The first of two rooms in the exhibition placed Dash’s dynamic crowd scenes in conversation with historical works. This was the realm of the Bacchanal, the Commedia dell’arte, the medieval carnival in the Bakhtinian sense: anarchic moments in which hierarchies and social norms were temporarily suspended and subverted. Brueghel brilliantly captures this hedonism in the details of his festive scene, such as a drunken man vomiting, a couple snatching an embrace, villagers joining hands in a lively circle dance.

Dash’s pen-and-ink drawings also encapsulated this sense of liberation in collective abandon, with figures at times dissolving into a blur of pure movement through his use of intricate crosshatching and collage, as seen in Dancing Through the Night (2022). From close up, the work could appear abstract, but, stepping back, the lines form into swaying, whirling, dancing figures that almost seem to float free of the paper. Dash’s distinctive technique contrasted with Dürer’s crosshatching in his 16th century woodcut The Torch Dance at Augsburg, but where Dash evokes motion, Dürer creates shadow and depth.

If Dürer’s sedate court dance felt a far cry from the frenzied rhythm of Carnival, Dash’s fluid movement of figures was echoed in Agostino Veneziano’s 17th-century etching Dance of Fauns and Bacchantes. But Dash’s figures were not limited to exuberant crowds: his wonderfully sinister etching Masked Stick-Lick Fighters Parade (2019), of a baton-wielding troupe in white masks, pointy hats, and Elizabethan ruffs spoke to the darker side of Carnival with its roots in European colonialism and slavery.

The second room presented Lyons and Lloyd alongside Modernist figurative and abstract works. Lyons’s work drew on popular figures from Caribbean folklore such as the Soucouyant, a bloodsucking hag, and Obeah woman, a witch-healer. His woodcuts have a primordial force and resonated with Fritz Möser’s linocut Monstrous Head Breathing and a phantasmagorical black-and-white painting by Picasso of a blind minotaur being guided by his lover Marie-Thérèse through a starry night. A highlight of the exhibition was Lyons’s vibrant 1990 painting Mama Look a Mas Passin, with three masked carnivalgoers—two crowned, one with demonic horns and red eyes—gyrating against a radiant backdrop. Lyons juxtaposed this with David Bomberg’s The Virgin of Peace in Procession through the Streets of Ronda, Holy Week (1935), a vivid expressionistic canvas composed of vertical brushstrokes.

Lloyd’s watercolors portraying London’s annual Notting Hill carnival, while accomplished, lacked some of the vitality of his peers’ works, and a few of the connections felt slight. It seemed a stretch, for example, to compare his naturalistic dancers with an abstract Frankenthaler nearby. The exhibition was also hindered by a lack of sculpture that might have further enhanced the comparisons it set up.

Despite such quibbles, “Paint Like the Swallow Sings Calypso” was a revelation. Its pairings of artworks accompanied by lyrical wall texts from Guyana-born poet Wilson Harris (1921-2018) filled in omissions in the Western canon, namely the exhilarating and important voices and stories of the formerly colonized. The question is: what took so long?

In a second room, three kinetic sculptures perform repetitive jerky movements with raucous groaning and clanking, part of the installation Bow Down and Very Low 123 (2021). Constructed from items suggestive of violence like saws, a baseball bat, and rope, these works collapse and rise again or swivel around, presenting an unsettling counterpoint to lenticular images on the wall of a young Black girl curtsying, taken from a 1944 colonial propaganda film.

Here, Pollard discusses the complexities of her exhibition “Seventeen of Sixty Eight” and the connecting threads in her works.

—Elizabeth Fullerton

WITH “SEVENTEEN OF SIXTY EIGHT,” I’m looking at pub signs and what they mean, other than being a political explanation of racism in Britain. If you just talk about it in those terms, that shuts down any other meaning. I’d like it to be much more complex.

