“I promise you a lot of beauty,” Brazilian curator Adriano Pedrosa announced as he launched his Venice Biennale, Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere. The main exhibition of this year’s Biennale could not have been more actual and relevant. ‘’Stranieri ovunque’’ blazes in neon letters at the entrance of the Giardini and speaks of the trauma of displacement, of the increasing, generalised xenophobia towards the migrants. In his work, Pedrosa has managed to balance politics and art by presenting an unbelievable array of paintings and sculptures from around the world: from Pakistani-American emerging star Salman Toor’s figures to fragmented geometric-organic wooden sculptures, hacked with a chainsaw by 88-year-old Korean-Argentine Kim Yun Shin, who gained gallery representation only this year.
Pedrosa’s show is very traditional: scant installations, few films, almost no digital media or AI. Instead paintings spanning a hundred years by artists of the “Global South” (the “foreigners”) bring to the Biennale Latin American, Middle Eastern, Asian and African art. More than half of the artists are dead; among the living, few are widely known.
So strong and timely is Pedrosa’s theme that it characterises nearly every national offering. Most major Western countries selected Indigenous artists or those with immigrant backgrounds. A handful — Britain’s John Akomfrah, France’s Julien Creuzet – produced the most impressive pavilions of 2024, as did, on tight budgets, several “Global South” countries.
John Akomfrah’s cycle of eight multiscreen films, or cantos, as he calls them, in homage to Ezra Pound, runs to more than five hours. You enter via the basement to the sound and vision of water ebbing and flowing, through English landscapes, over submerged clocks and other strange riddles, across the faces of the long-dead Tudor courtiers in Holbein’s stupendously sensitive drawings. Upstairs, like Holbein before them, other immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean arrive in Britain. Scenes from their lives appear in degraded period footage or as performed by actors positioned like chess pieces in the rolling green landscape.
In this Biennale Venice, Russia has loaned its pavilion to Bolivia this time around, and Israel’s pavilion, guarded by carabinieri, will open “when a ceasefire and hostage release agreement is reached,” says a note pinned to the empty building.
Back in St Mark’s at Espace Louis Vuitton, in Je est un autre, 82-year-old French street artist Ernest Pignon-Ernest, the precursor of Banksy, displays exquisitely drawn torn murals depicting dispossessed or exiled poets — Rimbaud, Genet, Mayakovsky, new representations of Anna Akhmatova and Iranian Forugh Farrokhzad. The show especially explores images, once passed across Rome, Matera, and Naples, of murdered poet-filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, carrying, like a pietà, his own corpse as a stranger to himself.
Nigeria’s show, curated by Aindrea Emelife, occupies a decaying palazzo. From its glamorous ruins rises a grand many-faced wooden Igbo figure, suggesting multiple possibilities. Upstairs, among many multimedia presentations, painting wins out. Including Yinka Shonibare’s batik-painted bust of General Rawson, leader of the Benin Expedition, caged beneath ceramic versions of Benin’s now restituted bronzes.
The Netherlands presents Congolese figures made of cocoa, palm oil and sugar alongside the live-streamed return from an American museum of the historic wooden effigy of a Belgian colonial officer to Lusanga. This man ordered the rape of a local woman in the 1930s, so the return of this angry “power object” is a form of reparation. And the sale of their figures, what is more, has allowed these Congolese sculptors to buy back some of the land their families once worked.
The project for the Italian Pavilion engages with the Biennale theme, Stranieri Ovunque / Foreigners Everywhere. The very title of the project, ‘’Due qui/To hear,’’ is meant to suggest the importance of inner listening as a prelude to listening to the other. The artist Bartolini brings forward the concept that meeting and listening to each other is fundamental to human understanding and connection.
During the Biennale, a host of other exhibitions and events will take place covering art, cinema, music and dance.
The Venice Biennale is an international art biennial exhibition held in Venice, Italy. Often described as “the Olympics of the art world”, participation in the Biennale is a prestigious event for contemporary artists. The festival has become a constellation of shows: a central exhibition curated by that year’s artistic director, national pavilions hosted by individual nations, and independent exhibitions throughout Venice. The Biennale parent organization also hosts regular festivals in other arts: architecture, dance, film, music, and theatre. The 60th Biennale runs from April 20 to November 24, 2024. For more info: https://www.labiennale.org/en/art/2024
