Anna Maria Maiolino, Nil Yalter Win Venice Biennale Lifetime Achievement Awards

Brazilian multimedia artist Anna Maria Maiolino and pathbreaking Turkish video artist Nil Yalter have each won the Sixtieth Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion award for lifetime achievement. They will receive the honor at a ceremony taking place on April 20. Both are making their Biennale debuts this year, with Maiolino showing a monumental new clay work and Yalter presenting her 1973Topak Ev, an installation recalling a traditional Turkish nomadic tent, and a new version of her 1974 workExile Is a Hard Job, which investigates experiences of migration. The two were nominated for the prize by Adriano Pedrosa, who is curating the 2024 Biennale’s main exhibition, “Foreigners Everywhere.” In a statement, Pedrosa called the choice of the artists, whose nominations were confirmed by the board of the Biennale, “particularly meaningful given the title and framework of my exhibition, focused as it is on artists who have traveled and migrated between North and South, Europe and beyond. In this sense,” he continued, “my choice rests upon two extraordinary, pioneering women artists who are also migrants and who embody in many ways the spirit of ‘Foreigners Everywhere.’”RelatedHELEN FRANKENTHALER FOUNDATION SUED FOR “DESTROYING” PAINTER’S LEGACYBMA CREATES PAID INTERNSHIPS HONORING VALERIE MAYNARD Maiolino as a child emigrated from Italy to Venezuela before eventually settling in Rio de Janeiro, where she became involved with contemporary Brazilian art movements of the time, including the New Configuration, Neo-Concretism, and New Brazilian Objectivity movements. Initially focusing on woodcuts, she eventually expanded her oeuvre to include painting, performance, printmaking, poetry, and sculpture, through which she examines issues of sexuality, language, and the unconscious. Maiolino frequently works with clay, cement, and plaster to produce her sculptural installations, which often conjure organic forms.

The self-taught Yalter, who was born in Cairo before moving to Turkey and then France, where she was instrumental in the French feminist art movement of the early 1970s, has long explored themes of immigration, gender, feminism, and labor through a practice that centers video but additionally embraces photography, collage, and drawing. As the first female Turkish video artist, she frequently made her own body her subject and inverted the male gaze traditional to filmmaking. Yalter has taken on subjects such as female genital mutilation, the Western practice of eroticizing Asian and Middle Eastern women in art, and the voicelessness of prisoners..