Location: Venice Biennale
Event: VB61: Darfur – Still Death, Still Deaf?

Thirty African women lie face down on a white canvas on the floor of a fish market. Their eyes are shut, their bodies motionless. There is no talking and no sound. The artist Vanessa Beecroft, makes wide, wild red paint strokes over their naked bodies. Genocide. Darfur. Jackson Pollock. The artist’s ability to create a visual image that stings the mind. Cameras flash, video cameras roll.

the art star and the sudanese twins follows Vanessa Beecroft’s intentions to adopt orphaned twins, Madit and Mongor Akot, and how this bleeds into her art and her personal life.

Vanessa Beecroft operates in the world of high art and high society. Over the last few years Vanessa has been drawn to Africa and then ultimately to the Sudanese twins she met in an orphanage. As New York dealer Jeffrey Deitch states, with Vanessa there is no boundary between life and art. Alongside the adoption process she has photographed herself breast-feeding the twins, incorporating them into her provocative work.

But what cost to her personal life?

For sixteen months the art star and the sudanese twins follows Vanessa as with an often brutal honesty, she exposes the truth about her life - her creative process, her struggle with depression, her volatile relationship with her husband, and her love for the twins.

Vanessa found the undernourished babies in an orphanage, on her first day, on her first visit to Sudan. She had been breastfeeding her own child prior to flying to the Sudan.

She wanted to ‘save’ them - she spent months trying to adopt them - but is she just another wealthy white celebrity seeking to adopt an exotic child? Vanessa asks herself that same question.

Her husband Greg initially knew nothing of her adoption moves and then was horrified by her intentions.

“Is adopting these two children from this village, helping them, saving them, is that the best we can do as a family? I don’t know. I think that’s kind of almost like a short-cut, its almost too selfish. I can fill my needs by bringing them into my world because its far easier for me to deal with things in my world.”
Greg Durkin, Vanessa’s husband and social anthropologist

Vanessa Beecroft’s work is provocative and controversial - she has gained notoriety with her nude tableaux - dozens of naked women standing motionless in stark locations. The critics could never decide if it was feminism or exploitation.

Without the knowledge of her husband, on her third visit to South Sudan, Vanessa attempts to adopt the twins. In a shell-shocked building the father of the twins puts his thumbprint to 10 copies of an affidavit.

“An American girl may not go for a Sudanese man. Socially they are misfits. This is not the way for this world to go ahead, this is not the way.”
Bishop Mazzolari, Bishop of Rumbek

“I want them but do I deserve them? I’m afraid of the judgement of the people. The Bishop, the Dinkas, the world. Ah here she is - not that I’m important - another white woman wanting something exotic.”
Vanessa Beecroft

Alongside the fireworks of her personal life, we witness her artistic drive. A photo session is interrupted with a hammering on the church doors - women from the orphanage want the twins back. Vanessa is photographing them naked which upsets their local customs.

“Vanessa Beecroft is one of very few artists who has developed a fresh way to make a work of art. It’s uncanny. This is a new focus - there’s never been anything like the double breastfeeding photo. It is a disturbing beauty.”
Jeffrey Deitch, New York Gallerist

On her return to life with her family in New York and completing her Sudan artwork for an exhibition in Milan, Vanessa tries to encourage her husband, Greg to complete the adoption paperwork. Greg offers her a divorce.

“Just because they don’t know the certain things we call luxuries it doesn’t mean that we’re better than them. I don’t see that dimension at all.”
Greg Durkin

On the streets of New York, Vanessa breaks down with the reality her personal life cannot be controlled like her art.

“My situation is falling apart I think. With Greg it’s falling apart, I am rolling off a cliff.”
Vanessa Beecroft

We follow Vanessa to Milan and Rome exhibitions, we interview her English father, and her Italian mother who contributes to our understanding of a conflicted daughter.

the art star and the sudanese twins is a timely documentary exploring the first world woman’s aspirations to adopt from a developing country. And the risks to her marriage and her career that one woman takes to “save” Sudanese twins.