Eliana Willis

Simone Leigh’s U.S. pavilion is drawing lines around the courtyard during this week’s Venice Biennale preview. But those who don’t manage to catch the show-stopping presentation in the Giardini will have several other chances.
The presentation, which features 11 new works, will form the basis of Leigh’s first-ever survey exhibition, at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, which commissioned the pavilion, next March. It will then embark on a national tour with a stop at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., in the fall and winter of 2023 and 2024, followed by a joint presentation at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the city’s California African American Museum in spring and summer 2024.
The ICA Boston’s chief curator, Eva Respini, who organized the Venice pavilion, will curate the traveling show. It spans 20 years of Leigh’s practice.
Simone Leigh, Last Garment (2022). Courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery. Photo by Timothy Schenck. © Simone Leigh.
For Venice, Leigh created a sweeping body of work about the Black female subject that draws on references ranging from ritual performances of the Baja peoples in Guinea to early Black American material culture from the Edgefield District in South Carolina and the 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition.
On view is a towering bronze female figure with a disc in place of a head (which barely arrived in time for the opening); a statue of a washerwoman at work that harkens back to stereotypical 19th-century postcards used to promote tourism in Jamaica; and the artist’s first ever portrait, of the writer Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts.
What is perhaps the show’s best and most memorable work will not travel, however. Leigh transformed the U.S. pavilion’s facade—a neoclassical Jeffersonian brick building with white columns—by covering it with thatch roofing that resembles a 1930s West African palace and encircling it with wooden poles.
The installation—titled, appropriately, Facade—draws on the 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition, a six-month event in which Western nations touted their colonial empires by constructing replicas of far-flung local architecture for public consumption. (It may not be a stretch to consider the work as a sly critique of the Biennale itself, another world fair that offers up bite-size visions of national cultures.)
The pavilion, titled “Sovereignty,” also presents a 26-minute film by Leigh and Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich that traces the creation of the works on view, with close-cropped shots of the artist crimping, braiding, and stepping on clay as if it were grapes being turned into wine. The film ends with a long shot of Leigh burning a papier-mâché and raffia version of a ceramic work, Anonymous, on view in an earlier gallery. That work—which depicts the unidentified Black female subject of a racist 1882 souvenir photograph by a white photographer—was reportedly so difficult for Leigh to live with in the studio that the burning of its twin served as a kind of cathartic distancing ritual.
The tight show is so full of historical and cultural references—about visible and invisible labor; how Black women have been depicted and have depicted themselves; European American appropriation of African culture and the endurance of African iconography in the diaspora—that it might require a full book to explain them all. Fortunately, the forthcoming museum exhibition will be accompanied by a major monograph.
“In order to tell the truth,” Leigh said in a statement, “you need to invent what might be missing from the archive, to collapse time, to concern yourself with issues of scale, to formally move things around in a way that reveals something more true than fact.”
See more images of “Simone Leigh: Sovereignty” below. 
Simone Leigh, Sharifa (detail) (2022). Courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery. Photo by Timothy Schenck. © Simone Leigh
Simone Leigh,Sentinel (2022). Courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery.Photo by Timothy Schenck. © Simone Leigh.
Simone Leigh Sphinx (2022). Courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery. Photo by Timothy Schenck. © Simone Leigh.
Simone Leigh, Cupboard (2022). Courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery. Photo by Timothy Schenck. © Simone Leigh.
Simone Leigh, Martinique (2022). Courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery. Photo by Timothy Schenck. © Simone Leigh.
Installation view, “Simone Leigh: Sovereignty.” Courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery. Photo by Timothy Schenck. © Simone Leigh.
Simone Leigh, Jug (2022). Courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery. Photo by Timothy Schenck. © Simone Leigh.
Simone Leigh, Last Garment (2022). Courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery. Photo by Timothy Schenck. © Simone Leigh.
Simone Leigh, Anonymous (detail) (2022). Courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery. Photo by Timothy Schenck © Simone Leigh.