All the signs are different. There’s always a story attached to them. Sometimes locals will say it’s named after a real person, like an enslaved boy saved by a local barman. Or they’ll say it’s named for someone who turns out to have lived 100 years after the pub was named. The story is never the fundamental reason why these places are called the Black Boy.

Sometimes the Black Boy sign might be just a historical symbol referring to colonial trade, indicating that you could get rum, sugar, and tobacco at this establishment, as the majority of the working population 500 years ago would have been illiterate. Then there’s a whole connection with King Charles II; the king was said to be swarthy, so the Black Boy sign was a way for the pub to indicate an allegiance to him. There have been African figures in signs around the United Kingdom for hundreds of years. The imperialist nations of Europe all went to the so-called New World for gain. It’s about “we’re here (in the UK) because you were there.”

Representations of the figure have changed with the times. One might have a modern flavor with the figure wearing a T-shirt and flat-top haircut, while another depicts a 17th-century bejeweled enslaved person to show the wealth of the slave owner. Within those representations, the historical aspects of Britishness, ownership, and money, and also contemporary life, are in there, all mixed up.

A lot of the work I do is meant to open up the idea of what we think England looks like. In the display there’s a photo of green, rolling hills, which is a romantic idyll, but it’s a managed, man-made environment. The landscapes, the African figure, the idea of Britishness, they’re all constructions when it comes down to it.

I still revisit the signs because it’s become compulsive, but it’s different now. Pub owners have become more aware. If they get frightened by media interest, then they’ll just change the sign. When you do that you wipe out 500 years of history of that sign and its connection to the local community. There was a media campaign to remove one that had a Black baby in the bath and a white woman trying to scrub it clean. The pub owner agreed to give it to a local museum, but then it was stolen.

There’s a lot of discussion about whether to save the signs. Many Black people hate them and want them destroyed because it’s heartbreaking to see those images. They don’t want their kids to see them. But if you just get rid of them, people will start to deny they ever existed. That’s what I’m afraid of.

The exhibition has lots of types of representations, whether a racist caricature in a painting or a beautiful profile of an African, a brooch, a coin, or a text. It’s not a room full of just signs.

I would like the audience to be physically involved. When you first see the embossed prints, they’re just white bits of paper on the wall; you have to stand in a particular position so that the light reflects right. You also have to get close to read the Virginia Woolf text, the same with the coin. It’s the idea of visibility. These things are in plain sight. All these ideas about race are there in the signs, but people appear not to notice them.

Then there’s the video inside the cupboard. You actually have to choose to open the scary little box. That’s a puppet I videoed from the collection of the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia in Detroit. The video just turns the screw a bit more; there’s no way you cannot interpret it as a racist caricature. That one never stops being shocking to me. The video connects to the tradition of blackface minstrels and the industrial scale of slavery, especially in America. It’s a way of drawing people back to the underlying racism in all those figures, even though they might be beautiful paintings.

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In the second room, Bow Down and Very Low 123 is about the gesture of that little girl, that very awkward curtsy she does and the repetition of the movement; she’s obviously been practicing it. The images are from a 1944 film made by the Colonial Film Unit, which went to West Africa and the Caribbean to recruit people to work in England. The girl was voted May Queen in a real competition, but when I saw the film I thought, I bet she had a hard time in 1944. So there was a disconnect.

The kinetic sculptures are about transferring something from the flat surface of a film to the photograph to something that’s moving and has a back and a front and different dimensions. It’s trying to understand sculpture, because it’s just so far from photography and film, and how those different mediums connect to each other. The effect of the lenticular photographs is that the girl bows to you as you walk across the room. There’s so much power imbalance in the gesture, who bows to whom and how deep it is.

Some people are quite scared of those sculptures. There’s a sense of danger to them. The baseball bat has glass embedded in it; it’s been used to smash a car window or something. So there is an implied violence, but it’s also a tool for a game of sport.

