Morning feminists,

I’m back! Thank you Cecily for the lovely Fem Friday last week. I was in Venice for the first weekend of the Biennalle, and I hope you are looking forward to today’s special Fem Friday ART REPORT. Everything here is installation based or at least sculptural, so I recommend seeing these in person if you have the chance to do so. This is also a video heavy newsletter, so if you are interested it might be nice to set aside some time at lunchtime for these.

We start with Leonor Antunes and …then we raised the terrain so that I could see out, her enormous installation in the Arsenale.

Obviously my camera phone photo does not really capture the scale of the piece; it’s not just that it extends from a high ceiling to the floor, it’s the entire length of a huge hall as well. Here’s Leonor talking about her artistic practice, and why she works in fabrics, for SFMOMA:

https://www.sfmoma.org/watch/leonor-antunes-architecture-inspiration/

Secondly, Yee Sookyung and her incredible vase forms. These are made from what are essentially factory seconds – anything that isn’t perfect is thrown away, and Yee Sookyung takes what is thrown away, fuses it together with gold, and makes something amazing. Again, hard to get a sense of scale, but this – Translated Vase_Nine Dragons In Wonderland – is several feet taller than I am:

Enjoy this a video in which she explains this in more detail, and in case you don’t watch it here’s a great fact for you to take to your best friend, loved one or date tonight; in Korean, the words for “crack” and “gold” are the same:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8RR-vRWt8Y

Finally, I love halls of mirrors and visual tricks so I was delighted by WeltenLinie, the Alicja Kwade installation that made me fundamentally suspicious of all my fellow attendees in case they were secretly me but in a mirror:

The New York Times liked it too, including it in their "ten best" report:

The static objects on the floor — rocks, a tree trunk, a duo of chairs — are set into motion by mirrors. Reality seems to shift as viewers walk through the piece. “I always try to give sculpture a time sequence,” Kwade explains of the mesmerizing doubling and tripling. “I hope that it is more like a feeling or experience than a solid sculpture; that is why I included the space so much — it’s like a phantasm rather than an object.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/16/t-magazine/art/venice-biennale-best-highlights-mark-bradford-tehching-hsieh-alicja-kwade.html?_r=0

You can see it in action here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDlQiP8kbY4

Enjoy the art and your weekends!

Alex.