The Venice Biennale opened to the public last weekend. This year, its main exhibition focuses on artists who have not been seen in Venice before – and especially these five pavilions are worth seeing there.
Venice
“Foreigners Everywhere” reads the neon sculpture at the entrance to the main exhibition of the Venice Biennale, strangers everywhere. It is the work of the artist collective Claire Fontaine, but also the theme of the entire biennale this year.
“Wherever you go, wherever you are, there are always strangers around you. And wherever you are, deep down you are a stranger yourself,” writes the Brazilian curator Adriano Pedrosa in the opening words of the exhibition.
With foreignness, Pedrosa refers not only to citizenship but also to how gender, sexuality, ethnicity or class status can also cause the experience of being outside. They can prevent full participation in society, and over the years they have kept many artists out of the spotlight of the art world.
For the main exhibition of the Venice Biennale, Pedrosa has gathered various outsiders under the same roof. With the help of their works, he shows how different experiences of the world can be conveyed through art.
What is it like to drive a motorcycle taxi in Lagos? That’s about it Karimah Ashadun video work. And what was it like to live as a homosexual farmer-artist in China? You can get acquainted Xiyadien to elaborate paper cuts. What do the happy moments of the queer community in South Africa look like? You can see a glimpse of it Sabelo Mlangenin in black and white photographs.
Multiply this list of subjects and authors by a hundred, and you get the main exhibition of the Venice Biennale.
Although the successful Nigerian-British artist Yinka Shonibare is not an outsider in the art world herself, her refugee astronauts encapsulate many of the biennale’s themes.
Pacita Abad is one of the biennial’s many first-timers. His work You Have to Blend in, Before You Stand Out (1995) describes the immigrant’s experience in a new country.
Xiyadie: Kaiyang, 2021.
Giardinin The exhibition, spread over the main pavilion and the premises of Arsenale’s old shipyard, feels both really traditional and really radical at the same time:
Traditional, because it is made like a traditional museum exhibition, and also because, for a contemporary art exhibition, a surprisingly large part of its works are from the 1940s to the 1970s. In the Giardini’s labyrinthine main pavilion, one hall is hung full of portrait paintings, and another displays modernist abstract works.
And at the same time, the exhibition is something that has never been seen so widely before.
Samia Halaby: Black is Beautiful, 1969.
The young American painter Louis Fratino, who depicts the everyday life of sexual minorities, is also participating in the Venice Biennale exhibition for the first time.
The Swiss outsider artist Aloïse (1886–1964) has been given a lot of space in the exhibition.
World Pedrosa, who received the biggest curatorial task this time, has put together an exhibition of 331 artists and artist collectives, most of which are participating in the biennale for the first time. The majority of them come from Latin America, Africa, the Middle East or South and Southeast Asia.
The fact that, according to some calculations, more than half of the artists are dead caused excitement beforehand. But it is essential to Pedrosa’s project.
He wants to open the viewer’s eyes to the fact that enormously beautiful things have been done and are constantly being done in the world, of which the western “art world” is not aware.
The Mataaho collective’s work Takapau (2022) is made of tourniquets. A group of Māori artists won the Golden Lion for the best work in the main exhibition.
Karimah Ashadu won the Silver Lion, which is awarded to a promising young artist in the main exhibition. His work Machine Boys (2024) depicts the motorcycle taxi drivers of Lagos.
The exhibition is like a bag of loose candy: You can never predict in advance what will be revealed in the next exhibition hall.
However, the candy analogy should not be taken as a trivialization. There is a lot of really important stuff in the exhibition: by Teresa Margolles the image of a human body covered in blood on the canvas concretizes the South American migration in a sugary way, and Salman Toor describes not only the communality of gay circles, but also the violence against them.
Adriano Pedrosa has brought from São Paulo the hanging technique designed by Lina Bo Bardi, where the works can be seen from the front and back. In the middle, Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato’s oil painting Araucárias (1973).
The sculptures of Greta Schödl’s Scrittura series, born in 1929, are included in Arsenale’s exhibition section.
WangShui: Lipid Muse, 2024.
Cynics have already written that Pedrosa is now exposing his artists to the international art world’s way of biting artists and then spitting them out. International mega-galleries have certainly rushed to the openings and signed exclusive contracts for the artists’ productions.
Other critics have seen the exhibition as a preachy identity quota exhibition that repeats all its artists and whose “level” varies, at least in the light of Western tradition.
I couldn’t find such glasses myself.
Naive or not, I experienced the exhibition as a gift in the middle of the opening week of the Venice Biennale, which seems to some to be more of an excuse to drink champagne than to look at art.
If you get through Pedrosa’s exhibition, it’s hard to look at art history the same way again.
5 pavilions worth seeing
The main show in addition, the Venice Biennale includes more than 80 country pavilions, some of which are in the Giardini, some on the banks of the Arsenale, and the rest around the city in palazzos, churches, and also, for example, in the Venice women’s prison (the Vatican pavilion, reportedly good this year!).
These five pavilions are worth seeing this year.
