Foreigners everywhere, but in style

On one hand, we find the lovers of what was touted as the first Biennale in history to include minority groups, left-out artists, all the world’s “foreigners”; on the other, the outraged who accuse the curator Adriano Pedrosa of having put together a Biennale with outdated and backward-looking contours, exclusive, out of touch with the times and turning those who are “different” into pets. No Venice Biennale has ever pleased all audiences, but the 2024 one will be remembered as a sort of battleground for diverging opinions and arguments.

Anyway, how can we report on Foreigners Everywhere?

It is definitely a thoughtfully curated project, especially in the Giardini’s central pavilion, where Pedrosa has crafted an absolutely perfect, seamless and flawless exhibition: all the rooms earned the highest scores, especially for the dialogues conceived between contemporary artists and those of yesteryear – as evidenced by the relationship between Filippo de Pisis’s paintings and those of Louis Fratino, Victor Fotso Nyie’s sculptures with Rubem Valentim’s geometries, and Joseka Mokahesi Yanomami’s drawings with the images snapped by Claudia Andujar.

Self-declaring himself “the first queer curator” in the Venice Biennale’s history, Adriano Pedrosa has provided a wide range of visibility for several artists who address, or have tackled, sexual topics, perhaps the last taboo to be broken in our more-than-liquid society. There are many works in Foreigners Everywhere addressing them: as well as Louis Fratino and his naïve, languid boys, Salman Toor’s “cruising” paintings are on show – he is represented by the New York gallery Luhring Augustine; the super-photographed mosaic of a kiss between two wrestlers by Lebanese artist Omar Mismar; Chinese artist Xiyadie with his homoerotic works on paper cut-outs; or the wonderful photographic series by artists Miguel Ángel Rojas and Dean Sameshima, greeting the visitors.

Whilst the exhibition is at its very best at the Giardini, the Arsenale’s dimensions seem to swallow up the vast amount of paintings in Pedrosa’s Biennale: notwithstanding some impressive installations – such as the Archive of Disobedient Artists, excellently staged by the Italian curator Marco Scotini; the one by the Colombian artist Daniel Otero Torres, highlighting the drinking water crisis in the Bogotá region; or the one by the New Zealand collective Mataaho, one of the Golden Lion winners – the show appears to lose some of its elegance at this point, growing weaker.

However, the most striking aspect is the museum-like identity of this International Visual Arts Exhibition, as if it had just arrived in Venice from a catalogue raisonné of some great institution: the unpleasant topics raised by the curator are dealt with in an acerbic manner.

The national pavilions

As opposed to the cold and accurate exhibition curated by Pedrosa, several of this year’s national pavilions would have merited a Lion or at least a special mention.

For instance, Spain, where Sandra Gamarra Heshiki’s Pinacoteca Migrante project – the first emigrant artist selected to represent the country in more than a century – sets up a genuine museum on the walls, attempting to challenge Spanish cultural institutions’ traditional culture by “presenting a series of narratives that have always been silenced”, as stated in the curator Augustín Peréz Rubio’s text, prioritising not only human migrants, but also plants and goods, and even questioning the Western concept of a “pinacotheca”.

The Romanian artist Şerban Savu breaks away from the themes explored by Foreigners Everywhere, presenting a magnificent polyptych of forty paintings reflecting on notions of time: labour and free time, blended according to professions, places and, above all, politics. Şerban, who spent two years studying in Rome, reminds us how his country, following the collapse of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s dictatorship in 1989, was caught up in the limbo-like situation revealed by his paintings, where activity and rest – whether in offices or intimate settings – are intertwined.

One other national entry worth highlighting comes from Serbia: with his Exposicion Colonial, Aleksandar Denić dares us to reflect on how our existence, even if lived on the “colonial” side of the world, has in itself been colonised by other cultures and, more than that, by the global economies developed with the approval of all governments, or almost all of them, during the last century.

Egyptian artist Wael Shawky – also featured at the Grimani Palace with the exhibition I Am Hymns of the New Temples – has been lauded as one of the leading figures deserving of the Golden Lion, and rightly so: his project Drama 1882 is a musical based on the memorable revolution of ʿUrābī, which took place in the African country against imperial rule. This epic staging, divided into several acts, goes from a brawl in an Alexandrian café to the city’s massive bombardment by British forces. This is a truly different project, wisely and tastefully executed: “For me, representing something significant from Egyptian history was crucial, discussing British colonisation in relation to current events. I’ve always been captivated by the idea of circumscribing particular moments in history and reading them from a different angle,” says Shawky.

The Pabellón Criollo by Venezuelan artist Sol Calero, at the entrance to the Giardini, is worth a lingering look among its tiled benches and colourful walls, reminiscent of South American architecture, between tradition and colonial style. Built using materials from other interventions in the 2023 Biennale pavilions, the work is a structure in its own right, whose life after the International Exhibition will ultimately depend on a relocation process in the Venice region.