With the demonstration banners, there’s a sense of joy and power of bodies being together, but there are other pieces in the series where police are manhandling people or there’s kettling going on. Then there are the four gridded photographs of the body, which draw links to the early use of photography in medicine, science, and police investigations as a state tool to classify people. They’re accompanied by three texts: The first refers to ways people feel forced to hide their same-gender partner, describing them in public as their secretary or researcher; the second is a text by sexologist Havelock Ellis talking about homosexuals as “inverts”; and the third cites different derogatory names for a lesbian. It’s about categorization, judgment, and name calling, that kind of low-level abuse. That room is about the body in peril.

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Juan Genovés, Celebrated Painter of Spain’s Postwar Transition Period, Has Died at 89

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Born in Valencia, Spain, in 1930, Genovés experienced a childhood defined by the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s fascist dictatorship. As an adult, he made art that was unabashedly political, committed to democracy and the working-class struggle. Rejecting what he considered the elitism of abstraction, Genovés found his voice in a distinctive figurative painting style that borrowed tools from Pop art, such as stencils and stamps, to create accessible eye-catching images. Having seen a 1962 exhibition of American Pop art in Madrid, Genovés said, according to the Marlborough catalogue, “I began to understand that painting could be used to truly say things,” that it need not be “just stains of abstraction.”

Crowds were Genovés’s signature subject, and they populate the majority of works in this show. In the catalogue, the artist is quoted acknowledging the Odessa Steps massacre sequence from Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 film The Battleship Potemkin as an inspiration: we find nightmarish paintings of running hordes hemmed in by walls (El muro, 1967) and throngs crawling along the ground like animals (El zoo, 1965). In several works, the canvas is divided into sections, allowing Genovés to present different perspectives on an event, with no place markers other than a white line that seems to demarcate a threshold of danger; crossing it leaves bodies sprawled along the line, felled by sniper fire.

Spotlights are another effective narrative device. In La caza, a running man and woman are caught in a semicircle of light in the upper left section of the painting; in the bottom right, another spotlight highlights this couple being arrested, their hands raised against a wall. At other times the viewpoint is aerial, the figures microscopic, like moving ants, as if observed by an omniscient eye. These are generalized, often stenciled depictions of silhouetted or faceless figures, yet Genovés sought to dignify each of them with individualized brush strokes and airbrush markings. One might ask, instead of evoking photographs in paint, why not simply use photographs? Perhaps by starkly stylizing his compositions, which are largely devoid of locational details, Genovés strove to capture the essence of what ordinary Spaniards were experiencing during this brutal period; the lack of specificity made his images more widely applicable, and arguably more potent. 

Deviating from the crowd and spotlight format is a series of acrylic works on canvas from 1973 painted in a darker palette. They show individuals being escorted, dragged, and beaten by state agents, perhaps under cover of night. Also included was a life-size mixed-medium relief from 1965, Contra la pared (Against the Wall), depicting a man and woman with arms raised, and a 1974 pencil drawing of a man in free fall, which could be read as a metaphor for life under Franco’s dictatorship.

After Franco’s death in 1975, Genovés continued painting crowds but shifted to exuberant colors, individualizing the figures by affixing bits of detritus, such as a USB key or an earphone. These paintings were presented in a separate room upstairs. Although lacking the impact of the artist’s earlier works, they offer an uplifting addendum, replacing the theme of shared terror with the joy of communality. “Juan Genovés: Reconsidered” revisited rather than shed new light on the artist’s important oeuvre, yet the show’s timeliness is striking; viewers will inevitably find disheartening echoes between these charged paintings and current threats to human rights and individual freedoms worldwide.

Some of the most exciting offerings can be found in the Spotlight section dedicated to trailblazing women artists born between 1900 and 1951. Curator Camille Morineau and the team at Paris-based AWARE (Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions) have made a point of focusing Spotlight on under-recognized women as part of their wider goal of realigning the art canon.   

Below is a look at some of the top picks of the fair, which runs through Sunday, October 16.

