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Comprising four Māori women, the Mataaho Collective has won the Golden Lion for Best Participant at the 60th Venice International Art Exhibition with the work Takapau. The Australian Pavilion, curated by Ellie Buttrose, has won the Golden Lion for Best National Participant for the kith and kin project by Aboriginal artist Archie Moore.
Karimah Ashadu, a London-based artist who was born in Nigeria in 1985, has won the Silver Lion for Promising Young Participant with two works: the sculpture Wreath and the video Machine Boys.
Three special mentions were also awarded to the Republic of Kosovo, and participants Samia Halaby and La Chola Poblete.
The awards ceremony took place at Ca’ Giustinian on Saturday, April 20, coinciding with the inauguration of the 2024 Venice Biennale Arte, entitled “Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere.” Curated by Adriano Pedrosa, the exhibition runs through November 24 at the Giardini and Arsenale sites and adjoining areas.
The winners were chosen by an international jury composed of chair Julia Bryan-Wilson (USA), Alia Swastika (Indonesia), Chika Okeke-Agulu (Nigeria), Elena Crippa (Italy), and María Inés Rodríguez (France/ Colombia).
As announced back in November, based on curator Adriano Pedrosa’s recommendation, Golden Lions for Lifetime Achievement went to Brazil-based Italian artist Anna Maria Maiolino and Paris-based Turkish artist Nil Yalter.
Golden Lion for Best National Participation to Australia
In this quietly powerful pavilion, Archie Moore worked for months to hand-draw with chalk a monumental First Nations family tree. Thus 65,000 years of history (both recorded and lost) are inscribed on the dark walls as well as on the ceiling, asking viewers to fill in blanks and take in the inherent fragility of this mournful archive. Floating in a moat of water are redacted official State records, reflecting Moore’s intense research as well as the high rates of incarceration of First Nations’ people. This installation stands out for its strong aesthetic, its lyricism, and its invocation of shared loss for occluded pasts. With his inventory of thousands of names, Moore also offers a glimmer of possibility for recuperation.
Golden Lion for the Best Artist to Mataaho Collective
The Maori Mataaho Collective has created a luminous woven structure of straps that poetically crisscross the gallery space. Referring to matrilinear traditions of textiles with its womb-like cradle, the installation is both a cosmology and a shelter. Its impressive scale is a feat of engineering that was only made possibly by the collective strength and creativity of the group. The dazzling pattern of shadows cast on the walls and floor harks back to ancestral techniques and gestures to future uses of such techniques.
Silver Lion for a Promising Young Artist to Karimah Ashadu
Karimah Ashadu with her video Machine Boys and related brass sculpture, Wreath, upends gendered assumptions about the gaze and what is considered proper to commemorate. With a searing intimacy, she captures the vulnerability of young men from the agrarian north of Nigeria who have migrated to Lagos and end up riding illegal motorbike taxis. Her feminist camera lens is extraordinarily sensitive and intimate, capturing the bikers’ subcultural experience as well as their economic precarity. Masterfully edited to draw out yet subtly critique the performance of masculinity on display, her sensual attention to surfaces of machine, flesh, and cloth reveals the rider’s marginal existence.
The first special mention went to the Republic of Kosovo, which presented the project The Echoing Silences of Metal and Skin by artist Doruntina Kastrati. Sited in the Museo Storico Navale di Venezia, the installation “refers to feminized industrial labor and the strain on the bodies of working women”.
Two special mentions also went to participants Samia Halaby and La Chola Poblete. Palestinian artist, teacher, and activist Samia Halaby was born in Jerusalem in 1936 and lives in New York. “She combined her commitment to the politics of abstraction with her concern over the suffering of the Palestinian people”. Argentinian La Chola Poblete, the first queer artist to receive this recognition, “has, with a certain humor, critically engaged with the histories of colonial representation from a trans-indigenous perspective”.
>>> Discover also the Golden Lions of 2022 Venice Biennale Arte
Images courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia
