Biennale Arte 2024 - Foreigners Everywhere - English Catalogue by La Biennale di Venezia

Exhibition

2024 Foreigners Everywhere

Stranieri Ovunque

Biennale Arte

La Biennale di Venezia President

Pietrangelo Buttafuoco Board Vice President

Luigi Brugnaro Tamara Gregoretti Luca Zaia Auditor’s Committee President

Pasqualino Castaldi Ines Gandini Angelo Napolitano Director General

Andrea Del Mercato Artistic Director of the Visual Arts Department

Adriano Pedrosa

60th International Art Exhibition Organisational Structure

Central Services

Director General Andrea Del Mercato

Legal and Institutional Affairs, Human Resources and Deputy

Curator of the 60th International Art Exhibition Adriano Pedrosa Artistic Organisers Amanda Carneiro Sofia Gotti Exhibition Designer Juliana Ziebell De Oliveira Graphic Designer Paula Tinoco

Director Debora Rossi Legal and Institutional Affairs Martina Ballarin Francesca Oddi Francesca Padovan Lucrezia Stocco Human Resources Graziano Carrer Luca Carta Giovanni Drudi Antonella Sfriso Alessia Viviani Rossella Zulian

Administration, Finance, Management Control and Sponsorship, Promotion, Educational Director Valentina Borsato Administration, Finance, Management Control Bruna Gabbiato Elia Canal Marco Caruso Giada Doria Martina Fiori Francesca Gallo Elisa Meggiato Irene Scarpa Sefora Tarì Sara Vianello Sponsorship Caterina De Marco Paola Pavan

Promotion, Educational Carlotta Carminati Caterina Castellani Serena Cutrone Lucia De Manincor Elisabetta Fiorese Stefania Guglielmo Laura Gravina Emanuela Padoan Marta Plevani Marianna Sartore

Secretariats

General Secretariat Chiara Arisi Caterina Boniollo Maria Cristina Cinti Elisabetta Mistri Protocol Office Francesca Boglietti Lara De Bellis Marta Isman

Biennale College Secretariat Claudia Capodiferro Giacinta Maria Dalla Pietà

Editorial Activities and Web Head Flavia Fossa Margutti Giovanni Alberti Roberta Fontanin Ornella Mogno Nicola Monaco Maddalena Pietragnoli Cristiana Scavone Technical and Logistic Services

Purchasing, Procurement and Assets

Director Cristiano Frizzele

Director Fabio Pacifico

Exhibition Design, Events and Live Performance Massimiliano Bigarello Cinzia Bernardi Maria Sol Buso Antonella Campisi Jessica Giassi Valentina Malossi Sandra Montagner

Purchasing and Procurement Silvia Gatto Marta Artuso Silvia Bruni Angelica Ciabocchi Eleonora Cialini Hospitality Linda Baldan Jasna Zoranovic Donato Zotta

Assets Maurizio Celoni Antonio Fantinelli Institutional and Cinema Press Office Head Paolo Lughi Cesare Bisantis Francesca Buccaro Michela Lazzarin

Facility Management Giulio Cantagalli Alvise Dolcetta Piero Novello Maurizio Urso

Information Technology Andrea Bonaldo Michele Schiavon Leonardo Viale Jacopo Zanchi Special Projects, Promotion of Venues Director Arianna Laurenzi Special Projects Margherita Audisio Valentina Baldessari Francesco Carabba Davide Ferrante Carolina Fullin Anna Mason Elisabetta Parmesan

Promotion of Venues Nicola Bon Cristina Graziussi Alessia Rosada

Cinema Department

Dance, Theatre, Music Department

Historical Archive of Contemporary Arts

Executive / Head of Organization Joern Rudolf Brandmeyer

Director General Andrea Del Mercato

Executive / Head of Organization Francesca Benvenuti

Executive / Head of Organization Debora Rossi

Secretariat Veronica Mozzetti Monterumici

Historical Archive Maria Elena Cazzaro Giovanna Bottaro Michela Campagnolo Marianna Carpentieri Lia Durante Marica Gallina Helga Greggio Judith Kranitz Silvia Levorato Michele Mangione Manuela Momentè Adriana Rosaria Scalise Alice Scandiuzzi

Marina Bertaggia Emilia Bonomi Raffaele Cinotti Stefania Fabris Stefania Guerra Francesca Aloisia Montorio Luigi Ricciari Micol Saleri Ilaria Zanella Visual Arts / Architecture Press Office Head Maria Cristiana Costanzo Claudia Gioia Collaborators for 60th International Art Exhibition Anna Albano Andrea Avezzù Valentina Campana Riccardo Cavallaro Gerardo Ernesto Cejas Marzia Cervellin Francesco di Cesare Francesca Dolzani Andrea Ferialdi Fabrizia Ferragina Giulia Gasparato Matteo Giannasi Caterina Moro Daniele Paolo Mulas Francesca Pavanel Sofia Pellegrini Maria Grazia Pontorno Luca Racchini Valeria Romagnini Solfato Federico Sanna Elisa Santoro Marco Tosato Lucia Toso Flavio Vido Marta Zannoner Francesco Zanon Alessandro Zorzetto

Secretariat Mariachiara Manci Alessandro Mezzalira

Venice International Film Festival Programming Office Piera Benedetti Giulia Erica Hornbostel Silvia Menegazzi Daniela Persi

Venice Production Bridge Chiara Marin Industry/Cinema Accreditation Flavia Lo Mastro

Biennale College Cinema Valentina Bellomo

Programming and Production Michela Mason Federica Colella Maya Romanelli Dance, Theatre, Music Press Office Head Emanuela Caldirola Ilaria Grando

Library Edoardo Armando Valentina Da Tos Valentina Greggio Elena Oselladore

La Biennale di Venezia

Visual Arts / Architecture Department

Media Partner

Thanks to

Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP

M I N I S T É R I O DA S R E L AÇ Õ E S EXTERIORES

We would like to thank the following Donors for their generosity in supporting our Exhibition

Main Donor Teiger Foundation Ford Foundation Ammodo LUMA Foundation

Christian Dior Couture Elisa Nuyten, Founder The Vega Foundation Bernardo Paz Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Shah Garg Foundation Sunpride Foundation A&L Berg Foundation Fundación Ama Amoedo Elina and Eduardo Costantini Samsung Foundation of Culture

Andrea and José Olympio Pereira Catherine Petitgas Rennie Collection, Vancouver Erica Roberts Georgiana Rothier and Bernardo Faria Graham Steele and Ulysses de Santi Cristiane Sultani juancarlosverme & proyectoamil Mercedes Vilardell

Beatrice Bulgari, Founder Fondazione In Between Art Film

Paulo Albert Weyland Vieira

Trinity College

Charlotte Feng Ford

Alexandre Nobre and Tania Haddad Nobre Anita Blanchard M.D. and Martin Nesbitt Liv Barrett and Patrick Collins Estrellita and Daniel Brodsky Füsun Eczacıbaşı

A4 Arts Foundation Isabel and Agustin Coppel Jana and Bernardo Hees Pamela J. Joyner and Alfred J. Giuffrida Vera Diniz Alessandra d’Aloia, Alexandre Gabriel and Marcia Fortes

Ella Fontanals-Cisneros

NABA, Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti

Cleusa Garfinkel

Teresa and Edson Moura

Heitor Martins

Mara and Marcio Fainziliber

Luisa Malzoni Strina

Juliana Sá and Manuelle Ferraz

Michelangelo Foundation for Creativity and Craftsmanship

Friends of the California Institute of the Arts

Alexandra Mollof

NESR Art Foundation

Cav. Simon Mordant AO and Catriona Mordant AM

List updated as of 27 February 2024

SCALEA, ITALY, 1942 LIVES IN SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL

The extensive and extraordinary sixtyyear career of Anna Maria Maiolino is multifaceted in various media and experimental poetics, encompassing painting, drawing, woodblock printing, photography, video, performance, and sculpture. She has become a reference point for multiple generations of artists. Born in Scalea, Italy, on May 20, 1942, after World War II she emigrated with her family to Caracas, Venezuela, in 1954. There she studied at the Escuela de Artes Visuales Cristóbal Rojas between 1958 and 1960. In 1960, she relocated to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where she studied at the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes. After her graduation, Maiolino became part of the well-known Brazilian art movement of the 1960s called Nova Figuração, a reaction to abstraction infused with Pop inflections that also reflected the harsh political climate in the Country during the first years of the military dictatorship (1964–1985). In this period, Maiolino continued to develop her visual language and skills, attending the famous art courses given by the artist Ivan Serpa at the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro. In 1964, she had her first solo exhibition at the Galeria G in Caracas and in 1967, she participated in the historical Nova Objetividade Brasileira exhibition in Rio de Janeiro. Between 1968 and 1971, Maiolino was in New York and studied at the Pratt Graphics Center expanding her artistic horizons to encompass various media as well as experimental poetry. Her paintings from the 1960s are quite radical, as they combine Pop imagery with the typical Nova Figuração repertoire, focusing on political characters and

photo Lívia Gonzaga

Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement

Anna Maria Maiolino

narratives, as well as personal, bodily, and familial references. In the late 1970s, Maiolino began dedicating herself to performance art and in 1981, she staged her astonishing Entrevidas, in which dozens of eggs are spread on the floor, challenging herself to navigate and walk through them as a “minefield,” taking into consideration the fragility and precariousness of the egg—a symbol for life itself. In the 1980s, Maiolino started working with clay, signalling a new focus on gestural expression, the handmade, and the relationship with elemental materials in her sculptures and reliefs that persists to the present day. For the Biennale Arte 2024, Maiolino presents a new large-scale work that continues and unfolds her series of sculptures and installations in clay. The Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, an award received during her first-time participation, recognises her significance both in Italy, her home Country, and internationally.

Nil Yalter

France. Additionally, her work Temporary Dwellings, first showcased in 1977, delved into the lives of migrant workers, as recounted by women. In the 1980s, Yalter made several works in collaboration with Nicole Croiset, including The Rituals (1980) and Women at Work, Women at Home (1981). The 1990s marked a period of creative exploration and recognition for Yalter, during which she embraced digital media. At the Biennale Arte 2024 Yalter showcases a new reconfiguration of her innovative installation Exile Is a Hard Job in conjunction with her iconic Topak Ev, placed in the opening room of the Central Pavilion. She is participatingat Biennale Arte for the first time in 2024. The Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement recognises her significant contributions to the intersection of the visual arts and migration.

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Nil Yalter, a Turkish artist originally born in Cairo, Egypt, made a transformative move to Paris in 1965, significantly impacting both her own life and the art scene in the city where she continues to reside. She is widely regarded as a pioneer in the global feminist art movement. Yalter has never received formal education in the visual arts, and as a self-taught artist, she has continuously conducted research into her own practices and areas of interest, working in painting, drawing, video, sculpture, and installation. Her artistic career began in 1957 when she held her first exhibition at the French Cultural Institute in Mumbai, India. However, it was during the 1960s that she delved deeper into her practice. After moving to Paris in 1965, Yalter’s work inaugurated a truly radical and pioneering chapter as she began to address social themes, particularly those related to immigration and women’s experiences, in a unique exploration and development of conceptual art practices. In 1973, Yalter created the groundbreaking installation Topak Ev, which was featured in a solo exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and which we will present in a newly reconfigured installation in the 60th International Art Exhibition. In the following year, she presented The Headless Woman, a key video piece addressing women’s sexual liberation and the Orientalist objectification of Middle Eastern women. Another extraordinary work from this period is La Roquette, Prison de Femmes from 1974, which presents the accounts of a former convict of the famous women’s prison in

photo Isabelle Arthuis

CAIRO, EGYPT, 1938 LIVES IN PARIS, FRANCE

Awards

The International Jury awards the prizes: Golden Lion for Best National Participation Golden Lion for the Best Participant in the International Exhibition Foreigners Everywhere - Stranieri Ovunque Silver Lion for a promising young participant in the International Exhibition Foreigners Everywhere - Stranieri Ovunque

is Professor of Contemporary Art and LGBTQ+ Studies at Columbia University. Her curatorial credits include Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen (with Andrea Andersson) and Louise Nevelson: Persistence. She is the author of Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era; Fray: Art and Textile Politics (winner of the ASAP Book Prize, the Frank Jewett Mather Award, and the Robert Motherwell Book Award); and Louise Nevelson’s Sculpture: Drag, Color, Join, Face. Bryan-Wilson was a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow.

Elena Crippa

is an Italian curator based in London. Since 2023, she has been Head of Exhibitions at London’s Whitechapel Gallery. She was previously Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Tate Britain, where her exhibitions explored transnational and transcultural intersections and engaged with art from a global perspective. Her shows at Tate included All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life (2018), Frank Bowling (2019), Paula Rego (2021) and the 2022 commission Hew Locke: The Procession.

Chika Okeke-Agulu

is Director of the Program in African Studies, Director of Africa World Initiative, and Robert Schirmer Professor of Art & Archaeology and African American Studies, Princeton University. He is editor of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Slade Professor of Fine Art, University of Oxford (2023), and a Fellow of The British Academy. The author of El Anatsui. The Reinvention of Sculpture (2022), he is on the advisory board of the Hyundai Tate Research Centre, Tate Modern.

María Inés Rodríguez

is a Colombian French curator, currently Director of the Walter Leblanc Foundation in Brussels and Artistic Director of Tropical Papers. With a profound commitment to fostering a dialogue between artistic production and historical, political, and social contexts on both local and global levels, she has consistently championed the interconnectedness of art and its broader cultural implications. She was the Director of the CAPC Musée d’art Contemporain, Bordeaux, Curator at Large at MASP, São Paulo; Chief Curator at the MUAC in Mexico City, as well as at the MUSAC in Spain and guest curator at the Jeu de Paume in Paris.

Alia Swastika

is a curator and researcher/writer that expands her practices in the last 10 years on the issue and perspectives of decoloniality and feminism, where she involved with different projects of decentralization of art, rewriting art history and encouraging local activism. She works as the Director of Biennale Jogja Foundation in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. She continues her researches on Indonesian female artists during Indonesia’s New Order and how the politics of gender from the regime influenced the practices of artists from that period. She is now part of curatorial team of Sharjah Biennal 16 in 2025.

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

The International Jury

Julia Bryan-Wilson

Contents

Introductions

Interviews

29 Foreword Pietrangelo Buttafuoco

65 Adriano Pedrosa interviewed by Julieta González

35 About the 60th International Art Exhibition Roberto Cicutto

81 Claire Fontaine interviewed by Adriano Pedrosa

47 Foreigners Everywhere Stranieri Ovunque Adriano Pedrosa

ESTRANGEIROS EM TODO LUGAR

57 Acknowledgements

95 Anna Maria Maiolino interviewed by Amanda Carneiro 107 Nil Yalter interviewed by Sofia Gotti

Essays

International Exhibition

119 Foreigners Everywhere Claire Fontaine

204 Nucleo Contemporaneo

125 The Migrant’s Time Ranajit Guha

Nucleo Storico 431 Portraits 549 Abstractions 591 Italians Everywhere

133 Art History After Globalization: Formations of the Colonial Modern Kobena Mercer 143 Crafts and the Indigenous Social Body Naine Terena de Jesus

634 Applied Arts Pavilion Special Project

149 Contemporary Indigenous Art as a Trap for Traps Jaider Esbell 157 Beyond Representational Justice Luce deLire FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

165 Issues in Popular Art Ticio Escobar 183 Coloniality: The Dark Side of Modernity Walter D. Mignolo

643 List of Works 673 Biennale College Arte

Artists

204 432 550 551 433 552 435 206 553 434 208 210 212 436 214 216 218 220 222

‫ألجانب في كل مكان‬

554 224 592 437 438 439 440 593 594 595 226 596 555 228 597 556 441 598 230 232 442/557 234 443 236 238 240 444 242 445 599 558 244 446 447 600 246 248 448 559 250

Pacita Abad Mariam Abdel-Aleem Etel Adnan Sandy Adsett Affandi Zubeida Agha Dia al-Azzawi Claudia Alarcón & Silät Rafa al-Nasiri Miguel Alandia Pantoja Aloïse Giulia Andreani Claudia Andujar María Aranís Aravani Art Project Iván Argote Karimah Ashadu Dana Awartani Aycoobo (Wilson Rodríguez) Margarita Azurdia Leilah Babirye Libero Badíi Ezekiel Baroukh Baya Aly Ben Salem Semiha Berksoy Gianni Bertini Lina Bo Bardi Maria Bonomi Bordadoras de Isla Negra Victor Brecheret Huguette Caland Sol Calero Elda Cerrato Mohammed Chebaa Georgette Chen Galileo Chini Kudzanai Chiurai Isaac Chong Wai Saloua Raouda Choucair Chaouki Choukini Chua Mia Tee Claire Fontaine Manauara Clandestina River Claure Julia Codesido Liz Collins Jaime Colson Waldemar Cordeiro Monika Correa Beatriz Cortez Olga Costa Miguel Covarrubias Victor Juan Cúnsolo Andrés Curruchich Rosa Elena Curruchich Djanira da Motta e Silva Olga de Amaral Filippo de Pisis

601 252 449 602 450

Juan Del Prete Pablo Delano Emiliano Di Cavalcanti Danilo Di Prete Cícero Dias

254

Disobedience Archive – Marco Scotini with Ursula Biemann, Black Audio-Film Collective, Seba Calfuqueo, Simone Cangelosi, Cinéastes pour les sans-papiers, Critical Art Ensemble, Snow Hnin Ei Hlaing, Marcelo Expósito with Nuria Vila, Maria Galindo & Mujeres Creando, Barbara Hammer, mixrice, Khaled Jarrar, Sara Jordenö, Bani Khoshnoudi, Maria Kourkouta & Niki Giannari, Pedro Lemebel, LIMINAL & Border Forensics (Lorenzo Pezzani, Jack Isles, Giovanna Reder, Stanislas Michel, Chiara Denaro, Alagie Jinkang, Charles Heller, Kiri Santer, Svitlana Lavrenchuk, Luca Obertüfer), Angela Melitopoulos, Jota Mombaça, Carlos Motta, Zanele Muholi, Pınar Öğrenci, Daniela Ortiz, Thunska Pansittivorakul, Anand Patwardhan, Pilot TV Collective, Queerocracy, Oliver Ressler and Zanny Begg, Carole Roussopoulos, Güliz Sağlam, Irwan Ahmett & Tita Salina, Tejal Shah, Chi Yin Sim, Hito Steyerl, Sweatmother, Raphaël Grisey and Bouba Touré, Nguyễn Trinh Thi, James Wentzy, Želimir Žilnik

451 452 560 453 454 455

Juana Elena Diz Tarsila do Amaral Saliba Douaihy Dullah Inji Efflatoun Uzo Egonu

561 456 256 457 258 458 260 459 460 262 603 461 604 264 266 605 268 606 270 272 607 274 276 278 462 463 280 464 282 465 562 466 284 467 563 468 469 470 564 286 288 471 472 473 290 292 294 566 474 296 475 298 300 302 608 304 476 306

Mohammad Ehsaei Hatem El Mekki Aref El Rayess Ibrahim El-Salahi Elyla Ben Enwonwu Romany Eveleigh Hamed Ewais Dumile Feni Alessandra Ferrini Cesare Ferro Milone Raquel Forner Simone Forti Victor Fotso Nyie Louis Fratino Paolo Gasparini Ṣàngódáre Gbádégẹsin Àjàlá Umberto Giangrandi Madge Gill Marlene Gilson Luigi Domenico Gismondi Gabrielle Goliath Brett Graham Fred Graham Enrique Grau Araújo Oswaldo Guayasamín Nedda Guidi Hendra Gunawan Antonio Jose Guzman & Iva Jankovic Marie Hadad Samia Halaby Tahia Halim Lauren Halsey Nazek Hamdi Mohamed Hamidi Faik Hassan Kadhim Hayder Gilberto Hernández Ortega Carmen Herrera Evan Ifekoya Julia Isídrez Mohammed Issiakhem Elena Izcue María Izquierdo Nour Jaouda Rindon Johnson Joyce Joumaa Mohammed Kacimi Frida Kahlo Nazira Karimi George Keyt Bhupen Khakhar Bouchra Khalili Kiluanji Kia Henda Linda Kohen Shalom Kufakwatenzi Ram Kumar Fred Kuwornu

568 312/611 612 569 487 488 314 489 570 316 318 571 490 491 320 322 613 492 493 494 495 496 497 498 324 614 326 499 328 330 500 572 501 573 574 332 334 502 336 503 504 615 616 505 481

617 618 338 340 619 506 342 507 620 344 482 346 348 508 575 509 510 511 350 512 352 354 576 356 513 514 515 358 516 577 517 578 518 579 580 360 581 362 621 582 622 364 366 519 521 520 368 370 623 522 565 372 523 583 524 525 526 624 527 374

Bona Pieyre de Mandiargues Ester Pilone La Chola Poblete Charmaine Poh Maria Polo Candido Portinari Sandra Poulson B. Prabha Lidy Prati Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo) Lee Qoede Agnes Questionmark Violeta Quispe Alfredo Ramos Martínez Sayed Haider Raza Armando Reverón Emma Reyes Diego Rivera Juana Marta Rodas Laura Rodig Abel Rodríguez Aydeé Rodríguez López Freddy Rodríguez Miguel Ángel Rojas Rosa Rolanda Jamini Roy Rómulo Rozo Erica Rutherford José Sabogal Mahmoud Sabri Syed Sadequain Nena Saguil Mahmoud Saïd Kazuya Sakai Ione Saldanha Dean Sameshima Zilia Sánchez Bárbara Sánchez-Kane Nenne Sanguineti Poggi Fanny Sanín Aligi Sassu Greta Schödl Ana Segovia Gerard Sekoto Jewad Selim Lorna Selim Joshua Serafin Kang Seung Lee Gino Severini Amrita Sher-Gil Anwar Jalal Shemza Yinka Shonibare Doreen Sibanda Fadjar Sidik Gazbia Sirry Lucas Sithole Francis Newton Souza Joseph Stella Irma Stern Leopold Strobl

528 376 529 378 380 530 382 384 584 625 386 388 626 531 627 532 390 392 394 628 629 630 396 398 400 533 534 402 404 535 536 537 406 408 410 412/585 414 416 538 539 418 586 420 540 634

Emiria Sunassa Superflex Armodio Tamayo Maria Taniguchi Evelyn Taocheng Wang Lucy Tejada Mariana Telleria Güneş Terkol Eduardo Terrazas Clorindo Testa Salman Toor Frieda Toranzo Jaeger Horacio Torres Joaquín Torres-García Mario Tozzi Twins Seven-Seven Ahmed Umar Unidentified Chilean artists, Arpilleristas Rubem Valentim Edoardo Daniele Villa Eliseu Visconti Alfredo Volpi Kay WalkingStick WangShui Agnes Waruguru Barrington Watson Osmond Watson Susanne Wenger Emmi Whitehorse Selwyn Wilson Chang Woosoung Celeste Woss y Gil Xiyadie Rember Yahuarcani Santiago Yahuarcani Nil Yalter Joseca Mokahesi Yanomami André Taniki Yanomami Yêdamaria Ramsès Younan Kim Yun Shin Fahrelnissa Zeid Anna Zemánková Bibi Zogbé Beatriz Milhazes

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

486 310

Grace Salome Kwami Lai Foong Moi Wifredo Lam Judith Lauand Maggie Laubser Simon Lekgetho Celia Leyton Vidal Lim Mu Hue Romualdo Locatelli Bertina Lopes Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato Anita Magsaysay-Ho MAHKU (Movimento dos Artistas Huni Kuin) Esther Mahlangu Anna Maria Maiolino Anita Malfatti Ernest Mancoba Edna Manley Josiah Manzi Teresa Margolles Maria Martins María Martorell Mataaho Collective Naminapu MaymuruWhite Mohamed Melehi Carlos Mérida Gladys Mgudlandlu Omar Mismar Sabelo Mlangeni Tina Modotti Bahman Mohasses Roberto Montenegro Camilo Mori Ahmed Morsi Effat Naghi Ismael Nery Malangatana Valente Ngwenya Paula Nicho Costantino Nivola Taylor Nkomo Marina Núñez del Prado Philomé Obin Sénèque Obin Alejandro Obregón Tomie Ohtake Uche Okeke Marco Ospina Samia Osseiran Junblatt Daniel Otero Torres Lydia Ourahmane Pan Yuliang Dalton Paula Amelia Peláez George Pemba Fulvio Pennacchi Claudio Perna Emilio Pettoruti Lê Phô

477 478 479 567 480 483 484 485 609 308 610

Foreword

And the compass is important to understanding this paradigm shift. Pedrosa is the first South American curator of the Biennale Arte and he is well aware that the compass points themselves are anthropized symbolic forms, with the North at the head – complete with a tall hat – and the South at the foot, a bare foot needless to say.

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE 29

Adriano Pedrosa has curated a Biennale Arte that reflects his personal approach to study and research, which is free of any prejudice in favour of the already established – where the vertigo of the unknown is an integral part of the process of exploration and enjoyment, and disorientation becomes a potent instrument for identifying new compass points.

STRANIERI OVUNQUE

PIETRANGELO BUTTAFUOCO PRESIDENT LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA

This 60th edition of the International Art Exhibition is all there in the title Foreigners Everywhere – Stranieri Ovunque. Strong words, explosive when paired that evoke both current scenarios and possible universes, on whose borderline the curator’s line of thought is constructed, sharp in its longer focus and vibrant with complex contrasts nearer to hand.

FOREWORD PIETRANGELO BUTTAFUOCO 30

A stranger among strangers is the (barefoot) wanderer making his way along the most daunting of goat tracks, the beggar under whose rags a God may be hiding, that deity unknown to himself from whom the renewal of dynasties springs. He is Aeneas quitting the flames of Troy to found – as a foreigner – a universalising civilization where no one is a barbarian and all are citizens. This is the principle guiding the selection of the artists, privileging those who have never previously participated in the Exhibition. Casting unaccustomed light on the paths of Modernism outside the Anglosphere. Foregrounding overlooked geographies on the margins of current dictates, albeit clear enough on the mappa mundi. Giving substance to voids that were never such – akin to what is going on in Rachel Whiteread’s sculptures – and coming back, finally, to auroral thinking, to that nostalgia for things that never had a beginning – as we see in language too, as the flatus vocis acquires meaning. Pedrosa explains, with explicit reference to Oswald de Andrade’s Manifesto antropófago, how it was necessary for the ‘Modernisms’ of the global South to cannibalise hegemonic postcolonial cultures in order to establish themselves. A form of artistic resistance that in the case of Brazil recalls the pre-invasion cannibalistic rituals of the Tupinambá people. De Andrade was in fact inspired to write his Manifesto by a painting of Tarsila do Amaral entitled ‘Abaporu’, which in the Tupi language means “the man who eats people.” And it is eating, nourishing oneself, that constitutes for him a sacred root – and certainly not a mere anthropological phenomenon – as in the familiar Mediterranean example of those two provocateurs, Dionysus and, later, Jesus the Nazarene. Two versions of the resurrected ‘slain God’, two banquets attended by people eating other people: Dionysus – born from the thigh of his father Zeus, torn to shreds, chewed up and swallowed by the Maenads – and Jesus, son of Mary the Chosen One, become eucharistically the host in the liturgy, a presence in the rite and the embodiment of the Almighty’s promise, food for all.

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

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

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. Once again Venice - over the centuries an open cradle of knowledge and communication between peoples, ethnicities, religions - is the natural forum in which to marshal new points of view and Fare Mondi (‘Making Worlds’) - to adopt the local lexicon of an earlier Biennale Arte 2009.

Two constant threads run through the curator’s selection: an explicit desire to focus on works that adopt the language of textiles; and the blood kinship that connects several of the artists on show. A return, then, to the corporeal res extensa and to visceral human relationships, understood as a repository of tradition and the transmission of knowledge, in an age dominated by the immaterial and the depersonalisation of form and content.

どこでも外国人

This edition of the Biennale Arte features both a contemporary and a historical nucleus, with a large presence of Italian artists from the 20th-century diaspora, whose works are displayed on the glass easels originally designed by architect Lina Bo Bardi for the São Paulo Museum of Art. For the first time, an indigenous Amazonian art collective – MAHKU (Movimento dos Artistas Huni Kuin) – also takes centre stage, with a large-scale work on the facade of the Central Pavilion. Seven hundred square metres of hallucinatory visions inspired by sacred ayahuasca-based rituals, experiences mirrored by those – no less sacred – that the Old Continent has experimented through, for example, Ernst Jünger’s Annäherungen.

PIETRANGELO BUTTAFUOCO

FOREWORD

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. 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. Foreigners, Everywhere.

Profound thanks to my predecessor Roberto Cicutto as President of La Biennale di Venezia, from whose wise words I have profited and will continue to profit.

Thanks also to the whole team at La Biennale di Venezia, living testimony to the critical spirit, the imagination and the power of visual language.

KUMAACHI-U ‘AGA-VA-TU-SAPA-NUM

ROBERTO CICUTTO ABOUT THE 60TH INTERNATIONAL ART EXHIBITION

In 2023, the 18th International Architecture Exhibition entitled The Laboratory of the Future was entrusted to the curatorship of Lesley Lokko, an architect and writer born in Ghana to a Scottish mother and Ghanaian father.

I chose Lesley Lokko because she hails from Africa – the youngest continent in terms of the average age of its population – and makes it a “laboratory of the future” for how it has addressed the most important contemporary challenges, prioritising the themes of decolonisation and decarbonisation. This approach has allowed many of us to hear voices we had never heard before, leaving us amazed at how little we know about that continent.

Both come from two great countries and continents of the Global South; different, however, are the reasons why I chose them.

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Adriano Pedrosa, curator of the 60th International Art Exhibition, was born, lives, and works in Brazil where he is the director of MASP (Museu de Arte de São Paulo) and is the first Biennale Arte curator from Latin America.

ABOUT THE 60TH INTERNATIONAL ART EXHIBITION

I chose Adriano Pedrosa so that he could bring his point of view on contemporary arts, rereading different cultures as if through a cinematic reverse shot. Through the title he chose, Foreigners Everywhere Stranieri Ovunque, we are made immediately aware that his exhibition gives voice not only to artists who are marginalised or belong to as-yet little-known cultures but, above all, to all those who share the mindset common to many art masters in every era and at all latitudes. Masters who have developed their personal creativity throughout the many diasporas imposed by history, by feeling like strangers in their own homes, or by belonging to the myriad diversities in the face of what is traditionally considered “normal”. Above all, he affords us the vision of a curator who declares he is very much a part of this state of mind due to his own personal experience and culture.

ROBERTO CICUTTO

It will also be, in the words of the curator, a journey into the beauty of art, which is capable of speaking to everyone while also addressing ethical and social issues through the power of artistic creation. Choosing a curator to propose to the Board is the most challenging responsibility for the President of La Biennale di Venezia, and it is not without its risks.

This is why one must be guided – aside from the obvious need to select competent personalities of international relevance – by an indispensable relationship of trust with those invested with this responsibility, which must be built in the preliminary phase and strengthened in the preparation of the exhibition. Ultimately, the curators must be allowed total autonomy in their choices. What matters is that the curator, called to represent the world in the context of the International Exhibition has the capacity to understand the contemporary themes and also capable of attracting the participating countries in a dialogue on the theme proposed.

Many of the countries participating in this edition have drawn inspiration from the curator’s proposed theme, a sign that Pedrosa has touched a very sensitive and mutually felt chord. In the difficult times the world is experiencing, the fact that such a considerable number of countries (88) has decided to participate confirms the nature of La Biennale, which continues to be not only a

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Adriano Pedrosa, like some of his predecessors, is attentive to the issue of sustainability, which has been judiciously considered in planning and setting up his exhibition. La Biennale has invested heavily in this area, putting in place practices that have, in the last two years, led to the “carbon neutral” certification for all its exhibithions and festivals. That this has been possible thanks to the efforts of a globally important cultural institution and in the city of Venice, with its many environmental susceptibilities, is something we are proud of.

This is an important result for La Biennale di Venezia, which thus transforms a cultural project into a grand design that involves Venice as well as the entire art world, with benefits for the residents of the city and its surrounding area, for the world of education, and for the restoration and regeneration of places and buildings of great historical and cultural importance.

DOXANDÉEM FÉPP

The more the theme is shared, the more interesting the outcome of the exhibition will be—and the stronger the impact of the reflections it will generate. Several times in recent years, it has been underscored that the lifecycle of La Biennale’s exhibitions and festival’s contents should not run its course within the bookends of their opening dates. Everything must find a place in an area available to those (insiders or otherwise) who want to explore it. The tool that will allow this to become reality is the development of the Historical Archive in the new International Centre for Research on Contemporary Arts — a project that has been endorsed and sustained during my four years in office by successive governments that have shown themselves to be equally committed.

ABOUT THE 60TH INTERNATIONAL ART EXHIBITION

unique observatory on the state of the world from the point of view of the arts, but also continues to present itself as a vital and indispensable place, offering, beyond politics and diplomacy, numerous and invaluable opportunities for dialogue and debate. My sincerest wishes to Adriano Pedrosa, to President Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, to all the artists and the participating countries and to all who have worked to make the sixtieth edition of Biennale Arte that this may indeed happen. We thank the Italian Ministry of Culture, the local Institutions that in various ways support La Biennale di Venezia, the City of Venice, the Veneto Region, the Soprintendenza Archeologia, belle arti e paesaggio for the Comune di Venezia e Laguna, and the Italian Navy.

ROBERTO CICUTTO

Our thanks also go to our Partner Swatch, our Main Sponsor illycaffè, Sponsors American Express, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and Vela–Venezia Unica, and to Biennale Arte 2024 Media Partner Rai. We also thank the Donors, International Bodies and Institutions who have been fundamental in the realisation of this year’s exhibition. In particular, we would like to warmly thank Adriano Pedrosa and his entire team.

And, finally, our thanks also go to all the great La Biennale professionals who tirelessly dedicated themselves to the realisation and organisation of Biennale Arte 2024.

“LANGUAGE IS A MIGRANT”. IN AND IF I DEVOTED MY LIFE TO ONE OF ITS FEATHERS? AESTHETIC RESPONSES TO EXTRACTION, ACCUMULATION, AND DISPOSSESSION, EDITED BY MIGUEL A. LÓPEZ, LONDON: STERNBERG PRESS, 2023.

Language is migrant. Words move from language to language, from culture to culture, from mouth to mouth. Our bodies are migrants, cells and bacteria are migrants too. Even galaxies migrate.

CECILIA VICUÑA

“CH’IXINAKAX UTXIWA: A REFLECTION ON THE PRACTICES AND DISCOURSES OF DECOLONIZATION.” THE SOUTH ATLANTIC QUARTERLY, 111:1 (WINTER 2012).

The indigenous world does not conceive of history as linear; the past–future is contained in the present. The regression or progression, the repetition or overcoming of the past is at play in each conjuncture and is dependent more on our acts than on our words. The project of indigenous modernity can emerge from the present in a spiral whose movement is a continuous feedback from the past to the future—a “principle of hope” or “anticipatory consciousness”— that both discerns and realises decolonisation at the same time.

SILVIA RIVERA CUSICANQUI

UNTITLED/UNDATED DOCUMENT. IN MARCELO FERRAZ, LINA BO BARDI. SÃO PAULO: INSTITUTO LINA BO BARDI, MILAN: CHARTA, 1993.

Linear time is a Western invention; time is not linear, it is a marvellous entanglement, where at any moment points can be chosen and solutions invented without beginning or end.

LINA BO BARDI

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. These crises reflect the perils and pitfalls of language, translation, and nationality, in turn highlighting differences and disparities conditioned by identity, nationality, race, gender,

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The title of the 60th International Art Exhibition is drawn from a series of works made by the Paris-born and Palermo-based collective Claire Fontaine since 2004. The works are neon sculptures in different colours, each rendering the expression “Foreigners Everywhere” in a growing number of languages. The expression was, in turn, appropriated from the name of a collective from Turin that in the early 2000s fought racism and xenophobia in Italy: Stranieri Ovunque. Claire Fontaine’s series of neon sculptures – exhibited as a new, large-scale installation at the Arsenale’s Gaggiandre – currently contains more than fifty Western and non-Western languages, including a number of indigenous languages, some of which are extinct.

處處都是外人

ADRIANO PEDROSA CURATOR OF THE 60TH INTERNATIONAL ART EXHIBITION

Foreigners Everywhere – Stranieri Ovunque

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sexuality, freedom, and wealth. In this panorama, the expression “Foreigners Everywhere” has several meanings. First of all, it means that wherever you go and wherever you are, you will always encounter foreigners—they/we are everywhere. Second, it means that no matter where you find yourself, you are always truly, and deep down inside, a foreigner. In addition, the expression takes on a very particular, site-specific meaning in Venice: a city whose original population consisted of refugees from Roman cities; a city that was, at one point, the most important centre for international trade and commerce in the Mediterranean; a city that was the capital of the Republic of Venice, dominated by Napoleon Bonaparte, and taken over by Austria; and whose population today consists of some 50,000 residents and may reach 165,000 in a single day during peak seasons, due to the enormous number of tourists and travellers—foreigners of a privileged kind—visiting the city. In Venice, foreigners are everywhere. Yet, one may also think of the expression as a motto, a slogan, a call to action, a cry—of excitement, joy, or fear: Foreigners everywhere! More importantly, today it assumes a critical signification in Europe, around the Mediterranean, and in the world, especially when the number of forcibly displaced people hit the highest in 2022, at 108.4 million according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and is expected to have grown even more in 2023. Artists have always travelled and moved about, under various circumstances, through cities, countries, and continents. This has only accelerated since the late twentieth century—ironically a period marked by increasing restrictions regarding the dislocation or displacement of people. Biennale Arte 2024’s primary focus is thus artists who are themselves foreigners, immigrants, expatriates, diasporic, émigrés, exiled, or refugees—particularly those who have moved between the Global South and the Global North. Migration and decolonisation are key themes here. The Italian straniero, the Portuguese estrangeiro, the French étranger, and the Spanish extranjero are all etymologically connected to the strano, the estranho,

MAMÕYGUARA OPÁ MAMÕ PUPÉ FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Indigenous artists have a robust presence in the International Art Exhibition, and their work greets the public in the Central Pavilion, where the MAHKU collective (Movimentos dos Artistas Huni Kuin) from Brazil paints a monumental mural on the building’s façade, and in the Corderie in the Arsenale, where the Mataaho Collective from Aotearoa—New Zealand will present a large-scale installation in the first room, two iconic sites of la Biennale. Queer artists appear throughout the Exhibition and are also the subject of a large section in the Corderie, which gathers works by artists from Canada, China, Hong Kong, India, Mexico, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Peru, the Philippines, South Africa, and the USA, and in another section devoted to Queer abstraction in the Central Pavilion, with works by artists from China, Italy, and the Philippines. Three of Europe’s most remarkable female outsider artists are also presented: Madge Gill from the United Kingdom,

the étrange, and the extraño, respectively, which is precisely the concept of “stranger”. Sigmund Freud’s notion of the Unheimliche comes to mind—the uncanny in English, which has indeed been translated as O estranho in Portuguese, signifying the strange that is also familiar, within, deep down inside. According to the American Heritage and the Oxford English dictionaries, the first meaning of the word “queer” is “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 self-taught artist, the folk artist, and the artista popular; and the Indigenous artist, who is frequently treated as a foreigner in their own land. The work of these four subjects is the focus of this Biennale Arte, constituting the International Art Exhibition’s Nucleo Contemporaneo. Although their work is often informed by their own lives, experiences, reflections, narratives, and histories, there are also those artists who delve into more formal issues with their own strange, foreign, or Indigenous accents.

ADRIANO PEDROSA

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE - STRANIERI OVUNQUE

Anna Zemánková from the Czech Republic, and Aloïse from Switzerland. The Nucleo Contemporaneo features a special section in the Corderie devoted to the Disobedience Archive, a project by Marco Scotini, which has been developing a video archive since 2005, focusing on the relationships between artistic practices and activism. In Biennale Arte 2024, the presentation of the Disobedience Archive is designed by Juliana Ziebell, who also worked on the architecture of the entire International Art Exhibition. The section is divided into two parts especially conceived for our framework—diaspora activism and gender disobedience—and will include works by thirty-nine artists and collectives made between 1975 and 2023. The International Art Exhibition also features a Nucleo Storico, which includes works from twentieth-century Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Much has been written about global modernisms and modernisms in the Global South, and three sections 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. We are all too familiar with the histories of modernism in Euroamerica, yet the modernisms in the Global South remain largely unknown. Knowledge about these is limited to the specialists in each individual country or region at best, therefore connecting and exhibiting these works together will be revealing. It is this sense that these histories assume a truly contemporary relevance—we urgently need to learn more about and from them. Additionally, European modernism travelled far beyond Europe throughout the twentieth century, often intertwined with colonialism, and many artists in the Global South travelled to Europe to be exposed to it. In this process, modernism was appropriated and devoured in the Global South. The reference here is to Oswald de Andrade’s notion of antropofagia, offered as a tool to the modern intellectual at the margins of Europe to appropriate metropolitan culture, cannibalizing it and producing something of his or her own, and evoking the cannibalistic practice of the indigenous Tupinambá

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Portraits includes works by about a hundred artists from Algeria, Aotearoa—New Zealand, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, China, Colombia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, Ghana, Guatemala, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jamaica, Korea, Lebanon, Malaysia, Mexico, Mozambique, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Singapore, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Tunisia, Turkey, Uruguay, Venezuela, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe. The selection shows how the human figure has been explored in countless different ways by artists in the Global South, reflecting on the crisis of representation around that very figure, something that marked much of the art in the twentieth century, posing other questions: who could be represented, by whom, and how? In the Global South, many artists encountered European modernism through travel, study, or books. Yet, they bring their own highly personal and powerful reflections and contributions to their works, depicting figures from their own visual repertoires, histories, and lives—including themselves. Most works depict nonwhite characters, which in Venice, at the heart of the Biennale Arte, becomes an emblematic feature of this large and heterogeneous group and of the International Art Exhibition itself: Stranieri Ovunque—Foreigners Everywhere.

The Nucleo Storico encompasses three sections, featuring one work by each artist, including mostly paintings, but also works on paper and sculpture, from the years 1915 to 1990. It is difficult to establish a strict overarching chronology here, as the processes may be quite singular in each country or region, often following their own idiosyncratic courses. For this reason, the chronological arc is much wider than the typical modernist time frame. In the Central Pavilion, one section is devoted to portraits and representations of the human figure and another is devoted to abstractions. In the Corderie of the Arsenale, a section is devoted to the worldwide Italian diaspora.

ИНОСТРАНЦЫ ВЕЗДЕ

people in pre-invasion Brazil. The unique, distinct types of modernism around the Global South assume radically new figures and forms as they often dialogue with local and Indigenous narratives and references.

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The section entitled Abstractions includes works by about forty artists from Argentina, Aotearoa—New Zealand, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, Guatemala, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Jordan, Korea, Lebanon, Mexico, Morocco, Pakistan, Palestine, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, South Africa, and Turkey. A key reference here is the extraordinary Casablanca School of painters from Morocco, presented at Biennale Arte for the first time. What is of interest is a certain type of abstraction that detaches itself from the European constructivist abstract geometric tradition, with its rigid orthogonal grid of verticals and horizontals, and its palette of primary colours, in order to privilege more organic, curvilinear shapes and forms, and bright and vivid colours, in striking compositions. Most of the artists in the Nucleo Storico are exhibited in the International Art Exhibition for the first time, and thus a historical debt is paid to them. Above all, their gathering in Venice in a single section is unprecedented, and we will learn from these unforeseen juxtapositions in the flesh, which will then hopefully point towards new connections, associations, and parallels beyond the rather straightforward categories that I have proposed. Although not technically part of the Global South any longer, artists from Singapore and Korea are included in these sections, given that at the time of the creation of their works, they were part of the so-called Third World. In a similar manner, Selwyn Wilson and Sandy Adsett from Aotearoa—New Zealand have been included in this Nucleo Storico because they are historical Māori artists, aligning with the Exhibition’s focus on Indigenous artists. A third section in the Nucleo Storico, titled Italians Everywhere, is dedicated to the worldwide Italian artistic diaspora in the twentieth century: Italian artists who travelled and moved abroad, developing their careers in Africa, Asia, Latin America, as well as in the rest of Europe and the United States. Italians abroad have often become embedded in local cultures, at times playing significant roles in the development of the narratives of modernism beyond their native land. This section features

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

A second motif is the family of artists—artists related by blood or marriage, many of them Indigenous—such as Andres Curruchich and his granddaughter, Rosa Elena Curruchich, from Guatemala; Abel Rodríguez and his son Aycoobo from Colombia; Fred Graham and his son Brett, Māori artists from Aotearoa—New Zealand; Juana Marta Rodas and her daughter Julia Isídrez from Paraguay; MAHKU (Movimento dos Artistas Huni Kuin), the Huni Kuin collective from the western part of the Brazilian Amazon region; Joseca Mokahesi e André Taniki of the Yanomami tribe, from the northern part of the same region; Santiago Yahuarcani and his son Rember from Peru; Susanne Wenger and her adopted son Ṣàngódáre

Two quite different but related elements have emerged rather organically from the research and have been developed, appearing as leitmotivs throughout the International Art Exhibition. The first one is textiles, which have been explored by many artists in the show in multiple ways, from key historical figures such as Bona Pieyre de Mandiargues and Gianni Bertini in Italians Everywhere and Olga de Amaral, Eduardo Terrazas, and Monika Correa in Abstractions in the Nucleo Storico, to many artists in the Nucleo Contemporaneo, including Agnès Waruguru, Ahmed Umar, Anna Zemánková, Antonio Guzman and Iva Jankovic, the Bordadoras de Isla Negra, Bouchra Khalili, Claudia Alarcón and Silät, Dana Awartani, Frieda Toranzo Jaeger, Güneş Terkol, Kang Seung Lee, Liz Collins, the Mataaho Collective, Nour Jaouda, Pacita Abad, Paula Nicho, Ṣàngódáre Gbádégẹsin Àjàlá, Shalom Kufakwatenzi, Susanne Wenger, Yinka Shonibare, as well as the Chilean arpilleristas. 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 field of fine arts.

HER YERDE YABANCI

works by about forty artists who are first- or secondgeneration Italian immigrants, exhibited in Lina Bo Bardi’s glass easel display system. Bo Bardi was herself an Italian who moved to Brazil and who won the Special Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in memoriam of the Biennale Architettura 2021.

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Gbádégẹsin Àjàlá from Nigeria; the brothers Philomé and Sénèque Obin from Haiti; Lorna and Jewad Selim, the husband and wife from Iraq and the UK, and Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, from Mexico. Once again tradition plays an important role here in the transmission of knowledge and practices from father or mother to son or daughter, or among siblings, relatives, and couples. As a guiding principle, Biennale Arte 2024 has favoured artists who have never participated in the International Art Exhibition—though a number of them will have been featured in a National Pavilion, a Collateral Event, or in an edition in the twentieth century. Special attention is being given to outdoor projects, both in the Arsenale (with works by Anna Maria Maiolino, Beatriz Cortez, Claire Fontaine, Lauren Halsey, Leilah Babirye, and Taylor Nkomo) and in the Giardini (with works by Iván Argote, Mariana Tellería, Rindon Johnson, and Sol Calero). The performance programme features events during the Exhibition’s opening and closing days and includes works by a number of artists who also presented works: Ahmed Umar, Bárbara Sánchez-Kane, Isaac Chong Wai, Güneş Terkol, Antonio Jose Guzman and Iva Jankovic, Joshua Serafin, Lydia Ourahmane, Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo), Simone Forti, and WangShui. At Forte Marghera in Mestre, we present the work of pioneering Italian ceramicist Nedda Guidi, who is also featured in the Central Pavilion in the room devoted to Queer abstractions, within the framework of the International Art Exhibition. On the other hand, outside this framework but still curated by me, the work of Beatriz Milhazes is presented in the Applied Arts Pavilion located in the Arsenale, which is developed in collaboration with the Victoria and Albert Museum, given her close connection to and interest in applied arts. A selection of textiles from different parts of the world that have inspired Milhazes are exhibited in the pavilion alongside her paintings, collages, and a textile work. The Catalogue and the Short Guide for Biennale Arte 2024 are designed by Paula Tinoco, Roderico Souza,

WSZĘDZIE OBCY FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

On a personal level, I myself feel implicated in many of the Exhibition’s themes, concepts, and motifs and in its framework. I have lived abroad and have been fortunate to travel extensively during my lifetime. Yet, I have often experienced treatment typically reserved for a Third World foreigner—although I’ve never been a refugee, and in fact, I hold one of the highest-ranking passports from the Global South, according to the Henley Passport Index. I also identify as Queer—the first openly Queer curator in the history of the Biennale Arte. Moreover, I come from a context in Brazil and in Latin America where the Indigenous artist and the artista popular play important roles; although they have been marginalised in art history, they have recently come to receive more recognition. Brazil is also home to many diasporas; it is a land of foreigners as it were: besides the Portuguese who invaded and colonised the country, it is home to

and Carolina Aboarrage from Estúdio Campo in São Paulo and edited by me, with the collaboration of our two artistic organisers, Amanda Carneiro and Sofia Gotti. Campo’s beautiful design references the neon, evoking Claire Fontaine’s sculptures in the Exhibition, as well as borders, demarcations, transitions, and the spaces in between, through the use of geometry and gradient colors. For the Catalogue and the Short Guide, we have invited over one hundred authors from different parts of the world to write the more than three hundred artists’ entries, privileging a polyphonic approach to the publication. The Catalogue features interviews with the two artists who won the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement this year, Anna Maria Maiolino and Nil Yalter, another with Claire Fontaine, and one with me, conducted by Julieta González. In addition, dispersed throughout the Catalogue, creating another layer in the book’s narrative, are multiple fragments of a critical, literary, poetic, or theoretical nature that have somehow inspired us and caught our attention during the research process. These fragments span different authors and periods, all of them somehow connected to our themes, subjects, and narratives. They have been selected with the help of Carneiro, Gotti, and Claire Fontaine.

ADRIANO PEDROSA

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE - STRANIERI OVUNQUE

the largest African, Italian, Japanese, and Lebanese diasporas in the world. Biennale Arte, an international event with so many official participating countries, has always been a platform for the exhibition of works by foreigners from all over the world. In this long and rich tradition, the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, will be a celebration of the foreign, the distant, the outsider, the Queer, as well as the Indigenous. In conclusion, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to the board of La Biennale di Venezia and to former president Roberto Cicutto, who appointed me the Artistic Director of the Visual Arts Department in December 2022, in charge of curating Biennale Arte 2024. His only request was for me to construct an exhibition full of beauty. I gather we are delivering a foreign, strange, uncanny, and Queer sort of beauty.

COIGRICH ANNS GACH ÀITE

Devika Singh Diego Amal Ceballos Don Handa Edgar Calel Eduardo Costantini Elisabeth Whitelaw Emilia Bonomi Emiliano Valdés Engel Leonardo Erica Roberts Erica Schmatz Eugene Tan Eungie Joo Fabiola Ceni Fadia Antar Fernanda Arruda Flavia Fossa Margutti Florencia Lowenthal Florencia Malbran Francesca Boglietti Francesca Montorio Frank Kilbourn Fulvia Carnevale Fusun Eczacibasi Garth Greenan Giacinta Dalla Pietà Gloria Cortés Aliaga Grace O’Malley Graham Steele Guilherme Assis Haco de Ridder Hala Choucair Hannah O’Leary Hans Ulrich Obrist Heba Elkayal Héctor Palhares Meza Henrique Faria Humberto Moro Ignez Simões Ilaria Zanella Inti Guerrero Isa Lorenzo Ivan Castellon Quiroga Jackeline Rojas Heredia Jacopo Galimberti James Thornhill Jan Fjeld Janaina Hees Jane and Kito de Boer Jasper Sharp Jean Pigozzi Jemma Read

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Abraham Cruzvillegas Adriana La Lime Adriana Paez Agnes Vilén Agustín Pérez Rubio Akram Zaatari Alessandro Pasotti Alessandro Rabottini Alex Logsdail Alex Mor Alexander Hertling Allan Schwartzman Amanda Carneiro Amanda Hereaka Andras Szanto Andrea Del Mercato Andree Sfeir-Semler Angela María Pérez Mejía Anna Sokoloff Antonio Almeida Antonio Lessa Arystela Paz Azu Nwagbogu Barbara Corti Basel Dallouol Beatriz Lopez Boris Hirmas Camila Siqueira Carlos Dale Carlos Uzcanga Gaona Carolina Aboarrage Catalina Casas Cecilia Alemani Cecilia Brunson Cecilia Vicuña Çelenk Bafra Charles Pocock Christian Berst Chus Martínez Claudia Gioia Claudia Saldanha Cleusa Garfinkel Conor Macklin Conrado Mesquita Cristiana Constanzo Cristiano Frizzele Daniele Balice David Kordansky Debora Ferreira Debora Rossi Deborah and Vincenzo Sanguineti

Acknowledgements

The research and preparations for the Biennale Arte have been an extraordinary, unforgettable journey, and I have been fortunate to count on the generous and enthusiastic support and advice of hundreds of colleagues and friends along the way, both new and old. Very special thanks are due to the entire Biennale and my own curatorial teams. I would also like to express my gratitude to all artists, authors, donors, sponsors, lenders to the exhibition, as well as the following individuals who have helped me in different ways in this ambitious and challenging process:

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 58

JeongJin Lee Jeremy Barns Joern Brandmeyer Jonathan Garnham José Darío Gutiérrez José Esparza Chong Cuy José Kuri Joselina Cruz Josh Ginsburg Juan Carlos Cordero Julia Bryan-Wilson Juliana Ziebell Julieta González Jussi Koitela Karen Marta Karoline Trollvik Kiki Mazzuchelli Koyo Kouoh Latika Gupta Laura Hakel Lena Malm Lia Colombino Lisa Horikawa Lívia Benevides Liza Essers Lorenzo Giusti Luciana Brito Luigi Ricciari Luisa Duarte Luisa Strina Maddalena Pietragnoli Magnolia de la Garza Maja Hoffmann Mami Kataoka Manuel Santos Marco Antonio Nakata Maria Grazia Chiuri María Inés Rodríguez Maria Montero Mariana Luvizutti Marina Bertaggia Marina Buendia Marina Moura Marita Garcia Mary Sabatino Massimiliano Bigarello Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz Max Perlingeiro Michela Alessandrini Miguel Lopez Mikala Tai Mónica Manzutto

Naine Terena Nara Roesler Natasha Conland Niamh Coghlan Nicholas Logsdail Nigel Borell Nontobeko Ntombela O’Neil Lawrence Olivier Bialobos Orly Benzacar Patrick Charpenel Paula Coelho Paula Nascimento Paula Tinoco Paula Zoppello Paulo A.W. Vieira Paulo Herkenhoff Paulo Soares Pedro Wollny Pilar Ríos Prajit Dutta Priya Jhaveri Raffaele Cinotti Raffaella Cortese Raphael Chikukwa Raphael Fonseca Regina Teixeira de Barros Rein Wolfs Riccardo Boni Richard Saltoun Roderico Souza Rodrigo Moura Ryan Inouye Sandra Gamarra Sandra Montagner Sara Hermann Sarah Wilson Sergio Fontanella Shabbir Hussain Mustafa Sharon Lerner Sherine Morsi Sherith Arasakula Suriya Shireen Gandhy Silvana Palma Silvia Paz Illobre de Orteu Simon Mordant Sofia Gotti Sofia Pellegrini Sonia Becce Stefan Benchoam Stefania Fabris Stuart Morrison

Suheyla Takesh Sultan Sooud Al-Qassemi Taimur Hassan Tandanzani Dhlakama Teofilo Cohen Thiago Gomide Thúlio Righeti Ticio Escobar Tina Kim Todd Bradway Tomás Toledo Vanessa Carlos Varinia Brodsky Zimmermann Victoria Noorthoorn Vilma Coutinho Vincent van Velsen Wenny Teo Zeina Arida

EARLY 1970S

I am your worst fear. I am your best fantasy.

GAY LIBERATION SLOGAN

“A DIALOGUE WITH MODERNISM.” IN DIA-AZZAWI: A RETROSPECTIVE FROM 1963 UNTIL TOMORROW, EDITED BY CATHERINE DAVID. DOHA, QATAR: ARAB MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, 2017.

I propose that modernism primarily entails a global crisis of representation, with the circumstances of that crisis, the specific forms it takes, and the artistic solutions devised to respond to it varying from one part of the world to another. While not the first or last crisis of its kind, this one is directly caused by modernity, and addresses representation, as the means of depicting or portraying a subject, with its connection to reality and originality, as specifically distinct from pre-modern presentation. This understanding of modernism allows us to recognise each particular and peculiar experiment around the world within its own context and significance, with no concern for the linearity or heterochronicity of the history of art. Modern art would then be understood within a broad non-linear and non-chronological narrative of intersections and overlaps that are dialectical and discursive, that can encompass global influences, as well as account for the continuity of other artistic traditions and their rupture.

