Venice Biennale Opens

What to see at the world's oldest and most famous art fair

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Ukraine is in, Russia is out, its pavilion on loan to artists from Bolivia. Thousands of pro-Palestine artists have petitioned the Venice Biennale to ban Israel for its Gaza war. Now the artist and curators of the Israeli pavilion have refused to open until there is a hostage release and ceasefire. A protest Wednesday marked the preview. 

In other news from the 60th Venice Biennale, opening to the public Saturday, April 20, the geopolitical focus and great diversity of artists in the main exhibition, Stranieri Ovunque — Foreigners Everywhere, put this edition of the great-grandmother of international art exhibitions squarely amid the historical differences, political conflicts, and cultural riches of the moment in a different way.

Curated by its Brazilian artistic director Adriano Pedrosa, the groundbreaking leader of the São Paolo Museum, the 2024 Biennale’s sprawling central exhibition of 331 invited artists’ work concentrates for the first time on the Global South and artists who are identified as queer, outsider, folk, and Indigenous. The emphasis on diversity, inclusion and unwritten, silenced, hidden, marginalized and re-visioned cultural and personal histories carries over as well to artists chosen to represent participating nations — there are 88 in this edition, with three African countries being the new arrivals. The Foreigners Everywhere theme is also apparent among the 30 Collateral Events, exhibitions throughout the city held under the Biennale aegis. 

“Foreigners Everywhere has (at least) a dual meaning,” Pedrosa says. “First of all, that wherever you go and wherever you are, you will always encounter you find foreigners — they/we are everywhere. Secondly, that no matter where you find yourself, you are always, truly, and deep down inside, a foreigner.”

Indigenous people, he adds, are often considered foreigners in their own countries. In Pedrosa’s biennale, the number of Indigenous artists representing their countries is significant, offering the opportunity to rethink the idea of what “nation” means.

Presented in the Giardini at the Central Pavilion and in the cavernous Arsenale, Foreigners Everywhere, has two sections: Nucleo Contemporeano and Nucleco Storico. The first is again divided into two main parts, Diaspora Activism and Gender Disobedience. The second section explores the history of modernisms in the Global South through the work of 20th-century artists from Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. This section has three rooms devoted to portraits, queer abstraction, and the worldwide diaspora of Italian artists. 

Among the national pavilions, Canada is represented by Kapwani Kiwanga who transforms the nation’s pavilion with Trinket (2024), a hotly anticipated site-specific sculptural installation. Exemplifying the complexity of relations in a global society, Kiwanga was born in Hamilton, Ontario, is of Tanzanian descent, and has lived much of her adult life in France. Based on rigorous research, her multidisciplinary work in sculpture, installation, video, and performance brings narratives excluded from history to the forefront. The primary material she uses in the luminous Trinket is the conterie, seed beads dispersed from Murano in trade that transformed the socioeconomic landscape of the 16th century and beyond.

The Brazilian pavilion has been renamed the Hãhãwpuá Pavilion by Glicéria Tupinambá, 42, the first Indigenous artist to solo there. The centerpiece of her work, Ka’a Pûera: we are walking birds, is an elaborate feather mantle like those made by the Tupinambá people, of whom she is an activist member, working to preserve their ancestral land and culture. Ka’a Pûera refers to the capoeira bird that becomes invisible walking in the forests and to ancient forests being cut down for agriculture by corporate interests. 

The Danish pavilion is presenting the first Indigenous artist to solo, a 35-year-old Inuk photographer, Inuuteq Storch, whose project is to show life in Greenland from a Greenlander’s perspective and “subtly and intricately modify the prevailing perception of my country.” 

In yet another first for an Indigenous artist, Jeffrey Gibson, who is Mississippi Choctaw and Cherokee, has a solo at the United States pavilion, which he has swathed in vibrant colour. In addition to painting, Gibson, 57, is known for making works whose aesthetics combine techno rave and club culture with powwow and whose materials include Native American beadwork, trading post blankets, metal studs, punching bags, rawhide, fringe and jingles. 

