Nil Yalter and Anna Maria Maiolino Win Golden Lions

Anna Maria Maiolino b. 1942, Italy Follow +

The Venice Biennale has awarded the 2024 Golden Lions for Lifetime Achievement to Nil Yalter and Anna Maria Maiolino.

Born in Egypt in 1938, Nil Yalter moved to Paris in 1965. The pioneering feminist artist’s major works include the yurt installation Topak Ev (1973), which she installed at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, and the video The Headless Woman or the Belly Dance (1974), which addresses the objectification of Middle Eastern women.

At the Biennale, Yalter will show Topak Ev and a new configuration of her installation Exile is a hard job (1975–ongoing), in which she posted drawings and photos of immigrants in neighbourhoods without authorisation.

Born in Italy in 1942, Maiolino emigrated to Venezuela with her family in 1954. After relocating to Brazil in 1960, she began making woodcut prints, a tradition she chose for its role in social criticism.

Maiolino later became involved with Brazil’s Nova Figuração (New Figuration) movement, practised performance art—including the work Entrevidas (1981), in which she strew eggs on the floor to create a ‘minefield’—and in the 1990s began working with clay, the material she will use in a presentation of sculptures and installations at the 2024 Biennale.

Adriano Pedrosa, the curator of the Biennale’s 60th International Art Exhibition, Stranieri Ovunque—Foreigners Everywhere, said, the Golden Lions were ‘particularly meaningful given the title and framework of my exhibition, focused as it is on artists who have travelled and migrated between North and South, Europe and beyond, and vice versa.’

‘In this sense, my choice rests upon two extraordinary, pioneering women artists who are also migrants and who embody in many ways the spirit of Stranieri Ovunque—Foreigners Everywhere,’ he said. —[O]

Main image: Nil Yalter. Courtesy Venice Biennale.