The 60th International Art Exhibition, titled Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere, will open to the public from Saturday April 20 to Sunday November 24, 2024, at the Giardini and the Arsenale; it will be curated by Adriano Pedrosa and organised by La Biennale di Venezia. The pre-opening will takes place on April 17, 18 and 19; the awards ceremony and inauguration will be held on 20 April 2024. Since 2021, La Biennale di Venezia launched a plan to reconsider all of its activities in light of recognized and consolidated principles of environmental sustainability. For the year 2024, the goal is to extend the achievement of “carbon neutrality” certification, which was obtained in 2023 for La Biennale’s scheduled activities: the 80th Venice International Film Festival, the Theatre, Music and Dance Festivals and, in particular, the 18th International Architecture Exhibition which was the first major Exhibition in this discipline to test in the field a tangible process for achieving carbon neutrality – while furthermore itself reflecting upon the themes of decolonisation and decarbonisation.
THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION of the Curator
The title of the 60th Exhibition is drawn from a series of works started in 2004 by the collective Claire Fontaine: neon sculptures in different colours that render in a growing number of languages the words “Foreigners Everywhere”. The phrase comes, in turn, from the name of a Turin collective who fought racism and xenophobia in Italy: Stranieri Ovunque. The backdrop for the work is a world rife with multifarious crises concerning the movement and existence of people across countries, nations, territories and borders, which reflect the perils and pitfalls of language, translation, nationality, expressing differences and disparities conditioned by identity, nationality, race, gender, sexuality, freedom, and wealth. In this panorama, the expression Foreigners Everywhere has several meanings. First of all, that wherever you go and wherever you are you will always encounter foreigners—they/we are everywhere. Secondly, that no matter where you find yourself, you are always truly, and deep down inside, a foreigner.
The Exhibition presents 331 artists and collectives who have lived or currently live in and among 80 countries, including Hong Kong, Palestine, and Puerto Rico, reflecting how artists have always traveled and moved for a wide variety of reasons. The main focus of the Biennale Arte 2024 is therefore on those artists who are foreigners, immigrants, expatriates, diasporans, exiles or refugees, particularly those who move between the Global South and Global North. The Italian straniero, the Portuguese estrangeiro, the French étranger, and the Spanish extranjero, are all etymologically connected to the strano, the estranho, the étrange, the extraño, respectively, which is precisely the stranger. The first meaning of the word “queer” is precisely “strange”, and thus the Exhibition unfolds and focuses on the production of other related subjects: the queer artist, who has moved within different sexualities and genders, often being persecuted or outlawed; the outsider artist, who is located at the margins of the art world, much like the selftaught artist, the folk artist and the artista popular; the indigenous artist, frequently treated as a foreigner in his or her own land. The productions of these four subjects are the interest of this Biennale, constituting the Nucleo Contemporaneo. Two elements have emerged in the research and recur throughout the International Exhibition. The first one is textiles, which have been explored by many artists in the show in multiple ways. These works reveal an interest in craft, tradition, and the handmade, and in techniques that were at times considered other or foreign, outsider or strange in the larger field of fine arts. A second motif is the family of artists, many of them Indigenous, related by blood or marriage. Again tradition plays an important role here: the transmission of knowledge and practices from father or mother to son or daughter or among siblings, relatives and couples. The International Exhibition will also feature a Nucleo Storico gathering
works from 20th century Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Much has been written about global modernisms and modernisms in the Global South, and a number of rooms will feature works from these territories, much like an essay, a draft, a speculative curatorial exercise that seeks to question the boundaries and definitions of modernism: Portraits and Abstractions in the Central Pavilion of the Giardini, and Italians Everywhere in the Corderie dell’Arsenale. We are all too familiar with the histories of modernism in Euroamerica, yet the modernisms in the Global South remain largely unknown. In this context, these stories take on real contemporary relevance: we urgently need to learn more about them and from them. Most of the artists from the Nucleo Storico are exhibited for the first time at the Biennale, and thus a historical debt to them is acknowledged.
