Columbia Artists Featured in Venice Bienniale

The 59th iteration of the famous International Art Exhibition, the Venice Biennale, will take place from April 23 to November 27, 2022. This year’s show, The Milk of Dreams, features alumni Aki Sasamoto ‘07 and Sondra Perry ‘15, as well as Visual Arts Professor Sable Elyse Smith. 

The Milk of Dreams, which takes its name from a book by surrealist writer and painter, Leonora Carrington, is curated by the first ever woman to hold this role, Cecilia Alemani. The exhibition includes over two hundred artists from 58 countries. For the first time in its 127-year history, the Biennale will include a majority of women and gender non-conforming artists, “a choice that reflects an international art scene full of creative ferment and a deliberate rethinking of man’s centrality in the history of art and contemporary culture,” according to the press release.

Thematically, The Milk of Dreams is grounded in our current cultural moment. Various questions emerge, including: How is the definition of the human changing? What constitutes life, and what differentiates plant and animal, human and non-human? What are our responsibilities towards the planet, other people, and other life forms? And what would life look like without us?

In response, the show is organized into five historical sections where “miniature constellations of artworks, found objects, and documents, [are] clustered together to explore certain key themes.” Imagined as time capsules, these “shows within the show provide additional tools of investigation and introspection, weaving a web of references and echoes that link artworks of the past— including major museum loans and unconventional selections—to the pieces by contemporary artists in the surrounding space.” In this way, the curators champion a transhistorical approach which traces kinships and affinities between artistic methods and practices across time to create new layers of meaning that bridge present and past. As noted in the press release, “what emerges is a historical narrative that is not built around systems of direct inheritance or conflict, but around forms of symbiosis, solidarity, and sisterhood.”

Sable Elyse Smith is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator based in New York. Using video, sculpture, photography, and text, she points to the carceral, the personal, the political, and the quotidian to speak about a violence that is largely unseen, and potentially imperceptible. Her work has been featured at MoMA Ps1, New Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem,  Brooklyn Museum, New York; ICA Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA; and MIT List Visual Arts Centers, Cambridge, MA amongst others. She has received awards from Creative Capital, Fine Arts Work Center, the Queens Museum, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Rema Hort Mann Foundation, the Franklin Furnace Fund, and Art Matters.

Aki Sasamoto works in sculpture, performance, and video. Her works appear in gallery spaces, theater spaces, as well as in odd sites. Her installation/performance works were shown at SculptureCenter, the Kitchen, Chocolate Factory Theater, Whitney Biennial 2010, Greater New York 2010 at MOMA-PS1, New York; National Museum of Art-Osaka, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Yokohama Triennale 2008, Japan; Gwangju Biennial 2012, South Korea; Shanghai Biennale 2016, China; Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2016, India; and numerous other international and domestic venues. Sasamoto has received grants from Foundation for Contemporary Arts, The New York Foundation for the Arts, The New York Community Trust, The Rema Hort Mann Foundation, the Agency for Cultural Affairs of the Japanese Government, and more. 

Sondra Perry is an interdisciplinary artist who works with video, computer-based media, and performance. She explores themes of race, identity, family history, and technology. Her work has been exhibited at The Kitchen and MOMAPS1 among other locations.