Venice Biennale, Golden Lion to Lithuania's fake beach. Best Artist Arthur Jafa

The award ceremony for the 58th edition of the Venice Biennale was held this morning at Ca’ Giustinian. The all-female international jury, composed of Stephanie Rosenthal (Jury President, Germany), Defne Ayas (Turkey/Holland), Cristiana Collu (Italy), Sunjung Kim (Korea), and Hamza Walker (United States), sanctioned the triumph of the Pavilion of Lithuania, which won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation. The winning work is Sun & Sea (Marina) by artists Lina Lapelyte, Vaiva Grainyte and Rugile Barzdziukaite, a mock beach set up in a warehouse near the Arsenale on the ground floor (the audience, upon entering, arranges itself on the upper floor and admires from above the performance where the figures move on the beach with, in the background, contemporary opera music through which the beach characters sing their stories and problems). The jury granted the award to Lithuania “for the Pavilion’s experimental approach and its unexpected way of dealing with national representation. The jury was impressed by the originality in the use of the exhibition space, which stages a Brechtian opera, and for the Pavilion’s active engagement with the city of Venice and its inhabitants. Sun & Sea (Marina) is a critique of leisure and contemporaneity, sung by the voices of a group of performers and volunteers impersonating ordinary people.”

The Golden Lion for best participant in the International Exhibition (which for this Biennale is titled May you live in interesting times and is curated by Ralph Rugoff goes to Arthur Jafa (Tupelo, 1960), awarded "for his 2019 film The White Album (venue: Central Pavilion, Giardini), which is in equal measure an essay, a poem and a portrait. Jafa uses original and appropriated material to reflect on the issue of race. In addition to critically addressing a moment fraught with violence, in tenderly portraying the artist’s friends and family, the film also appeals to our capacity to love."

The Silver Lion for a promising young participant in the International Film Festival goes to Haris Epaminonda (Nicosia, 1980), “for his constellations that unite in a careful construction images, objects, text, shapes and colors, made of fragmented memories, stories and connections that are the result of imagination; to show us that the historical and personal dimensions can be compressed into a weave of multiple meanings, powerful and ductile at the same time.”

The jury also awarded a number of special mentions: the first, for national participations, goes to Belgium and its Mondo cane pavilion by Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys, curated by Anne-Claire Schmitz (the motivation: “with its ruthless humor, the Belgium Pavilion offers an alternative view of the often neglected aspects of social relations in Europe. The disturbing depiction of a series of characters who look like mechanical puppets inspired by folklore stereotypes make the Pavilion act on various registers creating two, if not more, parallel realities.”). The others went to two artists in the international exhibition-Teresa Margolles (Culiacán, 1963), “for her acute and moving works that deal with the plight of women severely affected by drug trafficking in her native Mexico, creating powerful testimonies that displace existing structures in the real world to the exhibition halls,” and Otobong Nkanga (Kano, 1974), “for his ongoing and inspirational research across media in the politics of land, body and time.”

Pictured is the pavilion of Lithuania

Venice Biennale, Golden Lion to Lithuania's fake beach. Best Artist Arthur Jafa

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