Venice Biennale’s top prize goes to Lithuania

An opera performance on an artificial beach, in which swim-suited performers break from sunbathing to sing warnings of ecological disaster, won Lithuania the top prize Saturday at the Venice Art Biennale, the world’s oldest and most high-profile international exhibition of contemporary art.

“Sun & Sea (Marina)” — presented by artists Lina Lapelyte, Vaiva Grainyte and Rugile Barzdziukaite — took the Golden Lion for best national participation at the Biennale, beating 89 other national pavilions.

This was the second successive time the prize has gone to a performance piece: In 2017, the winner was the German pavilion, for Anne Imhof’s haunting “Faust.”

Saturday’s other big prize, the Golden Lion for best participant in the Biennale’s central exhibition, was won by American artist and filmmaker Arthur Jafa. He showed a stirring 50-minute film, “The White Album,” in which he juxtaposes manifestations of white supremacy with portraits of white people he cares for and is close to. Jafa also showed a set of monumental sculptures of truck tires in chains.

“If I could have picked a list, I would’ve picked the same list,” said Catherine Wood, a senior curator specialising in performance at the Tate in London.

Wood said the Lithuanian pavilion had “this very clever way of framing people’s everyday activities and leisure” — lying on towels, playing board games, applying suntan lotion, chatting, reading — with a “quite powerful activist dimension” of warnings against ecological disaster and species extinction.

“It’s pedestrian movement meeting this overarching framework of a story that was joyful and melancholic at the same time,” she said.

The Lithuanian pavilion’s curator, Lucia Pietroiusti — who is curator of general ecology and live programmes at the Serpentine Galleries in London — encouraged museums to start thinking outside the box.

“The exhibition format is begging for a certain kind of opening up of possibilities,” she said. “We specialise so much, create these niches of specialism. Then we encounter these huge catastrophic situations like climate change or species extinction, and we need to find more ways to connect.”

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