1. Australia
Archie Moore’s collection of works “Kith and Kin” in the Australian pavilion won the Golden Lion for the best pavilion.
Last at the biennale, the Nordic pavilion was changed to the Sami pavilion, and they performed there Máret Anne Sara, Paulina Feodoroff and Anders Sunna. The Nordic countries were at the forefront: this year’s biennial is a major indigenous biennial, as indigenous artists are represented in the pavilions of Australia, Brazil, Denmark and the United States, among others.
The most visible of these is by Jeffrey Gibson exhibit at the US Pavilion. Belonging to the Choctaw people, Gibson combines glowing pinks, reds, yellows, oranges and turquoise with arrow-like patterns and slogans. They also cover the outside walls of the pavilion and create an image of a psychedelic Pride week.
In terms of effectiveness, however, Gibson remains second in the Australian pavilion Archie Moorelle. On the walls of the black-speaking pavilion, Moore has drawn his dizzying family tree, which he says includes 3,484 names and stretches back 65,000 years. The central part of the pavilion is dominated by piles of paper raised on a stand and arranged in a staggered manner. They are official documents about members of the indigenous people who died in the hots of the Australian authorities.
The mournful whole is reduced in form, but on an emotional level like a fist on a diaphragm. At one place, the nation dies at the hands of the colonizer, but also sprouts new members.
2. Egypt
Wael Shawky’s “musical” is about the Urabi rebellion, which ended with Britain occupying Egypt in 1882.
of Egypt the pavilion is not a lasting hit of the biennale, but this year rumors about its excellence started circulating in the first days, and by the weekend there were already queues for hours to enter the pavilion.
It’s hard to explain why Wael Shawkyn the work became a topic of conversation: It is a slow-moving, epic musical sung in Arabic, with a hint of whimsical sets and costumes. Drama 1882 is part of a series of works in which Shawky presents the events of history in a new light.
A good video work is one that captures the moment. Exactly Drama 1882 does, and then holds in his hypnotic grip for 45 minutes.
3. German
In the German pavilion, Ersan Mondtag’s work culminates on the roof of the “house”.
About the wow effect and the German pavilion, where an Israeli artist will perform, is responsible for the longest queues this year Yael Bartana and a director better known from the theater side Ersan Mondtag. The queues are caused by the Mondtag section, where the main door of the pavilion has been blocked with earth imported from Turkey, and a three-story house has been built inside it.
The dilapidated house and the expressionless singer-performers wandering there tell the story of Mondtag’s Turkish-born grandfather, who moved to the GDR as a guest worker in 1968, worked in an asbestos factory and died of cancer in 2001.
Mondtag’s work on recent history is a startling emotional experience and would be quite enough for the content of the pavilion, but its counterpart is the future in the form of Bartana’s kabbalistic space adventure.
4. Attacks
In the work of the Open Group artist collective in the Polish pavilion, the main role is played by the soundtrack of war.
Sota can be seen this year in the biennale especially through absence. During the opening, it was announced that the Israeli artist had decided to keep the pavilion closed until a ceasefire is established in Gaza and the hostages are released. Russia will not be seen at the biennale this time either.
The Austrian pavilion sums up how strange it is to run around Venice with the power of espresso looking at art while wars are going on in Gaza and Ukraine. There Ukrainian ballet dancer Oksana Serhejeva practicing Swan pond as a part Anna Jermolaeva of the work, as a reference to the Soviet way of showing ballet on TV whenever the real news was to be kept hidden.
However, the best war-themed work is the bombing karaoke of the Polish pavilion. In the work of the Оpen Group collective Repeat after Me II Ukrainian civilians imitate the sounds of missiles, tanks and artillery fire, for example like this: WEEEEEEEEEHWEEUUWee facingthat’s it! THAT’S IT! THAT’S IT!
Identifying sounds may be a matter of survival. When the Ukrainians appearing in the video look into the camera and ask the audience to repeat the sounds, an embarrassed silence spreads through the pavilion.
5 South Korea
In Koo Jeong An’s work, a bronze sculpture blows steam from its interior that smells like old electronics, for example.
When sense of sight starts to get overloaded, it’s time to move on to the South Korean pavilion, where there is very little to see. The sense of smell comes first. Koo Jeong A has interviewed people and created 16 different scents for the pavilion, from rice to the fish market, from public baths to old electronics.
The nose is also challenged in the Japanese pavilion next door, where Yuko Mohri has attached tangerines and other fruits to the strings. When they mold, they evaporate moisture, which causes light bulbs to turn on and off. In other sculptures, water leaking through a funnel and an umbrella triggers a mechanism that causes a triangle to sizzle or a pound to dance on the surface of a drum.
The Dutch pavilion, on the other hand, smells of bitter chocolate, from which the CATPC collective from Luanda has cast sculptures together with an artist Renzo Martensin with. Through the sculptures, the collective buys back lands that have been owned by European companies such as Unilever.
The 60th Venice Art Biennale is open to the public from April 20 to November 24, 2024. Day ticket 30.5 euros.