Why? Surrealist art, with its outlandish, hyper juxtapositions, appealed to Carrington for the same reasons it seems relevant now – it highlights human folly but also celebrates the wildness of dreams, reminding us – perhaps – that whilst we live in a war-torn, pandemic ravaged, carbon choked world, we might imagine an alternative. Yet, each time her work is seen, it seems more prescient. To Cecilia Alemani, nominated as curator in January 2020, Carrington’s surreal, irreverent, and sardonic body of work articulates “our growing consciousness of the nonhuman world and the forces that inhabit it.” Her creations - hundreds of paintings, sculptures, and objects, two novels, a memoir, and a fantastically morbid collection of stories - have rarely been exhibited since her death in 2011. Fitting then that the 59th Biennale takes its curatorial title from a children’s book of fairytales by the Surrealist Anglo-Irish/ Mexican artist Leonora Carrington’s Milk of Dreams. Why do we pretend that the world is not a ridiculous, theatrical fiasco? The Venetians acknowledge this continuously with Carnival and La Biennale when the whole corpus arts descend on the glittering, tragically precarious city perched on a forest of petrified trees in a waterlogged lagoon. The answer is hiding somewhere if I could only read.” ― Leonora Carrington, The Seventh Horse And Other Tales Leonora Carrington, The Chair: Daghda Tuatha de Danann, 1955 A noisy puzzle whose solution is another puzzle noisier and more stupid. “The long tentacles of vision and understanding have withdrawn and all that is left to me is the ragged black hole of my loss.

The Venice Biennale sparks surreal conversations between past and present in ‘ Milk of Dreams’, curated by Cecilia Alemani and Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity, curated by Grazine Subelyte, Associate Curator of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.

A Dream of White Horses by Simone Leigh