The 59th Venice Biennale

The 59th Venice Biennale, the world’s most prestigious art exhibition, opened this past April with a year’s delay due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The biennale, which includes exhibitions in national pavilions and an all-important central exhibition, takes place across two main locations in Venice: the Giardini della Biennale and the Arsenale, with additional national pavilions – usually by countries that have joined in more recent years – presenting inside palazzos all around the City of Bridges.

Traditionally, the thesis-driven central exhibition reflects and pushes forward dominant conversations in the art world, and indeed, Cecilia Alemani, the Italian, New York–based curator of this year’s international exhibition, presented a captivating and alluring premise that synthesises several such themes.

Titled , the central exhibition – which takes its name from a book by the British-Mexican surrealist painter Leonora Carrington – centres on the interest in the spiritual and the mythic, the is undeniably the singular vision of Alemani, purposefully selected, full of associative twists, and pointing towards a way out of the current crisis of imagination.