NADA SHABOUT

Julieta González ESTRANJEROS EN TODAS PARTES

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

interviewed by

Adriano Pedrosa

JG 66

ADRIANO PEDROSA

INTERVIEWED BY JULIETA GONZÁLEZ

BIENNALE ARTE 2024

As the curator of the Biennale Arte 2024—and notably the first from Latin America and the second from the Global South— how do you perceive your role and responsibilities, both within and beyond the 60th International Art Exhibition? What specific responsibilities come with being a curator from the peripheries when curating such a prominent international event? Working on the Biennale Arte 2024 is a great honour and comes as a recognition of the work one has done over the years, but as the first Latin American and the first curator actually living and working in the Global South, it also comes with an enormous responsibility, at least in my mind. I feel this sense of responsibility perhaps even more strongly than if I were yet another European curator organising the Biennale Arte1. Thus, I don’t really see this as a personal project, or a project where I simply implement and execute my own curatorial vision. Instead I am also thinking about the many extraordinary artists from the Global South who have never participated in the International Art Exhibition, of the many cities and art scenes that were not visited by previous curators during their research2. We know very well the enormous visibility the International Art Exhibition brings to an artist and to a work of art, especially in recent decades with the broad public and media attention and the pivotal role the event performs in the global contemporary art circuit. Often, we hear or read about an artist or an artwork that has been exhibited in Venice—a milestone that serves as an art world imprimatur in their exhibition history, which of course reflects a Eurocentric matrix of power in the art world. I kept this in mind during my research putting together both the Nucleo Contemporaneo and the Nucleo Storico, which is the historical nucleus of the Biennale Arte 2024. It focuses on modernism in the Global South—artists who worked in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America in the twentieth century, which in fact is much of the historical arc of La Biennale itself, which began in 1895. I thus privileged artists who had never participated in the Exhibition, or at least who had not participated in this century, and developed a general focus on the Global South within the larger framework of Stranieri Ovunque—Foreigners Everywhere. Perhaps this is more critical in the Nucleo Storico because today it is much more feasible for a living artist from the Global South to participate in the international circuit than it was during much of the twentieth century. Even European and North American curators know that these days they must develop a more global view and include artists from our part of the world in their projects. Although this has become a common practice since the late 1990s and early 2000s, it was not common in the twentieth century, so there are many great artists that remain to be exhibited and researched more widely—artists who perhaps are important figures in their own country or region but who are not well-known internationally. This is why, I feel, the Nucleo Storico becomes so relevant and indeed contemporary. Yet of course the Nucleo Contemporaneo plays the central role in the Biennale Arte 2024— occupying the majority of the spaces in the Corderie of the Arsenale and the Central Pavilion in the Giardini, as well as in the open areas—with its focus on four subjects: the foreigner, the Queer, the outsider, and the Indigenous artist. I myself have lived as a foreigner during many years of my life. I am of course Queer—the first openly Queer curator in the

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history of the Biennale Arte. And I am coming from a context in Brazil and Latin America where Indigenous artists and outsider, or self-taught artists—the artista popular—are so important, even if they were often neglected in the past. In 2009, you organised an edition of the Panorama da Arte Brasileira, an exhibition traditionally focused on Brazilian art, but uniquely included a roster of mostly foreign artists working in, on, and about Brazil. Notably titled in Old Tupi, Mamõyguara Opá Mamõ Pupé (Foreigners Everywhere), referencing Claire Fontaine’s work, this exhibition, like The Traveling Show in Mexico City, which you curated the following year, seemed to emphasise ideas of mobility, shifting identities, and the dissolution of boundaries. Now, almost fifteen years later, as you revisit these themes at the Biennale Arte with a similar title, how have your perspectives on foreignness and the role of the foreigner evolved in your curatorial practice? Some ten years ago I was visiting the Biennale Arte. I had recently co-curated (with Jens Hoffmann) the 12th Istanbul Biennial in 2011, and I kept thinking how challenging it was to develop a theme and a concept that would lend itself to an interesting framework for a biennial. I also recalled our difficulties in coming up with a title for Istanbul. In this context, the idea of Foreigners Everywhere emerged, drawing from the work of Claire Fontaine, with whom I had already worked in São Paulo at the Panorama, as you mention, as well as in Fundación Jumex’s The Traveling Show in 2010, and even in Istanbul3. I thus kept the title in mind for a possible Italian project in the future. Before that, I had curated an exhibition with the same title but in a different language. I was not expecting or planning to curate the Biennale Arte; it was more a curatorial exercise in my mind at that time—What if . . . ? In São Paulo, the context was very different, and I was addressing a few concerns I had regarding the local scene, the increasing importance of Brazilian art history internationally (especially in Latin America), and the very model of the exhibition Panorama da Arte Brasileira (Panorama of Brazilian Art)—an important, though quite local, biennial devoted to Brazilian contemporary art organised by the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo. For that exhibition, I selected only non-Brazilian artists who had somehow brought Brazilian references to their work, with the exception of Tamar Guimarães—a midcareer Brazilian artist who had developed her career outside of the country and was showing in Brazil with us for the first time. My argument was that many foreign artists were bringing Brazilian references to their works—such as neoconcretismo or Brazilian modernist architecture—which in turn spoke to the internationalisation of Brazilian art, in that these works made by foreigners could somehow be considered “Brazilian”. After all, the Panorama was devoted to Brazilian art and not Brazilian artists, so I was trying to question these notions and boundaries of territory and nationality in a provocative and speculative manner. Needless to say, the exhibition was quite polemic. For a hypothetical Biennale Arte, I thought, some ten years ago, the guiding principle could be to include just “foreign” artists, which could extend to the national pavilions, in fact4. It was quite interesting that Claire Fontaine, who is, after all, 50

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percent Italian born and now live in Palermo, had never participated in the Biennale Arte. I had kept the framework and the title, Foreigners Everywhere, in the back of my mind for all these years, and I feel it remains relevant and, in fact, has become increasingly urgent—not just in Italy and Europe, but around the world today. The Nucleo Contemporaneo, which constitutes the core of the Biennale Arte 2024, is intriguingly structured through “conversations” between diverse “foreigners”, allowing for a fluid interpretation of the idea of the foreigner. Could you elaborate on these dynamic pairings and identify key moments or works that are pivotal in the exhibition’s narrative? I have been to every edition of the Biennale Arte since 1997, when Germano Celant curated it (though I visited the 1990 edition as well), and it gives me a feeling that it is often quite cacophonic. There is a multitude of artists in the national pavilions and in the International Exhibition, not to mention the Collateral Events. I often find that the exhibition’s titles and frameworks do not offer much guidance and seem quite poetically vague or all-encompassing, to the point that they lose their specificity and may become rather meaningless or watered down. Or else I find certain themes and concepts that are quite complex and cryptic, and although they might be theoretically grounded, they are not very generous with the audience. There are, of course, many ways of working as a curator, as there should be, but I have taken a different approach. I am more interested in communicating with a larger audience—especially in a biennial like the International Art Exhibition with hundreds of thousands of visitors—much like we do at Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP), where I am artistic director. So if you look at our themes and concepts at the museum, which we’ve been exploring in our series around different Histórias over the years, they are quite palpable, yet still complex and layered5. I feel this is also the case with the title of this edition, Stranieri Ovunque—Foreigners Everywhere. From the very beginning, I was in touch with Claire Fontaine about the project, and I decided to have a bilingual title—two languages in dialogue with one another. Although they are both Indo-European, Italian is a Romance language, and English is a West Germanic one. This acknowledges the nuances associated with translation, the specificities of each language, and places one in juxtaposition to the other. Within that framework, the first subject of interest is, of course, the foreigner— the immigrant, the expatriate, the diasporic, the émigré, the exiled, and the refugee. I should say that even with this focus, it was important to allow for foreign artists who worked in a more formal manner—around abstraction or language, for example—beyond the subject of migration. This is also the case for the Exhibition’s other subjects of interest—the Indigenous, the Queer, and the outsider artist. For many years, while I had this framework in the back of my mind, I thought it would have been enough to develop an entire exhibition around the subject of the foreigner. However, in October 2022, when I started the conversation with the president of La Biennale, Roberto Cicutto, I began to think more seriously about the framework and the current state of contemporary art. The theme of migration remained quite relevant and, indeed, became more

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pressing, especially in the region. However, I also thought that it might be excessive, perhaps even redundant, to focus an exhibition of such a scale entirely on the subject of the foreigner. A biennial is rather different from a group exhibition at an institution. It has its own demands and peculiarities, at least in my mind, and especially in Venice. As I have said, for me it was important to avoid artists who had already participated in the Biennale Arte, because there are so many great artists in the world that deserve this visibility. I wanted to give this opportunity to artists who had never been in Venice, or who had never been in the International Exhibition, or who at least had not participated in this century6. Early on in the development of the project—it seems like a long time ago, but it was only a little over a year ago—while considering its linguistic dimension, I kept thinking about how I could unfold the subject of the foreigner into other related subjects. 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. Freud’s unheimliche comes to mind—the uncanny in English, which in Portuguese has been translated as estranho, the strange that is also familiar7. According to the American Heritage and Oxford English dictionaries, the first meaning of the word “queer” is precisely “strange”. And this is how I arrived at the Exhibition’s second, more specific subject of interest: the Queer subject. It relates not only to my own life experience but also to a broader interest in those who have been excluded, sidelined, or marginalised from the primary narratives of contemporary and modern art and culture. The outsider artist is a similar subject, one closely connected to the self-taught artist and the figure of the so-called artista popular in Brazil and in Latin America. Finally, the fourth subject is the Indigenous—again an important subject where I come from, and a subject that is often treated as a foreigner in his or her own land. Indigenous art plays a central role in the Biennale Arte 2024: the first work you will see as you approach the Central Pavilion in the Giardini is the large-scale mural painted by the MAHKU collective (the Movimento dos Artistas Huni Kuin), who live and work in the western part of the Brazilian Amazon region and with whom I have now been working for ten years. Similarly, in the Corderie in the Arsenale—in the large, emblematic room that functions as an overture to that part of the Exhibition—the first work you encounter is a powerful installation by the Māori collective Mataaho, titled Takapau. It is a work I saw in the collective’s retrospective at Te Papa Museum in Wellington when I visited in March. It is quite meaningful to me that two Indigenous collectives, from Aotearoa—New Zealand and from Brazil, are performing the opening acts in Stranieri Ovunque—Foreigners Everywhere in this manner. Throughout the Central Pavilion, because of its unique layout with many distinct galleries of different sizes, I was able to construct closer dialogues between the artists and their artworks. So, for instance, in addition to many rooms that gather artists related by blood, there is a room focused around Queer abstraction (with works by Evelyn Taocheng Wang, Maria Taniguchi, and Nedda Guidi) and another devoted to landscapes (with Aref El Rayess, Kay

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WalkingStick, Kim Yun Shin, and Leopold Strobl). There is a room with two artists who photographed gay movie theatres in different contexts (Miguel Ángel Rojas in Bogotá in the 1970s and Dean Sameshima in Berlin in the 2020s) and another that features Afro-diasporic artists from different generations who lived in Italy at distinct moments between the 1960s and today (the late Rubem Valentim from Brazil and Bertina Lopes from Mozambique, as well as the young Victor Fotso Nyie from Cameroon, who lives in Faenza). In the Corderie of the Arsenale, the space is more fluid and so are the sections. Again we have galleries devoted to artists related by blood, a large section featuring textiles, and another large section bringing together Queer artists from different parts of the world (Isaac Chong Wai, Bárbara Sánchez-Kane, Sabelo Mlangeni, Xiyadie, Ana Segovia, Erica Rutherford, Violeta Quispe, La Chola Poblete, Salman Toor, Puppies Puppies, Aravani Art Project, Joshua Serafin, and again Dean Sameshima). Special attention was given to the outdoor spaces, not only in the Arsenale (where you’ll find works by Lauren Halsey, Claire Fontaine, Beatriz Cortez, Anna Maria Maiolino, Taylor Nkomo, and Leilah Babirye), but also in the Giardini (which has large-scale works by Sol Calero, Iván Argote, Mariana Telleria, and Rindon Johnson). Looking back at your trajectory, including your work with Paulo Herkenhoff at the XXIV Bienal de São Paulo in 1998 and with Ivo Mesquita in the F[r]icciones exhibition at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (20002001), your curatorial approach often questions a univocal and linear notion of history. These exhibitions featured works from different periods and geographic locations placed in dialogue with each other in order to generate frictions that ultimately contributed to dismantling a singular notion of history. Since 2016, you have continued to work on this idea at Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP) with your own focus on “histórias” rather than a singular “history”. Could you discuss how this concept has evolved in your curatorial practice, especially in preparation for the Biennale Arte 2024? My development of the notion of “histórias” began in 1996, when I conceived of a book on Valeska Soares with the artist that was titled histórias in Portuguese. It was a bilingual book, and it had a deliberately long translation for the title that appeared between brackets: “[Unlike the more limited English ‘histories’, the Portuguese ‘histórias’, much like the French ‘histoires’ and the Spanish ‘historias’, may identify both fictional and non-fictional texts, thus marking at once the historical, the anecdotal and the literary.]”8. I was quite interested back then in more experimental modes of art writing, on the overlaps and frictions between critical writing and creative writing. There was this idea of writing not so much directly about the artist or the artwork, but alongside them. I was also interested in the fragment, as in art school I had been reading quite a lot of Roland Barthes, who remains an important figure to me. In Valeska Soares’s book, there are many fragments and short texts—one in the form of a letter, another as a bibliography.

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In 1997–98, I worked with Herkenhoff on the legendary XXIV Bienal de São Paulo, which is considered the most important edition of the Bienal, as an adjunct curator and editor of publications9. It was my first real curatorial position (I had organised a couple of other smaller shows, was writing for Artforum, Frieze, and other magazines, and was working as an artist back then). That Bienal also had a Núcleo Histórico, which was titled Antropofagia e Histórias de Canibalismos (Antropofagia and Histories of Cannibalism), and in this sense my project now in Venice harks back to that special edition of the Bienal, the Nucleo Storico now somehow unfolding that Núcleo Histórico twenty-six years later in a different way10. When I started working with Herkenhoff, his Núcleo Histórico was already fully designed, and my only humble contribution was adding the “s” to Histórias. Antropofagia is a key term in Brazilian and global modernism, developed by writer Oswald de Andrade in the 1920s. It offers a strategy or framework through which to look at the relationships between European modernism and artists and intellectuals working at the margins, or in the periphery, of Europe. De Andrade’s antropofagia referenced the cannibalistic practice of the Indigenous Tupinambá people, the proto-Brazilian fathers of appropriation who ate the flesh of their enemies in order to acquire and embody their strengths and virtues11. For the Brazilian modern and contemporary intellectual, antropofagia may become a productive and liberating epistemological tool true to our own Indigenous origins. Many artists from Latin America, Africa, and Asia travelled to London, Paris, Rome, and other European capitals in the twentieth century and appropriated or “devoured” different elements of modernism or European styles and genres, often blending them with their own Indigenous or Native references and thus reinventing and reinvigorating the original sources. In this respect, antropofagia, in my view, is still an interesting framework (though of course not the only one) to examine twentieth century art productions in the Global South. F[r]icciones is indeed an important exhibition in my trajectory, and in it I was able to develop further the idea of blending different histórias—history and literature, visual art and text. The exhibition’s title referenced Jorge Luis Borges’s landmark Ficciones book, first published in Spanish in 1944, which itself erases the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction. In a rather Borgean manner, there was a subtle play in the description of the project that was printed on the Catalogue’s cover and gatefold, which stated that that the exhibition accompanied the book, not the other way around12. There are a number of elements that were already in F[r]icciones that reappear in other projects of mine, including in this very book. For one, the idea of a conversation between the curators of the exhibition, in lieu of a curatorial essay, came about first in F[r]icciones with Mesquita and again in the Istanbul Biennial catalogue with Hoffmann13. The use of fragments dispersed throughout the book is something quite Barthesian, and I first used them in the Núcleo Histórico catalogue of the XXIV Bienal de São Paulo in 1998 and again in the exhibition catalogue of Histórias Mestiças (Mestizo Histories), which I co-organised with Lilia Moritz Schwarcz in 201414. And they are present in this volume.

ADRIANO PEDROSA

INTERVIEWED BY JULIETA GONZÁLEZ

BIENNALE ARTE 2024

The room devoted to portraits was also in F[r]icciones, with Latin American characters of different races, genders, backgrounds, geographies, and periods from Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Mexico, and the Caribbean. The portraits section comes up again in Histórias Mestiças, and at MASP in Afro-Atlantic Histories and in Brazilian Histories. Looking back, I see how I consistently employ certain models and strategies which become a trace of my own work. At the same time, I also try to reconfigure them, hopefully giving them new meaning and significance in different contexts and projects over the years. I should also mention a survey exhibition I organised at Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo in 2012 on the work of Adriana Varejão, titled Histórias às margens (Histories at the Margins). With this project, the idea of histórias appeared in the exhibition’s title for the first time. Yet what is really behind the histórias is an understanding that we can never be truly certain, definitive, authoritative, all-encompassing, that interpretations and meanings are multiple, diverse, overlapping, and at times contradictory, and that they are shifting in time and space, from viewpoint to viewpoint. It is widely accepted that we must abandon the master narrative—which was, of course, dominated by Europeans and US Americans, both as protagonists (the artists and the artworks they created) and as authors— where everything fits in an orderly manner, in time and place. When we now consider the Global South, the panorama is much wider. There are many different geographies and chronologies. It is all quite heterogeneous, plural, polyphonic, with a “messy asymmetrical quality”, as the Indian art historian Partha Mitter puts it, but also quite vital and exciting15. The issue of chronology is central, as we must be open to more flexible time frames in the Global South in the twentieth century, as there are very different contexts and processes that cannot be unified nor synchronised. This is why the Nucleo Storico includes works from the 1910s (by Latin American artists such as Diego Rivera, Roberto Montenegro, Emilio Pettoruti, Carlos Mérida, and Anita Malfatti) through the 1980s (by African artists like Dumile Feni, Lucas Sithole, and Twins Seven Seven, and a Jamaican artist, Barrington Watson) and even a work from 1990 (by Josiah Manzi from Zimbabwe). There is no longer a single modernism—as there is no longer a single art history—but many, each with their own local inflections, narratives, accounts, and site-specificities16. In one of our conversations, you’ve characterised the Nucleo Storico as a transnational space, where the idea of “modernism” is as plural, dynamic, and mobile as the artists represented. This seems particularly relevant to the section on the Italian diaspora in the Arsenale. Can you elaborate on how this section reflects the movement and influence of Italian artists, and how the concept of the foreigner is manifested in their artistic production? The Nucleo Storico’s third section is devoted to the Italian diaspora, mostly in the Global South, but not exclusively. With that particular section, I wanted to show how Italians travelled abroad and participated in local art histories beyond their own

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borders, especially in the Global South. After all, I am the curator from the Global South with a focus on this extensive region, yet as I am developing a project in Italy, I felt I needed to advance a meaningful approach that considers the local art scene and art histories, but from a different angle. As a foreigner, I will necessarily cast a different eye on all this, which also is true to my own personal history and context. Although I do not have an Italian background, I live in São Paulo, Brazil—a city and country that is home to the largest Italian diaspora in the world. In addition, I work at MASP, a museum with a strong Italian lineage: our founding director, Italian Pietro Maria Bardi, led the museum for forty-five years, acquiring many Italian masterpieces for the collection—from Raphael and Titian to Modigliani. (And under my tenure, we acquired a work by Giulia Andreani, who is also present in the Biennale Arte.) Pietro was married to Lina Bo Bardi, the extraordinary Roman architect who designed MASP’s building and many of the early exhibition displays and worked as a curator in some of the museum’s landmark shows. Bo Bardi—who received a Gold Lion for Lifetime Achievement in memoriam in 2021 and who is one of the most iconic figures in the Italian diaspora worldwide—is also present in this section, which I titled Italians Everywhere - Italiani Ovunque, as we will install the works in her iconic glass easels, a well-known device in the history of museum displays. I should mention here that I worked with two artistic organisers on the Biennale Arte 2024: Amanda Carneiro, a Brazilian who worked with me on the Nucleo Contemporaneo, and Sofia Gotti, an Italian who I worked with on the Nucleo Storico and who was especially engaged in the research around the Italian diaspora in this section. In the Central Pavilion, you have placed two sections of the Nucleo Storico, which seem to provide a foundation for the contemporary works showcased in both that Pavilion and the Arsenale. Could you elaborate on how these historical sections relate to the contemporary works? There are certainly artists working with abstraction and with the human figure in the Nucleo Contemporaneo, and there are, of course, many artists from the Global South in it as well. But I am not positioning the Nucleo Storico as structurally grounding the Nucleo Contemporaneo. What links them all is really the notion of the foreign, the strange, the other, as well as the focus on the Global South. An exhibition should not be translated in numbers, but this is already the Biennale Arte with the largest number of artists from Asia, Africa, the Arab world, and Latin America, as well as Queer artists and Indigenous artists. Besides the obvious leitmotivs of the foreign, the Queer, the outsider, and the Indigenous, the Nucleo Contemporaneo brings a number of other motifs that were not curatorial premises, but which emerged organically in the research in a striking way. One of these is the use of textiles— in the work of Agnès Waruguru, Ahmed Umar, Anna Zemánková, Antonio Jose Guzman and Iva Jankovic, the Bordadoras de Isla Negra, Bouchra Khalili, Claudia Alarcón, Dana Awartani, Frieda Toranzo Jaeger, Güneş Terkol, Kang Seung Lee, Liz Collins, Mataaho Collective, Nour Jaouda, Pacita Abad, Paula Nicho, Ṣàngódáre Gbádégẹsin Àjàlá, Shalom Kufakwatenzi, Susanne Wenger, Yinka Shonibare, as well as in the Chilean arpilleristas. Textiles are also present in the works of a number of artists

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BIENNALE ARTE 2024

in the Nucleo Storico: Bona Pieyre de Mandiargues and Gianni Bertini in Italians Everywhere - Italiani Ovunque, and Olga de Amaral, Eduardo Terrazas, and Monika Correa in Abstractions. 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 and practice of fine arts. A second motif is the family of artists—artists related by blood, many of them Indigenous—such as Andrés Curruchich and his granddaughter, Rosa Elena, from Guatemala; Abel Rodríguez and his son Aycoobo from Colombia; Fred Graham and his son Brett, Māori artists from Aotearoa—New Zealand; Juana Marta Rodas and her daughter Julia Isídrez from Paraguay; MAHKU, the Huni Kuin collective who are members of the same family from Brazil; Santiago Yahuarcani and his son Rember from Peru; Susanne Wenger and her adopted son Ṣàngódáre Gbádégẹsin Àjàlá from Nigeria; Joseca and Taniki Yanomami, from the same family of artists in Brazil; the brothers Philomé and Sénèque Obin from Haiti; and Lorna and Jewad Selim, the husband and wife from Iraq and the UK. Again, tradition plays an important role here in the transmission of knowledge practices from father or mother to son or daughter, as well as among siblings and relatives. How do these motifs contribute to reimagining or recontextualising twentieth-century art history, especially concerning artists from regions that have been historically marginalised? Could you discuss the contrast in visibility between contemporary artists from the Global South and their twentieth-century counterparts? Additionally, how does the Biennale Arte act as a platform for re-examining and potentially rewriting narratives about the contributions of these artists to modern art history? I would say it is easier for a European or US American viewer to recognise contemporary artists from the Global South than a twentieth-century figure from the same region. This is because, since the late 1990s and early 2000s, contemporary artists from our part of the world have gained increased visibility: at least some of them travel and show in museums, galleries, and biennials. However, a number of museums are also slowly trying to correct these lacunae in the twentieth century. I recall the recent monographic exhibitions devoted to Raza at the Centre Pompidou, Paris; or to Ibrahim El-Salahi, Fahrelnissa Zeid, Bhupen Khakhar, and Saloua Raouda Choucair at the Tate, London; Margarita Azurdia at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; and Tarsila do Amaral at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Art Institute of Chicago, and others. A number of postwar Brazilian artists have also enjoyed remarkable visibility, and twentieth-century luminaries like Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, and Lygia Pape have been the subject of countless solo shows in Europe and the US in recent decades—one reason, in fact, that I did not include them in the Nucleo Storico. In this sense, we are living in very exciting times in the field of twentieth-century art history, as we question and rewrite the narratives around the art of the past to include works and territories that have long been marginalised. There have been many seminars, conferences, and publications around global modernisms,

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multiple modernisms, alternative modernisms, and modernism in the Global South, as well as about art and globalisation and art and decolonisation—but not as many exhibitions as one would like17. In this context, I wanted to somehow offer a speculative correction to this—but also a provocation—and that is the key motivation behind the Nucleo Storico. There are some two hundred artists participating in it—many of them key figures in their own local contexts—who were ignored by the Biennale Arte for many years. We are well-versed in the histories of modernisms in Europe and the United Sates. Those of us from the Global South may also be familiar with the history of modernisms in our own countries, and perhaps our regions or continents. However we are less familiar with those from other regions in the Global South. The fact of the matter is that there is still much work to be done, so many wonderful twentieth-century artists from the Global South who need to have their work more widely known, researched, exhibited. Realistically, I would need a team of ten curators and a five-year research period in order to put together a proper comprehensive exhibition that covers this vast territory and time period. However, I have been exploring this material for over a decade through my travels and research, and La Biennale offers this incredible opportunity to present an essay, a draft, a speculative proposal on such a broad topic. I made many trips this year, often returning to places with which I was already familiar. It is easier for me to return to Buenos Aires, Beirut, Singapore, Bogotá, Istanbul, Santiago, Johannesburg, or Mexico City and expand my research in order to select artists and artworks for this section. I must acknowledge that I have been fortunate to count on the very generous support of so many colleagues in different parts of the world for this research. There will, of course, be gaps and lacunae, but hopefully it will open up the possibility for others to pick up new information and perhaps expand and take it elsewhere. In our prior conversation, you mentioned “portraits” and “abstractions” as organising principles in the Nucleo Storico. How do these thematic groupings contribute to a dialogue on identity and modernity? Additionally, how do they challenge the traditional Western aesthetic canon and bring to light repressed histories and identities, especially considering that these genres are cornerstones of the history of Western and modern art? Are you thinking about a history that perhaps has yet to be written? How does this Biennale write that history? As I mentioned, my premise was that the histories of modernisms in the Global South are largely unknown and yet are of contemporary relevance. It is as if we are discovering so many extraordinary new artists and territories, and we need to map them out and integrate them into new, more open, plural, and diverse narratives of the twentieth century. Even though this might be an impossible task, we will certainly learn and illuminate something along the way. In this process, I could not aspire to offer a fully articulated chronology and framework, complete with antecedents and predecessors, ruptures and continuities. In fact, I doubt we will ever achieve that in a truly global sense. On the other hand, a lot of the local histories have already been researched in their own contexts. Many of these artists are canonical figures in their countries and have been

ADRIANO PEDROSA

INTERVIEWED BY JULIETA GONZÁLEZ

BIENNALE ARTE 2024

the subject of significant research back home. Yet, with a handful of exceptions, they remain relatively unknown internationally. More importantly, these artists have not been adequately contrasted and compared, juxtaposed, or placed in dialogue with their peers from the Global South in the flesh. This is what an exhibition can do—more so than academic studies, papers, books, and seminars—and this is what I had in mind. I would like to mention two exhibitions here as examples. The first one is Catherine Grenier’s Modernités plurielles, 1905–1970, a rehanging of the collection at the Centre Pompidou in Paris that opened in 2015. It was a massive undertaking that drew from the French state collections and was quite inspiring, but if I were to single out one critique, it would be the feeble presence of African modernism. The second one is Okwui Enwezor’s extraordinary Postwar: Art between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965 at Haus der Kunst in Munich in 2017, which had global aspirations from both the North and the South. It managed to bring together, in an unprecedented way, artists from sixty-five countries—many of whom are here in Venice once again. Enwezor had much more time than I did and offered many constellations around different themes and concepts. Yet, by concentrating only on two decades, he achieved greater focus and depth. I myself proposed two rather simple and straightforward criteria that permitted me to bring together so many disparate works from different parts of the world. That is how I got to abstraction and the human figure, the two sections of the Nucleo Storico in the Giardini. These sections of course do challenge the Western canon, that is their raison d’être. However, I am not trying to propose new formats or models. On the contrary, I am actually interested in seeing how these traditional genres of portraiture and abstraction—which, as you say, are cornerstones of the history of Western and modern art—have been cannibalised, how they have been appropriated and subverted in the Global South. I would say that in portraits or representations of the human figure, the issue of identity emerges quite strongly, chiefly because most of the portraits are of non-white and non-European characters—they do express their identity somehow, or the identity that the artist has recreated for them. In Venice of all places, you will be surrounded by over one hundred of these works, many of them staring at you, and I feel this will be quite powerful. We shall see. On the other hand, it is important to keep in mind that the Nucleo Storico is very much an essay, a draft, a provocation, a speculative curatorial exercise that seeks to question the boundaries and definitions of modernism. Formally, in terms of the exhibition’s structure, I am drawing on the 1998 Bienal de São Paulo’s Nucleo Histórico, and that is one of the reasons, in fact, that I have decided to keep the Italian names for the sections, as they evoke my own Portuguese. But I draw also on the series of group shows that we devised in the Istanbul Biennial in 2011, as well as on Cecilia Alemani’s wonderful time capsules in 2022. The Nucleo Storico is not a definitive proposition, but a starting point. Hopefully we will learn from looking at the works in the flesh, all under the same roof, in dialogue with one another. Then, perhaps, others might propose new formats, models, genres, and frameworks.

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I should say here that I don’t really have formal training in art history, which perhaps allows me to move more freely in the field. I studied law and economics in Rio de Janeiro and then went to graduate school at the California Institute of the Arts, where I got an MFA in the art programme and in the critical writing programme. I consider myself an outsider in art history—a self-taught curator, as it were, and an exhibition-maker coming from an artist’s background. In this regard, I have a rather different relationship with art and artists, and that is where my deep engagement with objects, exhibitions, and books comes from. This is why I am often taking a more speculative approach—which is also a key dimension in the Histórias programme at MASP—and calling attention to the crucial importance of seeing, experiencing, and learning from the artists, the works, and the exhibitions in real life. There is one issue that I would like to address. I have been speaking about modernisms in the Global South, but this might not always the best approach. Upon closer examination, we might find certain issues and critiques regarding its use and application that are inextricably colonial. I will give you one example. According to art historian James Elkins, someone who has engaged with many of these discussions, an exceptional artist like Jamini Roy from India is not “necessary to modernism”, and Tarsila do Amaral from Brazil is “ultimately [a] marginal optional artist of modernism”18. (Both artists are in the Nucleo Storico.) If you think of modernism in its original EuroAmerican configuration, of course artists from India and Brazil will not fit in it. They will be perceived as pale, local, optional, unnecessary, and marginal versions of the original model. But I would disagree with Elkins; and, in fact, I am more interested in learning from Roy and do Amaral about how they appropriated and reworked modernist idioms, infusing them with local Indigenous elements from their own contexts and imaginaries. Even if they are “unnecessary” to a traditional notion of modernism, they are very much necessary to art history. So one must be open to accepting a more plural, heterogeneous, conflicting, and diverse understanding of modernisms. What unsettles me is reading someone like Elkins reject do Amaral and Roy, as if we were trying to get into the modernist club in search of a certain recognition. I do feel quite strongly that one of the most exciting areas in the field are these different versions and unfoldings of modernisms in the Global South, which often bring in unique local features, histories, and contexts not seen in the original Euro-American versions. Art is so often linked to the context in which it is produced, and although it may not precisely reflect that context, it somehow mediates and processes it. I believe today there is a strong desire to learn more from these contexts in the Global South—perhaps even more so than from Paris, London, Rome, and New York, which we already know so well. And that is perhaps why I was chosen to organise the International Art Exhibition this year.

NOTES

The late, great Okwui Enwezor (1963–2019) was, of course, the curator of the 2015 edition. Although he was born in the Global South, in Nigeria, he was based in New York and Munich, where he was director of Haus der Kunst.

I was told that I was the first curator of the Biennale Arte to visit cities like Harare, Nairobi, Luanda, Asunción, La Paz, Santo Domingo, Guatemala City, Jakarta, Manila, and others.

BIENNALE ARTE 2024

See Adriano Pedrosa, The Traveling Book (Mexico City: Fundación Jumex, 2010).

As the Artistic Director of the Biennale Arte 2024, I do not have any say in the choices of the national pavilions, which are made independently by the respective countries; they may choose to follow the given framework or not, as they wish. However, it is interesting to note that many countries have chosen artists who are somehow aligned with the Biennale Arte’s theme. Indigenous artists are featured in the Australian (Archie Moore), Brazilian (Renata Tupinambá), American (Jeffrey Gibson), and Canadian (Kapwani Kiwanga) pavilions. Other pavilions feature foreign artists or artists from former European colonies, such as Anna Jermolaewa for Austria, Guerreiro do Divino Amor for Switzerland, John Akomfrah for Britain, Julien Creuzet for France, Sandra Gamarra for Spain, and Yael Bartana for Germany.

INTERVIEWED BY JULIETA GONZÁLEZ

ADRIANO PEDROSA

The Histórias program at MASP—a full year of exhibitions, seminars, talks, books, and workshops—has included Histories of Childhood (2016), Histories of Sexuality (2017), Afro-Atlantic Histories (2018), Women’s Histories, Feminist Histories (2019), Histories of Dance (2020), Brazilian Histories (2022), Indigenous Histories (2023), and Queer Histories (2024). There are in fact only four artists in the Nucleo Contemporaneo who have participated in the International Exhibition in the twenty-first century—Anna Zemánková, Bouchra Khalili, Superflex, and Teresa Margolles— and they all seemed quite essential to the exhibition. Filippo De Pisis, Greta Schödl, and Rubem Valentim participated in the Biennale Arte in the Twentieth century. Beatriz Milhazes and Mariana Telleria have participated in national pavilions, and Iván Argote, Kiluanji Kia Henda, and Yinka Shonibare have participated in Collateral Events.

Sigmund Freud, “O estranho,” 1919, in Edição standard brasileira das obras psicológicas completas de Sigmund Freud, vol. 17 (Rio de Janeiro: Imago, 1976). For an English version, see: Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” 1919, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 17 (London: Hogarth Press, 1955).

Valeska Soares and Adriano Pedrosa, histórias: Valeska Soares (São Paulo: Galeria Camargo Vilaça, 1996).

It is often included in the books and series devoted to the most important exhibitions of the Twentieth century. See for example Bruce Altshuler, ed., Biennials and Beyond: Exhibitions that Made Art History, 1962–2002 (London: Phaidon Press, 2013); Lisette Lagnado and Pablo Lafuente, eds., Cultural Anthropophagy: The 24th Bienal de São Paulo, 1998 (London: Afterall Books, 2015).

10 The XXIV Bienal de São Paulo (1998), in which I worked as an adjunct curator with chief curator Paulo Herkenhoff, brought antropofagia to the international debate, proposing it as a tool with which to look at contemporary art and art history through the exhibition and its publications. See Paulo Herkenhoff and Adriano Pedrosa, XXIV Bienal de São Paulo, 4 vols. (São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 1998). 11 Oswald de Andrade, “Anthropophagite Manifesto,” originally published in Revista de Antropofagia 1, no. 1 (May 1928). Translated by Adriano Pedrosa and Veronica Cordeiro in XXIV Bienal de São Paulo: Núcleo Histórico: Antropofagia e histórias de canibalismos (São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 1998). 12 Adriano Pedrosa and Ivo Mesquita, F[r]icciones (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2000).

13 Pedrosa and Mesquita, “Plática,” in F[r]icciones, 213–17; Adriano Pedrosa and Jens Hoffmann, “Critical Aesthetics—A Conversation between Adriano Pedrosa and Jens Hoffmann,” in Untitled (12th Istanbul Biennial): The Catalogue (Istanbul: Istanbul Kültür Sanat Vakfi, 2011), 82–101. 14 Pedrosa and Herkenhoff, XXIV Bienal de São Paulo, vol. 1: Núcleo Histórico: antropofagia e histórias de canibalismos; Adriano Pedrosa and Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, Histórias mestiças: Catálogo (Rio de Janeiro: Cobogó, 2015). 15 Partha Mitter, “Decentering Modernism: Art History and AvantGarde Art from the Periphery,” The Art Bulletin 90, no. 4 (2008): 540. 16 See my own “History, Histórias”, which is often published in a different updated or reworked version in our Histórias catalogues at MASP. For example, in Adriano Pedrosa and Tomás Toledo, eds., Afro-Atlantic Histories (São Paulo: Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, 2021), 21–25. 17 See for example Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, ed., Alternative Modernities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001); Kobena Mercer, ed., Cosmopolitan Modernisms (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005); Elizabeth Harney and Ruth Phillips, eds., Mapping Modernisms: Art, Indigeneity, Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018); Diana Newall, ed., Art and Its Global Histories: A Reader (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017); Elaine O’Brien et al., Modern Art in Africa, Asia, and Latin America: An Introduction to Global Modernisms (Chichester, West Sussex: WileyBlackwell, 2013). 18 James Elkins, Zhivka Valiavicharska, and Alice Kim, eds., Art and Globalization (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 2010), 120, 122.

“LA TORTURE, C’EST LA RAISON”, DITS ET ECRITS 1954-1988, VOL. II. PARIS: GALLIMARD, 1994.

It’s a beautiful dream that many share: giving the word to the ones who haven’t been able to speak until now, the ones who have been forced to remain silent by history, whose mouths were shut by the violence of history and all the systems of violence and exploitation. Yes. But [...] the ones who have been defeated […] are by definition the ones whose speech has been taken away! And yet if they spoke they would not speak their own language. A foreign language has been imposed to them, they are not silent.

MICHEL FOUCAULT

FREMMEDE OVERALT

interviewed by Adriano Pedrosa

Claire Fontaine

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CLAIRE FONTAINE

INTERVIEWED BY ADRIANO PEDROSA

BIENNALE ARTE 2024

I would like to start with the origins—how did you first become interested in art, how did you meet, how did you start to work together, and how was Claire Fontaine born, what is the meaning of her, and how do you define her? We were already professionally involved in the art world when we met in 2003. We were also teaching in an art school in the north of France. Our interest in art has very different origins: for James, it dates back to childhood, he always wanted to be an artist. He went first to the Free International University created by Joseph Beuys in Hamburg, and then to the Glasgow School of Art for his undergraduate and MFA; he started exhibiting his work in 1993. Fulvia studied philosophy at Université Paris 8 and co-founded the magazine Tiqqun in Paris in 19981. She refused for as long as possible any professional identification but in the late 1990s, she began working with friends who were artists, until the collaboration with Claire Fontaine took all the space. Claire Fontaine was born out of a need for freedom: first of all the freedom from having to do things that were expected from us. One of the most inspiring teachings from the Italian feminist movement of the 1970s is the idea of refusing the image that others project upon us; one beautiful quote from Sexual Difference, a Socio-Symbolic Practice that we often use is, “We didn’t believe in what they said about us”2. People are constantly deprived of the possibility of experimenting with their lives because they are afraid of the reaction of their loved ones or the people that they depend on. Refusing this destructive blackmail is what we call “human strike” which we have extensively written about3. Claire Fontaine’s work is an attempt to present the viewer with thoughts and emotions that often get expelled from daily life; we wish to protect from extinction the feelings and the forms that allow us to inhabit a certain level of reality. We hope that, when people encounter our work, they feel that they can extend the scope of their creativity to new spaces, to their life, their relationships. As Deleuze wrote in Proust and Signs—“who knows how a schoolboy suddenly becomes ‘good at Latin,’ which signs (if need be, those of love or even inadmissible ones) have served his apprenticeship? We never learn from the dictionaries our teachers or our parents lend us”4. We know that in Claire Fontaine’s works, there are germs of something that keep us alive and hopeful, that they are saving someone or something. Who am I speaking to? Is it Fulvia Carnevale, James Thornhill, both of them, or am I speaking to Claire Fontaine? If Fulvia and James are assistants of Claire Fontaine, can she somehow be considered a fiction? On the other hand, your work has, of course, very strong political motivations and messages, even if often duplicitous, poetic or with multiple meanings. You obviously have chosen these strategies very carefully and deliberately, and you must have considered the question which I often wonder about—if the ambiguous and poetic quality of work with strong political content compromises its precision and effectiveness, or even leaves room for misinterpretation? Have there been misreadings or appropriations of your work in the past that have disturbed you?

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You are definitely speaking to both of us. When we talk to people or give interviews, we are not playing a game, we are disarmingly sincere. There is no secret about us or our creative protocol. We have often said that naming ourselves Claire Fontaine was more accurate than using both of our names because Claire Fontaine is a third space, a space of desubjectivisation, where we can expand our consciousness and fearlessly tackle complexities. This distance between ourselves as persons and the artworks that we make isn’t one of dishonesty or irresponsibility, it’s the space where modernity settled. Since the birth of the avant-garde, the author—as a “function”—is always undergoing a crisis (AI recently accelerated the process). Who was an author until very recently? A white man from a dominant social position. The liberal fiction of the “uniqueness of the individual”, regardless of their gender, social class, colour or nationality, produces confusion, solitude, suicides, and dating apps; we don’t seem to be aware of how our subjectivities are formed by society, we have trouble associating and supporting each other. Being an author, an artist, today, is being the receptacle, the amplifier of these phenomena that involve us and the public. Anything different would be a dishonest strategy that treats authorship as a brand. Contemporary art isn’t just one of the many forms that we have chosen for our work, it’s the context in which we express ourselves. We are passionate about its history, we keep studying it and discovering it, we quote it, we question it. Contemporary art is also one of the rare fields where words and images don’t entertain a hierarchical relationship, where the emotional and the visual exploration of many aspects of reality (that we tend to reject when we encounter them in the news or in daily life) is still possible. Our art is not more political than anybody’s life, except that we refuse to be vague or opportunistic about the place where we are thinking from; we believe that it is essential for each and everyone to know where we are in the mechanisms of society, what we are taking part in and what we are excluded from, how damaged or affected we are in our microscale by what is happening in the world at large. Poetry and ambiguity are essential elements in all works of art: if they aren’t there, we are looking at commodities or propaganda. If we just had a message to transmit, certitudes to instil into people, we wouldn’t make art and especially not the art that we make; we don’t have a political agenda through our work, we are conducting continuous research on the meaning of being alive in our time—our works are the results of it. Yes, there have been both misreadings and appropriations—we don’t care so much about the latter but it’s infuriating when the nature of the artwork is erased in order to transform it into an advertisement or a decoration. We would rather not name the people responsible for it as this isn’t a court of law. It is interesting to me that artists are often evading definitions and categories, but you very clearly define yourself as a feminist conceptual readymade artist. Fulvia and James have also defined themselves as assistants to Claire Fontaine, and have used the expression “management in an empty centre”. Can you please explain and elaborate on all this?

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CLAIRE FONTAINE

INTERVIEWED BY ADRIANO PEDROSA

BIENNALE ARTE 2024

We don’t feel like we are “directing” or controlling the creative process at work in Claire Fontaine. We accompany the ideas that become possible inside it. It is more like a work of care than a work of decision making. It’s not about imposing one’s will but about helping the artworks to come into existence, ushering them into the world where they will then live their lives without us, so we are the assistants. It is a cooperative process that is definitely feminist because it isn’t governed by patriarchal values; it’s conceptual and strongly related to the history of the readymade because it isn’t a retinal operation. Although the formal and visual aspects of our work are obviously inseparable from, and as important as, its subject, our final aim isn’t to make ornamental gestures in exhibition spaces but to provoke thoughts, emotions, feelings that we find essential. That’s also why we reinvest existing forms, quote others—drawing inspiration from our predecessors and our contemporaries is an act of humility and love. Could you speak about your work process, your creative process? How does a work come about? It is interesting how one piece or series might unfold and progress over the years—not only Stranieri Ovunque (2004 onwards), but I am thinking of the very striking Burnt/Unburnt series, which I believe starts with France (Burnt/Unburnt) (2011), and the most recent iteration is Mediterranean Sea (Burnt/Unburnt) (2023), now being exhibited in Berlin5. Works form themselves as visual– conceptual intuitions that keep transforming during the process. Once the work is made, it unfolds into other potentialities that weren’t yet perceptible in the thinking process that took us there. A work isn’t the final station of an investigation, it’s a fresh start for a new journey. We give you the example of the Brickbats, a series that we started in 2007. Very early in Claire Fontaine’s practice we became obsessed with a work by Robert Fillou from 1977, Je meurs trop, a brick that looks like a book but we never thought about quoting it in any way. We also taught for many years in an art school in the north of France, where the majority of students came from disadvantaged backgrounds with traumatizing learning experiences; putting a book from the library into their hands felt like giving them a lifeless, impenetrable object. They didn’t feel free to look inside it, to begin from the middle, skip parts, explore the index and the footnotes; they behaved like foreigners in an unknown land, afraid to get lost in it or to act in the wrong way. This is where the intuition of transforming the book into an illegible object came from: in Italian, a boring book is described as a mattone (a brick), in French as a pavé (a paving stone). The title of these series of works, Brickbats, comes from the English term that describes a message, a threat, wrapped around a brick that is thrown through a window. Claire Fontaine’s brickbats are enveloped by printed scans of book jackets whose spines have been stretched to match the thickness of the bricks. We realised that these petrified books had become “equivalent”: the original number of pages no longer mattered, the thickness of their spines was identical and so was their weight. In this process, we understood differently Carl Andre’s idea of the Equivalents. From the singular Brickbats came then the intuition of transforming some books published in the French Gallimard Folio collection into elements to re-create Andre’s sculptures. Identical in weight and dimensions, the bricks

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of our equivalents looked like Folio books, every one displayed the title, the name of the writer, and the reproduction of an artwork. Each sculpture was made of the same 120 “ghost” books disposed in variable order; if Andre’s works were visually homogenous and mute, ours were colourful and dense with words. With the Lever series (2007–2011), we reasoned always in the same path on which Andre’s minimalism was overturned, but we focused on the serial aspect of the sculpture: we used only the cover of Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (1968), one of our favourite books that majestically deconstructs the notion of uniqueness. In these series of works, we also declined the idea of difference and repetition through translation. The repetition wasn’t limited to the 137 firebricks with the same modified covers of the book printed 137 times and disposed in a straight line but it extended to its different translations. We have made versions of Lever in English, German, Italian, and French; they are all the same books but their lives in different languages make them fundamentally singular. The Burnt/Unburnt (2008 onwards) works came from a reflection on the political history of fire. We became interested in the way people react in demonstrations when a fire breaks out, or the way in which one looks at something that has been burnt, indoors or in the street. There is a specific feeling that charred things awake in people: combustion destroys usefulness and evokes death. Our smoke signs that quote the vandalistic practice of writing with fire in public enclosed spaces (such as toilets, elevators, staircases) hold this sadness and violence that accompany the burning; although they are just shadows, traces left by a trembling flame, they are somehow heavy. We have also realised that their execution is influenced by the breathing and the emotional vibrations of a room: when writing with the flame, it inexplicably moves, even in spaces that are airtight. The idea of burning a territory or a text inside an exhibition space seemed interesting because fire doesn’t only leave the darkness of scorch marks behind itself but a smell that alters the sensorial neutrality of the white cube. We began by burning texts and then France (France (Burnt/ Unburnt)) was the first country to go up in flames. The same year, with María Inés Rodríguez, we burned P.I.G.S. (2011) at MUSAC (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León) in León. The title quoted the offensive acronym used by journalists to regroup Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain, the first countries that defaulted from the euro zone. Their shapes were reproduced by hundreds of thousands of matchsticks planted into a wall and set alight. Immolating a territory can obviously take many different meanings and there is both excitement and fear when the flames start raging. The burning usually takes place privately and it is visible in video and photographic documentation; when people visit the show, they see a sculpture, a wall drawing made by the fire. Last year, in the exhibition Pier Paolo Pasolini. Tutto è santo. Il corpo politico at the MAXXI (Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo) in Rome, a matchstick-work 25 m long that read “They hate us for our freedom” was installed and left unburnt. The same work had been exhibited burnt by Anthony Huberman at the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis in 2008 and by Thierry Ollat at the mac (Musée d’art contemporain) in Marseille in 2013, the experiences were incomparable. If the unburnt versions of these works don’t transform so radically the space, they are a looming danger

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CLAIRE FONTAINE

INTERVIEWED BY ADRIANO PEDROSA

BIENNALE ARTE 2024

because potentially anybody can set them on fire. The MAXXI chose to have permanent surveillance in the installation, which naturally affected the way in which the public experienced it. “They hate us for our freedom” is a quote from the speech that George Bush gave on September 20, 2001, when he laid the ideological ground for the wars to come by defining the cultural and anthropological hostility between America and its enemies as irreparable. Outside of its original context, this sentence can be read in many ways: it might, for example, represent a statement from the curators of the MAXXI about the fragility of their freedom of expression due to the changes implemented by the government of Fratelli d’Italia. In our recent exhibition Become a Sea (2023) at Galerie Neu in Berlin, we have, for the first time, reproduced a liquid space that we will burn before the end of the show. The Mediterranean is an enclosed sea full of invisible borders and conflicts, a tomb for the refugees that don’t reach the shore, and yet it’s surrounded by the most densely touristic coasts in the world. With Mediterranean Sea (Burnt/Unburnt), we wanted to make an alchemic operation, merging water and fire, tourists and refugees, peace and war. This work, we feel, truly derives from observing the forms of the countries, recognizing their iconic borders that visually define them. Nobody knows the shape of water, and it has been incredible to see the land appear as a negative and borderless empty space. That’s how the maps represent it for the people who navigate the sea. How do you position yourself in the larger context of art history? One can surely think of (post-)Conceptual art, (post)institutional critique, (post-)Minimalism, and even (post-)Pop. Warhol comes up with the images of Marilyn Monroe and Mao, Carl Andre is referenced or counterreferenced in your use of bricks (I am thinking of your use of Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition in the great Lever (Version Americaine) (2007), Dan Flavin is a predecessor for the K font signs (2006 onwards), and, of course, there is Marcel Duchamp and the readymade, and Félix González-Torres in so many ways. In addition, one can perhaps think of Bruce Nauman and Jenny Holzer). Yet surely, as a feminist artist, Claire Fontaine will have other female references? We are strongly influenced by many women artists: Cady Noland, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Barbara Kruger, Lee Lozano, Martha Rosler, Adrian Piper, Renée Green, Andrea Fraser, Elaine Sturtevant, just to name a few. And there is definitely a feminist habit in art of quoting, writing, studying, and not just trusting one’s pure instinct or invention that Claire Fontaine is sympathetic with. Art history is a tragicomic tale that can be read in many ways: the excluded, the outsiders (women amongst others) develop a certain ironic detachment from it that it is functional to maintaining a critical perspective. The patriarchal relationship to one’s work that consists in using the artwork to earn money and power, oppressing others, and climbing the success ladder, is the dominant one amongst the art icons of our time, despite the romantic mythology about artists seen as sensitive and vulnerable. Other narratives must and will emerge in art history, so it’s important to keep asking ourselves how the criteria that organise the legibility and the

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desirability of artworks, the admiration of their authors, have changed during the last century. Institutional critique, for example, is one of our greatest inspirations, but now the institution that we must criticise is capitalism, the one that contains all the others and that doesn’t have an outside. This means that a gesture like Hans Haacke’s Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971 (1971) is today still possible but no longer sensational. Nan Goldin, by holding the Sackler family accountable for its role in the opioid crisis, recently proved that the voice of an artist can help raise awareness about the changes that our society needs. There is an existential use value in contemporary artworks and this is what we try to activate when we use art history as a data bank: existing forms can take new meanings. Our work isn’t aesthetically disruptive, it might look like something one already knows because the change that we long for might not take place in the exhibition space or in the museum, but inside the viewers and in the way they affect the world with their daily actions. The artwork can be a transitional object between oneself and one’s life, it can make things possible in unimagined ways. This is part of what we call magic materialism6. What were the origins of the series of works Stranieri Ovunque (Foreigners Everywhere), and how do you see it actually shifting from language to language, from context to context, and over the years? How does the work transform itself when it becomes the title of the 60th International Art Exhibition? It had already been the title of the Panorama da Arte Brasileira at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (which I curated in 2009 and in which you participated) in the Old Tupi language—Mamõyguara Opá Mamõ Pupé—but that was a very different context, and very few people indeed were able to understand the title in the extinct Brazilian Indigenous language. More importantly perhaps, how do you see Stranieri Ovunque reverberating in the current Italian and global context today? The origin of this work is rooted in a history of appropriation. Some friends, in 2002, gave Fulvia a doublesided fanzine, an A3 leaflet that they had found in Turin. It used the same graphic language and one of the photographs that had been printed in Tiqqun. This document was written in broken English but stated an interesting position defending the position of migrants around the world. It was signed Stranieri Ovunque. We saw in the coupling of these two words an exciting ambiguity and a universal content (we are always someone else’s foreigner and we might feel like a foreigner everywhere we go) so we immediately decided to transform it into a neon sign that would act like a subtitle to the environment, and to translate it into different languages to change the perspective on who is a foreigner. The first work of the series was in Italian and was presented in 2005, a few meters away from the main entrance of the Biennale di Venezia, in the Mars Pavilion curated by Marco Baravalle and Andrea Morucchio. The second one was in Arabic and was exhibited in the window of Reena Spaulings Fine Art in New York in our first solo exhibition there that same year; it was met with such hostility by the neighbours and the landlord that the gallery was forced to display an English translation on a piece of paper next to it. The Arabic language was perceived as threatening at the

CLAIRE FONTAINE

INTERVIEWED BY ADRIANO PEDROSA

BIENNALE ARTE 2024

time: the war in Iraq was raging and the detention camp of Guantanamo was considered scandalous by many in the media. Shortly after this incident, the lease of the gallery wasn’t renewed and they moved to their present location on East Broadway. This work awakens all sorts of reactions depending on the geopolitical context, it activates a different perception of the people moving in the space, it’s a comment about our communal condition, and about the mechanisms of aggregation and exclusion that we all participate in. We live in a xenophobic, historical moment with right governments in Italy and elsewhere that criminalize migrants without trying to tackle the reasons for their influx. The difficulties of living in our society are amplified by being a refugee, clandestine or simply alien to the logic of the place where one has landed. The theme of foreignness as a decisive, existential experience of our time is a recurrent obsession for Claire Fontaine. In 2012, we exhibited The Isle of Tears at the Jewish Museum in New York, an installation that is now part of their collection. “The Isle of Tears” is the name that the immigrants to the United States gave to Ellis Island because it was the place where they could be separated from each other and sent back home if not deemed acceptable to become American citizens. Composed of eight suspended neon signs reading the words “isle of tears” in different languages, the work quotes George Perec and Robert Bober’s book and documentary from 1979 titled Ellis Island7. Bober and Perec collected the stories of the last survivors who passed through Ellis Island. Nearly sixteen million immigrants passed by the Isle of Tears between 1892 to 1914, a place that was as much the site where a new life was beginning as it was the burial of the previous identity of the newcomers, who sometimes even abandoned their names to sound more American. According to Perec, this research was inseparable from his and Bober’s Jewish identity. Perec writes: I don’t know exactly what it is to be a Jew, or what effect being a Jew has on me there’s something obvious about it, […] like a silence, a deficiency, a question, a questioning, a dubiousness, an uneasiness: an uneasy certainty, and looming behind that, another certainty, abstract, oppressive, and intolerable: that of having been labeled a Jew, Jew therefore victim, and so beholden for being alive to exile and luck…8 We have explored the differences between the destiny of the readymade, a common object deprived of its context and its traditional use value that gets transformed into an artwork, and the displaced persons who have also lost their original context and purpose in life but don’t gain any value from this process, on

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the contrary—they lose it all. We wonder if we can find the infrathin9 of the foreigners, if we can show how magic and miraculous these people can be if they are given the value and attention that they deserve. This year has seen record-breaking numbers of displaced and stateless people: according to the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees), we are looking at 117.2 million lives. If the situation was desperate before the tragic war in Palestine, now it is terrifying. Besides our happiness at seeing the words “foreigners everywhere” living a new life as the title of the Biennale Arte 2024, thanks to you, we hope that this will lead more people to look at migration as one of the most essential and vital phenomena of all times, and not as a factor of instability or something to criminalize and prevent. You have spoken about yourselves as political refugees in the art field, and as the refugee as a tragic figure, a survivor, as well as a foreigner. Could you please elaborate on that? When, in 2004, we started Claire Fontaine, we had both previously worked as artists and we were aware of the reactionary turn that history was taking. The wars that followed 9/11 are the true antecedent to the current Israel/Palestine conflict: disproportionate retaliations after a terrorist attack that entailed aggression against large parts of civilian populations were deemed acceptable by the international community. In Iraq and Afghanistan, along with an immense amount of innocent civilians, died also a certain way of telling the political truth. Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning became the symbols of the criminalization of dissent, a phenomenon that has become common in Western democracies and that has now completely changed the context and the meaning of every cultural or symbolic activity. The G8 of Genoa—that took place a few months before the attack on the Twin Towers—was, for example, an unprecedented experiment in the use of war tactics in a time of peace10. Protesting in Europe has never been the same after these bloody days: groups of young, handicapped, elderly, sick, fragile people could no longer join demonstrations. The drastic change of policy of the French government regarding the expressions of dissent and racial conflict after the Sarkozy presidency is also exemplary of this violent turn11. Freedom of expression can become an empty word when we can’t live life in harmony with our convictions12. We may pay the price even now for just putting something so banal in writing, and we probably will. The politically correct has also become a way to prevent real changes from happening. We need to explore our discomfort, understand it, and only then will we be able to radically change and end the suffering that we are causing. The best way not to hurt people’s feelings is to understand what we do to them every day through our way of going about life and not only through what we say. Art is still a space that allows us to access our deepest feelings, our fears, and transform ourselves and others without wanting to control or capture this process. Contemporary art is truly one of the last laboratories to work on our life forms, on what we understand cognitively and emotionally about reality. Its aim is to keep open a space for questioning everything, inside and outside, every one of us. Life will lose its flavour when we won’t be able to talk about what is happening

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CLAIRE FONTAINE

INTERVIEWED BY ADRIANO PEDROSA

BIENNALE ARTE 2024

to us. This is why we believe that the confusing silence of contemporary art still is the best place to find the right words. I want to take a moment to ask you about the challenges of existing, operating, and surviving within the contemporary art world, the gallery system, so marked by capitalist commodity culture, and in fact intercrossed by the culture of celebrity, glamour, and luxury. It really is a wild world out there! How have you seen all this change and evolve over the past twenty years since you have started in 2004? Witnessing these changes for the worst has been—and still is—a truly unsettling journey. We have worked with many different partners and we have experienced in first person the limitations of the gallery system: people who work in these structures are exploited and often not paid enough; competition can also be destructive for the quality of a gallery program, when making ends meet becomes an acrobatic exercise, the temptation of looking for easier solutions can become strong and sometimes inescapable for a financially fragile operation. We have seen the monopolist mechanisms at work along with the increase of the speculative economy in art, the biodiversity supposed to create all the charm and the excitement slowly becoming unsustainable, and extinction starting to take place. The subjectivities that could weather this storm financially and emotionally are of a specific kind and—as everyone knows—survivors don’t make good communities because there is no solidarity amongst oppressors. It would be an interesting archaeological operation to search all the artists and the artwork that got eclipsed by the hardship of these last twenty years, a counter history of what we have been told was the contemporary art that we should look at. Because the institutions in Europe increasingly rely on galleries’ or sponsors’ financial help, this has reduced the independence of curators and the possibilities of exhibiting, even in non-commercial spaces, the work of the type of artists that, for an unimaginable number of reasons, don’t happen to have this support. We are going through a tragic blind spot in our civilization where value is exclusively measured economically, although everybody knows that monetary value isn’t generated without another type of invisible work, a precious unremunerated labour of care, love, intelligence, and dedication. We might still think, as heirs of a colonial subconscious, that nature and the migrants are there for our material profit, yet we now know that such material profit depletes its very source and turns wealth into scarcity. Art needs an ecosystem where gentrification and speculation are kept under control, only when this happens will collectors be able to own truly valuable artworks because they will have been created in freedom. The most shocking part of the experience of this change that you describe has been the witnessing of the normalization of censorship during the last five years, the shrinking of the space of what is possible in an exhibition and what is accepted as a “thinkable zone”. This is harming all of us: the most recent examples of censorship and the punishment of the voices of artist and art workers in support of Palestine has shown how poor our standards of freedom of expression are, how easily we can decide to be blackmailed and silenced, how we can destroy our credibility and our self-respect as a magazine,

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an institution, a person. The systematic accusation of antisemitism against anyone who dares raise objections against the politics of Israel is just one example, but its impact on an institution like documenta is nothing short of devastating. We have witnessed a few episodes of this sort and we know that the general lack of courage must have played an important role in how Claire Fontaine’s work and research have been received or disregarded in the last twenty years. We shouldn’t allow the space of contemporary art to be depleted, terrorized or ruined for any reason in the world, we invite everyone to nurture and defend it. You are always so critically observant of the political moment, and I want to ask if you would like to express yourself about the current moment in which we are living, especially in terms of the crisis around migration that we see unfolding in different parts of the world. There is one work of yours in particular that comes to mind in this respect, perhaps you can speak about Untitled (same war time zone) (2016–18)? We share with you an acute sensibility to the present and this convergence that you have created with the title of the Biennale Arte 2024— Stranieri Ovunque—is, in retrospect, terribly prophetic. We are devastated by what is happening in the war in Palestine and we feel very close to it, we don’t feel above it, we are scared for the future after watching all this pain, and go about our days tearful and impotent. What has been broadcasted and posted on social media during this war will change everything but we can’t say how. We made Untitled (same war time zone) as a hijack of and a homage to Félix González-Torres’s “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers) (1991) that is a truly moving work about loving a person of the same sex and feeling exactly the same desire at the same time. It’s also a work about fear, we feel that the clocks may stop at different moments, that they are like hearts that can stop moving, go out of sync and then be separate; it is also a work about solitude, about repetitiveness and death. In our own work, we wanted to talk about a specific separation, to show precisely that people can suffer similar pains, live on the same land, and yet be the cause of each other’s disgrace. It is a work that has become sadly more and more contemporary and we hope that this historical moment teaches us the lesson that we should have learned more than seventy-eight years ago.

Claire Fontaine Untitled (Same War Time Zone), 2016-18 Battery operated wall clock, printed paper and masking tape, 34.93 × 5.72 cm. Photo and Courtesy Claire Fontaine.

CLAIRE FONTAINE

INTERVIEWED BY ADRIANO PEDROSA

BIENNALE ARTE 2024

8 New Directions Publishing 11 Since 2001, the French police has been 1 Tiqqun was a magazine created in Organization, “George Perec, Of equipped with new weapons, such as Paris by a group of people close to Wandering and Hope: George Perec’s flash balls, tasers, GLI F4 grenades that the situationists and the political Ode to Ellis Island. On Immigration, cause temporary or permanent hearing area of the autonomy. Two issues Place, and the Jewish Diaspora,” loss (165 dB at a distance of 5 m), were anonymously self-published lithub.com, February 10, 2021, https:// dispersal grenades (which have caused and written collectively, the second lithub.com/of-wandering-and-hopeseveral amputations and occasionally and last one appeared in 2001, after george-perecs-ode-to-ellis-island/. deaths), and offensive grenades (which which the group dissolved. Some of have been banned after causing the the texts were published separately in 9 The term “infrathin” (inframince in death of Remi Fraisse in 2014). Flash English, Italian, and French by different French) is an invention of Marcel balls, which should only be aimed at publishers—with or without the consent Duchamp. Used as an adjective or the lower body, have caused the loss of the authors. “A Beautiful Hell” as a noun, it defines a sensation, of an eye in several people, who all was published after the dissolution, a phenomenon that is almost affirm having been targeted by the it wasn’t written by Tiqqun and is imperceptible. It also describes the police. The Assemblée des Blessés wrongly attributed to the collective. potential that a common object (the Assembly of the Injured) regroups The magazine was extremely influential possesses to transition into the realm a growing number of victims of police because it generated a poetic language of art, becoming a readymade. violence throughout France and tries, able to tackle the contradictions of through the help of medical experts, our time along with a constellation of to enforce a more responsible use of 10 The G8 summit that took place in references ranging from the Kabbalah these weapons by the French police. Genoa in July 2001 was an intergovto Foucault, from Italian feminism to workerism and cybernetics; it allowed ernmental political forum that brought 12 Paesaggio/Unpacking my History, for a nonideological and existential together representatives of France, curated by Daphne Vitali for a section approach to radical politics. Germany, Italy, Japan, the United of the Rome Quadriennale of 2023, Kingdom, the United States, Canada, featured two works by Claire Fontaine 2 Milan Women’s Bookstore and Russia. Because a call for protest that revolved around the events of Collective, Sexual Difference, a had been issued and thousands of the Genoa G8 meeting as a turning Theory of Socio-Symbolic Practice people were expected to come to point in recent political history. (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Genoa to demonstrate, the Italian Indiana University Press, 1990). State decided to set up a new protocol supposed to prevent disorders. A part of the city of Genoa—that was called 3 Claire Fontaine, Human Strike and the red zone—was made inaccessible the Art of Creating Freedom (Los for days through militarized borders Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2020). to anyone who couldn’t exhibit a proof of residency in that perimeter. In a 4 Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs city of 600,000 inhabitants, 13,000 (Minneapolis: University of militaries and 600 police officers were Minnesota Press, 2000), 22. dispatched. The large international demonstrations were repressed with 5 Claire Fontaine, Become a Sea. an unprecedented violence, 560 Berlin: Galerie Neu, people were injured, and one unarmed December 15, 2023–February 17, 2024. demonstrator, Carlo Giuliani, was shot dead and ran over by a jeep of the 6 See Claire Fontaine, “Human Strike, Carabinieri. During the night of July 21, Reproduction and Magic Materialism,” a large amount of police officers and in Dispositif. A Cartography, ed. by Carabinieri (the number was never Giovanbattista Tusa and Greg Bird confirmed by any official source) (Boston: The MIT Press, 2023), 37. broke into the Diaz School where the city council had set up a hospitality 7 The documentary was titled Ellis Island centre for the demonstrators and the Revisited: Tales of Vagrancy and Hope media centre The ninety-three people and was directed by Robert Bober present on the premises, amongst in 1979. Perec had a key role in the which were journalists, were arrested elaboration of the script as can be and brutally beaten; sixty-three people seen in his article, “E as Emigration: were severely injured, three of them Ellis Island”, included in his posthuwere left in critical condition, and one mous book I was born (Je suis né) in a coma. The victims initiated several (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1990). In 1980, legal actions against the police and Perec published for INA-Magazine a the Carabinieri. On April 7, 2015, the text related to this film, with input European Court of Human Rights unanfrom Robert Bober. The script was published under both their names imously declared that Article 3 of the the same year, by Éditions du Sorbier Convention Against Torture and Other and later published in English as Ellis Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Torture or Island (George Perec with Robert Punishment had been violated during Bober, trans. Henry Mathews (New the raid on the Diaz School. On April York: New York City Press, 1995)). 6, 2017, at the same Court, the Italian State admitted its responsibility and reached an amicable agreement with six of the sixty-five victims appealing against the acts of torture endured in the police station of Bolzaneto.

