Exuberant Assembly [VIDEO]

Michael Kurcfeld attends the 2024 Venice Biennale and profiles its curator, Adriano Pedrosa.

By Michael KurcfeldAugust 2, 2024

• Art & Architecture

In the accompanying video, Michael Kurcfeld explores the 2024 Venice Biennale and interviews curator Adriano Pedrosa about the outsider impulses behind the selections and themes for this year’s festival.

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WHAT’S HAPPENING IN US politics—the ascent of a woman of mixed race to an electrifying run at the presidency, again transcending the standard white males normally on offer—can be said to have been foreshadowed by the 60th Venice Biennale’s centerpiece exhibition, Stranieri Ovunque—Foreigners Everywhere. This year’s designated curator, Brazilian Adriano Pedrosa, invited over 330 artists, a record number, and predominantly from the Global South. Beyond this detour from the more frequent adherence to the mainstream districts of art, he rigorously delved into the rarely seen work of outsider, Indigenous, and LGBTQ+ artists—for many of them a debut on this most prestigious of art-world stages.

Some jaded preview-week attendees grumbled about the sheer number of artist newbies on display and wondered what criteria were used by Pedrosa, besides that of regional authenticity and a seeming desire for absolute inclusion. His effort appears more as a project of addressing neglect and erasure than that of burnishing existing laurels and reputations. But if not now for representing, indeed celebrating, the most marginalized art on earth, then when? For many, it is both refreshing and edifying to view work, on such a teeming scale, that had hardly ever been seen in the usual sanctums of fine art, until recently. The Biennale has been, after all, the most international art forum for over a century, and Pedrosa was canny enough to run with its implied mandate of inclusivity, not only geographically but also historically. The Portraits section in the Giardini, for example, is a profusion of places, eras, styles, and identities—the renowned, such as Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, side-by-side with names previously unknown to Biennale habitués.

Art-world gatekeepers have slowly opened up to a broader and more global range of artistic voices, but in Venice, the flood of entrants into the VIP lounge of Art is for some a revelation and for others an anxiety-inducing signal of the twilight of vintage credentials for what is deemed legitimate Art—in scholarship and in market value. It’s no longer Picasso, Gauguin, and their descendants appropriating “Global South” iconography; it’s the non-Western, noncanonical, sidelined artists themselves who now command the spotlight, viewed on their own terms. (Note: If a current project succeeds, the next Biennale will see the launch of Papua New Guinea’s own pavilion.)

As has been observed by some critics, Foreigners Everywhere is not a perfect exhibition. Some categories are simply generalized buckets (Abstractions, Portraits) with little to distinguish the individual artists, many with but a single entry. And at times it can seem as if Pedrosa hasn’t applied much in the way of a critical filter, editing out the so-so work that would not normally find its way into the Biennale, so much as embracing any and all artists who “authentically” (via basic descriptors) represent their origins and/or identities. But this is a minor quibble, more than compensated for by a bounty of new discoveries.

Pedrosa’s exhibition is a potent solvent that blurs some boundaries while highlighting others. It reveals a nomadic world that is rapidly shrinking through migrations, rootlessness, diaspora, border criss-crossings, assimilations, regional-style fusions (and resistance), art-immersion pilgrimages and an international art-world dialogue that he has brazenly expanded. Woven into it, implicitly or explicitly, are many of the political frictions of the day.

It goes far beyond the matter of Israel’s anointed artist refusing to open her exhibit in its pavilion, in predictable protest. Pedrosa’s invited Indigenous artists tell stories in their work, elaborated in wall texts by an army of invited writers, about the far less media-saturated issues of their own territories, including colonial dispossession. The artists often source not only art-history keystones but also powerful local mythologies transmitted orally by ancestors unconcerned with the rest of the world, sacred knowledge handed down by shamans and tribal artisans. (There’s an abundance of textile and ceramic art here, echoing a reevaluating and validating craft renaissance currently underway in art-world institutions.) These in turn enter into a conversation with more mainstream ideology and practice, either confluently or turbulently—a maze of juxtapositions, of unintended echoes and rhymes, of modernist debts absorbed and counterpointed, of cultural mash-ups and confrontations.

The show’s “Outsider” artists, doubling the meaning of the exhibition’s “foreigner” theme, allow into the mix the psychological terrain now referred to as neurodivergent, which has its own off-the-beaten-path country, one that also harbors art brut and any other autodidact expression. LGBTQ+ artists are generously threaded throughout the spaces by the Biennale’s first openly gay curator. Their “strange” (“stranieri”) experiences and wisdoms add some of the most compelling energy to the array of artworks while cementing their contributions to our understanding of exclusion and fraught identity, though contemporary art history is hardly without gay icons, from Cocteau to Bacon to Haring. What seems new is their representation from all corners of the globe—China, Lebanon, Nicaragua, Belgium—as Venice’s doors are flung open.

The whole notion of “foreign,” Pedrosa’s project seems to suggest, is fluid, ubiquitous, and finally absurd. His Babel of images, objects, and texts flows into a collective of creativity that ties the vast range of labors together under two roofs, a dual edifice of many windows and mirrors, and a common humanity—Art as the world’s one true unifying religion. In a sense, the exhibition transcends Western judgment, as an exuberant assembly of self-sustaining, self-justifying, self-sanctifying work. It is conventional market-swaying criticism that is the foreigner here.

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Featured thumbnail: Susanne Wenger, The Great Festival of Ajagemo, 1958. Still from the video, courtesy of Michael Kurcfeld.