ARTnews has selected some of the best exhibitions taking place in London right now. Hosted in venues ranging from blue-chip galleries to artist-run spaces across, their offerings span miniatures of pre-revolutionary Iranian feminist icons, delicate depictions of the Amazonian flora through the eyes of a Yanomami artist, and a phantasmagorical film delving into the cosmology of one Indigenous people in Indonesia.

Titled “The Fear of NOW” and running October 12 to December 22, the exhibition explores the physical and social impact of digital technology and online culture in two series of contorted portraits: of the human figure and of Marilyn Monroe, based on Andy Warhol’s iconic screen prints of the actress. Amalgamating references to Old Masters and today’s digital consumer culture, Ghenie gives a contemporary twist to the conventions of sacred art. His painting The Conversion (2022), for instance,depicts a monstrous figure seated in a white plastic chair in front of a laptop that seems to explode, radiating beams, dust, and clouds. Riffing off the dramaticiconography of Saul’s conversion on the road to Damascus, it’s a parodic reference to the “constant state of revelation we have when we go online,” according to the artist.

In this new body of work, Ghenie’s figures are nearly all bowed over, connected to a laptop or phone by lines resembling rays or some sort of sci-fi goop, as if they are in communion. “When you see people, especially in the evening, looking at a shiny object that generates this blue light, there’s almost something mystical,” Ghenie said. “I can’t help myself from associating that with classical Baroque paintings where you have a saint pierced by this beam of light.”

Another work, The App (2022), shows two figures facing each other in what looks like a moment of intimacy. A third figure on a phone, however, intrudes on their privacy. For Ghenie this encapsulates the way we constantly call up images on our devices so that there is always another, digital, presence intervening in our real-life exchanges. We’re never truly alone anymore, he seems to say.

The artist has a conflicted relationship with technology in general, verging on the phobic, by his own admission. It runs in the male line of his family, he said. His father always refused to speak on the phone, while his 58-year-old brother has never used email. “In the ’90s when I was a student, everyone knew if you called me on the phone, my mother was instructed to say, ‘He’s not at home,’” Ghenie recalled. He shuns social media—although a fan page, which someone set up without his knowing on Instagram under @Adrian.Ghenie, has 30K followers—and he makes no attempt to correct inaccurate posts. “I don’t want to interfere with the forming of this creature. And this creature looks like that,” he said, pointing to one of his paintings on the wall. So the “Fear” of the exhibition’s title is his very much his own. “I realize I might have an allergy or a phobia to the very thing that bites everyone today,” he said.

Several works titled Impossible Bodies feature elephantine heads and deformed physiques which sprout wormlike protuberances and multiple body parts in random places. These works start with a self-portrait taken on Ghenie’s laptop and then build out from there, accumulating motion and outlandish forms far removed from accurate anatomical depictions. The artist cited Picasso, Giacometti, and Baconas his forbears in the breaking down and reconstruction of the human form. However, the cartoonish grotesqueness of these latest figures marks something of a departure for Ghenie.

The change came about during the pandemic, he explained, when he was isolated in his studio. Having previously employed collage in preparation for his paintings, he began drawing instead as a sort of rehearsal and found an unexpected freedom in the medium. “Somehow I discovered a need which I did not know before,” he said, “a tendency toward the grotesque and caricature and I said, ‘That’s funny—don’t censor yourself.’”

This sense of liberation is mirrored in his sources of inspiration, which increasingly derive not from other artists but from cartoons and science fiction, of which he has always been a huge fan. The irreverent animated sci-fi series Rick and Morty is a particular favorite. “In Rick and Morty, what is a wrong body? There’s no such thing. If you want to have 500 legs you will have 500 legs,” he said.

Ghenie has applied this same freedom to his portraits of Marilyn Monroe. Coincidentally, these works came about through another mini epiphany. Having watched The Andy Warhol Diaries on Netflix, the artist happened to visit Christie’s website since he had a work on sale with the auction house. (That work was 2014’s Pie Fight Interior 12, which in May set his auction record of $10.3 million.) On the house’s website, he encountered an installation photograph of Warhol’s Shot Sage Blue Marilyn and was transfixed, despite never having had any interest in the Pop artist previously.

