“May you live in interesting times”—however reviled the glib and privileged title of the 2019 Venice Biennale group exhibition may have been, it feels fair to say that few expected the years between the subsequent edition of the highest-profile event in contemporary art could have been even more unpredictable and disastrous than those that preceded it.
Such turbulence included a one-year delay in the presentation of the exhibition itself, which was slated for 2021 and finally opened to throngs of professionals and tourists in late April. Across curator Cecilia Alemani’s sweeping group exhibition , a proposed treatise on the present—as well as predictions for the future—remains particularly grounded in the past. Pitched as something of a corrective to the historical dominance of men in the art world, the show is intentionally and explicitly populated by the work of women and non-binary artists. To think beyond the established limits of bodies (and the physical more broadly), society, and perception itself, Alemani was keen to plumb the lingering influence of diverse 20th-century intellectual and artistic movements on contemporary practices. Surrealism above all permeates the exhibition—including the title, borrowed from a Leonora Carrington children’s novella—alongside healthy doses of cyborgs and monsters, much of which feels too tethered to its intellectual provenance to effectuate a meaningful comment on the present
