Foreigners Everywhere
La Biennale Arte di Venezia 2024
Delving deeply into themes of migration and cultural exchange and making a bold statement against the backdrop of Italy's current political climate, the "Foreigners Everywhere" exhibition at the Venice Biennale was curated by Brazil-based Adriano Pedrosa. The exhibition’s title, drawn from a series of neon works by the Claire Fontaine collective, emphasizes the pervasive presence of foreigners and explores themes of migration and identity. Pedrosa elaborates on the concept, suggesting that everyone, regardless of location, is inherently a foreigner.
Split into two parts, the Nucleo Contemporaneo section of the exhibition highlights the works of queer, Indigenous, outsider, and self-taught artists, focusing on their contributions to contemporary art. Indigenous artists are prominently featured, with the Mahku collective painting a mural on the Central Pavilion’s facade and the Mataaho collective presenting a large-scale installation in the Arsenale. Queer artists also have a significant presence, with dedicated sections in both the Central Pavilion and the Arsenale. Additionally, the Nucleo Contemporaneo includes a special section on the Disobedience Archive, a video project exploring the intersection of artistic practices and activism, focusing on diaspora activism and gender disobedience.
The Nucleo Storico section presents works from 20th-century Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, challenging traditional narratives of modernism. This section includes three rooms: Portraits, featuring 112 artists exploring the human figure; Abstractions, showcasing 37 artists in a groundbreaking juxtaposition of styles; and a room dedicated to the worldwide Italian artistic diaspora, highlighting Italian artists who integrated into local cultures across the globe.
Two recurring motifs throughout the exhibition are textiles, which appear in both historical and contemporary works, and the theme of familial artistic traditions, particularly among Indigenous artists. These elements underscore the exhibition’s emphasis on craft, tradition, and the transmission of knowledge across generations.
Curator Daria de Beauvais guided us through the Giardini (further below) while Palais de Tokyo president Guillaume Désanges led us through the Arsenale portion of exhibition.
National Pavilions
France
Our first national pavilion of the day, Julien Creuzet’s French Pavilion is a fluid, immersive space where a radical collective imagination unfolds, populated with divine presences and intimately connected to Venice through its water. The exhibition, titled "Attila cataract your source at the feet of the green peaks will end up in the great sea blue abyss where we drowned in the tidal tears of the moon," is a multi-sensory experience, immersing us in the artist’s unique forms, materials, and themes.
Creuzet, whom we met as he fed a dove from his hand, envisioned the pavilion as a sensory confluence, a space where visitors encounter diverse experiences and, ultimately, themselves. The pavilion features over 80 sculptures, six new video creations, seven musical sequences, and an olfactory dimension, creating a dense, immersive environment that resonates with Creuzet's sonic and chromatic language.
Czech Republic
The Czech Pavilion’s "The Heart of a Giraffe in Captivity is Twelve Kilos Lighter" is a poignant exploration of Lenka the giraffe's story, emblematic of Czechoslovakia's historical animal acquisitions from the Global South. Through a contemporary ecological and decolonial lens, this project prompts a reimagining of humanity's relationship with nature. Lenka, captured in Kenya in 1954 and transported to Prague Zoo, lived a brief life in captivity before her body was exhibited at the National Museum in Prague until 2000.
Eva Koťátková's collaborative project at the 60th Venice Biennale transforms Lenka's narrative into a poetic, immersive experience, serving as both an artistic encounter and a critical reflection on institutional relationships with the environment.
Koťátková's project challenges ingrained hierarchies, violence, and exploitative practices in human-animal encounters, advocating for alternative modes of engagement where care, imagination, and emotion hold equal importance to historical narratives.
Canada
At the Canadian Pavilion, we met with artist Kapwani Kiwanga for a visit of her exhibition “Trinket” as it discusses manifestations of power and the overlooked histories they suppress, exploring their impact on daily life.
Kiwanga transformed the Pavilion into an immersive environment through a site-specific sculptural installation. Using conterie, or seed beads, historically significant as currency and items of exchange, the artist creates a monumental tableau that blurs the boundaries between interior and exterior, symbolizing the dissolution of established norms.
These seed beads, witnesses to past transactions that shaped socioeconomic landscapes, serve as a focal point, reflecting on the history of commerce and the global exchange of materials. Integrating other raw materials, Kiwanga's installation prompts reflection on inherent value, aesthetics, and the complexities of global economic relations, inviting us as viewers to contemplate the intersections of history, power, and exchange within our contemporary world.