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In 2018, I wandered into Garth Greenan gallery in New York without the faintest idea of what was on show. From afar, I saw a group of eight small pictures, none much bigger than a postcard, all by a painter I did not know, Victoria Gitman. The closer I got, the more the paintings seemed to flicker like gems catching the light just right, luring me in with their effortless, irresistible charm.
Each work depicted, in close focus and finely articulated detail, a fur handbag in which Gitman saw a small abstraction in the making. An immediate list of artists came to mind as clear comparisons. Her tiny works had all the luxurious power of any large Sean Scully; all the closely observed detail of a Vija Celmins night-scape; and all the trembling, nervous energy of a Giorgio Morandi. It occurs to me now, years later, that the paintings are also enormously funny: Who could ever think to paint handbags in such detail but an artist with a clear, if muted, sense of humor?
Gitman, who was born in 1972 in Buenos Aires and now lives and works in Miami, is currently the subject of a 20-year retrospective at François Ghebaly gallery in Los Angeles, her second solo show with the gallery in L.A.
On the occasion of the exhibition, we spoke with the painter about how she chooses her subjects, where her art fits into the Modernist tradition, and how a productive sense of confusion infuses her work.
Among the earliest works in Victoria Gitman’s condensed retrospective at François Ghebaly is this 2002 picture from her “On Display” series. At this point in her career, Gitman was still painting objects in full against flat grounds. Photo: Paul Salveson, courtesy François Ghebaly.
You’ve now basically had two retrospectives in just seven years: a 14-year survey at the Pérez Art Museum Miami in 2015, and now a show looking at 20 years of work at François Ghebaly in Los Angeles. What has changed in the brief intervening period, and what has remained the same?
The biggest change is that, in the past five or six years, the objects in the paintings no longer rest on a flat ground, as they did in my work of the previous 15 years. The PAMM show was in one large room, and we had a wall with paintings of necklaces on flat grounds and another wall with fur purses, again leaning towards foregrounding. In the new works, I began to crop the images so that the fur surface fills the entire picture plane, from edge to edge. So compositionally, the new works are totally abstract. Interestingly, though, the cropping resulted not only in a more abstract image, but I think it also makes the furs more concrete as well. So it’s almost like the cropping brings the fur or the sequins closer to the surface, and that makes them all the more tangible.
Even though the cropped works were a big change, my work has been moving in this direction for years, so it seems like a very natural progression. I was thinking about abstraction from very early on. I was thinking, for example, of the round outline of a necklace as a Robert Mangold, and I was thinking about a series of white purses in terms of the history of the white monochrome in Modern art. When I finally made that jump towards filling the entire picture plan, that felt like a move that had been in the works for a while. 
By 2017, when Victoria Gitman made this untitled work depicting a fur handbag, she was cropping her subjects so that small areas of purses filled out the entire picture plane. Photo: Paul Salveson, courtesy François Ghebaly.
It’s interesting that we’re having a very material conversation about what you do. Obviously, that’s extremely important to you.
Yeah. I’m interested not just in the surface of the objects the paintings represent, but also in the material surface of the painting itself. When people see my work in reproduction, it’s kind of misleading, because you only get the part about the work being very familiar. In person, the paintings do something very different.
A detail from the untitled 2017 work above. Photo: Paul Salveson, courtesy François Ghebaly.
One thing you’ve acknowledged before is that the paintings are, on the one hand, very inviting, but on the other hand very cold and aloof. How do you manage to maintain a balance and avoid doing too much of one and not enough of the other?
Honestly, it’s not completely in my control. I plan things and I make decisions. But ultimately, it comes down to touch. The painting’s seductiveness had to do with the subjects I choose. And the sense of cool detachment is partly conveyed by the way the objects are represented, by the compositional choices I make, by the light—very formal things.
I think I saw pretty early on that the objects I was representing were already so sensual, and so loaded with meanings by their associations with the body and femininity, that I wanted to counterbalance that with a kind of coolness and objectivity. That was a conscious choice. But ultimately, that combination of seductiveness and detachment has to do with painterly touch. All painters have their touch. That’s what my touch conveys, in a sense.