BORDERLANDS/LA FRONTERA: THE NEW MESTIZA. SAN FRANCISCO: AUNT LUTE, 1987.

To survive the Borderlands / you must live sin Fronteras / be a crossroads.

GLORIA ANZALDÚA

interviewed by

BITHEMESKO SA EKHE THANESTE

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Amanda Carneiro

Anna Maria Maiolino

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ANNA MARIA MAIOLINO

INTERVIEWED BY AMANDA CARNEIRO

BIENNALE ARTE 2024

Processes of displacement are a significant part of your work, which is a perfect fit with the theme of the 60th International Art Exhibition, Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere. The notion of Foreigners Everywhere doesn’t correspond exclusively to the foreigner who moves between countries or identities; it extends to the stranger within oneself. Your work has consistently delved into—or at least that’s my interpretation—this dimension of self-alienation and the sense of belonging. Since this dimension of the trajectory of displacement, involving both your physical and subjective displacement as well as what appears within your work, is relevant to the Biennale Arte 2024, I wanted to start with that connection. Two of your works, Anna from 1967 and My Family (1966)—part of this collection from the mid-1960s— address this association. While appearing highly subjective, they also speak to processes that connect the observer with the experience, the memory of what the notion of subjectivity is within a communal context. Family doesn’t seem to be just the group to which one belongs but, rather, a very extended community. Therefore, please share a bit about your trajectory of displacement based on this body of work. As you began to speak, it struck me that we are already immigrants when we leave the mother’s womb and enter the world. And as you grow as an individual, you are confronted by the reality of your surroundings and this reality shapes your character, your desires, your joys, and what you will become, what you seek from life. In my case, I believe that the fact I departed from my homeland—I’ve moved several times, within Italy, from Calabria to Bari in Apulia, then to Venezuela, then to Rio de Janeiro, later to São Paulo… I’ve lived in New York, Argentina, and so on—leads me to view every disruption, each segment of life, as both death and rebirth, a fresh surprise. You have to deal with very different situations. So, I notice objective memory, subjective memory, psychological, sensory, affective memory—the memory of what affected you in life—[these] have been elaborated in my work. Let’s say that memory plays a role, and sometimes I think I didn’t even realize that it was so present. Reflecting on my work over time, I’ve been discovering things. I think I have been lucky to have lived this long because I never envisioned creating a forceful or large-scale work, or being an artist who could stir profound emotions in others. My work has developed in conjunction with small, rather subjective poetic modes throughout the years. What I read was also important because I’ve always been an avid, passionate reader. And also, the experience of living with other artists and critics played a crucial part. You have explored many different materials in order to express these “subjective languages”. Unlike your artistic production from the 1960s, which I began by mentioning, you are creating for the Biennale Arte 2024 works in clay, a medium that emerged in the 1980s, gained prominence in the 1990s and with which you continue to work… I am currently celebrating sixty four years dedicated to art-making. The installations in the series Modelled Earth, which involve a great quantity of clay handled at the exhibition site, be-

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gan in 1994. In these, the body of the work is constructed by the accrual of clay fragments, forms, and compacted segments by means of action performed by hands. All segments, equal and different, are repeated and incorporated into the body of the installation. The question arises, then: could there be a search for the whole in these works? I’ve always known that aiming for wholeness was an unattainable task but the aspiration has never left me, the will to create impactful work that could express this incessant search. I believe it is us that constitute the whole, and with this installation, I can only present the expense of energy, the entropy, involved in the execution of the work brought into being by myself and my collaborators. When I read Adriano Pedrosa’s statement addressing the issue of immigration, I felt deeply touched because it’s clear that we are in a moment when history is repeating itself. If we observe closely, the reasons why immigrants are displaced in the world today are, as always, the same: war, hunger, scarcity, domination. We used to say, “slavery is over”. That’s not true, otherwise there wouldn’t be so many displaced people in search of places to be free, [of] less persecutory places. Because slavery isn’t just a matter of pressing an iron to your leg so you’ll move forward, as it used to be in the past. There are many forms of slavery. And there is some irony here because I, too, left Italy due to a war, and now, there seems to be about forty undeclared war situations in the world, not to mention the threat of atomic bombs. And as human beings, we are all alike, we share conflicts; which is why an artwork, when it is honest and sincere, allows others to see you and themselves. Because when you express yourself honestly in your work, you are also speaking about others. This way, you are expressing emotions that belong to everyone. You have a highly extensive and varied production encompassing several themes. In a substantial part of your work, your own figure takes on a central role. Does casting yourself as protagonist somehow connect with what you just mentioned? Yes, certainly. Because I don’t believe that artists from the past are any different from those of today. While modes of production may vary, the feelings remain the same since our ancestors: rage, hatred, love. In fact, I believe that when an artist creates a work, first and foremost, they are the very support of the work they are expressing with their bodies. And this makes the artist’s presence in the artwork livelier in contemporary art. In my performances and installations, I am the interpreter of my own work, either alone or in the company of other people. Naturally, an audience more accustomed to conventional and classical production might be disturbed by the artist’s presence because said presence holds a mirror to the spectator where they see their own image, which spurs them on to think about themselves. What’s your perspective about the process of relocating multiple times, residing in numerous places, and ultimately choosing—after all, it is a choice—to be in Brazil? Look, let’s go back a minute. I didn’t answer the previous question about Anna (1967) and My Family (1966). These more figurative works stem from the years of the 1960s when I was in the process of discovery. By the way, a work of art is always a way

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ANNA MARIA MAIOLINO

INTERVIEWED BY AMANDA CARNEIRO

BIENNALE ARTE 2024

for you to look at yourself and know yourself. In art, it’s difficult to lie, or when you lie, the observer realizes it’s a bluff, that there’s no sincerity, no truths. So, I created Anna featuring two figures that would represent my parents saying “Anna”, with my name repeated below, inscribed on a tombstone. This is because birth and death will always be part of my existence and, consequently, my artwork, as life movements. It’s life, not death, that is frightening. In order to dodge one’s natural fear of death, one must have a capability for renewal, resurrection, remaking, resisting. Look at what we endured during the military dictatorship1. I believe individuals are always having to make choices. In the distant past, our ancestors shared both labour and harvest. Living turned sour when humanity divided up the land and “you get this share and I’ll get that one”. With land division, we lost the ritualistic manifestations that entwined possession and pleasure. With land division, other human beings’ labour turns into something exploitable. Now, the speed of news, the impact of new platforms and means of communication, hit us and have us play out the world’s problems within ourselves, in the flesh. How can one not care that humanity is destroying itself and Mother Nature? So, you realize that there are floods everywhere all over the Earth, in southern Brazil, in Italy, in China... With a goddamned virus that is threatening us all with death. I’m always very cautious about mentioning the word “capitalism” because, with money, one can do marvellous things for the general well-being. But how does one wish to make money, and at what cost? It’s not only about money; it’s also a matter of value, and we often get those two aspects mixed up. Yes. And I often feel inept in discussing matters related to money, wealth, and poverty these days. I feel more comfortable metaphorically expressing my doubts and concerns by means of my art practice. When you say, “these days”, to what period are you referring? I can only be self-referential when it comes to matters like these because I have weathered some storms in my time. I was born in 1942, in Italy, during the war. If you look closely at the few photographs that remain from the early years of my life, you will see a sour-faced, sad-looking girl. My family didn’t own a camera because taking photos was a luxury not everyone could afford at a time when food was the main priority. Seated at the dining table, I could see the worry etched all over the faces of those thirteen people, during morning, afternoon, and nightly meals. Thirteen! At the table, I overheard all the adults’ conversations and wondered to myself, “Why was I brought into this world?” We’re constantly facing a door, and we must decide whether we go through or not. We have to make choices. Even this meeting of ours is the fruit of a choice. Empathy is important, understanding what the other person expects from you. But back to that frowning face I always had on as a child—I kept it that way for many a year because being an immigrant is no easy thing. You don’t belong to the new territory, and you know that the condition of foreigner is one in which you must strive for acceptance. I also had to undergo the experience of immigration as a female artist working in an environment presided over by hegemonic male artists and critics. The term “immigrant” doesn’t limit itself to those who switch territories; it also includes people who

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undergo transformations in terms of gender identity, as well as those who suffer massive dislocations and oppressions due to ethnic-racial and minority issues. I was deeply touched by Adriano’s proposal because its scope far exceeds the figure of the immigrant travelling with his little suitcase, or the figure of our retirante, who used to journey by foot from the north or northeast all the way to Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in order to work in civil construction and ended being brutalized. I’d like to revisit something interesting you mentioned: the experience of feeling like an immigrant as a woman artist. Your work seems to bear this provocation, particularly at the time of its conception, since today, this is a theme that circulates more widely. Feel free to correct me if I’m mistaken, but I’ve never witnessed you explicitly presenting this as a political cause, as was done, for instance, by feminists in the 1960s and 1970s. Although this always appears as a concern in your work, it was neither explicitly denied nor affirmed, seeming, instead, to be an inherent part of your poetic process. I behaved as an immigrant and as a woman. I don’t believe I would have torn up bras like the women of the 1960s’ and 1970s’ American feminist movements who fought for women’s liberation, even though I agreed with them. In other words, I think in every minority, there’s someone who makes sacrifices. I wouldn’t have made the sacrifice because I became a mother very early, at twenty-two. And motherhood is not limited to my relations with my children; you experience motherhood with the surroundings, including your work. That is to say, I perceive femininity as an acceptance, a caring for life. There are abandoned children in the world who are embraced by families—actually, by women who raise them as their own children. In Venezuela, it used to amaze me that every one of my friends had a foster sibling because the woman takes them in. So, I never wanted to turn my being a woman into a problem because, among other reasons, I trusted things would change. It’s not that action isn’t important, but there are ways of being extremely relevant in certain situations that do not include taking up arms. So, this does rest upon the belief that there is room for all things? Yes, I wouldn’t be able, nor would I have the disposition, to act any other way; neither have I ever intended to create artworks that were propagandist in content. I brought this up precisely because I think your work, within the circle you lived in, particularly in Rio de Janeiro, pertains to a generation where several strong women burst into the art system and operated in very distinct ways. Your work has never struck me as explicitly feminist, but it has consistently dealt with poetics associated with the sense of family, where the woman evidently plays a role in the face of gender-related oppression… Yes, moreover, with the sense of politics. There’s no shying away from the political aspect. Yet, many times, this becomes a fog for those who do not have the sensitivity to grasp that what is personal is also

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INTERVIEWED BY AMANDA CARNEIRO

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profoundly political, and your work encompasses many layers of the interpersonal sphere. Some men in the art scene of the 1960s classified my work as obvious. Because, clearly, you would be far more accepted if you adhered to a male model of production. It seems that what men considered obvious about my work was my expression of a feminine way of feeling in art. I believe every artist is endowed with a certain androgyny, a non-binarism, as they carry within themselves both the feminine and the masculine. There was a time when I was upset by this because some men who admired my work said, “It’s so good it seems like it was made by a man”. I shared this with Lygia Clark, and she remarked, “Anna, let it go. All art is feminine, and all action is masculine”. Which is true, and yet, at the same time, a paradox. Recently, one of these critics published a text about women artists in the 1960s and he doesn’t mention my name. Maybe because for him I continue to be too obvious. In general, I don’t feel offended and I try to understand other people’s whys and wherefores, acknowledging the fact that we must all handle our own complexities as human beings. It is a remarkable quality, to be able to transform via dialogue with others. I feel that experiencing displacement elicits this, as you are confronted with diverse realities. For instance, you have experienced vastly different contexts, engaged with numerous languages, and immersed yourself in various cultures. This is a transformative experience accessible to those who open themselves to it. One can discover new worlds within the same world. I say this because I don’t believe it’s always necessary to physically relocate to feel like an outsider. However, becoming a stranger to a new territory, culture, and language undoubtedly is another challenge. I left Italy when I was twelve, deeply affected by the changes. We typically associate illness with something physical but profound sadness is also a disease. There’s a text by Catherine de Zegher [“The Inside is the Outside: The Relational as the (Feminine) Space of the Radical”]2 and also a Charlie Chaplin movie, The Immigrant (1917), that had a very significant impact on me and proved helpful in understanding my own trajectory. I travelled to Caracas with my family at a time when Venezuela was searching for immigrants in order to boost its economy, offering to pay for sea fare for anyone interested. So, the Venezuelan government actually put up the costs of my trip. During the voyage, we were obliged to wear a label on our chests with the inscription “immigrant”. I never wore that and wrote a short story, a small memoir, where I describe how, upon arriving in Caracas, I carried that label inside my pocket everywhere, as a talisman and a token. When I enrolled at the Cristóbal Rojas School of Fine Arts in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1958, at sixteen, that brought about a crucial change in me. I can state that art cured me of my sadness. This experience I went through is similar to works carried out by our social movements and NGOs here in Brazil, that fight for underprivileged children’s access to art practices, restoring their dignity. Art can be a powerful medicine, even in the midst of wars and in the face of all the world’s persecutions, because it restores a person’s capability to be an individual. Realizing the potency that emanates from art moves me. In art school, I went

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through only two years of fine arts. Since I was a good student, I was granted the privilege of using all the studios and materials I wanted. At that time, Venezuela was a rich land, boosted by the exploration of oil. At eighteen, I submitted one of my first paintings to the Twenty-First National Salon of Venezuelan Art, thus, marking my first participation in an official event. For many young artists, taking part in art salons was the most common way of exhibiting one’s work. It was a figurative piece, depicting kitchen pans. Curiously, in this first work, there is already an interest in working with relations between outside and inside, issues that would provide the grounds for the development of so many other works that came later, such as the holes in the series Desenhos Objetos, from the 1970s, and my work in modelled sculpture, initiated in the 1980s and going on up to now, 2023. Art has brought me happiness and I believe my parents were aware of this, since they never called my vocation into question. When we were in Rio de Janeiro, my father would always come home from work bringing some handy tools as gifts as I began to engage with engraving, saying: “Daughter, could this pair of pliers be of any use to you?” It was a beautiful gesture, symbolically, given that all tools are commonly associated with the masculine universe, and he, my father, would furnish me, his daughter, a woman, with them, in order to make artworks. Your father seems to have been a very sensitive person. Yes. I’ll always be grateful to him for this significant and liberating gesture of affection. In your work, the idea of borders and encounters also sheds light on conflicts. They do not seem to reinforce placidity, despite offering a certain poetic comfort. People are very fond of these works; as an example, the ones deriving from those that result from Fotopoemação (1981)—a piece that, however beautiful, unveils conflicts—come to mind. Poetry can transform any pain and any drama into something bearable and beautiful. Fortunately, art holds this capacity! It has the ability to convert the worst things imaginable into something you can witness and still come out feeling nourished by that experience. Cinema accomplishes that a lot; writing, too, some books leave you breathless. A book that always comes to mind is One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) [by Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez]. It was one of the first books I read when I was very young. Despite being a tragedy, you come out enriched by it due to the emotional impact it has on you. Yes, I’ll say it again, poetry offers solace. I’d say that the series Fotopoemação are my most explicitly socially-minded works, as well as poetic, in their attempt to exorcize arbitrary political situations. My film In-Out (Antropofagia) (1973–1974) was the first 8 mm film shot during the military dictatorship. In it, the reality of the content is masked by the poetry expressed between the symbolism and the metaphors that are being mobilized, as they often go unnoticed through the system of censorship and repression. However, I do believe that the audience grasps the message of the film. Fortunately, these works stand the test of time. For example, my performance Entrevidas (1981), which I presented this year in Berlin, at the Neue Nationalgalerie, still holds

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ANNA MARIA MAIOLINO

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INTERVIEWED BY AMANDA CARNEIRO

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a vitality and meaningfulness that remain relevant to this day, as it interrogates violence. Talking about aging, you mentioned that your body no longer responds the same way it used to. However, this aging process coincides with a production that is very extensive in duration, and, as can happen with works of art, outlives yourself. Your body of work, which has had such a lasting presence in the lives of both myself and Brazilian audiences, shapes our artistic imagination in a continually evolving way because it comprises works susceptible to new readings and understandings. And your current production remains highly dynamic; all your latest exhibitions feature recent work. I am a nomad within myself, that is to say, I come and go between my own emotions and desires. Along these movements, I turn back to making artworks. That’s why I deem my work evergreen; I am a mutant who joyfully allows herself to sustain the work. Everything can serve as motivation for the creation of an artwork. Reading newspapers acted as a stimulus for the politically-charged drawings on the feminicides that are rampant in today’s societies which I sequenced into a series I then titled Andazzo, an Italian title which translates to “Go Away”, initiated in 2020. My artwork is multifaceted because it responds to the contaminations of the real world, of my surroundings, and so many other interests of mine, both sensory and conceptual, vis-à-vis life. And I embrace this contamination by life, by life as it is. Now, I would like to briefly talk about the project for the Biennale Arte 2024. How about the title, did you like it? I liked it, especially because it reinforces the feeling of transit in your artistic practice. So, I thought the title Going Back and Forth, with its multiple meanings, would suffice in naming and pointing out the intention of the work, but without dwelling excessively on definitions. A series you create with clay is titled Modelled Earth. I really like this title. I find it to be more than just indicative—it carries a multidimensional quality. Analogies can be drawn with other sculptural forms… Including processes of the earth itself, in a more territorial reading, as indicated by the very process of modelling clay—an act of transforming nature through human hands. Moulding raw material also carries the image of constructing a form through labour. Yes. My contribution to this Biennale Arte is going to occupy a space called the Casetta Scaffalli (at the Arsenale), with some multimedia pieces being shown in monitors and a piece done with vegetation, as well as another clay piece called Ao Infinito, from the series Modelled Earth, one of the main components of the Going Back and Forth installation3. Work done by modelling allows one to repeat each form ad infinitum, utilizing the repetition of the energy drive of the hand-gestures’ actions as they compact earth/clay. This primordial organic matter is elastic, pleasurable, and sensuous to the touch. This way, forms become repeated segments—both equal and different—

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which are added together and accumulate in the body of the sculptureinstallation. We know the actions of the hand are always unique and multiple in their repetition. In this clay-modelling work, I was moved by my desire to achieve wholeness with the repetition of gestures. What I managed was to accumulate fragments and disclose the entropy, the energy expended in this work’s realization. What comes first: the hand or the brain? Surely, when our ancestors ceased grabbing food with their mouths and started using their hands, they were turning the latter into the first tools ever. With them, over time, came the elaboration of pots, of receptacles, which connects us always to food, giving rise to our cultures. Rather like handling earth, clay can also be a game to children; modelling can be a means of therapy. Symbolically, handling earth is important because humanity only truly reached the technical aspect and its production culture when it figured out how to treat the land, how to plough the soil, how to cultivate seeds, and how to harvest. Again, we are up against the need to make choices, aren’t we? But when I see this ability we had, and continue to have, of developing different working techniques, even though I am no expert in digital technologies, I am always fascinated. In this sense, without other people’s support, I’d be lost, and I am always thrilled by humanity’s ability to renew itself. I like dialectics with some negativity thrown in because it feeds the mind. When I visit exhibitions and come across works I don’t like, they entice my imagination more than works I do like, because they furnish me with a possibility for a dialogue with myself on the issues and problems presented by the artist. On the other hand, I don’t think there can be any perfection in art, but one can find beauty in what is imperfect. And I have had many incredible people close to me, relations that helped me carve out my identity. I still owe a great deal to the few friends who shared knowledge and affection with me, as well as to books, which make great friends. I am also an avid reader of fiction and I believe that every reader can construct thought in a way where contemplation becomes highly poetic and positions itself as a present part of the world’s processes. Living (and aging) with literature is always an excellent choice. When you speak of One Hundred Years of Solitude, you emphasize the process of coming across a given work, whether in literature or visual art, and how life-altering it can be, with new meanings being created as you come into contact repeatedly with the same piece— something I also feel in my repeated engagement with your work. I’ll reread a book two or three times, and it always seems new to me. However, as of late, my workload has been keeping me from my reading. The relationship that emerges when work attains greater visibility is intriguing because, if you don’t pay attention, it can end up hijacking you… How do you perceive this kind of “imprisonment”? A work’s visibility entails compromises that may take away from the sense of gratuitousness, freedom, and spontaneity with which one would like to experience the process. However, if I find myself giving an interview, I believe that is part of the harvest, that I am reaping what I sowed throughout my career as an

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NOTES

artist. For me, more than money, the actual reaping comes down to everything good that derives from my art work. I thank you because I take this interview to be a beautiful harvest. Thank you very much, Anna. Thank you for your dedication. This interview was conducted in São Paulo, Brazil, on September 21, 2023.

1 Anna Maria Maiolino refers in this passage to the civil-military dictatorship in Brazil, an authoritarian regime established in 1961 through a political coup that subjugated the country under successive military governments. Throughout this period, the regime committed numerous human rights violations, including press censorship, restrictions on political rights, and police persecution of regime opponents. This oppressive era persisted until 1985 when a constituent assembly was formed, ultimately resulting in the approval of the constitution in 1988. This marked the restoration of Brazil to institutional democratic normalcy.

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2 Zegher, Catherine de, et al., ‘The Inside Is the Outside: The Relational as the (Feminine) Space of the Radical Women Artist at the Millennium’, in Women Artists at the Millennium, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2001

3 The Biennale Arte 2024 is divided into two primary sections: the Nucleo Contemporaneo and the Nucleo Storico. Anna Maria Maiolino stands out as one of the few artists featured in both segments of the exhibition. In the Nucleo Contemporaneo, she introduces the newly created installation Going Back and Forth, as mentioned. For the Nucleo Storico, she is presented in a dedicated space to Italian artists who emigrated to the global South, under the title “Italians Everywhere”, featuring her work Year 1942 from the Mental Maps series (1973), displayed on Lina Bo Bardi’s glass easels.

“REFLECTIONS ON EXILE.” IN REFLECTIONS ON EXILE: & OTHER LITERARY & CULTURAL ESSAYS. LONDON: GRANTA, 2000.

Seeing “the entire world as a foreign land” makes possible originality of vision. Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that—to borrow a phrase from music—is contrapuntal. For an exile, habits of life, expression or activity in the new environment inevitably occur against the memory of these things in another environment. Thus, both the new and the old environments are vivid, actual, occurring together contrapuntally.

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interviewed by Sofia Gotti FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Nil Yalter

In the 1970s, many considered Nil Yalter’s practice folkloric or documentary: work that did not belong in contemporary art museums, but rather in anthropological museums or labour unions. Concerned with the layers of subalternity and inequality on the basis of class, race, and gender, the artist foregrounds intersectionality avant la lettre. She has made it her mission to lend a voice to those cast to the margins of society, anticipating much of the research about what today is referred to as decolonial feminism. Yalter trained informally in Istanbul through her family, friends, and peers who introduced her to the canon of European modern art. Russian Constructivism struck a chord and geometric abstraction became her pictorial language. It wasn’t until she moved to Paris in 1965 that her work radically transformed as she became an active figure among various feminist groups assembled in the aftermath of May 1968. By 1973 Yalter had abandoned the canvas and took up photography, video, text, and installations as her fields of experimentation. When Yalter welcomed me in her Paris studio, I entered a space filled with books in piles all around the small apartment near the ChampsÉlysées. “I am donating half of them!” she said, listing museums and libraries interested in acquiring what for a lifetime the artist has gathered through her collaborations and research with peers, anthropologists, and filmmakers across iconic spaces like the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London or A.I.R. Gallery in New York.

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I discovered recently that when you were very young, you were an actress, and you walked from Turkey to India with a young man. Yes, I did. He was a playwright and also a mime performer. I met him in Istanbul, where we performed the first mimodramas on the city’s stages. He and Marcel Marceau were both students of Étienne Decroux, who invented modern mime after what existed already in the commedia dell’arte and in Shakespeare. In India, the traditional kathakali theatre is a kind of pantomime, similar to Japanese Noh—in both there is no talking, only music and dance. We performed all over India for about one-and-a-half years, and we made a living with our performances, since with mime you have no language barrier. Art making for us was the pantomime. I found some reviews of our performances in the Bombay Times and other magazines. For them it was completely new. We performed in the Alliance Française and very traditional places, and we lived like the first hippies. I have images about this whole experience. I would like to do a work about this journey. When I felt weak, I returned to Istanbul. The boy kept on travelling and went on to Japan. I must ask. How did you pull it off? How did your family deal with your travelling across India alone with a young man? Nobody could deal with me, my dear. And they still can’t! When I decided to go, both my father and mother—who were separated—knew they couldn’t stop me. Unless they tied me to a chair, they couldn’t stop me. I was always like that. I got married at eighteen to get a French passport to travel—as a Turk, I couldn’t have a passport. It’s hard to imagine you as weak. I read that you said it was during this trip that you became “a stranger”. Within the

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Biennale Arte 2024 we have played with the slippage between the foreigner, the stranger, and the strange. What does it mean to you to be a stranger? During this trip I discovered for the first time what being a stranger to a culture felt like, and I was fascinated. Indian culture is so rich—the poverty, the caste system, the colours, this amazing religion. Hinduism has so many gods—each one its own art event. Krishna and Shiva are art, and I lived in the midst of it. It was astonishing. It was my university. This was the first time I felt like a stranger. Indians consider non-Hindus impure. I am referring to the small villages through which we were travelling. Even though we were shown great hospitality, we were still impure. When we arrived at a village, they would give us a guest room. These were very simple spaces where we would use our sleeping bags. While they were friendly, they would not eat with us. They would give us food in very simple pottery, and they would break it once we had finished with it. It’s just their tradition. They are kind with you, and they look after you, but you are not one of them. You are the Other. I stayed in the house of Ravi Shankar, who was different because he had travelled to Europe. The Beatles said he had inspired them. He was in between tradition and modernity, so he wouldn’t break the dishes, but I am sure his father did. Perhaps all the work I am doing on immigration now came from this huge voyage when I was young. However, the immigration I deal with in my work is primarily economic. The people I have collaborated with came here to France to work. When did you begin painting and drawing? At the age of ten or twelve. Little girls were interested in dolls, but I would play with paint and pencils, and my father bought small publications for me about all the modern artists. I started learning to draw when I was a child with my father’s mother, who was a Circassian from Russia. She came on horseback with her father to the Ottoman Empire. I remember her from when I was five, just back to Istanbul from Cairo where I was born. She was living with us—she was very pious, and she prayed five times a day with a little mat. I would take the mat from below her feet, and she’d fall down. They left me with her, and she looked after me. She was very modern. She told me stories like you would to a child. At one point she had enough of telling me stories and said, “Now we are going to draw”. So she started drawing stories on sheets of paper divided in squares like a comic book. She drew the stories—she was a very talented draughtswoman—and when she was halfway through, she would turn to me and say, “Now you are going to draw the rest of the tale”. This is how I started drawing, and I never stopped. And when did you become interested in abstraction? It wasn’t until Michel Seuphor wrote A Dictionary of Abstract Painting (Tudor Publishing, 1957). Before that, there was nothing—no galleries, no museums, no books—nothing in Turkey about abstraction. They had one copy of this dictionary that we would share. A friend of mine gave it to me for a while, then I got one of my own. That was much later. Between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, I started being friends with what they call abstract artists. Most of them had trained in Paris and had come back to Istanbul. One

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of them—a sculptor who studied in Paris, returned to Istanbul, and later settled in Denmark—really explained what Constructivism was to me. From then on, art from the Russian Revolution was the most important movement for me. You frequently reference Malevich’s writing on Byzantine art. I am also interested in such diachronic art histories by artists who connect with foreign contexts—of course only foreign on the surface. You are one of the very few artists in this exhibition to have a double presence—in both the Nucleo Storico and the Nucleo Contemporaneo. The painting in the Nucleo Storico, Pink Tension (1969), is a geometric abstraction—a style you experimented with when you moved to Paris. How did your approach to geometric abstraction change when you emigrated? In Turkey I made abstractions like Serge Poliakoff—but in Paris, hard-edge painting really influenced me. In Istanbul I had become a fairly well-known painter, but the only place where we could show was the Goethe-Institut. I started making costumes and sets for the theatre to make a living, and I sold many of my paintings. But I knew there was something going on beyond Istanbul and being familiar with Cézanne and Picasso was not enough. I wanted to discover the contemporary art world that in the 1960s already existed—I wanted to know about Pop Art, Conceptual Art, and so forth. When I came to Paris I was very lucky to know the gallery of Ileana Sonnabend, who had been married to New York dealer Leo Castelli. They discovered Pop Art. Ileana, after divorcing Castelli, married Michael Sonnabend and opened her own gallery, which at first was on the Seine. The first thing I did when I arrived in 1965 was to go and see the Andy Warhol show in her gallery. He had made flowered wall paintings all over the gallery and had small prints and paintings hung over them. It was an astonishing thing for me. I thought: “This is art but I cannot understand it. I need to process it and learn how to get into it”. Then, the art world was not like it is today. It was very simple. For example, Rauschenberg liked Japanese food, so Ileana would order sushi from the one place that made sushi in Paris. Everyone would come to the gallery, and we would eat sushi together. I met Robert Morris there too. I started to learn in that atmosphere. And nobody was a star. However, this was not my first contact with Paris. I had come with a friend of mine in 1956 for one month, which is when I first discovered Yves Klein. That also shocked me. I also discovered the playwrights Arthur Adamov and Eugène Ionesco. In the decade between 1956 and 1965, I had so many questions in my mind. I came to Paris to settle and to learn. Your early abstractions almost function as a bridge. At first, a bridge between Turkey, where “nothing” was happening on a cultural plane, and the rest of Europe, where avantgardism was rampant. And later between Paris and Turkey, where political turmoil defined everyday life. It seems that the series of drawings Deniz Gezmiş (1972) connects the formalist experimentation that defined your early practice and the political commitment that drove your later work. It’s the first work in which you brought together found materials, text, and

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performance, and it is also the first work in which you directly address a political subject. Deniz Gezmiş is the name of one of three revolutionary young men who founded the People’s Liberation Army of Turkey and were executed in Istanbul in 1972. I went back to Istanbul in 1971, so I was in Istanbul when the events leading up to the execution unfolded. Every day I followed what was happening, and I wrote the facts down. While Pink Tension seems to reflect the influences you were exposed to in Paris—Pop Art and hardedge nouveau réalisme. There is a perceivable break between geometric abstraction and installations like Topak Ev (1973), which is the other work installed in Venice in the Central Pavilion of the Giardini. It is an elaboration of a nomads’ tent made of felt and animal skins. How did you get the impulse to create an immersive installation following years of working with paint on canvas? The idea for Topak Ev was born out of my research into nomadic societies in Turkey. I went and found the nomads in Niğde, the capital of the central region of Anatolia. An ethnographer from the Musée de l’Homme, Bernard Dupaigne, gave me all the information about the nomads. When a woman of a nomadic tribe is thirteen, she begins making her own tent, which becomes her home. The tent is like a womb. It’s round. When she gets married, she invites a potential husband into her tent. If she doesn’t want him to, he cannot come in. At the same time, her world is inside, and she cannot go out much. I made collages there. All the women told me that they had a brother, uncle, son, father who left for the big city where they started building favelas—in one day they’d put up walls despite there being no private property. From there, they went on to Germany as immigrant workers. So it was almost a natural or biological progression from nomadism to immigration. Nomadism and migration are both neuralgic points within your work. Of course nomadism is a concept that thinkers like Gilles Deleuze or Félix Guattari relied on to map a deterritorialised form of knowledge and to think anew about the politics of relation between self and Other. While much of my work is centred on immigration, I don’t consider myself an immigrant. At the beginning I performed an act of nomadism, changing country for cultural reasons. I was involved politically with illegal Turkish Communist Party intellectuals. I co-founded with Joël Boutteville the group Amicale France-Turquie, and we distributed information all over Europe in the late 1970s. I became informed of what was happening after the military putsch in 1980 in Istanbul, and then for thirteen consecutive years I was unable to return to Turkey. People think it was because of my work. However it was because of my work that I was involved politically, and because I was involved politically I was doing this work. Your work with immigrant communities of workers shows the importance of labour when dealing with issues around migration. Labour here is visible in your praxis, in the way you were politically involved, and in the way you

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approached the participants in your projects whose daily lives and social conditions were defined by their relation to work. But I don’t think that you can go to people’s houses and ask them whether you can film them. I worked with Turkish students in universities and with immigrant communities and social workers within city councils outside Paris to make this happen. The city councils asked people whether they wanted to meet me. I explained what I wanted to do, and they either said yes or no. This is the way you work in these contexts. But to be able to do this, I had to be involved politically and vice versa. At one point all my friends were part of those groups—I wouldn’t say activists because they really worked as social workers. Those who went back to Turkey after 1980 were all imprisoned. Many of those who were part of the illegal Turkish Communist Party were tortured. Turkish history has seen the military taking power time and time again. Republican history, that is. The title of Nâzım Hikmet’s poem, Exile is a Hard Job (1957)—also the title of your installation in the Central Pavilion— is not only about the difficulties of being in exile, but also about the working conditions that define the life of an immigrant. While this installation made of photographs and videos was made later, it has also been exhibited together with Topak Ev. Can you tell me more about the genesis of these two projects? In 1973, Suzanne Pagé asked me to do the tent as a solo show at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris. I was living and working in a space of 18 square meters. All I had was a plan for the tent and a few sketches, but she said, “Do it, and I’ll give you a show in November”. So I did the show, and it was full of people. I have a little video of people going inside the tent. This was the first time I used a portapak. I was hesitant with the camera. Inside the tent there was dried cheese that nomads had given me. Some people were amazed because it was probably one of the first installations made in France. We didn’t call them installations at that time; we called them environmental works. Suzanne was very pleased, but at the same time people who came—especially the snobbish rich art world collectors—said that it should have been at the Musée de l’Homme. And of course, I made it with the advice of an ethnographer from that same museum. Ten years later, in 1983, she asked me to do another solo show and that’s when I made Exile is a Hard Job. Which is the installation we’ll see in the Central Pavilion. In the videos, men and women working in the secret workshops of the Faubourg-Saint-Denis talk about their living situation. The differences between the testimonies of men and women recorded in the videos offer further grounds for reflection. At times the men dwell on the systemic forms of economic exploitation by the French government, while the women reflect on the double burden of family and home. The scholar Fabienne Dumont has written about this aspect of your work since the 1970s, and in this sense your work is fundamentally intersectional. It insists on the layers of gender, class, and geography when dealing with oppression and inequality towards what could become a meeting ground

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across disadvantaged immigrant experiences. How did the participants receive the projects? When I showed them what they had said on film, they would check it, and if they didn’t like what they said, we would refilm it. The people—as far as immigrants, claimants waiting for their papers, clandestine, or nonclandestine workers—were very open, and they all came to the different events where I presented the work. The first one was in the Biennale de Paris in 1977 when I showed La communauté des travailleurs turcs à Paris (Turkish workers’ community in Paris), a project of videos, drawings, and photographs made with immigrants settled in suburban Paris. I have an image that is very interesting because you can see the same women and men in the pictures on the walls, visiting the exhibition space and looking at themselves. The mise en abyme in your work recurs once more. At first, the director of the Biennale Arte was against these communities being invited to the exhibition because he was afraid that all the children would touch the works. I told him that if he didn’t let them in, I would have to take all my works and go away. He had to agree, but afterwards he was very pleased. Being more familiar with the British context of the 1980s and Thatcherism’s multicultural policies, which were being critiqued by figures like Stuart Hall or Rasheed Araeen, I am wondering about the relations of such discourses within the context of France during that time. There was a very important exhibition curated by Lucy Lippard called Issue that happened at the ICA in 1980. This was a fantastic show. Even in London there was nothing like it, and it’s amazing how it developed afterwards. My work was a video with wall pieces. Lippard came to give a press conference in Paris four years before that in 1976, more or less. I went to the conference, and she didn’t see me. I was in the audience, and she talked about my Topak Ev. She hadn’t seen it, but she’d already written about it because she was very interested in that work. So I went backstage afterwards to thank her for talking about the tent. That’s how we first met each other, and then she invited me to participate in Issue. I became quite friendly with Lucy. The show had come from the United States, so many artists featured were American. When the show was close to its end, I spent a week in London, and Lucy asked me to go and see a curator then working at the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris. Because the show was in England and all its shipping had been paid for from the United States, it made sense for it to travel to Paris. When I went to see the curator, he laughed at me. That’s what women artists were. He said that the only good thing about my page in the catalogue was that it had been left untranslated in French. It’s shocking that you were faced with such exclusionary institutional politics. Despite what you are telling me, and the grim reality of being a woman in the art world at the time, you still managed to show consistently in alternative art spaces like the ICA, or even the A.I.R. Gallery or the Renault Factory in Le Havre. What is your relationship, then, to institutionalisation and the structures of institutions?

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NIL YALTER

INTERVIEWED BY SOFIA GOTTI

BIENNALE ARTE 2024

I didn’t work much in institutions. When the art people came through the Tenth Biennale de Paris, for example, they saw my work and said, “This is not art, this is politics! Who is going to put these pieces on their walls?” That was the reaction many had to the work I did. I always worked because nothing can stop me—no galleries, no museums. And they were art spaces and community centres in the peripheries around Paris where I often did shows. They paid me a decent honorarium and left all the work with me. They are extraordinary contexts in cities with social housing. Collaboration seems to have been a central feature of your practice. Well, besides collaborating with other artists like Judy Blum, who was great, I was involved with multiple feminist groups. We had two groups—Femmes en lutte (Fighting women) with Esther and Mathilde Ferrer, Dorothée Selz, and Isabelle ChampionMétadier, and Femmes/Art, which I was in—and we met every fifteen days. There were journalists, writers, painters, artists. It was open to everyone. We made a manifestation at the Salon D’Automne in 1978. Before then, between 1976 and 1977, we collectively made pieces about the situation of women in the public sphere and in the home. There was another group of women more concerned with psychiatry, but we were all active militants. For example, we staged a manifestation against the UNESCO International Women’s Year in 1975. We were very much against it. We didn’t understand why women would have to have a single year, when every other was a man’s year. Returning somewhat to where we started—it is undeniable that privilege is a vital aspect of much of the work we all do within the art system. I view privilege as the ability to speak, to imagine, to be seen—a privilege that not so many are able to obtain. I was particularly fascinated by a phrase you used in earlier interviews, which is “to lend a voice”. Can you tell me more about what lending your voice has meant for you? Everyone has the right to be educated. The whole problem today in the world, especially in Islamic countries and Turkey, is the lack of education. It’s important that people have the right to speak and to tell what’s going on. In my work I ask one question, and then I never interfere. I usually just ask one question like, “How do you feel about your situation?” I don’t ask lots of questions—I don’t interfere—and let them talk. They express themselves. I give the people I work with the opportunity to speak with their own voices. I don’t do interviews. My works are very documentary, but they’re not documentaries. I just say, “I am going to film you, and then I’m going to show you, and if you don’t like it, we can restart”. How do you feel about your situation now? In this moment, I am worried.

This interview was conducted in Paris, France, on October 17, 2023.

AN APARTMENT ON URANUS: CHRONICLES OF THE CROSSING. CAMBRIDGE, (MA) MIT PRESS, 2019.

Sex change and migration are two practices that, by calling into question the political and legal architecture of patriarchal colonialism, of sexual difference and racial hierarchy, of family and nation-state, place a living human body inside the limits of citizenship, even of what we understand by “humanity.”

PAUL B. PRECIADO

Claire Fontaine, 2005

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Claire Fontaine

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KINO NGWAGI MEGIZIJIG EYAAWAG

Foreigners Everywhere

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FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Far, far from you unfolds world history, the world history of your soul. – Franz Kafka

CLAIRE FONTAINE

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The “porteurs de valises” were the French that supported the Algerians’ struggle for independence by smuggling money and false papers.

Respectively Algerians who fought for in the French army, and French settlers in North Africa.

We always begin by wondering who are those who are not desired, only to later include them in the list of the undesirable. We ask them to spell out their names, because they are always foreign, unknown names. We ask them to get in line, stay calm, and not ask questions—there are no interpreters, anyway. We put them on file, we make long lists, we keep them in electronic memory, we let them sleep in the computers’ stomach, then one fine day we wake them up: it is him, or her, or them that we don’t want anymore, that man, those children, and that woman, thanks, but we don’t want them. It has happened before, it is still happening, the same procedure, the same feelings between the people carrying out orders and those being deported. Because “you can’t have a country reduced to the state of a strainer” (Dominique de Villepin, 12 May 2005), but, on the other hand, you have a fortress-like country, a doorcode-like country, a deaf-country, a killer-in-a-white-collar-country, a politely-xenophobic-country, a camp-like country. A country which expels, extradites and tortures (but discreetly); the country of police blunders and ill-digested colonialism, which one day drowned foreigners in the Seine, and on another imprisoned the “luggage carriers”1, that hid beneath its apron-flag harkis and pieds-noirs2, devastated by the shame of having been born. We will keep this country as it is, we work at it. We will actually spend one hundred million euros next year to get rid of undesirables. Which is a fair price to pay. Why, anyway, did they come here in the first place, those people, far from their language, their family, and their country? But nobody ever asks them what is their language, or what their family is like, or which place would they like for themselves. Where are the undesirables going, when they disappear from sight? The terminology used says it all: in “retention” camps, they undergo an “expulsion”, fecal terms which fool no one; not only has capitalism failed to solve the problem of its waste, but the status of waste is rapidly overtaking what until yesterday wasn’t yet rubbish—this applies to things, this applies to people. One aspect of the state of exception,

“Fear of proximity” is a pun on “police of proximity” a specific capillary deployment of the police within the city to supposedly counter the sense of insecurity of the French population and get closer to the citizens. It was instituted in 1998 and abolished in 2003 by the then minister of the interior Nicolas Sarkozy, because of the lack of results.

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which is normalcy for us, is that our compatibility with the system is the object of an ongoing negotiation which we endlessly work on, and that our usefulness on the labour market is a clockwork concept. They say “go home” to people who have lost their “home”, to such a degree that they agree to go to look for it at the other end of the world. We say “we don’t need you any more” to people who need the very work that rejects them. Foreigners are not people coming from somewhere else, people who belong to another “race”. The race of undesirables is simply the race of exploited people, those whom we relegate to the space of need, and who mistake the borders of their desires for the mirages of advertising. They reckon that they will disappear as such, that they are the outcome of unfavorable circumstances, of an unfinished democracy, that they are the symptoms of an infantile illness of global capitalism. But it isn’t true. They are the driving force of our economy, the immune carriers of wealth. Anyhow, in any case you will say that this story is sad and well-known, but these things happen to Others, not to us, to Others; those Others whom we don’t ask who they are, and where they live. Our inner exile puts them in the first cell, locked up every day at the same time because of the general lack of time, and curiosity. Yet the others are here, nonetheless, in our place, this morning they’ve washed the windows of the local butcher’s shop, they were sitting on this same seat in the subway just before us, they were living in our apartment before they were evicted. Their pain infects the air we breathe, their workforce paid peanuts keeps our wages low, their solitude prevents them from organizing, their confinement silently materializes a prison aura around our lives. Our western introverted assertion of identity, our fear of proximity3, our European communitarianism and our opinions borrowed from newspapers and TV, we will pay very dearly for them. We will know a poverty that will awake the worst memories, a poverty that is not related to the economical crisis and recession, that is far more destructive, a poverty of possibilities which is already eroding all the borders of politics. The state of the streets affects the state of our interiors. Since our apartments have become refuges where we cannot dare to host those who have been forgotten by police memory, our private property has been unmasked of its seeming innocence and is finally revealed as an act of war. We don’t want refugees here, because we are the real refugees, colonized by our own country which, for us, is just an adoptive country: a territory under the watch of global capital whose hostile laws we have to accept, or end up in the non-place of prison. For some years now, we have been asked to be scared several times a day, and at times to be terrorized, and they dare talk to us about security. But security has never been a matter of militias, security can only be measured through the possibility of being protected when needed, it is the potential for friendship that lurks in every human being. Since it has been destroyed, everything in the public space is haunted by risk. Foreigners are everywhere, it is true, but we ourselves are strangers in our streets and in the subway corridors patrolled by men in uniforms. These laws that reject strangers who have come from somewhere else cast a new light on Paris as a playground of Capital, on the “cleansing” of popular neighbourhoods, and on the organization of inner tourism within the urban space. You will see what they mean when they install a “civilized space” or when they write on a notice that: “Your neighbourhood is changing”. They mean that colonialism is war and that those being colonized are us, the rest of us. …this text must end, it could go on, but there is no point. We know it. In order to exist it needs the poorest freedom that we still have: the freedom of expression, which is an irony. Language is already an ocean liner sinking under the weight of its inoffensiveness. It does not shelter us, it is always someone’s stranger. We urgently need to set off on another journey, that will put us on the side of the undesirable, questioning our personal boundaries, and ridding us of fear.

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“We, on the other hand, with our sad experiences and fears, can’t help being frightened by every creak of the floorboards, without being able to help ourselves, and if one takes fright, the next one instantly takes fright too and even without knowing the proper reason for it.” – Franz Kafka, Appendix, The Castle.

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BORDER AS METHOD, OR, THE MULTIPLICATION OF LABOR. DURHAM: DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2013.

Symbolic, linguistic, cultural, and urban boundaries are no longer articulated in fixed ways by the geopolitical border. Rather, they overlap, connect, and disconnect in often unpredictable ways, contributing to shaping new forms of domination and exploitation. [...] Borders, far from serving merely to block or obstruct global passages of people, money or objects, have become central devices for their articulation. Borders play a key role in the production of the heterogeneous time and space of contemporary global and postcolonial capitalism.

SANDRO MEZZADRA AND BRETT NEILSON

BIYANÎ LI HER DERÊ FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

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The Migrant’s Time Ranajit Guha This article was originally published in The Journal Postcolonial Studies: Culture, Politics, Economy, vol. 1, Issue 2, 1998, pp. 155-160.

THE MIGRANT’S TIME 126 RANAJIT GUHA

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To belong to a diaspora ... I wrote down those words and stopped. For I was not sure one could belong to a diaspora. Belonging is predicated on something that is already constituted. Would the first migrant then remain excluded for ever from a diaspora? Who constitutes a diaspora anyhow? And what is it after all? Is it a place or simply a region of the mind—a mnemic condensation used to form figures of nostalgia out of a vast dispersal? Or is it nothing but the ruse of a beleaguered nationalism to summon to its aid the resources of long-forgotten expatriates in the name of patriotism? Well, I don’t know—not yet in any case. So, to start with let me stay close to the essential connotation of the term as a parting and scattering and say that to be in a diaspora is already to be branded by the mark of distance. Somewhat like being an immigrant, but with a difference. The latter is distantiated from the community—the people or the nation or the country or whatever the name of the community—where he finds himself more often than not as an unwelcome guest. From the moment he knocks on his host’s door, he is one who has come in from the outside. The diasporan as a migrant is, on the contrary, someone who has gone away from what once was home—from a motherland or a fatherland. In this case, unlike the other, the function of distance is not to make an alien of him but an apostate. An apostate, because, by leaving the homeland, he has been unfaithful to it. Since there is no culture, certainly not in South Asia, which does not regard the home as the guardian and propagator of values associated with parenthood to the extent of investing the latter with a sanctity akin to religiosity, desertion amounts to transgression. The migrant, even the involuntary one washed offshore by circumstances beyond his control, has therefore broken faith and is subjected to judgements normally reserved for apostasy. I speak of apostasy in order to highlight the intensity of the moral strictures heaped by their compatriots on those who have gone away. The disapproval could be nationalistic or familial in rhetoric and

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the defector condemned for weakening in that fidelity which makes for good citizenship and kinship. Whichever the idiom in which it is expressed, its object is nothing less than the violation of some sacrosanct codes. These are codes of solidarity and exchange, alliance and hostility, love of neighbours and fear of strangers, respect for tradition and resistance to change—all of which help a population to form a community through mutual understanding. Presupposed in every transaction between its members, these are in effect codes of belonging by which they identify themselves and recognise each other. To violate these by going away, by breaking loose from the bonds of a native world is to be disowned and bring down on oneself the harsh sentence: `You no longer belong here; you are no longer one of us’. The voice in which such a sentence is pronounced is that of the first-person plural speaking for an entire community from a position entrenched within it. What is within is here—a place the migrant will not be entitled to call his own. The displacement is made all the more poignant by the paradox that it corresponds to no distantiation in time. For it is stapled firmly to an accentuated and immediate present cut off from a shared past by the adverbial force of `no longer’. A sharp and clean cut, the dismissal leaves its victim with nothing to fall back on, no background where to take umbrage, no actual communitarian links to refer to. For it is in their everyday dealings with one another that people in any society form such links in a present which continually assimilates the past to itself as experience and looks forward at the same time to a future secure for all. The loss of that present amounts, therefore, to a loss of the world in which the migrant has had his own identity forged. Ousted temporally no less than spatially, he will, henceforth, be adrift until he lands in a second world where his place will seek and hopefully find matching co-ordinates again in a time he, like others, should be able to claim as `our time’. A diaspora’s past is, therefore, not merely or even primarily a historiological question. It is, in the first place, the question of an individual’s loss of his communal identity and his struggle to find another. The conditions in which that first identity was formed are no longer available to him. Birth and kinship which gave his place in the first community the semblance of so complete a naturalness as to hide its man-made character, are now of little help to him as an alien set apart by ethnicity and culture. Birthmarks of an originary affiliation, these are precisely what make it hard for him to find a toehold in that living present where a communal identity renews itself as incessantly in the day-to-day transactions between people as it is promptly reinforced by a common code of belonging. For everything that appertains to such a code is framed in time. Indeed belonging in this communitarian sense is nothing other than temporality acted upon and thought—and generally speaking, lived—as being with others in shared time, with sharing meant, in this context, as what is disclosed by the community to its constituents as temporal. One has simply to listen to the discourse of belonging to realise how pervasive such temporalisation is in all that people say or otherwise indicate to each other about good and bad times, about work and leisure, about how it was and how it might turn out to be, about being young and growing old, and more than anything else about the finitude of life in being born and dying. This is not only a matter of some linguistic compulsion requiring the grammar of a language to insist on the aspectual category of verb phrases in an utterance. More fundamentally, this is an existential question of being in time. There is no way for those who live in a community to make themselves intelligible to each other except by temporalizing their experience of being together. Temporalization such as this has, of course, all the strands of past, present and future inextricably woven into it. However, the migrant who has just arrived stands before the host community only in the immediacy of the present. This is so because, from the latter’s point

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1 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987, p. 420.

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of view, whatever (if anything) is known about his past and presumed about his future, is so completely absorbed in the sheer fact of his arrival that, as an occurrence in time, it is grasped as a pure externality, mediated neither by what he was nor by what he will be. Yet there is nothing abstract about this. Quite the opposite seems to be the case. For, it has the concreteness of a sudden break with continuity, or more appropriately, if figuratively speaking, that of a clinamen which disturbs the laminar flow of time to create a whirlpool for the strangeness of the arrival to turn round and round as a moment of absolute uncertainty, a present without a before or an after, hence beyond understanding. Of course it will not be long before the latter recovers from the shock of suddenness and takes hold of the occurrence by interpretation—that is, by such codes as may assign it a meaning in terms of one or any number of alterities ranging from race to religion. All of which, again, will be phrased, much as was the very last sentence of rejection addressed to the migrant on the point of departure from his native land, thus: `You don’t belong here’. Wanting as it is in the adverbial phrase `no longer’, this interdicts rather than rejects. However, like that other sentence, this too will be uttered unmistakably within a nowness. How come that the now sits on guard at the gate of the host community as well? It does so because, as Heidegger says, `Belonging-somewhere (Hingehörigkeit) has an essential relationship to involvement’.1 Belonging to a community is no exception, for it involves being with others in the everyday life of an ordinary world. Since the now is the mode in which everydayness articulates mostly and primarily, it serves as the knot that ties together the other strands of a community’s temporal bonding. The past is gathered into this knot and the future projected from there as well. The now is, therefore, the base from which all the distantiating strategies are deployed against the alien as the one who stands outside the community’s time—its past of glory and misery, its future pregnant with possibilities and risks, but above all its present charged with the concerns of an authentic belonging. Nothing could be more acute as a predicament for the migrant who personifies the first generation of any diaspora. Participation in the host community’s now, that is, a moment of temporality made present as today, is an indispensable condition of his admission to it. Yet, as one who has just arrived from the outside, he is, by definition, not admissible at all. For he has nothing to show for his present except that moment of absolute discontinuity—the foreshortened time of an arrival—which is conspicuous precisely by its exclusion from the today of the community at whose threshold he has landed. Not a little of the complexity and pathos of the diasporic condition relates to this very impasse. At this point it would be convenient for us perhaps simply to go round this difficult and embarrassing moment and allow our narrative a small, almost imperceptible jump in order to move on to that firm ground where the migrant, washed and fed and admitted already to his new community, awaits assimilation as either a mimic or a misfit, depending on the degree of his resistance to that always painful and often humiliating process. But let us not be tempted by this option. Let us continue a little longer with our concern for the impasse in which, literally, he finds himself: stranded between a world left behind and another whose doors are barred, he has nowhere to go. Homeless and with little hope left for anything but one last chance, he has all his orientation and comportment taken over by anxiety. That is a mood notorious for its unsettling effect. It shakes him out of the groove of an immediate and unbearable present and makes him ready to summon the experience of what he has been for an encounter with the indefiniteness of what lies ahead. In other words, it is anxiety which enables him to look forward to his own possibilities, helps him to mobilise the past as a fund of energies and resources available for use in his project to clear for himself a path which has the future

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with all its potentiality on its horizon. A difficult path opened up by the tragic disjunction of his past and present, it lies across that now from which he has been excluded so far and posits him there by the logic of that very crossing. Thus, the migrant has situated himself at last. But he is far from assimilated yet. For the everydayness of his new situation and that of the host community’s intersect, but do not coincide. There is a mismatch which will serve for a field of alienation from now on with differences read along ethnic, political, cultural and other axes. This non-coincidence puts a new spin on the problem of the migrant’s time. Why does his now resist absorption in that of his adopted community? Because it is constituted differently from the latter. For the now of any time whatsoever arises from the connectedness of the present with the past and the future. It inherits and projects, and in that dual function, integrates to itself all that is specific to a culture as it has formed so far and all that will determine its quality and character in time to come. A community’s now is, therefore, not just one of a series of identical moments arranged in a steady succession. Aligned by its connectedness and coloured by the specificities of its overdeterminations, the moment of its time a community experiences as now is necessarily different from that of any other. This is why switching communities is in every instance the occasion of a temporal maladjustment which, however, is grasped by common sense, not for what it is, but as the failure of one culture to slot smoothly into another. There is nothing particularly wrong with this interpretation except that it makes a part stand in for the whole. For what is cultural about this phenomenon is already entailed in the temporal and follows directly from it. Thus, to cite an all too familiar example, the difference in attitudes to clock time ascribed often so readily to religious distinctions is perhaps much better explained in terms of the differing temporalities which connect a community’s understanding of its own past, present and future in a manner unlike another’s. The migrant, too, is subjected to such misinterpretation in the host community once he has been admitted to it. For the connectedness of time which makes up the fabric of its life is not and cannot be the same as in the one he has left behind. As an immigrant—with the prefix im to register the change in his status as one kept no longer waiting outside—the sense of time he brings with him is the child of another temporality. The myriad relationships it has for its referent— relations to his own people, its traditions and customs, its language, even the environment of his native land—set it clearly apart from those that inform such relationships in the community where he finds himself. His attempt to get in touch with the latter and involve himself in the everydayness of being with others is, therefore, fraught inevitably with all the difficulties of translation between accents, inflexions, syntaxes and lexicons—between paradigms, for short. All that is creole about a culture is indeed nothing other than evidence of its creative overcoming of such difficulty. It is not uncommon for the necessary inadequacy of such translation to be diagnosed wrongly as nostalgia. The error lies not only in the pathological suggestion it carries, but primarily in its failure to understand or even consider how the migrant relates to his own time at this point. Driven on by anxiety, he has only the future in his horizon. `What is going to happen to me? What should I do now? How am I to be with the others in this unfamiliar world?’ These are all cogitations oriented towards what is to come rather than ruminations about what has been so far. Lacking as he does the kind of support and understanding one finds in one’s native community, he is entirely on his own with no hinterland for retreat but only a prospect which faces him with its daunting openness and an indefiniteness which is as promising as it is disconcerting. All that is in him, and makes him what he is, is caught

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2 Text of a presentation at a Humanities Research Centre workshop of the Australian National University on 7 August 1995.

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now—at this moment—in an inexorably forward drift. What he has been so far is also caught in that drift, but not as dead baggage towed along by a force not its own. On the contrary, it is itself constitutive of that headlong movement carrying him forward. In that movement the past does not float passively as a chunk of frozen time, but functions as experience both activated by and invested in the force of a precipitation. There is nothing in it of any desperate effort at finding what has been lost, but only an ongoing current in which the past is integral to the present. The alignment of the migrant’s past with his predicament in the flow of his being towards a future occurs, therefore, not as a process of recovery but of repetition. Far from being dead that past has remained embedded in its time fully alive like a seed in the soil, awaiting the season of warmth and growth to bring it to germination. As such, what has been is nothing other than a potentiality ready to be fertilised and redeployed. It anticipates the future and offers itself for use, and through such use, renewal as the very stuff of what is to come. That is why the migrant’s present, the moment of that tide in which his future-oriented past is being carried along, draws attention to itself invariably as the figure of an ambiguity. For at any such moment, he still appears to speak in the voice of the community where he was born to his first language, even as he is so obviously picking up the language of the other community where he is about to find a second home. In all other respects of his comportment as well—the way he dresses, works, eats, speaks and generally conducts himself in his everyday relationship with others—he mixes idioms and accents and is typecast as one who defies translation, hence understanding. Our first migrant is, therefore, in a temporal dilemma. He must win recognition from his fellows in the host community by participating in the now of their everyday life. But such participation is made difficult by the fact that whatever is anticipatory and futural about it is liable to make him appear as an alien, and whatever is past will perhaps be mistaken for nostalgia. He must learn to live with this doublebind until the next generation arrives on the scene with its own time, overdetermining and thereby re-evaluating his temporality in a new round of conflicts and convergences.2

POTENTIAL HISTORY: UNLEARNING IMPERIALISM. NEW YORK: VERSO, 2019.

This is what unlearning imperialism looks like. It means unlearning the dissociation that unleashed an unstoppable movement of (forced) migration of objects and people in different circuits and the destruction of the worlds of which they were part.

ARIELLA AZOULAY

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Formations of the Colonial Modern Art History After Globalization:

Kobena Mercer This chapter was first published in Kobena Mercer. Travel and See: Black Diaspora Art Practices since the 1980s. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016, pp. 248-261.

ART HISTORY AFTER GLOBALIZATION 134 KOBENA MERCER

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The phrasing of the term “colonial modern” is quite promising for it suggests a fresh approach to understanding the interrelationship between modernism and colonialism. In an attempt to tease out what the implications might be for art history, my focus in this contribution is to reflect upon the three cognate terms at the heart of the debate—“modernism,” “modernity,” and “modernization”—in light of what has become known, in the sociology of culture, as the multiple modernities thesis. Drawing on examples from the Annotating Art’s Histories texts that I recently completed as series editor, my aim is to suggest what cross-cultural studies in art history might look like when we carry out archival research “after” globalization. While there is the view that globalization is an intrinsically “new” phenomenon that refers to an increasing sense of worldwide connectedness brought about by new technologies, the alternative perspective of the longue dureé gives us the advantage of a much wider canvas upon which to theorize cross-cultural interactions as a variable in the social production of art. Describing the features of contemporary globalization that are indeed new—transnational corporations, neoliberal economies, the heightened role of information technologies and the culture industries—Stuart Hall nonetheless stresses that this is merely the most recent phase in a long-term process. In his scheme of periodization, “the fourth phase, then, is the current one, which passes under the title of ‘Globalization’ tout court (but which, I argue, has to be seen as an epochal phase in a longer historical durée)” (Hall, 2003, 194). In the context of discussing creolization as a specific modality of cross-culturality arising out of colonization and forced migrations, Hall states: “I date globalization from the moment when Western Europe breaks out of its confinement, at the end of the 15th century, and the era of exploration and conquest of the non-European world begins.” Adding that “somewhere around 1492 we begin to see this project as having a global rather than a national or continental character,” his account of this first phase of globalization makes it “coterminous with the onset of the process which Karl Marx identified as the attempt to construct a world market, the result of which was to constitute the rest of the world in a subordinate relationship to Europe and to Western civilization” (193). To say globalization is nothing new, and that it is simply our intellectual understanding of it that has changed in recent years, is to take a critical position with regard to routine orthodoxies in current thinking about cultural difference in the arts. Opting to start with ideas that are deliberately big in scale, I want to convey my sense of what is at stake in the paradigm shift that is currently under way in art history, to which the Annotating Art’s Histories series has contributed some small steps. But the issue of scale also helps put in perspective those obstacles to historical thinking on crosscultural dynamics that need to be addressed at a metatheoretical level before we can adjust our orientation toward the archive of colonial modernity. Two such obstacles can be characterized in the following terms—“inclusionism” and “presentism.” To the extent that difference is widely addressed today through an ideology of multicultural inclusionism, there is a strong tendency to elevate a horizontal axis that embraces an ever wider capture of identities over and above a vertical axis that would attempt a historical explanation of their mutual entanglement. Across survey exhibitions and anthology textbooks, the pervasive emphasis on the horizontal breadth of coverage tends to dehistoricize and flatten out the contradictory relations among the diverse elements brought together in the name of inclusion. What results is a pluralist illusion of plenitude that assumes each of the parts coexists in a side-by-side relationship, with little interaction or dynamism among them. Where the language of multiculturalism is evoked to compensate for past exclusions (as a kind of solution to a legitimation crisis on the part of art world institutions), we not only find the view whereby cultural diversity is seen as a mere

2 On “world art” approaches, see John Onians, ed., Compression vs. Expression: Containing and Explaining the World’s Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006).

