Venice Biennale 2024: Celebrating Diversity.

A Venice Biennale The 2024 edition will be entitled “Foreigners everywhere” and will be “a celebration” of the 'outsider', of what comes from outside, through artists “themselves foreigners, immigrants, expatriates, exiles, refugees”.

The announcement was made today by the show's curator, Adriano Pedrosa, in Italy, who also listed the expressions “queer”, "often persecuted or proscribed", and artists "on the fringes of the art world“, just like the indigenous people.

The theme of the 60th International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale in Italy – “Foreigners Everywhere” -, which will take place between April 20 and November 24, 2024, was announced today at a joint press conference by the president of the biennale, Roberto Cicutto, and the curator appointed by the organization, Adriano Pedrosa, artistic director of the São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP).

Adriano Pedrosa indicated that the theme of the next art biennial has “at least a double meaning”.

“First of all, it means that wherever you go and wherever you are, you will always find foreigners – they are everywhere”.

Said the curator, immediately switching to the first person plural: “We are everywhere”.

So, secondly, he continued,

“it means that, regardless of where we are, deep down we are always truly foreigners”.

Adriano Pedrosa underlined that the international art biennial will stage the production of;

“artists who are themselves foreigners, immigrants, expatriates, diasporas, emigrants, exiles and refugees, especially those who have moved between the global south and north”.

The figure of the foreigner will be associated with that of the outsider, the stranger and, therefore, according to the curator, “the exhibition will develop and focus on works by related others: the artist”queer”, which moves between different sexualities and genders and is often persecuted or proscribed.

The outsider artist, who is on the margins of the art world, such as the self-taught and the indigenous artist, who is often treated as a foreigner in his own land”.

The production of these artists will be the focus of the Art Biennial and will constitute the Contemporary Nucleus of the exhibition.

For the curator, the context of art is, in itself, “a world full of multifaceted crises that affect the circulation and existence of people within countries, nations, territories and borders”, a context that reflects;

“the risks and pitfalls that lurk inside language, its possible translations”.

“Expressing differences and disparities conditioned by identity, citizenship, race, gender, sexuality, freedom, wealth”.

Not forgetting questions of colonialism, as he said. Adriano Pedrosa left no doubt:

“Yes, there are political connotations and implications in the exhibition, but there will also be artists dealing with other, more formal themes”.

He said this at the end of the press conference, when asked about the political nature of the chosen topic.

At the same time, Roberto Cicutto commented that “political positions are part of contemporary art”, and pointed out that the Bienal, in its history, “has [always] given visibility to those who have less representation space”.

In the opening speech, Cicutto had already stated that the next Venice Art Biennale “and its curator will know how to fill these gaps in the History of Art with many presences that have been neglected until now”.

The president of the biennial established a parallel with the Architecture Biennial, curated by Lesley Lokko and with a focus on African artists, under the theme “The Laboratory of the Future”.

He noted, however, that the choice of themes is always made by the appointed curators, and, in the different areas, whether with Lokko or with Cecilia Alemani, in the previous art biennial, the curators “showed the need to pay attention to critical aspects of the world".

The title of the 60th Venice Biennale International Art Exhibition – “Foreigners Everywhere” – comes from a series of works started in 2004 by the Claire Fontaine collective, born in Paris and based in Palermo, Italy, which exhibited at the Galleries from Lisbon in 2019.

The works consist of neon sculptures in different colors that reproduce, in a growing number of languages, the words “Foreigners Everywhere”. The phrase, in turn, comes from the name of a Turin collective, Stranieri Ovunque, which fought against racism and xenophobia in Italy in the early 2000s, recalled Pedrosa.

The international exhibition – he said – will also feature a Historical Nucleus that will bring together works from Latin America, Africa, the Arab World and Asia in the XNUMXth century, and a special section dedicated to the Italian artistic diaspora, with Italian artists who traveled all over the world, developing careers in Africa, Asia, Latin America, as well as the rest of Europe, integrating with local cultures.

These artists “often played significant roles in the development of Modernist narratives beyond Italy”, detailed the first Latin American curator of the Bienal.

“The Biennial itself – an international event with numerous official participations from different countries – has always been a platform for the exhibition of works by artists from all over the world”, he added.

Asked about the size of the representation of Brazilian artists, Adriano Pedrosa did not indicate numbers or names, “because the exhibition is still in the process of being prepared”, but said that “many artists from Latin America will be there, since Brazil and Argentina have the largest diaspora Italian in the world”.

Adriano Pedrosa also said that the Venice International Art Exhibition will have approximately the usual number of artists, around 200, in addition to national participation, with their own exhibitions in the Pavilions of the Giardini and Arsenale, as well as in the historic center of the city.

The second edition of College Arte will also take place, for young emerging artists under 30, starting next autumn, which may lead to an exhibition, at the end of the process, up to four new projects.

Adriano Pedrosa was joint curator of the São Paulo Art Biennial in 1998 and its co-curator in 2006, curator of exhibitions and collections at the Museu de Arte da Pampulha in Belo Horizonte (2000-2003).

The 2024 Venice Biennale program will be presented in February of the same year.

The previous edition, “The Milk of Dreams”, curated by Cecilia Alemani, which ended in November, featured Portuguese painter Paula Rego.

Picture: © DR