This 2007 work from Gitman’s “A Beauty” series is a finely rendered oil reproduction of a Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres drawing from 1815. Ingres’s original picture is 11.25 by 8.25 inches; Gitman’s work is even more truncated, at 7 by 5 inches. Photo: Paul Salveson, courtesy François Ghebaly.
But you also very consciously—because of the handbags you choose to depict, or the women you’ve painted, as with the works that reproduce Ingres pictures—bring the world into your work. You’ve talked before about implicit gendering in painting and how that’s impossible to avoid.
Yes, that’s kind of the basic thing my paintings do. Because I’m representing subjects that have to do with the body and with femininity, I’m drawing attention to implicit gendering. 
Do you find that part of your work generally harder to talk about?
No. To me it’s really obvious, especially if you look at 20 years of work. They’re all related to femininity and representations of women. But on an even more basic level, I think the works have to do with the kind of desire that paintings generate, a kind of tactile/optic blend of seduction and attraction. To me, the works are about that. It’s very hard to separate that from a gendered way of seeing. But that’s not something I set out to explore when I started. I’m very analytical. I look at what I’ve done and I recognize it and I may want to pursue it further. But even at this point, when I choose what I’m going to paint, I’m not thinking about what it’s going to say.
A 2004 work from Gitman’s “On Display” series. Photo: Paul Salveson, courtesy François Ghebaly.
Would you call yourself a formalist?
In some sense I am. I don’t want to say that once I choose the object, the work is predetermined, because I have many other choices to make. It makes a difference whether the ground is cropped this way or that way. But when I’m looking at a subject, I’m looking at it in formal terms. It’s almost like a readymade abstraction. Usually, I work a couple years on each series. That lets me fully explore the possibilities of an idea, so that within the parameters of the series, each painting does something different. It also means some of my basic decisions are predetermined. So generally, the question of subject matter is resolved. But the possibilities can be surprising. I’m now painting cropped fragments of vintage sequins jackets, dresses, tops, and from work to work, a direction emerges that leads me to something else.
Gitman is a meticulous painter, working slowly for several months on almost every work she mades. The above image is a detail from another picture, made in 2010, from the “On Display” series. Photo: Paul Salveson, courtesy François Ghebaly.
To be clear, I didn’t mean formalist with any negative connotations. I think the word describes something specific, and your work seems to come from that tradition.
Daniel Weinberg, who used to represent me in L.A., told me that a lot of collectors he worked with over the years who only collected Minimalism or geometric abstraction would buy my work and it would be the first time they strayed from their formalist collection. And some people who are more inclined to figurative work or narrative work are very turned off by my painting. 
This untitled work from 2016 was part of Gitman’s most recent New York solo show at Garth Greenan gallery in 2018. Photo: Paul Salveson, courtesy François Ghebaly.
Another thing you’ve acknowledged before is that there’s an absurd quality to your exercises of painstakingly painting furs and beads. It’s quite meticulous. How do you stay sane?
I do acknowledge that it’s ridiculous. That’s partly what makes it so interesting. But this very focused, daily painting routine is what keeps me sane. It requires a certain kind of temperament and patience. It’s not mechanical. It’s not a repetitive process. I paint from life. I’m looking at the actual object very closely and very carefully. I’m focusing my attention on each individual bead or sequin or strand of fun. I’m actually painting a particular sequin, the way it tilts or recedes, the way it catches the light. The same is true of the fur. I don’t generalize. This requires a very intense focus.
You suggested earlier that your paintings conflate erotic and pictorial desire, which is a very specific combination. Are there other conflations you see at work?
I love this question because it recognizes that my work hinges on the conflation of a number of things. We can talk about the conflation of the visual and the tactile; of image and object; of the represented surface versus the surface of the painting. But it’s more than just a conflation. It’s a kind of confusion that hopefully destabilizes some ways of seeing. The evocation of tactility in my work is heightened to such an extreme extent that sight and touch are indistinguishable. I like the word confusion to describe that because things get fused—fused and confused. The experience of my work has so much to do with these different combinations and confusions. I think that’s what gives the paintings their power.
This untitled 2021 work is part of Gitman’s latest series, which focuses on sequins. Photo: Paul Salveson, courtesy François Ghebaly.
Victoria Gitman’s show, “Everything is Surface: Twenty Years of Painting,” is on view at François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, through May 7.
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Heavy black curtains conceal the entrance to the Malta pavilion at the Venice Biennale, but if they open at the right moment, you’ll catch a glimpse of streaking lights falling from the ceiling like meteorites trailing through the night sky.
The piece is Arcangelo Sassolino’s Diplomazija Astuta, at once a technological marvel (the artist uses induction technology to liquify 400 pounds of steel each day) and a reference to one of Malta’s most historic Baroque paintings.
“Induction is really magic,” Sassolino told Artnet News. “Through a magnetic field, it can turn steel from [room temperature] to 1500 degrees Celsius [2732 degrees Fahrenheit], which is the point which steel melts.”
A large metal armature stands inside the pavilion, concealing a computer-programmed system that feeds steel coils into the induction machine. The installation is inspired by Caravaggio’s altarpiece, The Beheading of St. John the Baptist (1608), at St. John’s Co-Cathedral in Valletta, Malta, and reflects the artist’s famed mastery of dramatic lighting.
Arcangelo Sassolino, Diplomazija Astuta (2022), Malta pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Photo by Massimo-Penzo.
“When steel is melted, the energy is transformed into light,” Sassolino said. “There is darkness and then a moment of light, and then the return of darkness.”
The steel collects in seven pools of water, where the light extinguished as the steel hisses and sinks to the bottom of the basin, also made of steel. Workers at the pavilion collect the steel each day and send it back to the factory that produced the original coil, working with Carbonsink, a “climate solutions provider,” according to its website, to offset its CO2 production.
The basins of water are arranged to mirror the placement of the figures in the Caravaggio painting, creating a 21st-century take on the artist’s depiction of the brutal scene.
The flaming steel is set against a backdrop of a large steel plate, titled Metal and Silence, on which is etched an inscription by Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci that features text from Ezekiel 37 and Psalm 139 in a combination of Aramaic, Hebrew, Latin, and Greek. The pavilion’s third artist is Brian Schembri, who composed a soundtrack for the installation, and the curators are Keith Sciberras and Jeffrey Uslip.
Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci, Metal and Silence, part of the Malta pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Photo by Massimo-Penzo.
The over 12.5-by-16-foot piece is an exact match to the dimensions of the original Caravaggio altarpiece, which he painted during a brief stint in Malta, after he was exiled from Rome in 1606.
Caravaggio was briefly inducted as into the Knights of Malta before being cast out of the order, likely due to a physical altercation with another knight. Two years later, he was dead.
“Going to Malta was supposed to save Caravaggio’s life,” Sassolino said.
See more photos of the pavilion below.
Arcangelo Sassolino, Diplomazija Astuta (2022), Malta pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Photo by Massimo-Penzo.
Arcangelo Sassolino, Diplomazija Astuta (2022), Malta pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Photo by Massimo-Penzo.
Arcangelo Sassolino, Diplomazija Astuta (2022), Malta pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Photo by Massimo-Penzo.
Arcangelo Sassolino, Diplomazija Astuta (2022), Malta pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Photo by Massimo-Penzo.
Arcangelo Sassolino, Diplomazija Astuta (2022), Malta pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Photo by Massimo-Penzo.
Arcangelo Sassolino, Diplomazija Astuta (2022), Malta pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Photo by Massimo-Penzo.
Arcangelo Sassolino, Diplomazija Astuta (2022), Malta pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Photo by Massimo-Penzo.
Arcangelo Sassolino, Diplomazija Astuta (2022), Malta pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Photo by Massimo-Penzo.
Arcangelo Sassolino, Diplomazija Astuta (2022), Malta pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Photo by Massimo-Penzo.
Arcangelo Sassolino, Diplomazija Astuta (2022), Malta pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Photo by Massimo-Penzo.
