West Baffin Eskimo Cooperative is pleased to celebrate the participation of Kinngait (Cape Dorset) Inuk artist Shuvinai Ashoona to the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia curated by Cecilia Alemani. Ashoona’s work is as preoccupied by aspects of Inuit cultural, daily activities in her home community and the vast Arctic landscape as it is with the influences of film or television and the potential of pure imagination. Conventional imagery and the recognizable, is often commingled with nightmarish creatures and depictions of other-worldly places, all as brightly rendered and complex drawings.

Taking place 23 April to 27 November 2022 in Venice, Italy, Biennale Arte is one of the world's largest and most prestigious international art exhibitions. Ashoona is the second Kinngait artist to participate in the curated component of this significant visual art showcase; in 2017, fellow Inuk artist Kananginak Pootoogook was represented posthumously by 10 drawings in the Arsenale venue of La Biennale. This exciting Biennale Arte 2022 edition further enhances the global profile of Kinngait artists and reinforce the role of Inuit art on the international stage.

“The mutant bodies convoked by Shuvinai Ashoona, together with those of other artists included in the show, suggest new mergers of the organic and the artificial, whether as a means of self-reinvention or as a disquieting foretaste of an increasingly dehumanised future.” -- Cecilia Alemani

The 59th International Art Exhibition will be titled The Milk of Dreams/Il latte dei sogni. This name is borrowed from a book by Leonora Carrington, in which, as Cecilia Alemani says, “the Surrealist artist describes a magical world where life is constantly re-envisioned through the prism of the imagination, and where everyone can change, be transformed, become something and someone else. The exhibition takes us on an imaginary journey through metamorphoses of the body and definitions of humanity.”

La Biennale Jury Awards Special Mention

Shuvinai Ashoona was awarded one of two special mentions by the Jury of the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. Her installation comprising six drawings garnered the recognition of a diverse group of visual arts luminaries, The award was accepted on Ashoona’s behalf by West Baffin Eskimo Cooperative staff William Huffman.

“Shuvinai Ashoona reveals in her drawings and paintings a profundity of indigenous Inuk cosmogonies. An existence in which species are interdependent on each other, and which is not mediated by the coloniality of power of the human species. Acknowledging the violences of the colonial enterprise, Ashoona, in her work proposes possibilities of escaping the cul-de-sac by listening in, listening back and listening forward to indigenous knowledge.”— Jury of the 59th International Art Exhibition

The Awards Ceremony of the 59th International Art Exhibition took place today, April 23rd, 2022, at Ca’ Giustinian. Upon recommendation of the Curator of the 59th Exhibition Cecilia Alemani, the board of La Biennale di Venezia, chaired by Roberto Cicutto, also awarded two Golden Lions for Lifetime Achievement to German artist Katharina Fritsch and the Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña. Other award recipients included:

Golden Lion for Best National Participation: (GREAT BRITAIN) Sonia Boyce: Feeling Her Way
Special Mention National Participation: (FRANCE) Les rêves n’ont pas de titre / Dreams have no titles
Special Mention National Participation: (UGANDA) RADIANCE: They dream In Time
Golden Lion for the Best Participant in the International Exhibition The Milk of Dreams: Simone Leigh
Silver Lion for a Promising Young Participant in the International Exhibition The Milk of Dreams: Ali Cherri
Participant in the International Exhibition The Milk of Dreams: Lynn Hershman Leeson

Members of the Jury of the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia are Adrienne Edwards (USA), President of the Jury, Lorenzo Giusti (Italy), Julieta González (Mexico), Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung (Cameroon), Susanne Pfeffer (Germany).

About the Artist

Shuvinai Ashoona (born 1961, Kinngait, Nunavut, Canada) lives and works in Kinngait. Ashoona first came to prominence in the late 1990s, when her work was included in the 1997 Cape Dorset Annual Print Collection. Recent solo presentations of Ashoona’s work include Holding on to Universes at Centre for Contemporary Arts Glasgow (2020), Mapping Worlds, organized by The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto (2019) and toured to venues across Canada, Nunatta Sunakkutaangit Museum, Iqaluit (2013), MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina (2012), Carleton University Art Gallery, Ottawa (2009) and Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton (2006). She has been included in major group exhibitions including National Ethnographic Museum, Warsaw (2022), Esker Foundation, Calgary (2017), Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2017), Mercer Union, Toronto (2016), National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2014), SITE Santa Fe (2014), 18th Biennale of Sydney (2012) and Massachusetts MoCA, North Adam (2012). Her work resides in a number of public collections including the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Winnipeg Art Gallery, Canadian Museum of History, Ottawa/Gatineau, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and National Museum of the American Indian, Washington. In 2018, Ashoona was recipient of the prestigious Gershon Iskowitz Prize.

About La Biennale di Venezia

La Biennale di Venezia was established in 1895 and is today acknowledged as one of the most prestigious cultural institutions. La Biennale di Venezia stands at the forefront of research and promotion of new contemporary art trends, and organizes events in all its specific sectors: Visual Arts (1895), Architecture (1980), Cinema (1932), Dance (1999), Music (1930), and Theatre (1934) alongside research and training activities.

Exhibition Documentation

This selection of images provides a full visual overview of the work featured at La Biennale along with installation shots from the Central Pavilion presentation. Photographs are courtesy West Baffin Eskimo Cooperative and Cheryl Rondeau.