VENICE.- Artist Sonia Boyce won Britain the top prize at the Venice Art Biennale, the worlds longest-running and most high-profile international exhibition of contemporary art.
Feeling Her Way a sound installation of five Black British female musicians singing a cappella took the Golden Lion for best national participation. Boyce is the first Black woman to represent Britain at the Venice event.
Saturdays other big prize, the Golden Lion for best artist in the Biennales central exhibition, was won by American artist Simone Leigh for her powerfully persuasive monumental sculptural opening to the Arsenale, one of the two main exhibition sites. The artist presented her work Brick House, a 16-foot-tall bronze of a Black woman with cornrows and a dome-shaped torso that combines the forms of a skirt and a clay house. It was first seen on the High Line in New York in 2019. Leigh is also representing the United States at this years event, so she has a show of her own in the American Pavilion.
I have been around the block a few times, but this is probably the biggest commission Ive ever done, Boyce said after the ceremony. That was really a glorious challenge.
The project at the center of the pavilion is about the question of collective remembering and resisting the erasure of womens voices within the British music system, she added. Its not just me celebrating.
The Biennales five-person jury was steered this year by Adrienne Edwards, director of curatorial affairs at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and a curator of the 2022 Whitney Biennial.
In announcing the awards, which were livestreamed Saturday from Venice, Edwards said that Boyce offered another reading of histories through the sonic.
In working collaboratively with other Black women, Edwards said, Boyce unpacks a plenitude of silenced stories.
The Venice Biennale was founded in 1895 as an exhibition of new art from around the world. As the number of participating artists grew, other countries built pavilions for them, Belgium being the first in 1907.
There are 80 national pavilions at this years event, which was originally planned for 2021 but was postponed by the coronavirus pandemic.
The Biennales two-part central exhibition is curated each time by a different artistic director. This years director is Italian-born Cecilia Alemani (director and chief curator of New Yorks High Line Art), who has taken the opportunity to reverse more than a century of male artistic domination and put on a show in which 9 out of every 10 artists are women.
At the awards ceremony Saturday, the Silver Lion for promising young participant in the central exhibition went to Lebanese artist Ali Cherri, who presented a multichannel video focusing on a seasonal brickmaker in Sudan whose story overlaps with that of the construction of a monumental dam.
The jury which also included Lorenzo Giusti, Julieta González, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and Susanne Pfeffer gave out four additional awards.
Special mentions for national participations went to France, represented by Zineb Sedira, an artist of Algerian descent, and to Uganda, represented by artists Acaye Kerunen and Collin Sekajugo.
Special mentions for artists went to Shuvinai Ashoona, who produces fantastical drawings that evoke her Inuit community and culture, and to Lynn Hershman Leeson, a San Francisco-based artist who works with technology and artificial intelligence.
In March, Golden Lion awards for lifetime achievement were awarded to artists Katharina Fritsch and Cecilia Vicuña.
The Venice Biennale runs through Nov. 27.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.