The 60th Venice Biennale

Curator Adriano Pedrosa presents a vision that narrowly defines artistic production based on artists’ identities, leaves little room for complexity, and encourages essentialist categorisations reminiscent of far-right worldviews. The national pavilions—an oft-criticised model—thankfully provide more thoughtful moments in an exhibition marked by polarising politics and wars.

If the central exhibition at the Venice Biennale is any indication of the direction in which the leading discourses in the art world are headed, then for this critic it seems like there’s little to be looking forward to. The trending shift towards focussing on an artist’s identity over the art itself is cemented with this biennale; it offers a lacklustre vision that pushes rigid self-definitions at a time when open-mindedness and a focus on our communalities are called for. The Biennale’s curator Adriano Pedrosa, who emphasised in interviews that he is the first Latin American and openly queer man to be selected for the role, has chosen Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere as the title and theme for the Biennale’s sixtieth edition. The name is based on a series by the British Italian artist duo Claire Fontaine, which in turn borrowed the slogan from the name of an anti-racism collective active in Italy in the early 2000s. The namesake work, which hangs by the water at the far end of the Arsenale, consists of a series of neon sculptures that spell out Foreigners Everywhere in different colours and languages. During opening week, at least four of those signs were spelled wrong, in languages including Farsi, Turkish, Swedish, and Yiddish. Why talk about Otherness and inclusivity if you’re going to do so with empty gestures and little effort to truly engage?

But there’s a lot of art on view before visitors get to those neon signs—and I mean a lot. Pedrosa has included more than 300 artists in the exhibition, most of whom are dead. In the central pavilion in the Giardini, an alternative mini museum, the Nucleo Storico, is dedicated to modernist painters from the global south. Borrowed from collections all over the world, from Singapore to Beirut, there are many exciting first-time encounters here, even for well-informed professionals. But strangely, rather than confronting entirely different takes on modernism in this capsule exhibition, a striking number of paintings repeat the same vaguely Picassoesque style. It’s also regrettable that the artists on display are shown with just one work; viewers are afforded no broader insights into their artistic production beyond the fact that they were painters working in the southern hemisphere in the first half of the twentieth century.

A comparatively small number of younger and living artists are featured in the main show this year and some, thankfully, offer more engrossing, thought-provoking experiences. Nigerian artist Karimah Ashadu’s video installation Machine Boys, 2024, which won a Silver Lion, looks at Lagos’ motorcycle taxis, colloquially known as okada. In 2022, due to numerous accidents and the impossibility of regulating okada’s informal economy, a ban was enforced, making passengers and drivers liable to imprisonment. Ashadu trains her camera on the drivers’ rituals of masculinity, which serve as an anchor for these precarious workers who continue to ride despite the ban. Elsewhere, the Mataaho Collective, consisting of four Māori women artists, present a large-scale fibre-based installation resembling a takapau, a finely woven mat traditionally employed in ceremonies. The monumental piece can be viewed from multiple perspectives, its intricate construction dazzling with the interplay of light and shadows on woven patterns. Mataaho Collective was honoured with a Golden Lion for this contribution to the main exhibition.

Meanwhile, many national pavilions echo Pedrosa’s celebration of the under-represented and actively overlooked. Jeffrey Gibson—the first Indigenous artist to represent the United States—transforms the American pavilion into a bright and colourful pastiche of sculptures and wall-works. There’s also a nine-channel video installation in which the former Miss Native American Sarah Ortegon performs a powwow dance to house music. It’s a sharp contrast to the Australian pavilion, winner of this year’s Golden Lion for best national participation with Archie Moore’s minimalist yet monumental work. Titled kith and kin, the work includes thousands of names from the artist’s own Kamilaroi and Bigambul family tree, dating back 65,000 years, written in chalk on the pavilion’s walls and ceiling. In the centre of the room stands a table with reams of redacted files, documenting injustices and arbitrary violence that continue to disproportionately target Australia’s First Nations citizens.

Among the several nations participating for the first time this year is Timor-Leste, represented by Australia-based artist Maria Madeira. Titled Kiss and Don’t Tell, the pavilion features large-scale works on tais, a traditional Timorese cloth, emblazoned with marks made from betel nut and natural pigments that resemble drips of blood. With this painfully beautiful offering, Madeira honours the women who were subject to systematic sexual violence during the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, which lasted from 1975-1999.

Germany’s pavilion was among the most lauded with its presentation by theatre director Ersan Mondtag and artist Yael Bartana. Mondtag’s work pays homage to his grandfather who came to postwar Germany from Turkey as a guest worker and suffered the medical consequences of working in asbestos production. Israeli-born Bartana offers a sci-fi interpretation of a concept from Jewish mysticism, with an intergalactic generation spaceship shaped like the diagram of the tree of life in the Jewish Kabbalah. Hope, according to this visually and conceptually challenging work, may not be easy to find on this planet. Other national participations dealt more directly with current events, and the Polish pavilion was particularly haunting. It featured a video titled Repeat after Me II by the collective Open Group, of Ukrainian civilians mimicking the sounds of Russia’s weapons, including mortar shelling and tanks, and prodding you to “repeat after me”—microphones were set up in the pavilion, and some visitors tried to participate in this heart-rending karaoke. “Ratatatatatatatatatata” goes the Kalashnikov.

The Israel-Hamas war dominated much of the reporting around the biennale, but in my opinion, most failed to capture the real controversy. On preview day, artist Ruth Patir announced her decision to not open the Israeli pavilion, where she is showing works around the theme of motherhood—an uneasy topic in light of the war raging in the region, but also the history of rape which led to Judaism becoming a matrilineal tradition in the twelfth century. A poster was hung on the pavilion’s glass front explaining that the exhibition would only open “when a ceasefire and hostage release agreement is reached.” Here, Patir and the curators were echoing the call by Israelis protesting against their government for months to reach a diplomatic deal that would end the war and bring the hostages home. But that didn’t stop those who were pushing for the Israel Pavilion’s boycott. A stream of protesters, members of the international art world and holders of professional badges, marched down the Giardini chanting “Shut it down,” “Free Palestine,” and “One solution, intifada revolution!”

The Second Intifada broke out in 2000 amidst failed peace talks between then Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and PLO [Palestine Liberation Organisation] leader Yasser Arafat, with numerous suicide bomb attacks targeting civilians in an orchestrated, successful attempt to end the peace process. It led to mounting casualties on both sides of the conflict, and to the construction of the separation wall around the West Bank, worsening Palestinian’s lives under Israeli occupation. There were no winners to the Intifada, and seeing members of our art community blindly glorifying it was a chilling display of hateful and ignorant rhetoric.

Where do we go from here? With even the realm of art becoming so deeply polarised and leaving little room for nuance and complexity, it’s hard to see a path forwards. What’s more, the new president of the Biennale Foundation is the far-right journalist Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, appointed in December 2023 by Meloni’s extreme right government. Whoever the Biennale appoints as curator for its next iteration could very well be pandering to a right-wing camp or, at best, struggling to appease it. It is all the more disappointing then that Pedrosa’s Biennale failed to advance a vision of truly progressive values so sorely needed to counter the shape of things to come.

This review was originally published in Artist Profile, issue 68

EXHIBITION
The 60th Venice Biennale: Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere
20 April – 24 November 2024
Various venues, Venice, Italy