“Suddenly I had this Marilyn-Warhol explosion into my life,” he said. He was shocked by the almost religious power of the image: “It is glowing. It’s almost like it’s a small miracle and you just want to look at it.”

Ghenie felt compelled to incorporate Warhol’s Marilyn into his practice. Retaining only the actress’s blond hair, lips, and one eye in place, he deconstructed Warhol’s smooth image, giving the star the Rick and Morty treatment, so that the end result is almost an alien version with misplaced features and tubular organic forms growing from her head. The portraits somehow evoke Monroe’s vulnerability and even ugliness behind the celebrity mask, although Ghenie’s fascination is not with Monroe the person but her image and the way she has been kept alive online.

For someone with a phobia of modern technology, Ghenie thrillingly juxtaposes traditional materials such as paint on canvas with uber contemporary references to the latest devices, tapping into the essence of our digitized existence today.

Mythology and folklore are present, too, in works such as Matthew Darbyshire’s sculpture Hercules Meets Galatea (2022). Here the artist gives a contemporary twist to famous portrayals of these classical figures, portraying the virile strongman as a shifting, unstable amalgamation of layers (which were in fact made from polystyrene before being cast in bronze) compared with the assured, solid form of the sea nymph Galatea who sits calmly facing him. Works that invite public interaction is yet another strand of the show. Ron Arad’s playful cast bronze sculpture Dubito Ergo Cogito (2022) imagines the base of Rodin’s The Thinker after he has got up, leaving behind just the print of his buttocks and feet; members of the public can sit in his place ruminating on the meaning of life or just watch the world go by. All in all, an exhibition that has something for everyone.

Below, the best of what’s offer at Frieze Sculpture, which runs until November 13 in Regent’s Park.

Amie Siegel is known for her slow-paced films interrogating cultural systems of labor and value in forensic depth, as in two films she presented at the South London Gallery in 2017 for her show “Strata”: Fetish (2016) tracks an annual deep-cleaning of collected objects in Sigmund Freud’s former London home, now a museum, and Quarry (2015) follows the tortuous journey of marble from deep underground caverns to luxury apartments in New York. Siegel applies a similarly investigative approach in her new video Bloodlines. Commissioned by the National Galleries of Scotland, where it is now on view, and recently shown at Thomas Dane Gallery in London, the film obliquely takes on Britain’s class system by tracing the trajectory of paintings by 18th-century English animal portraitist George Stubbs on loan from aristocratic estates around Britain to a 2019 exhibition at the public MK Gallery in southeast England.

Amie Siegel, Bloodlines, 2022, 4K video, color, sound, 82 minutes.

Touring the opulent homes where the paintings reside, the camera glides dispassionately through wood-paneled rooms hung with chandeliers, pans around chambers furnished with four-poster beds, and looks down from a colonnaded marble staircase. There is no commentary, but Siegel’s layered editing and painstaking attention to detail suggest certain themes. The camera lingers, for example, on two figurines of Black servants astride leopards, reminding the viewer of Britain’s brutal colonial past, which supported many aristocratic fortunes. Gilt-framed portraits everywhere testify to the owners’ noble lineage. Interspersed among them are Stubbs’s depictions of domestic and exotic animals and of the gentry at leisure on their land, shooting pheasants or hunting foxes on horseback. These painted scenes materialize uncannily in another sequence of Siegel’s film that captures a modern-day hunt—rite of a bygone era that has, for the wealthy, largely retained the same customs and attire since Stubbs’s day.

Amie Siegel, Bloodlines, 2022, 4K video, color, sound, 82 minutes.