Interestingly, the Swiss Pavilion conceived by the Swiss-Brazilian Guerreiro do Divino Amor, whose project entitled Roma Talismano (one of the two parts of the exhibition) about the Italian capital – completed during his residency at the Swiss Institute of Rome in 2022 – could have perfectly represented Italy, whereas in the Arsenale, the pavilion of the nation that has been hosting the Venice Biennale – the oldest in the world – for over one hundred and twenty years, housed the sound project Due qui – To Hear, by the artist Massimo Bartolini: although much better than many of the participations we’ve seen in the Italian pavilion, the installation failed to touch the hearts of art world insiders.

Beyond the Biennale: overkill in all its foundations

Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty, the most recent Italian movie to win an Oscar in Hollywood for “best foreign film” ten years ago, felt like the perfect backdrop to the other events taking place during the Biennale’s opening week: crowds vying to get into parties and events to experience their fifteen minutes of limelight in one of the world’s most fascinating and expensive cities.

The Swiss artist Christoph Büchel’s project Monte di Pietà, designed for the Venetian headquarters of the Prada Foundation, is a bit over the top. Reflecting on the ancient charitable institutions that offered small-scale loans on more favourable terms than those of the market, drawing on the history of the Ca’ Corner della Regina palace – home to Venice’s Monte di Pietà between 1834 and 1969 -, Büchel has built a complex network of spatial and economic relationships and cultural landmarks, exploring the notion of debt as the root of human society and the primary medium through which political and cultural powers have been wielded. The exhibition overtly presents itself as the ultimate response to projects whose identity is to provide a theme-based intersection of commercial and artistic mixtures and exchanges, whilst observing the present: between the millions of low-value objects at Monte di Pietà are hidden artworks, from Kounellis to Titian, piled-up paintings, stacked basins, washing machines and other instruments known to mankind; an unparalleled archive, even in the trajectory of one of the boldest and wealthiest global institutions dedicated to promoting art today.

The presentation-performance was excessive and bewildering, as was the “project-encounter” – defined as such by the artist Eun-Me Ahn – Pinky Pinky Good, on the island of San Giacomo in Paludo (acquired by the Turinese collector Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in 2021). Over three hours, exclusively on the morning of April 19, hundreds of art enthusiasts brought there by boat were entertained with music, performances, purple smoke clouds, soap bubbles and songs from different origins, trying to establish, according to the project, a connection between the afterlife and the present. Eun-Me Ahn, passionate about shamanic practices and contemporary dance, concluded her rite by symbolically pouring water from the Venice lagoon using a crane. An absolute delight.

Once back in the city, Pierre Huyghe, at Punta della Dogana (home of the Pinault Collection), reshapes the environment with the Liminal project: driven by the French artist’s fascination with the relationship between the human and the non-human, we enter dark rooms and encounter mysterious objects, alien creatures spouting an unknown language, understanding fictions as “means of accessing the possible or the impossible – what could or could not be”, in keeping with the artist’s philosophy.

On the subject of painting once more, Harold Stevens was the American artist chosen by the gallerist Tommaso Calabro to open his second Venice office, in Campo San Polo. Obsessed with men, friends with Andy Warhol and a protégé of the French gallerist Iris Clert, Stevens also took part in the 1964 “Floating Biennale”: this was a group exhibition on the Bella Laura boat, docked next to the Church of Health, run by the same Clert, who was accused of spreading pornography in the days leading up to the Biennale’s official opening.

The young Italian Guglielmo Castelli, represented by the Mendes Wood DM gallery, is exhibiting at Palazzetto Tito, the headquarters of the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation, with an outstanding and unprecedented pictorial production prompted by a guide book for kids entitled Improving Songs for Anxious Children, found by chance in the New York Public Library during a trip by the artist.

There’s also another Foundation in Venice by producer Beatrice Bulgari, In Between Art Film, limited to Complesso dell’Ospedaletto for the last two years. This year there was Nebula – “cloud” or “mist” in Latin -, the second chapter in an exhibition series organised by the Foundation to pursue the study of vision and extra-visual perception, which began in 2022 with Penumbra. This edition delves deeper into the narrative and spatial dialogue between the video installation medium and the hosting architecture. The new pieces by Brazilian duo Cinthia Marcelle and Tiago Mata Machado, Italian Diego Marcon and Pakistani artist Basir Mahmood, whose project is a breathtaking and touching look at migratory routes, are not to be missed.

A new opening in the Dorsoduro neighbourhood – or sestriere, according to Venetian toponymy – is the Palazzo Diedo, the recently acquired Italian headquarters of another Foundation, the German-American Berggruen, established by investor Nicolas Berggruen in 2010. After ten years of neglect and two years of thorough remodelling, the building reopened its rooms with the group exhibition Janus, a heterogeneous ensemble of works attempting to bridge east and west, driven by the site-specific interventions of Japan’s Lee Ufan teamed up with the photographs of Hiroshi Sugimoto and Urs Fischer’s striking installation, among many others.

All in all, even in the absence of major international galleries renting spaces in Venice to present their art stars, as usual, the figures for this year’s Biennale are telling: there were almost 27.000 accredited journalists during the pre-opening days (19% more than in 2022) and almost 9.000 visitors on the first opening day, Saturday April 20 (5% more than in the record edition of 2022): in Venice, excess once again came with the right personality.