The 59th Venice Biennale: there is so much to get behind the big and established names that has fallen away.

You might, when visiting the 2022 Venice Biennale Arte, immediately shout 'woke' or 'wokism'. It's not that difficult, as the curator's choices emphasise female and non-Western artists.1 But I would find that too easy and ultimately unjustified. When you try to look fresh - forgetting all prior reflections - you notice, or at least I noticed: this is just a beautiful and interesting edition. I saw - especially at the main exhibition in the Arsenale - a unity in it that I could not easily describe, but which struck me. There was little that stood out. There was a connectedness that moved along the individual artworks like a pendulum whispering. 'You may be here, stronger: you belong here' it sounded softly towards the work.

It was the 11th time I had visited the Biennale from 2001. Perhaps my mellow mood was due to post-Corona joy or other, non-rational and non-substantive impulses, but you couldn't take it away from me: 'The Milk of Dreams' (title of this edition) was flowing, I was indulging in it and enjoying it, more than in the last previous editions.

Historical lines

'Woke' or not, it is not a surprising, let alone nonsensical, idea to give female and non-Western artists much more attention. There is so much to pick up that has fallen away behind the big and established names. Moreover, curator Cecilia Alemani has added an extra, historical, dimension. Contemporary artists come to be related to names from the past such as Sonia Delaunay or Niki de Saint Phalle. Even scientist Aletta Jacobs makes a brief appearance.

On the thread of art history - within limits that were often imposed on them - much has been spun by women. Oi, this metaphor of the spinning wheel already seems suspiciously sexist. But Alemani herself has a rather generalising argument at one of her sub-exhibitions: the men as hunters, the women as collectors. To collect, you need bowls, baskets, baskets, buckets. That influences how women make art, the curator argues.

I was not able (or dared) to get that out of it so much, though perhaps it was that indefinable pendulum through which a form of unanimity emerges. I just found a lot of it beautiful or interesting. And I was happy this time with a smaller proportion of conceptual art that sometimes spurred more reading pleasure (the signs, the catalogue) than viewing pleasure.

And there were surprising introductions. Like with Cecilia Vicuna, (Chile, 1948), poet, activist and painter. Or the Danish Ovatarci (1894-1985), also noted with enthusiasm by Joyce Roodnat recently in NRC. Born a man, declared insane by her family and put in an institution, transformed into a woman in the 1950s. Painted intriguing, mythological figures. Now appears to have her own museum in Denmark (www.ovartaci.dk).

Other examples: Julia Philips (Hamburg, 1985) with slender, almost floating sculptures or Pinaree Sanpitak (Bangkok, 1961) with monochrome, textile works, so big you can't miss them. And not that there were no men. Belkis Ayón (Cuba, 1967-1999), already invited to Venice in 1993, with collage-like large black-and-white canvases. Diego Marcon (Italy, 1985) who was previously featured at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. As I kept asking myself "art or kitsch?", I became more and more mesmerised by his short, alienating film - partly animation, actors painted up like puppets -, apt in image and atmosphere.

Milk of Dreams

There is a bit more to say about the common thread in 'The Milk of Dreams' than I did above. Alemani took the title from the book of the same name by Leonora Carrington (1917 -2011). In your imagination, anyone can constantly transform, become who you most want to be, move into another person's body and life. In the imagination, transformation and fluidity are within reach; in practice, this freedom of movement turns out not to be so easy, as the author herself experienced.

Dreaming of and thinking about 'fluidity' also means dwelling on dominant patterns, up to and including the anthropocentric view of man. Three themes Alemani draws from this as guiding principles: the depiction of bodies and their metamorphoses, the relationship between the body and technology (technology is going to save us versus technology threatens us), and the relationship between human beings and nature. These are at once very universal and very current, but also very personally takeable themes. And that is what many artists do: make the universal personal and take the individual to a universal level.

It seems that many of the country pavilions also turned convincingly towards these themes. Simone Leigh transformed the US pavilion with a straw roof and erected large monuments to enslaved black women. Who have been freed. Are they free? Greek filmmaker Loukia Alavanou compressed in virtual reality the timeline from Sophocles to contemporary Roma. Oedipus, Antigone, the stage-playing Roma from the camp, they are all equally close, really close.

In the metamorphoses of the Korean pavilion, on the contrary, there is no human to be seen: kinetic, hydraulic, dripping water. Technology is in charge and silently brings movement. While a little further on in Romania's pavilion Adina Pintilie shows men, in nude and intimate togetherness, talking a lot on very large screens with the aim of showing the political context of relationships and intimacy.

The Netherlands and sexual reform

And the Dutch Pavilion? The Netherlands - that is, the Mondriaan Foundation - made a remarkable gesture, now offering its own place that it has had for so long to Estonia, one of the countries wandering through Venice, because without a permanent residence in the Giardini. That gesture could well have received a little more appreciative attention from the organisation and from Estonia. The Dutch pavilion itself was now showing in the little old church of Della Misericordia Abbey'.

Melanie Bonajo, nominated as this year's artist of the year, "challenges the traditional division between men and women, nature and technology" (according to the explanation of the nomination). So ideally suited to contribute to the themes of this Biennale. Lying in the soft cushions on the floor of the centuries-old church, I still got a double feeling. Her film "When the body says yes" emphasises the importance of and taboo on touch. Good theme. Playful, joyful, beautifully portrayed, with individual testimonies, also about gender fluidity. But with a lot of text.

Perhaps it comes across more strongly to younger generations and other cultures. I got non-intended associations with the education provided by the NVSH (Dutch Society for Sexual Reform) in the happy 60s and 70s. After this, I accidentally found myself once again in an old church; here Holy Mass was being celebrated. Then I retrospectively chose Bonajo's worship service again anyway.

On the volcano?

The 59th Biennale was postponed for a year because of the 2021 pandemic. Preparations had, of course, started earlier. So the war in Ukraine was not visible other than in a written statement by the Biennale organisers and in a closed Russian pavilion (where otherwise there are always surprises). The Ukraine war, the accumulation of crises and threats raise the question: 'Isn't strolling past the pavilions a kind of dancing on the volcano?' It need not feel that way. Art does not surrender its functions, whether it is highly socially engaged art or art that seems to exist within itself.

Mirroring, telling, imagining, dreaming, attaching, disrupting, giving voice, it remains in all variations of immediacy and abstraction, necessity. In "The Parents Room", Diego Marcon's film mentioned above, a man stares silently out of the window. A bird appears in the windowsill, first softly then singing louder and louder. It seduces the man into a song of his own. When the latter has told his gruesome story, the room is forever silent. There is no more life in the people in this room. But the bird flies on. And will sing.