60th Venice Art Biennale Announces Agenda – Strangers Everywhere

The 60th Venice Biennale of Contemporary Art will take place from 20 April to 24 November 2024 at the Giardini, Arsenale and other venues in Venice. The motto of the main project will be “Stranieri Ovunque” (“Foreigners everywhere”) – a reference to the name of the Turin band of the same name, which fought against racism and xenophobia in Italy in the early 2000s. This was announced by the curator of the anniversary biennale, artistic director of the Art Museum in Sao Paulo (MASP) Adriano Pedrosa. In the ten months remaining before the opening, Pedrosa will have to put together the main exhibition of the Biennale, which also includes dozens of national pavilions.

Adriano Pedrosa, 58 years old, born in Rio de Janeiro, was appointed Artistic Director of MASP in 2014 and, having received at his disposal a rich classical museum, in a few years reoriented it to posing the most complex problems of modern civilization. He became famous for his “Historias” series of exhibitions, each of which explored topics related to different cultures and identities. This cycle includes the exhibitions “History and Sexuality” (2017), “History of the Afro-Atlantic” (2018), “History of the Brazilians” (2022). Critics say that Pedrosa’s ostentatious interest in multiculturalism and redefining the ideological conventions of the “old” world is not so much a step towards renovating a classic museum of European art as “a not-so-subtle reproach to Brazil’s political leaning to the right.” The Afro-Atlantic History exhibition, a mix of American artists, historical artefacts and archival documents on the trauma and legacy of slavery, was a hit and toured the best US museums from Los Angeles to Washington.

Adriano Pedrosa will be the first Latin American to be chosen to curate the Venice Biennale. In this choice lies the expectation from him of just such topics and practices. The title of the main exhibition the other day confirmed those hopes: Strangers Everywhere is based on Pedrosa’s designs at MASP, and it will be an exhibition that he says will highlight the diversity of races, genders and nationalities, serving what he called “celebrating foreign, distant, foreign, queer and so-called natives. “Artists have always traveled in a variety of circumstances, moving across cities, countries and continents, a phenomenon that has only grown since the end of the 20th century — ironically, a period marked by increased restrictions on the movement or movement of people,” Pedrosa said in a statement.— Biennale 2024 will be dedicated to artists who are themselves foreigners, immigrants, expats, diasporas, emigrants, exiles and refugees, especially those who have migrated between the global South and the global North.”

The theme of the Pedrosa Biennale continues the main exhibition of the previous biennial curator Cecilia Alemani “The Milk of Dreams”, which was dedicated to women and non-binary artists and in which less than a tenth of the more than 200 invited artists were male participants. A feature of this project was the inclusion in it of a group of “capsule” exhibitions, connected exclusively by a common theme. The 2024 Biennale will also not be homogeneous: Pedrosa names two main sections – “Modern Core” and “Historical Core”, dedicated to new and old works of art, respectively. The second part aims to expand the history of modernism beyond Europe and North America.

“We are all all too familiar with the history of modernism in Euro-America, but modernism in the global South remains largely unknown and thus gaining real relevance – we urgently need to learn more about them and learn from them,” Pedrosa said. European modernism traveled far beyond Europe throughout the 20th century, often intertwined with colonialism, and many artists from the global South traveled to Europe to experience it. Nevertheless, modernism has been appropriated, absorbed and cannibalized in the global South, repeatedly taking on radical new shapes and forms in dialogue with local artists and contexts.” So far, only one part of the “Historical Core” is known for sure: it will be devoted to what Pedrosa called “the worldwide Italian artistic diaspora of the twentieth century”, and will tell about Italians who traveled and moved to Africa, Asia, Latin America and other places.

It is clear from Pedrosa’s statements that the idea of ​​decolonialism will be central in Venice next year. Changing the vector not from distant countries to Europe and America, but exactly the opposite, from world art centers to foreign and little-known cultures, the curator not only follows the already bored ideological fashion, but also looks for artistic evidence of mutual influences that are necessary to work with the colonial past. Some countries participating in the 2024 Biennale have already begun to announce their representatives: the French-Caribbean artist Julien Kruse will speak for France, the anti-globalist and anti-colonialist John Akomfra will exhibit in the British pavilion, the famous expert on the transatlantic slave trade and cultural diplomacy Kawani Kiwanga – in the Canadian pavilion, Australia will be represented by Archie Moore, a representative of one of the indigenous peoples of Australia, Denmark – Greenland photographer Inuutek Storh, etc. Russia’s participation in the 60th Venice Biennale is not expected.

Kira Dolinina