The owners are absent amid all this busyness. Standing in for them are well-groomed animals that lord over palatial homes: a somber-looking Labrador perches on a chintzy sofa and a spaniel eyes the viewer from a long corridor lined with portraits and dust-sheeted antiques. The camera dignifies those serving this strange privileged world of the aristocracy, from the workers to the animals, lavishing time on them as well as on the endless material wealth on view; in this way, Siegel seems implicitly to question hierarchies of value in these grand deadening spaces.

In this Arctic region, which already intimately feels the accelerated impact of our climate crisis, large swathes of the old-growth surrounding forest have been decimated by aggressive commercial logging for pulp over the past 50 years. This, in turn, has affected the habitat of the reindeer, which feed off lichen that grows on the trees.

Photographic portraits of this haunting landscape and its Indigenous guardians will feature in the performance project that the Sámi artist and activist Pauliina Feodoroff will present during the 2022 Venice Biennale in the Giardini as part of the Nordic Pavilion, which this year has been transformed into the Sámi Pavilion. Her aim is to draw international support for protecting Sámi lands. “It’s hard to think when we’re witnessing such a beautiful day in such quiet, how strong a battle is going on all the time, from each square meter, from each tree, how strong interests are colliding here,” Feodoroff told a group of visiting reporters, bundled in winter survival suits, as they ate reindeer soup and warmed themselves around a fire amid temperatures of around minus 15 degrees Fahrenheit.

Feodoroff is one of three Indigenous artists—the other two are Máret Ánne Sara and Anders Sunna—who will represent Finland, Norway, and Sweden in an unprecedented Sámi takeover of the Nordic pavilion at the Venice Biennale, one of the art world’s main events, with its own complicated history of colonialism.

Katya García-Antón, commissioner and co-curator of the pavilion, called it “a historic moment of decolonization,” adding, “It’s also a very strong story about the ongoing struggles that Sámi society is experiencing today.”

Visiting reindeer winter pastures with The Samiway (Nils Peder Gaup and Ánne Kátjá Gaup).

The Sámi’s struggles are related to climate change and land dispossession for mineral extraction, dam building, and the creation of wind turbine farms, among other things. The three artists are staking their claim for the future of their people and share a common message based on Sámi notions of kinship with the land: what happens to the land happens to the people. “Many of those operations are actually funded by European countries so it’s important to realize that the colonialism ongoing today in Norway is deeply connected to Europe,” García-Antón added.

The semi-nomadic Sámi, who number roughly 100,000 across northern Norway, Finland, Sweden, and Russia’s Kola Peninsula (an area they call Sápmi), have been subjected to colonization by all four countries for hundreds of years. They have been forcibly removed from their ancestral lands, seen their culture and language suppressed, and witnessed the persecution of their noaidis, or spiritual shamans.

Although the Nordic Sámi now have their own parliaments and Scandinavian states have recognized some Indigenous rights, racism against them remains rife and the Sámi still have little say over what happens on their land or to their land. Some of these issues are highlighted by the three pavilion artists, for whom art is a last resort in their fight for justice. “We don’t have so many means of resistance,” said Siljá Somby, a Sámi parliamentarian and filmmaker. “Art becomes a way to resist and make sure that the truth will come out.

Artist Anders Sunna in his studio.

Sunna, an artist and reindeer herder from the Swedish part of Sápmi, will use his platform at Venice to present a large-scale painting installation detailing 50 years of legal battles between his family and the Swedish authorities, largely around reindeer herding rights. Sunna has created a series of six collaged paintings, each depicting a decade of his family’s ordeals, set within cabinets that will contain some 10,000 photocopied documents of all the court cases. The final, sixth painting will point toward the future. A related sonic landscape will also be on display.

“We have been to trial 30 or 40 times and almost never won anything,” Sunna said in his studio in the Swedish town of Jokkmokk, where two paintings from the Venice series hung on the wall. One depicted a forest standoff, police cars and reindeer against an ominous red dripping sky. “This is from a moment in 2002 when we had heard that they were going to steal our reindeers, this Sámi village that had forced us away,” he explained. “The mayor has a camera and had some other fellows with him who wanted to draw knives against us, but the police came and tried to calm the situation.”