Arcangelo Sassolino, Diplomazija Astuta (2022), Malta pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Photo by Massimo-Penzo.
Arcangelo Sassolino, Diplomazija Astuta (2022), Malta pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Photo by Massimo-Penzo.
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After the past two calamitous years, our memories of 2011 may be hazy, but the year was politically significant for several uprisings around the globe, from Occupy Wall Street to the Arab Spring. But what happened after the protests were kettled off by police and eventually dissipated? How has populist anger fomented ten years on? Stan Douglas asks these questions with his two-part pavilion for Canada in Venice. 
In a triumphant turn, Douglas looks at four distinct uprisings that were different in character but similarly driven by disenfranchisement and a sense of frustration with social systems. The acclaimed Los-Angeles and Vancouver-based artist is a key voice internationally working in image-based media, and once again, he has turned to music to peg his story, this time employing two popular genres that served as anthems for the political turbulences that rocked 2011.
Across four monumental photographs that have been painstakingly staged and stitched together, as well as a major two-channel film installation, the question we are left with at the end of viewing both halves of “1848 ≠ 2011” is: where have we arrived at since 2011, and what are we left with? The answer is, of course, deeply unsettling, as we face unprecedented and ongoing challenges with social ruptures, and race and class inequality, and police brutality.
Stan Douglas New York City, 10 October 2011, from the series “2011 ≠ 1848” (2021). © Stan Douglas. Courtesy of the artist, Victoria Miro, London and Venice, and David Zwirner, New York, London, Paris and Hong Kong.
For his project in Venice, commissioned by the National Gallery of Canada and curated by Reid Shier, Douglas has drawn a line between 2011 and 1848, a year of several revolutions across Europe known as the Springtime of Nations. This marked the beginning of the end of absolute monarchy rule in Europe and prompted a major shift toward democracy and liberalism.
“1848 is exactly what I thought about when these events were going on [in 2011], except that the kind of democratic reform that 1848 brought, the kinds of nations that resulted from those revolutions—that did not happen this time,” Douglas told Artnet News.  “While 1848 allowed for some democratic reform, it was clear that this was not going to be the case with what happened in 2011.“
In his presentation at the pavilion, four monumental photographs string together four disparate occurrences. In the first, diverse groups of people sit in the twilit streets of Cairo, incubating what would become the Arab Spring; in the next photograph, we see the Vancouver 2011 riots, which spilled into the streets when a local hockey team lost the Stanley Cup—Douglas sees this moment as a catharsis that had less to do with sports than with frustrations around gentrification in the city, which had become increasingly unaffordable due to speculative real estate. Another image portrays a standoff in the Hackney riots in London; and the final scene is of police kettling Occupy Wall Street protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City.
Installation view of “Stan Douglas: 2011 ≠ 1848,” at the Canada Pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Jack Hems. Courtesy of the artist, the National Gallery of Canada, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner.
“Even though these events were not organized by a political party, there was an intuition on the part of the participants that something was wrong and that something needed to be done, even though they did not quite know what that something was,” said Douglas.
Douglas’s works often balance on a razor-sharp tipping point, depicting a moment in flux. He recreates historical events but artificially stitches together archival and staged images to produce a kind of hyperrealism. And while he usually mines niche or overlooked events in history, what is poignant about this most recent project is that it focuses on events that we all witnessed in real time on our cellphones.
These cathedral-worthy photographs find their proper setting in Venice, a city brimming with larger-than-life works that tell a story in multiple acts on a single canvas. Douglas’s images leave you similarly overwhelmed by their catharsis and clarity; from edge to edge, the photographs borrow the raw narrative power of Brueghel and the emotional electricity of Titian, but with a Kubrickian attention to detail. Each image, which uses largely actors, takes months to create.
Stan Douglas, Vancouver, 15 June 2011, from the series “2011 ≠ 1848” (2021). ©Stan Douglas. Courtesy of the artist, Victoria Miro, London and Venice, and David Zwirner, New York, London, Paris, and Hong Kong.
