Faiza Butt
Image credit: Faiza Butt portrait, photo: Carlotta Cardana
Every two years, Venice hosts the Biennale d’Arte—the world’s largest and longest-running international art exhibition. Sometimes called the Art Olympics, the Biennale is made up of dozens of competing national pavilions, alongside two large-scale group shows put together by a guest curator. Programmed to coincide with this are hundreds more exhibitions, performances and interventions that turn the city into a unique cultural phenomenon.
The Venice Biennale is the art world’s most storied stage. From a performance pioneer making history to a feminist icon debuting new work, below (in no particular order!) is my pick of some of the women telling the most inspiring and powerful stories this year.
Lahore-born, London-based artist Faiza Butt represents Pakistan with Punj•AB: A Sublime Terrain—one of the most beautiful presentations of the biennale. The exhibition is inspired by a region that is both a deeply personal geography for the artist and a historically rich site, shaped by millennia of trade, migration and cultural exchange.
Butt has filled the exhibition space with monumental and magnificent tapestries that combine dhurrie weaving, ikat, jacquard, and hand-spun cotton, and map the rise and fall of civilisations through colour and composition. A film work shot in a factory introduces viewers to rituals, labour, and communal life of Punjab today, juxtaposing rural traditions with industrialisation, and creating a through line from the past into the future.