Presented in the 59th Venice Biennale, Queendom materializes within the Israeli Pavilion, turning the building’s focus from West to East, and transforming it into an interconnected space of shared histories and exposed appropriations. In this project, Azoulay explores alternatives to male-dominated and Eurocentric forms of storytelling and knowledge transfer, incorporating photomontage, sound, and architectural elements; she scrutinizes how visual information is processed culturally, economically, politically, and academically transmitted. Using macro-photographic images from the archive of David Storm Rice (1913–1962), a scholar of Islamic medieval metal vessels, Queendom visualizes the afterlife of images and their transformations, highlighting missing links in their geographies of knowledge. What appears to be an innocent foray into a realm of fantasy is, in fact, a call to take responsibility for one’s imagination. Via an exclusive website, powered by str-ing.org project, one can enter further stories through the individual panels.
Queendom, La Biennale di Venezia, Israeli pavilion, 2022.