3 Victor Burgin, “The Absence of Presence: Conceptualism and Postmodernisms,” in The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Postmodernity (London: Macmillan, 1986), 29–50.

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1 Niru Ratnam, “Art and Globalisation,” in Themes in Contemporary Art, ed. Gill Perry and Paul Wood (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 293, 295.

“novelty” that belongs to contemporary art alone, but also find that such presentism works in insidious ways to preserve earlier canons of modern art whose monocultural authority thus remains intact. The consequences of ahistorical presentism can be seen in a conservative approach to descriptive ekphrasis whereby critics seek to match the contemporary theorization of globalization with art practices that supposedly embody such concepts. Niru Ratnam’s chapter titled “Art and Globalisation” in Themes in Contemporary Art (2004), devoted to works shown in Documenta 11 in 2002, starts by qualifying the newness of globalization theory, pointing out that it “exhibits continuity with earlier practice and theory exploring the legacy of European colonialism,” but then dismisses relations between globalization and post-colonialism on the basis of Negri and Hardt’s view that, because “the post-colonialist perspective remains primarily concerned with colonial sovereignty . . . it may be suitable for analysing history, [but] it is not able to theorise contemporary global structures.”1 Where theory takes precedence over the concrete actuality of the work of art as an object of study in its own right, we find that art is reduced to a passive illustration of a concept that the theorist has already arrived at, thereby denying art the autonomy of its own aesthetic intelligence. Moreover, traditional historiography remains intact and is unaltered by its encounter with other disciplines. In his edited collection Is Art History Global?, James Elkins (2007) assembles an international cast of contributors to debate the epistemological shifts of the past thirty years in which the canonical scholarship of Erwin Panofsky, Arnold Hauser, Meyer Schapiro, and others has been displaced by poststructuralism, feminism, visual culture, and postcolonial studies. Approaching the debate in such abstract terms, however, we find that no actual works of art are discussed by Elkins at all. Moreover, by merging the topic of globalization with the category of “world art,” the area-studies model established in anthropological and archaeological orientations toward non-Western art maintains an essentialist notion of self-contained cultures as discretely boundaried totalities, offering no account of their interactions. When the non-Western is confined to premodern antiquity, we face another paradox, namely, that modern art, Western or otherwise, has no place within the category of “world art.”2 As I argue in my introduction to Cosmopolitan Modernisms (2005a), postcolonial theory (which originated in literary scholarship) is itself highly culpable with regard to the tendency toward theoreticism. Having revealed the constitutive rather than reflective role of representation in constructions of colonial reality, the emphasis on the positioning of Self and Other has led to an imbalance whereby studies of visual othering in Western art constantly refer back to the imperial ego, as it were, in such a way that overshadows the agency of colonial and diasporic artists as creators of representations in their own right. Standing back for a moment, one might observe that the so-called dominant narrative of modern art has been under attack ever since conceptual art called the optical model of visuality into question, precipitating a crisis for modernism as such.3 But it is one thing to dismantle an influential way of seeing, quite another to put forward a sustainable alternative. Rather than suggest a fully fledged model for the study of cross-cultural relations in art, my series drew attention to the gradual and incremental steps needed to both deconstruct the dominance of formalist universalism and also explore methods that refuse the converse tendencies of sociological or contextual reductionism. As a case in point we may consider how the modernism/colonialism relationship is mostly addressed within the episteme of art history within the extremely limited purview of primitivism. Considering the amount of ink spilled on the subject of Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) during the 1980s and since, one might say that the disavowal of primitivism’s colonial contexts within the formalist narrative of morphological “borrowings” was held fully intact for the best part of eighty years. The idea of “significant form” proposed in the 1920s by Bloomsbury critics Clive Bell and Roger Fry

4 Simon Gikandi, “Picasso, Africa and the Schemata of Difference,” Modernism/Modernities 10, no. 3 (2003): 455–80.

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5 Mark Crinson, Modern Architecture and the End of Empire (Farnham: Ashgate, 2003).

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was only dislodged from epistemological privilege by the psychoanalytic concept of fetishism that informed readings of Picasso by Hal Foster (1985) and Simon Gikandi,4 and by James Clifford’s (1988) notion of the circulation of tribal artifacts in museum collections and other institutional sites of exchange in the art and culture system (fig. 13.1). In the twenty-five years since this breakthrough moment, it is the concept of appropriation, above all, that has played a transformative role in our understanding of subaltern agency and authorship; but because such concepts have been mostly deployed in relation to contemporary art, it is only in the last ten years or so that its paradigm-shifting potential has been activated in archival and historical research. Perhaps more so than painting and sculpture, it strikes me that architecture further contributes to breaking primitivism’s interpretative monopoly on our understanding of modernism and colonialism, for the 2008 exhibition In the Desert of Modernity, like my own series, shares a timeline of research that also includes work such as Modern Architecture and the End of Empire (2003) by Mark Crinson.5 For my part, starting from the premise that modernity defines a state of being or condition of life in which disparate material elements and social actors are constantly uprooted from their origins and brought into contact by proliferating networks of trade, travel, and market exchange, the Annotating Art’s History series set out to demonstrate that, far from being limited to primitivism, cross-cultural dialogue plays a meaningful and ever-present role in the story of modernism as a whole. From movements such as surrealism, through major underlying processes such as abstraction or montage, to the “high/low” crossovers of pop that inaugurated the problematic of postmodernism, cultural difference is not aberrant, accidental, or “special,” but a structural variable and an even normative feature of artistic production under the conditions of modernity that had become global by the late nineteenth century. Modernism, one might say, was always multicultural—it is simply our consciousness of it that has changed. Each of the ruptures inaugurated in European modernism circa 1910 made contact with a global system of transnational flows and exchanges— from Malevich’s conception of monochrome painting, shaped by his reading of Vedic philosophy and Indian mysticism, to Duchamp’s ready-mades, which mirrored the decontextualized mobility of tribal artifacts. Modernist primitivism may be the generic paradigm in which these (unequal) exchanges are most visible, but a broader understanding of cross-culturality as a consequence of modern globalization also entails the necessity to question the optical model of visuality that determines how cultural differences are rendered legible as “readable” objects of study. Because current thinking on globalization breaks the foundational equivalence between modernization and Westernization, it interrupts the classical geometry of center and periphery that was indispensable for earlier approaches in development studies and world-system theory in Marxism. The assumption that becoming modern was at all times identical to the process of becoming Western (and hence giving up one’s identity) has been wholly undermined by awareness of the agency of selective appropriation on the part of social actors who were indeed subordinate to the hegemony of the Western center economically and politically, but who nonetheless exercised choices in what they adapted and what they rejected in the space of the cross-cultural encounter. Whereas previous theories saw imperialist globalization in the age of empire as a steamroller of dominance, eliminating local, tribal, and indigenous differences in total, the agency of adaptation on the part of the colonized made the lived experience of colonialism a contradictory phenomenon on all sides, thereby creating multiple sites of resistance, antagonism, and negotiation. This emphasis on the mutual entanglement of contradictory forces is what distinguishes the multiple modernities thesis. With the greater focus given to spatial processes of globalization in the work of urbanist Anthony King (2011), along with Arjun Appadurai’s

7 Howard J. Booth and Nigel Rigby, Modernism and Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 28.

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6 David Morley, “EurAm, Modernity, Reason and Alterity,” in Morley and Chen, 1995, 349.

(1996) studies of localized adaptations of material and symbolic goods in global circulation, and Ulf Hannerz’s (1996) account of transnational flows, the range of analytical perspectives brought together in Global Modernities (Featherstone, Lash, and Robertson, 1995) defined a turning point in the sociology of culture which was further developed by Jan Nederveen Pieterse (2004). Far from resulting in a pluralist free-for-all in which there are as many modernisms as you like, the attention that the multiple modernities thesis gives to complex dynamics of structure and agency shows that the process of modernization-as-Westernization rarely resulted in a fully achieved or finalized state of colonial subjectification because it was constantly made ambivalent by the generative agonism of power and resistance. When told as a narrative that emanates from a unitary center, the material processes of modernization—the application of scientific knowledge to technologies of social infrastructure and wealth creation that act as engines of “progress”—are often conflated with the philosophical condition of modernity. This concerns the lived experience or subjectivity of the atomized individual that is taken to characterize the rationalist self-consciousness associated with secularization. But by decoupling the equation between modernity and the West, contemporary globalization theory calls for historical investigation of the combinatory formations whereby certain aspects of the objective process of modernization were accepted while certain subjective features of modernity were deselected. Although never colonized, imperial Japan accepted modernization in science and technology but not democracy in politics; Arab nations of the Middle East similarly adopted capitalist infrastructure while retaining religious traditions instead of individualism. Whereas Eurocentric ideology told the story as a linear sequence from the Renaissance and Reformation to the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, the alternative is to conceptually disaggregate the constituent processes, as David Morley explains in the context of cultural studies methodology: “The association between the Occident and modernity has to be viewed as radically contingent in historical terms. If there is no necessary relation between these terms, then it follows that to oppose either one of them is not necessarily to oppose the other.”6 Taken up in their literary history of the modernism/ colonialism relation, Booth and Rigby add: “This would mean for instance that modernity could be … welcomed in the non-Western world, even as the precise form it takes in the West, or the West’s way of promoting or exporting it could be stridently opposed.” Hence it is equally important to bear in mind the disjunctions whereby, “rather than thinking of empire as actively involved in the exporting or disseminating of modernism (which … might be ideologically or politically suspect in the eyes of imperialists), we could see it as exporting modernity.”7 Understood as culture’s answering response to predicaments and dilemmas thrown up by the lived experience of modernization, modernism was not only a multivoiced phenomenon within the West—at times celebrating the machine age, at times articulating critique of capitalist alienation—it was further fractured in the envelope of colonial modernity where the exported reality of the nation-state constituted a decisive frontier of cultural and political agonism. In the context of anticolonial struggles in India, Partha Mitter notes that the circulation of modernist ideas following the 1922 exhibition of Bauhaus artists in Calcutta (including Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee) played a catalytic role for painterly experimentation by Gaganendranath Tagore, Amrita Sher-Gil, and Jamimi Roy, who in his view articulated a variant of primitivism that acted as a counterdiscourse of modernity (fig. 13.2). Whereas nationalist artists of the 1890s such as Ravi Varma and the Bengal school embraced academic naturalism and inserted indigenous content, the formal break with verisimilitude on the part of Indian modernists combined local and global elements to forge a cosmopolitanism in which the binarist logic of imperialism and nationalism alike was

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8 Partha Mitter, “Reflections on Modern Art and National Identity in Colonial India: An Interview,” in Mercer, 2005a, 42.

9 Ian McLean, “Aboriginal Modernism in Central Australia,” in Mercer, 2008, 92.

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10 McLean, “Aboriginal Modernism in Central Australia,” 76.

displaced. Because “the very ambiguities of primitivism provided a powerful tool for challenging the values and assumptions of modern industrial civilization, that is the West,” Mitter regards its presence in early Indian modernism as a “counter-modern rather than an anti-modern tendency, because it is really the twin sister of modernity, its alter ego; it’s within it and yet continually questioning it.” Where indigenous traditions among Bengali intelligentsia created favorable conditions for the reception of modernism, the agency of appropriation produced semiotic transformations of the “primitive.” As Mitter adds, “I think of Mahatma Gandhi, in this sense, as the most profound primitivist critic of western capitalism. He fashioned the philosophy of non-violent resistance, and the self-sufficiency of village life in India, as symbolised by the humble spinning-wheel, out of elements associated with the discourse of primitivism.”8 Within the same timeline of the 1890s to the 1920s, Ian McLean examines formations of colonial modernism and anticolonial modernism in Aboriginal Australia. Breaking with the standard view that modern art by Aboriginal artists only began with the use of canvas and acrylic paints in the 1970s, McLean argues that an artistic response to Western modernity began at the point of first contact with remote desert communities in the late nineteenth century. Ceremonial dances received European visitors with acts of performative mimicry. Sacred carvings were refashioned for secular purposes in such a way that their “outside designs” sought to educate white foreigners even as they contained “inner secrets” known only to initiates. During the 1930s Albert Namitjira produced watercolor landscapes, but while his technical mastery rendered him inauthentic under Eurocentric eyes, McLean reveals how his choices “make a claim for his Aboriginal inheritance, especially for the sacred sites of Arrernte Dreaming.” McLean accepts that exported modernization established a universal or worldwide condition, but he insists that “far from being a purely Western or European construct, modernity is a mode of living that has taken root in many traditions, including ones often considered antithetical to it.”9 Hence rejecting the view that indigenous peoples and cultures were passively “victimized” by modernity as an “alien invader,” McLean’s emphasis is on the combinatory logics of hybridization in art’s answering response: Modernity’s apocalyptic effects on all traditional societies, including Aboriginal ones, are undeniable. However, such argument easily slips into a binary logic that flattens the ambiguities of the colonial encounter and silences the historical adaptations of the colonised; thus colonising them all over again. This binary logic is the principal reason why western critics have had such difficulty accepting the modernism of non-western and especially tribal art. In reality, the agents of tradition did what they always had: they adapted and adjusted to the new, even appropriated some of its ideas. Admittedly the adjustment was often bumpy and at times contradictory, but the history of Aboriginal modernism is the story of such adaptation.10 In my third example of the colonial modern I would cite the Adinembo House built in the Niger delta between 1919 and 1924 by the Nigerian architect James Onwudinjo (fig. 13.3), which is the focus of Stanley Ikem Okoye’s contribution to the fourth volume in my series, Exiles, Diasporas & Strangers. Observing how the building’s flat roof struck a double-sided contrast with both the clay and thatch materials of indigenous dwellings and the brickwork of British colonial architecture, Okoye devotes attention to the use of reinforced concrete as a “foreign” technology that found a receptive environment on the part of the local elite, including the wealthy Igbo trader who had commissioned the house. Where Okoye highlights the decorative and ornamental features on its external walls by way of contrast to Adolf Loos, the key point is the overlapping time frame in which modernist architects in Austria and West Africa explored similar concerns.11

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12 Samella Lewis, Art: African American (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978); David Driskell, Two Centuries of Black American Art, exhibition catalogue (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1976); Romare Bearden with Harry Henderson, A History of AfricanAmerican Artists, from 1792 to the Present (New York: Pantheon, 1993).

My own contributions to the series focused on the modern black diaspora, from Caribbean abstract painters in the New Commonwealth era such as Aubrey Williams and Frank Bowling to the photomontage of Romare Bearden in the African American scene of the 1960s. In one sense, as products of forced migrations, diasporas are very distinct from colonies—in the latter your land has been taken away from you, whereas in the former you have been taken away from your land. But with methods opened up by Paul Gilroy’s concept of the Black Atlantic as a circulatory space of migrant flows, the study of diasporic modernity provides a fresh point of entry into the archive, with sometimes surprising results. Surveys by Richard Powell (2001) and Sharon Patton (1999) acknowledge the global dimensions by which blackness tends to overflow the territorial boundaries of nationality, thereby widening the scope of previous work by Samella Lewis and David Driskell, and the encyclopedia Romare Bearden cowrote with Harry Henderson, which established African American art history as a distinct field of study.12 The Harlem Renaissance tends to be viewed within this field as the originating moment of black modernism, but with the broader concept of modernity we not only see visual mediums such as photography as a key site in which the representation of autonomous selfhood was staged after the abolition of slavery, but we begin to notice that it was also in the earlier 1890s that a distinctive philosophical discourse of self-inquiry was generated among African American intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois. Du Bois took part in the Exposition Universelle held in Paris in 1900, traveling there to oversee the installation of the American Negro Exhibit (fig. 13.4)—a collection of photographs, maps, books, journals, and scientific charts documenting his research at Atlanta University. World fairs and international expositions have been widely studied as spectacles of imperial power—and in the Dahomey Village in the French pavilion, Africans were put on display in 1900 as living specimens of otherness—but how much richer would our understanding of these contested sites of globality be once we factor in the simultaneous presence of African American diaspora subjects? What Du Bois exhibited, to be sure, was not art but information: however, the documents of self-improvement he displayed in the American Negro Exhibit were understood by Du Bois himself as a manifestation of black self-modernization (fig. 13.5). The nineteenth-century networks of travel that paved the way for the Pan-African Congress (whose first meeting, which Du Bois also attended, was held in London in 1900) encourage us to conceptualize the Black Atlantic as a “counter-culture of modernity” (Gilroy, 1993) not only in music and literature but in the visual arts as well. Dominant discourses of internationalism, designed to establish conditions for capitalist competition among rival nation-states (which, for Hall, defines the second phase of globalization up to the imperialist catastrophe of World War I), were themselves shadowed and antagonized by an internationalism-from-below, of which Black Atlantic spaces are exemplary. The transatlantic journeys African American artists took to Paris in the 1930s were prefigured in the nineteenth century by sculptor Mary Edmonia Lewis and painter Henry Ossawa Tanner—whose work was not modernist per se even though it was engaged with self-conscious reflection on the dilemmas of life under conditions of diasporic modernity. Revisiting the formative period of the 1890s to the 1920s through the lens of the multiple formations of modernism on a global scale now gives us the opportunity to examine how each of these cross-cultural variants was structured in dominance and subordination. In other words, we can think of the genealogy of modernism not as an “internalist” or self-generating story that only begins and ends in the West but as the narrative of a decisive moment in which the driving contradictions of the modern global conjuncture gave rise to many different forms of artistic production. Having touched upon anticolonial appropriations that generated a cosmopolitan modernism which rejected neotraditionalism and nationalism, and a diasporic modernity that was

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11 Stanley Ikem Okoye, “Unmapped Trajectories: Early Sculpture and Architecture of a ‘Nigerian’ Modernity,” in Mercer, 2008, 28–44.

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inhabited by the transnational travels of black artists who acted as world citizens, it must be stressed that art history is only now—extremely belatedly—beginning to arrive at a truly universalist understanding of the logic of transculturation in the visual arts. In periodizing globalization, Hall characterizes “the third phase, culminating in the post–World War II period,” as marked by “the decline of the old European-based empires, the era of national independence movements and decolonisation,” which “coincides with the break-up of a whole visual, conceptual epistemological framework which we call ‘modernism.’ Modernism follows the wider index by shifting from its origins in turn-of-the-century Europe to the US” (2003, 194). In the trauma-based temporality of nachträglichkeit—that is, deferred action or “afterwardsness”—the interdependent or co-constitutive imbrication of modernism and colonialism only became visible with the breakup of hegemonic consensus brought about by the “post” in postmodernism and postcolonialism. Although concepts of hybridity soon fell out of the metropolitan fashion cycle, the multiple modernity thesis encourages us to reconsider the entire range of its cognate terms—creolization, syncretism, translation, dialogism—as conceptual resources for mapping the logic of transculturation in the visual arts. By clarifying the differential combinations of modernization and modernity in specific conjunctures of the global, we may move toward a more rounded view of modernism as a world-making practice of art that was always already driven by cross-culturality.

IN AN INTERVIEW TO TV-KULTURAFDELINGEN DANMARKS RADIO, 1987.

Since we met you, people, five hundred years ago, look at us. We’ve given everything, you are still taking. I mean, where will the whole Western world be without us Africans? Our cocoa, timber, gold, diamond, platinum, etc., everything you have is us. I am not saying it, it’s a fact, and in return for all these, what have we got? Nothing.

AMA ATA AIDOO

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Naine Terena de Jesus

Crafts and the Indigenous Social Body

This text was originally published in TERENA DE JESUS, Naine. “Artesanato e o corpo social dos indígenas”. Arte indígena no Brasil midiatização, apagamentos e ritos de passagem. Cuiabá: Oráculo Comunica, 2022.

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“But this isn’t contemporary art. It looks like the stuff indigenous people sell at traffic lights in the cities.” — (One day watching social media, November 2022)

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But what is indigenous art? Handicrafts, artefacts, contemporary indigenous art. The process of hybridisation between indigenous handicrafts and non-indigenous elements must be taken into account if we are to think about the possibility of a definition of art, assuming we can find a common term. This analysis can be conducted from different perspectives, including the fields of economics, media, and art disciplines. In a nutshell, we could simplify everything and say that art is any product that is recognised by non-native people specialised in the subject matter who validate it. It can thus be found in those places where contemporary art moves. Or we could deduce that it is a product that can be approached with the languages and artistic media known to the non-indigenous art system and is therefore more quickly absorbed. As far as the community and social aspects are concerned, however, we have to be a little more concerned about the meaning of this initial statement. One day I asked an indigenous relative if there were any women painters in her community. She told me that many, if not all, were, but some were at university studying visual arts. This valuable piece of information immediately got me thinking. I felt I was adopting the models of differentiation between the craftswoman and the artist – from the village courtyard to the academy, where technique and academic aspects are privileged over original technique. I realised I had made a mistake and rephrased my request: “Ask the women in your area, those who consider themselves artists, to get in touch with me.” I was thus delegating the understanding of art and the artist to the relationships experienced within the territory and by each of these women, taking into account the context of the people, their intersections, and their personal journey. For this reason, in this text I refer to those who are considered to be artisans as artist–artists, to make some considerations on the social place assigned to these indigenous women artists.

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1 I use the term white to refer to the way many of us indigenous people refer to non-indigenous people.

All this simply to say that I do not want the content of our indigenous productions to be fragmented and inserted into disputes over narratives built on what art is that is born from creativity and (white)1 intellectual thinking, and that is endorsed by filmmakers, critics, and venues and spaces specialising in the arts. Let alone multiply the discourse that our artistic productions are the stuff that’s “sold at traffic lights on city streets”. For us indigenous people, it must be reiterated, our perceptions have to be more robust than what we do, even if it means understanding the languages in which our productions end up being framed in the non-indigenous system. What is indigenous art, my relative? There are so many answers that I couldn’t collect all those I have heard over the years invested in following processes and activities. The craftsperson and artisanship, or perhaps artefacts, remain associated with repetition that leaves no room for creativity, intelligence, or ideas. From an economic point of view, it is well known that what is considered art and what is considered a handicraft have a market that generates income for families. This is an important fact that should not be overlooked when thinking about the paths of these productions. It should be emphasised that, just as for non-indigenous artists, “making a living from the arts” is also a challenge. But for indigenous peoples this challenge can be much greater, because it implies a total lack of knowledge of ethnic groups and their diversity, which leads to a narrowing of ideas and a homogenisation of the ways of seeing and making art. Thus, only what an artist–thinker proposes is assumed to be true. In saying this, we have to keep in mind that not all indigenous artists will be able to make their mark on the contemporary art scene in terms of visibility and the market. Let us remember that indigenous artist–artisans have spent decades selling their art, art that forms the financial basis of their families, often without any respect for their skills and identity. And where is the drawback in this discourse? Certainly, in the political construction and imagery concerning the potential and places of artisans and artists. Is there an educational and social responsibility of the art market towards indigenous peoples? In this game of musical chairs, the social position of the indigenous artist and craftsperson composes a scene in which hierarchy or categorisation defines spaces for each according to the non-indigenous value system. This social position of the artist–craftsperson is continually trivialised and marginalised among non-indigenous people, undermining capacities and fostering the disappearance of the social body of indigenous people who are undoubtedly agents who produce and maintain techniques, memories, ethno-knowledge, artistic knowledge, and experiences. By reproducing the opposition between tradition and innovation, they are also denied the place of innovation. What we can see with on closer inspection is that, in the indigenous context, to innovate means to maintain what is known as tradition in the face of pressure and dwindling cultural practices, in the face of the advance of mega-businesses, metropolises, and consumerism. To innovate means to continue to be what one is. Promoting a creation closer to non-indigenous language or, conversely, focusing on manifestations that are perpetuated from generation to generation does not disqualify the work of today’s indigenous people. Not even one of them. This should be a concern and a practice between the creator and the receiving audience, because both are cultural mediators. What I mean by this is that indigenous relatives should reflect very consistently on the fact that they adapt their productions to gain media visibility or to obtain more financial coverage, and that this could become a collective burden for future generations. If a contemporary installation made by an indigenous artist tells a story, or many stories, ancestral clay pottery – produced according to production codes established by a specific people – also contains within itself processes, pleasures, dialogues, and references,

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assuming multiple functions ranging from the utilitarian aspect to the status of an art object, depending on the context in which it is presented. Finally, one could imagine a more in-depth discourse on the cross-fertilisation of these productions into fields such as design, fashion, and other categories that would increase both their symbolic and commercial value. To a certain extent, this is already happening. The adoption of certain categories such as fashion, furniture, or eco-friendly jewellery repositions these productions as art deriving from the dedication of those who produce them and the rigour of their aesthetic creation. There is also a recognition of the productions in these fields – especially due to the multiplication of models that are spreading among indigenous artists – such as eco-friendly jewellery. This is perhaps a plausible topic for discussion: the affiliation of the pieces produced and how much this affects the consumer public. One day someone commented on a social network that a piece of jewellery on display did not belong to the people it was connected to in the shop. The problem in this case was broader, as it was a shop selling products from different peoples, but under the trade name of one person, reflecting virtual narratives, the distortions of the posted image, and the lack of identification of the context in which the pieces were produced. Identification is necessary to explain that, in a more practical sense, the pieces are being sold along with their symbolic value: the history of a people, their style, their origin, etc. Even if several similar pieces are produced, they will always carry stories. Even if the artist–craftsperson knows where their pieces will end up once completed, it is a journey fraught with temporalities and artistic skills that make the process always different while still resulting in identical pieces. Starting from the different productions and their public recognition, what is being exercised is human dignity and the social place of all indigenous peoples, as a people endowed with knowledge, technology, and memory.

THE FALLING SKY. CAMBRIDGE AND LONDON: HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2013.

The forest is alive. It can only die if the white people persist in destroying it. If they succeed, the rivers will disappear underground, the soil will crumble, the trees will shrivel up, and the stones will crack in the heat. The dried-up earth will become empty and silent. The xapiri spirits who come down from the mountains to play on their mirrors in the forest will escape far away. Their shaman fathers will no longer be able to call them and make them dance to protect us. They will be powerless to repel the epidemic fumes which devour us. They will no longer be able to hold back the evil beings who will turn the forest to chaos. We will die one after the other, the white people as well as us. All the shamans will finally perish. Then, if none of them survive to hold it up, the sky will fall.

DAVI KOPENAWA

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149

Contemporary Indigenous Art as a Trap for Traps

This text was first published by Galeria Jaider Esbell online on 9.9.2020.

外国人无处不在

Jaider Esbell

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Before any other matter, I want to emphasise the legitimacy of this essay. I believe – indeed, I hope – that it should be considered important by all those who question the term, its negation, or even its exaltation. Writing on the subject is a legitimate activity precisely from this perspective: I am alive, artistic, indigenous, and autonomous. For an entire decade I have devoted myself entirely to thinking of my art as part of a broad political and strategic system. Its limits are deliberately blurred, so that one day they can be placed in a context of equivalence, to give rise to real possibilities for dialogue with movements that are already extensively disseminated. From where I stand, I can neither affirm nor deny anything. Nor does the intention of my writing go beyond the boundaries of my own work. I do not hold a professorship within an influential academy, but over the years I have realised that these spaces already exist and that they build theories and then propagate them according to their own structures and motivations. I was born into an environment full of creativity, or lethargy if I had succumbed to the invitations of self-destruction. I came into the world already distorted. I use the word “distorted” with reservations and licence, because at this initial level I cannot help but refer to the arrival and action of the European invaders on the specific dynamics of the indigenous peoples of the lands now claimed. Let us then reflect for a moment on the subject of this text. Trap by trap. Systems of power. Colonial concepts. Practices mixed with values and references. Identity and self-consciousness. Function, form, and content. The question of territory and territoriality from this point of view, and I repeat: I, a living artist of Makuxi descent, a people with a broad socio-interactive and expansionist political and aesthetic movement that was a point of reference well before the arrival of the “white” invaders, a point that I, too, wished to underscore. When you are born where and how I was born, you don’t have much choice but to try to become yourself, and this means denying not exactly who you are, but what they wanted you to be. The first resistance comes from within. The way I was raised was by no means the first violence I endured. It is just that my body does not belong to me unless I see it as an extension of historical accumulations. Violence is a propagated energy of almost indiscernible range, but so it is. At some point, we have to broaden our reading of the world simply to be just with the object of our study. Imagine the effects on a population that is constantly assimilating and de-assimilating for five hundred years. I could not help but question the ways in which the idea of education mattered to me. The uprising, which I now understand better, did not come about after a matter of a few years, but of centuries and, on another level, of millennia of untreated emotional disorders accumulating and projecting themselves more and more effectively onto the official general models and other forces of their own time. I was born at the end of the dictatorship. In a way, I was privileged to be born in the cradle of violence and to be able to see its face as my first landscape. As a second landscape, I was able to form worlds within myself from fragments. At that time, I was presented with a seemingly rigid, rounded, limited narrative, where all factors converge to give rise to other genetic codes, as it were. Hearing about the big tree took me to distant worlds. It was a summer’s night, the sky moonless, and I could hear the Milky Way. I started looking at all kinds of trees and observing all kinds of tracks, turning over rocks, going into crevices, digging everything out. Surely nothing unusual or exceptional would have happened in my life had the story been presented to me in another way, by someone else, at another time. But it was where our land is today, the indigenous land of Raposa Serra do Sol. It was told to me by my grandfather, an

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excellent teller of playful and fantastical stories. But he was a slave on the farms of the foreigners who usurped our world with the best of intentions: their own intentions, and all for themselves. I could not imagine that this scenario was possible. That the cowhides we lay on were the footprints of colonisation and war over land that was already foreign to us, because by national order it did not belong to us, as is still the case and as I believe it forever will be. A long time ago there was a big tree here. It had all kinds of fruit... How could I find it normal to have to go to school and not be able to accompany my relatives in their community work and thus enjoy the true knowledge constituted by our language and traditions? Who could I talk to about the great problems that plagued me if my teachers only knew how to teach reading and writing and had no time for my thoughts because theirs were fixed on tax returns. Everyone in their own world and me in yet another, more distant world, scribbling imaginary thoughts while the class shed tears over learning how to write their names. Today I can say that it was art that caught up with me. And this is the rhythm I have kept all these years: a constant movement of crossing the senses along a very narrow margin, those invisible places traversed only by the most judicious explorers. I became an explorer in a place where everything was being explored. I had to deal with fear, shyness, sadness, loneliness, and apathy. There, the land was no longer exploited for communal family farming, but for large corporations. Monocultural farming. They explored the land to extract minerals, timber, and land for cattle farms so large that you could not see where they were going. They explored the land for labour. They explored the land to spread miscegenation in perverse ways, from deception and promises to violent rape in the distant countryside that they imagined no one would be able to divulge. Hence the systems, the tricks, the strategies, the official and unofficial public policies of genocide were established. I was able to follow the whole process from where I was, as I said, having the privilege of being born where I was born and, what’s more, being able to take advantage of the Christian system my parents were born into. The Church had not yet declared war on the State. Their relationship was still complementary. As a boy going to catechism classes, I was able to explore the Church, walk with mothers across much of my land, to see and hear how the Church treated its inhabitants and how it related to the State, to power. Today I can more confidently say that what I was undertaking was an in-depth investigation and research into my origins. Above all, I can say that it was an investigation of my destiny, because I was curious about every aspect of society, regardless of my age and my reality. So why do I say that using the term Contemporary Indigenous Art is first and foremost a strategy? Perhaps because I cannot say, do, show, or experience everything that I have accumulated in imagination and vision through other means. I would not be like this if I had become a scientist, a priest, a soldier, a possibly illegal prospector, a farmer, a servant, or a teacher. Perhaps I would not have been able to externalise or give vent to my and others’ being if I had become a family man, a run-of-the-mill employee. It certainly would not have been so if I had not relinquished all these possibilities to be just an artist. And even the term artist, given what is expected of professionals in this field, could only go so far. I claim to be an artist, but what am I really? I decided to take on this role, to dedicate myself to it absolutely, and yet to get here I had to, as a strategy, follow conventional paths, like having a formal job. I got a job after sitting for an open state

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competition, and worked as a technical assistant in a state-owned electricity company. There, too, I continued my research into systems, policies, and strategies. At the same time, I was also studying at university; I eventually graduated and wanted to continue, but they wouldn’t let me. However, I was given an introduction to scientific methodologies and a basic understanding of the mechanisms by which science makes its case. Returning to the broader topic – contemporary indigenous art – I can say that it is another term in a realm of terms. But when working on this side, the subject of self, artist, indigenous, and author is given undeniable legitimacy. It is a trap to catch traps for various reasons, especially in the field of self-criticism, self-analysis, and self-development. Perhaps we should discuss whether indigenous people make art, craft, or artefacts; question uses and appropriations on both sides; discuss issues of collective authorship, the autonomy of an artist, or even obtain parameters that decide who might be considered an artist who isn’t among indigenous subjects. Perhaps going beyond borders and frontiers that in many places are blurred, such as the legitimisation of a claim to self-identity, miscegenation, or dual ethnic identity when natives merge with those of African descent. Perhaps one could go further, such as having a more defined field to highlight injustices that cannot be ignored, such as the disadvantages we bear as indigenous peoples in relation to all other ethnic groups, and also in relation to black population movements in this country and in the Americas, for example. Of course, I am opening this essay to the world, and I would like this material to be included in the content of higher education courses. I would like it to be read in postgraduate courses, teacher training courses, and the like. Today we can see, through dozens of indigenous subjects who openly express themselves to the general public, that this is actually an extremely complex system of visibility of pluralities. We have artists of all genders aiming at a strategy that is not yet evident. Perhaps what we are dealing with is a phenomenal transgenerational change and not a modal one. Not only because of the age of the subjects, but because of the content, the tenor of their performances, their voices, and the growing revolt of non-binary indigenous artists, those without gender. The question of gender, radicalisation, village life or lack thereof, the mastery or lack thereof of the native language of the people of origin, are all latent issues that can and should always be addressed from a constructive perspective. I cannot not underscore the issue of authorship, of the autonomy of artistic intent as a dissenting voice from the common environment without ceasing to be one. From artistic practice as a composite of higher acts. As a ritualistic rather than mythical whole, leading up to pajelança. As a shamanic, healing, and psycho-medical practice. As a connector of historical facts and as a trigger of synapses for worlds that exist but are not like those we have access to. An artist does not develop through impositions. Violent impositions can be very dangerous for the sensitive minds of artists. Finally, I would like to remind you that there are traps in everything and that we, indigenous peoples, need a trap to detect traps and, who knows, perhaps this is not exactly CIA – Contemporary Indigenous Art – realised and contextualised by its own authors.

THE LOCATION OF CULTURE. 2ND EDITION. LONDON: ROUTLEDGE, 2004.

If hybridity is heresy, then to blaspheme is to dream.

HOMI K. BHABHA

Exergue Luce deLire

Wherever you scratch a neoliberal society, you will find an intensification of violent discipline. For the 60th International Art Exhibition Foreigners Everywhere, this is of particular importance. Queer and trans people of color, migrants and refugees are subject to particular forms of violence and discipline barely addressed in the text generously republished here . In fact, the categories “trans” and “gender” have their own ties to whiteness and colonialism . Meanwhile opposition to so called “Gender Ideologies” still functions as the glue that keeps the European (and Global) right aligned . For example, in the year since my text was published, the German government, unbeknownst to international attention, drafted its so called “Self-Determination Law”, bending to TERF rhetoric with a particularly unhappy union between permissive rhetoric and disciplinary legal force . As matters are quickly evolving, I can only recommend that you listen to the queer and trans people around you – and to the ones within. 2

AJNABI MELKASTA JOGA

For starters, consider: Aizura, Aren Z., Cotten, Trystan, Balzer, Carsten, LaGata, Carla, Ochoa, Marcia, Vidal-Ortiz, Salvador, “Introduction – Decolonizing the Transgender Imaginary”, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly * Volume 1, Number 3 * August 2014, 308-319., Saleh, Fadi. 2020. “Transgender as a Humanitarian Category: The Case of Syrian Queer and Gender-Variant Refugees in Turkey.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 7 i (January). Doi:10.1215/23289252-7914500., Luce deLire, “Can the Transsexual Speak?“, in: philoSOPHIA: Journal of Transcontinental Feminism, Special Issue on Intersectionality Today, Vol. 13, 2024, Sandow Sinai, “On Returning Things to Their Proper Places,” Hypocrite Reader 99 (January 2022) <https://hypocritereader.com/99/ proper-places>

See exemplarily: Snorton, C. Riley. Black on Both Sides a Racial History of Trans Identity / C. Riley Snorton. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2017 and Gill-Peterson, Jules. Histories of the Transgender Child / Julian Gill-Peterson. Minneapolis ; University of Minnesota Press, 2018.

See exemplarily: Corredor, Elizabeth S. “Unpacking ‘Gender Ideology’ and the Global Right’s Antigender Countermovement.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 44, no. 3 (2019): 613–638, Bassi, Serena and LaFleur Greta (eds.). “TransExclusionary Feminisms and the Global New Right,” special issue, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 9, no. 3 (August 2022)

There isn’t much quality research in English, but you may follow @ buendnis.selbstbestimmung on Instagram to stay up to date. And if you read German, I recommend Pajam Masoumi, Juliana Franke, Mine Pleasure Bouvar, Luce deLire, “Das Selbstbestimmungsgesetz ist ein Angstgesetz”, in: Analyse und Kritik, 2/1/2024 <https://www. akweb.de/politik/das-selbstbestimmungsgesetz-der-ampelkoalition-ist-ein-angstgesetz/>

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NOTES

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MGA DAYUHAN SA LAHAT NG DAKO

Beyond Representational Justice

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Luce deLire

This article was first published in Texte Zur Kunst, Issue 129, “Trans Perspectives”, (March 2023), pp. 48-63.

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Anselm Franke used this term rather incidentally during the final discussion of the Freedom in the Bush of Ghosts conference, held December 16, 2017, as part of the programming for the exhibition “Parapolitics,” at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin.

See also Duncan Ballantyne-Way, “The Secret History of Cross Dressing with Sebastian Lifshitz,” Exberliner, September 12, 2022.

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For case studies, see Reina Gossett, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton, Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017).

Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005).

What is representational justice?1 One example can be found in the exhibition “Under Cover: A Secret History of Cross-Dressers” at C|O Berlin. The impressive collection, assembled by Sébastien Lifshitz over decades of detailed work, consists largely of postcards and snapshots of gender-nonconforming people. The collection is a treasure trove for historical research. 2 Yet the exhibition, curated by Lifshitz and Kathrin Schönegg, turns it into a school of clocking. We encounter a typology of gender-nonconforming people, with a particular focus on trans femininity centering around Marie-Pierre Pruvot (known as Bambi), who performed as a burlesque artist in France from the 1950s to the 1970s, then studied, transitioned, and later worked as an elementary school teacher in a Paris suburb. Besides her central role in the exhibition, we find a nearly 90-minute documentary of her life. Her story is surely worth telling. However, I want to focus on something else: the exhibition turns visitors into criminal investigators. Picture by picture, our gaze is trained to spot the more or less subtle clues indicating what sex had been assigned at birth to the person depicted. The exhibition seems oblivious to the real-world consequences of visibility. And here we have our prime example: Representational justice treats representation as a means of equality. Yet it ignores that the problem is not the (lack of or incorrect) representation itself but the violence it perpetrates. For on the one hand, trans people benefit from media representation, insofar as it presents trans identity as a viable alternative. Furthermore, such representation also engenders a social discourse that can serve as a basis for legal changes. Visibility does, however, have a toxic component as well.3 Some trans people – and for many years this also included Pruvot – simply prefer not to be recognized as trans.4 Another factor is safety: After the visibility of trans people of color increased in the United States in 2014, the violence seemed to worsen dramatically.

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1999).

Butler, Gender Trouble, XX, XXIII.

Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control.“ October, 59 (1992): 3-7; Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in The Pharmacopornographic Era, trans. Bruce Benderson (New York: Feminist Press, 2013). See also Luce deLire, “Can the Transsexual Speak?,” in “Intersectionality Today,” special issue, philoSOPHIA: Journal of Transcontinental Feminism 13 (forthcoming).

Quote from Hailee Bland Walsh, owaner of City Gym in Kansas City, Missouri, in Google Small Business, “The Story of Jacob and City Gym,” YouTube video, Jun 16, 2015, 2:30.

10 Jasbir K. Puar, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 1; and McKenzie Wark, Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse? (London: Verso, 2021); deLire, “Can the Transsexual Speak?” 11 Caél Keegan, “Transgender Studies, or How to Do Things with Trans*,” in The Cambridge Companion to Queer Studies, ed. Siobhan B. Somerville, Cambridge Companions to Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 66–78, at 72. 12 For more, see in Texte Zur Kunst, Issue 129, “Trans Perspectives”, (March 2023), pp. 48-63. 13 See Serena Bassi and Greta LaFleur, eds., “Trans-Exclusionary Feminisms and the Global New Right,” special issue, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 9, no. 3 (August 2022); and Sabine Hark and Paula-Irene Villa, eds., Anti-Genderismus – Sexualität und Geschlecht als Schauplätze aktueller politischer Auseinandersetzungen (Berlin: Transcript 2015).

どこでも外国人

The number of murders of trans people grew in 2015 by 50 percent. […] [T]ransgender women and people of color [are still] experiencing the highest rate of violence. […] The continued increase in murders of trans women of color underscores the deep need for political strategies other than simple visibility or invisibility […]. 5 But is subversive visibility not a credo of queer theory? Judith Butler famously argues in Gender Trouble that gender is constantly constructed via the performative re-iteration of gender norms.6 Consequentially, these norms can be gradually subverted by repeatedly enacting in alternative, dissenting ways. A larger spectrum of differently gendered people can then be accommodated in the spaces thus created. These emancipatory effects of visibility are the theoretical foundation of representational justice. However, this picture is only partially true. After all, the erosion of norms is only emancipatory where oppression is carried out through the violent enforcement of prescriptive norms. 7 But what happens when transgression itself becomes a mechanism of control? If we differentiate disciplinary societies from neoliberal societies, we notice two fundamentally different modes of normativity: 8 Disciplinary societies enforce obedience by violence; deviance is pathologized, punished, threatened, beaten, excluded, murdered. In neoliberal societies, transgression generates surplus value. Here, deviance is made marketable for consumption and production. Transness is currently situated on the threshold between normative disciple and neoliberal control – that is, between pathologization, criminalization, and disciplinary violence, on the one hand, and the diversification of consumption and production, on the other. What’s next? This is currently the subject of intense struggle. Back in 2015, for example, Google Business took advantage of Jacob Wanderling’s transition to advertise the company’s search function: “When people are looking online for a different kind of gym, somewhere that’s safe and inclusive, I want them to find us.”9 Deviance is in great demand as a creative impulse. After all, alternative perspectives offer an ideal resource for the perpetual renewal of neoliberal mechanisms of production.10 Consequentially, trans people have made significant contributions in all sorts of disciplines and are increasingly being rewarded for it.11 And yet, euphoria and fear toward trans people can and do coexist.12 From all sides, trans people are being deployed against the specter of disciplinary society: while hostility toward trans people has served as a unifying element of right-wing authoritarian politics in its struggle against an allegedly authoritarian “gender ideology,” so-called progressive forces are forming in opposition to what they see as an oppressive and restrictive array of norms, stereotypes, and prejudices.13 Yet progressive tolerance is kept in narrow confines: trans people will be granted protection and recognition only insofar as they participate in neoliberal regimes of exploitation as market-virile, tax-paying, and otherwise law-abiding individuals. Visibility and subversion have thus become objects of ideological exploitation in the face of neoliberalized mechanisms of social control. This counts for both the politics of power and the politics of exploitation, and with limited agency for (at least white, bourgeois, market-oriented) trans subjects. Here pinkwashing, there conservative values – but always in opposition to the specter of a disciplinary society. It is only in this context of resistance to allegedly disciplinary forces that visibility and subversion make any sense as a means of emancipation from norms. But visibility and subversion also generate problems apart from ideological exploitation:

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micha cárdenas, Poetic Operations: Trans of Color Art in Digital Media (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022), 15.

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14 Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The ‘Expositions Universelles,’ Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 21.

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15 David J. Getsy, “How to Teach Manet’s Olympia after Transgender Studies,” Art History 45, no. 2 (April 2022): 342–69, at 347. Elsewhere, I call this approach “gender abolitionism”; see Luce deLire, “Catchy Title [1] – Gender Abolitionism, Trans Materialism, and Beyond,” Year of the Women Magazine, 2022.

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16 Self-recognition may be an alternative reason, but for many, social intelligibility is crucial as well. On social intelligibility see deLire “Catchy Titel.”

INDETERMINACY Although the systematic transgression of norms can help to transform them, it can also lead to their intensification: when I was recently threatened with death at a Halloween party, I was not perceived as an epitome of queer subversion. In fact, my transgression became an occasion to perform cis patriarchal hetero masculinity in an entirely unironic way. Nothing can guarantee the subversive effect of transness. The same can be said about the exhibition of the Lifshitz collection at C|O: nothing prevents hegemonically identified visitors from reading it as a freak show, from reaffirming their own gender identity one photo at a time, or from drawing on this typology of transgressions to identify trans people outside the exhibition space, where they become subject to other people’s projections and insecurities. Subversion without re-subjectification runs the risk of remaining mere re-inscription. The goal of subversion cannot be mere representation. Every audience must be addressed in a particular way. The standard mode of subjectification in a photo exhibition like “Under Cover” is still that of the disembodied arbiter deciding between good and bad, interesting and uninteresting, beautiful and boring, affecting and depressing, et cetera.14 This is the cis-white patriarchal subjectivity the exhibition space and its cultural history are inscribed with and, indeed, modeled on. Therefore, subversion cannot simply mean to confront patriarchal subjects with some imagery and hope for the best. Subversion must actively render cis white patriarchal subjectification impossible while also creating alternative spaces. Therefore, subversion is more a question of curation and less of representation. EXHAUSTION AND NORMALIZATION The idea of performative subversion can lead one to (implicitly) conceive of transness as a momentary transgression or as the horizon of an emancipation process of society at large – cis gender is then tacitly normalized as the unexamined opposite of transgression. Yet, some of us have to live in the metaphors that others decorate their theories and artworks with. Representational justice, the politics of visibility, and subversion as a political strategy are fashionable instruments for academic analysis. They are neat concepts if we want to stage ourselves as revolutionary subjects in left-wing political peer groups. Yet they are tough to live in. What are the effects when socially sanctioned aggression, constant distance in everyday interactions, repeated refusal of solidarity and privileging toward cis gender drag on for years? Is it not exhaustion and mistrust? The revolution has been overdue for a long time, and our allies do not – or barely – have to carry its burden. The existence of viable trans identities is being left out of the equation. Why? Who is afraid of irreversible transitions and surgical intervention – if not those who (implicitly) normalize cis bodies and cis identities as intrinsically worthy of protection? Is this not ultimately the reinscription of biological gender at the level of political reality? EXPLOITATION In neoliberal societies, the transgression of norms itself becomes a source of exploitation. David Getsy’s “axioms” for trans studies in art history can serve as an exemplary case: “Take as axiomatic that seeing someone’s body – even in a state of exposure and scrutiny – does not tell us who they are or what gender they know themselves to be.” 15 But why undergo facial feminization surgery if not for the sake of social intelligibility?16 If white cis men can declare in the name of trans studies that trans women should not be read as women, nothing is won. Getsy, of course, can capitalize on the growing interest in trans by giving cis artists the consecrations of political correctness. Yet neither he nor his subjects must suffer the consequences of the lauded transgression of gender norms themselves. 17 The bottom line is: trans people are being exploited.

19 For a contrary position, compare Jules Pelta Feldman, “On Loss – or Feelings Thereof,” Texte zur Kunst no. 128 (December 2022): 72–82. 20 I’m crossing out “rectify” here because this scale of violence doesn’t allow for actual rectification. See also Luce deLire, “How Ideal is Ideal Theory actually? Rawls, Mills, Reverse Racism and Justice as Failure,” Philosophy Today 67 no. 2 (forthcoming). 21 In addition to TZK, such special issues are published by Sinister Wisdom, forthcoming, and the Journal of Visual Culture 19, no 2 (August 2020). It remains to be seen how sustainable these interventions will be. 22 They were, for example, the first to lose their lives in the course of colonization (I am using “trans” catachrestically here). See for instance: Jessica Hinchy, Governing Gender and Sexuality In Colonial India: ‘The Hijra,’ c. 1850–1900, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); and Oyèrónké Oyěwùmí, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

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18 Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 75.

Getsy has been making his academic career on the backs of those who live in his theories – and, in the worst case, he even stands in their way. Representational justice forgets that the problem is not representation itself but the violence that emanates from it. Representational justice is merely nominal, not material emancipation. In relation to race, Charles Mills describes a state of nominal recognition accompanied by the denial of the material consequences of racism: Whereas before it was denied that nonwhites were equal persons, it is now pretended that nonwhites are equal abstract persons who can be fully included in the polity merely by extending the scope of the moral operator [access to rights], without any fundamental change in the arrangements that have resulted from the previous system of explicit de jure racial privilege [such as the distribution of wealth].18 In disciplinary societies, minoritized people are denied the status of legal subjects. They are subjected to violence, ignorance, and social isolation. Neoliberal societies, on the other hand, recognize minoritized people as legal subjects. The minoritized now have the right to be exploited without risking their lives – just like everyone else. That being said, the existing material order is, among other things, a result of the disciplinary imposition of cis gender norms. What about the effects of past historical injustice? What happens to fortunes that were amassed through theft, expropriation, and murder? And what happens to the careers of trans people that have been ruined, to social networks that partly generate their binding power from transphobic stereotypes (male alliances, fraternities, patriarchal female socialization)? What happens to artistic canonization, to ideals of beauty, to pictorial traditions and archives that were established over centuries? Here, the violence lives on – day by day. Yet museums are full of works by cis artists. Sell them! Generate a new canon! Devalue cis gender aesthetically! Let trans people write about your art! Turn over your galleries, your studios, your art collections to trans collectives!19 Provide trans people with money, housing, resources, et cetera! These would be adequate measures to respond to how, historically, trans identities, careers, and the representation of trans people have been rendered impossible. Shocked? Provoked? Representational justice belies the magnitude of the injustice and obfuscates the radical nature of the steps that would be needed to rectify it.20 It distorts the problem into a minority issue. But the murder, exploitation, and disciplining of all minorities always means the establishment of a hegemonic order. People are not born cis – they are made so. And how are they made so? Through transphobia – and especially through transmisogyny. By encouraging cis male behavior while discouraging non-male behavior – that is, trans femininity. There is no patriarchy without transmisogyny. Thus, to be cis means to benefit from hostility toward trans people. Yet relief and repair in this context mean more than just a few jobs for a few trans people, a special issue and some trans perspectives once in a while, occasionally featuring some trans people on the cover of a magazine, or sharing their posts on social media.21 Trans politics must mean the fundamental transformation of all social conditions. Trans people have been systematically murdered, intimidated, and kept in poverty.22 Trans politics is not just the politics of legal equality. It is also the politics of improving the material living conditions of all people through eradicating exploitation and violence against trans people. Therefore, successful trans politics must ultimately lead to the end of cis white hetero patriarchy. Trans politics is thus also the expropriation of large housing companies, because the vast majority of trans people pay rent. Trans politics is also the decriminalization of sex work, because many trans people do sex work. Trans politics is also about collective bargaining as well as curbing inflation and the rising cost of living, because trans people are more likely to be affected by poverty

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

17 Another example is Sascha Crasnow, “Beyond Binaries: Trans Studies and the Global Contemporary,” Art Journal 80, no. 4 (2021): 82–90, at 84.

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23 An open letter to art institutions regarding reparations for trans people has yet to be written. For an example regarding psychoanalysis, see McKenzie Wark, “Dear Cis Analysts. A call for reparations,” P&RAPRAXIS, Fall 2022

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and thus proportionately more likely to be impacted by such trends. Trans politics is also about allocating opportunities for therapeutic care and group-based support programs to help cope with day-to-day violence. It also means a ban on the inheritance of wealth, because many trans people are estranged from their families. In the remuneration of trans people, it also means taking into account the additional work that trans people inevitably have to perform in cis structures – something that Texte zur Kunst has also not managed to do optimally. Nominally, I was not paid less than is usual for a self-employed coeditor here. Materially, however, it required extra work on my part to make up for existing inequalities. Mills encapsulates it: a history of structural discrimination against trans people prevents cooperation on a material level that distributes the workload equally. The politics of visibility, which aims at representational justice, ignores these concrete political dimensions. As such, it benefits those who want to pat themselves on the back for having done everything just right, without actually changing the real-world conditions for trans people, trans artists, or a canon that is inherently hostile to trans people. Representational justice systematically benefits those who have the most privilege. It makes trans safe – for cis people. What can art do? Art institutions can stop obsessively orbiting around the representation of identity and regarding art about trans people as the paradigmatic form of trans art. Art institutions can commission and purchase art by trans artists and have it discussed by trans critics. They can deaccession cis art for a change or not talk about it so much; and how about not hiring cis people for a while?23 The texts and artworks in this issue of TZK can perhaps function as gestures in that direction – and it is to be hoped that it won’t stop here. Can art institutions cultivate hospitality toward trans people? For this purpose, trans people will need to be consulted. In this spirit, this issue of TZK is also meant as an invitation to trans people: Let’s make more art! Let’s do more critical writing, beyond the discourses of rights, recognition, and representation! burn it all down.

AT YOUR OWN RISK: A SAINT’S TESTAMENT. WOODSTOCK, (NY) OVERLOOK PRESS, 1992.

These names: gay, queer, homosexual are limiting. I would love to finish with them. […] For me to use the word “queer” is a liberation; it was a word that frightened me, but no longer.

DEREK JARMAN

COIGRICH ANNS GACH ÀITE

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Ticio Escobar

This chapter was first published in Mosquera, Gerardo (ed.), Beyond the Fantastic: Contemporary Art Criticism from Latin America, Cambridge (MA) and London: MIT Press and Institute of International Visual Arts (Iniva), 1996.

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Marílena Chauí, Conformismo e resistência. Aspectos da cultura popular no Brasil (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1986), p. 120.

Mirko Lauer, Crítica de la artesanía: Plástica y sociedad en los Andes peruanos (Lima: Centro de Estudios y Promoción del Desarollo, 1982), p. 111.

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One of the most characteristic myths of the Western world is that the popular, especially if it is indigenous, should always remain the same, stuck in the past. Petrified in its most picturesque manifestations, popular art becomes a surviving relic of an archaic world, a miraculous link with nostalgic pasts and distant places. This myth is a favourite among romantics and nationalist ideologies that need to raise the concept of national essence on to a pedestal. It is easy to see the manoeuvres that this devious version of history can generate. High art is allowed to change, it feeds from a variety of innovations and sources, it should keep up to date, expand and look forward to an optimistic future. Meanwhile, popular art is condemned to remain genuine and pure: change is perversion and novelty is the betrayal of its essence, distortion of its true values and corruption of its primary authenticity. Marilena Chauí has written that for nationalist populism: ‘The past preserved by popular culture is the future guaranteed by educated culture.’1 Of course, if culture is a living process of symbolic responses to particular circumstances, its forms will inevitably change when faced with the demands of new situations, but certain myths interfere in this process by isolating particular moments and dealing with them as if they were separate phenomena. This is how tradition and future, or universal and local, appear as opposite concepts in an oscillating and fractured discourse, forcing one to choose between them as abstract alternatives. When reality is made into an essence (a national or Latin American being, free of conflict), the concrete oppositions that make history dynamic are treated as breakdowns of logic (the irreconcilable aut of metaphysics) rather than dialectical historical forces. In accordance with this paralysing view fixed positions are established: popular art belongs to the past and high art to the future. The former must deal with roots and look after the indigenous or mestizo soul and national identity; the latter should be frantically launched towards a vague linear modern aim that, without doubt, should come from venerable precolonial roots. As Mirko Lauer has written: ‘Indigenism is the fixed point against which modernity is measured.’2 A similar phenomenon occurs with the sharp local/ universal division that violently places local, original and genuine art in opposition to foreign forms. In this case we can again see the manipulation taking place: the way in which popular culture is deprived of contact with contemporary forms and techniques shows a paternalist and reactionary attitude. Applied to theories of Latin American art, this system has been the source of countless unnecessary dichotomies and simplifications. Latin America’s young art has debated with great pain and guilt when faced with dramatic choices between loyalty to its roots or access to the contemporary world: between backwardness and mimetic parody. This choice between isolation and alienation is a false one; self-imposed quarantine is as negative as the automatic adoption of imposed forms. Through isolation, art cannot tackle dependency: its only option is to face up to it and try to reformulate and transgress its conditions. The issue is not whether change is possible, nor what should be conserved and what should be changed, but rather whether or not we have any control over this change. There is no point in paternalistically pontificating from outside on what should or could be changed. Popular creativity is perfectly capable of assimilating new challenges and formulating answers and solutions according to its own needs and at its own speed. According to the creators themselves, popular art can preserve centuries-old elements or incorporate new ones. The only real condition of authenticity is that traditional or innovatory choices are made in response to internal cultural demands and that they be

Criollo: a Latin American of Spanish descent who in the postcolonial era constituted the ruling class [translator’s note].

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generated by the dynamics of this culture. For this reason any innovation and appropriation of alien elements or any use of images or techniques created elsewhere are only valid in as much as they are adopted by a community according to its needs; the slightest incorporation of alien systems is enough to disturb a cultural process, distort its forms and confuse its meaning. Seen from outside, a cultural body seems terribly fragile, a small pressure is enough to damage it. Seen from within, it is vigorous and resistant, able to withstand great weight and cope with sharp resistance without changing its course. A subordinate culture can respond to an invasion of alien forms by integrating these into its own processes, although this requires a huge assimilative effort. Since the impact of colonization Indians have endlessly demonstrated an almost limitless capacity for the process of digestion that a culture must endure when forced to survive and adapt to new conditions, take a leading role and direct its own development. When it is the community itself that chooses the elements to be preserved, incorporated or overcome, however shocking the acculturation process may appear, it will be resolved in a natural and successful way. Generally speaking, ethnic groups preserve a basic formal reserve connected to their symbolic nuclei; they tend not to change expressive systems related to their deepest sociocultural functions, for example, mythical ceremonies and rituals, especially featherwork, ceremonial baskets and pottery (Guaraní Indians), body paint, tattoos and caraguatá textiles (Chaco Indians). In contrast, they often change customs related to domestic matters, play, intertribal festivities, commerce, etc. When the Chiriguano Guaraní went to the central region in the fifteenth century they conserved the techniques and decorative motifs of their japepó (large ritual vessels), but they soon adopted the rich forms and decorative patterns of sub-Andean ceramics and later of colonial mestizo iconography. Prom here, they developed decorative schemes of undoubted value based on the widest possible stylistic sources. When the Caduveo Guaykurú attacked the Jesuitical mission in Belén at the end of the eighteenth century they were so impressed with the ornamentation on the ceremonial clothes, embroidery, tapestries and book illustrations that they incorporated it into their pottery, which thus became covered in surprising Renaissance and baroque arabesques. A similar process happened with the Payaguá who, living on the outskirts of Asunción during the early colonial period, thought nothing of decorating their mates (tea-drinking vessel) with dynamic designs based on European models to make them easier to sell, nor of decorating their shamanic pipes with biblical scenes (although in this case it was probably to increase the shaman’s power by using the Christian conquistador’s powerful imagery). Deep down, all cultural phenomena are essentially hybrid. The dream of pure cultures is a romantic myth with fascist implications and ancient roots; a myth that obscures the fact that all assimilation is nutrition and that change is essential to ensure the flow of cultural forms, challenge the imagination and prevent automatic repetition. Many of the elements that we now consider to be typical of certain communities are in fact sudden and late adoptions: decorations on glass beads, characteristic of certain ethnic groups, were made as a result of contact with Venetian glass brought by missionaries; all the ceramics and woollen textiles of the Chaco Indians, like typical Chamacoco basketwork, are the result of late colonial and inter-ethnic influences, Woodwork, which became a powerful medium, was introduced by civilian or missionary settlements and has no precursor in precolonial Indian practice. Also, the phenomenon of mestizaje itself - recognized and glorified as the mixed origins of genuine paraguayidad (Paraguayan-ness) - is always aware of its double character. Many of the most representative criollo3 craft traditions derive directly from Europe: ñandutí, a development of Tenerife lace; religious imagery, of Spanish,

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Osvaldo Salerno, Artesanía y arte popular (Asunción: Museo Paraguayo de Arte Contemporáneo, 1983), p. 20.