«This 60th edition of the International Art Exhibition is all there in the title Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere. Two powerful and “scandalous” words – Biennale President Pietrangelo Buttafuoco commented – that open up current scenarios and possible universes, on the horizon of which the curatorial line of thought is composed, sharp in the glance of distance, vibrant with complex contrasts when observed more closely. Adriano Pedrosa signs for La Biennale an Exhibition that reflects his personal attitude of study and research on which the prejudice of the already known does not weigh. […] This Biennale Arte, then, hosts samples of marginalised, excluded, oppressed beauty, erased by the dominant matrices of geo-thinking. The interlacing themes of Pedrosa’s Exhibition – the different, the foreigner, the journey, integration – will reverberate nowhere better than in the calm and ever-renewed waters of the lagoon city. The city that as many as 129 years ago had the idea of staging the first International Art Exhibition thus renews its commitment to curiosity and the love of knowledge. That same impulse that drove Marco Polo – the 700th anniversary of whose death will be celebrated in this same 2024 – to meet and explore cultures seen as distant and threatening: finding acceptance, as a foreigner in those lands, by virtue of a sincere openness to human and equal exchange. Those were times when the Rialto market teemed with languages, ethnicities, styles and vitality. And many countries had Fondeghi – trade centres in modern terms – in Venice: Turks, Syrians, Germans… showcasing their goods and expertise. Biennale Arte – with its National Pavilions, artefacts, artists and visitors from all over the world – was already there in embryo. For Venice, in fact, diversity has stood from the outset as a basic condition of normality. A process of mirroring and confrontation with the Other, never perceived in terms of denial or rejection. A process of mirroring and confrontation with the Other, never perceived in terms of denial or rejection. Pedrosa has been on an elevenmonth-long physical and mental journey, taking in Chile, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Puerto Rico, Guatemala, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Angola, South Africa, Singapore, Indonesia, the Middle East, before landing here in the lagoon to construct his own Fable of Venice, his Sirat al Bunduqiyyah. Venice is the only European city to have had, since 1000 AD, a name in Arabic. A constellation of meanings that functions as a fine counterpoint to the 60th International Art Exhibition. Bunduqiyyah: different, mestizo, mixture of peoples, foreigner».
VIRTUAL MUSEUM DIGITAL COLLECTION
If you cannot make it to the Venice Biennale this season, you can try a new immersive and interactive experience of a new virtual museum of Abstract Art sub-themed “Digitally Venizia” of the Avant-Garde Artist Elena Butko who was highlighted for her artworks depicting the war in her home country Ukraine with the quote of Angelina Jolie on refugee crisis in the “Calling Hearts” documentary trailer by the UN Ambassador of the University for Peace – UN Commission for Peace at the Climate Change Forum during COP28UAE last year on the Green Carpet and Awards Ceremony Gala with Emily Thorner Ultra Soprano, and Naomi Campbell receiving the “Outstanding Contribution to Gender and Racial Equality” Award. The film “Calling Hearts” by Annina Alexis Fedorkova has been nominated and officially selected fro screening at Bridge of Peace, Catania, and Capri, Hollywood international film festivals.
ART AND FASHION ILLUSTRATION WITHIN LEGENDARY ARCHITECTURE
And while architecture is on the agenda of the Venetian Biennale. One cannot but to highlight Dame Zaha Hadid and her unique and one of a kind architecture designs. A tribute to her artistic architecture was made by a coalition of some of her admirers on social media such as CINAR Fine Rugs, The Fashion Factor, Porterium Magazine, Moral Moda Magazine, Emily Thorner Ultra Soprano, Art & Hope, Zenith Art and Fashion, Artist Alena Vailina, Monacolife Magazine, Marco Polo Experience Magazine among others on her annual memory; the day she left the world with her mesmerising legacy, shedding the spotlight on her one and only designed hotel ME
Dubai at the Opus by Omniyat where the world renowned fashion artist and illustrator Alena Lavdosvkaya (aka Alena Love) had her collaboration art exhibition for a month of Art-In_Residence themed WOMAN IS ART in celebration of Women’s day from the 6th of March to the 15th of April, 2024.
PARTNERS AND SPONSORS OF LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA
The 60th Exhibition was also made possible thanks to the support of Swatch, Partner of the event. Main Sponsor of the 60th Exhibition is illycaffè. Sponsor: American Express, Bloomberg Philantropies, Vela-Venezia Unica Our thanks go to Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP. Rai is Media Partner of the 60th International Art Exhibition and will follow the event with a dedicated offer on TV, radio and on the web.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We would like to thank the Ministero della Cultura, the regional Institutions that each in their own way support La Biennale, the City of Venice, the Regione Veneto, the Soprintendenza Archeologia, belle arti e paesaggio per il Comune di Venezia e Laguna, and the Italian Navy. We thank our Donors and the International Councils and Organizations, which are essential to the creation of the 60thExhibition. We especially wish to thank Adriano Pedrosa and all his team. And finally we would like to thank the highly professional staff of La Biennale, who work with such great dedication on the organisation and management of the Exhibition.
LINKS
Biennale Arte 2024: www.labiennale.org
Elena Butko Virtual Museum “Digitally Venizia”: www.elenabutko.com/museum
Zaha Hadid Architects: www.zaha-hadid.com
Alena Love: www.lavdovskaya.com
Alena Vavilina: www.arts-av.com
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For more information
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