Simone Leigh, Sonia Boyce Win Top Awards at 2022 Venice Biennale – ARTnews.com

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For the initial time, both of the Venice Biennale’s top rated honors went to Black gals.

People awards, acknowledged as the Golden Lions, went this year to Simone Leigh and Sonia Boyce, who received for participation in Cecilia Alemani’s main present and for a countrywide pavilion, respectively.

The Silver Lion, for a “promising young artist” in the key display, went to Ali Cherri. Unique mentions for Alemani’s exhibition have been also awarded to Shuvinai Ashoona and Lynn Hershman Leeson.

Boyce won for her British Pavilion, which was curated by Emma Ridgway. Zineb Sedira’s French Pavilion and the Uganda Pavilion, which highlighted work by Acaye Kerunen and Collin Sekajugo, acquired special mentions.

Leigh, who also represented the United States this year at the Venice Biennale, was recognized for Brick Dwelling (2019), a 16-foot-tall sculpture that had previously appeared on New York’s High Line park, in which Alemani serves as main curator. The work depicts an eyeless Black female figure whose variety seems to merge with an architectural framework. Drawing on the variations of Batammaliba architecture and Mousgoum dwellings, the get the job done also alludes to Mammy’s Cupboard, an eatery in Natchez, Mississippi, whose building resembles a mammy figure.

Brick Property gained prominent placement at the Biennale, wherever it was surrounded by operates by Belkis Ayón. It was the first piece viewers saw when they entered the Arsenale area of the primary clearly show, titled “The Milk of Goals,” which was centered loosely on a reemergence of Surrealist tendencies.

In a statement read through by Adrienne Edwards, a Whitney Museum curator who led the team that chosen the winners, the jury stated it had offered Leigh the Golden Lion for her “rigorously investigated, virtuosically understood, and powerfully persuasive monumental sculptural.”

Leigh utilized her speech to shell out homage to people whom she known as her “interlocutors,” among the them Rashida Bumbray, who will direct an occasion as element of Leigh’s Biennale pavilion afterwards this year, and artist Lorraine O’Grady.

Boyce’s British Pavilion equally centered Black girls, focusing especially on kinds in Britain whose broad contributions to the country’s musical record have gone below-regarded by the mainstream. By way of films, sculptures, and shows of archival product, Boyce, who initially emerged during the Black British Arts motion of the 1980s, surveyed the perform of five Black female singers spanning numerous generations and musical variations.

“Sonia Boyce proposes, for that reason, another reading of histories by way of the sonic,” the jury explained in its assertion.

By tears, Boyce thanked a quantity of figures, which include the late curator Okwui Enwezor, who introduced her work to the principal demonstrate of the 2015 Venice Biennale. She applied her speech to recommend that there are a lot of extra figures within just her lineage who have yet to emerge.

“We mustn’t neglect that there’s an even extended arc, which we see in Zineb,” she stated. “We mustn’t neglect that there’s a longer arc that is much more than the men and women than we see in this article.”

Cherri received for Of Males and Gods and Mud (2022), a video clip installation that attracts a line in between the previous and the present by way of the Merowe Dam in Sudan. The function envisions the dam as anything akin to a creature alone, a person that has similarities to beasts noticed in art of generations earlier. The jury praised the do the job for “opening up from other narratives that depart from the logic of progress and purpose.”

Forward of the opening of the biennale, the prestigious Golden Lions for Life time Accomplishment Awards have been supplied to Cecilia Vicuña and Katharina Fritsch, both of whom are featured in the most important demonstrate.

The German-born Fritsch was lauded for her uncanny, frequently about-sized reproductions of objects, animals, and men and women. Vicuña, a Chilean visible artist and a poet, was honored for her wide-ranging observe “built all over a deep fascination with Indigenous traditions and non-Western epistemologies,” in accordance to Alemani in a assertion. The Golden Lion for Lifetime Accomplishment is typically presented to 1 mid or late-career artist this 12 months marked the initial time because 2013 that two artists shared the prize.

In addition to Edwards, this year’s jury also consists of Lorenzo Giusti, the director of GAMeC Bergamo in Italy Julieta González, inventive director of Instituto Inhotim in Brazil Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, the founder of Savvy Modern in Berlin, inventive director of Sonsbeek 20–24 in the Netherlands, and the incoming director of Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin and Susanne Pfeffer, director of Museum MMK für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt.

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