Gender and Deterritorialized Identity

Abstract

This article explores the immersive audio-visual and sculptural art installations in the 59th Venice Biennale (2022) of three transnational contemporary women artists with familial ties to former colonies and protectorates. The Afro-Caribbean artist Sonia Boyce, MBE, presented Feeling Her Way in the British National Pavilion, for which she won the Golden Lion, the biennale’s highest honor. Zineb Sedira, a Franco-Algerian artist who lives and works in Britain, exhibited Les rêves n’ont pas de titre (Dreams Have No Titles) in the French National pavilion. The Moroccan artist, Latifa Echakhch, who was raised in France and lives in Switzerland, represented Switzerland with Le Concert, a sculptural sound installation. Each of their multidisciplinary installations engages differently with the intersections of race, gender, and ethnicity to challenge cultural stereotypes and erasures—of women artists and histories of liberation struggles. This article introduces early works by each artist as a basis for understanding how their biennale projects are decolonial and feminist in order to argue that the deterritorialized may reterritorialize—create new spaces of enunciation—in and through culture. The Venice Biennale installations of Boyce, Sedira, and Echakhch bring light to intersections of present-day and historical politics and memory by engaging with identity—individual and collective—as constructed, negotiated, and always in flux. Their work is shaped by migration, displacement, refugee status, exile, and the frontier as site of obstruction and passage.