Switzerland
Swiss-Brazilian artist Guerreiro do Divino Amor greeted us at the Swiss Pavilion to view his exhibition "Super Superior Civilizations," featuring the sixth and seventh chapters of the artist's ongoing "Superfictional World Atlas" saga: "The Miracle of Helvetia" and "Roma Talismano." This cartographic project, spanning nearly two decades, explores the relationship between urban space and collective imagination, architecture and ideology, and political propaganda and national identity.
Guerreiro installation features classical architectural elements as symbols of Western racial superiority. "The Miracle of Helvetia" presents Switzerland as a surreal paradise, blending nature and technology, capitalism and democracy, while "Roma Talismano" embodies the allegorical essence of Roman civilization, depicting it as a symbol of moral, political, and cultural superiority. Ventura Profana, a Brazilian artist and singer, portrays the Capitoline wolf in a phantasmagorical narrative that explores the mythical figures shaping white identity and perceived superiority.
Through playful self-representation and critique of cultural clichés, Guerreiro prompts viewers to reflect on the construction of national identities and the current political polarization.
United States
At the US Pavilion, "The Space in Which to Place Me" served as a kaleidoscopic amalgam of Jeffrey Gibson's artistic practice, celebrating resilience in the face of adversity while challenging modernist norms. Drawing on ancestral spirits and historical texts, Gibson's work probes the gap between democratic ideals and lived realities, inviting viewers to engage with themes of identity, history, and power.
Across the exhibition, Gibson employs diverse materials and texts, juxtaposing pop culture with legislative documents to disrupt conventional narratives and elevate marginalized stories. Through the incorporation of materials with complex cultural histories, such as commercially made fringe and beads, Gibson asserts the right of Indigenous makers to embrace heterogeneity and innovation.
The exhibition culminates in a video installation, "She Never Dances Alone," paying homage to Indigenous matriarchy and the healing power of art. Through an ethos of love and acceptance, Gibson's work asserts the enduring presence and resilience of Indigenous communities.
Germany
At the German Pavilion, we met with artist Yael Bartana. But, before we could do so, we first had to traverse Ersan Mondtag’s "Monument of an Unknown Man," an immense pile of earth obstructing the main entrance of the Pavilion.
Once inside, we saw the first part of Bartana’s work, "Light To The Nations,” a floating model of a spaceship. Further exploration led us to the main room, where Mondtag’s monument intersects with Bartana’s video installation, "Farewell," thematically linked to the narrative of the spaceship. The left wing offered insight into the background of "Light To The Nations," including an interview with Doreet Levitte-Harten, whose expertise in science fiction and Jewish mysticism inspired the work. Central to the left wing is the inner world of the spaceship, depicted in virtual reality.
These works aimed to show us that, in a world marked by uncertainty and crisis, boundaries and thresholds take on profound significance, serving as spaces laden with experience and division. The border, with its divisive nature, serves as a poignant reminder of the provisional nature of human existence, yet also holds the potential to become a threshold, a space where dreams of a shared future can emerge.
United Kingdom
The British Pavilion’s exhibition "Listening All Night To The Rain" stands as John Akomfrah’s boldest commission, delving into post-colonialism, environmental devastation, and the politics of aesthetics. Inspired by 11th-century Chinese writer Su Dongpo’s poetry on life’s transitory nature during political exile, the exhibition is organized into song-like movements, or ‘cantos,’ intertwining eight multimedia and sound installations. Through decades of meticulous research, Akomfrah and his team contextualize present-day experiences of migrant diasporas in Britain, drawing from historical records to craft an immersive environment.
The exhibition weaves together newly filmed material, archival footage, still images, and audio and text from international archives and libraries, presenting global narratives through the memories of these migrant communities. Each gallery space is layered with specific color fields, emphasizing how abstraction can convey the essence of human drama.
The artist explores how the sonic experience reflects and shapes cultural realities, drawing from diverse influences such as protests and club culture in 1970s-80s London. With each ‘canto’ accompanied by a unique soundtrack blending archival material with field recordings and music, the exhibition ultimately invites us to reflect on the breadth of cultural identity in modern Britain.
Belgium
We met with members of the collective Denicolai & Provoost · Antoinette Jattiot · Nord · Speculoos, representing Belgium to visit how their exhibition “Petticoat Government.” With a theme centered on the physical and symbolic crossing of boundaries, the collective created a multidisciplinary scenario featuring existing folkloric giants from various communities in Belgium, France, and Spain. Their performative journeys inject a joyful disruption into reality, emphasizing the interplay between human and non-human elements, landscape and architecture, and the transgression of borders.
Unlike a closed work, the Belgian Pavilion is conceived as a space of passage, offering a multisensorial perspective through oral storytelling and the co-construction of narratives. The project explores contemporary mythologies and centuries-old stories, drawing from historical expressions of power reversal.