July 15, 2022
13:51
With her exhibition “Sovereignty”, Simone Leigh makes women from the African diaspora the protagonists of the American Pavilion at the 59ᵉ edition of the Venice Biennale.
Impossible to do without Simone Leigh at the Venice Biennale: first African-American woman to represent the United Stateswinner of the Golden Lion as best artist, it is to her that we owe the enormous sculpture “Brick House”, a true icon of this 59th edition which opens the course “The Milk of Dreams” imagined by curator Cecilia Alemani at Arsenal. Both a woman’s head and a clay house, this bust of 5 meters high best represents the spirit of the demonstration which gives voice to women (80% of the artists who participate), to black women and, more generally, to the forces of change that cross our society.
“Sovereignty” offers a new visual narrative made up of stories, work, the inner lives of women and the household objects they used.
This 2,700 kg black bronze, his face framed by simple braids, comes directly from Tenth Avenue in New York where he was erected in 2019 before the Black Lives Matter movement broke out all over the world. In the same city where the statue of Thomas Jefferson will be removed two years later because of his slave past, this Jamaican-born artist had already denounced racial conflicts by erecting a simple woman in the role of a goddess with a hieratic posture.
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New visual narrative
Black women, the artist’s favorite subject for 20 years, are also the protagonists of the American pavilion whose neoclassical structure, precisely inspired by Jefferson’s plantation in Monticello, was transformed for the occasion into an African-style building in wood and straw.
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Part of the corpus of the nine sculptures, exhibited inside and outside, refers to the Paris colonial exhibition of the thirties in which France and other powers took a stereotypical view of the minorities who inhabited their territories. A work of revisiting these representations takes place throughout the exhibition. “Sovereignty” which offers a new visual narrative made up of stories, work, the inner life of women and the household objects they used.
From “Satellite”, a monumental sculpture in the shape of a nimba – a mask used during rituals to communicate with the ancestors – to “Last Garment”, showing a leaning washerwoman rubbing a garment with her feet in the water, Simone Leigh restores dignity and power to the great forgotten of history.