November 2024
Notes from Venice by Sascha Behrendt
Biennale Arte 2024
Guerreiro do Divino Amor. Aevuma artwork courtesy the artist, the Swiss Arts Council, and La Biennale di Venezia.
As one arrives at Venice by boat, you pass the 12th-century winged Lion of Venice high up its column, reigning over Piazza San Marco. Glimpsing it is a thrill. A reminder of the port city’s wealth trading silk, spices, and timber between the Islamic and Roman Holy Empires. First built as a refuge by fleeing immigrants, Venice needed no walls, protected by its lagoons.
That 600,000 people today, descend upon this fragile, car-free island to check the latest pulse of international art is an astonishing thought. That it continues every two years, is a testament to the Venetian pride as hosts and their deeply felt appreciation of art and culture, despite climate change precarity.
For this 60th Venice Arts Biennale, provocatively titled Foreigners Everywhere — Stranieri Ovunque, Brazilian curator Adriano Pedrosa set out to showcase works by Indigenous, Queer, and Global South communities, as an alternative to the dominant American-Euro modernist canon. The former Biennale president, Roberto Cicutto’s only request, according to Pedrosa, was that he “construct an exhibition full of beauty.”
Pedrosa won awards for his curation of the first Afro-Atlantic Histories exhibition in 2018 at the São Paulo Museum of Art, Brazil, which later toured major North American museums. Charting the transatlantic slave trade, its legacies and African diaspora, it demonstrated Pedrosa was not daunted by tackling large, sprawling themes.
The Biennale hosts National Pavilions and curated sections split between the charming Giardini and austere naval Arsenale complex. To get to either by public water bus involves jostling with tourists, luggage, Venetians with shopping, and feisty old ladies with superior balancing skills.
So, beginning with a bang within the Giardini main pavilion, was work by winner of the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, Turkish-born Nil Yalter. Her title slogan Exile is a Hard Job (1977-2024) alongside videos of immigrants sharing their experiences immediately met Pedrosa’s concept with expected integrity.
Nil Yalter Exile is a hard job, 1983-2024. Video Installation. Photo: Matteo de Mayda Courtesy: La Biennale di Venezia
However, soon elsewhere, artworks varied enormously in quality of ideas and execution, with at times lesser works adjacent, dragging down the good. Paintings by established artists, Louis Fratino, and Salman Toor came to mind, and were surprisingly affected by this.
Curated sections such as the Nucleo Storico Abstractions suffered from an ambitious jamming together of too many paintings, so that renowned artists such as Carmen Herrera and Etel Adnan were drowned out by the salon-style hanging. Their artworks also felt unrepresentative of their brilliance. Since both are well established, and this their first showing at Venice, it felt like a telling missed opportunity.
Carmen Herrera Untitled (Halloween), 1948. Acrylic on burlap. Photo: Matteo de Mayda Courtesy: La Biennale di Venezia
Santiago Yahuarcani El Mundo del Agua, 2024. Natural pigments and acrylic on llanchama. Photo by: Andrea Avezzù Courtesy: La Biennale di Venezia
It was a pleasure to then discover at the Nucleo Contemporaneo section, a diverse series of beautiful textile artworks. Compositions by Noura Jaouda of torn, dyed fabrics, subdued yet rich in tonal play, and Susanne Wenger’s 1960s intricate resist-dyed batiks depicting Yoruba-inspired cosmologies. Not far, were magnificent acrylic paintings on llanchama parchment by the self-taught Santiago Yahuarcani, a member of the White Heron clan from northern Amazonia.
Susanne Wenger Mythos Oduduwà, Schopfungsgeschichte, 1963. Cassava starch batik. Photo by: Marco Zorzanello. Courtesy: La Biennale di Venezia
A contrasting surprise came from 1970s paintings by Scottish-born Erica Rutherford, who recorded her transition to becoming a woman through her Pop Art styled, colorful self-portraits.
Erica Rutherford Self Portrait with Red Boots, 1974. Acrylic on canvas. Courtesy the Estate of Erica Rutherford, Beth Rudin DeWoody. Photo by: Andrea Avezzù Courtesy: La Biennale di Venezia
Erica Rutherford installation view. Photo by: Andrea Avezzù Courtesy: La Biennale di Venezia
River Claure, from the series Warawar Wawa VII, 2019 Pigment prints on cotton. Photo by: Marco Zorzanello. Courtesy: La Biennale di Venezia
Also refreshing were the docufiction photographs by Bolivian visual artist River Claure, who gives power back to the Andean mining communities he serves, by inserting their desires into mutually collaborative portrayals.
Pavilion of the Netherlands, The International Celebration of Blasphemy and The Sacred. Photo: Matteo de Mayda. Courtesy: La Biennale di Venezia
The 30 National Pavilions built in the Giardini in the 19th and 20th centuries are today physical reminders of the hierarchies, politics, and colonialism of those times. The legacies of which, within art, Pedrosa attempts with this Biennale to redefine.