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Italian, German or Austrian Catholic origin; crafts in leather, silver and ebony, of proud Western and Christian origin. These factors are enough to show the inevitable mixture of cultural processes and the changing and complex nature of their symbols. This much is beyond doubt. But at this stage the mechanisms of myth lay a trap. They accept that Indians have incorporated foreign systems at some distant point in their history and approve of the fact that folk crafts also derive from the same double root that sustains our criollo past (at the end of the day this hybrid characteristic of culture serves to illustrate a sweetened version of history based on the idyllic encounter between Indians and conquistadors and to justify the numerous dualisms in official discourse), yet they consider that history is always in the past and that today popular culture is already made and is as it is; if it changes, it loses value, and so on. This myth is more widespread than one would imagine: many anthropologists, historians, journalists and cultural intermediaries believe, more or less explicitly, that the value of the popular lies in tradition and that it is impervious to change. This train of thought is largely based on the damage done by urban-industrial acculturation of popular forms, the invasion of mass images, the loss of greatly expressive unique techniques and forms, the alarming proliferation of kitsch encouraged by tourism, etc. Faced with these circumstances, the problem has been badly put; its solution, as we have seen, is not to bury one’s head in the sand but to find a way of controlling its impact. Many changes now taking place in popular culture are heartening in as much as they demonstrate its ability to negotiate difficulties and face challenges using all its imagination, resources and memory. Through its actions, everyday popular culture resolves the conflicts that arise between tradition and new techniques. Pottery, for example, has easily absorbed urban subjects without compromising its rich stylistic inheritance. Certain pieces made in Tobatí are based on ancient anthropomorphic forms, but they now incorporate audacious subjects and unautochthonous solutions: fat women wearing tiny bikinis or cheerful miniskirts. Their formal success and powerful energy make Tobatí’s fat women as valid as the best expressions of a closed rural environment. Other situations have created forms charged with a unique temperament; some of the recent pottery of Areguá (figures made on potter’s wheels or in moulds and painted with industrial enamel) manages to show new aspects of suburban culture and suggest a new originality.4 Recently we have seen popular manifestations using industrial rubbish (such as candlesticks and lamps made of tin), images from mass culture and prefabricated elements. In all these cases expressivity has not been compromised: novelty has been absorbed and recreated by the community. Even rituals include new systems. It is common today to see impressive kurusu jegua montages using neon lights; traditional pesebres using artificial flowers, tin foil, photographs and plastic ornaments; local festivals that include dramatizations of current national and international events (as in the ancient San Pedro y San Pablo festival in Altos where, alongside the archaic ritual of fire and the capture of women by the Guaykurú, an obsession since colonial times, people wearing masks and dressed in elaborate leaf costumes act out recent events: beauty contests, political disputes, fashion shows, satires on international celebrities, etc.). The traditional agricultural festival of the Chiriguanos, the Areté guasú, has joined up with the criollo carnival, keeping its social cohesion and proprietary rites. The masks used for the ceremony are of chané arawak origin, the top hats are a colonial legacy, the outfits show an Andean influence on mestizo clothes, the ornaments are Chiriguano, criollo, Andean, Nivaklé, Lengua, maybe Mennonite. Some of the disguises, alongside jaguar skins, heron feathers and caraguatá textiles, use motorcycling gloves, fake wigs and dark glasses. Wooden samuhú masks are decorated with falcon wings that carry, like a collage, a face cut from a magazine.

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From the 1950s on, certain oil companies begun to make exploratory excursions into the Cerro León region (Paraguayan Chaco). The entry into Ayoreode territory caused violent clashes resulting in the death of some Paraguayans and several Indians. This ease of the ayoi was told to me by Luke Holland of Survival International, who, several years after the event, bought the object for a ridiculous price in the Nuevas Tribus mission (where the Totobeigosoode were then confined) and donated it to the Museo Etnográfico de Asunción.

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Masks made from the fur of wild cats, pecarí or deer coexist with others made of cardboard and plastic; representations of ancestors or mythological beasts share the festival with Batman and ET. But the festival as a whole is perfectly coherent beyond its apparent heterogeneity and disorder; it is a surviving and sane ritual capable of absorbing anything and assimilating it, able to digest the most distant images and find its own value in them. Sometimes certain models that were considered unchangeable are suddenly transgressed by novelty, curiosity, imagination and the personal taste of individuals who, by re-establishing the altered meanings into a new order, are stimulating the sociocultural field. In a Tomároho (Chamacoco) ceremony in San Carlos, Alto Paraguay in 1986, one of the konsáha (shamans), intrigued by the colour of a plastic medicine box we had taken, cut the box in long thin strips and carefully wove them into a crown, which he then placed into his feather headdress. In cases such as this the substitution of forms is based on the characteristic rhetorical mechanism of any aesthetic discourse: signifiers move about freely according to formal or semantic associations. Through metaphor or metonym, old codes are changed and new truths established. Asuté (Ayoreode war chiefs) wear a conical hat made of jaguar fur called ayoi as a sign of their domination over a dangerous enemy. During the 1960s a group of Ayoreode, the Totobeigosoode, who had been living isolated in the jungle until then, felt themselves under increasing attack from landowners and fanatical missionaries. Many lost their freedom or even their lives in evangelical concentration camps like those of Nuevas Tribus), they were decimated by unknown illnesses and persecuted by a civilization imposed like a punishment. At one point in the middle of 1965, in the Cerro Len region, an asuté, feeling his land and life under threat, killed a businessman from a petrol company and made himself a new ayoi from his victim’s ‘skin’. The hat of the invading company was substituted, in a figurative sense, for that of the jaguar.5 A community can resist cultural impacts and change or adapt its formal repertoire as long as it has a guaranteed space for creation and symbolic control from which it can challenge new elements with its own answers. For this reason the point is not to isolate communities under threat of acculturation (any form of apartheid is discriminatory) but rather to recognize the need to strengthen their capacity for internal organization. While some communities have been culturally emptied in a brutal way (like the Ayoreode, who lost their entire ritual universe to the missionaries in just four decades), others, culturally integrated, have managed to maintain their internal strength and thus continue to survive even the most adverse circumstances. It is amazing to see in urban Asunción to this day estacioneros and pasioneros dressed in colonial costume, carrying candles, lamps and banners while chanting plaintive songs in certain celebrations (kurusu jegua, Easter). One can still see the presence of kambá ra’anga in the very heartland of modernity and progress. San Bernardino is a small bourgeois spa town 40 kilometres from the capital, overlooking Lake Ypacaraí. It boasts a luxurious international-style Casino Hotel with clean spaces free of historical reference and staff trained to the highest international standards. Yet on certain June evenings some of the waiters and croupiers leave their dinner jackets, green tables and friendly English phrases behind and go back to the nearby Compañía Yvyhanguy (from which most of them come) and cover their faces with shiny black masks to enact an obscure ancient ritual.

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This process of commercializing a natural economy occurred fundamentally as a result of the agrarian reform and also because of the hegemonic imposition of financial capital. This process was especially important during the Second World War, and since then capital has been advancing steadily on the countryside. From this point the farmer starts to produce a universal product for export (cotton, soya, tobacco, etc.) and becomes a vital part of the nation’s economic activities; he no longer produces for his community but for Asunción, multinationals and the rest of the world. Effective urbanization in Paraguay started only at the end of the 1960s. Morínigo has pointed out: ‘Another factor in the configuration of Paraguayan cultures is the lack of a dynamic urban process. Paraguay was a rural country until the 1970s. While it is true that Asunción was undoubtedly in charge, the rural-agricultural economy and its demography impeded a strong urban cultural presence in the countryside. On the contrary, Asunción as a city of peasant migration, without sufficient industrialization to absorb this migration, defined itself partly through the influx of rural culture.’ José Nicolás Morínigo, ‘El impacto de la cultura urbano-industrial’, in El hombre paraguayo y su cultura, Semana Social Paraguaya, Cuadernos de Pastoral Social 7, Conferencia Episcopal Paraguaya, Equipo Nacional de Pastoral Social (Asunción, 1986), p. 53.

THE ISSUE OF DESTINY IN POPULAR ART A) EXTERMINATION AND SURVIVAL Once we have accepted that popular art has the need and the right to change, in which direction should this change take place? What is the future of popular art and what chances does it have of reacting to socioeconomic conditions different from the ones that created it? Popular art in Paraguay responds to rural forms of subsistence and barter, cultural systems in which practical value is more important than trade. However, communities are increasingly producing their objects to sell and not for their own use. The process by which capital entered the countryside, along with increasing urbanization and the gradual increase of industrial patterns of consumption, led to an abandoning of traditional culture.6,7 Migration, communication networks (road-building and improved transport) and the expansion of the mass media have created new models, tastes and values and the gradual abandonment of traditional functions. From this point a large part of our definition of popular art starts to fall apart. If we still understand it as a collection of practices whose products are consumed by the group that makes them (an art by and for the people), then this alteration in the productive circuit (production-distribution-consumption) results in the separation of the community from its own products and the breaking of the unity of form and function characteristic of popular art. If, for example, we go to the popular festival of San Blás-í (small San Blás) in the Compañía Caaguazú de Itá on the last Sunday of February, we can still see the procession of the patron saint, kambá ra’anga dances and jokes, traditional parades on horseback, flags, water-jugs decorated with flowers to quench the thirst of pilgrims, the sad music of the Peteke-Peteke band, ornaments made of tissue paper, shrubs and roses. However, what we see on sale in the fair opposite the chapel are not Itá ceramics - the clay jugs, containers and toys that have made the village famous since colonial times - but plastic buckets, various types of Argentine, Korean or Brazilian crockery and industrial toys and decorations. Apart from the red water-jugs that are still widely used in rural areas (and even in Asunción until twenty or thirty years ago), one is more likely to see Itá ceramics in shops in the capital than in peasant homes. The same is happening with ñandutí, silverwork, iconography, etc. It appears, therefore, that the ceaseless abandoning of traditional forms leads popular art into a dead end: it can either disappear or deny itself by becoming a picturesque appendix to ‘high’ art. Leaving aside those attitudes that consider popular art to be a hindrance that should disappear, I will list some proposals to deal with this situation: a) The conservation, preservation and rescuing of objects that have survived the general collapse of self-sufficient cultures. If a way of life, and therefore also a means of expression, are disappearing for ever before our very eyes, the least we can do is collect and catalogue the left-overs and protect and salvage them for future generations. Publications, museums, recordings, photographs and films are the refuge of threatened memory, a warehouse of symbols and fragments of dreams. Of course, the rescuing of these last forms is important in as much as it shows a recognition of popular cultures and a support of their right to be alternatives, as well as leading to a better understanding of their values. Often this salvaging can become an important element in the recognition of and respect for expressive particularities. But in itself it is not enough if it is divorced from a more complex understanding of the processes that created these forms, and can result in fetishization, producing mummified signs without context

Baudrillard has analysed authenticity from the dominant point of view in those objects he calls marginal (unusual objects, baroque, folk, exotic, ancient’). According to him, these objects have a very specific function within this system: they signify time, not real time but ‘signs or indicators of time’. The system, albeit with difficulty, tries to control it seeing that ‘nature and time, all is consumed in these signs’. For this reason, however authentic these objects may seem, they are always somewhat false; for this reason they cannot escape the demands of a ‘defined, consummate self’. The mythological object exists in the perfect tense: ‘It is what has its place in the present as though it had had a place in the past, and for this reason is authentic…’ This demand is expressed through two aspects that mythify the object: ‘nostalgia of its origins and obsession with authenticity’. Jean Baudrillard, El sistema de los objectos, 8th edn (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1985), pp. 83-96.

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b) With a similar aim of preservation, other proposals suggest the conservation not of the objects themselves but of disappearing techniques and motifs considered to be unique to popular culture. There are many thinkers who propose a salvation of the authenticity of popular art by conserving traditional techniques and motifs at all cost, or even reviving them where they have disappeared, in an attempt to go backwards in history to discover a chosen spot that can act as the paradigm of authenticity: Certain Indians are encouraged - for aesthetic or commercial reasons - to use archaic vegetable dyes (the piece becomes more valuable in direct proportion to the redundance of the technique), natural colours, ancestral techniques and ancient motifs. It is of no interest whether those communities respond to these colours, if these techniques allow them freer expression, or if those motifs have any current symbolic meaning. The point is to make the objects appear more authentic and natural, corresponding as much as possible to an archetypal view of what a popular image should be (rustic, archaic, earthy and with a hint of the savage).8 Of course it is important to support traditional techniques whenever possible, but only when the communities need it. Sometimes, as a result of a dismissal of popular culture, the impossibility of getting certain supplies or the coercive imposition of foreign models, a community can lose the use of a technique or image that is still valid. In these cases there can be no doubting the value in removing obstacles and recovering native expressive media. What is unacceptable is to force a group to cure itself by faking emotions it no longer feels. Some have tried to rescue typical techniques or motifs by applying them to alien practices. An example of this is the use of Indian or rural motifs applied to industrial design, or the mannerist use of stereotypical images or symbols without understanding their meaning. Pretence and falsity in art have disastrous effects: when rural scenes are recreated from outside, the result is a clumsy realism that always betrays reality by making typical caricatures. When anyone tries to reproduce the assumed signs of Guaraní culture (the paradigm of Paraguayan indigenism) the resulting images are indistinguishable from any standard mass-media Indian image (zigzag patterns, Apache headbands, bright colours, etc.).

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or meaning. If the idea is that mere preservation is an alternative, it is accepting a fatalist attitude and proposing a passive archivist culture.

Gilberto Giménez, Cultura popular y religión en el Anáhuac (Mexico City: Centro de Etudios Ecuménicos, 1978), р. 229.

1) Aestheticism, faced with the extinction of popular art, tries to save at least the forms, even if the functions have to be sacrificed (sometimes willingly). From the point at which there is a lack of continuity between artistic creation and the social conditions of production (and therefore an increasing autonomy of form over function), more often than not as a result of cultural inertia, more often than not as a result of cultural inertia, formal patterns continue to be used even after their original meanings have become exhausted. This continuity of forms in a vacuum can be explained in terms of the particular strength of certain expressions that are so deep-rooted that they can survive they own loss of functional validity. This phenomenon, characteristic of all creativity activity, is somehow more evident in popular art, in which forms have a greater social dimension. According to Giménez: ‘In as much as they create a lasting system, class habits or ethos can also explain the survival of cultural forms and practices even after the disappearance or deterioration of their material bases. In other words, they can explain the frequently noted discrepancy between the economic base and ideological-cultural superstructure.’9

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c) The break in the unity between form and function has been approached in two ways:

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10 At this point I am referring to those proposals that try to rescue popular art from outside. I am not ir way denying the right of any community to develop artistic processes that favour the formal aspects traditional functions.

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Traditional popular art (mestizo and Indian) has its own pace, a different timescale from other cultural systems, and a more conservative approach towards the repetition of community models, which is how, even when faced with new circumstances, it can continue to produce formal solutions relating to previous demands. At this point forms appear to be disconnected from their function. This proposal keeps popular art in this limbo and suggests that it keep producing in terms of pure forms, thus making it comparable to the ‘uselessness’ of ‘high’ art. This attitude is present in a common approach to popular art that, by promoting its aesthetic characteristics, forgets its utilitarian or symbolic roles. Although this promotion is a stimulus to creativity and a recognition of the artistic possibilities of popular art, it also encourages a dualism between form and function that alters its communal productive mechanisms and distorts its meaning.10 2) Technical functionalism opts for a sacrifice of aesthetic factors, oping to improve the technical quality of the product, thus guaranteeing its survival and opening it to a more demanding market. This attitude is typical of development theories: emphasizing commercial aspects and technical fracture but ignoring symbolic implications and historical context. In Paraguay the Banco Interamericano del Desarrollo (Consejo Nacional de Entidades Benéficas) carries out a programme that is a clear illustration of this technocratic thinking. Projects for the ‘promotion of crafts’ are developed with the help of foreign technicians and institutions, totally ignoring creative factors. The results are risible and oscillate unhappily between complete stereotype and ‘urban applied crafts’ that, like all attempts at distortion, end up as insipid kitsch. All the attitudes we have discussed so far approach the issue from the point of view of the dominant culture and try to rescue popular art by isolating it from its context, fragmenting its practices, arbitrarily favouring certain aspects (aesthetic, commercial, utilitarian, symbolic) and trivializing its deepest meanings. To summarize: notwithstanding some good intentions, dominant culture tries to appropriate popular expressions, making them into trophies, objects for scientific research, commercial goods or souvenirs. It rescues popular art on condition that it control its distribution (through museums, boutiques, tourist shops, galleries), that it change to fit expectations and satisfy particular desires (primitive nostalgia, authenticity, references to colonial tradition, etc.). Looked at from this point of view, it is clear that the only option for popular art if it is to survive is to try to catch up with an alien modernity or to shut itself away in the past and renounce historical destiny. Therefore these proposals are paternalistic; from outside they try to write the rule book for popular art - whether or not it can sign its own products, innovate, or sell. Its fortunes (or death) are decided from outside: change is feared, and projects are formulated that should be the responsibility of the community.

B) THE MYTH OF DIVINE DOMINATION Apocalyptic predictions regarding the extinction of popular art are based on an unquestionable mythical verdict: as popular forms are a precapitalist product, and they cannot change outside this model, they will be forced to enter a modernity that will destroy them along with all other traditional forms. However, a look at several facts forces us to admit that:

4) social systems do not condition so strongly that they can totally determine the destiny of a culture. Although we have already discussed many of these points, we should now go over them quickly to structure this section.

11 Néstor García Canclini, Las culturas populares en el capitalismo, 3rd edn (Mexico City: Nueva Imagen, 1986), р. 104. 12 Miguel A Bartolomé and Scott S Robinson, ‘Indigenismo, dialéctica y conciencia étnica’, Journal de la Societé des Americanistes, publié ave la concours du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Tome LX, extrait, au siège de la Société Musée de l’Homme (Paris, 1971), p. 296. 13 Adolfo Colombres, Liberación y desarollo del arte popular, Textos de Cultura Popular del Museo del Barro (Asunción, 1986), p. 26.

1) In fact, in Paraguay, as in other Latin American countries, it is only rural and ethnic communities (which fall into the category of precapitalist) that create artistic works; but we should not deduce from this that there is no expressive potential in the other sectors (urban and suburban), which could develop creative spaces as they mature their practices and discourses. Also, the coexistence in Latin America of different historical timescales has created a web so complex that many cultural forms can easily go from one historical extreme to the other or flourish in the uncertain space between each of them. It is no easy task to isolate precapitalism. Canclini has said that: ‘Crafts are and are not a precapitalist product… Their double character - historical (in a process that started in pre-Columbian societies) and structural (in the current logic of dependent capitalism) - is what creates their hybrid aspects.’11 Finally, the term ‘precapitalist’, which takes modern Western society as its paradigm, is debatable when simply applied to different historical processes, and assumes an aim that is not necessarily the same. Bartolomé and Robinson have argued that the way in which Indian societies are seen as precapitalist (i.e. part of the history and economic development of the West) places them ‘behind’ this history, while in fact: ‘Indian societies relatively unaffected by colonialism are “acapitalist” and not “precapitalist”. Therefore they present per se a different social and political model from that created by the economic and political history of our society.’12 For this reason Colombres also chooses to use the term ‘acapitalist’ rather than ‘precapitalist’ as the latter assumes an unavoidable and unique destiny.13 2) The use of the concept of hegemony can question the assumption that the dominant is an all-powerful force, able to cover every area and devour everything in its path. Canclini has spoken of a ‘theological concept’ concerning the omnipotence of a capitalism that controls everything; in societies as complex as those of peripheral capitalism, sociocultural processes are the result of conflicting forces. ‘One of them is the continuance (or the remains) of communal economic and cultural organizations interacting with the dominant culture in a

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3) popular sectors are not passive and incapable of answering back or resisting;

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2) not even dominant culture can (or wishes to) dissolve all other imaginary and social forms;

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1) popular does not always mean precapitalist;

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14 Canclini, op.cit., p. 105. 15 Ibid., p. 192. 16 Ibid., p. 104.

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17 José Joaquín Brunner, Los debates sobre la modernidad y el futuro de América Latina, (FLACSO 293, Santiago de Chile, April 1986), pp. 30-1.

much more dynamic manner than is assumed by those who only speak of the penetration into and destruction of native cultures.’14 For this reason: ‘Supra-urban capitalist development, its need for standardized production and consumption, are limited by the specific characteristics of any particular culture and by the interest that the system itself may have in preserving ancient forms of social organization and representation; the dominant culture preserves certain archaisms to reconfigure and recontextualize.’15 Thus, although they may not contribute directly to the development of new forms of production, certain precapitalist forms are necessary for a balanced reproduction of the system as they can hold together large sectors of society, be an additional source of income for the countryside, renew consumption and stimulate tourism.16 3) The price paid by ‘traditional forms’ to gain acceptance is that they adapt to the general mechanism of the system and do not get in the way. This is why the hegemonic culture tries to polish and change those forms that do not fit into its system; picturesque folklore, invasion, distortion of meaning and undermining of the symbolic base are characteristic strategies of this process. The dominant fragments the culture of its subordinate and isolates its elements to manipulate and recondition them as it sees fit. However, as we noted before, popular culture is not a weak and shapeless vessel that passively accepts invasion and gives in to its demands. Also, popular culture is not only seduced, it allows itself to be seduced, to back down and give up; its aims are not always very clear, nor are the boundaries between itself and its adversary so stable. For this reason it incorporates and appropriates many harmful elements and gratefully receives diverse false presents. We have also pointed out how the very contradictions of the dominant system create small pockets of dissent within itself in which the right to cultural difference is defended. From these pockets it is possible to encourage this right and disable many mechanisms designed to empty popular discourses. The notion that popular art is irredeemably condemned to disappear in the face of advances made by cultural industries, with the assumption that this industry is responsible for all the problems of traditional expression, is based in part on a mechanical application of critical theories of the Frankfurt School to dependent cultures. This school believes that the uncontrollable advance of a new culture destroys all previous ones, reducing its differences and particularities. But these critics were speaking from different contexts; for this reason Brunner insists that before we apply critical theories we should analyse the meaning of Latin America’s cultural industry, obviously different from that it could have in a totally different historical context. ‘For a start… European criticism of the cultural industry was never related to a discourse on the survival of popular cultures… Quite the opposite: its complaint was that the cultural industry destroys “high” culture, submitting it to a new form of mass culture. In contrast, in peripheral and developing countries, cultural industries act over huge areas of popular culture…’ His conclusion is that a rejection of everything that comes from the cultural industry and enters into popular culture, ‘is based on the assumption that consciences are manipulated, recipients are vulnerable and that cultural consumption is totally passive’.17 We have already noted how the mechanical application of a concept to different cultural realities generates simplifications. In this case the shift creates a large rift between popular culture (originally innocent and good) and cultural industry (alienating and fatally corrupting). The former is seen as passive and malleable, the latter as a destructive and unstoppable avalanche. We have seen how the complex ambiguity of popular art and its conflictive nature act as forces of tension, constantly threatening it with a loss of coherence and understanding. However, these same forces paradoxically guarantee its survival: they create a parallel mental landscape full of hiding places, a residual world without frontiers

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4) Attempts to define popular art in terms of a particular socioeconomic system (in this case, precapitalist production) tends to assume a mechanistic simplification of signification processes, understanding them to be locked into the conditions they express. The condition of Palaeolithic peoples illustrates this point well. Let us examine Zamuco (Ayoreo and Chamacoco), hunter-gatherers who live in the Paraguayan Chaco. Whether we like it or not, in today’s world there is no place for hunters; the expansion of national society is progressively restricting forests and exterminating entire species of animals, so that, chasing a tapir or a pecarí, the hunter will inevitably come up against the fence of a farm on the never-ending Compañía Carlos Casado, a Mennonite or missionary advertisement, a road or an airstrip. Thus an entire civilization is gradually being destroyed for ever. The problem here is that the symbolic structure of any of these communities is arranged around a specific set of conditions that determine its myths, ceremonies, artistic and social forms. The debylyby ceremony of the Tomároho (Chamacoco), for example, is partially a rite of appeasement. The mysterious festival of the Anábser, supernatural beings, invokes good catches and plentiful fruits through the shaking of feathers; through the great ceremonial secret that demands the wearing of vegetable masks; through the sudden appearance of spirits with red, white and black painted bodies; and finally through the deep chorus of shouts that echoes across the whole village and spreads into the jungle from the hárra (ceremonial circle), causing an alarming explosion of bird song and animal cries, which, like the noise of the spirits, frightens children and herons. The last survivors of the Tomároho, escaping from exploitation, left their devastated mountains behind and moved to Péixota where they decided (without much choice) to become farmers, to a certain extent. This is an abrupt and drastic change, it assumes a sudden change of lifestyle and of historical time. For the time being, they conserve the debylyby ceremony almost intact; it is too soon for the ritual to absorb these new conditions. What will happen then to this hunting ceremony? The approach I am criticizing would answer that nothing will happen, that this ceremony is built up of condemned forms and anachronistic structures that will soon disappear as their (Palaeolithic) system already has. This would be true in those cases where change is imposed compulsively, leaving no margin for the community to reinterpret it. The recent history of the Ebytoso (another Chamacoco group) illustrates the rapid death of rituals when the group is attacked by missionaries or exploited. In Puerto Esperanza a community has been torn apart by fanatical sects, leaving it without communal images, and without the desire to dream them. In Puerto Diana there is another Ebytoso group undermined by foreign profits and beliefs; it is now no more than an embarrassed shadow of its history - a pool of cheap labour and a supply-source for brothels. These communities, like so many others, have lost their symbolic vitality, the strength with which to reinterpret new conditions. But when any group preserves a significant productive space it can reconstruct a social repertoire to incorporate these new conditions. It is then that worship can be readjusted, myths of origin adapted and new figures created to explain recent events. The assumption that cultural systems of meaning are totally defined by original social conditions is based on the fantasy that myths are not historical. In fact, Tomároho stories today explain the arrival of white men, horses, aeroplanes and firearms; they also speak of mythical heroes of the Chaco War (1932-5). Many old Ebytoso keep the Anábser as stowaways of this new religion:

‫ألجانب في كل مكان‬

or doors in which popular symbols can develop protected by shadows and hybrid images; they hide and grow beyond the control, interest or reach of the dominant culture.

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18 This quotation is from an interview I held with Miguel Bartolomé in April 1987 on the current situation of the ayoreo, forced into Nuevas Tribus missions. This interview remains unpublished.

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they link Axnuwerta with the Virgin Mary and Nemur with Jesus Christ, and explain the extinction of their culture as the fulfilment of the curse of the last Anábsoro. Referring to this subject and evoking Levi-Strauss’s hypothesis (which Clamstres applied to Guaraní culture), Miguel Bartolomé says that it is feasible to assume that the Zamuco were archaic groups, ancient farmers who were forced to become hunters by other historical circumstances. Thus, their original Neolithic mythical-cultural pattern would have adjusted to new cultural demands and started to conceive forms typical of Palaeolithic conditions. He quotes the case of Araucanian farmers who, escaping the frontier battles on their territory, moved in the eighteenth century to Argentina; there they became equestrian hunters, first of ostriches, then of cattle until, finally, they became settled shepherds. For this reason contemporary Araucanian rituals show the intermixing of several worlds: they are essentially farming ceremonies including offerings of fruit and animal sacrifices (originally from their experience as hunter-gatherers) and elements from the current status as shepherds. Bartolome adds that it is difficult to imagine a Jew or Christian in New York recalling that their religion started among shepherds, and was then readapted and changed according to new conditions.18 At the end of the day, what is the subject matter of Western art if not an accumulation of residues, different substrata and forms originally belonging to other histories, vanished systems and forgotten situations? Although conditions have changed and although it may drag along considerably outdated forms and techniques, contemporary art has developed along basically Renaissance lines. Although it may be hard to accept, Picasso’s painting is essentially easel painting. What is more, Renaissance forms did not spring from nowhere in the fifteenth century, but were built up from previous forms that escaped their own destinies by transforming or adapting themselves to the demands of a new age, where they could once again establish themselves and reproduce. How many remnants of forgotten systems lie under contemporary iconography, visual codes and techniques? How many Palaeolithic, pastoral or feudal symbols can we find in the rich heritage that Western art claims for itself? If this forgotten Chamacoco community can keep open the possibility of generating meanings, it can find solutions for the challenges it faces by reworking established forms or creating new ones in which the residues of the old will always be present.

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20 Lauer argues that: ‘It is when production is made in advance to cater for a demand outside the village or region (and the dominated sectors) that we start to see precapitalist producers moving from one market system into another.’ (Lauer, op. cit., p. 187). In colonial, and even more republican, Paraguay the production of artisans is made in advance in almost all those areas listed. For example, the black silversmiths who lived near Asunción, image makers, furniture makers of Itá, ñandutí makers, etc., accumulated products to sell outside the community.

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19 Campesino: literally ‘countryside-dweller’, more neutral than either ‘farmer’ or ‘peasant’ [translator’s note].

C) OWNERS OF SYMBOLS For this reason the issue is not whether one should conserve, protect, overcome or integrate popular art. If the question is posed in these terms, from outside, the solutions will inevitably be populist or protectionist. Discussions on popular art should always take its constitutional process into account. A work is not popular through any inherent qualities it may have but through its use by popular sectors. As long as these sectors maintain their control the object will still be a piece of popular art even if its qualities, functions and stylistic elements change. As long as people engage in their own aesthetic production there will always be popular art, whether it is traditional or not. The destiny of any particular form of popular art will depend on whether or not it is backed up by a collective imagination, and whether or not a community can recognize itself in it, whether it is seen to respond to moments in its identity and experience, its sensibility and history. New conditions that separate the campesino19 and the Indian from their products create serious problems. Yet, even then, this separation should not be considered as the transgression of a norm, rather as a conflict with many possible solutions. From the early colonial period onwards, many pieces were made that escaped the system of consumption by makers and barter: religious images created for family altars and local chapels, and some other articles so expensive and luxurious that they tended to be used more by rich criollos than by campesinos - for example, ñandutí (fine lace for elegant altars and dresses), silver and gold pieces (mates, harnesses and jewellery), fine furniture and doors. Demand for these products grew in the late eighteenth century to cater for a new commercial bourgeoisie that was more refined than its predecessor. Even so, they are expressions marked by the solemn and simple taste of Paraguayan rural art; they are popular forms, even if their consumption does not coincide exactly with the community that made them.20 When a rural community maintains control over its own symbolic production, creating symbols in which it recognizes itself, in which its experiences and desires are condensed, then these symbols are popular even if new economic conditions have disassociated them from many of their functions. A campesino does not become any less campesino or any less ‘popular’ because his products have passed from a subsistence to a market economy. His artistic production must show this change; what it does is adapt and readjust. Capitalist markets create very distinctive spaces. Any artistic object that enters them splits up and one part becomes merchandise, fetish, escapism. To the extent to which its conditions are imposed, the campesino partially separates himself from his products. How he will create new forms to solve this problem is a question we cannot answer from outside. For the time being, many previous forms (those related to the logic of use) will continue to be produced and generated by a genuine impulse that nonetheless cannot sustain them in a vacuum for ever. But popular imagination has worked out successful ways of dealing with challenges at least as difficult as this one. In the meantime a symbolic reserve should be kept with which to resist the trauma of violent new impacts and with which to nourish the capacity for making new forms. It is important not to lose track of meaning and poetic direction or to let go of the thread that created so many figures and shaped so many memories. It is easier to explore new avenues with a solid history behind you. Sometimes the symbol vanishes when the object becomes something else. Sometimes it surrenders to overwhelming pressure. Some potters in Itá, for example, were unable to respond to new conditions

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21 Particularly in the case of ethnic cultures, support for a dedicated creative space is as important as the fight for a living space. Creativity guarantees a group’s identity and is a force for resistance. When exposed to forces of ethnocide communities fall apart and become alienated.

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created by the market and they started compulsively to produce hundreds of identical pieces. These pieces were unexpressive not because they were the same but because they were undefined. They were dumb objects without memory or desire. They contained no passion and had been told no secrets. This is why it is essential that when faced with new situations, so often adverse, popular sectors find a solid base from which to face them. There is no point in approving or condemning alternatives from outside: if they manage to generate change and find the forms to do so, they will be valid. In this sense popular culture has the right to use all channels and institutions by which the dominant culture interrupts and interferes) and use them as refuges, trenches, or even runways for potential flights. From this point of view one cannot criticize the decision to use the market and to fight for fairer prices and greater recognition of popular creativity. One can also understand the desire to occupy all available space, even provisionally, to resist or create new forms.21 Space, however, is not enough. If ultimately the energy of forms and the secret of their success lies in the internal cohesion of the community. in order to preserve their destiny we should also fight to strengthen their social identity and support the communities themselves. If we accept that subordinacy (in the context of a field of conflict) and communal self-assertiveness are fundamental characteristics of popular culture, then the gaining of territory and internal reinforcement are essential stages in the process of resistance and development of popular culture, and the only guarantors of its continuity. For marginalized and oppressed sectors, internal organization, affirmation of difference and the constitution of a communal body are fundamental for the group to be able to face civil society, confront other forces and sectors, and articulate its struggles and demands in terms of common dreams and aspirations. An internally well-adjusted community able to mobilize itself enough to gain positions and to fight for its space can play a leading role in the imaginary development of its realities, however strong the conditioning historical forces may be.

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These historical forces do exist and they are strong; but the destiny of popular art also depends on other forces. If we accept that popular art can change and modernize, what is this modernity we are referring to? This question is especially pertinent now that the very meaning of modernity is being debated. Is it the case that popular art can gain access to modernity by riding on its back, or is it rather that it has the right not only to win access to modernity but also to have its own ‘modernity’? Once again we are faced with the characteristic problem of trying to fit Latin American cultural production into alien categories and projects. The fact that popular art, essentially precapitalist, is now considered from a point of view we could vaguely call postmodern is a symptom of the risk we run by entering into an illusory space defined between a ‘pre’ and a ‘post’ that mark the before and after of alien experiences and desires. For this reason a critique of modernity in Latin America should regard it as the result of an adulterated and incomplete experience rather than as an exhausted moment. Peripheral modernity is not the result of local processes but the consequence of impositions and seductions, the result of dependency and consumption. It is a contradictory modernity, a semi-mystified project inspired as much by a misunderstood Reason as by the alien desires of a global market. It is a second-rate modernity, programmed for monumental totalities in which it will always be peripheral, inspired by grand notions of progress, civilization and freedom, the benefits of which are few and far between on this side of the ocean, this dark side of history. Now we are faced with a confusing and strange situation in which modern consciousness has diagnosed its own crisis and announced that it has overcome its limitations, becoming ‘post’-itself (in a way that preserves the omnipotence and narcissism of the system it was supposed to replace). For the first time in history we are contemporary with a ‘state of post’ (postmodernism), which was normally decided in retrospect. Faced with the collapse of so many rationalist utopias, the discrediting of technological paradigms and the cliché of indefinite progress, late-modern culture is in the grip of a deep unease and the subject of painful questions. On the one hand, this crisis has symptoms that oscillate between scepticism and nihilism, disappointment and nostalgia, cynical irony and frank disillusionment. On the other hand, critical positions vary from radical attacks on fundamental modern myths to diverse attempts at a solution. Postmodernism, as promoted by certain metropolitan centres, attacks the consequences of modernism without quite managing to free itself from its vices. Somehow it harkens back to old forms, not to find nourishment there or a basis from which to launch into the future, but a refuge, an alibi in which to hide from new conflicts. Thus postmodernism becomes more of an epigonal movement than one of rupture; it questions the avant-garde but ends up as another avant-garde, though without the original innovatory power. It laments the death of utopias but is incapable of proposing alternatives. It is opposed to the cultural uniformity of technological imperialism while it again imposes and diffuses standard forms and abstract patterns, still dependent on technological powers. On its way to a confused modernity, there is no reason why Latin American culture should suffer the consequences of a process in which, generally speaking, it played a passive role as spectator or was considered to be an eternal loser. The cult of indefinite progress, dependent on industrialized production, or the glorification of technological reason and the crushing expansion of international functionalism invaded our histories and left behind bastard children, uniform (or barren) territories and scant benefits. In fact, our societies

KUMAACHI-U ‘AGA-VA-TU-SAPA-NUM

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22 Brunner, op. cit., p. 58.

23 In this last point I am no longer referring to those signs that can readapt to new circumstances and grow in spite of them, but to those that appear to be unchangeable.

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never totally believed in uninterrupted progress, nor did they trust a Reason that they never fully understood. Our first avant-garde movements could not promise much: isolated from society, repressed or ignored, they were either unimportant parodies or did not have the strength to capture and express collective dreams. For this reason we should be on our guard to avoid paying for goods we did not have the time or the opportunity to explore. ‘[We are] condemned to live in a world in which all images of modernity come from outside and become obsolete before we can use them.’22 We should take advantage of this situation by not running after the broken plates of a foreign banquet. Peripheral countries can resist and not enter the dead end that exhausted and cynical cultures have led themselves into. Stuck in this process, the latter are unable to escape by imagining another time or finding an escape in artistic practices that can turn on history and question it. Artistic experiments in Latin America have not yet exhausted many possibilities or even entered paths that now appear to be closed; they have not shared assumptions, histories and values that have created many frustrations and disappointments. Many of these experiments have been made by popular marginalized sectors who have different memories and desires. Therefore they still have opportunities to propose projects through ancient myths or newly acquired symbols; they still have the right to utopia. At the same time, one can still learn from the critique of modernity in as much as it has questioned the cultural homogenization created by the terrible weight of technological forces; new attention has been given to particular and alternative voices and to small fragments, to specific efforts that can create new meanings and found other projects without messianic or apocalyptic overtones. What is the ultimate destiny of popular art in this universal machine? What place do its forms have in a history that is always looking forward? How do these ‘primitive’ forms fit into the internal forces of progress? Today these questions seem somehow innocent. But maybe the prestige of Reason will recover and it will try once again to organize everything into totalities (so necessary to fill emptiness), fuse images into a single memory and all symbols into the same mould. In the meantime we can enjoy this breathing space, this truce maybe, to examine those many events that do not fit into universalist projects and which are not blessed by Reason; some shreds of condemned cultures that stubbornly survive despite decrees and plans.23 It is pointless to ask after the ultimate destiny of many forms discarded by an exclusive history. The fact is that they exist now. They are here, hidden or threatened, supported by their own memories or in their pure present, they are still alive, each reflecting a particular slice of time. When Ayoreode chiefs are defeated and taken to the missions they leave their furs and feathers behind; they have lost the right and the pride to wear them. When Chamacoco shamans approach farms to offer their labour and powers of healing they wear no garlands or crowns. But the last free chiefs and shamans zealously seek out the chosen birds and patiently carry out complicated rituals that their children will not use, but which right now can summon forth the ephemeral truth of the moment, conjure up alien timescales and capture an intense and fleeting moment in its unbearable lightness, as beautiful and real as a bolt of lightning.

“EMPIRE TWENTY YEARS ON.” NEW LEFT REVIEW NO. 120 (NOV./DEC. 2019).

You have to step back to make out the design of the mosaic, to appreciate the political significance of global migrations as an ongoing insurgency. Rest assured that the ruling authorities recognise the menace: the power of the insurgency is confirmed by the cruel and costly counterinsurgency strategies launched against migrants, from the EU-backed concentration camps in Libya to the barbaric policies at the US border. The migrant insurgency, simply by traversing them, threatens to make the various walls that segment the global system crack and crumble.

ANTONIO NEGRI AND MICHAEL HARDT

DOXANDÉEM FÉPP 183 FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Walter D. Mignolo

Coloniality: The Dark Side of Modernity Previously published in Modernologies: Contemporary Artists Researching Modernity and Modernism. Edited by Sabine Breitwieser et al. Barcelona: MACBA, 2009, pp. 39-49.

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The article is available in English: ‘Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality’, Cultural Studies, vol. 21, nos. 2–3, pp. 155–67 (2007).

The first publication in English of the work done by the collective since 1998 has been published in Cultural Studies, vol. 21, nos. 1–2 (2007). A special issue on ‘Globalisation and the Decolonial Option’.

The point has been argued several times in the past decade. See for instance, Arturo Escobar, ‘Beyond the Third World: imperial globality, global coloniality, and anti-globalization social movements’, Third World Quarterly, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 207–30 (2004).

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I. I was intrigued, many years ago (around 1991), when I saw on the ‘newsstand’ of a book store the title of Stephen Toulmin’s latest book: Cosmopolis, The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (1990). I went to a coffee shop, across the street from Borders in Ann Arbor and devoured the book over a cup of coffee: what was the hidden agenda of modernity? was the intriguing question. Shortly after that I was in Bogotá and found a book just published: Los conquistados: 1492 y la población indígena de América (1992). The last chapter of that book caught my attention. It was authored by Anibal Quijano of whom I had heard, but was not familiar. The article was titled ‘Coloniality and modernity/rationality’.1 I bought the book and found another coffee shop nearby. I devoured the article and the reading was a sort of epiphany. At that time I was finishing the manuscript of The Darker Side of the Renaissance (1995), but did not incorporate the article. There was much I had to think about and the manuscript was already framed. As soon I handed the manuscript to the press, I concentrated on ‘coloniality’, which became a central concept in Local Histories/ Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledge and Border Thinking (2000). After the publication of the book, I wrote a lengthy theoretical article, ‘The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference’, published in South Atlantic Quarterly (2002). For Toulmin the hidden agenda of modernity was the humanistic river running behind instrumental reason. For me the hidden agenda (and darker side) of modernity was coloniality. What follows is a recap of the work I have since done in collaboration with members of the collective modernity/coloniality.2 The basic thesis is the following: ‘modernity’ is a European narrative that hides its darker side, ‘coloniality’. Coloniality, in other words, is constitutive of modernity – there is no modernity without coloniality.3 Hence, today the common expression ‘global modernities’ imply ‘global colonialities’ in the precise sense that the colonial matrix of power (coloniality, for short) is being disputed by many contenders: if there cannot be modernity without coloniality, there cannot be either global modernities without global colonialities. That is the logic of the polycentric capitalist world of today. Consequently, de-colonial thinking and doing emerged, from the sixteenth century on, as responses to the oppressive and imperial bent of modern European ideals projected to, and enacted in, the non-European world.

II. I will start with two scenarios – one from the sixteenth century and the other from the late twentieth and the first decade of the twenty-first centuries. Let’s imagine the world around 1500. It was, briefly stated, a polycentric and non-capitalist world. There were several co-existing civilisations, some of long histories, others being formed around that time. In China, the Ming Dynasty ruled from 1368 to 1644. It was a centre of trade and a civilisation of long history. Around 200 BC, Chinese Huángdinate (often wrongly called ‘Chinese Empire’) co-existed with the Roman Empire. By 1500, the former Roman Empire became the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nations, which still co-existed with the Chinese Huángdinate ruled by the Ming Dynasty. Out of the dismembering of the Islamic Caliphate (formed in the sixth century and ruled by the Umayyads in the seventh and eighth centuries, and by the Abassids from the eight to the thirteenth centuries) in the fourteenth century three sultanates emerged. The Ottoman Sultanate in Anatolia with its centre in Constantinople; the Safavid Sultane with its centre in Baku, Azerbaijan and the Mughal Sultanate formed out of the ruins of the Delhi Sultanate that lasted from 1206 to 1526. The Mughals

Walter D. Mignolo, ‘Cosmopolitanism and the De-Colonial Option’, in Torill Strand (ed.), Cosmopolitanism in the Making. Special issue of Philosophy and Education. An International Journal, forthcoming.

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Every time I say ‘capitalism’ I mean it in the sense of Max Weber: ‘The spirit of capitalism is here used in this specific sense, it is the spirit of modern capitalism... Western European and American capitalism... ’ The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism [1904/05], London: Routledge, 1992, pp. 51–52.

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(whose first Sultan was Babur, descendent of Genghis Kan and Timur) extended from 1526 to 1707. By 1520, Moscovites had expelled the Golden Horde and declared Moscow the ‘Third Rome’. The history of the Russian Tsarate began. In Africa, the Oyo Kingdom (around what is today Nigeria), formed by the Yoruba nation, was the largest Kingdom in West Africa encountered by European explorers. The Benin Kingdom, after Oyo the second largest in Africa, lasted from 1440 to 1897. Last but not least, the Incas in Tawantinsuyu and the Aztecs in Anáhuac were two sophisticated civilisations by the time of the Spanish arrival. What happened then in the sixteenth century that would change the world order transforming it into the one in which we are living today? The advent of ‘modernity’ could be a simple and general answer, but... when, how, why, where? At the beginning of the twenty-first century the world is interconnected by a single type of economy (capitalism)4 and distinguished by a diversity of political theories and practices. Dependency theory should be reviewed in the light of these changes. But I will limit myself to distinguishing two overall orientations. On the one hand, the globalisation of capitalist economy and the diversification of global politics is taking place. On the other, we are witnessing the multiplication and diversification of anti-neo-liberal globalisation (e.g., anti-global capitalism). On the first orientation, China, India, Russia, Iran, Venezuela and the emerging South American Union have already made clear that they are no longer willing to follow up on uni-directional orders coming from the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank or the White House. Beneath Iran there is the history of Persia and the Safavid Sultanate; beneath Iraq the history of the Ottoman Sultanate. The past sixty years of Western entry in China (Marxism and capitalism) did not replace China’s history with the history of Europe and the United States since 1500; and the same with India. On the contrary, it reinforced China’s aim for sovereignty. In Africa, the imperial partition of Western countries between the end of the nineteenth and early-twentieth century (that provoked the First World War) did not replace the past of Africa with the past of Western Europe. And so in South America, 500 years of colonial rule by peninsular officers and, since early 1900, by Creole and Mestizo elites, did not erase the energy, force and memories of the Indian past (cf., current issues in Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, South of Mexico and Guatemala); neither did it erase the histories and memories of communities of African descent in Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela and the insular Caribbean. Moving in the opposite direction was the emergence of the state of Israel in 1948, which exploded toward the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century. On the second orientation, we are observing many non-official (rather than non-governmental) transnational organisations not only manifesting themselves ‘against’ capitalism, globalisation and questioning modernity, but also opening up global but non-capitalist horizons and de-linking from the idea that there is a single and main modernity surrounded by peripheral or alternative ones. Not necessarily rejecting modernity but making clear that modernity goes hand in hand with coloniality and, therefore, modernity has to be assumed in both its glories and its crimes. Let’s refer to this global domain ‘de-colonial cosmopolitanism’.5 No doubt that artists and museums are playing and have an important role to play in global formations of trans-modern and de-colonial subjectivities.

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Karen Armstrong, Islam: A Short Story, New York: The Modern Library, 2000, p. 142 (emphasis added).

Ibid., p. 142.

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Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1944, p. 32.

John Dagenais, ‘The Postcolonial Laura’, MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly, vol. 65, no. 3, September 2004, pp. 365–89.

10 • See for instance the symposium on Global Modernities, a conceptual debate on Altermodern: Tate Triennal 2009 Exhibition (http://www.tate.org.uk).

III. What happened in between the two scenarios outlined above, the sixteenth and the twenty-first centuries? Historian Karen Armstrong – looking at the history of the West from the perspective of a historian of Islam – has made two crucial points. Armstrong underscores the singularity of Western achievements in relation to the known history until the sixteenth century. She notes two salient spheres: economy and epistemology. In the sphere of economy, Armstrong points out that ‘the new society of Europe and its American colonies had a different economic basis’ that consisted in reinvesting the surplus in order to increase production. The first radical transformation in the domain of economy that allowed the West to ‘reproduce its resources indefinitely ’ is generally associated with colonialism.6 The second transformation, epistemological, is generally associated with the European Renaissance. Epistemological here shall be extended to encompass both science/knowledge and arts/meaning. Armstrong locates the transformation in the domain of knowledge in the sixteenth century, when Europeans ‘achieved a scientific revolution that gave them greater control over the environment than anybody had achieved before’.7 No doubt, Armstrong is right in highlighting the relevance of a new type of economy (capitalism) and the scientific revolution. They both fit and correspond to the celebratory rhetoric of modernity – that is, the rhetoric of salvation and newness, based on European achievements during the Renaissance. There is, however, a hidden dimension of events that were taking place at the same time, both in the sphere of economy and in the sphere of knowledge: the expendability of human life (e.g., enslaved Africans) and of life in general from the Industrial Revolution into the twenty-first century. Afro-Trinidadian politician and intellectual Eric Williams succinctly described this situation by noting that: ‘one of the most important consequences of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 [...] was the impetus it gave to the principle of free trade Only in one particular did the freedom accorded in the slave trade differ from the freedom accorded in other trades – the commodity involved was man.’8 Thus, hidden behind the rhetoric of modernity, human lives became expendable to the benefit of increasing wealth and such expendability was justified by the naturalisation of the racial ranking of human beings. In between the two scenarios described above, the idea of ‘modernity’ came into the picture. It appeared first as a double colonisation, of time and of space. Colonisation of time was created by the simultaneous invention of the Middle Age in the process of conceptualising the Renaissance;9 the colonisation of space by the colonisation and conquest of the New World. In the colonisation of space, modernity encounters its darker side, coloniality. During the time span 1500 to 2000 three cumulative (and not successive) faces of modernity are discernable: the first is the Iberian and Catholic face led by Spain and Portugal (1500–1750, approximately); the second, the ‘heart of Europe’ (Hegel) face lead by England, France and Germany (1750–1945); and finally the US American face lead by the United States (1945–2000). Since then, a new global order began to unfold: a polycentric world interconnected by the same type of economy. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, ‘modernity’ was questioned in its own chronology and ideals, within Europe and the United States: the term postmodernity refers to such critical arguments. More recently, altermodernity is coming out as a new term and period, within Europe.10 Spatially, expressions such as alternative modernities, subaltern modernities and peripheral modernities were introduced to account for modernity but from non-European perspectives. All of them have one common problem: these narratives and arguments maintain the centrality of Euro-American modernity or, if you wish, assume

13 Kaldoum Shaman, Islam and the Orientalist World-System, London: Paradigm Publishers, 2008. 14 Walter D. Mignolo, ‘The Darker Side of the Enlightenment. A Decolonial Reading of Kant’s Geography’ in Stuart Elden and Eduardo Mendieta (eds.), Kant’s Geography, Stony Brook: Stony Brook Press, forthcoming. 15 See Enrique Dussel, ‘Modernity, Eurocentrism and Transmodernity: in dialogue with Charles Taylor’, Biblioteca Virtual CLACSO. For an analytical survey of ‘transmodernity’ and ‘coloniality’, see Ramón Grosfóguel: ‘Trans-modernity, Border Thinking and Global Coloniality. Decolonizing Political Economy and Postcolonial Studies’, Eurozine, 2007, (http:// www.eurozine.com).

16 ‘On the Colonization of Amerindian Languages and Memories: Renaissance Theories of Writing and the Discontinuity of the Classical Tradition’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 34, no. 2, 1992, pp. 301–30 (http://www.jstor.org).

IV. The preceding explorations are based on the hypothesis that modernity and coloniality are two sides of the same coin. ‘Coloniality’ is short hand for ‘colonial matrix (or order) of power’; it describes and explains coloniality as the hidden and darker side of modernity. The hypothesis runs as follows: As I mentioned before, the European Renaissance was conceived as such, establishing the bases for the idea of modernity, through the double colonisation of time and space. The double colonisation was tantamount with the invention of European traditions. One was Europe’s own tradition (colonisation of time). The other was the invention of nonEuropean traditions: the non-European world that co-existed before 1500 (colonisation of space). The invention of America was indeed the first step in the invention of non-European traditions that modernity was in charge of superseding by conversion, civilisation and later by development.16 ‘Modernity’ became – in relation to the nonEuropean world – synonymous with salvation and newness. From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, it was spearheaded by Christian Theology as well as by secular Renaissance Humanism (still linked to theology). The rhetoric of salvation by conversion to Christianity was translated into the rhetoric of salvation by the civilising mission, from the eighteenth century on, when England and France displaced Spain leading to Western imperial/colonial expansion. The rhetoric of newness was complemented with the idea of ‘progress’. Salvation, newness and progress took a new turn – and a new vocabulary – after the Second World War, when the United States took over the previous leadership of England and France, supported the struggle for decolonisation in Africa

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12 See interview with Kishore Mahbubani by Suzy Hansen in http://dir.salon.com.

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11 The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East, Kishore Mahbubani, 2008. Mahbubani is dean of the Lee Kwan Yee School of Public Policy in Singapore and collaborator for the Financial Times. See an illuminating interview in youtube.

one ‘modernity of reference’ and put themselves in subordinate positions. All these narratives have another element in common: they assume that ‘the world is flat’ in its triumphal march toward the future while concealing coloniality. And finally, all of them overlooked the possible reality that local actors in the non-European world are claiming ‘our modernity’ while de-linking from Western imperatives, be it the corporate camp claiming ‘our capitalist modernity’ or the de-colonial camp claiming ‘our non-capitalist, de-colonial modernity’. The corporate claim (de-Westernisation) is being forcefully argued by Singaporean Kishore Mahbubani, among others. Mahbubani had made the case for the rise of the ‘new Asian hemisphere and the shift of global power’.11 ‘Modernity’ is not rejected but appropriated in the current shift lead by East and South Asia. Mahbubani’s provocative question: ‘Can Asians Think?’ is, on the one hand a confrontation with Western epistemic racism and, on the other, a defiant and disobedient appropriation of Western ‘modernity’: Why would the West feel threatened by Asian appropriation of capitalism and modernity if such an appropriation will benefit the world and humanity at large, he asks? 12 In the de-colonial camp (that is, not the postmodern and the altermodern), transmodernity would be the parallel concept. This type of argument is already at work among Islamic intellectuals. Being part of the modern-world system and entrenched unabashedly with European modernity, a global future lies in working toward the rejection of modernity and genocidal reason, and the appropriation of its emancipating ideals.13 Similarly, claims are being made in the growing con-versations on ‘de-colonial cosmopolitanism’. While Kant’s cosmopolitanism was Eurocentred and imperial, de-colonial cosmopolitanism becomes critical of both, Kant’s imperial legacies and of polycentric capitalism in the name of de-Westernisation.14 For these reasons, trans-modernity would be a more fitting description of envisioned futures from de-colonial perspectives.15

18 For example, in Africa, Kwame Gyekye: Tradition and Modernity. Philosophical Reflections on the African Experience, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997; in Iran, Ramin Jahanbegloo (ed.), Iran: Between Modernity and Tradition, Laham, Md: Lexigton Books, 2004; in India, Ashis Nandy, Talking India. Ashis Nandy in Conversation with Ramin Jahangegloo, New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. In South America, where the intelligentsia is basically of European descent (contrary to Africa, Iran or India, where the intelligentsia is basically ‘native’, that is, not of European descent), the concern is more with modernity than with tradition, since ‘tradition’ for such ethno-class is basically European tradition. Which is not the case for Africans, Iranians or Indians. 19 See Madina Tlostanova, ‘The Janus-Faced Empire Distorting Orientalist Discourses. Gender, Race and Religion in the Russian/(post) Soviet Construction of the Orient’, WKO (Spring 2008); Leonid Heretz, Russia on the Eve of Modernity. Popular Religion and Traditional Culture under the Last Tsars, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007; Eugene Ivakhnenko, ‘A ThresholdDominant Model of the Imperial and Colonial Discourses of Russia’, South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 105, no. 3, 2006, pp. 595–616.

and Asia and started an economic global project under the name of ‘development and modernisation’. We know today the consequences of salvation by development. The new version of this rhetoric, ‘globalisation and free trade’, is under dispute. From de-colonial perspectives, then, these four stages and versions of salvation and newness coexist today in diachronic accumulation although from the (post)modern perspective and selffashioned narrative of modernity, based on the celebration of salvation and newness, each stage supersedes and makes the previous one obsolete: it builds on newness and on modernity’s own tradition. The rhetoric of modernity (salvation, newness, progress, development) went hand in hand with the logic of coloniality. In some cases, it was through colonisation. In other cases, like China, it was by diplomatic and commercial manipulations from the Opium War to Mao Ze-dong. The period of neo-liberal globalisation (from Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher to the collapse of the George W. Bush administration with the failure in Iraq and on Wall Street), exemplifies the logic of coloniality taken to its extreme: to the extreme of revealing itself in its own spectacular failure. The economic failure of Wall Street coupled with the failure in Iraq, opened up the gates to the polycentric world order. In summation, modernity/coloniality are two sides of the same coin. Coloniality is constitutive of modernity; there is no modernity, there cannot be, without coloniality. Postmodernity and altermodernity do not get rid of coloniality. They only present a new mask that, intentionally or not, continues to hide it.

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17 See Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity. Essays on the Ontology of the Present, London: Verso, 2002.

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20 Sanjib Baruah, ‘India and China: Debating Modernity’, World Policy Journal, vol. 23, no. 4, 2006–07, p. 62. 21 ‘Modernisation’ since 1945 translates as ‘development’, that is, conflating the spirit of an historical period with economic imperial designs. The argument has been made several times. For instance, Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development. The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994; for the Mediterranean area, see Ella Habiba Shohat, ‘The Narrative of the Nation and the Discourse of Modernization: The Case of Arab-Jews in Israel’, 1998 (http://www.worldbank.org).

V. Because the idea of modernity was built as solely European and, in that argument, there was and is just a ‘singular’ modernity,17 it engendered a series of latecomers and wannabes (e.g., alternative, peripheral, subaltern, altermodernities). All of which reproduce the vexing question on ‘modernity and tradition’, a question you do not find much debated among Euro-American intellectuals. For that very reason, the debates about ‘modernity and tradition’ were and still are a concern, mainly, of intellectuals from the non-European (and US) world.18 Basically, the problems and concerns with modernity and tradition are enunciated from or in relation to the ex-Third World and of non-European histories – Japan, for example. In/for Japan, modernity was and is an issue extensively explored and debated. Harry Harootunian explored the issue in detail in his book Overcome by Modernity. History, Culture and Community in Interwar Japan (2000); in Russia, modernity was an issue since Peter and Catherine the Great who wanted to jump on the band-wagon of European modernity, but it was too late and ended up in reproducing, in Russia, a sort of second-class modernity.19 China and India are not exempt. I have mentioned de-Westernisation arguments advanced in East and South East Asia. Sanjib Baruah recently summarised ‘India and China’ debating modernity. In a section revealingly entitled ‘engaging the modern’, Baruah observes that India is – in spite of its recent corporate face – the home of strong intellectual opposition to ideas of development and modernisation, following the teaching of Mahatma Gandhi.20 His analysis points toward conflictive scenarios confronting arguments in defence of ‘wanting to become modern and to develop’ with those engaging in radical criticisms of modernity and development.21 The scenario is a common one in Africa and in South America. But in that general scenario, what is really at stake in modernisation is vested in economic development. Baruah writes:

24 Partha Chatterjee, ‘Talking About Modernity in Two Languages’, A Possible India. Essays in Political Criticism, New Delhi: Oxford India, 1998, pp. 263–85.

VI. If you dwell in the history of British India, rather than in Britain, the world doesn’t look the same. In Britain you may see it through Giddens lenses; in India probably through Gandhi’s lenses. Would you make a choice or work with the undeniable conflictive co-existence of both? Indian historian and political theorist, Partha Chatterjee addressed the problem of ‘modernity in two languages’. The article, collected in his book A Possible India (1998), is the English version of a lecture he delivered in Bengali and presented in Calcutta.24 The English version is not just a translation but also a theoretical reflection on the geo-politics of knowledge and epistemic and political de-linking. Unapologetically and forcefully, Chatterjee structured his talk on the distinction between ‘our modernity’ and ‘their modernity’. Rather than a single modernity defended by postmodern intellectuals in the ‘First World’ Chatterjee plants a solid pillar to build the future of ‘our’ modernity – not independent from ‘their modernity’ (because Western expansion is a fact), but unrepentantly and unashamedly ‘ours’. This is one of the strengths of Chatterjee’s argument. But remember, first, that the British entered India, commercially, toward the end of the eighteenth century and, politically, during the first half of the nineteenth century when England and France, after Napoleon, extended their tentacles in Asia and Africa. So for Chatterjee, in contradistinction with South American and Caribbean intellectuals, ‘modernity’ means Enlightenment and not Renaissance. Not surprisingly Chatterjee takes Immanuel Kant’s ‘What is Enlightenment’ as a pillar in the foundation of the European idea of modernity. For Kant, Enlightenment meant that Man (in the sense of the human being) was coming of age, abandoning its immaturity, reaching his freedom. Chatterjee points out Kant’s silence (intentionally or not) and Michel Foucault’s short sightedness when reading Kant’s essays. Missing in Kant’s celebration of freedom and maturity and

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23 Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, California: Stanford University Press, 1990, p. 174.

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22 Baruah, op. cit., p. 63.

Critics of modernity enjoy quite a bit of intellectual prestige in India (though this should not be confused with an actual adherence to their ideas). India is home to sophisticated intellectual and activist opposition to mainstream ideas on development and modernisation. As the China-historian Prasenjit Duara points out, counter narratives to modernity have ‘almost as much visibility as the narrative of progress’ in India. Viewed comparatively, the ‘general acceptability and prestige’ of Gandhi’s anti-modern ideas in India is remarkable, even though policymakers ignore his ideas in practice.22 In England, Anthony Giddens ended his argument in his celebrated book The Consequences of Modernity (1990) by asking himself: ‘Is Modernity a Western Project?’ He sees the nation-state and systematic capitalist production as the European anchor of modernity. That is, control of authority and control of economy grounded on the historical foundation of imperial Europe. In this sense, the answer to his question was ‘a blatant yes’.23 What Giddens says is true. So, what is the problem? The problem is that it is half true: it is true in the story told by someone who dwells, comfortably one should think, in the house of ‘modernity’. If we accept that ‘modernity’ is a Western project let’s then take responsibility for ‘coloniality’ (the darker and constitutive side of modernity): the crimes and violence justified in the name of modernity. ‘Coloniality’ in other words is one of the most tragic ‘consequences of modernity’ and at the same time the most hopeful in that it has engendered the global march toward de-coloniality.

