Visual Art: Artists at Venice Biennale 2024
Posted: 16 April, 2024
The pleasures we choose and Crip Arte Spazio showcase visual art by artists with a disability at this year’s Venice Biennale.
The pleasures we choose is a multifaceted collaboration by artists Pia Lindman, Vidha Saumya, Jenni-Juulia Wallinheimo-Heimonen, curators Yvonne Billimore and Jussi Koitela, and architectural designer Kaisa Sööt. Commissioned and produced by Frame Contemporary Art Finland, it premieres at the Pavilion of Finland at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia.
Blurring the boundaries between art, architecture, and social commentary, the Pavilion of Finland brings together three artists for whom art, life, and activism are intertwined. Embraced as a collective project, The pleasures we choose evolved through the exchange of shared and individual experiences to create areas of diverse ‘occupancies’ where visitors are encouraged to reassess and (re)consider societal expectations.
Jenni-Juulia Wallinheimo-Heimonen’s artwork brings to light the variety of forms of discrimination and violence that people with disabilities are subjected to. Her intricately fabricated realities celebrate a world in which a diversity of human bodies have won the right to choose a pleasurable life over mere existence. To learn more about her work, visit frame-finland.fi.
Presented by Shape Arts, Crip Arte Spazio is a huge, joyous, and exuberant celebration showcasing the dynamism, wit, and grandeur of the Disability Arts Movement (DAM). The DAM aligned art with the fight for rights, broke barriers, and ultimately affected changes in UK law, while making great art about doing so. Exhibiting artists include Terence Birch, Tony Heaton OBE, Jameisha Prescod, Abi Palmer, Ker Wallwork, Tanya Raabe-Webber, and Jason Wilsher-Mills.
Crip Arte Spazio at La Biennale di Venezia 2024 is the first major international exhibition of the unique and radical UK Disability Arts Movement, curated by David Hevey and produced by Shape Arts. Crip Arte Spazio is supported by Shape Arts’ National Disability Movement Archive and Collection and will also showcase archival work from the activist street photographer, Keith Armstrong (1950 – 2017), whose work catalogues the front line of the fight for rights and contextualises the exhibition.
David Hevey, Curator and Shape’s Creative Director, said: “We want to put the DAM on the international art map! The Disability Arts Movement is one of the most successful political art movements in the world because it helped to achieve rights. To celebrate this, we went gigantic in scale with bespoke flags, huge film screens, and the epic story plastered across the gallery walls. The monument we’ve created makes us regard disabled people as powerful, rather than pitiful.”
For more information and to view some of the artworks or listen to their audio descriptions, visit shapearts.org.uk.
Images courtesy of Shape Arts, Frame Contemporary Art, HAM, and Jenni-Juulia Wallinheimo-Heimonen.