Sara, from Norwegian Sápmi, has also experienced clashes with the state over her family’s reindeer herding. Sara participated in Documenta 14 in 2017, exhibiting a monumental curtain of reindeer skulls as part of a four-year campaign titled Pile O’Sápmi around her brother’s ultimately unsuccessful legal fight to prevent the forced culling of his herd. The work has been purchased by the new National Museum of Oslo, where it will confront visitors in the entrance once the doors open in June. “If my work at Documenta was addressing and making visible this maelstrom of Nordic colonialism, Venice is really the aftermath of this,” she said in her studio in Kautokeino, Norway, surrounded by amorphous hanging sculptures.

Máret Ánne Sara, Pile o’Sámpi Supreme (detail), 2017, installation view.

These are among the works she will show at Venice: a series of sculptures made from reindeer stomachs that speak of the burden of emotional trauma carried by the Sámi, but also celebrate their culture, wisdom, and values—the reindeer being central to the Sámi cosmology and creation story. Sara’s work also connects to the Sámi notion of duodji, which crudely translates as “craft” but embodies a philosophy of life based on a belief in the indivisibility of humans, animals, and nature.

“When I work with the stomach, it’s a combination of knowledge and experiences,” she said. “It’s on the one hand, as if I was standing in the kitchen, preparing intestines for food. On the other, it’s techniques that I learned from my grandparents and parents about traditional handicraft.”

Artist Máret Ánne Sara and her brother, Jovsset Ante Sara, whose unsuccessful legal battles have provided source material for his sister’s artistic practice.

There are many layers of complexity to the Sámi struggle, which pits traditional Indigenous values and expertise against modern Scandinavian practices. The Nordic states enforce regular reindeer culls, ostensibly to prevent overgrazing, and stringent wildlife laws protect predators such as wolverines and eagles which prey on reindeer calves. But compensation for these losses depends on providing proof and the carcasses are often hard to locate. Likewise, state efforts to increase renewable energy through wind turbines disrupt the reindeers’ centuries-old migration routes since the animals tend to avoid the turbines. The Sámi argue that they, not the Nordic governments, are best placed to maintain the ecological balance based on their ancient knowledge systems, which have maintained balance for centuries prior.

The three artists hope that by shining a light on the challenges facing the Sámi at Venice the Nordic states, which are seen internationally as flag bearers for human rights, will be shamed into taking action to protect the rights and culture of their own Indigenous citizens.

“It’s often very easy for Norway, Sweden, and Finland to be the best in the class regarding human rights and Indigenous rights but then these three artists come and tell a totally different story on how they are treated, and that’s very revealing,” said Beaska Niillas, a co-curator of the pavilion, as well as a land guardian and Norwegian Sámi parliament member. 

Artist Pauliina Feodorof at Čuhččlåå’ddrääuhvää’r, part of her homeland on Finnish part of Sápmi.

The issue of land is especially close to Feodoroff’s heart since her family in Finnish and Russian Sápmi suffered losses during the early 20th century as part of Soviet collectivization and in the postwar changes in state borders and forced relocations. Much of that land has been devastated by polluting nickel mines. In addition to the photographic portraits of what she calls “land(person)scapes,” she plans to eventually auction off these works with the rights to visit the land every five years.

She hopes to raise enough money to buy privately owned land formerly inhabited by Sámi people so it can be responsibly managed by the Sámi collectively. “It is an act of desperation,” Feodoroff said. “It’s outrageous that we have to buy our own land back. And it’s outrageous that we have to heal the damages that somebody else has done.”

Feodoroff’s Venice presentation will also involve a three-part performance with eight female dancers titled Matriarchy. The first part, First Contact references the brutal power dynamic that resulted from the earliest encounters between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples; the second, Auction, enacts an auction using the photographic portraits as props; and the final part, also titled Matriarchy, focuses on purging the colonized female body in order to reconnect with its surroundings. The whole project can be viewed in opposition to the narrative of land representation in Western painting as a symbol of status, an entity to be conquered, or a romantic wilderness.

