A celebration “of the immigrant, the foreigner, the 'queer' and the indigenous”: all the excluded take power at the Venice Biennale

The excluded have taken power at the Venice Biennale. The main global event for contemporary art will open the doors of its 60th edition this Friday in the Italian city with a celebration “of the immigrant, the foreigner, the

queer

and the

indigenous”, in the words of its artistic director, the Brazilian Adriano Pedrosa. The commissioner has devised a route guided by the new ideal of imperative decolonization of culture. The vast majority of the selected artists – 200 historical and 100 contemporary – belong to the global south. Almost none of them had been to this event before and many of them are true strangers. The edition orchestrated by Pedrosa is an invitation to observe everything that this biennial has strived to ignore during its 130 years of history. And, by extension, the entire art world, and all of society.

The curator, director of the São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP), is the first Latin American to assume this position, one of the most coveted in the cultural sector. He is also the first openly

queer

curator to spearhead this biennial. And the first to have traveled to countries such as Kenya, Zimbabwe, Angola, Indonesia, Guatemala or Paraguay to screen artists, admirable for its geographical breadth. “I felt like I had a mission,” he said Monday as he put the finishing touches on the exhibit.

In reality, non-Western art and that made by artistic collectives are not an absolute novelty: they have already been present in other recent events, such as Documenta in 2022 and the São Paulo Biennial in 2023, which featured 80% artists. not white. But its prominence in an event as canonical and Eurocentric as Venice represents a kind of consecration. “It is natural that they are increasingly dominant topics, because they are what mark the current moment. I wanted to make a very political proposal, but also very poetic,” Pedrosa responds.

In the central pavilion of the Giardini, the nuclear white of the neoclassical building has been replaced by colorful motifs that represent the Amazonian fauna and flora, the work of the MAHKU collective, which brings together artists of

Huni Kuin

culture , on the border between Brazil and Peru. . The title chosen for this edition,

Foreigners Everywhere

, denounces the uprooting of subaltern identities, but also praises the creativity that emanates from their marginal position. The main exhibition of the biennial, which tends to consolidate a great trend in the sector, proposes an alternative genealogy of the art of the last two centuries (especially the 20th), through a permanent movement between historical times that eludes the figures guardians of European modernity.

The itinerary opens with a tribute to exiles from around the world, the work of the Egyptian Nil Yalter, who in this edition receives the Golden Lion, together with the Brazilian Anna Maria Maiolino, in recognition of their long careers. In the next room, several dozen abstract works made outside Europe hang, from the asymmetrical geometries of the Turkish Fahrelnissa Zeid to the sensual volumes of the Cuban Zilia Sánchez. They are hybrids of European teachings and local traditions, an artistic attitude that Pedrosa compares, without any irony, to “cannibalism.”

A little further on, a hallway links queer

portraits

by Louis Fratino with photos of gay porn cinemas by Dean Sameshima and a series by Miguel Ángel Rojas about

crusing

in an old room in Bogotá in the seventies. Then comes the naive art of two Guatemalans, Andrés and Rosa Elena Curruchich (grandfather and granddaughter), who documented daily life in their community. Just like Sénèque and Philomène Obin in Haiti, authors of delicate vignettes about their daily rituals, or like the paintings by Yanomami painters who have arrived from the Amazon.

In the Arsenale of the Italian city, a monumental historical complex of shipyards and armories, the Maori collective Matahoo opens the route with an unconscious nod to the optical games of the Brazilian Lygia Pape. Moroccan Bouchra Khalili urges several migrants to paint on a map the routes that led them to exile. Iván Argote presents “a decolonial fiction” in which a monument of Columbus is transported in a truck through the streets of Madrid and observes the amazed reaction of the passers-by. And the Mexican Bárbara Sánchez Kane presents several military mannequins that hide fine lingerie under the uniform.

The story of this biennial, perhaps more in favor of cataloging than interpreting, draws a world of invisible alliances between individuals and subjected groups of different kinds, who only share their transversal condition of being excluded. Only sometimes does the comparison become unintelligible, as when equating the

art brut

of Aloïse, which inspired Breton and Dubuffet, with the current tapestries of Liz Collins, “fantasies of a

queer

utopia .” Or when confronting the anodyne portraits of Giulia Andreani with a delicate mural on textile by Madge Gill, a self-taught artist who painted under the effects of hypnosis during the first half of the 20th century.

Adriano Pedrosa, curator of the biennial: “I am aware that it is not an exhibition about landscaping, but about a political issue. I'm not afraid of controversy; “It would be natural for there to be”

In a room in the same venue, Pedrosa has exhibited dozens of works by Italian artists who emigrated to the rest of the world on the legendary concrete and glass easels designed by Lina Bo Bardi, the Roman architect who went into exile in Brazil after World War II. It is worth seeing in that room a political commentary on the Italy of Giorgia Meloni, to whom Pedrosa seems to remind that his compatriots were also treated as plagued in other places and times. “It is a provocation,” admits the commissioner. “I am aware of not having made an exhibition on landscaping, of having chosen a political topic. I'm not afraid of controversy; It would be natural that there be. It is part of the process if you are interested in dealing with contemporary issues.”

The geopolitical context has intruded on the biennale, as is customary in Venice. After the suspension of the exhibition by the Israeli Ruth Patir (by her own will), the artist who represents the country in Venice, a hundred professionals demonstrated on Wednesday in front of the Israeli pavilion and the US pavilion, coincidentally neighbors. . The first, renamed by those protesting as “the genocide pavilion.” Hours before, the new president of the biennial, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, had referred to the non-inauguration. “To quote Magritte, this is not a pavilion. It is an artistic fact, it is the genius of art that knows how to find an answer,” said the journalist and writer, close to the theses of Meloni and Salvini and who, as a young man, was active in the extreme right.

If the biennial has maintained a criticized equidistance, in the different exhibitions on its premises there are plenty of nods of solidarity to Palestine. A large mural work by the Mexican Frieda Toranzo Jaeger includes several watermelons, a symbol of pro-Palestinian resistance. In the so-called

Archives of Disobedience

, a series of videos about art and political action, the Peruvian Daniela Ortiz also refers to the State without full international recognition. Sandra Gamarra does the same in the Spanish pavilion, with a quote from Paul B. Preciado that compares Palestine to the trans body, “a colony whose extent and form are perpetuated solely through violence.”

Politics is found even in the Vatican pavilion, which has been installed in a women's prison on the island of Giudecca; It is the areas themselves that guide the visitor through the exhibition. At the end of April, they will receive a visit from Pope Francis. Also in that it will be a new edition: it will be the first time in its entire history that the biennial welcomes the highest authority of the Catholic Church. He continues to be, saving distances, another foreigner.

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