Dialogues and Disparities at the Venice Biennale

The highly prestigious Venice Biennale represents seven months of artistic reinvention throughout the entire city of Venice as independent artists and countries host collateral exhibitions and pavilions outside the Giardini and Arsenale museums. These collateral events offer free admission and take place in old warehouses, small gallery spaces, and gardens. For its 60th anniversary, the Biennale is especially sprawling; it highlights over 330 artists and nearly 90 national pavilions, creating an immersive array of diverse perspectives. 

 While the 2024 Biennale’s theme, Stranieri Ovunque - Foreigners Everywhere, might sound like a slogan plastered on a Republican bumper sticker, the exhibition is actually a nuanced display of immigration, belonging, and solidarity—each didactic in its own way.  Curated by Brazilian artistic director Adriano Pedrosa, the exhibit transcends the socialized connection between foreigners and immigrants, widening its scope to highlight people of color and indigenous communities. As the Venice Bienniale’s first openly queer and Latino curator, Pedrosa expresses a deep connection to the “foreigner” title, which inspired his curation. In an interview with Metropolis M, Pedrosa explained the different strata of the foreigner identity: “[t]he exhibition unfolds and focuses on the production of several related subjects: the queer artist, who has moved within different sexualities and genders, often being persecuted or outlawed; the outsider artist, who is located at the margins of the art world, much like the self-taught artist, the folk artist and the artista popular; as well as the indigenous artist, who is often treated as a foreigner in their own land.”

Other marginalized voices selected for the Biennale are celebrated with newfound awareness in the national pavilions. Contrastingly, the communal spaces that engage multiple nations appear to be in a mode of retrospection, arguably trying to highlight lesser-known, under-recognized artists from the past. The main communal galleries in the Arsenale and the Giardini are imbued with a sense of historical awareness and repatriation, displaying paintings from the early 20th century. In the Arsenale, many of the selected works are over 50 years old, which is incongruous with the most prestigious showcase of contemporary art in the world. However, the art from once-obscure and historically marginalized painters like Pakistani Zubeida Agha and Brazilian Emiliano di Cavalcanti retain their relevance to the Biennale’s title; they are “foreigners” to the elitist scope of the Western art world. In their lifetimes, these artists—mostly from the global south—never achieved recognition outside of their birthplaces. 

Puerto Rico-based Pablo Delano traces colonial history in novel mediums in the Giardini, creating awareness for issues and demographics often left overlooked by traditional art institutions. Delano’s The Museum Of The Old Colony (2024) is a museum in and of itself, displaying archival photographs and film footage of Puerto Rico after the Spanish-American war. The pictures and artifacts of Delano’s archive attest to the colonial subjugation that Spain and the United States imposed on the institutional and cultural foundation of Puerto Rican society. At the center of the cornflower blue room lies old wooden desks, topped with various satirical American memorabilia: a mini Teddy Roosevelt bust, an ashtray with a metal military tank on it, a ceramic cookie jar labeled “Little White Lies,” and books that read “Dynamite on my Doorstep.” Through these objects, Delano challenges viewers to visualize the stark and exoticized depictions of the destruction and exploitation of Puerto Rico, as well as the potent link between the country’s past and present. 

In contrast, Japan’s national pavilion is the most lighthearted installation in the Biennale’s showcase. Sculptor Yuko Mohri transforms found objects from local Venice grocery stores and supermarkets into a consuming aerial waterway in the in situ installation Moré Moré (Leaky) (2015-2024). It consists of plastic tubes, funnels, umbrellas, cymbals, buckets, and other everyday tools suspended in the air. Water cycles through the installation in a closed system, causing leaks as the exhibit self-corrects them. Mohri was inspired by the creative, albeit haphazard methods improvised by the Tokyo subway system to combat flooding and leaks. The installation is also fittingly cross-cultural; like Tokyo, the climate crisis and flooding of Venice are in a constant state of flux. 

The 2024 Biennale focuses on installations of found objects—like the works of Yuko Mohri and Pablo Delano—leading to a repetitive array of artistic mediums. While the central pavilion generally lacks video pieces, the few displayed demonstrate genuine quality and ingenuity. South African artist Gabrielle Goliath’s Personal Accounts (2024) is a ten-year-long ongoing video project highlighting survival against patriarchal violence. Personal Accounts is a rebuttal to transnational patriarchal and colonial orders, exploring how to dismantle these structures in a post-colonial world. Personal Accounts lies in a small, darkened room. Vertical and horizontal screens are slanted against the wall, seemingly unmounted. Each screen displays testimonies from black, brown, and indigenous individuals. They each narrate their experiences with violence and trauma—but Goliath deliberately withholds their words, opting only to include paralinguistic elements such as their hesitations, swallows, and breaths. Each portrait is played simultaneously, creating a harmonious buzz in the space. The collective sound of the several cycles of breaths and hums draws listeners into an auditory entanglement as the personal narratives transcend the voiceless restrictions of social power. Goliath’s stylistic choices demand a new form of relationship between survivors and listeners that prioritize more cooperative methods of getting to know, hear, and recognize the incommensurability of suffering. 

Efforts to raise consciousness of global socioeconomic disparities must permeate the actual landscape of the Biennale’s layout. Most of the pavilions in the Giardini are dedicated to established, heavily industrialized nations every year. Meanwhile, smaller, newer, and poorer countries are pigeonholed into shared gallery spaces outside of the main museums. The superpower nations are housed in monolithic structures with their country names sprawled across the facade—literally concretizing their participation in the Biennale. The disparity of location and space paradoxically affirms the inequity that the exhibition is contesting, leading to an establishment of set nationalities and perspectives in the sanctum of the Giardini. 

When the Venice Biennale was pioneered in 1895, the quality or style of an artwork was directly tied to the artist’s nationality. However, the global art world has outgrown this system, as definitive national identities have blurred with globalization, affirming that people can feel “foreign” in their nations of origin for other aspects of identity, such as race or ethnicity. The 2024 Biennale highlights this shift in rigidity: the American pavilion showcased the work of a Native American artist for the first time; Denmark’s pavilion highlighted an indigenous Greenlandic artist; Russia lent its national pavilion to Bolivia. While world politics sway the curatorial and artistic decisions of every Biennale, the crux of the 2024 Venice Biennale is evidently altered and dominated by ulterior political motives. Russia did not donate the use of its pavilion to Bolivia out of the kindness of Vladimir Putin’s heart; in 2023, Bolivia signed a lithium extraction agreement with Russia. While Ruth Patir, Israel’s representative for the Biennale, refused to open her show until a ceasefire agreement is reached, she has been hosting private tours of her exhibition, and her video installation is completely visible through the pavilion’s glass. These performative elements of representation will ideally diminish as more unheard voices are engaged in genuine dialogue. 

Nonetheless, the progress noted in the 2024 Biennale is worth celebrating. It holds potential for broader exhibitions that can explore issues of alienation and exclusion that have historically barraged the art world. The sheer reach of the Biennale’s breadth renders it impossible to fully unearth in a single day or newspaper article. The three works highlighted in this review present a range of unseen artists. Stranieri Ovunque can be a milestone for institutional art, setting a new precedent for artists of all backgrounds to be included.