Foreigners Everywhere celebrates the joy and courage of the South at the Venice Biennale

The title of Adriano Pedroso’s new exhibition at the Venice Biennale, Foreigners Everywhere, is not the rebuke it seems from afar. Rather, the show highlights art that has been overlooked over the past century and celebrates the multiculturalism of the Global South.

Featuring contributions from more than 100 artists, the exhibition captures the joy and political audacity of the work produced by otherwise marginalized artists while the rest of the art world kept an eye on gallery sales or their gaze on a Western canon .

The first part, the ‘contemporary core’, is exhibited in the Arsenale, the former arms warehouse of the former Republic of Venice. A second part, the “core of stories”, is located in the International Pavilion of the Giardini, the gardens where the national pavilions of the Biennale are located.

Broadly speaking, these two sections fall into the categories of contemporary and modernist works, but Brazilian curator Pedroso overlaps historical and contemporary throughout the exhibition, while also moving across vastly different geographies.

Textiles are an important medium, especially in the Arsenale. Long considered less impressive than oil paintings – reserved for women or folk traditions – embroidery, weaving and quilting are reclaimed here through historical practices such as those of the Filipino artist Pacita Abad, the artist Claudia Alarcon of the Wichi people of northern Argentina. working here with the Silat collective), or the women who made embroidery arpileras under Pinochet in Chile.

Pedroso also underlines its potential as a contemporary medium, as in Dana Awartani’s stunning work Come, let me heal your wounds. Let me mend your broken bones, while we stand here mourning (2024). Arranged like floating blocks of painted silk, it maps examples of destruction of cultural sites across the Arab world, signaled by small tears in the fabric that the Saudi-Palestinian artist creates and then stops. The project was first developed for Abu Dhabi’s Al Burda Festival in 2019 and grows with each exhibition, with the latest tears reflecting the war in Gaza.

It is a connection to war, and the role of art as testimony, that runs through both shows, and gives a sense of the urgency and vital necessity of art as a cultural medium.

Global modernisms

At the Giardini, two special salon-style presentations showcase masterpieces from global modernism: one dedicated to abstraction and one dedicated to portraiture, from Latin America, the Middle East and Asia.

“I feel like I can breathe,” says Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi at the preview. “It’s such a relief to see work from the region, without having to see it next to European paintings.”

Al Qassemi’s Barjeel Art Foundation, based in Sharjah, lent work to the exhibition, alongside other regional entities such as Mathaf in Doha, the Dalloul Art Foundation in Lebanon and the collection of Taimur Hassan. All were on loan for the first time, reflecting the importance of properly collecting the region’s art history.

Pedroso used these rooms to make new connections. Latin American abstraction and that of Middle Eastern artists were both extremely rich, exciting periods – with a sense of color that largely surpassed Western painting.

This show revealed the potential to study these correspondences more fully. For example, a work with waves by Mohamed Melehi was combined with a painting with similar color bands by the Argentinian artist Maria Martorell, both made in 1968.

Dominican artist Freddy Rodriguez, who died in 2003, made abstractions based on the landscape in much the same way that Samia Halaby uses her work to recall the Palestinian land of her childhood (Halaby was represented here by one of her large cross paintings ) .

The rooms were beautiful, but they also run the risk of flattening the work into mere visual patterns. The exhibition works hard to provide context, with short texts commissioned by scholars and writers who know what they are talking about, such as (from the Middle Eastern perspective) Jessica Gerschultz, Rasha Salti and Saira Ansari. But the salon-like presentation of artworks displayed along the walls somewhat prevents individual works from speaking on their own terms.

The juxtaposition of different contexts works best in the most difficult part of Pedroso’s thesis: the idea of ​​foreigners everywhere. The title, taken from a work by the French collective Claire Fontaine, has been criticized for its apparent nod to nativist rhetoric – although Pedroso clarifies that ‘foreigners’ are intended to be read broadly, for example to include those those who feel strange in their own body or in their own mind.

People are at the heart of art making and migration is at the heart of strangeness, he explains. This is underlined by the array of subjects in the installation of modernist portraits. A number of paintings show black figures in different regions; such as works by South African artist George Pemba; the Nigerian Uche Okeke; Brazilian artist Candio Portinari; and Jamaican artists Barrington Watson and Osmond Watson. They act as a document of the geographical scope of the African diaspora – with the cause (slavery) left hanging unsaid in the room.

Institutional amnesia

Despite its deliberate focus on historical practices, Foreigners Everywhere is ironically seen as a departure from the standard mode of curation. Pedroso, for example, is known as the first South American to curate the biennale, and the first “born and raised in the Global South.”

The analysis is telling – because Pedroso is not the first curator from the Global South to curate the biennial, nor the first curator to deliberately bring in artists with marginalized identities. With the exception of the 2017 and 2019 editions, expanding the geographies of art has been the explicit leitmotif of the Biennale since Massimiliano Giani’s presentation in 2013.

The lack of institutional memory in the art world is significant. In part, it demonstrates the need for innovation, but more importantly, it recognizes the compromised nature of the project: even as the players in the exhibition change, the structure of the art world remains Western-dominated, with power and financial influence still in hands. New York, London, Paris and Berlin. The idea that “foreigners everywhere” is a new idea simply reflects the fact that the exhibition format is so steeped in Western mindsets that the inclusion of outliers still feels jarring to those who perpetuate them.

The beauty of the exhibition, however, is that many works of art seem unconcerned about their place in the Western art world. There were fewer dealers on the stock exchange, fewer power brokers selling anything. Works such as those of Rosa Elena Currurich from Guatemala, those of Aycoobo from Colombia and the Aravani Art Project from Bangalore document political struggles closer to home or demonstrate different forms of faith and art practice.

They are a crucial reminder that the task of art – especially in the Global South – has so often been to resist official histories and to give voice to alternative realities. Rather than flattening the similarities between these works, the work of Foreigners Everywhere feels united in solidarity.

Updated: April 24, 2024, 4:36 am