29 For the ontological and epistemic difference, see Nelson MaldonadoTorres, ‘On the Coloniality of Being: Contributions to the Development of a Concept’, Cultural Studies vol. 21, nos. 2–3, 2007, pp. 240–70. 30 I am thinking, certainly, of Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum. History, Theory, Politics. London: Routledge, 1995, pp. 60ff, but also of more specific studies such as Nick Prior, Museums and Modernity, Art Galleries and the Making of Modern Culture, Oxford: Berg Publisher, 2002, and Gisela Weiss, Sinnstiftung in der Provinz: Westfälische Museen im Kaiserreich, Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöning Verlag, 2005; and the review by Eva Giloi for H-German, June, 2007 (https://www.h-net.org).

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25 Ibid., pp. 273–74. 26 Ibid., p. 275. 27 Ibid. 28 Thus it is not surprising to find today growing concerns, and a number of scholars, working on the de-colonisation of international law, Branwen Gruffydd Jones (ed.), Boulder/ New York: Decolonizing International Relations, Roman and Littlefield Publishers Inc., 2006.

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in Foucault’s celebration was the fact that Kant’s concept of Man and humanity was based on the European concept idea of humanity from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment and not in the ‘lesser humans’ that populated the world beyond the heart of Europe. So, ‘enlightenment’ was not for everybody, unless they become ‘modern’ in the European idea of modernity. One point in Chatterjee’s insightful interpretation of Kant-Foucault is relevant for the argument I am developing here. I would surmise, following Chatterjee’s argument, that Kant and Foucault lacked the colonial experience and political interest propelled by the colonial wound. Not that they had to have it. But yes, that their view cannot be universalised. If you have been born, educated and your subjectivity formed in Germany and France, your conception of the world and feeling will be different from someone born and raised in British India. Thus Chatterjee can state that ‘we – in India – have built up an intricately differentiated structure of authorities which specifies who has the right to say what on which subjects’.25 In ‘Modernity in two languages’ Chatterjee reminds us that the ‘Third World’ has been mainly ‘consumer’ of First World scholarship and knowledge: Somehow, from the very beginning, we had made a shrewd guess that given the close complicity between modern knowledge and modern regimes of power, we would for ever remain consumers of universal modernity; never would we be taken as serious producers.26 Chatterjee concludes that it is for this reason that ‘we have tried, for over a hundred years, to take our eyes away from this chimera of universal modernity and clear up a space where we might become the creators of our own modernity’.27 I imagine you are getting the point. ‘The other’ (the anthropos) decided to disobey: epistemic and political disobedience that consist of the appropriation of European modernity while dwelling in the house of coloniality.

VII. It is not common to think of international law as related to the making of ‘modernity’. I will argue in this section that international law (more exactly legal theology) contributed in the sixteenth century to the creation – a creation demanded by the ‘discovery’ of America – of racial differences as we sense them today. What to do, Spanish legal theologians asked themselves, with the ‘Indians’ (in the Spanish imaginary) and, more concretely, with their land? International law was founded on racial assumptions: ‘Indians’ had to be conceived, if humans, as not quite rational, although ready for conversion.28 ‘Modernity’ showed up its face in the epistemic assumptions and arguments of legal theology to decide and determine who was what. Simultaneously, the face of ‘coloniality’ was disguised under the inferior status of the invented inferior. Here you have a clear case of coloniality as the needed and constitutive darker side of modernity. Modernity/coloniality is articulated here on the ontological and epistemic differences: Indians are, ontologically, lesser human beings and, in consequence, not fully rational.29 Conversely, museums have been counted in the making of modernity.30 However, questions about museums (as institutions) and coloniality (as the hidden logic of modernity) have not been asked. It is taken for granted that museums are ‘naturally’ part of the European imagination and creativity. In VII.1 I attempt to unveil coloniality under international law regulating international relations. And in VII.2, I open up the question about museums and coloniality. Museums, as we know them today, did not exist before 1500. They have been built and transformed – on

33 A case in point could found in Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (particularly section IV), Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960. 34 Antony Anghie, ‘Francisco de Vitoria and the Colonial Origins of International Law’ in Eve Darian-Smith and Peter Fitzpatrick (eds.), Laws of the Postcolonial, Ann Arbor: the University of Michigan Press, 1999, pp. 89–108. 35 A de-colonial history of international law can be found in Siba N’Zatioula Grovogui, Sovereigns, Quasi Sovereigns, and Africans, Minneapolis: the University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

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VII. 1 Francisco de Vitoria is rightly celebrated mainly among Spanish and other European scholars for being one of the fathers of international law. His treatise, Relectio de Indis is considered foundational in the history of the discipline. Central to Vitoria’s argument was the question of ius gentium (rights of the people or rights of nations). Ius gentium allowed Vitoria to put at the same level of humanity both Spaniards and Indians. He did not pay attention to the fact that by collapsing Quechuas, Aymaras, Nahuatls, Mayas, etc, under the label ‘Indians’ he was already stepping into a racial classification. So it was not difficult for Vitoria to slide smoothly into the second step of his argument: although equal to Spaniards in the domain of ius gentium, Vitoria concluded (or he knew it first and then argued it) Indians were sort of childish and needed the guidance and protection of Spaniards. At that moment Vitoria inserted the colonial difference (ontological and epistemic) into international law. The colonial difference operates by converting differences into values and establishing a hierarchy of human beings ontologically and epistemically. Ontologically, is assumed that there are inferior human beings. Epistemically, it is assumed that inferior human beings are rational and aesthetically deficient.33 Legal scholar Anthony Anghie has provided an insightful analysis of the historical foundational moment of the colonial difference.34 In a nutshell the argument is the following: Indians and Spaniards are equal in the face of natural law as both, by natural law, are endowed with ius gentium. In making this move, Vitoria prevented the Pope and divine law from legislating on human issues. However, once Vitoria established the distinction between ‘principes Christianos’ (as well as Castilians in general) and ‘los bárbaros’ (e.g., the anthropos) on the other, and he made his best effort to balance his arguments based on the equality he attributed to both people by natural law and ius gentium, he turns into justifying Spaniard’s rights and limits toward ‘the barbarians’ to expropriate or not; to declare war or not; to govern or not. Communication and interaction between Christians and barbarians are one-sided: the barbarians have no say in whatever Vitoria said because barbarians were deprived from sovereignty even when they are recognised as equal per natural law and ius gentium. The move is foundational to the legal and philosophical constitution of modernity/coloniality and the principle of reasoning would be maintained through the centuries, modified in the vocabulary from barbarians to primitives, from primitives to communists, from communists to terrorists.35 Thus orbis christianius, secular cosmopolitanism and economic globalism are names corresponding to different moments of the colonial order of power and distinct imperial leadership (from Spain to England to the United States). Anghie made three decisive points about Vitoria and the historical origins of international law that illuminate how modernity/ coloniality are bound together and how salvation justifies oppression and violence. The first is ‘that Vitoria is concerned, not so much with the

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32 Two examples of de-colonial uses of museums installations are Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum (http:// www.citypaper.com); and Pedro Lasch, Black Mirror/Espejo Negro (http://www. ambriente.com).

one hand – to be the institutions where Western memory is honoured and displayed; where European modernity conserves its tradition (the colonisation of time) and – on the other hand – to be the institutions in which the difference of non-European traditions is recognised. 31 The open question is then how to de-colonise museums and to use museums to de-colonise the reproduction of Western colonisation of time and space.32

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31 Walter D. Mignolo, ‘Museums in the Colonial Horizon of Modernity’, CIMAM Annual Conference, São Paulo, November 2005, pp. 66–77, (http:// www.cimam.org).

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36 Anghie, op. cit., p. 102 (emphasis added). 37 Franz Hinkelammert’s analysis of Locke’s inversion of human rights is very helpful to understand the double side/double density of ‘modernity/ coloniality’ and how the rhetoric of modernity continues to obliterate coloniality. See his ‘The Hidden Logic of Modernity: Locke’s Inversion of Human Rights’, 2004. 38 It is certainly very telling that a Japanese scholar, Nishitan Osanu, has cogently argued that ‘anthropos’ and ‘humanitas’ are two Western concepts. Indeed, they produce the effect of reality when the modern ideals of ‘humanitas’ cannot exist without the modern/colonial invention of ‘anthropos’. Think of the debate of immigration in Europe, for example. There you have modernity/coloniality at its best. See Nishitai Osamu, ‘Anthropos and Humanitas, Two Western Concepts’in Naoki Sakai and Jon Solomon (eds.), Translation, Biopolitics, Colonial Difference, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006, pp. 259–74.

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39 Anghie, op. cit., p. 103 (emphasis added).

problem of order among sovereign states but the problem of order among societies belonging to two different cultural systems’.36 The second is that the framework is there to regulate its violation. And when the violation occurs, then the creators and enforcers of the framework had a justification to invade and use force to punish and expropriate the violator. This logic was wonderfully rehearsed by John Locke in his Second Treatise on Government (1681). One can say that ‘coloniality’, in Vitoria, set the stage not only for international law but also for ‘modern and European’ conceptions of governmentality. It seems obvious that Locke did not get as much from Machiavelli as from the emergence of international law in the sixteenth century, and in the way that Vitoria, and his followers, settled to discuss both the question of ‘property’ and ‘governance’ in the interaction between Christians and the barbarians. 37 The third is that the ‘framework’ is not dictated by divine or natural law but by human interests, and in this case, the interests of Christian Castilian males. Thus, the ‘framework’ presupposes a very well located and singular locus of enunciation that, guarded by divine and natural law, it is presumed to be uni-versal. And on the other hand, the uni-versal and uni-lateral frame ‘includes’ the barbarians or Indians (a principle that is valid for all politics of inclusion we hear today) in their difference thus justifying any action Christians will take to tame them. The construction of the colonial difference goes hand in hand with the establishment of exteriority: exteriority is the place in which the outside (e.g., anthropos) is invented in the process of creating the inside (e.g., humanitas) to secure the safe space where the enunciator dwells.38 Clearly, then, Vitoria’s work suggests that the conventional view that sovereignty doctrine was developed in the West and then transferred to the non-European world is, in important respects, misleading. Sovereignty doctrine acquired its character through the colonial encounter. This is the darker history of sovereignty, which cannot be understood by any account of the doctrine that assumes the existence of sovereign states. Briefly stated: if modernity is a Western invention (as Giddens says), so too is coloniality. Therefore, it seems very difficult to overcome coloniality from a Western modern perspective. De-colonial arguments are pressing this blind spot in both right-wing and left-wing oriented arguments.39

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40 See the cogent argument, on this issue, by Donald Preziosi, ‘Brain of the Earth’s Body: Museums and the Framing of Modernity’, in Bettina Messias Carbonell (ed.), Museum Studies. An Anthology of Contexts, London: Black- well, 2004, pp. 71–84.

VII. 2 In the context at hand, ‘museums’ as we know them today (and their forerunner – Wunderkammer, Kunstkammer) have been instrumental in shaping modern/ colonial subjectivities by splitting Kunstkammer into ‘museums of arts’ and ‘museums of natural histories’.40 Initially, Peter the Great’s Kunstkammer was put in place toward 1720, while the British Museum (founded as a Cabinet of Curiosity) was created later (toward 1750). However, the institution of Kunstkammer in the West became the locale for curiosities brought from European colonies, most of the time, by looting. The history of the building, Le Louvre, goes back to the Middle Ages. But the museum, Le Louvre, came into being after the French Revolution. Nowadays, a process of de-Westernisation has already begun. The hundreds of museums being constructed in China are part of this process. De-Westernisation is a process parallel to de-coloniality at the level of the state and of the economy. Kishore Mahbubani, quoted above, is one of the most consistent and coherent

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42 For example, Modernity in Central Europe, 1918–1945 is one of those exhibitions that ‘enhances’ Western Europe by embracing modernity. National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C, 10 June – 10 September 2007.

voices of de-Westernisation and the political, economic and epistemic shift to Asia.41 One can ask, then, given this exhibition titled ‘Modernologies’ what is the place of museums and art, in general, in the rhetoric of modernity and the colonial matrix of power? How can museums become places of de-colonisation of knowledge and of being or, on the contrary, how can they remain institutions and instruments of control, regulation and reproduction of coloniality? 42 By asking these questions, we are entering here in plain territory of knowledge, meaning and subjectivity. If international law legalised economic appropriation of land, natural resources and non-European labour (of which ‘outsourcing’ today shows the independence of the economic sector from patriotic or nationalist arguments of ‘developed’ states) and warranted the accumulation of money, universities and museums (and lately mainstream media) warranted the accumulation of meaning. The complementarity of accumulation of money and accumulation of meaning (hence, the rhetoric of modernity as salvation and progress) sustains the narratives of modernity. While colonialilty is the unavoidable consequence of ‘the unfinished project of modernity’ (as Jürgen Habermas would say) – since coloniality is constitutive of modernity – de-coloniality (in the sense of global de-colonial projects) becomes the global option and horizons of liberation. The horizon of such liberation is a transmodern, non-capitalist world, no longer mapped by ‘la pensée unique’, adapting Ignacio Ramonet’s expression, neither from the right nor from the left: coloniality engendered de-coloniality.

VIII. CODA I hope to have contributed to understanding how the logic of coloniality was structured during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; to understand how it changed hands, was transformed and adapted to the new circumstances, although maintaining the spheres (and the interrelations) in which management and control of authority, of economy, of people (subjectivity, gender, sexuality) and of knowledge has been played out in building the mono-centric world order from 1500 to 2000; and how that order is being transformed into a polycentric one. Now what is exactly the colonial matrix of power/ coloniality? Let’s imagine it in two semiotic levels: the level of the enunciated and the level of the enunciation. At the level of the enunciated, the colonial matrix operates at four interrelated domains interrelated in the specific sense that a single domain cannot be properly understood independently from the other three. This is the junction between conceptualisations of ‘capitalism’ (either liberal or Marxist) and the conceptualisation of the colonial matrix, which implies a de-colonial conceptualisation. The four domains in question, briefly described, are (and remember that each of these domains is disguised by a constant and changing rhetoric of modernity (that is, of salvation, progress, development, happiness): 1) Management and control of subjectivities (for example, Christian and secular education, yesterday and today, museums and universities, media and advertising today, etc.) 2) Management and control of authority (for example, viceroyalties in the Americas, British authority in India, US army, Politbureau in the Soviet Union, etc.) 3) Management and control of economy (for example, by reinvesting of the surplus engendered by massive appropriation of land in America and Africa; massive exploitation of labour

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41 See Mahubani, op. cit., note 9, and also his provocative arguments under the heading of ‘Can Asians Think?’ (http:// dir.salon.com).

COLONIALITY: THE DARK SIDE OF MODERNITY 194 WALTER D. MIGNOLO

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starting with the slave-trade; by foreign debts through the creation of economic institutions such as World Bank and IMF, etc.); 4) Management and control of knowledge (for example, theology and the invention of international law that set up a geo-political order of knowledge founded on European epistemic and aesthetic principles that legitimised the disqualifications over the centuries of non-European knowledge and non-Europeans aesthetic standards, from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment and from the Enlightenment to neo-liberal globalisation; philosophy). The four domains (the enunciated) are all and constantly interrelated and held together by the two anchors of enunciation. Indeed, who were and are the agents and institutions that generated and continue to reproduce the rhetoric of modernity and the logic of coloniality? It so happened that, in general, the agents (and institutions) creating and managing the logic of coloniality were Western Europeans, mostly men; if not all heterosexual, at least assuming heterosexuality as the norm of sexual conduct. And they were – in general – mostly white and Christian (either Catholic or Protestant). Thus, the enunciation of the colonial matrix was founded in two embodied and geo-historically located pillars: the seed for the subsequent racial classification of the planet population and the superiority of white men over men of colour but also over white women. The racial and patriarchal underlying organisation of knowledge-making (the enunciation) put together and maintain the colonial matrix of power that daily becomes less visible because of the loss of holistic views promoted by the modern emphasis on expertise and on the division and sub-division of scientific labour and knowledge. Global futures need to be imagined and constructed through de-colonial options; that is, working globally and collectively to de-colonise the colonial matrix of power; to stop the sand castles built by modernity and its derivatives. Museums can indeed play a crucial role in the building of de-colonial futures.

SHORT VOYAGES TO THE LAND OF THE PEOPLE. STANFORD, (CA) STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2003.

The foreigner … persists in the curiosity of his gaze, displaces his angle of vision, reworks the first way of putting together words and images, undoes the certainties of place, and thereby reawakens the power present in each of us to become a foreigner on the map of places and paths generally known as reality.

JACQUES RANCIÈRE

“QUEER.” TSQ 1, NOS.1-2 (MAY 2014).

Queer, with its valences of strange, odd, and perplexing, was also meant to indicate a range of nonnormative sexual practices and gender identifications beyond gay and lesbian. Forwarding a model of coalition among the marginalised and the excluded, queer, as at its most capacious, was imagined as a rallying cry against “the regimes of the normal” (Michael Warner), poised to address “the fractal intricacies of language, skin, migration, state” (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick).

HEATHER LOVE

“ON BEING A REFUGEE, AN AMERICAN—AND A HUMAN BEING.” FINANCIAL TIMES, FEBRUARY 3, 2017.

Refugees are living embodiments of a disturbing possibility: that human privileges are quite fragile, that one’s home, family, and nation are one catastrophe away from being destroyed.

VIET THANH NGUYEN

204

Pacita Abad

BASCO, PHILIPPINES, 1946– 2004, SINGAPORE

Pacita Abad’s work is characterised by the effusive use of colour and extensive range of techniques and materials influenced and inspired by her contact with people and cultures during her travels. Part of a deeply political family, Abad left the Philippines for Spain in 1970 to study immigration law. A stop in San Francisco became permanent when she was drawn to the city’s alternative culture and burgeoning immigrant population. The events of this period, including her introduction to art and meeting her husband, eventually kindled Abad’s inevitable trajectory as an artist. She developed a prolific practice that, according to critic Tausif Noor, “sidestepped hierarchies between craft and high art and unravelled received notions of the local, national, and global, pursuing… a vibrant eclecticism that was often at odds with the dominant artistic movements of her time”. Haitians Waiting At Guantanamo Bay, 1994 Oil, painted cloth, buttons and beads on stitched and padded canvas, 231.1 × 177.8 cm. Courtesy Pacita Abad Art Estate.

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Abad, along with her husband, a development economist whose work necessitated extensive travel, lived in eleven countries and travelled to sixty-two. Her interest in the immigrant experience inspired a series using her trapunto painting technique. Haitians Waiting At Guantanamo Bay (1994) depicts the hopeful wait behind barbed wires, leaving behind empty skiffs and a town with sunlit skies and palm trees. During this time, Abad also created Contemplating Flor (1995) and Filipinas in Hong Kong (1995). You Have to Blend in Before You Stand Out (1995) is a large trapunto of a woman dressed in a sarong that matches a Yankees baseball cap and Bulls basketball jersey, illustrating the internal struggle that immigrants and their families experience when integrating into a new society. Abad herself became a naturalised US citizen twenty-four years after arriving in the US. This is the first time the work of Pacita Abad is presented at Biennale Arte. —Joselina Cruz

You Have to Blend In Before You Stand Out, 1995 Oil, painted batik cloth, sequins, buttons on stitched and padded canvas, 294.6 × 297.2 cm. Courtesy Pacita Abad Art Estate.

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Filipinas in Hong Kong, 1995 Acrylic on stitched and padded canvas, 270 × 300 cm. Art Jameel Collection. Courtesy Pacita Abad Art Estate.

206

Claudia Alarcón & Silät

Claudia Alarcón is a textile artist from the La Puntana community of the Wichí people of northern Salta, Argentina. She works individually and in collaboration with Silät, an artist collective of one hundred women weavers of different generations from the Alto la Sierra and La Puntana Wichí communities. The name Silät comes from the Wichí lhämtes language and means “message” or “warning”, reflecting the value placed by the Wichí on non-verbal communication and subconscious intuition, as well as the role of textiles to convey messages and a shared cultural sentiment. The collective emerged in 2015 from the Thañí/Viene del monte organisation, a public project aimed at reviving and

advancing ancestral textile traditions. Alarcón provides a means for women across generations to transmit a contemporary Indigenous culture into the webs of international art dialogues. Her practice, supported by new curatorial perspectives, marks a shift in the contemporary art system, one more receptive to collective and community-based practices. Alarcón worked with other members of Silät (Anabel Luna, Graciela López, Ana López, Mariela Pérez, Fermina Pérez, Francisca Pérez, Marta Pacheco, Rosilda López, Margarita López, Melania Pereyra, Nelba Mendoza, Tomasa Alonso, and Edith Cruz) to process, spin, and dye fibres from the native chaguar

COMUNIDAD LA PUNTANA, SANTA VICTORIA ESTE, ARGENTINA, 1989 LIVES IN COMUNIDAD LA PUNTANA

plant and to weave them into the textiles exhibited at the Biennale Arte. Departing from inherited weaving practices, traditional geometric patterns bend to fluid forms of colour that spill across the works and animate them. Marking a close connection with the water and the land, they evoke the cycles of nature. These artworks stem from stories dreamt and told by elders in the community which warn of the relationships humans forge and break with all living things. This is the first time the work of Claudia Alarcon, and the work in collaboration with Silät, is presented at Biennale Arte. —María Amalia García

Kates tsinhay [Star women], 2023 Hand-spun chaguar fibre, natural dyes from the native forest, woven fabric, “yica” stitch, 192 × 203 cm. Photo Eva Herzog. Antonio Murzi & Diana Morgan Collection. Courtesy Cecilia Brunson Projects.

Claudia Alarcón & Silät Chelhchup [Autumn], 2023 Hand-spun chaguar fibre, natural dyes and aniline dyes, woven fabric, “yica” stitch, 187 × 176 cm. Photo Eva Herzog. Courtesy Cecilia Brunson Projects.

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Fwokachaj kiotey [Armadillo ears], 2023 Hand-spun chaguar fibre, natural dyes from the native forest, woven fabric, antique stitch, 152.5 × 139 cm. Photo Eva Herzog. Courtesy Estrellita B. Brodsky Collection

208

Aloïse

Aloïse Corbaz was born in Lausanne to a middleclass family and dreamt of becoming an opera singer before being sent to Germany, where she found employment as a governess in the court of Emperor Wilhelm II. She reportedly harboured ardent feelings for the emperor, who appears as one of the archetypal male figures in the cast of characters that occupy her kaleidoscopic images of romance and theatricality. After returning to Switzerland at the onset of World War I, Aloïse began to demonstrate behaviour deemed erratic by family members. In 1918, she was hospitalised; two years later she became an inpatient at La Rosière Asylum, where she would remain until her death. While interned, she began to write and draw in secret, using rudimentary materials including toothpaste, thread, and juice from plants as well as coloured pencil and oil pastel. In a letter sent to her father at the beginning of her hospitalisation, Aloïse writes: “I feel a slow and sure physical decay, fanaticism of the mad love that has torn everything from my body”. Coincidentally resonating with André Breton’s Surrealist notion of the infinitely revelatory nature of romantic passion, Aloïse’s own sense of “mad love” can be seen as the generative force underpinning her visions of courtly ladies, dashing uniformed men, and mythic figures, including Cleopatra and Ben-Hur.

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LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND, 1886– 1964, GIMEL, SWITZERLAND

Cloisonné de théâtre [Theater partition] (1941–1951), a multipanel epic depicting a series of fervent embraces set in florid surroundings, is structured into “acts”. As in many of her works, female figures regaled in splendour or sensuous nakedness act as the protagonists. In 1936, Aloïse’s practice was brought to the attention of her physician, who passed it on to Jean Dubuffet; as a result, her work became a key presence within his collection and theorisation of Art Brut, admired by Breton and other key Surrealists and modernists of the twentieth century. This is the first time the work of Aloïse is presented at Biennale Arte. —Sybilla Griffin

L’Angleterre – Trône de Dehli, 1960-63 Drawing with colored pencils, 101 × 72 cm. Photo Atelier de numérisation de la Ville de Lausanne. Christine et Jean-David Mermod Collection. Courtesy SIK-ISEA, Zürich.

209 NUCLEO CONTEMPORANEO Cloisonné de théâtre, 1941-51 Drawing with colored pencils, 14 m. Photo LAM (Lille métropole, musée d’art moderne, d’art contemporain et d’art brut). Christine et Jean-David Mermod Collection. Courtesy SIK-ISEA, Zürich.

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Gloria in excelsis Deo Chanteuse Bornod, 1951-60 Drawing with colored pencils, 70 × 98 cm. Photo Jean-David Mermod. Christine et Jean-David Mermod Collection. Courtesy SIK-ISEA, Zürich.

210

Giulia Andreani

Giulia Andreani has been living in Paris, France, for the last ten years. Her work reveals and subverts history by addressing notions of historical amnesia and generating new layers of meaning, interrogating the narratives conveyed in photo archives, sifting through the folds of official history to make them liberated. Andreani engages with ghosts of a past that has yet to be told, often with a feminist approach that poignantly reflects on women’s position in society, motherhood, trauma, and forgotten figures in political and art history. Painted mainly in Payne’s grey, a colour similar to the old ink of press photos, and with the watercolour technique, so often associated with minor arts and rarely used on large-scale canvases such as Andreani’s. Her paintings attempt to resuscitate and reenact histories trapped in a memorial fog.

Genitæ Manæ, 2022 Acrylic on canvas, 150 × 200 cm. Photo Charles Duprat. Courtesy the Artist; Galerie Max Hetzler Berlin, Paris, London. © Giulia Andreani.

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Andreani’s work initiates a dialogue with self-taught artist Madge Gill. Working under the influence of Myrninerest, her spirit guide, Gill’s work is the result of her traumatic life experiences and ability to be mediumistically connected to other worlds. Drawing a connection between her story and the history of women’s access to artistic practice, Andreani’s five paintings and glass sculpture highlight the women’s suffrage movement in Britain at the turn of the twentieth century. Facing Gill’s masterpiece, Crucifixion of the Soul (1936), Andreani’s work draws inspiration partly from archives documenting the pioneering women of that period, and Gill’s position as a woman and artist during that period. Exploring possible links between feminism and spiritualism as a form of empowerment and resistance, Andreani deals with invisible emotional affinities among creative female bodies.

VENICE, ITALY, 1985 LIVES IN PARIS, FRANCE

This is the first time the work of Giulia Andreani is presented at Biennale Arte. —Michela Alessandrini

211 La mariée, 2019 Murano glass and pear wood base, 37 × 30 × 30 cm. Photo Marc Domage. Courtesy the Artist; Galerie Max Hetzler Berlin, Paris, London. © Giulia Andreani.

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La scuola di taglio e cucito, 2023 Watercolour on paper, 140 × 300 cm. Photo Charles Duprat and Dario Lasagni. Courtesy the Artist; Galerie Max Hetzler Berlin, Paris, London. © Giulia Andreani.

212

Claudia Andujar

Claudia Andujar survived genocide thanks to exile; her life has since been branded by a past of war and extermination. Born Claudine Hess, she and her family moved to Transylvania until her 1944 return to Switzerland with her mother. That same year, Andujar’s father and paternal relatives of Jewish background were killed in concentration camps. In 1955, at twenty-four, she migrated to Brazil to settle in São Paulo, reuniting with her mother who had also relocated there. Not being conversant in Brazilian Portuguese, the artist found a way to engage with local habits and Indigenous peoples in photography. Andujar’s first encounter with the Yanomami took place at Catrimani, in the State of Roraima, in 1971. From that moment, she began chronicling life in the urihi a (forest-land) and the ritualistic experiences of the shaman with the xapiri (spirits). She was one of the

founders of the Pro-Yanomami Commission, campaigning for the demarcation of Indigenous lands. Andujar’s work combines a repertoire of images that extend far beyond purely documentary photography, evoking, from the point of view of Indigenous cosmovision, that which seems invisible to us. In the series entitled House (1974), Andujar photographs the day-to-day life of the Yanomami as they go about domestic chores. In one of the photographs of the series, a child appears illuminated by light filtering through cracks into the dark environs of a yano (collective house), transforming it into a visual manifestation expressing a nonseparation between life in the forest and the intangible spiritual world of the xapiri. In the series O reahu (1974), the artist documents an important funeral ceremony.

NEUCHÂTEL, SWITZERLAND, 1931 LIVES IN SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL

In these black-and-white photographs, participants appear embellished with bird plumage as light filtering through cracks again illuminates the surroundings. The points of luminosity that penetrate collective spaces of habitation, work, and ritual registered by Andujar all help compose a dream-like ambiance. This is the first time the work of Claudia Andujar is presented at Biennale Arte. —André Mesquita

Xirixana Xaxanapi thëri mistura mingau de banana em cocho suspenso, capaz de armazenar até 200 litros de alimento para as festas, Catrimani - da série A casa, 1974 Gelatin and silver analog enlargement on Ilford Multigrade Classic fibre based matte paper, with selenium toning, 40 × 60 cm. Courtesy Galeria Vermelho. © Claudia Andujar.

213 Catrimani - da série O reahu, 1974 Gelatin and silver analog enlargement on Ilford Multigrade Classic fibre based matte paper, with selenium toning, 40 × 60 cm. Courtesy Galeria Vermelho. © Claudia Andujar.

Yanomami da série Casa, 1974 Gelatin and silver analog enlargement on Ilford Multigrade Classic fibre based matte paper, with selenium toning, 40 × 60 cm. Courtesy Galeria Vermelho. © Claudia Andujar.

214

Aravani Art Project

Aravani Art Project is a collective composed of cis and transgender women with the aim of spreading positivity and hope to their communities through their commissioned mural paintings. Gathering around forty fixed members, they started in Bangalore, India, but now have members in various parts of the country. The project is named after the annual Aravani Festival, in which members of the transgender community perform religious rituals. Arvani Art Project begins all projects with drawings to figure out the narratives they want to create, these are then digitalised, before being applied to wall paintings. Recently, they have also worked with textiles, transposing the bright colours of the materials to visualise their patchwork language. BIENNALE ARTE 2024

Their commissioned mural for the Venice Biennale relates representations of trans bodies and nature, with a nod to the processes of transition, dysphoria, and acceptance that trans people experience when acknowledging their identities. While denaturalising gender constructions, their work queries the dominant norms and how gender dysphoria is a feeling of being a foreigner in one’s own body, along with how they overcome this obstacle. Using bright colours and multifaceted images, the narrative shows the different possibilities trans people should have, beyond the narrow stereotypes perpetrated by society. In this sense, colour is a crucial element of their work, both echoing their Indian background – where bright colour appears

BANGALORE, INDIA, 2016 LIVES IN BANGALORE

in clothing, spices, and architecture – as well as an amplification of the colours of the LGBTQI+ and trans flags that frequently appear in their work and resonate diversity among people. This is the first time the work of Aravani Art Project is presented at Biennale Arte. —Leandro Muniz

Forever Womanhood, 2020 Mural painting. Courtesy the Artists.

Mural experience in Asia’s largest Red light district, 2018 Mural painting. Courtesy the Artists.

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Trans Lives Matter Lodhi Art District, 2019 Mural painting. Courtesy the Artists.

216

Iván Argote

Iván Argote’s artistry is heavily influenced by resistance, civil disobedience, and his migration from Colombia to France. Argote’s projects span various countries and media, encompassing sculptures, installations, interventions, and moving images. His work centres on the re-evaluation of hegemonic narratives, and delves into the complexities of communal and individual emotions. He also examines the intricacy of power and the production of history. Amidst cyclical layers of time, meaning, and interpretation, Argote’s multidisciplinary approach unsettles convention and seeks the emergence of new political imaginaries. Argote frequently operates in public spaces, executing interventions in monuments, and creating large-scale sculptures and installations in open settings. He suggests fresh symbolic interpretations and ignites an ecocritical drive that demands focus.

Descanso (2024) features the fragmented body of Christopher Columbus, an emblematic figure of Latin American colonisation, amidst local and migrant plants. Exhibited in the Giardini, at the Biennale Arte, the statue’s political connotations are metamorphosed into vessels for natural life. In addition to the installation, Argote’s video Paseo can be viewed in the Arsenale. This work is a decolonial fiction that depicts Madrid’s Plaza de Colón’s Columbus statue riding in exile through the capital. Argote’s deconstructions underscore his commitment to historical injustices and ecological concerns. From Columbus’s downfall, a stunning transformation is born, from which new life emerges and a fresh legacy is written.

BOGOTÁ, COLOMBIA, 1983 LIVES IN PARIS, FRANCE

Descanso (detail), 2022-24 Sculpture, carved sandstone, wild migrant and local weeds grown in the region, 1250 × 280 × 140 cm. Courtesy the Artist; Albarrán Bourdais, Perrotin & Vermelho.

—Amanda Carneiro

Paseo (still), 2022 Video 23 min 30 sec. Courtesy the Artist; Albarrán Bourdais, Perrotin & Vermelho.

217 NUCLEO CONTEMPORANEO FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Descanso, 2022-24 Sculpture, carved sandstone, wild migrant and local weeds grown in the region, 1250 × 280 × 140 cm. Courtesy the Artist; Albarrán Bourdais, Perrotin & Vermelho.

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Karimah Ashadu

Raised in Nigeria, Karimah Ashadu was first trained in painting at the University of Reading. It was her interest in corporeality and spatiality that led her to transition into performance and ultimately video, with an MA in spatial design at Chelsea College of Art. In her films, Ashadu explores stories related to Nigeria and West Africa. She focuses on practices of self-determination and resilience, particularly within alternative or underground economies of undocumented labourers in Nigeria and Europe – contexts unequivocally entangled with neoliberalism and the legacies of colonial power. Having gained great traction within international film and gallery circuits, her videos are the product of research projects conducted in close collaboration with their protagonists, also the films’ narrating voices, with whom the artist connects over intense periods of time.

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Machine Boys (2024) portrays motorcycle taxis, colloquially known as okada, in the megacity of Lagos. In 2022, due to numerous accidents involving okada and the impossibility of regulating its informal economy, a ban was enforced, making passengers and drivers liable to imprisonment. In Machine Boys, Ashadu dwells on the consequences of this ban, while portraying the daily rituals and challenges faced by okada riders. The riders embody a particular kind of masculinity through their stylish attire and selfassured, powerful behaviour.

LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM, 1985 LIVES IN HAMBURG, GERMANY AND LAGOS, NIGERIA

This is the first time the work of Karimah Ashadu is presented at Biennale Arte. —Sofia Gotti

Through this exploration of Nigerian patriarchal ideals, Ashadu relates the performance of masculinity to the vulnerability of a precarious class of workers. She projects the film in a purple room, inspired by one of the bikers’ flashing headlights. The brass sculpture Wreath (2024), an interwoven relief of tyres, evokes a medallion, suggesting notions of commemoration and legitimacy.

Machine Boys (stills), 2024 Video. Courtesy the Artist; Fondazione in Between Art Film.

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220

Dana Awartani

Dana Awartani is a Palestinian– Saudi artist who has sought kinship in the knowledge of Indigenous communities across the Arab world, India, and other countries where she developed her work in conversation with craftspeople. Through their generational wisdom, Awartani has incorporated the symbolic acts of healing in her art, navigating sustainable and nature-friendly techniques, reviving vernacular designs, and employing natural materials in her installations, videos, performances, and paintings. Awartani has received training in contemporary and traditional arts, evidenced by her bachelor’s degree from Central Saint Martins and her master’s degree from the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts in London. She is also working towards the prestigious

Ijazah certification. This diverse guidance allows Awartani’s practice to intertwine contemporary and traditional forms, evident in her meditative way of working in measured moves, in which every gesture and mark holds meaning. Awartani’s installation Come, let me heal your wounds. Let me mend your broken bones (2024) is a requiem for the historical and cultural sites that have been destroyed in the Arab world during wars and by acts of terror. Chillingly, the installation expands with each iteration to make room for newer documentation. This edition adds testimony to the devastation in Gaza and sites that have been flattened indiscriminately through bombings and bulldozers. Awartani tears holes across

PALESTINIAN, BORN IN JEDDAH, SAUDI ARABIA, 1987 LIVES IN JEDDAH, AND NEW YORK, UNITED STATES

yards of silk, each rip marking a site. Then she darns – a fading practice that is more intimate yet undervalued compared to patchwork – each gash tenderly as a gesture for healing; the resulting scars symbolise the physical and emotional ones left behind in the real world. The fabric is dipped in herb and spicebased natural dyes that carry medicinal value, using the sacred healing properties embedded in the traditional textile dyeing practices of Kerala, which Awartani spent time learning. This is the first time the work of Dana Awartani is presented at Biennale Arte. —Saira Ansari

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Come, let me heal your wounds. Let me mend your broken bones, as we stand here mourning, 2019 Darning on medicinally dyed silk, 630 × 720 × 300 cm. Photo Anna Shtraus. Courtesy the Artist; Athr Gallery.

222

Aycoobo (Wilson Rodríguez)

Aycoobo learned his craft empirically and through his father, renowned painter and plant expert Abel Rodríguez, whose broad knowledge of the Amazonian landscape served as the foundations for elaborating on the worldview of the Nonuya people. In meticulous and intricate drawings, Aycoobo relates aspects of the history of his people, their relationship to the physical world, and their experiences in accessing higher forms of consciousness through ritual and medicinal plants, such as ayahuasca and tobacco. Aycoobo understands his practice, which is characterised by vivid colours, as a manifestation of the knowledge he inherited from his father and other community elders, as much as a channel though which he shares the myths, histories, and experience of the Nonuya.

The works presented in this exhibition address some of Aycoobo’s most pressing concerns: Calendario (2023) is a drawing depicting a monthly calendar that associates the passage of time with the conditions of the Amazonian forests in each month of the year. It also represents the agricultural processes of the chagra (a part of the forest organically used for growing crops), as well as the underwater worlds and the centre of the earth. Laguna misterioso (2022) presents a wise man emerging from a sacred pond, hinting at the interrelation between all species in the Nonuya cosmogony, structured by the law of origin and guided by ancestral knowledge. Vibración (2022), in turn, depicts an elder woman in a state of expanded consciousness brought on by using medicinal plants.

LA CHORRERA, COLOMBIA, 1967 LIVES IN BOGOTÁ, COLOMBIA

Together, these works speak of what Aycoobo understands as a mandate: the transmission of knowledge and the creation of images that spring from a higher consciousness. This is the first time the work of Aycoobo is presented at Biennale Arte. —Emiliano Valdés

Laguna misterioso, 2022 Acrylic on paper, 70 × 100 cm. Photo Nicole López. Courtesy the Artist; Instituto de Visión.

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Vibración, 2022 Acrylic on paper, 70 × 100 cm. Photo Nicole López. Courtesy the Artist; Instituto de Visión.

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Calendario, 2023 Acrylic on paper, 70 × 100 cm. Photo Ana María Balaguera. Courtesy the Artist; Instituto de Visión.

224

Leilah Babirye

Leilah Babirye’s artistic practice spans multiple disciplines and delves into the intricate intersections of identity, sexuality, and human rights. Her artistic repertoire includes portraits depicting members of the LGBTQI community, offering a poetic and metaphorical commentary on the devaluation and rejection these groups endure. The sculptures are crafted from debris collected on the streets, intricately woven together through processes such as burning, whittling, welding, and burnishing. As someone who was publicly outed, Babirye’s journey confronts the harsh realities of being queer in Uganda, including the recent passing of the antihomosexuality bill, leading her to seek asylum in New York. The city’s cosmopolitan landscape, which frequently

acts as a setting for gathering the materials she incorporates into her pieces, also transforms into a stage to subtly underscore the challenges of being a political exile. The sculptures Babirye presents in this exhibition highlight a defining aspect of her artistic practice: populating external spaces with sculptural figures that incorporate the visual traits of African masks, merging tradition with contemporaneity. Crafted from metal, ceramics, and handcarved wood, with the addition of rubber, nails, teapots, and other found objects, the artist establishes a deliberate contrast between textures, lending the pieces an intriguing composition. Namasole Wannyana, Mother of King Kimera from the Kuchu Royal Family of Buganda (2021), draws

KAMPALA, UGANDA, 1985 LIVES IN NEW YORK CITY, UNITED STATES

inspiration from Uganda’s Bantu Kingdom of Buganda, known for its historical significance. While rooted in the traditional ruling kingdoms of present-day Uganda, the artwork goes beyond historical representation. It becomes a manifestation of the artist’s political imagination, weaving personal history and resilience into the concept of a queer lineage among Buganda clanspeople. These collective works envision a utopia where queer Ugandans are liberated from the oppressive homophobia prevalent in the artist’s homeland. This is the first time the work of Leilah Babirye is presented at Biennale Arte. —Amanda Carneiro

Namasole Wannyana, Mother of King Kimera from the Kuchu Royal Family of Buganda, 2021 Ceramic, wire, metal electrical conduit, bicycle tyre inner tubes and found objects, 273 × 84 × 84 cm. Photo Mark Blower. Courtesy the Artist; Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and New York; Gordon Robichaux, New York.

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Namasole Namaganda, Mother of King Mutesa II from the Kuchu Royal Family of Buganda, 2021 Wood, wax, nails, glue, bolts, nuts, washers and found objects, 281.9 × 61 × 48.3 cm. Photo Mark Blower. Courtesy the Artist; Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and New York; Gordon Robichaux, New York.

Agali Awamu (Togetherness), 2022 Wood, wax, steel, aluminium, nails, bolts, nuts, washers, wire, bicycle parts, and found and altered objects, 264.2 × 365.8 × 182.9 cm. Photo Nicholas Knight. Courtesy the Artist; Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and New York; Gordon Robichaux, New York; Public Art Fund, NY.

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Bordadoras de Isla Negra

Bordadoras de Isla Negra was a group of self-taught women who, between 1967 and 1980, embroidered textiles in brightly coloured wool and polyangular perspectives that told the story of daily life in this coastal village in Chile. Leonor Sobrino, an aristocratic cultural visitor, was amazed by the rural textile heritage of the group of sixteen women and their ability to arrange sensitive forms that enhanced the meaning of their experience. The dreamlike forms and the spontaneity of the colours, as well as the radical freedom in the composition, imbued their textures with movement and placed them at the centre of arte popular.

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The creation of Bordadoras de Isla Negra was organised by Eduardo Martinez Bonati, the artistic advisor to the Third Session of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD III). It was assembled in a record time of 275 days, with the work of thousands of workers, architects, craftsmen, and artists, and was inaugurated on April 3, 1972. The task was to create a textile that would enter into an aesthetic dialogue with the building constructed as the UNCTAD III headquarters and which would be recognised as the work of the people. The intimate, fragmentary, and paused construction of these textiles, embroidered with brightly coloured wools, is fundamental to understanding their strength and expressive freedom in a locally inherited craft.

ISLA NEGRA, CHILE, 1967–1980

The characters are real and recognisable inhabitants of Isla Negra, including Pablo Neruda hunting butterflies. This enormous textile was embroidered from individual cloths with different environments, all of which were joined together to form a cross section of Chile, from the sea to the Andes. The embroidery was stolen and disappeared in September 1973, after the Pinochet dictatorship had taken over the building as its centre of operations. It reappeared in August 2019 and is today once more reintegrated in the building. This is the first time the work of Bordadoras de Isla Negra is presented at Biennale Arte. —Carolina Arévalo Karl

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Untitled, 1972 Embroidered canvas, 230 × 774 cm. Photo Nicolas Aguayo. Collection Centro Cultural Gabriela Mistral. © Nicolas Aguayo and Collection Centro Cultural Gabriela Mistral.

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Sol Calero

Sol Calero creates work that explores themes of representation and identity, often through immersive environments filled with colourful patterns and textiles. As an artist who has lived in Europe for several years but spent her childhood and adolescence in Venezuela, Calero is particularly interested in interrogating the stereotypes behind Latin American culture and identity. Much of her work is also imbued with a strong social charge. Previous projects have included recreations of spaces such as a bus, a hair salon, an internet café, a Caribbean-style house erected in a car park, and a currency exchange office, all rendered in bright colours and filled with playful objects. A recipient of

several international awards, Calero runs the Berlin project space Kinderhook & Caracas with her husband and fellow artist Christopher Kline. Embracing a wide range of media, including painting, sculpture, found objects, textiles, video, sound, and site-specific installations, Calero’s conceptual approach is underscored by weighty questions surrounding hospitality and belonging. At the Biennale Arte, the artist has approached the invitation to design a site-specific installation in the Giardini della Biennale with her signature sensitivity. Here, the concept of the national pavilion is cheerfully reinvented as an environment formed of a

CARACAS, VENEZUELA, 1982 LIVES IN BERLIN, GERMANY

kaleidoscope of shapes and colours, with geometrically painted walls, sloping roofs, monochromatic columns and fences, and curving terraces. Calero’s project reflects her continuing interest in how objects, architectural forms, and interiors signify cultural preconceptions and also articulate forms of selfexoticisation, as often seen in sites related to tourism. This is the first time the work of Sol Calero is presented at Biennale Arte. —Marko Ilić

Casa Isadora, 2018-20 Mixed media, Dimensions variable. Photo Anika Büssemeier. Courtesy the Artist. © Brücke-Museum, Berlin.

Casa Anacaona, 2017 Installation view at Folkestone, UK. Photo Thierry Bal. Courtesy the Artist.

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Casa Anacaona - detail, 2017 Installation view at Folkestone, UK. Photo Thierry Bal. Courtesy the Artist.

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Kudzanai Chiurai

Kudzanai Chiurai uses film, photography, painting, print making, installation, and sonic interventions to explore postindependence sociopolitical concerns. Born in 1981, one year after his home country of Zimbabwe gained independence, Chiurai obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Pretoria, South Africa, in 2006, at the cusp of Zimbabwe’s hyperinflation years. The politics of Chiurai’s local contexts in both South Africa and Zimbabwe are often reflected in his practice, though his work is also informed by broader concerns connected to the African continent. Largely rooted in South African archives

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and literature, his practice engages issues around land contestations, postcoloniality, the abuse of power, and underrepresented liberation narratives. In 2021, Chiurai initiated The Library of Things We Forgot to Remember, an interactive exhibition based in Johannesburg. Activated and curated by various invited librarians or protagonists, this library consists of vinyl, print, painting, and the like drawn from key archives and collections from the African continent.

HARARE, ZIMBABWE, 1981 LIVES IN HARARE

B-Diamond is a recurring figure in Chiurai’s practice who epitomises a corrupt politician. Often adorned in lush leopardprint coats, mayoral chains, and regalia, B-Diamond has inherited colonially rooted tools of injustice from previous regimes. The dark foliage surrounding her references Neoclassicism and its associations with the gentry. The layers of collaged texture, paint, and text point to complex colonial entanglements that mar present-day postliberation politics. The gold text overlaying her face include inscriptions derived from ledgers of enslaved people found in Cape Town, South Africa. Such paintings

The Fear of Magic, 2020 Oil on canvas, 150 × 120 cm. Courtesy Goodman Gallery.

are often part of installations that include sculptural and archival elements such as What More Can One Ask For? (2017). Collectively, elements such as the barbed-wire fence, colonial map, and landsurveying instrument highlight histories of extraction and displacement. They cause us to question who or what is being protected, and from whom. This is the first time the work of Kudzanai Chiurai is presented at Biennale Arte. —Tandazani Dhlakama

231 To Walk Barefoot, 2020 Oil on canvas, 150 × 120 cm. Courtesy Goodman Gallery.

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Sorcery, 2020 Oil on canvas, 150 × 120 cm. Courtesy Goodman Gallery.

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Isaac Chong Wai

Isaac Chong Wai delves into research around performance, dance, video, and creating objects with diverse media. He studied Visual Arts at Hong Kong Baptist University and went on to the BauhausUniversität in Weimar, Germany, where he received a master’s degree in Public Art and New Artistic Strategies. Since then, Chong Wai has lived in Berlin. His research is usually based on the notion of narratives, inviting the viewer to establish relationships between series of images that tend to deal with questions of fragility, repetition, and absurdity.

HONG KONG, CHINA, 1990 LIVES IN BERLIN, GERMANY, AND HONG KONG

In Falling Reversely (2021–2024) Chong Wai deepens his research into acts of violence committed not only against the many Asian migrant communities – and especially those of Chinese descent – in Europe and abroad, but also in attacks made against queer individuals. Taking as its starting point an attack made on Chong Wai near a scaffold, the installation has a sculptural character that refers to civil construction. Attached to its structure is a series of videos showing the artist and a group of dancers reacting to the act of a body falling in front of a community. How do you respond to this fall? Would it be possible to prevent it or at least try to break the fall to reduce the physical pain? Between the choreography and the spontaneous act, Chong Wai suggests that the individual and the collective mix in a single movement. We, as spectators, are also agents capable of both avoiding future falls and longing for the care of our friends. This is the first time the work of Isaac Chong Wai is presented at Biennale Arte. —Raphael Fonseca

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Falling Reversely (stills), 2021-24 Video. Photo Isaac Chong Wai, Julia Geiß and Lana Immelman. Courtesy the Artist; Blindspot Gallery and Zilberman. © Isaac Chong Wai.

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Chaouki Choukini

CHOUKINE, LEBANON, 1946 LIVES IN LA VERRIÈRE, FRANCE

Chaouki Choukini has spent over six decades reacting materially to how landscapes evolve and how societies shapeshift throughout history. His last name, an Arabic demonym, means “from Choukine”, the artist’s southern Lebanese village where he made wooden toys as a child. Choukini left Beirut for Paris in 1967, where he trained at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. In France, his practice in the 1970s and 1980s flourished with the Lieux and Paysages series of horizontal sculptures. He spent five years working alongside Japanese sculptor Fumio Otani – uncle to his wife and his core influence to date. In 1984, he spent a pivotal year in Japan, where his practice took more Minimalist interests. Shortly after, he returned to the Levant where he taught sculpture in Tripoli, Lebanon, and Irbid, Jordan. Choukini settled in Paris in the early 1990s and has continued his work with mostly vertical sculptures up to the present day.

While he has worked with bronze, stone, and other materials, this selection of works illustrates his mastery of freeform wooden sculpture, his main craft. His fascination with wenge wood, native to Central Africa, goes hand-in-hand with his use of other African woods in his practice. Besides wenge, the selected pieces also boast carvings in iroko, sipo, and bubinga hardwoods, with occasional uses of oak. For Choukini, wood is a material that is deeply connected to the very earth he examines in his work. His chippings and scrapings normally follow the natural direction of wooden fibres. Be it horizons, abstract concepts, human figures, aerial views of land, bird flights, celestial figures, or tragedies, he treats these themes with inventive geometries and curves. Choukini’s threedimensional works, dancing between rough and polished, presence and absence, may well be the “second life” of the watercolour sketches that generally impel his pieces. This is the first time the work of Chaouki Choukini is presented at Biennale Arte. —Daniel Rey

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Claire de Lune, 2011-12 Iroko, 97 × 19 × 19 cm. Courtesy Sharjah Art Foundation Collection, UAE.

Dame de Coeur, 2007 Oak and bubinga, 42.50 × 43.50 × 19 cm. Courtesy Sharjah Art Foundation Collection, UAE.

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Blessure de Gaza, 2009 Oak, 80 × 36 × 15 cm. Photo Anna Shtraus. Collection Fairouz and JeanPaul Villain, Abu Dhabi.

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Claire Fontaine

Claire Fontaine, a Palermobased collective established in Paris in 2004 by the Italian–British artist duo Fulvia Carnevale and James Thornhill, confronts the political impotence and crisis of singularity within contemporary art and society today. Employing an array of media, including neon, video, sculpture, painting, and text, Claire Fontaine rejects the commodification of artists. Instead, they engage a collective practice resisting self-objectification through experimental approaches of sharing creativity and knowledge. Writing assumes a pivotal role, deconstructing the established hierarchy between visual and verbal expression. The name, borrowed from a French stationery brand, underscores the ready-made nature of the collective, employing the concept to

critique barriers to the use and dissemination of ideas, by exploring the effects of the fetishism of the commodity on the production and the reception of contemporary art. Claire Fontaine actively integrates into the established art circuit, forging alliances, and instigating change by engaging proactively with the mechanisms and themes of the art industry. Foreigners Everywhere / Stranieri Ovunque (60th International Art Exhibition / 60. Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte) (2004-24) comprises a series of neon sign sculptures spanning multiple languages, capturing the nuanced ambivalence embedded in its title. The works draw inspiration from the name of an anarchist collective that fought against xenophobia in Turin in the early 2000s. Exhibited across

FOUNDED IN PARIS, FRANCE, 2004 BASED IN PALERMO, ITALY

diverse contexts and public spaces, these sculptures serve both as a factual statement against and a countermeasure to potential racist threats. It evokes a palpable sense of estrangement experienced by individuals navigating a globalised society – a sentiment relatable to immigrants and other marginalised groups, encompassing issues of race, gender, and class. The work acknowledges that meanings can be altered or confused through the act of relocation. By investigating a “foreign language within language”, they delve into new meanings and experiences to underscore that each of us may be, or has been, foreign to something or someone at some point in time, somewhere in our lives.

Foreigners Everywhere (Romany), 2010 Suspended, wall or window mounted neon, framework, electronic transformer and cables - installation view, 98 × 2.28 × 45 cm. Photo Studio Claire Fontaine. Courtesy Claire Fontaine and Mennour, Paris. © Studio Claire Fontaine.

This is the first time the work of Claire Fontaine is presented at Biennale Arte. —Amanda Carneiro

Foreigners Everywhere (Spanish), 2007 Suspended, wall or window mounted neon, framework, electronic transformer and cables - installation view, 98 × 2.16 × 45 cm. Photo Studio Claire Fontaine. Courtesy Claire Fontaine and Mennour, Paris. © Studio Claire Fontaine.

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Foreigners Everywhere (Tibetan), 2010 Suspended, wall or window mounted neon, Tecnolux No. 44s 8/10mm tube, framework, electronic transformer and cables installation view, 48 × 3.25 × 45 cm. Photo Florian Kleinefenn. Courtesy Claire Fontaine and Mennour, Paris. © Studio Claire Fontaine.

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Manauara Clandestina

Manauara Clandestina’s practice includes photography, video, performance, textiles, and fashion, frequently collaborating with other artists and featuring the travesti community as one of her main subjects. In this sense, she alternates between personal memories and social critique, nodding to the relations between these spheres. Her name refers to her Manaus origins – the capital of the state of Amazonas, Brazil. The name Manaus comes from that of the indigenous Manaós people. The name also alludes to her constant displacement in the world and her social conditions as an Afro-indigenous trans person, since “Clandestina” literally means “clandestine”.

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For the Venice Biennale, the artist presents the second version of the video Migranta (2020-23), incorporating new elements such as recent recordings of her father. In this sense, one should understand the title as a sign of the ongoing construction process of the work, as well as the artist’s identity and relations. The video alternates screenshots from her mobile phone, excerpts from security cameras, material from archives, and historical movies, using a wide range of technologies, from high-resolution images to low-tech, which results in different textures and qualities of depictions. For Clandestina, this use of ready-made images transposes the concept of

MANAUS, BRAZIL, 1992 LIVES IN MANAUS

“upcycling” – in which one uses discarded material to make new clothes – that she learned in the fashion world to her practice in video. In narrative terms, Building (2021-24) gathers scenes depicting the exploration of the moon, edifices in collapse, and the artist herself, as well as accounts about travestility, ecology, economic inequalities, labour, religion, violence, intimacy, and affection, proposing interconnections between all these issues. This is the first time the work of Manauara Clandestina is presented at Biennale Arte. —Leandro Muniz

Building, 2021-2024 Video, 5 min 37 sec

Migranta, 2020 Video, 17 min

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River Claure

River Claure is a photographer and visual artist best known for his meticulously constructed portraits, magical landscapes, and photographic docufiction series. In his work, he questions the role of cultural identity and the centrality of photographic images in our perception of reality. The son of a migrant family from a small community in the Andean high plateau, Claure grew up experiencing the tensions between his own Indigenous roots and the urban realities at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Trained first in his home town Cochabamba, he then studied contemporary photography in Madrid and soon became one of the most visible Bolivian artists of his generation. His

work has been distinguished with Bolivia’s national art prize, Premio Nacional Eduardo Abaroa, and acclaimed by leading international platforms, such as National Geographic, the New York Times, and the World Press Photo Foundation. The photographic series Warawar Wawa (2019–2020), an adaptation of Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince set in contemporary Bolivia, and Mita (2022–present), a sensitive portrait of life in Andean mining communities that references five hundred years of colonial extractivism, both exhibit a fundamentally performative approach to photography. Rather than mechanical representations

COCHABAMBA, BOLIVIA, 1997 LIVES IN COCHABAMBA AND LA PAZ, BOLIVIA

of a given reality, they appear as playful interventions in what we take as given. A portrayed person can become an actor, or a documentary photograph may become a film set. Claure’s photographs are real portraits of real faces, landscapes, and identities and are based on his extensive work living in and with real communities. They also joyfully reorganise the codes and arrangements that are made to depict a given reality: they are tableaux vivants in which the portrayed may speak the indescribable in their own way, based on the principles of selfdetermination and dignity and a little bit of magic.

Yatiri - from the series Warawar Wawa, 2019 Pigment print on cotton matte paper, 127 × 85 cm. Courtesy the Artist.

This is the first time the work of River Claure is presented at Biennale Arte. —Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz

Cerro 3 - from the series Mita, 2023 Pigment print on cotton matte paper, 112 × 84 cm. Courtesy the Artist.

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Villa Adela - from the series Warawar Wawa, 2019 Pigment print on cotton matte paper, 190 × 127 cm. Courtesy the Artist.

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Liz Collins

Liz Collins works fluidly between art and design to produce a wide range of works that are activated by vibrant optical energy and queer feminist sensibilities. Incorporating fibre arts, painting, drawing, video, performance, and design forms, her work encompasses multiple processes and associations: handmade and mechanical, familiar and abstract, playful and political. A specialist in textiles and fibre, Collins launched her innovative knitwear fashion label in 1999 and continues to experiment with multiple construction techniques, which she developed while working internationally. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Collins shifted away

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ALEXANDRIA, UNITED STATES, 1968 LIVES IN NEW YORK CITY, UNITED STATES

from fashion and expanded the scale of her works to interact with larger environments and audiences. Shown in the US and abroad, her current textile work varies from small needlework objects to collaborative industrial pieces and architectural installations that create immersive social spaces. Activism is central to Collins’s practice: her expansive projects address global labour politics, ecological crises, and queer communities. Driven by affective and elemental forces, Collins’s work evokes natural phenomena and produces haptic sensual encounters. Her enormous tapestries create an immersive horizon: rainbows flood out of mountain range peaks against a

dark sky, conjuring what Collins describes as the “fantasy of a queer utopia that is just out of reach”. This dream is also inflected by environmental peril, as a lightning wheel descends like a spinning cyclone. A moon-like orb pays tribute to the geometric abstractions of visionary artist and designer Sonia Delaunay. This symbolic vision also makes visible its own fabrication: up close, the weave of the tapestry is a fractured pattern, and lines of coloured yarn flow behind the expansive black sky. Evoking a multiplicity of possible meanings, Collins’s work acknowledges our collective states of precarity while allowing us to sense the Queer worlds that can be manifested only if we can imagine and materialise them.

This is the first time the work of Liz Collins is presented at Biennale Arte. —Lex Morgan Lancaster

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Rainbow Mountains Weather, 2024 Linen, mohair, monofilament, nylon, polyester, wool, 340 × 425 cm. Photo Joe Kramm. Courtesy the Artist. © Liz Collins 2024.

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Rainbow Mountains Moon, 2024 Linen, mohair, monofilament, nylon, polyester, wool, 340 × 373 cm. Photo Joe Kramm. Courtesy the Artist. © Liz Collins 2024.

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Beatriz Cortez

Beatriz Cortez is an artist and scholar who grew up during the civil war in El Salvador (1979-92) and subsequently migrated to Los Angeles. Deeply committed to making multiple temporalities visible within our shared space of the present, Cortez’s works often follow material traces of premodern Mesoamerican cultures and their relationship to geological processes and cosmologies that continue through Indigenous practices today. She constructs imaginative sculptures of welded and hand-beaten steel that articulate a diasporic experience of simultaneity and multiplicity. Like a double exposure that captures multiple sites and moments within a single frame, her artworks are time machines or speculative portals to other dimensions. Questions of migration and its dynamics of recursion and

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connection are present in all her works. In particular, Cortez considers these across multiple registers, from the social to the geological, as even a landscape is in perpetual tectonic motion across territories and borders. Stela XX (Absence) (2024), a monolithic steel sculpture, follows the migration of particles from the Ilopango Tierra Blanca Joven supereruption in the mid-fifth century CE. As rock and magma blasted into the stratosphere, it darkened the sun and was carried by atmospheric currents to fall across the globe, resulting in an extended winter that affected the ancient Maya civilisation and continents beyond. The traces of the volcano are present both near and far: the caldera, or deep depression in the earth, left in the volcano’s wake subsequently filled with

SAN SALVADOR, EL SALVADOR, 1970 LIVES IN LOS ANGELES AND DAVIS, UNITED STATES

water to become Lake Ilopango, while particles of its ash can still be found deep in Arctic ice. Stela XX’s contoured lines are inspired by photographs and drawings of premodern Maya monoliths now housed in museum collections, which were deliberately broken to extract them from their sacred sites. Its undulating steel surface is welded with glyphs that chart this loss and mark their absences. This is the first time the work of Beatriz Cortez is presented at Biennale Arte. —Vic Brook

Glacial Erratic, 2020 Steel, 289.5 × 274 × 160 cm. Photo Beatriz Cortez Studio. Courtesy the Artist and Commonwealth and Council.

