Simone Leigh’s Sovereign Territory
By Nancy Princenthal, May 4, 2022
Initially, Simone Leigh’s exhibition in the United States Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale was to be titled “Grittin’,” a vernacular term suggesting protective determination. Not long before the opening, Leigh changed the title to “Sovereignty.” You come to know why even before entering the stately Palladian structure, whose exterior she effectively obliterates with thatch that hangs low from the roof and a double colonnade of rough wooden beams. Leigh’s transfiguration of the deeply symbolic site, and the grace and force of the work she displays in it, are equally commanding.
Rather than any actual African building style, Leigh’s facade refers to a structure at the 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition, a show that a group of French Surrealists— who made their own artistic (and commercial) uses of tribal artwork—challenged in a counter-exposition coorganized with the French Communist Party. Leigh has taken these several twisting threads of exploitation and advocacy and given them a seemingly conclusive turn,
asserting ownership of imagery that, her work argues, is her rightful heritage.
Further to that end, Leigh has plunked a monumental bronze figure, patinaed a sleek black, in the building’s transformed forecourt. Titled Satellite and, like all works in the pavilion, dated 2022, the 24-foot-high figure is based on long-renowned D’mba ritual masks that have been collected by the likes of Pablo Picasso. For the Baga people of West Africa, these masks, worn for weddings, funerals, and agricultural festivals, represented vital female elders and the spirit of maternal nurturing, but they were worn, complicatingly, by young men, with the legs of the masks spanning their shoulders. Leigh has amplified and abstracted her source’s features, including flat drooping breasts that signify long years of nursing, and her version is big enough for anyone to stand beneath. Most radically, she replaced the head with a giant shallow bowl, tipped up—a powerful satellite dish for receiving and transmitting expressive signals. ( … )