At the Australian pavilion, Archie Moore, 54, who is Kamilaroi and Bigambul on his mother’s side and Scottish and British on his father’s, confronts the country’s colonial history with kith and kin, a huge hand-drawn genealogical chart of his First Nations connections, which span more than 2,400 generations and 65,000 years. 

Every exhibition mentioned above is on my must-see list. Here are some others that will challenge and enlighten:

Ydessa Hendeles: Grand Hotel

Spazio Berlendis 

Hendeles, a Canadian and Polish citizen and the only daughter of Auschwitz survivors, is a collector and artist whose medium is making exhibitions. Grand Hotel, informed by the artist’s family history of persecution and migration, offers a visceral experience that addresses perceptions of cultural identity and otherness to present a timely questioning of the psychosocial dynamics.

Christoph Büchel: Monte di Pietà

Fondazione Prada Venezia 

The often-controversial Swiss artist makes a complex installation about debt as the concept at the base of society and an instrument of power. Included are historical and contemporary works, objects and documents related to the history of property, credit and finance, the development of collections and archives, and the creation of real or artificial wealth.

Pierre Huyghe: Liminal

Punta della Dogana, Pinault Collection 

The French-born artist based in Chile turns the Punta della Dogana into a perpetually evolving exhibition as transitory state inhabited by human and non-human creatures. AI subjectivities are formed that are constantly learning, changing, and hybridizing. 

Julie Mehretu: Ensemble

Palazzo Grassi through Jan. 6, 2025

A gathering of the Ethiopia-born, New York-based painter’s work of the past 25 years is punctuated by that of her oldest artist friends, including some who, like her, experienced displacements that deeply shaped who they became. With Nairy Baghramian, Huma Bhabha, Robin Coste Lewis, Tacita Dean, David Hammons, Paul Pfeiffer, and Jessica Rankin.

De Kooning e l'Italia

Accademia Galleries through Sept. 15, 2024 

A show of painting and sculpture that investigates the impact that Willem de Kooning’s Italian stays, in 1959 and 1969, had on this American abstract expressionist’s work from the 1950 into the 1980s. He made his first sculpture in Rome. 

Peter Hujar: Portraits in Life and Death

Chiesa di Santa Maria della Pietà 

All 41 of the photographs in the only book by this influential American photographer, who died of AIDS-related illness in 1987, appear in the exhibition. Portraits of Hujar’s artist and writer friends are shown beside photographs taken of the mummified remains in the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo, made in 1963. The book was published in 1976. 

Jean Cocteau: The Juggler’s Revenge

Peggy Guggenheim Foundation through Sept. 16, 2024

Organized by an eminent Cocteau scholar, the exhibition highlights the French artist’s versatility as a poet, playwright, novelist, designer, film director, visual artist, and critic. One of the foremost artists of the Surrealist, avant-garde, and Dadaist movements, he was a seminal figure in the early 20th century.

Janus

Berggruen Arts & Culture, Palazzo Diedo

Site-specific commissions by 11 artists: Urs Fischer, Piero Golia, Carsten Höller, Ibrahim Mahama, Mariko Mori, Sterling Ruby, Jim Shaw, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Aya Takano, Lee Ufan, Liu Wei.

Beati Pacifici: The Disasters of War and the Hope for International Peace

Chiesa di San Samuele, Campo San Samuele through Sept. 29, 2024

Drawn from the collection of Canadian philanthropist W. Bruce Bailey, Francisco Goya’s The Disasters of War is the centerpiece that links dozens of historical and contemporary artworks by artists such as Otto Dix, the Chapman brothers, and Marlene Dumas. ■

The 60th Venice Biennale International Art Exhibition will take place from April 20 to Nov. 24, 2024 in Venice, Italy.

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