Stephanie Bailey reviews the Venice Biennale’s central exhibition for Ocula. The excerpts below include her assessment of Cuban artist Wilfredo Prieto’s Curtain and Puerto Rican artist and educator Pablo Delano’s ongoing installation The Museum of the Old Colony. 

[. . .] Billed as the first edition led by an openly queer curator, Adriano Pedrosa, who is also the first Latin American artistic director, Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere (20 April–24 November 2024) raises the bar a little higher.

Pedrosa describes the central show as paying ‘a historical debt‘. Part of this payment is exacted through the Nucleo Storico section, with three rooms in the Giardini’s Central Pavilion filled with salon-style hangings of 20th-century paintings by artists from Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, most of whom are showing in the Biennale for the first time.

A central room focuses on abstract paintings by 37 artists, including an untitled 1978 acrylic on canvas vision of sand waves blending in and out of a turquoise surface by Tomie Ohtake, who migrated to Brazil from Japan in 1936; and Filipino modernist Nena Saguil’s oil on canvas Untitled (Abstract) (1972), containing spiralling layers of mauve, blue, red, and greyscale circles.

Many have critiqued this space for its curatorial flattening, defined by surface-level similarities like comparable shapes. In the cases of Casablanca Art School founding member Mohammed Chebaa (Composition, 1974), Iranian modernist Mohammad Ehsaei (Untitled, 1974), and Iraqi painter Rafa al-Nasiri (Untitled, 1971), brightly coloured linear and cursive striped patterns

[. . .] Still, as curator Hammad Nasar noted during the forum ‘A World of Many Worlds’, a collateral event organised by Asia Forum with the Asymmetry Art and Bagri foundations, seeing the work of an artist like Anwar Jalal Shemza in the central show, showing circles and semi-circles arranged on a grid in Composition in Red, Green, and Yellow (1963), means something. Especially to those who have been working for decades to expand the landscape of art history beyond an old-world Western canon.

But that’s where much disappointment stems. So many have indeed done and are doing the work, yet the Venice Biennale can barely keep up with the world it purports to represent, which results in the slow-clap historical revisionism that has defined its central show for this edition and the last.

Far from evidencing a culture of looking backwards, however, there is a forward thrust to these redresses. Take the historic presence of Indigenous artists in the Nucleo Contemporaneo portion of Foreigners Everywhere, which includes paintings by Maya Kaqchikel artist Rosa Elena Curruchich that document her community.

[. . .] Nevertheless, Pedrosa mounts a more convincing challenge at the Arsenale, which opens with Mataaho Collective‘s Golden Lion-winning installation Takapau (2022). The Corderie columns have become a frame for a magnificent architectural weave of reflective silver straps forming a triangular arch over the space. Walking through the Arsenale, the memory of Takapau draws attention to the building’s fish-boned wooden ceiling, reframing the space as a site of gathering where stories are shared.

Dalton Paula’s ‘Full-Body Portraits’ series (2024) shows historical figures from anti-slavery resistance movements in Brazil, including Tereza de Benguela, who led an escape of Black and Indigenous people and founded the Quariterê quilombo in the 18th century. [. . .]

That recovery includes engaging with traditions of representation that draw on other lineages, without reducing them into the historical framework of modern and contemporary art, whose internationalism is rooted in the physical and spiritual violence of Western modernity.

Which is to say: it’s not enough to say you’re a secular atheist (read: enlightened), as one critic did, to abscond from engaging with forms of art-making where myths function as conceptual and relational forms and structures that both defy and respond to the histories of domination that have shaped the international world order, including the contemporary art world.

Just look at the Venice Biennale’s professional preview, an industry event when the Biennale’s origin as an imperialist art fair is at its most transparent, with advisors, collectors, curators, and PR agents joining galleries promoting their artists in the main programme, or those with exhibitions in the city.

[. . .] There is a politics of Western complicity here that a few powerful works in Foreigners Everywhere highlight, pointing to the violent contradictions historically baked into the notion of an international community that keeps exhibitions like this—not to mention international institutions more broadly—in a gruesome, ouroboric loop, if not death spiral.

At the Giardini’s Central Pavilion, Pablo Delano’s ongoing installation The Museum of the Old Colony confronts the oppression of the Puerto Rican people by the U.S. state. Archival images, footage, and objects touch on the classification of Puerto Rico as an ‘unincorporated U.S. territory’, the treatment of the island as an American playground, and racist, colonialist initiatives to ‘educate’ the population.

One news reel depicts the arrest of Puerto Rican nationalists Lolita Lebrón, Rafael Cancel Miranda, Irving Flores Rodríguez, and Andrés Figueroa Cordero, who entered the visitors’ gallery in the United States Capitol’s House of Representatives chamber in 1954 and opened fire, injuring five. On a wall nearby, Delano has placed the face of Lebrón next to that of the Statue of Liberty.

Nearby, documentarian Fred Kuwornu’s film, We Were here: The Untold History of Black Africans in Renaissance Europe (2024), highlights the erasures of history that feed nationalist politics today by recovering the presence of Black Africans in Renaissance Europe. Figures include Afro-Hispanic painter Juan de Pareja, whom Diego Velázquez enslaved for over two decades, apparently making Pareja walk the street holding the portrait Velázquez made of him to promote his talents. [. . .]

On that note, while this is a central show review, here’s a shout out to Wilfredo Prieto’s Curtain for the Cuban Pavilion—a stunning reminder of sense and experience beyond the gilded spectacle.

In the pitch-black hall of Teatro Fondamenta Nuove on the backstreets of Cannaregio, Prieto has restaged his 2014 work, An illuminated rock, an unilluminated rock, placing one rock under a spotlight and another left unlit so audiences seek it out in the dark. The result is a sensory engagement with both space and context, as the sounds of the city and its waters seep into the room. [. . .]

For full article, see https://ocula.com/magazine/features/2024-venice-biennales-bare-minimum/

[Photo above by Matteo de Mayda: Pablo Delano, The Museum of the Old Colony (2024). Installation. Dimensions variable. Exhibition view: Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere, 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia (20 April–24 November 2024). Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia.]