Venice Biennale titled 'Foreigners Everywhere' platforms LGBTQ, outsider and Indigenous artists
Outsider, queer and Indigenous artists are getting an overdue platform at the 60th Venice Biennale contemporary art exhibition that opened Saturday.
VENICE, Italy — Outsider, queer and Indigenous artists are getting an overdue platform at the 60th Venice Biennale contemporary art exhibition that opened Saturday, curated for the first time by a Latin American.
Brazilian curator Adriano Pedrosa’s main show, which accompanies 88 national pavilions for the seven-month run, is strong on figurative painting, with fewer installations than recent editions. A preponderance of artists are from the Global South, long overlooked by the mainstream art world circuits. Many are dead. Frida Kahlo, for example, is making her first appearance at the Venice Biennale. Her 1949 painting “Diego and I” hangs alongside one by her husband and fellow artist, Diego Rivera.
Despite their lower numbers, living artists have “a much stronger physical presence in the exhibition,” Pedrosa said, with each either showing one large-scale work, or a collection of smaller works. The vast majority are making their Venice Biennale debut.
Brazilian curator Adriano Pedrosa at the Biennale.Gabriel Bouys / AFP - Getty ImagesVisitors to the two main venues, the Giardini and the Arsenale, will be greeted by a neon sign by the conceptual art cooperative Claire Fontaine with the exhibition’s title: “Stranieri Ovunque — Foreigners Everywhere.” A total of 60 in different languages hang throughout the venues.
When taken in the context of global conflicts and hardening borders, the title seems a provocation against intransigent governments — at the very least a prod to consider our shared humanity. Through artists with underrepresented perspectives, the exhibition address themes of migration and the nature of diaspora as well as indigeneity and the role of craft.
Rating: 5