Venice
“Foreigners Everywhere—Stranieri Ovunque,” the 60th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale (on view through November 24, 2024), is a jubilant, defiant celebration of otherness. Brazilian curator Adriano Pedrosa has interpreted the theme loosely, expanding the notion of “foreigner” to encompass not just the migrant, the exile, and the stranger, but also the Indigenous, queer, self-taught, and folk artist within a broad spectrum of marginalization. Against a backdrop of war in Gaza and Ukraine and a rising far right in Europe—not least in Italy itself—this public commemoration of “foreignness” feels vital.
The first openly gay curator of the Biennale and the first from the Global South, Pedrosa is presenting probably the most inclusive and diverse edition ever, with works by 331 artists and collectives living in and between 80 countries. His show repositions the art historical narrative away from the Western-dominated Global North to bring overlooked voices to the fore. An overwhelming number of exhibiting artists have never previously participated in a Biennale, making the show a journey of discovery for visitors. It’s also the first Biennale exhibition with more dead than living artists. Some may argue this undermines the show’s role as a pulse-taker of contemporary art, but in a sense, the art world now is all about rewriting and broadening the canon, so Pedrosa’s approach is right on message, even if that message isn’t new.
His emphasis on inclusivity is exhilarating, but it’s also fair to say that the exhibition feels conservative in terms of represented mediums. Paintings and sculptures predominate, and innovative installations are a little thin on the ground, with a surprising dearth of new media technologies. In addition to foregrounding queer art, Pedrosa has focused his research in two directions—textiles and familial artistic connections, especially among Indigenous communities. (The pairing of hallucinatory mythological paintings by Rember Yahuarcani and his father Santiago is a brilliantly effective example of the latter.) Like Cecilia Alemani for her 2022 show “The Milk of Dreams,” Pedrosa has created a historical core intended to open out the narrative of 20th-century art history; three segments are dedicated to Modernists from Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Yet where Alemani’s historical “capsules” contextualized the contemporary art on display, it feels like Pedrosa’s are less about completing a coherent story than shining a light on as many unfamiliar names (“foreigners”) as he can fit.
In terms of three-dimensional works across the two venues, Yinka Shonibare’s Refugee Astronaut VIII (2024) makes for an uncanny harbinger of the future at the Arsenale entrance. Wearing a space suit and oxygen tank decorated with the artist’s trademark “African” fabric, the figure hauls items for surviving disaster. Beyond, a silvery canopy of woven hi-vis nylon straps envelops viewers in an arresting lattice of light and shadow. Created by the female Maori collective Mataaho, Takapau (2022) alludes to a mat traditionally used in childbirth ceremonies, perhaps marking a protective space between outside and inside.
In the vast, former rope-making factory known as the Corderie, the walls are mostly lined with textiles and paintings, with sculptures and installations occupying the central space. Three main zones diverge from this format: there’s the Disobedience Archive, featuring nearly 40 powerful video works on art and activism, albeit in an overly dense display; Bouchra Khalili’s poignant installation Mapping Journey Project (2008–11), in which migrants chart their fraught, circuitous trajectories from North Africa to Europe in black marker pen on suspended screens; and a historic section, “Italians Everywhere,” presenting works by the 20th-century Italian artistic diaspora on elegant glass easels originally designed by the émigrée architect Lina Bo Bardi for the São Paulo Museum of Art, where Pedrosa is artistic director.
The main exhibition space is bookended by two exuberant, monumental murals depicting women in nature. The first, Rage Is a Machine in Times of Senselessness (2024), by Mexican artist Frieda Toranzo Jaeger, is a vibrant, multi-paneled paean to queer women, evoking in oil and embroidery an erotic Eden where a sapphic group cavorts among gigantic machines and lush vegetation. The second mural, Diaspore (2024), by a collective of cis and trans Indian women called Aravani Art Project, portrays trans women surrounded by flowers and patterns in flat expanses of vivid color.
Of the small-scale sculptures, Italian-Austrian artist Greta Schödl’s rock pieces from her “Scritture” (“Scriptures”) series are a standout. Each one is a visual poem, delicately webbed in filigree-like written repetitions of the stone’s name, with one letter repeatedly decorated in gold leaf. These rhythmic gold striations, which Schödl considers “vibrations,” lend a talismanic aspect to her asymmetrical stone forms.
Another highlight is Antonio Jose Guzman and Iva Jankovic’s Orbital Mechanics (2024), a towering structure hung with indigo-dyed fabrics and periodically enlivened by musicians and performers wearing indigo-printed garments who interact with the installation. While the reference to indigo clearly evokes colonial trade in the once prized plant and the horrors of enslavement, the performers’ actions suggest some kind of healing in cross-cultural collectiveness.
I also loved Palestinian-Saudi artist Dana Awartani’s lyrical hanging textile installation Come, let me heal your wounds. Let me mend your broken bones (2024). Large rectangles of silk dyed in sunrise hues derived from medicinal plants have been gashed and then painstakingly darned; each gash represents a heritage site in the Arab world devastated by conflict and the artist’s symbolic attempt to heal the ever-repeating scars.