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Stela Z, after Quiriguá (Contrary Warrior), 2023 Steel, 252 × 101 × 60 cm. Photo Jeffrey Jenkins. Courtesy the Artist and Commonwealth and Council.

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Ilopango, the Volcano that Left, 2023 Steel, 366 × 595 × 305 cm. Photo Jeffrey Jenkins. Courtesy the Artist and Commonwealth and Council.

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Andrés Curruchich

Andrés Curruchich Cúmez, a prominent self-taught painter from the Kaqchikel people, is widely regarded as the most influential artist in Guatemala. His artistic journey began in the 1920s when he came into contact with painting materials, and it was later marked by the presentation of his works in numerous Guatemalan festivals. He gained acclaim for his detailed narratives portraying the everyday life of Maya communities while also reflecting the profound impact of Spanish colonisation and Christian religion on Indigenous traditions. His paintings depict scenes of encounters, markets, spiritual devotion, festivities, and communion. Often featuring handwritten stories and intricate trajes adorned with characteristic designs and patterns found in Maya handwoven textiles, Curruchich’s enduring legacy echoes through the work of a group of Kaqchikel painters in Comalapa – a hub for self-taught art. Artists like Rosa Elena Curruchich, Paula Nicho, and María Elena Curruchich continue to carry forward his influence.

COMALAPA, GUATEMALA, 1891–1969

Procesión: patrón de San Juan está en su trono (1966) captures the vibrant June celebration of Saint John, the revered patron saint of San Juan Comalapa, after whom the Kaqchikel city was named following Spanish colonisation. The painting features colourful altars, embellished with feathers and small flags, dedicated to the saint. Devotees, in their reverence, carry the altars while holding their hats alongside their bodies and walking barefoot. Curruchich’s distinctive signature lies at the base of the canvas. The adoption of Christianity by Indigenous populations in the Americas was an intricate and often conflicting process, marked by coercive conversion methods such as land deprivation and the destruction of Indigenous cultures and traditions. Today, many Indigenous peoples in the Americas practice a syncretised form of Christianity that incorporates elements of their traditional beliefs and religious practices. This is the first time the work of Andrés Curruchich is presented at Biennale Arte. —Amanda Carneiro

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Procesión patron de San Juan esta en su trono, 1966 Oil on canvas, 44 × 48.3 cm. Photo Martin Seck. Collection of El Museo del Barrio, New York. Gift from Gale Simmons, Craig Duncan and Lynn Tarbox in memory of Barbara Duncan, 2007.

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Rosa Elena Curruchich

Rosa Elena Curruchich was a Maya Kaqchikel artist. She is considered the first woman painter in Comalapa in the Chimaltenango Department of Guatemala. She was the granddaughter of Andrés Curruchich, one of the most important painters of Comalapa, who enjoyed international recognition in the 1950s. She taught herself to paint in the mid-1970s. Her first exhibition was in 1979, at the French Institute in Guatemala City. Her pictorial work was not well received due to misgivings and prejudices surrounding a woman working in what was considered a strong tradition within her community. Members of her own family posed great resistance to her dedication to the trade, which at times resulted in her feeling of rejected and isolated.

Curruchich’s works exemplify her desire to document, through meticulously detailed paintings, the daily life, traditional customs, religious festivities, and artisanal work of her Indigenous community, such as the production of candles, bread, kites, and perrajes (blankets). The miniature format of Curruchich’s work responds to the fact that much of her work was done in secret. The paintings’ small size also allowed her to discreetly transport them during Guatemala’s violent civil war period (1960–1996). Rather than offering exoticised images produced for tourist consumption, her paintings pay attention to the role of women within the local Indigenous social organisation and acknowledge the value of care work. In each painting, she included a small text describing the characters and their actions. Curruchich’s images tell her own personal history while reclaiming the transformational power of communal work. This is the first time the work of Rosa Elena Curruchich is presented at Biennale Arte. —Miguel Lopez

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COMALAPA, GUATEMALA, 1958– 2005

Rosa Curruchich vendiendo comidas. Mi hermanita, 1980 ca Oil on canvas, 14.3 × 16.9 × 1.3 cm. Photo Margo Porres. Courtesy La Galería, Panajachel and Proyectos Ultravioleta, Guatemala City. Van a escoger capitana del nuevo año, 1980 ca Oil on canvas, 14.30 × 19 × 1.20 cm. Photo Margo Porres. Courtesy La Galería, Panajachel and Proyectos Ultravioleta, Guatemala City.

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Mi tío Pablo. Pintando Rosa Elena, 1980 ca. Oil on canvas, 12 × 15.60 × 1.40 cm. Photo Margo Porres. Courtesy La Galería, Panajachel and Proyectos Ultravioleta, Guatemala City.

Iglesia San Marcos, 1980 ca Oil on canvas, 15 × 16.40 × 1.60 cm. Photo Margo Porres. Courtesy La Galería, Panajachel and Proyectos Ultravioleta, Guatemala City.

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Campesinas van a hacer una Fiesta. Las Muchachas que cortan árboles, 1980 ca. Oil on canvas, 13.10 × 15.10 × 1.40 cm. Photo Margo Porres. Courtesy La Galería, Panajachel and Proyectos Ultravioleta, Guatemala City.

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Filippo de Pisis

Filippo de Pisis – a dandy, aristocrat, writer, and painter – lived in Rome, Milan, Venice, and Paris, in search of artistic inspiration and life experiences. De Pisis was influenced by Futurism and metaphysical painting in Rome. After he moved to Paris in 1925, he painted en plein air, creating landscapes, still lifes, and portraits in delicate hues, with vibrant strokes and a dreamlike quality. In 1928, he founded the group Les Italiens de Paris with Giorgio de Chirico, Alberto Savinio, Gino Severini, Massimo Campigli, Mario Tozzi, and René Paresce, establishing himself as a successful artist and exhibiting at the Biennale Arte in 1926, 1930, and 1942. Returning to Italy in 1939, his homosexuality rendered him persona non grata. Post-war, he returned to Paris with his young niece and protégée, Bona Pieyre de Mandiargues (born Tibertelli), whose work is included in the Nucleo Storico. Due to a neurological disorder, he spent most of his final years in Italian mental hospitals.

FERRARA, ITALY, 1896– 1956, MILAN, ITALY

Renowned for his melancholic landscapes and still lifes, such as Vaso di fiori (1942) and Vaso di Fiori con Ventaglio (1952), de Pisis also devoted himself to representing the male nude, particularly in Paris, where he could live more openly as a homosexual. He frequently invited young male prostitutes to his studio at 7 Rue Servandoni. He portrayed them in languid poses reminiscent of Renaissance painting, creating a suspended erotic atmosphere. The delicate Volto di ragazzo (1931) and Ragazzo con cappello (mid1930s) exemplify his skill in capturing his subject’s personality. La bottiglia tragica (1927) alludes to a dramatic episode in the painter’s life: during a conversation with two young men he had invited to his studio, they suddenly attacked and attempted to rob him. After fighting them off, de Pisis surveyed his table, adorned with a colourful tablecloth and overloaded with various objects, including his palette. This image remained etched in his mind, inspiring a symbolic still life. —Antonella Camarda

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Il Nudino Rosa, 1931 Oil on canvas, 65.2 × 46 cm. Photo Carlo Favero. Courtesy P420, Bologna.

251 NUCLEO CONTEMPORANEO Vaso di Fiori con Ventaglio, 1942 Oil on canvas, 80.5 × 59.5 cm. Photo Carlo Favero. Courtesy P420, Bologna.

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Ragazzo con Cappello, mid 1930s Colored pencil on tissue paper, 42.4 × 25.5 cm. Photo Carlo Favero. Courtesy P420, Bologna.

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Pablo Delano

Pablo Delano is a visual artist and photographer with a keen interest in archives and the lives, histories, and struggles of Latin American and Caribbean communities. Born and raised in the unincorporated US territory of Puerto Rico and originally trained as a painter, he moved to the US where he started to work with photography under the influence of his father, the well-known Ukrainian immigrant photographer Jack Delano. Using his large collection of historical material, archival photographs, artefacts, and film footage related to Puerto Rico’s history, Pablo Delano constructs intricate installations that delve into the complex histories of US colonialism in his homeland. With these works, the artist challenges official narratives and calls attention to perverse elements that, upon closer inspection, reveal symptoms and systems of racism, oppression, and domination. The Museum of the Old Colony (2024), an archivalbased conceptual installation, examines the enduring colonial structures through the lens of Puerto Rico’s experience. The Caribbean island has lived through over five hundred years of colonial rule, beginning with Christopher Columbus’s arrival in 1493 which led to Spanish dominion. Following the Spanish–American War in 1898, Puerto Rico became a US unincorporated territory, facing various adverse political and economic effects, including capitalist expropriation, racial hierarchy, and an idea of citizenship without the right to vote in US presidential

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elections. The installation’s title ironically references the complicity of museums and a US soft drink brand that is very popular in Puerto Rico, while highlighting how the power and presence of the US is grounded on colonial exploitation, social hygiene, and racial hierarchy in multiple ways, from the circulation of goods, peoples, and values to the recruitment of anthropologists, missionaries, photographers, and politicians in sustaining a colonial matrix. The Museum of the Old Colony includes myriad objects, photographs, newspapers, films, and magazines from various sources that tell multiple stories related to Spanish and US domination over indigenous and native communities as well as people of African descent, picturing an intricately woven tapestry of Puerto Rico’s troubled histories. This is the first time the work of Pablo Delano is presented at Biennale Arte. —Amanda Carneiro and Adriano Pedrosa

SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO, 1954 LIVES IN WEST HARTFORD, UNITED STATES

School for Maids in Puerto Rico - from The Museum of the Old Colony, 1948 Pigment print on rag paper, 91.5 × 72 cm. Courtesy the Artist; Wide World Photo.

The Museum of the Old Colony - from The Museum of the Old Colony, 2022 Photo Pablo Delano. Courtesy Duke Hall Gallery of Fine Art, James Madison University, Harrisonburg, USA.

War Bird and Banana Man - from The Museum of the Old Colony, 1940 Pigment print on rag paper, 91.5 × 72 cm. Courtesy the Artist; International News Photo. Statue of Liberty with Puerto Rican flag - from The Museum of the Old Colony, 1991 Pigment print on rag paper, 91.5 × 71 cm. Courtesy the Artist; UPI; Bettman Archive.

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Disobedience Archive

Disobedience Archive is a multiphase, mobile, and evolving video archive that concentrates on the relationship between artistic practices and political action. Developed by the curator and art theorist Marco Scotini in 2005, the project generates an atlas of contemporary resistance tactics from direct action to counterinformation, from constituent practices to bioresistance. It also functions as a “user’s guide” to social disobedience, encompassing hundreds of documentary elements spanning decades. Disobedience Archive investigates art activism that emerged after the end of modernism and comprises hundreds of video and film images that reveal the mediatised nature of history. On the one hand, it aims to show precisely what corporate media, as the central agents of political authoritarianism, attempts to conceal or remove from sight. On the other, it aims to take back control of the violent expropriation of experience and, in turn, ends up producing history and rendering it visible.

Presented fifteen times in different countries, Disobedience Archive transforms each time without ever assuming a final configuration. Whether in the form of a parliament, a school, or a community garden, the project turns the archive, typically static and taxonomic, into a dynamic and generative device. For the Biennale Arte, Disobedience Archive embodies The Zoetrope – the pre-filmic machine that animated images. It investigates the representation of movement, giving rise to a centrifugal space. On this occasion it presents two new macrosections including forty films: Diaspora Activism deals with transnational migration processes in the context of hegemonic neoliberalism, as a struggle that drives new ways of inhabiting the world and questions the very meaning of citizenship. Gender Disobedience is, in continuity with the previous section, dedicated to nomadic subjectivities, conceived as a rupture of heterosexual binarism. This section brings together the alliances between activism that critiques capitalism and the LGBTQ+ movements that have emerged globally.

MARCO SCOTINI WITH: URSULA BIEMANN, BLACK AUDIO-FILM COLLECTIVE, SEBA CALFUQUEO, SIMONE CANGELOSI, CINÉASTES POUR LES SANSPAPIERS, CRITICAL ART ENSEMBLE, SNOW HNIN EI HLAING, MARCELO EXPÓSITO WITH NURIA VILA, MARIA GALINDO & MUJERES CREANDO, BARBARA HAMMER, MIXRICE, KHALED JARRAR, SARA JORDENÖ, BANI KHOSHNOUDI, MARIA KOURKOUTA & NIKI GIANNARI, PEDRO LEMEBEL, LIMINAL & BORDER FORENSICS (LORENZO PEZZANI, JACK ISLES, GIOVANNA REDER, STANISLAS MICHEL,

CHIARA DENARO, ALAGIE JINKANG, CHARLES HELLER, KIRI SANTER, SVITLANA LAVRENCHUK, LUCA OBERTÜFER), ANGELA MELITOPOULOS, JOTA MOMBAÇA, CARLOS MOTTA, ZANELE MUHOLI, PINAR ÖĞRENCI, DANIELA ORTIZ, THUNSKA PANSITTIVORAKUL, ANAND PATWARDHAN, PILOT TV COLLECTIVE, QUEEROCRACY, OLIVER RESSLER AND ZANNY BEGG, CAROLE ROUSSOPOULOS, GÜLIZ SAĞLAM, IRWAN AHMETT & TITA SALINA, TEJAL SHAH, CHI YIN SIM, HITO STEYERL, SWEATMOTHER, RAPHAËL GRISEY AND BOUBA TOURÉ, NGUYỄ ỄN TRINH THI, JAMES WENTZY, ŽELIMIR ŽILNIK

This is the first time Disobedience Archive is presented at Biennale Arte. —Marco Scotini

Disobedience Archive, 2010 Installation view at Raven Row, London. Photo Marcus J. Leith. Exhibition Display Xabier Salaberria.

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Disobedience Archive (Ders Bitti), 2022 Installation view at the 17th Istanbul Biennial, Central Greek School for Girls, Istanbul. Photo Sahir Ugur Eren. Exhibition Display Can Altay.

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Aref el Rayess

Aref el Rayess, a sculptor, painter, and designer, was a prolific and eclectic Arab Modernist whose oeuvre spans the colonial, decolonial, and postcolonial periods. Born to a Druze family (an ethnic and religious minority), he began painting with his mother, Latifeh Abi Rafeh, and his studies led him far abroad. In Senegal, a lasting influence, there came landscapes and sensitive portraits. In Paris, after forays in different disciplines, he returned to painting at the École des Beaux-Arts, along with other Lebanese artists: Shafic Abboud, Etel Adnan, Farid Aouad, and Said Akl, to name a few. Algeria, Mexico, Italy on scholarship; the US on commission – wherever he went, el Rayess was at the centre of the intellectual debates, politics, and philosophy of the postwar decolonial period. A nomadic, deeply spiritual person, he was immersed in Christianity in Lebanon. In London, he explored Buddhism. And in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, it was Islam. The painting Toli’ al Bader Alaina (1982) depicts a

maquette (a scale model) of one of many sculptures elRayess and other artists were commissioned as part of the Jeddah embellishment project. One such piece was Column of Light (1980), a 28-metrehigh aluminium monument representing the word Allah, installed in Palestine Square. Referencing a nasheed, a song for the Prophet Muhammad in al-Madinah, this painting belongs to Desert, a significant series in which the desert landscape, dunes, and structures emerge from colours both hazy and vibrant. He, his wife, and daughter left Lebanon for Saudi Arabia in the 1980s during the Civil War.

ALEY, LEBANON, 1928–2005

This is the first time the work of Aref el Rayess is presented at Biennale Arte. —Khushi Nansi

Toli’ al Bader Alaina (Moonrise), 1982 Oil on canvas, 60 × 91 cm. Courtesy the Estate of the Artist and SfeirSemler Gallery Beirut / Hamburg.

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Untitled (Desert series), 1986 Oil on canvas, 61 × 91.5 cm. Courtesy the Estate of the Artist and SfeirSemler Gallery Beirut / Hamburg.

Untitled (Desert series), 1986 Oil on canvas, 91.5 × 120 cm. Courtesy the Estate of the Artist and SfeirSemler Gallery Beirut / Hamburg.

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Elyla

Elyla reinterprets folk traditions to disrupt our relationships with them and the power structures they represent. A dynamic force in performance art and activism from Central America, Elyla coined the term barro-mestiza to take distance from the traditional reading of mestizaje during their ongoing process of decolonisation. Elyla’s selfdirected artistic research at the margins of academia manifests as a form of experimental autoethnography that encompasses video performance, installations, photo-performance, theatre, and anticolonial communitybased artivism. Their work questions the hegemonic constructions of identity politics and nationalist cultural narratives relating to mestizaje, queerness, and ancestral Indigenous cosmovision. Actively dismantling conventional ways of inhabiting the body they view it as a collective territory and memory as a site where challenges to the system can be articulated. The artist’s early work contested the patriarchal and repressive policies upheld by the conservative forces and its effect on queer existence.

CHONTALES, NICARAGUA, 1989 LIVES IN MASAYA, NICARAGUA

Elyla’s video performance, Torita-encuetada (2023), an anticolonial ceremony, explores liberation from the colonial yoke through a fire ritual rooted in a Nicaraguan cultural practice called toro encuetado. Serving as a poignant act of political remembrance, the ritual dance, or mitote, calls for a return to earthhonouring practices and for the decolonisation of the mestizaje of sexual and gender-diverse identities in Mesoamerica. Collaborating with Nicaraguan filmmaker Milton Guillén and with music by Susy Shock and Luigi Bridges, the filmed ritual delves into the encounter of ancestral corpodivinities from Nicaragua’s Pacific region, inviting viewers to witness the intersections of culture, anticolonial artistic praxis, and the sacred. Committed to challenging societal norms, Elyla transforms the cochón (queer) utopia into a revolutionary artistic practice of the now. The performance is dedicated in honour of Indigenous Mangue-Chorotega cultural leaders and guardians of ancestral knowledge, Gustavo Herrera and Cristian Ruiz (1977–2022), the artist’s friends, collaborators, and guides. This is the first time the work of Elyla is presented at Biennale Arte. —Sofía Shaula Reeser-del Rio

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Torita-encuetada, 2023 Videoperformance, 9 min 43 sec. Courtesy the Artist. Made in collaboration with Milton Guillén.

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Romany Eveleigh

Romany Eveleigh, born in London but raised in Montreal, came from an artistic background: she was the daughter of painter and designer Henry Rowland Eveleigh and the artist’s model Ivy Florence Beasley. Eveleigh’s artistic career spanned over fifty years, beginning with studies at the École des Beaux-Arts in Montreal before following in her father’s footsteps at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. She started exhibiting internationally in the 1950s and became known for her pared-down, almost monochromatic abstract paintings and drawings. These are characterised by delicate lines and mark making that draw their visual vocabulary from writing. Her biography often highlights 1963 as a decisive year, when she met Italian photojournalist Anna

Baldazzi, who became her life partner and wife and who introduced her to the radical feminist movement. Eveleigh settled in Rome but travelled extensively in Europe and Asia, also dividing her time between New York and Montreal. The works on paper glued to canvas – Pages (1973) and Tri-Part (1974)– take their visual cue, materials, and techniques from the written and printed page. The Pages drawings are characterised by the repetition of the letter “o”, which fills the square support in columns of vertical text, creating irregular bands of faint colour, so that from a distance these abstract works appear as the pages of a book or printed media. Eveleigh’s practice is produced as writing but does not communicate a message. Rather, the fields of flat colour covering the surface of the

LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM, 1934– 2020, ROME, ITALY

page are a reminder of the gesture of the artist’s hand and have been likened to the work of colour field painters. Despite the all-over text, the effect is a pared-down sparseness that the artist has remarked upon as “not a sought-after end but a sought-for beginning”. This is the first time the work of Romany Eveleigh is presented at Biennale Arte. —Teresa Kittler

Tri-Part, 1974 Oil and printer’s ink on paper, mounted on linen canvas, 78 × 70 cm (each). Private Collection. Courtesy Delancey and Greene, LLC. © The Estate of Romany Eveleigh.

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1/2 Eight, 1974 Paint and printer’s ink on paper, mounted on linen canvas, 123 × 131.5 cm. Courtesy Tia Collection, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. © The Estate of Romany Eveleigh.

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Alessandra Ferrini

Alessandra Ferrini is an Italian artist, researcher, and educator based in London. Her research fits into the postcolonial methodological framework, drawing on historiographic and archival practices and Critical Whiteness Studies. In particular, her focus so far has been on the reworking of the Italian colonial experience and how historical narratives mark the current relations between Italy, the Southern Mediterranean, and the African continent. In doing so, the artist juxtaposes different media, revisiting the format of the documentary and exploiting the multi-perspective gaze offered by the medium of film, photography, installation, and textual non-fiction.

FLORENCE, ITALY, 1984 LIVES IN LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM

Gaddafi in Rome: Anatomy of a Friendship (2024) is part of research carried out by Ferrini since 2017. The title refers to the “treaty of friendship, partnership, and cooperation between Italy and Libya”, signed by the then heads of state Muammar Gaddafi and Silvio Berlusconi in 2008. These agreements were ratified during the Libyan leader’s visit to Rome in 2009. On that occasion, Gaddafi’s uniform displayed the image of Omar al-Mukhtar, leader of the anti-colonialist resistance. Starting from the iconicity of that encounter, the short film Anatomy of a Friendship analyses the relationship between the two states, digging into the roots of the Italian occupation between 1911 and 1943 to arrive at the recent bilateral agreements that have redesigned migration policies in the Mediterranean. The film is flanked by the much-debated image of Omar al-Mukhtar and a timeline of diplomatic agreements. The series intends to dissect the historical events and colonial dynamics that have characterised this controversial relationship. This intention is not only made explicit in the title but is recalled in the configuration of the installation environment, which cites, in the curtains and seating, the first anatomical theatre in Padua. This is the first time the work of Alessandra Ferrini is presented at Biennale Arte. —Lorenzo Giusti

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Gaddafi in Rome: Anatomy of a Friendship, 2024 Video still. Courtesy the Artist.

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Victor Fotso Nyie

Victor Fotso Nyie is a contemporary artist whose work is centred on figurative sculptures, which are often portraits that meld the form of traditional African wood statuettes with imaginative science fiction characters. Driven by interest in materiality and craftsmanship, Fotso Nyie first trained in ceramics in his homeland and continued his studies at the Istituto Tecnico Superiore Tonito Emiliani in Faenza, the Academy of Fine Arts in Ravenna, and the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna. Placing particular emphasis on the material and symbolic characteristics of clay, his practice revolves around the entire manufacturing process, culminating in anthropomorphic sculptures that hover between dreams and restlessness. Fotso Nyie’s work draws a parallelism between the feelings of displacement and homelessness experienced by the artists in Italy and Europe at large, lands that feel both familiar and foreign. It also questions the displaced heritage of African art, scattered across ethnographic collections around the world. The iconography of the doublebaked clay figures, which were subjected to a third firing with gold, merges biographical elements with Pan-African vernacular culture, particularly the spiritual knowledge from West Africa. In Malinconia (2020), a homage to one of his two sisters, a young woman stands before a mirror. Her gaze, deeply introspective, reveals sentiments of loneliness and melancholy. The portrait conveys the precarious balance

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between her gentle beauty and the fragility of life. A sentiment of nostalgia surfaces in the work Veglia (2023), a tribute to his late beloved mother, who is represented as a dormant head in a deep slumber, with her hair tied back and a subtle smile. Gioia (2023) is a portrayal of the artist’s other sister. It features the head of a young girl, her joyous expression encapsulating youth’s optimism, enthusiasm, and carefreeness, all captured by the artist with a wistful and tender gaze. This is the first time the work of Victor Fotso Nyie is presented at Biennale Arte. —Mariella Franzoni

DOUALA, CAMEROON, 1990 LIVES IN FAENZA, ITALY

Malinconia, 2020 Glazed ceramic and gold, 37 × 25 × 30 cm. Photo Carlo Favero. Courtesy P420, Bologna. Gioia, 2023 Glazed ceramic and gold, 45 × 35 × 40 cm. Photo Carlo Favero. Courtesy P420, Bologna.

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Louis Fratino

Louis Fratino is an artist whose paintings and drawings of the male body and domestic spaces capture the intimacy and tenderness found within everyday queer life. Fratino’s imagery – be it a large pile of dirty dishes in his sink, or the morning light illuminating his partner’s torso – begins with a drawing and is progressively transformed on the canvas by a visual vocabulary he synthesises from art history’s greatest hits. After graduating from college, Fratino lived in Berlin for a year on a Fulbright Fellowship in Painting, where he relished the “freedom of being a working artist”. New work emerged from his desire to archive significant observations and emotive experiences during his time abroad. Fratino’s work is deeply personal,

and he positions himself in conversation with a lineage of other queer artists seeking to subvert classicist forms of art celebrating the pleasures of LGBTQ+ everyday life. For this exhibition, Fratino presents new paintings that explore the ways in which LGBTQ+ people are socialised to navigate the world as an “outsider”. This new body of work critiques the complexity of familial dynamics queer people face, beginning at childhood and continuing into adulthood. Drawing visual sources from the personal, Fratino juxtaposes the image of the family in contrast with visceral homoerotic imagery as a way to visually complicate the tensions between the two.

NEW YORK, UNITED STATES, 1993 LIVES IN NEW YORK

For decades, queer communities have endured the burden of being “the other”, subjected to varying degrees of violence in both the domestic and public spheres; permissible by traditional family values and even the law, in certain countries. Fratino’s new work carries an emotional weight that feels urgent, unveiling an additional layer of political response to the social climate queer people are facing everywhere. This is the first time the work of Louis Fratino is presented at Biennale Arte. —Juan Manuel Silverio

I keep my treasure in my ass, 2019 Oil on canvas, 217.8 × 165.1 cm. Private collection. Courtesy Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York. © Louis Fratino.

267 NUCLEO CONTEMPORANEO Eggs, dishes, coreopsis, 2020 Oil on canvas, 106.7 × 106.7 cm. Private collection. Courtesy Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York. © Louis Fratino.

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Metropolitan, 2019 Oil on canvas, 152.4 × 240.7 cm. Collection Tom Keyes and Keith Fox. Courtesy Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York. © Louis Fratino.

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Ṣàngódáre Gbádégẹsin Àjàlá

Ṣàngódáre Gbádégẹsin Àjàlá was a batik painter of handpainted textiles using the wax-resist dyeing method which fused his artistic and ritual practice. Born into a lineage of Ṣàngó (the Yoruba thunder god) priests, Àjàlá was on the cusp of initiation when his father passed away in 1959. He was then adopted by an Austrian artist and Yoruba religious enthusiast living in Osogbo, Susanne Wenger, herself initiated as a priestess. Àjàlá was finally initiated into the Ṣàngó cult in 1960. Originally taught batik painting by Wenger, Àjàlá became a renowned batik innovator in his own right. He exhibited internationally and travelled across Nigeria, Cuba, and Brazil to oversee priestly initiations. He became a leading artist of the New Sacred Art Movement founded by Wenger and other artists, later ensuring the preservation of shrines and sculptures in the 75-hectare Osun–Osogbo Sacred Grove, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

OSOGBO, NIGERIA, 1948–2021

Àjàlá’s practice conveyed, in his words, “the rich complexity of his heritage and spirituality”. The dense storytelling of his batiks often depicted initiations of olórìṣàs, individuals consecrated to Yoruba deities, such as himself, or festivals for deities. Others, however, celebrated everyday life, like men tapping palm wine or women carrying market goods. Àjàlá’s preference for precise drawing and multidimensional colour led to a lifelong experimentation in the wax-resist technique of batik seen in these works, in which designs are drawn in wax and dye is applied afterward. In addition to his characteristic figuration, Àjàlá’s extensive knowledge of Yoruba herbology informed his formal innovations in batik painting. It enabled him to develop plant dyes that facilitated the extraordinary colouring and shading of his work, with single compositions like these including up to thirty-five colours. This is the first time the work of Ṣàngódáre Gbádégẹsin Àjàlá is presented at Biennale Arte. —Merve Fejzula

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Unknown title (Ọya pẹlu àṣẹ rẹ, Ọya with her symbols of sacred force), n.d. Batik, 148 × 235 cm. Courtesy Susanne Wenger Foundation. © Martin Bilinovac.

Unknown title (abstract batik motif around palm wine tapper scene), n.d. Batik, 125 x 93 cm. Courtesy Susanne Wenger Foundation. © Martin Bilinovac.

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Unknown title (Ṣọ̀npọ̀nná, also known as Ọbalúayé), n.d. Batik, 135 × 88 cm. Collection J. & W. Druml. Courtesy. Susanne Wenger Foundation. © Martin Bilinovac.

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Madge Gill

Madge Gill’s drawings, textiles, and writings have been received variously as mediumistic communication from another world, visionary masterpieces, and works influenced by her mental health challenges. Gill was born Maude Eades to unmarried parents in East London in 1882. At age nine, she was placed in the care of Barnardo’s orphanage before being sent to Canada as part of their child immigration programme. After working there as a domestic servant for seven years, Gill returned to the UK. As she forged her life in London, Gill experienced a series of hardships including the death of her young son in 1918, a stillbirth, and drastically ill health, eventually suffering a breakdown. This traumatic period has been cited as the precipitation of Gill’s impulse to create: from 1920, she began to experience visions, often mythic or religious in tone. She started producing drawings and textiles at great speed, stating that she was “guided by an unseen force”. As she continued to communicate with this realm of otherworldly influences, Gill became a locally renowned medium, participating in Spiritualist circles.

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WALTHAMSTOW, UNITED KINGDOM, 1882– 1961, LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM

Gill’s drawings are populated by inscrutable female faces, vertiginous staircases, and chequered planes that seem to endlessly proliferate in a dense web of repetitive mark making. In its immense scale, Crucifixion of the Soul (1934) is a monumental iteration of Gill’s characteristic style, though it diverges from her usual monochromatic palette. Reminiscent of fractured stained glass, both in its luminous intricacy and the piecemeal process of its making, the composition developed as the calico fabric was unrolled in sections, each part unfolding into the eventual whole. The faces that punctuate Gill’s work have been theorised as self-portraits, images of Gill’s spirit guide, and as sublimated expressions of isolation, suspended in unstable landscapes. This is the first time the work of Madge Gill is presented at Biennale Arte. —Sybilla Griffin

Crucifixion of the Soul, 1936 Ink on calico, 147 × 1062 cm. Photo Ollie Harrop. Courtesy London Borough of Newham. © London Borough of Newham.

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Marlene Gilson

WADAWURRUNG, WARRNAMBOOL, AUSTRALIA, 1944 LIVES IN GORDON, AUSTRALIA

Marlene Gilson is a Wathaurung/Wadawurrung Elder and Traditional Owner whose contemporary painting practice is marked by a meticulous attention to detail. Informed by intergenerational knowledge passed on from her grandmother, Gilson speculates about the lives of Aboriginal people in the face of colonisation and at the height of the gold rush on Wathaurung/Wadawurrung country. Her paintings often depict her ancestors Willem Baa Nip (King Billy) and his wife Queen Mary, and feature her totems, Bunjil (Wedge-Tailed Eagle) and Waa (Crow). Gilson’s work has been exhibited widely throughout Australia and has more recently been animated and expanded into largescale public art.

Gilson’s paintings redress the art historical record that has rendered Aboriginal people, communities, and culture absent. Her expansive and panoramic desert, beach, and bush landscapes open up highly detailed and culturally rich portals into the past, filled with her signature characters going about their day-to-day lives. Throughout her work, Gilson highlights Wathaurung/ Wadawurrung involvement in historical events. These include the Eureka Stockade (1854) and interactions between First Nations people and immigrants from other cultures, including William Buckley (1780–1856), an escaped British convict who lived with Wathaurung/ Wadawurrung people for thirtytwo years before returning to colonial society, and the Afghan

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cameleers. Significant cultural sites such as Moorabool Falls, related to Bunjil, the ancestral creator of the Kulin nation, are also featured. By asserting the presence of her Wathaurung/ Wadawurrung ancestors and cultural signifiers, Gilson’s paintings function as a form of personal truthtelling. She explains: “Each brushstroke contributes to placing my family history on the world map and back into the history books”. This is the first time the work of Marlene Gilson is presented at Biennale Arte. —Jessica Clark

Building the Stockade at Eureka, 2021 Acrylic on linen, 100 × 120 cm. Photo Jessica Maurer. Private Collection, Sydney, Australia. Courtesy Martin Browne Contemporary, Sydney.

273 NUCLEO CONTEMPORANEO Market Day, 2022 Acrylic on linen, 76 × 100 cm. Photo Jessica Maurer. The Wesfarmers Collection, Perth, Australia. Courtesy Martin Browne Contemporary, Sydney.

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William Buckley, Interpreter, 2023 Acrylic on linen, 60 × 76 cm. Photo Jessica Maurer. Private Collection, Sidney, Australia. Courtesy Martin Browne Contemporary, Sydney.

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Gabrielle Goliath

Gabrielle Goliath works mainly within the medium of video and performance, exploring concerns around forms of violence towards the historically marginalized or underrepresented, such as Black, Brown, queer, and femme people. Goliath received both a BFA (2007) and an MAFA (2011) from the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. Through her practice, Goliath has explored the prevalence of violence, the politics of the language used around it, acts of reverence and commemoration for those affected, and manifestations of grief.

KIMBERLEY, SOUTH AFRICA, 1983 LIVES IN JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA

Personal Accounts (2024) is an ongoing, transnational, multichannel, audiovisual installation rooted in concerns around refusal and repair. Here, women and gender non-conforming collaborators share their personal stories of nuanced forms of physical, psychological, and systemic violence. Instead of hearing detailed accounts, one witnesses the breathing, sighing, humming, crying, or laughing, which testify to tenacity and survival. Viewers are informed through body expressions that usually embellish and give emphasis to language. This work points to care, survival, and comradery. Though the work is rooted in performance, it refuses to cater to the spectacle of violence and its aftermath, but rather emphasises the subtle and particular. This artwork has been produced in Johannesburg, Tunis, Oslo, Milan, Edinburgh, and Stellenbosch. —Tandanzani Dhlakama

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Personal Accounts (There’s a river of birds in migration), 2024 Video stills. Courtesy the Artist.

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Brett Graham

Having been raised in the fulcrum of the contemporary Māori art movement, Brett Graham’s artistic practice has extended and cemented the position of a distinct Māori visual language, broadening its connections to global Indigenous issues. While absorbing the influence of his father Fred Graham and his contemporaries, who had often trained in art education, he attended the University of Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Arts, followed by a postgraduate degree at the University of Hawai’i, Honolulu (1990), a stronghold for Indigenous studies. Returning to New Zealand, he regularly exhibited in a range of sculptural and installation practices, incorporating a wide range of materials and exploring a combination of political, philosophical, and artistic subjects central to Māori and Pacific histories. In a period of Māori art history that was renowned for absorbing Post-Pop practices and urban narratives, Graham’s work is unique for explicitly centring Māori knowledge and whakapapa (ancestry) informed by the past while remaining politically engaged in contemporary issues.

Graham’s sculpture Wastelands (2024) situates a carved pātaka (storehouse) on wheels, implying mobility, transience, and separation from homeland. A raised architectural structure on poles, the pātaka was traditionally used by Māori as a house for food and treasures, often bearing particularly ornate carving across the lintel, indicative of the wealth and prestige of the iwi community. Instead of using traditional carved patterns, Graham covers his pātaka in eels, referencing the food source and in reverence to the natural world of his Tainui people. In 1858, as part of the colonial project, the New Zealand government passed the Waste Lands Act, which shifted the definition of large swamp lands – a rich resource for Māori – to “waste”. The act claimed these vast swamps as unoccupiable land, redefining them as territories of wetland to be drained and turned towards agriculture. Graham’s presentation of this storehouse is a reminder that for Māori, these eel preserves were as valuable as goldmines. This is the first time the work of Brett Graham is presented at Biennale Arte. —Natasha Conland

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Maungārongo Ki Te Whenua, Maungārongo Ki Te Tangata, 2020 Wood, synthetic polymer paint and graphite, 320 × 800 × 320 cm. Photo Neil Pardington. Courtesy the Artist.

AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND, 1967 LIVES IN AUCKLAND

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Fred Graham

A revered artist and educator, Fred Graham is one of the most esteemed figures working in sculpture to emerge from the first generation of contemporary Māori artists in the 1950s. Like many from this group who organically combined two distinct artistic traditions – Indigenous Māori and Western modernism – to forge their own artistic identity, Graham originally studied for teacher training in art. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, he held key positions for art education in Māori schools while developing his sculptural language in carved wood, stone, and steel. For his first exhibition in 1965, he returned to his home and iwi community of the Waikato in the central North Island exhibiting alongside a growing movement of Māori. These exhibitions became a mechanism for exchanging ideas and a means to strengthen the visibility of Māori art. In 1978, Graham participated in a meaningful exchange programme to the United States, which strengthened his beliefs about the importance of customary carving knowledge and Indigenous world views.

ARAPUNI, AOTEAROA, NEW ZEALAND, 1928 LIVES IN WAIUKU, AOTEAROA, NEW ZEALAND

Whiti Te Ra (1966) is a portrayal of four figures in action. Cleverly combining simplified forms from customary carvings and the fluid markings of oil stick, he renders the action and iconic phrase from the Māori haka composed by legendary Ngāti Toa chief Te Rauparaha from around 1820. The haka, which chants “Ka mate, ka mate” (It is death, it is death), celebrates life over death and Te Rauparaha’s lucky escape. The title Whiti Te Ra (Into the sunlight) is a positive exclamation of wellbeing and advancement. The cluster of carved works showcases Graham’s experimental beginnings by creatively giving form to concepts from Māori mythology. These include narratives about the origins of carving itself and its interrelationship with the natural world. Figures of the god Tangaroa and the guardian Tinirau, both central to the story of the origins of carving, and are depicted in a striking new visual language, embodying both continuity with Indigenous Māori knowledge and respect for the land and a rebellious new form that defies singular definition. This is the first time the work of Fred Graham is presented at Biennale Arte. —Natasha Conland

Tamariki a Tangaroa, 1970 Wood, 76 × 244 × 120 cm. Colleen Hill Collection. Courtesy of the artist.

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Whiti Te Rā, 1966 Oil stick on board, 137 × 62.8 × 6 cm. Courtesy Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. © Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.

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Nedda Guidi

Nedda Guidi was in conflict with the contemporary art world as a queer woman, a committed feminist, and an educator who chose to work with ceramics, which many considered a minor craft. Across sixty years of artistic practice, she upturned traditional ways of working with clay, using it against the grain and counter to conventional techniques and forms. When she moved to Rome in the early 1950s, her ceramics played with the intersection of abstraction and figuration. Her first solo exhibition at Galleria Numero in 1964, prefaced by celebrated critic Filiberto Menna, presented paperthin sculptures that evoked bodily volumes and curves. By the end of the decade, Guidi turned to modularity and moved away from enamels. She endeavoured to study the alchemy of natural oxides by mixing them directly with clay to “rediscover a lost innocence and to recover the originality of the material”.

GUBBIO, ITALY, 1923– 2015, ROME, ITALY

Glazed in Sèvres blue, Modular 1 (1967–1968) captures a negotiation between geometric volumes and bodily forms. While made of four identical blocks, the work is as tall as a person, and its cut-out rubyred sections anthropomorphise and gender the sculpture. Conversely, Otto B o NaturaleArtificiale (1974) exemplifies her deployment of modularity. With millimetric precision, Guidi cast elements made of different impastos, each requiring unique cooking times and temperatures, which assemble in multiple formations. Showcasing her alchemical mastery of natural dying processes for clay, De-position (1977) is made of a sequence of rectangular tassels in shades of blue. The work takes on two markers of patriarchal power: Catholicism, by referencing the Deposition of Christ; and language, by translating the gap she placed between the letters in the title to the work’s structure. De-position was first exhibited in the spaces of the Cooperativa Beato Angelico in 1977, the pioneering feminist artist collective co-founded by Guidi the previous year. This is the first time the work of Nedda Guidi is presented at Biennale Arte. —Sofia Gotti

Tavola di Campionatura n. 1 (crudo-cotto), 1976 Terracotta and oxides in wooden case, 50 × 50 cm. Photo Giorgio Benni. Private Collection, Rome, Italy.

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Nedda Guidi’s presentation in the International Exhibition is complemented by a small survey as a Special Project at Forte Marghera, Mestre.

Otto B o Naturale-Artificiale, 1974 Unglazed terracotta and pink enamelled terracotta, Eight elements, overall ø 90 cm. Courtesy Museo Internazionale delle Ceramiche in Faenza, Italy. De-posizione, 1977 Terracotta and oxides, 6 × 66 × 155 cm. Photo Giorgio Benni. Private Collection, Rome, Italy.

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Antonio Jose Guzman & Iva Jankovic

In their ongoing artistic collaboration, Antonio Jose Guzman and Iva Jankovic incorporate indigo textiles, soundscapes, and performances to address how our world has been shaped by colonialism and migration. Often presented in monumental installations, their block-printed textiles demonstrate that borders are the product of a constant reconstruction of political, cultural, and social practices. As one of the chapters in the Electronic Dub Station series, Orbital Mechanics takes shape as an immersive labyrinth focusing on spaces between cultures, as identified by scholar Homi Bhabha in his third space theory. “Third space” describes the hybrid cultural identity which emerges from the interweaving elements of different cultures. This ties to a central notion in Guzman and Jankovic’s projects: the “Black Atlantic

culture”, coined by scholar Paul Gilroy as a culture that is not specifically African, American, Caribbean, or European, but all of these at once. Guzman and Jankovic reinterpret the history of sacred indigo textiles, which are deeply connected with colonial histories and the trade of enslaved Africans who carried the expertise of cultivating indigo with them to the Americas. The textiles in the installation feature an abstract pattern of intercultural DNA sequences that embody a global connection between the Black Atlantic. The textiles are printed at the Ajrakh workshop of Sufiyan Khatri in Ajrakhpur, India. Using traditional manual dyeing methods, Ajrakh is a 4,000-year-old practice orally passed down through generations. The accompanying soundscape alludes to ideas of belonging and exclusion through an

PANAMA CITY, PANAMA, 1971 LIVES IN AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS, AND PANAMA CITY RUMA, SERBIA, 1979 LIVES IN AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS

exploration of diasporic sounds that combine electronic music, dub, punk, and Senegalese drums. The music resonates in a performance titled Messengers of the Sun which embodies the project’s themes such as migration, race, and cultural hybrid identities in a processional parade and dance. This is the first time the work of Antonio Jose Guzman & Iva Jankovic is presented at Biennale Arte. —Amanda Pinatih and Britte Sloothaak Jupiter Moonrise Dub, Electric Dub Station Series, 2020 Ajrakh block printed Indigo dyed. Photo Natascha Libbert. Courtesy Atelier GF Workstation. © Antonio José Guzman and Iva Jankovic. Ultra DNA Sequencing, Electric Dub Station Series, 2020 Ajrakh block printed Indigo dyed. Photo Natascha Libbert. Courtesy Atelier GF Workstation. © Antonio José Guzman and Iva Jankovic.

Orbital Ignition, Electric Dub Station Series, Sonsbeek 20-24, 2021 Ajrakh block printed Indigo dyed textiles and parametric cubes. Photo Natascha Libbert. Courtesy Atelier GF Workstation. © Antonio José Guzman and Iva Jankovic.

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Lauren Halsey

LOS ANGELES, UNITED STATES, 1987 LIVES IN LOS ANGELES

Lauren Halsey is an artist who reimagines the relationship between architecture and community. Halsey works collaboratively with her South Central Los Angeles community to create projects that rethink the parameters of aesthetic and architectural possibility on the largest possible scale. The artist’s responsive, site-specific works critique the ongoing dispossession of historically working class, Black and Brown, and queer populations in her community, preserving and archiving their legacies into the cultural landscape and memory of the city. Halsey’s installations are real-world architectural proposals which become largescale models forged with a “for us, by us” ethos that inspire a collective vision for a culture of radical inclusion.

For the Biennale Arte, Halsey presents a new installation at the end of the Arsenale comprised of a series of monumental columns inspired by everyday life in South Central Los Angeles. Halsey has made columns before, some inscribed with words and images, others hand painted. For this iteration, she recontextualises the form of the Hathoric column by carving the capitals with the likenesses and stories of people from her neighbourhood, honouring their contributions. This remix of temporalities – the ancient with the contemporary – is a political gesture to uphold the Black and African American diaspora and its history with the same reverence as other architectural landmarks across the West. The installation, embedded with power and stories from Halsey’s local community, stands in conversation with the rest of Venice’s architecture. This is the first time the work of Lauren Halsey is presented at Biennale Arte. —Juan Silverio

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The Eastside of South Central Los Angeles Hieroglyph Prototype Architecture (I), 2023 Installation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Art Resource; Scala, Firenze.

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Evan Ifekoya

Evan Ifekoya is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice mirrors their role as a spiritual practitioner, perceiving art as a platform for redistributing and renegotiating resources, challenging implicit rules and hierarchies in public and social spaces. Through archival and sonic investigations, they explore the abundance of Blackness. Employing architectural interventions, ritual, installations, and workshops, they establish a practice of living as a counter to despair. At the core of their exploration is the body, focusing on how those perceived as marginal move, transform, and transmute. Portraiture and spatial installations engage multiple senses, connecting to deeper aspects of awareness and prompting a reconsideration of established categories. Operating under the pseudonym Oceanic Sage, they delve into sacred traditions influenced by the cosmology of their Yorùbá ancestors. Their work explores belief, emphasising the body as a system of knowledge.

IPERU, NIGERIA, 1988 LIVES IN LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM

The Central Sun (2022) functions as a broadcast station within the Resonant Frequencies project, an immersive sound installation aiming to investigate existence and understanding beyond the limitations of visual perception. Compressing a day’s movement into one hour, this work aims to facilitate cellular-level transformation through sensory engagement and immersive environments. Featuring the sun disc and crescent moon as symbols of balance and harmony, The Central Sun incorporates frequencies such as the transformative 528 Hz. This integration transforms the work into spaces of renewal and repair, fostering both the individual and communal well-being of those historically excluded from sacred spaces. Delving into altered states of consciousness through the experiences of sound, silence, and listening, the artist draws on the wisdom of both Yorùbá traditions and practices, always with the elevation of Black and queer consciousness at the forefront. This is the first time the work of Evan Ifekoya is presented at Biennale Arte. —Amanda Carneiro

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The Central Sun, 2022 Single-channel sound installation, speakers, wood, acrylic glass, styrodur, motor, painted gourd rattles, rubber skin pellet drum with cowrie shells, cork, carpet. Photo Stefan Altenburger Photography, Zurich. Courtesy Sammlung Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst. © ProLitteris, Zürich.

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Julia Isídrez

Julia Isídrez is a Guaraní Indigenous artist and a ceramicist who learned pottery from her mother, Juana Marta Rodas. In the mid-1990s, beset by economic difficulties, she planned to relocate to Buenos Aires. However, she was dissuaded from the idea by her mother and her own vocation as a ceramicist. This decision ultimately enabled her to develop a brilliant artistic career in Paraguay and attain renown in contemporary art. Both Isídrez and her mother have been featured in various exhibitions and biennials, and they have both received shared awards. As soon as her mother passed away, Isídrez obtained a Maestra del Arte diploma, offered in 2014 by Centro Cultural Cabildo, Congreso de Paraguay, as well as the Carlos Colombino award, given by Paraguay’s National Department of Culture in 2018.

Isídrez works within the Guaraní tradition, according to which the craft of pottery must be handed down from mother to daughter. Isídrez also learned from her mother how to take on the challenge of boldly incorporating forms and functions belonging to several different timespans. After her mother’s death, Isídrez continued investigating new paths that do not erase the ones she inherited: her continual, innovative experiments have not led her to forget the elemental force of clay, nor the antique Guaraní techniques. Nourished by different worlds, moved by the pure drive of aesthetics, her sculpted pots shift from hallucinatory, at times baroque, figuration, to the exactness of austere volumes and clean lines. Fed by a feverish imagination and backed by impeccable vocation where form is concerned, her work has become one of the most notable in her native country today. This is the first time the work of Julia Isídrez is presented at Biennale Arte. —Ticio Escobar

Ginea (Diseño de Juana Marta), 2017 Ceramics, 110 × ø 48 cm. Photo Edouard Fraipont. Courtesy Gomide & Co.

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Vasija base tinója con tapa 2 ranas, 2023 Ceramics, 77 × 35 × 35 cm. Photo Edouard Fraipont. Courtesy Gomide & Co.

ITÁ, PARAGUAY, 1967 LIVES IN ITÁ

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Grito de libertad, 2019 Ceramics, 102 × ø 55 cm. Photo Edouard Fraipont. Courtesy Gomide & Co.

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Nour Jaouda

Nour Jaouda is a Libyan artist who fuses life and aesthetic practice through her continual movements between places real and remembered. Through earthy, saturated colours and the fibre medium, Jaouda explores tensions between closeness and distance, presence and absence, and fragmentation and reconstruction. The simultaneous experiences of rooting, as a process, and being rootless imbue her work with conceptual, sensory dimensions. Whether evoking the uprooting or replanting of the self, Jaouda’s textiles convey the fluidity of identity and a constant state of becoming. This shapeshifting is made visible through the layering and folding of richly coloured fabrics the artist has hand-dyed, cut, and restitched. Traversing environments and ecologies, Jaouda collects the natural pigments, cloths, and found materials for her tapestries and fibre installations. She lives and works between Cairo, where her family resides, and London, where she obtained her MA in painting from the Royal College of Art in 2021.

LIBYAN, BORN IN CAIRO, EGYPT, 1997 LIVES IN CAIRO AND LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM

Fig trees belonging to the artist’s grandmother in Benghazi, Libya, lend their poetic impetus for the three textiles displayed in the Biennale Arte. Strongly attached to place, trees hold and embody memories. Jaouda recreates their botanical elements by deconstructing cloth, dyeing it in earthen tones, and then resewing it into sculptural tapestries. She draws from the personification of olive trees by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish in conceptualisation and title. Threaded through these and previous works are notions of rootlessness and resilience, destruction and regeneration, and timelessness. Jaouda relishes in the slow, physical, and felt processes of fabricating hand-dyed textiles. The textiles’ inherent connectivity begets their association with the eternal and divine; to the artist, textiles have no beginning or end. The vegetal dyes possess their own force and unpredictability, activating the work. Jaouda’s sumptuously layered fabrics reverberate with colours that are deep and ethereal, shadowy and luminescent, and as infinitely textured as memory itself. This is the first time the work of Nour Jaouda is presented at Biennale Arte. —Jessica Gerschultz

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This poem will never be finished, 2023 Dye and pigment on canvas, steel, 170 × 80 cm. Photo Nour Jaouda. Courtesy the Artist.

Everything touches everything else, 2023 Dye and pigment on canvas, steel, 170 × 80 cm. Photo Nour Jaouda. Courtesy the Artist.

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Rindon Johnson

SAN FRANCISCO, UNITED STATES, 1990 LIVES IN SAN FRANCISCO

The stage is no place for the riot, 2019-ongoing Rawhide, water, variable dimensions. Photo Kyle Knodell. Courtesy the artist and Max Goelitz, Munich and Berlin.

Rindon Johnson’s artistic practice is rooted in exploring the complexities of identity and the human experience through language and objects. His work often delves into themes of belonging, otherness, and the ways language can shape our perception of reality. He uses a range of mediums, including poetry, sculpture, photography, performance, and virtual reality, to create immersive and contemplative experiences. As a poet, Johnson often employs humour and a relaxed yet biting tone that draws attention to the critical yet neglected details of daily life. Meanwhile, his object-based work addresses the failings of language and its inability to properly contain all the context of the world around us. Johnson’s practice hovers within this paradox: on the one

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hand, language structures our experience, and on the other, it is often incapable of communicating the depth of our feelings. In Coeval Proposition #1: Tear down so as to make flat with the Ground or The *Trans America Building DISMANTLE EVERYTHING (2021), Johnson addresses both the poetic play on words as well as the ineptitude of words to capture the entirety of an experience. Essentially a pun, he crafted the form of the Transamerica Pyramid – a forty-eightstorey modernist skyscraper in downtown San Francisco – out of reclaimed redwood, addressing his own experience as a trans man in America. The pyramid form has become synonymous with

the artist’s hometown skyline, reflecting the way language, place of origin, and emigration collectively shape one’s identity. Identity is further complicated by its incompleteness, like an empty skin. Works like The stage is no place for a riot (2019 - ongoing) utilise cowhide in a variety of ways – repurposed in windows, used as a water-catcher, and hung as flags. This body of work serves as a reminder of the way in which identity can be equipped and shed, turning identity into a symbolic garment or a material tool. This is the first time the work of Rindon Johnson is presented at Biennale Arte. —William Hernandez Luege Coeval Proposition #1: Tear down so as to make flat with the Ground or The*Trans America Building DISMANTLE EVERYTHING, 2021 Redwood, 520 x 125 cm. Photo Andy Keate. Courtesy the Artist; Max Goelitz, Munich and Berlin; With thanks to Rennie Collection, Vancouver, Canada.

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Joyce Joumaa

Joyce Joumaa is an artist and filmmaker whose work engages with histories shaped by conflict and crisis, often rooted in her native Lebanon or in diasporic experiences. Through documentary and experimental filmmaking, archival research, and photography, she creates narratives that complicate our readings of past events, historical figures, or emblematic sites, examining how they continue to act upon us in the present. In this vein, her works dissect politically charged spaces and collective memories that highlight the relations, power structures, and paradoxes embodied within them. In 2021–2022, Joumaa was selected for the Emerging Curator Residency Program at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, during which she produced To Remain In The No Longer (2023). The film considers the failed project of the International Fair in Tripoli, designed by Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, within the framework of the current socioeconomic context of Lebanon.

In Memory Contours (2024), Joumaa turns to a chapter of the eugenics movement in the United States and its effects on newly arrived immigrants in the early 1900s. Specifically, she investigates the “intelligence” tests designed to identify mental deficiency, potentially leading to the detention and deportation of individuals. Departing from the 1914 US Public Health Service report Mentality of the Arriving Immigrant, Joumaa focuses on a particular mental test conducted on Ellis Island, New York, where participants were instructed to draw shapes from memory. She replicates four drawings featured in the report as case studies and juxtaposes them with close-up videos of hands recreating each sketch. The interplay heightens a tension between drawing as a gestural expression and its instrumentalisation as a measure of skill and intelligence. Joumaa’s installation lays bare the discriminatory controls imposed on newcomers and the systemic stigmatisation of foreignness, linking it to inadequacy, unsuitability, and inferiority.

BEIRUT, LEBANON, 1998 LIVES IN MONTREAL, CANADA

Joyce Joumaa is one of the four recipients of the Biennale College Arte 2024 scholarship. This work is not in competition.

This is the first time the work of Joyce Joumaa is presented at Biennale Arte. —Julia Eilers Smith

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Joyce Joumaa is one of the four recipients of the Biennale College Arte 2024 grant. Her work is out of competition.

Four drawings reproduced in Eugene H. Mullan, Mentality of the Arriving Immigrant. Washington DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1917. Courtesy Eugene H. Mullan and United States Public Health Service.

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Nazira Karimi

Nazira Karimi’s films tell women’s stories and explore Central Asian identity, memory, and land reappropriation impacted by Soviet colonisation. The artist, of halfTajik and half-Kazakh heritage, repatriated to Kazakhstan with her family in 2013. In Almaty, she studied scenography and painting, and since 2018, she has continued her artistic exploration in Vienna. Feminism and decoloniality aren’t just themes in Karimi’s works, they embody her artistic process. She is actively involved in multiple female artist collectives and platforms, fostering art and knowledge production and nurturing art communities in Central Asia. Karimi participated in documenta 15 (2022) as a member of the DAVRA Research Group initiated by artist Saodat Ismailova. Over the last five years, Karimi has embarked on artistic residencies and has showcased her films and installations across Asia and Europe.

DUSHANBE, TAJIKISTAN, 1996 LIVES IN ALMATY, KAZAKHSTAN AND VIENNA, AUSTRIA

Karimi’s 2024 film Hafta (which translates as “seven” and “a week” from Tajik) is a sevenpart video work narrating the artist’s ancestry. According to the Central Asian tradition called Jety-Ata (“seven grandfathers” in Kazakh), one has to know the names of seven direct blood grandfathers. Karimi instead imagines and tells stories of seven women from her maternal line, representing generations who lived through the dreadful episodes of Central Asian history. To make this film, Karimi has come a long way from Kazakhstan to Tajikistan and back, together with her mother, Mariam. They repeated the path of their family, depicted in Hafta, from displacement and migration along the Aral Sea and Syr Darya to their recent repatriation. In the receding waters and desiccating landscapes, Karimi finds the grief and mourning of all the losses the region has gone through. This is the first time the work of Nazira Karimi is presented at Biennale Arte. —Dana Iskakova

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Nazira Karimi is one of the four recipients of the Biennale College Arte 2024 grant. Her work is out of competition.

Hafta, 2024 Video stills Courtesy of the Artist

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Bhupen Khakhar

Bhupen Khakhar trained in Bombay as a chartered accountant before moving to Baroda, where he studied art criticism at the Faculty of Fine Arts. Here he also became part of the close-knit circle of artists, writers, and poets who were based in the city at the time. Khakhar’s work draws its strength from a lack of formal training, combined with his study of David Hockney, R B Kitaj, and Henri Rousseau, and his deep interest in premodern art in India and contemporary pop culture. Along with artists like Vivan Sundaram, Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, Sudhir Patwardhan, Nalini Malani, and others, Khakhar was instrumental in the turn towards figurative, narrative art that drew its subjects from “particular people in particular places”. This resulted in Khakhar’s 1970s painting series of workers and tradespeople such as tailors, shopkeepers, and watch repairmen, which was rooted in his commitment to the depiction of everyday life.

BOMBAY, INDIA, 1934– 2003, BARODA, INDIA

In the 1980s, Khakhar came out as a gay man and painted a series of iconic works such as You Can’t Please All (1981). These paintings were among the first in India to delve into themes of relationships between men and societal taboos around homosexuality. Fishermen in Goa (1985) depicts a group of three men – one fully dressed, another in a vest, and the third naked. It is an example of the fetishisation of the sexualised male body through gesture and metaphors, such as the fish that the man in the centre holds in one hand, while his other hand reaches under his companion’s shirt. The large figures in the foreground and the thickly worked pigment are typical of Khakhar’s style during this period. Khakhar’s work has been widely exhibited internationally in group shows in London, Paris, Kassel, Amsterdam, New York, and Tokyo. This is the first time the work of Bhupen Khakhar is presented at Biennale Arte. —Latika Gupta

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Fisherman in Goa, 1985 Oil on canvas, 168 × 168 cm. Shireen Gandhy’s Collection. Courtesy the Estate of the Artist; Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai, India.

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Bouchra Khalili

Bouchra Khalili studied film at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle and visual arts at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Paris-Cergy. Khalili’s multidisciplinary practice develops collaborative strategies of storytelling with members of communities excluded from citizen membership. With her works, she suggests poetical hypotheses meditating on newer imaginations of community. Khalili’s work has been subject to many solo exhibitions around the world.

Khalili’s The Mapping Journey Project was developed over three years across the Mediterranean migration routes of North and Eastern Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. Khalili gathered participatory stories from migrants she met at local train stations and other public spaces. The eight video installations of The Mapping Journey Project document stories alongside the hands of migrants who mark on a map the arduous path across the geopolitical terrain of land and sea. In our contemporary era of Land Back and settler colonial genocide, The Mapping Journey Project is a long-standing call for selfdetermination of diasporic and Indigenous communities.

CASABLANCA, MOROCCO, 1975 LIVES IN VIENNA, AUSTRIA

The Constellations Series, the closing chapter of The Mapping Journey Project, poetically reformulates and illuminates the video installation. The eight silkscreen prints translate the narrated journeys in the form of constellations of stars, referring to ancient astronomy as rooted in mythology. Khalili invites viewers to actively project themselves into the constellation to collectively imagine other ways to belong. —Tracy Fenix

Constellations, 2011 Silkscreen print on paper, 60 × 40 cm. Courtesy the Artist.

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The Mapping Journey Project, 2008-11 Video installation, 8 video projections, Variable durations and dimensions. Photo Jonathan Muzikar. Courtesy the Artist. © Jonathan Muzikar.

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Kiluanji Kia Henda

Kiluanji Kia Henda was born in 1979, four years after Angola gained independence from Portugal and the country’s civil war began. Angola was one of the last countries in Africa to obtain independence, and the thirteen-year struggle with fascist Portugal was one of Africa’s longest wars of independence. Kia Henda is keenly interested in the political dimensions of art, culture, and history, especially as they intersect with his native Luanda, and the African continent. Kia Henda has worked in many different media – video, photography, sculpture, installation, and performance – and often manipulates images and narratives, at times with a remarkable sense of humour. Topics such as modernist architecture in Luanda, Angola’s colonial past and

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communist legacy, African immigration to Europe, and abstraction and the modernist grid are intertwined in his work. Three works by Kia Henda are presented at the Biennale Arte. Despite being made over a span of seven years, they are closely connected. The Geometric Ballad of Fear (2015) consists of nine photographs documenting white-painted protective metal railings found in buildings and houses in Angola, which are a prevalent feature in big cities in the Global South with significant disparities amongst their populations. The Geometric Ballad of Fear (Sardegna) (2019) also consists of nine photographs, this time in black and white, with the same grids in black superimposed as a graphic element over views of the Sardinian landscape, overlooking the Mediterranean.

