The work presages much of what’s to come in “The Milk of Dreams”: a revaluation of Indigenous and syncretic cosmologies over Enlightenment paradigms of knowledge production a recursive treatment of art history (especially in the five thematic “time capsule” rooms scattered through the Giardini and the Arsenale) a pluralistic and affirmative feminist politics reflective of the show’s unprecedented demographics (with more than 90 percent of the included artists identifying as female or nonbinary) an aesthetic embrace of Surrealism and magic befitting Silvia Federici’s call for a “re-enchantment of the world” against the spiritual privations of capitalism and an ethos of “symbiosis, solidarity, and sisterhood” across national, identitarian, and speciational divisions. The print, the wall text tells us, was a gift to the ceramicist Stellana Favaro Poletti, who hosted Ayón in Italy when she exhibited at the 1993 Biennale its back is inscribed with a dedication: To Stellana with much love and gratitude. She cradles a sacrificial goat in the icon-like Sin título (Sikán con chivo) (Untitled ), 1993, her big bright eyes meeting our gaze.
Sikán appears in a number of Ayón’s collagraphs, sometimes as a black figure, sometimes white, often armored in fish scales. From “The Milk of Dreams.” © Belkis Ayón Estate, Havana, Cuba. (Ayón’s own story also ends tragically, with the artist’s mysterious 1999 suicide.)īelkis Ayón, Sin título (Sikán con chivo) (Untitled ), 1993, collograph on paper, 34 7⁄8 × 27 1⁄2". Her Promethean crime was punished by death. In defiance of her father, she disclosed these secrets to her lover, said to be the prince of a rival kingdom.
While collecting river water, the princess Sikán captured in her vessel a sacred talking fish that revealed to her ancestral wisdom reserved for men. A self-described atheist, Ayón devoted her oeuvre to interpreting the mysteries and rituals of Abakuá, an Afro-Cuban initiatory fraternity whose core legend concerns a woman who, much like Ayón herself, appropriated and redistributed patriarchal knowledge. In the rotunda entrance to the Arsenale, Golden Lion winner Simone Leigh’s sightless Brick House, 2019, part female figure, part architectural envelope, is encircled by the gorgonizing black-and-white collagraphs of the late Cuban printmaker Belkis Ayón.
A poem for my daughter plaster art 1950 free#
Filled with disobedient children, deviant friendships, orphaned monsters, evil crones, sentient meat, hungry furniture, misplaced heads, scatological warfare, and pharmacological magic, Carrington’s stories struck curator Cecilia Alemani for their construction of what she describes as “a world free of hierarchies, where everyone can become something else.” Alemani endeavored to create something like this world in her beautiful and perturbing exhibition, and to a great degree she has succeeded. PAINTED IN THE 1950S on the walls of her sons’ bedroom and later collected in a children’s book called The Milk of Dreams, Leonora Carrington’s wicked fairy tales inspired the title and tenor of the Fifty-Ninth Venice Biennale. The child was even nastier than he was before because he could go everywhere with the crocodile. Humbert and the crocodile had become friends. “AI” yelled Humbert, “I’m afraid there’s a crocodile in my bed!”īut Humbert was so beautiful the crocodile gave him an agreeable smile. One day, Rose, his sister, put a crocodile in his bed. He liked putting rats in the beds of his sisters. Humbert was the most beautiful boy in the town. From “The Milk of Dreams.” Photo: Roberto Marossi. Installation view, Arsenale, Venice, 2022.
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