"Predictably, the freshest names to me are toward the end: Saya Woolfalk, Joiri Minaya, and Saif Senussi Azzuz. Woolfalk‘s installations imagine a sci-fi culture of half-human, half-plant beings, their symbolism mingling her Japanese, African American, and European American family histories; Minaya works in conceptual collage dealing with stereotypes of Caribbean women and the imagery of the tropics; Azzuz, who is Lebanese-Yurok, makes art about the “de-contextualization of Yurok and Arab imagery,” according to one of his galleries. Despite their differences, all three make art about personal heritage, ancestral knowledge, cross-cultural symbolism, plants and nature—very much the cardinal themes of today’s biennale art." —Ben Davis