“It was not a revolution but an expression of political despair,” said Douglas of why he grouped these four events. “There was a lot of anger, frustration about the lack of representation of their interests by their local governments in very diverse ways. But my frame is to say that these are not just policing events, these are political representations.”
The second half of the presentation, a film called ISDN, is, somewhat inconveniently, a vaporetto ride away from the Giardini at the Magazzino del Sale, a 500-year-old salt storage house. The large cavernous room is much better suited to film than the light-filled Canada pavilion, but it feels unfortunate that the two bodies of work cannot rub up against each other.
On two separate screens, the camera hovers around a pair of grime rappers, TrueMendous and LadySanity in London, and two Mahraganat lyricists, Raptor and Youssef Joker in Egypt. Mahraganat emerged as a street music in the mid-2000s, and although it is one of the most popular genres in the country, it is controversial with the government and has even been banned from being played publicly.
Grime has a similar history in the U.K.; Lethal Bizzle’s 2011 song “Pow!” was de-platformed and banned from music venues, as authorities claimed it would incite violence. After tuition fees were raised nationally in 2010, the song became an anthem of the frustration, and anger towards the hike in costs folded into the race-based protests in Hackney. 
Stan Douglas ISDN (2022). Still from two-channel video installation. © Stan Douglas. Courtesy of the artist, Victoria Miro, London and Venice, and David Zwirner, New York, London, Paris, and Hong Kong.
As the lyricists race through fierce verses pounding at a blistering 140 beats per minute, Douglas conjures a fake call-and-response session, bringing together two music genres that emerged out of states of disenfranchisement in distinct communities in both countries. (Despite their differences, both genres’ beats are made on Fruity Loops, a low-cost and often pirated software.)
On screen, the musicians vent the frustrations of everyday life, weaving in triumphant boasts about self-determination. As LadySanity raps: “Whole city alight / searching for revolution tonight… riot vans on move tonight / angry faces on the news tonight.” The Egyptian rappers’ verses are less explicitly political, but as Douglas noted, the very act is transgressive since the genre is officially banned.
Whatever lost futures haunt the photographic images Douglas painstakingly recreated in “2011 ≠ 1848,” the music that pulsates through ISDN is evidence that creativity emerges as a way to process the unresolved problems we face as a society, offering us words to hold on to and ways to ultimately persist.
“Music is a model of how people endure time together,” said Douglas. “Is it a time of harmony, independence, collaboration? All these aspects play out in musical form.”
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Sigurður Guðjónsson likes to keep people guessing. Take the award-winning artist’s latest offering, Perpetual Motion. At first glance, the nearly 20-foot-tall multisensory sculpture at the Icelandic pavilion at the Venice Biennale presents itself as an enigmatic, immersive, abstract audio-visual piece that transports viewers from one reality to another.
But as one watches the seemingly never-ending moving image installation, on display on perpendicular screens, one can’t help but ask: What is this exactly? And where are we headed?
“This piece will take people to thousands of directions,” Guðjónsson told Artnet News. “It’s similar to music. When you listen to music, it takes you somewhere. It is a sensory experience. It’s abstract and offers layers of readings.”
The destination varies on each viewer’s experience—as well as on their level of curiosity. The work may lead one to see it as a sculpture, a painting, or a cinematic world, the artist noted. It could also be a landscape (the most natural, yet cliched, association with anything coming from Iceland).
“Yes, we have the landscape. It’s Iceland. It always comes up,” the artist quipped.
Sigurður Guðjónsson, Installation view: Perpetual Motion, Icelandic Pavilion, 59th International Art Exhibition -– La Biennale di Venezia, 2022, Courtesy of the artist and BERG Contemporary, Photos: Ugo Carmeni.
Challenging Perception
Landscape, in fact, was not his mind when Guðjónsson started creating Perpetual Motion for the Icelandic pavilion, curated by Monica Bello, the curator and head of arts at CERN. The work, rather, is the result of experimentation with objects and materials.