Another sociopolitical installation, by Colombian artist Daniel Otero Torres, draws attention to the scarcity of drinking water for people living on the margins. The colossal Aguacero (Downpour, 2024), a makeshift, stilted structure on water, is cobbled together from wood, corrugated iron, oil drums and buckets to exert a strong physical and sensory presence.
Mexican artist Bárbara Sánchez-Kane brings sardonic humor with Prêt-à-Patria (2021), a vertical sculpture of three marching military figures skewered by a brass pole that penetrates from their upturned mouths to their anuses. Viewed from behind, red lingerie emerges from beneath the uniforms in a subversion of the uber-masculinity performed by armies everywhere. This queering of conventions reverberates on surrounding walls with South African photographer Sabelo Mlangeni’s celebratory images of trans and queer men and Chinese artist Xiyadie’s steamy paper cuts, threaded through with angst—both artists hailing from countries where LGBTQ+ communities face severe persecution.
In the Arsenale’s final, transcendental room, U.S. artist WangShui enfolds visitors in a darkened amniotic space pulsating with light and shadow. Points of luminescence travel across an LED video sculpture, giving it a continuously shapeshifting presence in a call and response to the writhing silvery traces etched on three arched aluminum paintings. WangShui has described the installation as “my vision of a quantum love.”
Some notable installations reward the trek to the often-missed spaces beyond the Arsenale warehouses. Suspended in a 16th-century shipyard called the Gaggiandre, neon signs in myriad languages and colors float over the water, spelling “Foreigners Everywhere.” Created by the Sicily-based duo Claire Fontaine, this work echoes Pedrosa’s exhibition title. Appropriated from an Italian collective, Stranieri Ovunque, which fought xenophobia in the early 2000s, the phrase can be variously understood as a statement of fact, a complaint, or a call to action.
In an outhouse, Agnes Questionmark’s Cyber-Teratology Operation (2024) is a rare foray into the posthuman for this exhibition, presenting a fantastical body—part human, part mercreature—hooked up to three screens where a Big Brother eye flickers. Technology’s utopian hope is offset by the reality of a heavily surveilled society in this futuristic glimpse of transspecies life.
In contrast, Golden Lion recipient Anna Maria Maiolino goes back to the elemental with her sensual installation INDO & VINDO (2024). Inside a dilapidated shed, unfired clay is stacked high in repeating series of handmade coils, snakes, mounds, and blocks, reminiscent of food, bodily organs, and waste—a meditation on vitality and passing.
At the Central Pavilion, MAKHU, an Indigenous group of Huni Kuin artists from Acre in Brazil, adorned the façade with a dazzling mural depicting a myth of an alligator carrying humans between the Asian and American continents. The main rotunda has been deservedly given over to the superb immersive installation Exile is a Hard Job (1977–ongoing) by Nil Yalter, a co-recipient with Maiolino of a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement. (Both artists are exemplars of uprootedness: Cairo-born Yalter is Turkish and lives in Paris; Maiolino’s Italian family emigrated to Venezuela, then Brazil.) A nomadic tent hung with animal skins squats in the center of the room, encircled by walls covered in images of immigrants, some with bodies blotted out, intimating a loss of identity. Video interviews further testify to this. Large red letters shout the titular slogan “Exile is a Hard Job” in multiple languages—a neat echo of Claire Fontaine’s neon signs and Bouchra Khalili’s installation on migration.
Two historical segments in the Central Pavilion are devoted to abstraction and portraiture. The former makes a strong case for visual dialogues between living and dead artists; Mexico’s Eduardo Terrazas and the late Iraq-born artist Mahmoud Sabri are one example. Modernist abstract paintings and textile works sing out joyfully to one another, animated by the late Brazilian Ione Saldanha’s dynamic sculptural composition of painted bamboo poles, Bambus (1960s–70s), which seems to dance in the air. The portrait segment contains works by more than 100 artists, offering a welcome counterbalance to prevalent representations of the figure by Euro-American Modernists, though Pedrosa’s focus on quantity of participants feels almost like speed dating and gives little sense of the artists’ practices.
“Foreigners Everywhere” is an eloquent, provocative show of uneven offerings. A plea for equality and acceptance, the exhibition makes tangible the vulnerability and trauma of artists ostracized, persecuted, and colonized, underscoring their courage and tenacity. It demonstrates the richness of cross-cultural hybridity and the power of plurality—which can only be positive. On the downside, one might argue that Pedrosa effects a certain leveling by centering identity, placing virtuoso artists on equal footing with skilled artisans. On the other hand, much of the work might not be best served by Western conventions of art criticism. Can one apply the same evaluation criteria to art created in remote reaches with scarce access to materials, under perilous circumstances? Or to art that depicts complex and unfamiliar cosmologies? Perhaps Western approaches are not equipped to understand it; perhaps a new lens is needed. And that is the crux of it. Pedrosa’s principal achievement may be the way that he’s turned the tables on Western complacency, questioning who are the foreigners in an unfamiliar world.