Reindeer herder Nils Peder Gaup.

Out on the Norwegian tundra, Nils Peder Gaup, a reindeer herder and Sámi politician, echoed the concerns that the artists will address in their works. With global warming, herders are having to buy food for their animals because fluctuating temperatures create layers of ice and snow that trap the moss the reindeer eat. The interdependence between mankind and nature has never been stronger. “Normally the reindeer feed you, but now we have to feed them,” said Peder Gaup, as he watched his herd, some nibbling food pellets from a trough and others pawing the icy ground for moss on the windswept hilltop.

The Sámi Pavilion will offer visitors a reminder of alternative, harmonious ways of living with the land, a sharp contrast for how contemporary capitalist societies have treated the Earth’s most remote regions as an uninhabited outback ripe for exploitation. “They call this area the wilderness of Norway,” said Peder Gaup. “But it isn’t—we’re here. It’s not a wilderness for us.”

Catalina de Erauso was a seventeenth-century Basque nun who escaped her convent, traveled to South America, and became a murderous, womanizing conquistador, under various male guises. The so-called Lieutenant Nun has been the subject of plays, novels, and films, but her transgressions are relayed in a more unconventional, fragmented mode by artist Mercedes Azpilicueta in her beguiling exhibition “Bondage of Passions” now at Gasworks in London. Drawing on extensive research with archival materials including maps, colonial art, and Erauso’s picaresque memoirs (whose authorship and veracity is disputed), Azpilicueta presents this contradictory figure not as a resolved entity (even the historical accounts conflict, down to her birth date) but as a figure in a state of continual becoming.

All the works in Azpilicueta’s show suggest fluid transitions—between male and female, public and private, fact and fantasy. A thirteen-foot phantasmagorical jacquard tapestry titled The Lieutenant-Nun Is Passing: An Autobiography of Katalina, Antonio, Alonso and More (all works 2021) portrays disparate episodes from Erauso’s life as a woman and as a man. Floating across a rolling landscape dominated by pinks and violets are nuns having sex with each other, disembodied heads and limbs of conquistadors, Indigenous women, and indigo and cacao plants. A second, smaller tapestry, Abya Yala (Tierra Madura), depicts historical details such as Spanish galleons and warring armies together with images of armed angels sourced from paintings of Erauso’s time. Each tapestry is attached to a curving wooden frame reminiscent of a boudoir partition designating an intimate space for dressing and undressing.

View of “Bondage of Passions,” 2021, at Gasworks.

Several sculptures inspired by colonial fashions riff on the implications of dressing up and performing identities. On the Dignity of Codpieces, titled after an imagined treatise mentioned in Rabelais’s 1532 novel Gargantua and Pantagruel, comprises an assortment of playful garments assembled from fabric remnants. In Azpilicueta’s hands, codpieces, whose original purpose may have ranged from protection to projection of power, have metamorphosed to look distinctly vaginal and somewhat like BDSM bondage gear. The Delinquent Breeches plays up the ribald tone, presenting an anthropomorphic arched wooden frame with splayed legs in knickerbockers bearing a genital covering cheekily adorned with a rosy face. Another sculpture, The Trans-forming Armour, comprises a mannequin with a jacket that evokes chain mail, but here the hard metal texture has undergone a queer makeover into sparkly knitwear. In these flamboyant, gender-ambiguous sculptures, suggestive of theater costumes and props, the artist draws out the inherent campiness of conquistador fashions without trivializing or precisely naming the challenges and decisions Erauso may have faced in navigating that era’s beliefs about gender and sexuality—where “female” was considered a form of sex lesser to “male.” Through its carnivalesque tone, the work also underlines the idea of history itself as a spectacle, a construct viewed through a heteronormative lens that must be exposed and redeveloped.