Venice Biennale – A Spotlight on Women and Non-Western Artists

Female artists outnumber male artists at the 59th edition of the Venice Biennale – but not everyone's happy about it.

Installation view at The Arsenale at the Venice Biennale. Image © James Ritchie

For the first time in the history of the most prestigious art event on the planet, female artists outnumber male artists, and in the international pavilions, the ratio is as high as 9 to one.

This one-sidedness has provoked anger among many critics including the influential Jackie Wullschläger from the Financial Times, who described the positive discrimination shown to female artists as “absurdly gender-unbalanced”. Such criticism has not phased the curator of this year’s edition, Cecilia Alemani, who points out: “for the first 100 years of this celebrated institution, the percentage of women artists in the show was less than 10%, and in the last 20 years, it was around 30%”. As she goes on to make clear, it’s striking that the people now complaining have never found the male dominance of previous editions so shocking.

The Italian-born Alemani, has created a captivating, surreal and often unsettling exhibition, yet despite the visually compelling nature of this delayed edition, recent media headlines have focused almost solely on the gender imbalance and its strongly non-western line up of artists.

Installation view at The Arsenale at the Venice Biennale. Image © James Ritchie

In the British pavilion in the Giardini, built in 1912, no black female artist has ever had the chance to participate until now. Perhaps appropriately in that case, Sonia Boyce’s pavilion won the coveted Golden Lion for her exploration of the extraordinary imaginative and creative potential of the human voice, featuring five black singers (including Tanita Tikaram).

Nearby in the US pavilion, which was built a little later in 1932, Simone Leigh also became the first black women to represented her country at Venice. And in Alemani’s international pavilion, just a short walk from the national pavilions, no male artists feature in the exhibition at all. “The world is awakening and realising that it is finally time,” said Alemani, speaking about the need to decenter the western, usually white male perspective, “but we need to go beyond the shock and use this time to reflect on the past and reinterpret history.”

On top of the gender rebalancing, one other notable aspect of the 59th Venice Art Biennale is the inactivity in the Russian pavilion. It stands empty and closed after the Russian artists scheduled to exhibit there refused to participate. Yet despite the war and all the horror emerging from Ukraine in the wake of the invasion on 24 February, the Ukrainian delegation managed to fill their official pavilion in the old naval dockyards of the nearby Arsenale.

At the Scuola Grande della Misericordia on the 21st of April, President Volodymyr Zelensky – “Support this fight with your art” – made a rousing speech which was live-streamed to a packed room at the opening of the exhibition “This is Ukraine: Defending Freedom”.

Installation view at The Arsenale at the Venice Biennale. Image © James Ritches

The title of this year’s edition of the Biennale, “The Milk of Dreams” was taken from a book by Leonora Carrington, the English Surrealist. It is charged with biomorphic and hybrid creatures including the green spectral figures of Sandra Mujinga (pictured above) and monumental woven sculptures of Mrinalini Mukherjee. Ultimately the exhibition intends to reconsider our anthropocentric relationship with the world and to celebrate a different relationship with the planet, nature and different species.

The remaining Palazzos of Venice, were mainly dominated by the large solo male shows including Anselm Kiefer at the Doge’s Palace and Anish Kapoor at the Accademia. Bruce Nauman, a former Golden Lion-winner, was honoured with a solo show at the Punta Della Dogana, and there were also shows by Markus Lüpertz and George Baselitz and Daniel Richter. With big advertisements around the city, their bombastic signage is a reminder of the institutionalised dominance of men in art and shows how necessary and brave Alemani’s biennale has proven to be.