Firelei Báez, The Milk of Dreams: The 2022 Venice Biennale

 

Furthering her ongoing investigation of the Afro-futurist Drexciya myth, in Muzidi Calabi Yau Space (or a matter of navigation), Firelei Báez fully envelopes the viewer in a commanding, but gently fantastical reimagining of the Middle Passage. In the place of fear, the ancestral spirits in Báez’s work radiate life. At times becoming almost indistinguishable from the swirling mass of the Atlantic, their forms shimmer with touches of encrusted salt, anemones, and barnacles.

 

"The visual references in Firelei Báez paintings, drawings, and installations range from mythology and science fiction to histories of the African diaspora. By re-examining ancient folk tales, Báez reflects on the theme of Black resistance, imagining new interpretations and possibilities for dissemination for the pages of history on the transatlantic slave trade. Her artistic practice interrogates dominant narratives of identity and Black subjectivity, as her protagonists expose the flimsiness of constructed hierarchies that privilege certain narratives over others. A series of recent paintings feature hybrid forms that oscillate between female avatars, plants, landscapes, and bodies of water. Báez layers these over blown-up reproductions of historical found material, such as maps of trade routes and travelogues, revealing obscured narratives of Black resistance and enhances the overlooked contributions and mythologies of women. Báez’s new paintings for The Milk of Dreams – made by layering paint drips that extend outward from the canvas – approach the medium as a method for giving form to memory. The artist applies abstract, calligraphic gestures that coalesce into the suggestion of nautical bodies or tendrils of hair. Her new paintings take mark-making as an entry-point for personal, embodied engagement with Afro-diasporic cultural memory: “A melding,” as the artist describes it, “of both the depicted illusory body and the materiality of my own presence.”

 

- Liv Cuniberti, The Venice Biennale