At one point, a voiceover in the film announces: ‘If the gods made us in their own image, then the gods, too, must have been made of mud.’ The image of interspecies life fashioned by Titans suggests that our own bodies are more entangled with the natural world than they might seem. They appear adjacent to Cherri’s three-channel film Of Men and Gods and Mud (2022), which lyrically considers our lives in relation to water, mud and stars. Courtesy: the artist photograph: Vincenzo PINTO / AFP via Getty ImagesĬombining the animal and the human, Ali Cherri’s Titans (2022) – three figurative sculptures made of mud and based on Assyrian Lamassu and other ancient gods – is a particularly strong evocation of the biennial’s theme of the earthy surreal. Thankfully, many of the works slip out from the confines of the show’s somewhat academic remit, offering a nuanced perspective that, at times, transfixed me.Īli Cherri, Titans, 2022, installation view, 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, The Milk of Dreams. In her curatorial statement, artistic director Cecilia Alemani claims that ‘many artists are imagining a posthuman condition that challenges the modern Western vision of the human being – especially the presumed universal ideal of the white, male “Man of Reason” – as fixed centre of the universe and measure of all things’. ‘The Milk of Dreams’ – boasting more than 200 artists from 58 countries, the majority of whom are female or gender non-conforming – derives its title from a short story by Leonora Carrington, whose surreal paintings of dreamy interiors and ecstatic landscapes are also included here and serve as a sort of precis. ‘The Milk of Dreams’ at the Arsenale opens with Simone Leigh’s huge bronze bust of a woman’s head and torso, Brick House (2019) – a work that, shown alongside enigmatic figurative paintings by the Cuban printmaker Belkis Ayón, announces this exhibition’s emphasis on painting and sculpture, as well as its thematic love of the mythic, the monumental and the mysterious.

Dreams and Memories by Lavinia Harris