The primary object is, in fact, a small magnetic disc taken from an old loudspeaker, with metal dust sprinkled around the rim. The work depicts the metal dusted rim in extreme close up as it revolves. The outcome is a 45-minute uncut video shown on two screens connected to each other like mirror images, but their playback speeds are different. Accompanied by a visceral soundtrack developed by Guðjónsson and the famed Icelandic musician and producer Valgeir Sigurðsson, founder of the record label Bedroom Community, Perpetual Motion is a work that challenges viewers’ perceptions of materiality.
This is not the first time that Guðjónsson has played with perception by using mundane objects. For Fluorescent (2021), the artist took a peep into a fluorescent tube and presented a mesmerizing alternative view of the everyday object, exposing a hidden universe made of swirling dust. He also employed an electron microscope to scan a fragment of carbon in Enigma (2019), conjuring an otherworldly image of the material, and made the mysterious poetic space of Lightroom (2018) from an old slide projector. Tape (2016), a particularly important work for the artist, is a close-up study of a cassette tape, another medium that has been largely forgotten in the digital age.
Sigurður Guðjónsson, Still from Perpetual Motion, 2022, courtesy of the artist and BERG Contemporary
So what inspired Guðjónsson to get his hands on these materials and look at them differently?
“Curiosity,” he said. “I was definitely a curious kid, looking at hidden places. What’s happening inside the light? It’s a very interesting space to look into. The experiment with space and objects, and then transforming the apparatus into something new by creating many layers of perception, are all very important to me.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the unique landscape of Iceland shaped his vision.
“When you are standing in the snow but there’s a very hot spring right in front of you, you pick up the contrasting layers of smell and sound, and you sense the materials and nature differently.”

Space as a New Dimension
With Perpetual Motion, an extra layer of experimentation has been added: the Icelandic pavilion’s new space.
The pavilion has been nomadic since the Icelandic Art Center took over as project commissioner in 2007. Some of the presentations took place at locations far from the center of Venice, such as in a warehouse venue on the island of Giudecca in 2017 and 2019, which saw the exhibitions of Egill Sæbjörnsson, and Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir (better known as Shoplifter), respectively.
Sigurður Guðjónsson, Fluorescent (2021). Courtesy of the artist.
This time, the Icelandic pavilion is right inside the Arsenale, one of the main exhibition venues. The Icelandic Art Center estimates that the number of visitors to this year’s pavilion will be 20 times that of previous editions.
Moving to a prime location means that Guðjónsson is likely to get more exposure, as well as more pressure. “But we just have to do our best and it will work out,” he noted.
At the same time, the high-ceiling cube that allows visitors to come in and out as they move from one exhibition to another poses another dimension for his experiment.
“I was inspired by the space, the high ceiling, and the flow of the room, which influences the mood and the motion of the work,” the artist noted. “The video work is like a source to activate the space.”
Sigurður Guðjónsson, Lightroom (2018). Courtesy of the artist.
It’s Not About the Landscape—or Is It?
Despite its small population of just under 350,000, Iceland has been participating in Biennale since 1960. It also has a thriving music scene.
The country’s vibrant cultural landscape drew the attention of Barbara Kerr, a psychology professor at the University of Kansas who led a 2017 study to investigate why Iceland is so creative.
The study concluded that family structures and education in the country lay the foundation for creative processes. Interviewees quoted in the study pointed to the built environment of the city as a factor of creative productivity: besides art museums, galleries, and art spaces in the capital city of Reykjavik, the small but elegant contemporary art space LÁ Art Museum can be found in Hveragerði, a town with a population of less than 3,000 people.
The ever-changing weather and storied landscape of Iceland, however, did not play such a conscious role in influencing artists’ creations, according to Kerr’s findings.
The magnificent landscape of Iceland. Photo: Vivienne Chow.
Guðjónsson, who was born in 1975, built his career against such a backdrop. He studied at the Iceland University of the Arts between 2000 and 2003, followed by a year at the Akademie Der Bildenden Kunste in Vienna.
“It’s a very local, small art scene,” he said of Iceland. “I like being here but it’s very important for us to get a broad perspective—it’s extremely important to get away.”
