Venice Biennale 2024 The Curated Exhibition

 

A major part of the Venice Biennale is the curated exhibition, whose theme often inspires many of the national pavilions and the collateral and other additional exhibitions that accompany the Biennale, spreading across Venice in museums and a panoply of other spaces.  This year’s curator was Adriano Pedrosa, who adopted the title “Foreigners Everywhere,” “Stranieri Ovunque,” from an installation initiated by a Paris-born, Palermo-based collective Claire Fontaine in 2004. This series of neon sculptures, each of which shows the expression in a different language was installed in my favorite part of the Arsenale, the large arcaded internal dock .

Claire Fontaine, Foreigners Everywhere, suspended neons,
framework, transformers, cables and fittings.

 Pedrosa is the director of the Sao Paolo Museum of Art in Brazil, which explains many of the choices he made for the exhibition. The subject lends itself to a variety of interpretations, and for Pedrosa it meant including a very large number of artists from the Global South, most of whom had not been seen at the Biennale before. This doesn’t mean they were unknown, just not shown at the Biennale. And a great many of them are represented by a single work of art in one of three rooms he designates as the Nucleo storico (historical nucleus), works dating from 1915 to 1990 hung salon-style, described by him as showing about 100 Portraits and about 40 Abstractions in the Giardini section, and about 40 Italians Everywhere in the Arsenale. The first two sections show one work per artist and for me the result was that they were difficult to differentiate, hung salon style. Even though I was familiar with most of the Latin American portrait artists, I hardly noticed them, except for the Frida Kahlo, which had its own security guard.

Wall of portraits with tiny Kahlo and its security guard

I was pleased to recognize an image by Twins Seven Seven, 

Twins Seven Seven, The Architect, 1989
Ink on plywood, glued and carved

a Nigerian artist I had recently discovered, who was included in the famous 1989 exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, “Magicians of the Earth.” And among the abstractions was a characteristic painting by Esther Mahlangu, 
a South African artist known for painting her abstract designs on buildings.  She also was included in “Magicians of the Earth,” and was also commissioned by BMW to decorate a car.

Esther Mahlangu, Untitled, 1990
Acrylic on canvas. Work on top

The Italians Everywhere section in the Arsenale was a different viewing experience. The section included artists who were born in Italy but emigrated elsewhere. Each work is hung on a single glass panel with the label on the back. The installation is the one Lina Bo Bardi (1914-1992) used for the audacious building of the Sao Paolo Museum of Art (curator Pedrosa’s home institution), which she designed and which opened in 1968. Bo Bardi won the Golden Lion for Architecture posthumously in 2021. She herself was an Italian - born in Rome – who moved to Brazil in 1946. I remembered this celebrated installation design from when I was in Sao Paolo in 1981. There, as in Venice, it was unusual and also problematic. If you wanted to look at the painting and glance at the label, you couldn’t; if you wanted to compare two works, or look at a group together, it was very difficult. All the works of art face the same direction, so you cannot turn around and see a group in a room. Looking is harder work, unless you only want to see one thing at a time and don’t need label information. It never surprised me that the system was not adopted elsewhere, but it was still fun to see it again in Venice. 

Bo Bardi installation objects from the front

Bo Bardi installation, objects from the back

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Here's also a Joseph Stella from that section.

Joseph Stella, Fountain, 1929, oil on canvas

And I did enjoy the photograph by Tina Modotti (1896-1942)

Tina Modotti, Falce, Pannocchia e Cartucciera,
1928/1985-1995 ca, gelatin silver print

 Pedrosa acknowledges the “robust presence” of indigenous artists, many of which I had identfied as I was walking through the shows as “folk” artists, not professionally trained or exhibited. The works were in a simplified, perhaps abstracted, narrative style, often charming or powerful manifestations of local issues, people or events.  The upper image, by Santiago Yahaurcani, reflects myths, memories, knowledge of plants, and climate catastrophes representative of his clan in upper Amazonia. The lower two are details of a huge cityscape depicting daily activities of a coastal village in Chile where the group worked between 1967 and 1980

Santiago Yahuarcani, Peru, b. 1960, Aqui esta caliente, 2024
Natural pigments and acrylic on llanchama

Bordadores de Isla Negra, Chile, 

two details from Untitled, 1972

Embroidered canvas

Coincidentally, a surprising number of the works were fiber: woven, collaged, or painted with narratives or abstractions. Some of these, like the two above, were also by outsider artists. I photographed at least 15. While there has been an increase in the presentation of fiber works in art exhibitions, artists such as Faith Ringgold, Olga de Amaral and Magdalena Abakanowicz, and while Yinka Shonibare incorporates African textiles in his works, it is still perceived more as a craft then a contemporary art medium, much like clay and glass. Several of the abstract fiber works were monumental and stunningly lovely. Here are just four:

Nour Jaouda, If the Olive Trees Knew, 2023
Libyan, born in Cairo, lives in Cairo and London
Hand-dyed textile, steel

Dana Awartani, Palestinian, born in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia,
Lives in Jeddah and New York
Come, Let Me Heal Your Wounds, Let Me Heal Your Broken Bones
2024, darning on medicinally dyed silk

Shalom Kufakwatenzi, Zimbabwe, Under the Sea, 2023
Fabric, wool, tobacco twine, fishing line

Antonia Jose Guzman and Iva Jankovic
Panama and Serbia, live in Amsterdam
Orbital Mechanics, 2024
Installation with Ayrakh hand block printed indigo dyed fabrics

Several of the artists are no longer alive, including Susanne Wenger (1915-2009), Anna Zemánková (1908-1986), and Sàngódáre Ġbádégẹsin Àjàlá (1948-2021)

Sàngódáre Ġbádégẹsin Àjàlá, Nigeria, Unknown title, batik

Another focus of the exhibition is Queer art, seen throughout the show and in two designated sections in each of the two main buildings, one devoted to Queer abstraction.  In the Short Guide he identifies himself as “the first openly Queer curator in the history of the Biennale Arte.”

 A lot of the artists, perhaps the majority, are unfamiliar to most critics, but it surprised me that Pedrosa focused on two well-known American Indian painters, Emmi Whitehorse and Kay Walkingstick, each of whom had a focused section of the larger theme exhibition. Jeffrey Gibson, the artist of the American Pavilion, was an indigenous artist less known to me. I hope to mention him in a later post. This one's running out of space.

 While the exhibition itself is exhausting with so many artists, reviewing the booklet a month or so later, one has to be impressed by the number of artists the curator has assembled and recognized.  I wonder if he has hopes that this exhibition and celebration of artists who are not all well-known will have the impact for their careers that Magiciens de la Terre had for those artists.