inspirations and pleasures of venturing into the area of “fortuitous finds”, to borrow the phrase from Siegfried Zielinski’s Deep Time of the Media. For 2022 Venice Art Biennial has demonstrated how much of a creative potential could have been wasted, if it wasn’t for so many efforts to bring to spotlight works and activities that at the time of their production were either considered not art, or located at the margins of the artworld (not surprisingly, overwhelming majority of those cases were / are women, LGBTQ+, and indigenous artists – and it’s worth keeping in mind that all those categories should be seen as arbitrary, unstable and contested). Even if such a perspective generates some problems in itself (and I’ll write about it next) and may result in exoticisation of the margins, delving into multitude of global imagination liberated from the established lines of interpretation of what constitutes the work of art is very refreshing and beneficial.

I brought a notebook full of handwritten notes on the particular artists I would like to continue to discover for myself, but here I’m going to focus on some broader tendencies, perspective shifts or narrative threads that proved to be generative and inspire further research.

Discoveries

Discovery no. 1

The confluence of pre-digital art and textile art. By no means a new topic, especially after the seminal retrospective of Anni Albers at the Tate Modern in 2018-2019. Here it constituted a visible thread running through entire exhibition and offering a very interesting and fresh feminist perspective on both the history of computer art and all the ambiguities of post-digital repositioning of the material and the computable. If you add the observation that textile work is a significant part of Indigenous art in many places of the world, shift in the perspective gets even deeper and more generative of follow-up research. It still gets further problematized by the fact that, for example, in Sámi art the category of duodji (very roughly, equivalent of Western crafts) does not fall into a binary division separating art and craftsmanship, instituted by the European modern art (more on the history of this division: Carolyn Korsmeyer, Gender and Aesthetics. An Introduction, New York: Routledge, 2004). It is wonderfully demonstrated by a Sámi artist, Britta Marakatt-Labba, whose intricate, hauntingly beautiful embroided landscapes are on display in the main pavilion in Giardini. Textile work is also often a form of activism: both to Marakatt-Labba, (whose works I’ve seen for the first time in a gallery in one of the Swedish Sapmi’s town’s galleries – either Gallivare, or Kiruna – around 2012 and have become impressed ever since) and to Charlotte Johannesson, an autodidact textile artist, a programmer and a digital art pioneer, who together with her husband, Sture Johannesson established in 1966 a gallery called Cannabis and in the 80s the platform for early experiments with the digital technology, Digitalteatern (Digital Theatre). Britta Marakatt-Labba-Labba belongs to a generation of Sami activists who protested against the hydropower plant by Alta River in the 1970s and she interestingly sums up her work as “embroidering resistance art”. The theme of weaving can be also found (albeit more implicitly) in Akosua Adoma Owusu’s video art, Kwaku Ananse. A Ghanaian-American cinematographer and producer presents a female protagonist in search of her deceased’s father spirit. In the process, she also finds out how weaving the new knowledge patterns based on the old layers of memory is crucial for the ability to move forward. Granted, there are also the more obvious examples, such as Rosemarie Trockel’s automated “knitting-machines”, and equally obvious larger thematic clusters, such as the whole section dedicated to the figure of cyborg, but the confluence outlined here has really captivated may attention and I am going to expand it at some point into a longer and fully developed writing. There are also embroideries that incorporate troubled and messed up materiality of storytelling, such as Violetta Parra‘s arpilleras, but here again I’m making a note to myself to do more research around a Chilean artist / singer-songwriter and her artworks.

…to be continued.