Such a strong desire to leave and return is prominent among Icelandic artists, who have a strong presence internationally, said Ingibjörg Jónsdóttir, director and founder of the Berg Contemporary art gallery, which represents Guðjónsson. The landscape and nature are there, she said, but much more deeply embedded in artists’ psyche.
“[Iceland] is not stagnant like other places. A small society has a need to connect with others. It is far from the continent, but it is right between Europe and America. There’s a connection with the mainstream, international environment of art. Over the years, artists have the opportunity to study abroad, and when they return, they bring something back,” said Jónsdóttir, whose gallery recently presented Guðjónsson’s work in London ahead of the Venice presentation.
Sigurður Guðjónsson, Installation view: Perpetual Motion, Icelandic Pavilion, 59th International Art Exhibition -– La Biennale di Venezia, 2022, Courtesy of the artist and BERG Contemporary, Photos: Ugo Carmeni.
As for Guðjónsson, he has big plans upon his return to Iceland, where he will release a book chronicling his journey over the past decade. He will also be teaming up with composer Anna Þorvaldsdóttir and multi-Grammy-nominated artists the Spektral Quartet for a performance of his work Enigma at the Reykjavík Arts Festival in June, followed by a major solo show at the Reykjavík Art Museum in October, coinciding with a presentation of Perpetual Motion at Berg Contemporary for a home audience.
He may have plans to experiment with a prolonged period of time away from home, but he has no plans to permanently relocate.
“My anchor point is here,” he said.
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A humble gouache of a colorful anthropomorphic creature by Ukrainian artist Maria Prymachenko, whose vivid and fantastical visions have become an international symbol of peace amid the devastating war in Ukraine, was hastily added to the main exhibition at the Venice Biennale, the show’s curator, Ceclia Alemani, told Artnet News.
The last-minute addition expains why Prymachenko’s name is not included in the exhibition catalogue, which lists more than 1,500 works by more 213 artists.
“I didn’t know her before,” Alemani said, adding that the artist would otherwise have had a more central place in the show. 
Born in 1909, Prymachenko began making art in the 1930s and was widely exhibited in her day. Influenced by Ukrainian folk traditions, including the intricate art of pysanka, the Ukrainian style of decorating Easter eggs, Prymachenko became a known inspiration for artists including Pablo Picasso and Marc Chagall. Her work appeared on Ukrainian stamps in the 1970s, and her face also appeared on Ukrainian currency.
But until recently, she was relatively little known to the international art world.
Alemani became aware of the artist’s work in February, when the Ivankiv Historical and Local History Museum in Kyiv, home to dozens of Prymachenko’s artworks, was burned down by Russian forces.
Early reports suggested that 25 of her works were burned in the assault, although it later emerged that a local man was able to evacuate at least some pictures.
Since the attack, her work, particularly Dove Has Spread Her Wings and Asks for Peace, has become a fixture at anti-war protests around the world.
Maria Prymachenko, A Dove Has Spread Her Wings and Asks for Peace (1982).
“The most interesting part of the work is in the titles she gives,” Alemani said, adding that the childlike names of her works are cruel reminders of the pressures of war and other societal ills.
The work included in the biennale, Scarecrow (1967), was made after Prymachenko took a 20-year hiatus from art-making following a series of scarring experiences, including the deaths of her partner and brother during the Second World War.
Her subsequent works, including Our Army, Our Protectors (1978) and May That Nuclear War Be Cursed! (1978), are phantasmagoric dreamscapes with a message of global peace.
The wall text at the Venice Biennale contrasts her fairytale style with the much more sober Soviet artistic language of the mid-20th century.
“As the title suggests, the work is a symbolic deterrent to the aggressors of every conflict,” according to the text. 
At the Biennale’s introductory press conference, Alemani said it felt “miraculous” to finally see the show open after “more than two years of fear and terrible losses,” which underscored her sense of “necessity and responsibility” as the show’s curator.
Alemani added that she hoped the eleventh-hour inclusion of Prymachenko’s work would be understood as “a sign of solidarity [with] Ukrainian culture.”
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