The real premise is that I believe in looking at the difficult things that my culture wants to suppress and not examine.

Carolee Schneemann talks about painting, performance, censorship and resistance in a telephone conversation we recorded just days before she receives the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the opening ceremony of the 57^th Venice Art Biennale.

Schneemann started as a painter in the 1950s. In the 1960s, she began using her own body as material in experiments with film, music, poetry, dance, and performance. Since then, she has explored a range of cultural and political taboos. Her groundbreaking work continues to move us.

This year, the artist finally gets her due. Close on the heels of the Golden Lion, her solo exhibition More Wrong Things opens at the Hales Gallery in London. This interactive installation of suspended monitors explores decades of public and private tragedies and suffering in the U.S., Asia and the Middle East. Museums of Modern Art in Frankfurt, Germany and New York, New York, will present Kinetic Painting, a retrospective exhibition originating in 2016, at the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg, Austria.

Lauren Lancaster’s photo of Carolee Schneemann at the artist’s home in New Paltz, New York, 2016

Sound editor: Guney Ozsan | Sound effects: Interior Scroll, The Cave, 1995, courtesy the artist and Electronic Arts Intermix | Photos courtesy the Carolee Schneemann and Lauren Lancaster, and via the Metropolitan Museum of Art and BOMB magazine