So, it was interesting to see the Dutch Pavilion hosting the Congo collective, Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC) in collaboration with artist Renzo Marten and curator Hicham Khalidi. Titled The International Celebration of Blasphemy and the Sacred their installation proposes sustainable art and monetary solutions for the degradation of their environment in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) from palm oil extraction by Dutch-British corporations.
The sale of CATPC’s figurative sculptures made from cacao and palm oil funds the buying up and replenishing of precious lands. The stark directness of CATPC’s raw sculptures placed in white space, their ethics and mission, cut through any art bullshit and power dynamics. This was art sold making a difference.
Meanwhile, at the British Pavilion, the Black-British artist John Akromfrah symbolically subverted Britain’s prominent placement at the Biennale site, by making all visitors enter through the back ‘trade’ door, rather than the English country house grand entrance. Akomfrah has done much important work using film and sound to overhaul and intervene in Britain’s historical colonialist narratives. However, his slickly produced video works based around poet Ezra Pound’s Cantos, felt overly complex, abstract, and longwinded, at a time when 86 other pavilions were competing for one’s attention.
On a lighter note, at the Swiss Pavilion, Brazilian-Swiss artist Guerreiro do Divino Amor (Warrior of Divine Love in Portuguese), brought a sassy humor and critique to Foreigners Everywhere. Poking fun, his projections using video-game aesthetics had goddesses of highly suspect motivations as utopian protectors of capitalist greed, national clichés, and slick PR spin at boardrooms and pristine glaciers. It was a laugh-out-loud, high-energy visual feast, titled ‘Super Superior Civilisations, The Miracle of Helvetia.’
Pavilion of Switzerland, Guerreiro do Divino Amor, Miracle of Helvetia, Super, Superior Civilizations, 2024. Artwork courtesy of the artist.
A collision of foreigners and national ideals was to be found in the paintings by Irina Elderova from the Republic of Azerbaijan. Here, with Girls Prefer Oilmen, Elderova toys with Marilyn Monroe as the American myth, falling in love with the communist ideal, a Caspian Sea oil worker. With a light hand, Elderova portrays giddy scenes from their romance, oil rigs lurking in the background. Geopolitics rendered in paint.
Pavilion of the Republic of Azerbaijan, Irina Eldarova Offer, 2013. Oil on canvas. Photo by Irina Eldarova Image courtesy of Irina Eldarova
After many, many, paintings and whimsical installations (yes looking at you, France and Finland) the Greek pavilion was a welcome relief. Xiromèro / Drylands put together by a collective of artists and composers featured a clanking irrigation machine, messy water, and videos of the ebbs and flows of village life. Plunged into its sensorial noisy experience in the dark was overwhelming and enjoyable.
Athens in Greece, has become a recent hotbed city for emerging artists, so it was good to see some formally coherent work, even if it didn’t meet Pedrosa’s concept exactly.
Pavilion of Greece, Ξηρόμερο/ DRYLAND, 2024, installation view. Photo by: Marco Zorzanello. Courtesy: La Biennale di Venezia
Another was the Republic of Uzbekistan, with artists Aziza Kadyri and the Quizlar Collective. Here contemporary AI technology was incorporated into the making of suzani, traditional embroidered cloths, to show the slippage and inherent bias towards Central Asian and Global South cultures. One spotlit example, amongst many, showed how AI interpreted and evolved the Zoroastrian peacock motif, a symbol of wisdom and fertility into abstracted sewing machines.
My personal favourite, was Trinket, showing sculptural artworks by Kapwani Kiwanga at the Canadian Pavilion. Tying past Venice to the present Biennale, she transformed the nautilus-shaped modernist building inside and out with thousands of glass beads, strung to create shimmering curtains of color. These refer to the blue seed beads called conterie, originally made in Murano, Venice, which were traded as currency in the 16th century around the world in exchange for ivory, gold, and slaves.
Kiwanga presented precious materials, gold, timber, and glass, shaped as pure simplified forms, in reference to the exchange, value, and structures that still underpin commerce and economic agreements today. Deeply researched, rigorous in form and expression, Kiwanga’s exhibit was sensitive to local history, and ‘full of beauty.’
Kapwani Kiwanga, Trinket, 2024, installation view. Courtesy Adagp Paris / CARCC Ottowa. Photo: Valentina Mori
Kapwani Kiwanga, Trinket, 2024, installation view. Courtesy Adagp Paris / CARCC Ottowa. Photo: Valentina Mori
Overall, Pedrosa’s mission is an ongoing needed correction to the predominant skew of Western influence over contemporary art. However, this Biennale was affected by such a mixed bag of quality, old and new, that it threatened to undermine the possibility of a new perspective. A tighter edit, with more spacing, and a consideration of visual aesthetics between works, would have made absorbing 331 artists an easier and rewarding experience of discovery.
Venice Biennale
April 20 - November 24, 2024
Editor Sascha Behrendt is a writer with an in-depth knowledge of arts and culture in the US and UK. Interviews and profiles include artists Stan Douglas, Arthur Jafa, Sakiko Nomura, Walter Van Beirendonck, Francesca Woodman and Wolfgang Tillmans. She writes for the Sasson Soffer Foundation in New York, and is currently working on a comedy thriller novel.