One Image by Nina Strand:

In a year afflicted by the war in Ukraine, and by the remains of the pandemic, the Biennale in Venice did actually open. Cecilia Alemani curated the main exhibition, The Milk of Dreams, which takes its title from a book by Leonora Carrington. Alemani describes the book as a ‘magical world where life is constantly re-envisioned through the prism of the imagination. It is a world where everyone can change, be transformed, become something or someone else.’ The show included brilliant photographic works by Elle Pèrez, Joanna Piotrowska, Louise Lawler among others. In the latter’s room, the artist Alexandra Pirici performed Encyclopedia of Relations, 2022.

While the Russian Pavilion was closed after curator Raimundas Malašauskas, and artists Alexandra Sukhareva and Kirill Savchenkov pulled out in protest against the invasion of Ukraine, the Ukrainian presence in the Italian city was ensured by curator Maria Lanko. She, together with her team, packed 72 copper funnels – components of the sculpture Fountain of Exhaustion by artist Pavlo Makov – into boxes and loaded them into her car, which she drove out of Kyiv in late February.

War was very much present in this year’s biennale. In Relocating a Structure, Maria Eichhorn dug up the foundations of the German Pavilion and stripped the walls of layers of plaster. In doing so, she revealed the joins between the original Pavilion of 1909 and the extensions made by the Nazis in 1938. The American Museum for Palestine showed work by several Palestinian artists in the Palazzo Mora as a reminder of the constant conflict in that country.

But ‘change’ is a word that often came to mind when looking at other works, such as Francis Alÿs films of children playing, The Nature of the Game, in the Belgian Pavilion, Melanie Bonajo’s film and installation, When the Body Says Yes, at the Chiesetta della Misericordia for the Dutch Pavillion, or The Concert by Latifa Echakhch in the Swiss Pavilion.

The song played at the end of the film Dreams Have No Titles by Zineb Sedira for the French Pavilion is still singing in my head. With the French presidential election just days away on the occasion of the press preview, Sedira, who is the first Algerian artist to represent France at the Biennale, talked about the cinema of the 1960s and 70s, the first co-productions between France, Italy and Algeria. The Pavilion was transformed into a series of sets reconstructed from notable examples of these films, which function as records of cultural and political activism in France, Italy and Algeria. With the film and installation, the artist wished to embrace themes such as the fight against discrimination and racism, decolonisation, freedom, solidarity, identity and family, questioning notions of identity, acceptance of the other, memory, and collective versus individual history.

It was this film that lingered in my mind while taking the ferry back to the airport. In the final credits, one could see Sedira dancing to Express Yourself by Charles Wright, showing – like the oily bodies hugging in Bonajo’s film, Pirici’s performers asking us to close our eyes and hold out our hands to experience touch, or even Eichhorn’s alteration of the Pavilion’s structure – how ‘everyone can change, be transformed, become something or someone else’.

Zineb Sedira, Les rêves n’ont pas de titre [Dreams Have No Titles], Giardini, Venice. Until 27 November 2022