Sonia Boyce and Simone Leigh Win Golden Lions at Venice Biennale 2022
Britain's Boyce won the gong for best national pavilion, while Leigh won for her contribution to the international exhibition The Milk of Dreams.
Pavilion of Great Britain. Sonia Boyce, Feeling Her Way (2022). Exhibition view: 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, The Milk of Dreams, Venice (23 April–27 November 2022). Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia.
Great Britain has received the Golden Lion for Best National Participation at the 59th Venice Biennale. The pavilion, created by artist Sonia Boyce and curator Emma Ridgway, features the vocal improvisations of musicians Jacqui Dankworth, Poppy Ajudha, Sofia Jernberg, Tanita Tikaram, and Errollyn Wallen.
'In working collaboratively with other black women, [Boyce] unpacks a plenitude of silenced stories,' said the jury in a statement. They praised Boyce for her use of 'a very contemporary language' that allowed the audience to piece together fragments, and for raising 'important questions of rehearsal as opposed to the perfect attuned.'
The jury—comprising Adrienne Edwards, Lorenzo Giusti, Julieta González, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, and Susanne Pfeffer—also awarded special mentions to France and Uganda.
For its inaugural Venice pavilion, Uganda featured paintings by Collin Sekajugo and weavings by Acaye Kerunen. Kerunen was singled out for her use of materials such as raffia, illustrating 'sustainability as a practice and not just a policy or concept'.
The jury also commended French artist Zineb Sedira, who was born to Algerian immigrants, for 'the idea of building communities in the diaspora' and reviewing the 'complex history of cinema beyond the West'.
The Golden Lion for best contribution to the Biennale's international exhibition, The Milk of Dreams, went to American artist Simone Leigh for her sculpture Brick House (2019), which the jury described as a 'rigorously researched, virtuosically realised, and powerfully persuasive monumental sculptural opening to the Arsenale.'
Special mentions in this category went to Inuk-Canadian artist Shuvinai Ashoona and American new media art pioneer Lynn Hershman Leeson.
Ashoona was praised for proposing possibilities of escaping the '[colonial power] cul-de-sac by listening in, listening back and listening forward to indigenous knowledge' and Hershman Leeson 'for indexing the cybernetic concerns that run through the exhibitions in an illuminating and powerful way'.
At the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019, Golden Lions went to Lithuania's Lina Lapelyte, Vaiva Grainyte and Rugile Barzdziukaite for their opera-installation Sun & Sea (Marina) (2019) and American video artist Arthur Jafa for his film The White Album (2019). —[O]