LUANDA, ANGOLA, 1979 LIVES IN LUANDA

A espiral do medo (2022) uses the actual metal railings taken from the buildings and houses in Luanda that interested the artist in 2015. Although made of metal railings that once offered robust protection to those inside, the large-scale sculpture now seems permeable and rather unstable – resembling a ruin of sorts – and serving as a mere emblem of fear. —Adriano Pedrosa

The Geometric Ballad of Fear, 2015 Inkjet print on cotton paper, 70 × 100 cm. Courtesy Galeria Filomena Soares, Lisbon; Galleria Fonti, Napoli; Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg. The Geometric Ballad of Fear (Sardegna), 2019 Inkjet print on fine art paper, 100 × 120 cm. Courtesy Galeria Filomena Soares, Lisbon; Galleria Fonti, Napoli; Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg.

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A Espiral do Medo, 2022 Iron sculpture, 400 × 400 cm. Courtesy Galeria Filomena Soares, Lisbon; Galleria Fonti, Napoli; Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg; Jahmek Contemporary Art, Luanda.

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Shalom Kufakwatenzi

Shalom Kufakwatenzi is a nonbinary artist who predominantly works with performance, photography, and textile. Often combining this with literary and sonic elements, their practice is a reflection on daily life and identity politics in Zimbabwe. It is informed by the continuous internal process of healing, refusal, and self-acceptance that occurs as they navigate challenging social structures, be they political or familial. Kufakwatenzi graduated from the National Gallery School of Visual Art and Design (NGSVAD) in Harare in 2015, a modest art school that many of the nation’s most acclaimed artists hail from. Though they majored in sculpture and photography, their proximity to artist mentors whose experimental work refused the constraints of classical categorisation impacted their

practice. Hence, eager to expound on the potential of transdisciplinary expression, they later enrolled at the AfriKera Professional Dance Training (APDT) academy run by renowned dancer Soukaina Edom and graduated in 2021. Under the Sea (2023) and Mubatanidzwa (Adjoined) (2023) are textile works as Kufakwatenzi is interested in the malleable and transformative nature of fabric. Fabric can be adjusted, stretched, folded, and sewn together, much like how Kufakwatenzi moves in their own context as a queer person. Under the sea embodies longing and belonging. As a result of feeling like a foreigner at home, through this work Kufakwatenzi has created a space devoid of the sea of societal opinions. It encompasses bright textured

HARARE, ZIMBABWE, 1995 LIVES IN HARARE

colours reminiscent of childhood while referencing dark places that are dangerous and yet beautiful. However, though the personal is often the starting point, Kufakwatenzi also explores broader themes around land, which has always been topical in Zimbabwe. Mubatanidzwa is made from hessian, fishing and tobacco twine, wool, and leather, all of which are linked to agricultural labour. The sewnon cartographical lines point to unfair land distribution policies, displacement, and corruption. This is the first time the work of Shalom Kufakwatenzi is presented at Biennale Arte. —Tandanzani Dhlakama

Mubatanidzwa (Adjoined), 2023 Hessian fabric, wool, tobacco twine, leather, upholstery canvas, 240 × 186 cm. Photo Sekai Machache.

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Under the sea, 2023 Hessian fabric, wool, tobacco twine, fishing line, 96 × 216 cm. Photo Sekai Machache.

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Fred Kuwornu

Fred Kudjo Kuwornu is an Italian Afro-descendant filmmaker and activist currently living in New York. His early training was in the field of political science. After some television experience – as a writer for RAI public television and as a presenter for the broadcaster LA7 – he met the American director Spike Lee in 2007 on the set of the film Miracle at St Anna, for which he was acting as an extra. This meeting led him to pursue a career as a documentary filmmaker and to choose to devote himself to the story of Italy’s colonial heritage and the invisibility of Black communities. Kuwornu’s work is characterised by a hybrid documentary form, mixing investigation and exposé with the intention of generating knowledge, promoting multiculturalism, and triggering social change.

BOLOGNA, ITALY, 1971 LIVES IN ACCRA, GHANA, BOLOGNA, ITALY AND NEW YORK CITY, UNITED STATES

We Were Here (2024), the film made by Kuwornu for the exhibition, is part of the journey that began with Inside Buffalo (2010) and continued with 18 Ius Soli (2012) and BlaxploItalian (2016). At the heart of these films is the intention to give visibility to the vicissitudes of Afro-descendants in Western societies: from historical events – such as the contribution of the 92nd Buffalo Soldiers regiment, which fought in Italy in World War II – to the micro-stories of second-generation immigrants engaged in the recognition of Italian citizenship, to the claim of Black identity in the world of creative industries and the arts. If BlaxploItalian investigates the processes of Blackness in the portrayal of the Black community in the media, We Were Here focuses on the history of art and the representation of Black Africans in European visual culture since the Renaissance. The journey is accompanied by the voice of the author, whose presence aims to create an empathic connection with the viewer. This is the first time the work of Fred Kuwornu is presented at Biennale Arte. —Lorenzo Giusti

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We Were Here: The Untold History of Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, 2024 Video, 45 min. Courtesy the Artist.

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Bertina Lopes

Bertina Lopes cultivated a distinctive body of work intimately intertwined with her political activism and social critique. Lopes studied in Lisbon and was exposed to modernism, influencing her artistic production and leading her to fuse it with African iconography. Upon returning to Mozambique in the early 1950s, Lopes became an influential art professor while actively engaging with the country’s poets, writers, and political activists. As her anti-colonialist views solidified, she faced persecution, prompting her to flee to Rome, where she would spend the remainder of her life. Lopes’s work stayed tied to events in Mozambique, reflecting a yearning for independence, an end to colonialism, and a keen awareness of her African identity. Lopes became a crucial figure in Rome, serving as a cultural attaché to Mozambique’s embassy. Following her death, the Archivio Bertina Lopes was established in Rome to preserve her legacy, along with her home and studio.

MAPUTO, MOZAMBIQUE, 1924– 2012, ROME, ITALY

Often blending formal and Constructive elements from European art circles with a visuality associated with the African continent, the artist transformed her canvas into a means of expressing freedom, both personally and in response to the repressive situation in her home country. Lopes’s works are characterised by intricate compositions of different perspectives and volumes arranged on the same plane. The Cubist influence becomes evident, albeit marked by her strong personal gesture, as she combines masks with totems, forming shapes that evoke dance movements created with bold brushstrokes. Not uncommonly, the artist incorporates straw, feathers, and coloured fabrics into her works. Her Totens draws inspiration from Nyau ceremonies and Tufo dances – local traditions in Mozambique that were scorned during the colonial period. These influences reinforce her sense of being a foreigner in Italy while maintaining a strong connection to her Mozambican heritage. This is the first time the work of Bertina Lopes is presented at Biennale Arte. —Amanda Carneiro

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Totem, 1980-86 Oil on canvas, 130 × 150 cm. Courtesy Richard Saltoun Gallery, London and Rome. © The Estate of Bertina Lopes.

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MAHKU (Movimento dos Artistas Huni Kuin)

The Huni Kuin Artists Movement (MAHKU) was officially founded in 2013 after several university drawing workshops were held in the upper Rio Jordão region, Acre, Brazil, near the Peru border. The txana (chant master) Ibã Huni Kuin and some of his relatives have been developing ways of memorising and recording Huni Kuin oral knowledge in painting, especially the songs that lead the rituals called nixi pae (enchanted thread), which involve the ingestion of the psychoactive beverage ayahuasca. Through this experience it is possible to produce ramibiranai (emerging images), an embodiment of the spirit of the forest, by accessing the perspective of yube (the boa constrictor), who taught humans the recipe for the drink. MAHKU’s paintings, whether on murals, canvas, or paper, are records of myths, ancestral

stories about the advent of the world and humanity in relation to other beings. The colours and forms in these works mirror the visionary experience that takes place during ayahuasca rituals. In the large mural created for the façade of the La Biennale di Venezia Central Pavilion, MAHKU has painted the story of kapewë pukeni (the alligator bridge). The myth describes the passage between the Asian and American continents through the Bering Strait. In order to cross it, the humans found an alligator who offered to carry them across the Strait on its back in exchange for food. However, as they crossed, animals became increasingly scarce and the humans ultimately resorted to hunting a small alligator, betraying the trust of the large one, who submerged itself beneath

FOUNDED IN KAXINAWÁ (HUNI KUIN) INDIGENOUS TERRITORY, ACRE, BRAZIL, 2013. BASED IN KAXINAWÁ (HUNI KUIN) INDIGENOUS TERRITORY

the sea. Thus originated the separation between different people and places. This myth underscores MAHKU and its members as the producers and products of passages between distant contexts and territories, connecting the visible aspects of their art to the invisible nature of their visions, through the association and translation between traditional village practices and the parameters and conventions of the art world.

Kapewë pukeni, 2022 Acrylic on canvas, 140 × 115 cm. Photo Daniel Cabrel. Courtesy the Artists; Collection Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP).

This is the first time the work of MAHKU is presented at Biennale Arte. —Guilherme Giufrida

Hawe Henewakame Mural painted in Montreal, 2023 Acrylic on wall, 240 × 7200 cm. SBC galerie d’art contemporain MilMurs.

Yube Nawa Ainbu - Mural painted at the exhibition Vaivém, 2019 Acrylic on wall, 377 × 472 cm. Photo Edson Kumasaka. Courtesy of the Artists. Centro cultural Banco do Brasil, São Paulo, Brasil.

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Anna Maria Maiolino

The diverse artistic production of Anna Maria Maiolino spans various media and experimental poetics, influenced by the changes she has experienced throughout her life. After World War II, her family migrated from Italy to Caracas, Venezuela, where she studied at the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes. In 1960, she relocated to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, integrating herself into the city’s artistic life and later becoming part of the Nova Figuração (New Figuration) movement, an artistic response to the political climate of opposition to the Brazilian dictatorship. Throughout her life, she also lived in New York and Buenos Aires. She engaged with artists such as Lygia Clark, Ivan Serpa, and Helio Oiticica, and serves as a reference for different generations of artists in Brazil. Although her practice has changed to encompass themes of her own migration, territory, memory, and family relations, her poetics follows a spiral trajectory. In this journey, the artist revisits works, reinventing

them in an attempt to exorcise arbitrary political situations or feelings that need to be re-elaborated. The site-specific installation Indo e Vindo (2024) at the Casetta Scaffali is part of Maiolino’s iconic series Terra Modelada (Shaped Earth) (1993–2024) in which the work in clay highlights the primordial, organic, elastic, and pleasing-to-touch qualities of the material. For the Biennale Arte, she returns to working within the context of the installation titled Ao Infinito alongside the construction made with vegetation, using pine branches. It emphasises the manual gesture and the repetition in the persistent modelling of numerous, similar, and diverse small sculptures, maintaining the work as unfinished, open, in eternal progress – a signature of Maiolino’s singularity. The transformative action of nature by human hands, shaping raw matter, also signifies the construction of form through

SCALEA, ITALY, 1942 LIVES IN SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL

labour and points to the natural cycle of the clay – it dehydrates, is petrified, and can return to being dust. The installation includes video works and soundscapes produced in recent decades in collaboration with photographers and musician friends. With these works, the artist continues the audiovisual production initiated with super 8 films in the 1970s. She is the recipient of the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2024 Biennale Arte.

Hic et Nunc - from Terra modelada series, 1994-2017 Installation view. Photo Brian Forrest. Courtesy the Artist. © Anna Maria Maiolino.

This is the first time the work of Anna Maria Maiolino is presented at Biennale Arte. —Amanda Carneiro

In-locu - from Terra Modelada at exhibition Poetic Wanderings, 2018 Installation view. Photo Timothy Doyon. Courtesy the Artist; Hauser & Wirth. © Anna Maria Maiolino.

Here and There, 2012 Installation view. Photo Elzbieta Bialkowska. Courtesy the Artist. © Anna Maria Maiolino.

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Teresa Margolles

Teresa Margolles works with the presence of death in and beyond Mexico. Her artistic practice is research based, and it includes installations, film, and sculptures created with the material traces of victims and sites of violence. After studying art, communication, and forensic medicine, she worked in a state-funded morgue, receiving the bodies of countless victims. She co-founded Grupo SEMEFO, which addressed the social and political dimension of violence in her country through the manipulation of organic material from morgues and animal corpses. For her projects, Margolles travels to various research sites. Her work includes immersive installations with bodily fluids and collaborative film projects with victims, their families, and friends. It extends to solid sculptures of concrete or glass, acquired from places of violence, and yet sober in their form. Her work addresses various political issues such as the drug war, trafficking, femicide, and forced migration. Additionally, it exposes the social indifference and oblivion towards victims around the world.

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CULIACÁN, MEXICO, 1963 LIVES IN MEXICO CITY AND MADRID, SPAIN

Part of a yearslong research project on labour and migration at the border between Venezuela and Colombia, Tela Venezuelana (2019) showcases a human silhouette imprinted on a large, white cloth. The silhouette’s brown colour is derived from the dried blood of a young Venezuelan man, killed at the Táchira River in Cúcuta, on the Colombian side of the border. Placing the cloth over his body during the autopsy, Margolles allowed the blood from the man’s face, arms, torso, and legs to leave behind a lasting mark, at the same time creating an irregular, anonymous portrait of yet another victim of forced migration. The cloth becomes an undecipherable map or document with a strong material presence. The amount of blood bears witness not only to the violence inflicted upon his body, but also to the brutality experienced by thousands of Venezuelan migrants throughout their journey. —Sebastián Eduardo

Tela Venezuelana, 2019 Human imprint on cloth, 210 × 210 cm. Photo Aurélien Mole. Courtesy the Artist; Mor Charpentier.

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Mataaho Collective

Mataaho Collective, consisting of Māori women artists Bridget Reweti, Erena Baker, Sarah Hudson, and Terri Te Tau, has collaboratively worked for a decade on large-scale fibrebased installations delving into the intricacies of Māori lives and knowledge systems. In Māori, the term mata encompasses meanings that include a prophetic chant and harakeke, a flax plant used for weaving. Aho (weft) represents the horizontal threads in woven fabric, crucial for the structure alongside the vertical warp threads. The collective’s name therefore embodies interconnectedness, reflecting Māori history, philosophy, and generational knowledge, emphasising the collaborative essence of their artistic practice. It also underscores a sense of supportive freedom as a manifestation of Māori women’s empowerment. Employing both industrial and natural fibre materials and using traditional Māori art techniques, they signal the vibrancy and adaptability of Te Ao Māori while addressing the realities faced by contemporary Indigenous communities.

The term takapau denotes a finely woven mat, traditionally employed in ceremonies, particularly during childbirth. In Te Ao Māori, the womb holds sacred significance as a space where infants connect with the gods. Takapau marks the moment of birth, signifying the transition between light and dark, Te Ao Marama (the realm of light), and Te Ao Atua (the realm of the gods). The tie-downs used in their installation embody a meticulous material selection, serving as tools of security and support for moving cargo, while also being affordable and accessible. This deliberate choice seeks to recognise often-overlooked labourers, emphasising the strength derived from interdependence and honouring a legacy that deserves acknowledgement. The Takapau installation, observable from multiple perspectives, unveils its intricate construction with the interplay of light and shadows on woven patterns offering a multisensorial experience. This is the first time the work of Mataaho Collective is presented at Biennale Arte. —Amanda Carneiro

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TE ATIAWA KI WHAKARONGOTAI, NGĀTI TOA RANGĀTIRA, NGĀTI AWA, NGĀI TŪHOE, NGĀTI PŪKEKO, NGĀTI RANGINUI, NGĀI TE RANGI, RANGITĀNE KI WAIRARAPA FOUNDED IN AOTEAROA, NEW ZEALAND, 2012 BASED IN AOTEAROA, NEW ZEALAND

Takapau, 2022 Polyester hi-vis tie-downs, stainless steel buckles, variable dimensions. Photo Maarten Holl. Courtesy the Artist; Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa Tongarewa.

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Naminapu Maymuru-White

Naminapu Maymuru-White is a Senior Yolŋu Elder with a contemporary art practice spanning painting, carving, printmaking, weaving, and batik. Her paintings represent a significant evolution of Yolŋu creative and cultural practice, as she is part of the first generation of Yolŋu women to be taught to paint miny’tji (sacred creation clan designs), a tradition passed down by her father Nänyin Maymuru and uncle Narritjin Maymuru, senior Maŋgalili artists and lawmen. Since 1984, Maymuru-White has exhibited extensively, both nationally and internationally.

DJARRAKPI, AUSTRALIA, 1952 LIVES IN YIRRKALA, AUSTRALIA

Maymuru-White’s iconic miny’tji designs reflect the Yolŋu concept of Milŋiyawuy, which simultaneously represents the Milŋiyawuy River that snakes across Maŋgalili Country and the celestial Milky Way. Her bark paintings host sprawling rivers of stars that twist and turn across the surface to convey an immersive view of the constellation against the night sky. Maymuru-White depicts Milŋiyawuy from above and below, from the sky and the earth, to reflect the convergence of the physical and ancestral realms. She has explained that each star represents Maŋgalili souls past, present, and future. Delicately rendered with sacred gapan (white ochre), a marwat (traditional fine brush made with human hair), and a wooden skewer, Maymuru-White’s star-filled sky and riverscapes emphasise a multidimensional understanding of Country; the inextricable link between the ancestral and lived worlds across generations, time, space, and place. MaymuruWhite’s paintings pulsate with energy and give layers of form and meaning to the cyclical concept of life and death. This is the first time the work of Naminapu Maymuru-White is presented at Biennale Arte. —Jessica Clark

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Milniyawuy, 2023 Painting on board, 60 × 90 cm. Photo Aaron Anderson.

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Omar Mismar

BEKAA VALLEY, LEBANON, 1986 LIVES IN BEIRUT, LEBANON

Two Unidentified Lovers in a Mirror, 2023 Mosaic, 130 × 130 cm. Photo Mahmoud Merjan. Courtesy the Artist.

Parting Scene (with Ahmad, Firas, Mostafa, Yehya, Mosaab) - from the series Studies in Mosaics (2019-23), 2023 Mosaic, 151 × 201 cm. Photo Mahmoud Merjan. Courtesy the Artist.

Omar Mismar, who lives and works in Beirut, was trained first as a graphic designer in Beirut and then as an artist in the United States. Thoroughly subversive and versatile in terms of media, Mismar’s practice probes the entanglement of art, politics, and the aesthetics of disaster. In the Studies in Mosaics series (2019–ongoing) and Two Unidentified Lovers in a Mirror (2023), Mismar employs the antiquated artistry and classical language of mosaicmaking to reproduce digital snapshots. He induces a temporal deterioration between the media and formal artistic language to capture visual traces of ordinary people and their quotidian. Mismar consigned to the antiquated artistry and classical language of mosaic-making to reproduce digital snapshots, inducing a temporal collapse between media and formal

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languages in how everyday folk produce visual traces of their quotidian. The collapse between the contemporary pixel and the archaic tessera resonates with the temporal collapse of our era, which witnesses the unhinged cruelty of antiquity concomitant with hyper technology, while its foundational conceits of humanism, solidarity, and empathy are ministered according to the political calculus of dominant powers. With Ahmad and Akram Protecting Hercules (2019– 2020) and Parting Scene (with Ahmad, Firas, Mostafa, Yehya, Mosaab) (2023), Mismar subverts the commission to honour the heroic actions of the forgotten and benevolent guardians of an archaeological museum in Syria. With Fantastical Scene [sic] (2019– 2020), he switches the head of the lion as predator with

the head of the bull as prey, a word play in Arabic, as the former translates to al-assad and the latter to al-thawr, which sounds like thawra, or revolution. With Spring Cleaning (2022), Mismar subverts representations of prized artefacts by consecrating the inexpensive polyester fibre blanket, emblematic of the living conditions of refugees. And with Two Unidentified Lovers in a Mirror (2023), he audaciously reclaims an explicit image of queer life, deemed unnatural in Lebanon, but whose explicitness is disrupted as the tesserae of the two men’s faces are rearranged. This is the first time the work of Omar Mismar is presented at Biennale Arte. —Rasha Salti

Ahmad and Akram Protecting Hercules - from the series Studies in Mosaics (2019–23), 2019-20 Mosaic, 130 × 200 cm. Photo Mahmoud Merjan. Courtesy the Artist.

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Sabelo Mlangeni

Sabelo Mlangeni is a photographer who draws attention to beauty, affection, vulnerability, and the mundane in unexpected places. Born in 1980 in Mkhizeville, a small village in Mpumalanga, South Africa, he predominantly produces black and white photographs, allowing him to focus on the essence of human intimacy. Mlangeni is best known for documenting queerness in rural spaces such as his home province of Mpumalanga or safe houses in Nigeria. Upon receiving a scholarship in 2001, Mlangeni left for Johannesburg to attend the Market Photo School founded by David Goldblatt. He graduated in 2004 and since then has been producing sensitive work that engages and highlights often underrepresented communities.

Mlangeni’s seminal work includes Country Girls (2003– 2009), Black Men in Dress (2011), and The Royal House of Allure (2020). Always refusing to centralise violence, all three bodies of work highlight queer individuals in states of repose, rest, or revelry. To capture such intimacy, trust and proximity are usually a prerequisite. Hence, Mlangeni often spends long periods of time with the people he is framing to ensure that he captures both their particular aura as well as broader universal experiences. The Royal House of Allure is the name of an LGBTQI+ safe house in Lagos, Nigeria. Mlangeni communed with its residents, making images of celebratory moments as well as ordinary settings of people lounging about.

MPUMALANGA, SOUTH AFRICA, 1980 LIVES IN JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA

In a similar manner, though located in South Africa, Country Girls and Black Men in Dress depict the elegant, defiant, sentimental aspects of queer life in places often perceived to be menacing. This is the first time the work of Sabelo Mlangeni is presented at Biennale Arte. —Tandanzani Dhlakama

A rooftop photoshoot with the dancers; Tonnex, (Ruby, Nonso and Oshodi) (from the series The Royal House of Allure), 2019 Digital ultrachrome archival print. Courtesy the Artist; Blank Projects, Cape Town. © Sabelo Mlangeni.

Faith and Sakhi Moruping Thembisa Township (from the series Isivumelwano), 2004 Hand-printed silver gelatin print. Courtesy the Artist; Blank Projects, Cape Town. © Sabelo Mlangeni.

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Identity (from the series Black Men in Dress), 2011 Hand-printed silver gelatin print. Courtesy the Artist; Blank Projects, Cape Town. © Sabelo Mlangeni.

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Paula Nicho

COMAPALA, GUATEMALA, 1955 LIVES IN COMAPALA

Paula Nicho Cumez is a Maya painter based in Comapala, Guatemala. From her earliest childhood, her grandfather, the sculptor Francisco Cumez, encouraged her to explore her artistic skills. With the support of her teacher and later husband the painter Salvador Cumez Curruchich, Nicho started to produce her first works in the mid-1980s in a context where painting was still traditionally reserved for men. Around that time, with five other Maya women, Nicho fostered the creation of a group of artists – first known as the Pintoras Surrealistas Kaqchikeles (Kaqchikel Surrealist Painters) and later just as the Kaqchikel Painters of Comapala. Her work was originally inspired by the stories told by the elders in her community and from reading the foundational sacred narratives of the Maya people, such as the books of Chilan Balan and Popol Vuh.

Nicho’s paintings acknowledge the balance and reciprocity of the natural and spiritual worlds as an essential component to the restoration of indigenous self-determination. Dream symbolism plays a central role in her creations. The paintings produced for the exhibition depict women keenly aware of their own power, resembling ancient Maya goddesses of healing, fertility, and weaving. They appear naked, covered with vibrant, colourful, Indigenous geometrical shapes and motifs. The images are a response to the artist’s memories of not being allowed to wear Indigenous clothing at school during her childhood. Nicho transforms that pain into affirmative representations where Maya patterns come out as women’s real skin. She counters a history of colonisation and Western assimilation while uplifting the value and beauty of Maya textile design, prominently expressed in the huipil – a traditional, hand-woven garment whose patterns reflect collective memories, knowledge, and political histories. This is the first time the work of Paula Nicho is presented at Biennale Arte. —Miguel Lopez

Tejiendo mi segunda piel, 2023 Oil on canvas, 64x 84 cm. Courtesy the Artist.

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Mi piel y sombrero, 2023 Oil on canvas, 64 × 84 cm. Courtesy the Artist.

Camino a xejul, 2005 Oil on canvas, 102 × 122 cm. Courtesy the Artist.

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Taylor Nkomo

Taylor Nkomo, a Ndebele artist, is a graduate of Mzilikazi Arts and Crafts Centre in Bulawayo and is considered an icon in the realm of Zimbabwean stone sculpture. He was introduced to sculpture at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe workshop school after joining the gallery in 1973, where he also worked as a graphic designer. The influences of his former profession are evident in the way he creates his works, offering another viewpoint into presenting everyday life. His sculptures are often crafted from white opal, green verdite, and cobalt stone in various forms, sizes, and shapes. This diversity is explored in the figures’ different hair styles, notions of beauty, and face scarifications that are presented in dialogue with visual forms found across the African continent.

The pieces presented at the Biennale Arte are frequently displayed outdoors, populating the artist’s studio garden – a gesture that establishes a connection between the artist, his works, and the community. The sculpture The Thinker (2023) engages with both positive and negative spaces, emphasising the prominence of one eye in contrast to the absence of the other, accentuating oppositions. Fashion Girl (2023), also explores contrasting forms: on one side of the sculpture’s face, scarifications are presented, while the other side highlights the figure’s hairstyle, suggesting a fusion of male and female figures. Nkomo’s sculptures pay tribute to the diverse sculptural traditions of the African continent while simultaneously reaffirming a powerful and distinctive signature. This is the first time the work of Taylor Nkomo is presented at Biennale Arte. —Raphael Chikukwa

Singing Blues, 2022 Cobalt, 27 × 11 × 48 cm. Courtesy the Artist.

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Thinker, 2023 Cobalt, 27 × 23 × 46 cm. Courtesy the Artist.

BULAWAYO, ZIMBABWE, 1957 LIVES IN HARARE, ZIMBABWE

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Fashion Girl, 2023 White opal, 33 × 25 × 10 cm. Courtesy the Artist.

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Philomé Obin

BAS-LIMBÉ, HAITI, 1892– 1986, CAP-HAÏTIEN, HAITI

Philomé Obin, like his younger brother Sénèque, is one of the creators of the Cap-Haitien school of painting, named for the commune on the north coast of Haiti. Obin references this foundational account in several of his paintings, in which he appears alongside his son Antoine and Sénèque in front of the building that housed the local branch of the Centre d’Art. The original art centre was founded in 1944, in the country’s capital Portau-Prince by American critic DeWitt Peters and Haitian intellectuals and artists such as Philippe Thoby-Marcelin and Albert Mangonès. Together with peers Hector Hyppolite, Rigaud Benoit, and Préfète Duffaut, Obin was one the first artists to be involved in the centre, although he had been painting for several decades before. The group became part of an international network that also included Cuban painter Wifredo Lam, French surrealist André Breton, and photographerethnographer Pierre Verger. With a wide range of themes and a recognisable and influential style of complex narrative compositions, Obin is a chronicler of social dynamics in the public space. His lively Carnival street scenes are often set against contrasting serene cityscapes, as seen in Carnaval (1958), in which a crowd parades in front of the façade of a health centre, its windows closed in sombre silence. In Deux deguisés de Carnaval (1947), a costumed couple stands in the middle of the street, forming an uncanny triangle with an observing male figure in a suit standing in a nearby doorway.

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Obin is also known for his historical paintings. One of his most famous political scenes represents the crucifixion of Charlemagne Péralte, who fought against the US occupation (1915–1934) – a testament to the importance of self-determination. This is the first time the work of Philomé Obin is presented at Biennale Arte. —Rodrigo Moura

Missionaire, 1951 Oil on wood board, 58.5 × 71 × 1 cm. Josh Feldstein Collection. Courtesy Zelaya Qattan Gallery

329 NUCLEO CONTEMPORANEO Deux Deguiseś du Carnaval, 1947 Oil on hardboard, 38 × 47 cm. Colección Chocolate Cortés

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Carnaval de 1958 au Cap-Haitien, 1958 Oil on wood board, 66 × 83.1 cm. Josh Feldstein Collection. Courtesy Zelaya Qattan Gallery, Philadelphia

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Sénèque Obin

Sénèque Obin – part of a family of artists that included his older brother Philomé, nephews Antoine and Telemaque, and son Othon – was in his fifties when he began painting and joined Port-au-Prince’s Centre d’Art in 1948. Together, they were key figures in the later development of the CapHaitien school of painting, promoting and influencing artists in the northern seacoast city’s scene. A practicing mason, Obin depicted Masonic ceremonies, everyday scenes and still lifes. He is well-known for his paintings of historic events and figures, such as the revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture, who organised the self-liberated enslaved population towards the independence of Haiti in 1804. He also created an allegorical representation of

President Paul Magloire’s rise to power with Haiti’s national coat of arms and the motto L’union fait la force. Obin’s practice as a painter and as an art activist offers a rich point of view from which to understand the arts in the Americas in the midtwentieth century. His work exposes the contradictions of the modernisation process, challenging labels like “selftaught”, “naive”, and “primitive” often applied to artists of colour, like himself, which have prejudicially obscured the understanding of their complex works. Through myriad themes, motifs, and iconographies, Obin visually articulated diverse aspects of Haitian culture, such as street markets, Carnival, and spiritual syncretism, as well as the political dynamics of Haiti.

LIMBÉ, HAITI, 1893– 1977, CAP-HAÏTIEN, HAITI

Marché Clugny (1966) depicts a theme to which Obin would return several times: he places the iron market built in 1890 at the centre of social life in Cap-Haitien. With its precise lines, bold colours, and multiple narratives, the painting alludes to commerce, extraction, and the transformation of natural resources, evoked both in the commodities offered in the market and by the surrounding mountainous landscape in the background.

Marché Clugny, 1950s-1960s Oil and/or gouache on masonite. Photo Jason Mandella. Collection of El Museo del Barrio, New York; Gift of Drs. Roslyn and Lloyd Siegel. Courtesy El Museo del Barrio, New York. Marché Poissons, 1956 Oil on masonite, 42 × 53.5 cm. Josh Feldstein Collection

This is the first time the work of Sénèque Obin is presented at Biennale Arte. —Rodrigo Moura

Eglise Sacré-Coeur, 1961 Oil on masonite, 60 × 76 cm. Photo Jose Zelaya. Josh Feldstein Collection

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Daniel Otero Torres

Daniel Otero Torres’s multidisciplinary practice encompasses installations, sculptures, and drawings, all of which are community-based movements of resistance carried out by marginalised groups. Torres’s technique of sculptural drawings with detailed and expressive figuration involves images sourced from various outlets, including historical archives, books, newspapers, online sources, and his own documentation. This formal process of juxtaposition and collage layers events from different regions, creating visuals metaphors of peoples’ experiences, knowledge, and technologies.

Aguacero (2024), unfolds from his prior work Lluvia (2022), and is an ephemeral site-specific installation made of collected locally and recycled materials, reflects Otero Torres’s engagement with the impact of ecological crises on the lives of marginalised Colombians. The work evokes the unusual system of vernacular stilt architecture of the Embera community along the banks of the Atrato River, designed to collect rainwater and provide the inhabitants with unpolluted water. Paradoxically, although they reside in one of the most rainfall-abundant regions, the Emberas face severe challenges in obtaining clean water due to extensive pollution caused by illegal gold mining. Through metaphorical recreation, Torres draws attention to the challenge of ensuring access to clean, drinkable water faced by communities worldwide, an issue that is intricately connected to the processes of privatising and financialising nature. As an open structure to the eyes of the world, the work reveals the journey of flowing water and its many meanings. This is the first time the work of Daniel Otero Torres is presented at Biennale Arte. —Amanda Carneiro

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BOGOTÁ, COLOMBIA, 1985 LIVES IN BOGOTÁ

Lluvia, 2020 Mixed media, 435 × 610 × 700 cm. Photo Omar-Tajmouati. Courtesy of the Artist and mor charpentier, Bogotá and Paris

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Lydia Ourahmane

Lydia Ourahmane has always known movement; transience is the way she was taught to live. Her work is at once ephemeral and a practice of palimpsest – intersecting colonialism, migration, spirituality, and geopolitics. Raised between London and Algeria, she grew up in Christian communes founded and run by her Algerian father and Malaysian mother, joyful spaces of belief that provided relief during the decade of Civil War (1991–2002) to the still persecuted minority. As near strangers, they danced, sang, ate, and raised their children. Simultaneously, their communities experienced close surveillance, which imbues Ourahmane’s interactive installation Barzakh (meaning limbo, in-between, knowing–unknowing). Shown at the Kunsthalle Basel (2021), Triangle–Astérides (2021), and S.M.A.K. (2022), Ourahmane uprooted and recreated in full her entire rented apartment from Algiers, wanting to be “home” when the borders sealed due to the pandemic. It is an exercise in the bureaucracy of the nation–state, whose second half involved the impossibility of “return” of objects fundamentally changed by their multiple travels, touched and altered by unknown hands, only the entrance remained.

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Entrance (1901–2021) comprises two functioning doors. On the second street from the sea, the original wooden door (1901) derives from a blueprint of a typical Parisian apartment, as the French occupation wanted Algiers to looked like France. The second metal door, with five locks, was added during the 1990s, in the Civil War. Embodying a collapse of the two moments, the slightly ajar entrance is an architectural invasion of the collective trust that had been built, broken anew in the War of Independence. Writer and curator Negar Azimi described it as a “stirring sculpture, a palimpsest of histories”. It is charged with psychological tension as, when Ourahmane felt more paranoid, she would lock more locks to feel safe. Now in use again by friends, the apartment and its “returned” objects have since settled. Relieving it of the original entrance, Ourahmane says, was cathartic. This is the first time the work of Lydia Ourahmane is presented at Biennale Arte. —Khushi Nansi

SAÏDA, ALGERIA, 1992 LIVES IN ALGIERS, ALGERIA AND BARCELONA, SPAIN

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21 Boulevard Mustapha Benboulaid (entrance), 1901–2021 Metal door, wooden door, 9 locks, concrete, plaster, brick, steel frame 220 × 200 × 16 cm. Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Photo Philipp Hänger. Courtesy the Artist

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Dalton Paula

BRASÍLIA, BRAZIL, 1982 LIVES IN GOIÂNIA, BRAZIL

Dalton Paula is a multifaceted artist working in painting, installation, performance art, photography, video, and the manufacture of objects. Residing in Goiânia, he runs Sertão Negro, a space he founded that is geared towards the education of local artists. He works from visual research that seeks to critically interpret historical happenings and the trajectory of Brazil’s Black population. He has obtained international recognition by creating a series of portraits that give dignity to Black men and women who have struggled for freedom, fought all manner of injustice, and still had their images erased or underrepresented in Brazilian history. Full-Body Portraits (2023-24) is a series of sixteen paintings that take up the investigation the artist has been developing since the Afro-Atlantic Histories (2018) exhibition at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo. In these works, historical figures of African descent who led, or were somewhat involved in, anti-slavery resistance movements in Brazil (such as Chico Rei, Zeferina, and Ventura Mina, among others) are represented in largescale bipartite canvases – a stylistic trait that evokes the gap as metaphor for uniting memories and histories. This composition establishes a dialogue between landscape and background, presenting an almost monochromatic relationship between them, and references the scenographic structures of late nineteenth-

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and early twentieth-century photography studios. Objects that are similarly scenographic – including glasses, rocks, chairs, flags, columns, curtains, stairs, and sceptres – are inserted in this new series in a critical and symbolic way, making evident the possible relationships between image, memory, and power.

This is the first time the work of Dalton Paula is presented at Biennale Arte. —Glaucea Helena de Britto

Manuel Congo, 2022 Oil and gold leaf on canvas, 61 × 45 cm. Photo Paulo Rezende. Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, obra comissionada, 2019-22, MASP.10837 Courtesy the Artist.

337 Mariana Crioula, 2022 Oil and gold leaf on canvas, 61 × 45 cm. Photo Paulo Rezende. Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, obra comissionada, 2019-22, MASP.10842 Courtesy the Artist.

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Marcilio Dias, 2022 Oil and gold leaf on canvas, 61 × 45 cm. Photo Paulo Rezende. Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, obra comissionada, 2019-22, MASP.10836. Courtesy the Artist.

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La Chola Poblete

La Chola Poblete is a transdisciplinary artist who works with performance, video art, photography, painting, and objects: through a sophisticated queer imagery, she recovers ancestral knowledge from the South American territories. Coming from a working-class family of Bolivian descent, she studied visual arts at the National University of Cuyo. Her work denounces the abuse of and prejudice towards indigenous populations, as well as the stereotyping and exoticisation of native peoples. In this line, the choice of her name (which reflects the common term for native Andean mestiza women) serves as an affirmation of identity. In this radical critique of the normative, she brings attention to anti-hegemonic forms of beauty and embodiment. Pop culture, comics, and rock contribute to the repertoire of visual strategies that challenge colonial legacy.

MENDOZA, ARGENTINA, 1989 LIVES IN BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA

La Chola Poblete’s large-scale watercolours exhibit the fluidity derived from her identity. A flood of hybrid beings coexist with abstract, religious, and pop motifs, among which small reproductions of her works, such as bread masks, are included. Virgins with braids, swords slicing potatoes, and organic forms adorned with penises resonate like songs of resistance. The Virgin is a multifaceted central motif in La Chola Poblete’s oeuvre as she embodies the syncretism between Western culture and indigenous communities. Her Vírgenes chola (Chola Virgins) series takes up from the mestizo baroque the identification between the Virgin and the goddess Pachamama (Mother Earth to the Andean communities). Also in this series, the enthroned Virgins wear their attributes as pop icons. The performance Il Martirio di Chola (2014) addresses the social marginalisation of the Bolivian community residing in Argentina, along with the use of evangelisation as a form of emotional and physical torture. This is the first time the work of La Chola Poblete is presented at Biennale Arte. —María Amalia García

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Il Martirio di Chola, 2014 Photograph, 100 × 70 cm. Courtesy the Artist.

Untitled, 2019 Textile, 140 × 90 cm. Courtesy the Artist.

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Virgen del cerro - da série Virgenes Chola, 2022 Watercolor and ink on paper, 198 × 153 cm. Courtesy the Artist.

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Charmaine Poh

Charmaine Poh is an artist, documentarian, and writer who delves into stories centred on Asian feminist and queer experiences, navigating questions of gender norms, kinship dynamics, and queer worldmaking. Having grown up in Singapore, where queer representation in state-run media is heavily regulated, Poh insists on the power of micronarratives to think through forms of resistance, repair, and survival for those at the margins of society. In her practice spanning photography, film, and performance–lectures, she combines storytelling and ethnographic inquiry and analyses, always seeking to foster a collaborative space that allows for the layering of diverse imaginaries and gender codes, of bodies in relation and introspection. She moved to Berlin in 2022, where she is currently pursuing PhD research on the Asian femme avatar, tracing its lineages from the East Asian economic “miracle” of the 1980s and the emergence of technoorientalism and cyberfeminism.

SINGAPORE, 1990 LIVES IN BERLIN, GERMANY AND SINGAPORE

Poh’s hybrid documentary series Kin (2021) delves into queer domestic life in Singapore. She highlights the dissonances experienced by queer people, whose desire to live and thrive is circumscribed by society’s idealisation of heterosexual nuclear families. In Kin, three young queer individuals contemplate notions of home and chosen family, where access to public housing hinges on heterosexual definitions of marriage. With Kin ll (2024), Poh examines the struggles of queer parents in raising children when their family lacks legal legitimacy in the eyes of the state. In 2022, Singapore’s Parliament repealed Section 377a, a colonial-era law criminalising sex between men, while simultaneously entrenching the definition of marriage, quashing future efforts to establish equal marital rights for LGBTQIA+ people. Interweaving personal letters from queer parents with intergenerational practices of caregiving, the film envisions queer domestic home life – simultaneously mundane, fantastic, and complex – as a site of potential for alternative forms of community. Queer kinship becomes an openended horizon of relational possibilities that points beyond heteronormative orderings of intimacy, desire, care, and reproduction. This is the first time the work of Charmaine Poh is presented at Biennale Arte. —Joleen Loh

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Kin, 2022 Video, 2 min 45 sec. Photo Charamine Poh. Courtesy the Artist.

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Sandra Poulson

Sandra Poulson is an Angolan artist based in London and Luanda. Focusing on local events, contexts, and histories that she experiences and observes in Luanda, Poulson forms narratives in her works that speak about global politics and societal structures and the ways they define access, movement, and habitable environments. Poulson works across different media and scales to create sculptural and spatial installations and performances. The artist uses a variety of material in her work, frequently mixing those with different qualities and possibilities, including fabrics, paper, soap, wood, and concrete, among others. Poulson’s practice also includes writing and visual documentation, which she uses as research material and translates it directly to her work.

ANGOLAN, BORN IN LISBON, PORTUGAL, 1995 LIVES IN LUANDA, ANGOLA AND LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM

Onde o Asfalto Termina, e a Terra Batida Começa (2024) continues Poulson’s exploration of the formal and informal environments of Luanda and the way they dictate movement in the city, both literally and in terms of societal structures. The work focuses on the moment in which the loose ground of an informal road meets the paved road and uses it to explore the nuance between what is deemed central or peripheral, habitable or inhabitable, local or global. Made of discarded cardboard and starch, this site-specific papier-mâché installation includes extracts from the cityscape that constitute human activity and divisions. A multichannel video installation displayed on the side walls is composed of candid videos filmed on a phone that capture different moments, events, and materials that occur and form the city. They complete the installation by offering insight into the rigorous and extensive documentation process that feeds into Poulson’s research. This is the first time the work of Sandra Poulson is presented at Biennale Arte. —Natalia Grabowska

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Sandra Poulson is one of the four recipients of the Biennale College Arte 2024 grant. Her work is out of competition.

Dust as an Accidental Gift, 2023 Installation views, Sharjah Architecture Triennial 2023, Al Qasimiya School, Sharjah, UAE. Photos by Danko Stjepanovic, Sandra Poulson. Courtesy the Artist.

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Puppies Puppies

DALLAS, UNITED STATES, 1989 LIVES IN NEW YORK CITY, UNITED STATES

(Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo) Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo works across sculpture, installation, and performance art to sharply address personal and political concerns. Her works have been known to confront patriarchal and capitalist modes of production through the use of readymades and everyday objects and durational performances that follow her daily activities – themselves a form of resistance and survival. Her works reckon with the trappings of identification and misidentification, visibility and opacity, the physical and digital, the public and private, often blurring the lines between these in a refusal of binary thinking. Through her nuanced and layered way of working, Kuriki-Olivo queers institutions,

plazas, galleries, and the very notion of identity and cultural origin, often bringing collaborators along with her. A Sculpture for Trans Women… (2023) is a life-size bronze sculpture taken from a 3-D scan of the artist’s body. Emblazoned with the word “WOMAN”, the work – which will be activated with performances throughout the exhibition – subverts the power of monuments to make visible and celebrates trans life in an act of protest and commemoration. Electric Dress (Atsuko Tanaka) (2023) pays tribute to those killed in 2016 at the mass shooting that took place during a “Latin Night” party at Pulse, a queer nightclub in Orlando, Florida. The sculpture references Atsuko Tanaka’s

Electric Dress (1956) with LED lights that flicker to the pulse of a heartbeat and lights that cycle through the rainbow colours found in the Progress Pride Flag. Both sculptures honour queer and trans life while confronting oblivion and invisibility. This is the first time the work of Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo) is presented at Biennale Arte. —Elena Ketelsen González

A sculpture for Trans Women. A sculpture for the Non-Binary Femmes A sculpture for Two-Spirit People. I am a woman. I don’t care what you think. (Transphobia is everywhere and everyone is susceptible to enacting it at any moment) (Unlearn the transphobia brewing within) I am a Trans Women. I am a Two-Spirit Person. I am a Woman. This is for my sisters and siblings everywhere. History erased many of us but we are still here. I will fight for our rights until the day I die. Exile me and I’ll keep fighting, 2022 Bronze cast on engraved brass base, 190 × 60 × 60 cm. Photo Vincent Blebois. Courtesy the Artist; Galerie Balice Hertling; Galerie Barbara Weiss; Hannah Hoffman Gallery; Galerie Francesca Pia.

Electric Dress (Atsuko Tanaka), 2023 LED-dress made from textile and plastic, draped on mannequin, 12 lithium-ion batteries in cases in textile pockets, Madrix programmed micro SD-card, 81 × 66 × 63 cm. Photo Cedric Mussano. Courtesy the Artist; Galerie Francesca Pia, Zurich.

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Agnes Questionmark

Agnes Questionmark is an artist working across performance, sculpture, video, and installation. Exploring the boundaries of the self, Questionmark’s practice delves into genetic experiments, surgical operations, and artificial reproductive processes whereby identity becomes unsettled. By forcing her body and her audiences into spaces where humanity fails to assert its normative demands, Questionmark disrupts the biopolitical implications of transgender and transspecies bodies in a human-dominated world. Recent long-duration performances, presented in public spaces such as streets and train stations, as well as her writing, constitute integral facets of her artistic practice, which has garnered widespread exhibition.

ROME, ITALY, 1995 LIVES IN ROME AND NEW YORK CITY, UNITED STATES

Cyber-Teratology Operation (2024) foregrounds a trans body (transspecies, transgender, transhuman) inside an operating room where everyone is under surveillance. Whilst the audience watches its internal movements, the subject’s eye is also a monitoring screen, as self and apparatus become one. Questionmark’s work addresses the transgender body as one that is often pathologised, mechanised, and hospitalised, illuminating the patriarchal biopolitics at play in science and healthcare. The installation problematises notions of perceived or expected artificiality for trans bodies by normative society and celebrates the emancipatory potential of a body-in-transformation that defies taxonomy through its own reclaimed process of becoming. It raises questions about the insistence on coupling gender with reproduction that still lingers today and wages a war on the scientific control exerted over bodies undergoing their own processes of deterritorialisation. CyberTeratology Operation oscillates between reality, fantasy, and more-than-human worlds, gestating futures and new neurons rendered possible if we dream and fuse otherwise. This is the first time the work of Agnes Questionmark is presented at Biennale Arte. —Kostas Stasinopoulos

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Agnes Questionmark is one of the four recipients of the Biennale College Arte 2024 grant. Her work is out of competition.

Cyber-Teratology Operation, 2024 Silicon, metal, and resin sculpture with video screen, 180 × 190 × 270 cm. Courtesy of the Artist.

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348

Violeta Quispe

LIMA, PERU, 1989 LIVES IN LIMA

Violeta Quispe is an artist and activist linked to Andean traditions of Quechua culture in the Ayacucho region of Peru. She grew up immersed in local artistic production such as the Tablas de Sarhua, wood paintings depicting the customs, rituals, festivities, and beliefs of the aforementioned community that are handed down from generation to generation. Generally manufactured by men, who would offer them as gifts to new families, they acquire other meanings in Quispe’s work, which reclaims the craft for women and transforms it into a tool for combatting gender violence. Since 2018, the artist has been focusing on representations which reimagine the figure of the Andean Ekeko, a male deity associated with prosperity and abundance, often depicted as a merchant carrying several objects – some symbolically linked to virility, such as the bull and the dragon. Challenging local beliefs that equate the female presence with bad luck, Quispe subverts the Ekeko’s gender, creating Ekekas and Ekekes.

The final letters “e” and “x” in the name Ekeke Sarhuinx stress the gender-neutral aspect of the Sarhuina figure which combines male elements, such as the poncho, the cigar, and the moustache, with skirts and sandals that are typically female. The megaphone, the gas mask, and the boxing glove with the phrase “constant struggle” denote her political activism, while the ball and the little car – toys usually associated with boys – interrogate gender conventions. Equally, flags, books, and slogans defend sexual freedom and LGBTQIAP+ rights. The “blood of Christ wine” stands as a critique of Christian conservatism and the softdrink “Hinca-Cola” denounces cultural imperialism. Quispe also incorporates references to Andean culture, such as the neon colours of Chicha street art, the different types of corn, the coca leaf, and musical instruments such as the Pan flute. In the lower section, there are depictions of the sun and moon deities, accompanied by the phrase “Kuyaykusqay Kuyaykusqaymi,” meaning “love is love” in Quechua. This is the first time the work of Violeta Quispe is presented at Biennale Arte. —Matheus de Andrade

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Ekeke, 2021 Polychrome, earth, natural pigment on MDF, 60 × 35 cm. Courtesy _VIGILGONZALES.

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El matrimonio de la chola, 2022 Mixed Polychrome, natural pigment with application of gold leaf on MDF, 150 × 170 cm. Courtesy Jorge M. Pérez Collection, Miami.

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Juana Marta Rodas

Juana Marta Rodas was born in a peasant village and was initiated into the art of ceramics by her grandmother Maria Balbina Cuevas following a popular Paraguayan tradition of mother–daughter mentorship. This tradition originates from pre-Hispanic Indigenous culture, cuts across colonial history, and leads into a space marked by several cultural challenges. Her ceramics constitute a notable case of transcultural appropriation that is of great interest both for contemporary Latin American art theory and for contemporary Latin American art practices. Juana Marta’s work has been featured in exhibitions and biennials in Paraguay, Brazil, Spain, and France and has been awarded the Premio Villa de Madrid, Spain (1998), and the Prince Claus Award, Amsterdam, the Netherlands (1999). Ceramics, one of the most significant manifestations of popular art in Paraguay, continues a millennia-old

ITÁ, PARAGUAY, 1925–2003

tradition, standing its ground in face of ongoing challenges posed – or imposed – by colonisation, modernity, and globalisation. Juana Marta Rodas has boldly effected an abrupt turn in this tradition by subverting its forms and themes and developing a singular style that both harkens back to her Guaraní origins and expresses a unique sensibility marked by contemporary art. The ancient pitchers, pots, and fountains of mestizo– Indigenous origins transform, incorporate zoomorphic and anthropomorphic forms, and take on whimsical protuberances and concavities. Juana Marta’s figures presented here reject the large-scale formats of conventional pots. Instead, she creates a bestiary of imaginary animals and hybrid beings guided by an imagination free from any reliance on naturalistic representation. This is the first time the work of Juana Marta Rodas is presented at Biennale Arte. —Ticio Escobar

Untitled, 1993 ca. Modeled ceramic and red engobe 10 × ø 11 cm. Colección del Centro de Artes Visuales/Museo del Barro (CAV/MdB) - Fundación Carlos Colombino Lailla (FCCL). The Musicians (series), 1993 ca. Modeled ceramic and red engobe 12.5 × 8.5 × 14 cm. Colección del Centro de Artes Visuales/Museo del Barro (CAV/MdB) - Fundación Carlos Colombino Lailla (FCCL).

351 Untitled, 1993 ca. Modeled ceramic, 18.5 × ø 55 cm. Colección del Centro de Artes Visuales/ Museo del Barro (CAV/MdB) - Fundación Carlos Colombino Lailla (FCCL).

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Untitled, 1993 ca. Modeled ceramic and red engobe 11 × 19 cm. Colección del Centro de Artes Visuales/ Museo del Barro (CAV/MdB) - Fundación Carlos Colombino Lailla (FCCL).

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Abel Rodríguez

Abel Rodríguez was born Mogaje Guihu in the Putumayo Department of Colombia and trained as a botanical expert amongst the Nonuya, one of several Amazonian ethnic groups. His appointment as a “plant name-giver” (an expert in the flora of the tropical rainforest) and his thorough knowledge of the medicinal properties of a wide variety of local species attracted international scientific attention. Seeking to systematise and document his broad knowledge and given the oral and visual nature of information transmission amongst Indigenous people, the artist turned to drawing as a tool. It quickly became a device to record and portray the Amazonian environment and its rich natural complexity.

Rodríguez is today regarded as one of the foremost Indigenous artists and plant experts from the Amazon. The works exhibited in the Biennale Arte are characteristic of Rodríguez’s recent production. Sin título (2023) is from a series that focuses on the taxonomical exploration of different varieties of Amazonian trees, capturing their distinct characteristics such as colour, leaf shape, trunk texture, and overall plant architecture. These meticulous depictions correspond to the specimen’s real-life characteristics and serve not only as compelling artistic representations, but also as scientifically accurate portrayals of Amazonian biodiversity. Centro el terreno que nunca se inunda (2022), a

CAHUINARÍ, COLOMBIA, 1944 LIVES IN BOGOTÁ, COLOMBIA

cross section of the Amazonian rainforest presented in a flat perspective, is a composition in which several species of flora coexist with animals and elements of the landscape. It speaks of the way that trees and plants, the artist’s specialty, intertwine both biologically as well as cosmologically in the understanding of nature and life amongst the Nonuya and other Indigenous groups. In their worldview, one cannot exist without the other. This is the first time the work of Abel Rodríguez is presented at Biennale Arte. —Emiliano Valdés

353 NUCLEO CONTEMPORANEO Sin título, 2023 Ink on paper, 30 × 20 cm (each). Photo Ana María Balaguera. Courtesy the Artist; Instituto de Visión.

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Centro el terreno que no se inunda, 2022 Ink on paper, 70 × 100 cm. Photo Nicole López. Courtesy the Artist; Instituto de Visión.

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Aydeé Rodríguez López

CUAJINICUILAPA, MEXICO, 1955 LIVES IN CUAJINICUILAPA

Aydeé Rodríguez López is a self-taught Afro-Mexican artist committed to making visible the history and voices of Black communities in Mexico. Raised in a peasant family, she moved to Mexico City at a young age. At thirtyeight, she began her journey into painting with a portrait of her grandmother. Since then, Rodríguez López has drawn attention to the history, culture, and beliefs of Afro-descendant people. Her paintings, driven by a commitment to fight racism, address issues of racial violence – topics that only gained official recognition in the country two decades ago. Rich in intricate details and compelling narratives, her paintings delve into historical events and their repercussions on contemporary society. Some serve as indictments, while others portray utopian visions of a future defined by justice and freedom. Ex hacienda de Guadalupe Collantes (2014) depicts the plantation system and the various stages of the cotton industry, symbolising the colonial system of enslavement in Mexico. Located in Oaxaca state, this hacienda played a significant role in the histories of Rodríguez López’s mother, grandmother, and greatgrandparents. Following her grandmother’s death, the artist embarked on a quest to uncover her roots and her Black ancestry. The work represents a significant contribution to the recognition of Black people in Mexico, their struggles, visibility, and freedom, themes vividly addressed in Rodríguez López’s body of work.

El negro Yanga (2011) honours Gaspar Yanga, an early liberator in the Americas, who led rebellions in colonial Mexico and founded the free African settlement of San Lorenzo de los Negros around 1618. Migración (2018) focuses on the Mexico–US border, contrasting human movement restrictions with the unhindered migration of birds and monarch butterflies across the continent. This is the first time the work of Aydeé Rodríguez López is presented at Biennale Arte. —Eva Posas

Ex hacienda de Guadalupe Collantes, 2014 Oil on canvas, mounted on handcarved dyed poplar wood frame 171.5 × 221 cm. Photo Ramiro Chaves. Courtesy Proyectos Monclova.

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El Negro Yanga, 2011 Oil on canvas, mounted on handcarved dyed poplar wood frame, 117 × 135.5 cm. Photo Ramiro Chaves. Courtesy Proyectos Monclova.

Migración, 2018 Oil on canvas, mounted on handcarved dyed poplar wood frame 110 × 153.5 cm. Photo Ramiro Chaves. Courtesy. Proyectos Monclova.

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Miguel Ángel Rojas

Since the mid-1960s, Miguel Ángel Rojas has worked in various media, such as drawing, printmaking, stitching, and video art. His work addresses diverse issues, including homosexuality and the internal armed conflict in Colombia, with a particular focus on exploring the nuances of experience and the male body. His black-and-white photographs from the 1970s deal with discrimination and other social issues related to the body and to personal experience and showcase hidden practices of queer intimacy and clandestine encounters in Bogotá. National and geopolitics are also treated with a focus on experience, as in the portrayal of wounded soldiers and drug users in video works and photographs that highlight male beauty. The artist includes coca plant leaves, gold, and earth in large compositions that require

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viewing from various angles. When on display, the economic, environmental, and human weight of these materials is transmitted through complex viewing experiences. Like other photographic series from the time, El Emperador (1973–1980) is named after a movie theatre in the Colombian capital that served as a place for illegal sexual encounters between men during the 1970s. In the black-and-white prints, we see the contour of body parts against a tile wall in the background. The photographs from El Negro (1979) frame the blurry image of a man in a circle. They were taken through a hole in the bathroom door of Teatro Mogador, another cinema in Bogotá’s city centre where clandestine intimate encounters took place. The circumstances of the setting prevented Rojas from capturing the whole

BOGOTÁ, COLOMBIA, 1946 LIVES IN BOGOTÁ

body, resulting in anonymised portraits that place viewers in the position of a voyeur. The title of the series points to the subject’s African descent, and it evidences Rojas’s interest in exposing theatregoers from different social spheres. His careful treatment of light and shadow emphasises the ambivalent relation between secrecy and exposure. This is the first time the work of Miguel Ángel Rojas is presented at Biennale Arte. —Sebastián Eduardo

El Negro, 1979 4 Vintage silver gelatin prints, 20.3 × 25.4 cm. Photo Miguel Ángel Rojas. Courtesy the Artist; Sicardi Ayers Bacino, Houston, US. © Miguel Ángel Rojas 2023.

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Erica Rutherford

An artist, actor, filmmaker, farmer, teacher, and writer, Erica Rutherford’s remarkably multidisciplined career took her across several countries and continents, including Britain, the US, Spain, South Africa, and, finally, Canada. Born in 1923, the artist underwent gender-affirmation surgery in 1976, at the age of fifty-three. Her lifelong struggle with what she described as “gender dysphoria” was documented in her autobiography Nine Lives: The Autobiography of Erica Rutherford (1993). A member of the Canadian Royal Academy of Arts, Rutherford continued to paint well into her eighties and was shown in several major galleries in North America and Europe. She died in 2008, aged eighty-five, in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, where she left an enduring mark on the local artistic community.

EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND, 1923– 2008, CHARLOTTETOWN, CANADA

While undergoing transition during the 1970s, Rutherford began experimenting with self-portraiture. Many of the works shown here are painted self-portraits, based on photographs of the artist. All feature faceless figures – flattened and deprived of any features – staged in a range of rigid poses. Bright monochromatic hues are another common feature to these works, along with bands of colours that frame the anonymous figures. Bearing an obvious affinity to Pop Art, Rutherford’s style extends the phenomenon’s critique of the mass media to a complex reflection on gender construction and agency. Writer Jay Prosser described Rutherford’s painted selfportraits as “envisioning the woman Rutherford wishes to become and are gradually transformed as she transitions into a record of that becoming … the painted self-portrait appears as a model for the transsexual body to follow”. This is the first time the work of Erica Rutherford is presented at Biennale Arte. —Marko Ilic

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The Diver, 1968 Acrylic on canvas, 172.6 × 121.6 cm. Courtesy of Richard Saltoun Gallery, London and Rome. © The Estate of Erica Rutherford.

The Coat (The Mirror), 1970 Acrylic on canvas, 122 × 127.2 cm. Courtesy of Richard Saltoun Gallery, London and Rome. © The Estate of Erica Rutherford.

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Self-Portrait with Red Boots, 1974 Acrylic on canvas, 137.2 cm × 132.1 cm. Courtesy of the Collection of Beth Rudin DeWoody. © The Estate of Erica Rutherford.

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Dean Sameshima

LOS ANGELES, UNITED STATES, 1971 LIVES IN BERLIN, GERMANY

Anonymous Homosexual, 2020 Acrylic on canvas, 30 × 40 cm. Courtesy the Artist; Kristina Kite Gallery, Los Angeles; Soft Opening, London.

Dean Sameshima’s work balances between a melancholic psychosocial position and the nostalgia within the spaces he investigates through photography. As a self-identified documentarian, Sameshima explores the nuances of past gay culture to narrate his experience of growing up gay in 1990s Los Angeles. Born in Torrance, Sameshima attended CalArts and later ArtCenter College of Design for his MFA, where he focused on photography. Sameshima’s active sense of “looking” led him to work in bookstores, where he learned about photographers such as Bruce Weber and Larry Clark. This critical “looking” later led him to the yellow pages in search of men, as well as a sense of self and the gay community. Public spaces

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have given him a deep insight into what it means to be a gay Asian man in Los Angeles amongst other gay men. Now residing in Berlin, he works in between both locations. Attuned to space and queer gesture, Sameshima documented adult movie theatres in Berlin to create his 2022 series, being alone, for which he covertly photographed lonely figures. As they stare into screens, the viewers gaze with them toward a horizon of (im)possibilities. Here Sameshima mobilises photography in a way that embeds a language of desire and pleasure in a time that once was, while also suggesting its resurgence. Oscillating between multiple viewers, Sameshima demonstrates the nuances of cruising and the ongoing act

of “looking”. Whether it be in the yellow pages, bookstores, or public theatres, he reminds us that such spaces of leisure and pleasure can make us feel alone and together while also rendering us anonymous. This is the first time the work of Dean Samechima is presented at Biennale Arte. —Xavier Robles Armas

being alone (no.5), 2022 Archival inkjet print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag paper, 59.4 × 42 cm. Courtesy the Artist; Kristina Kite Gallery, Los Angeles; Soft Opening, London. being alone (no.12), 2022 Archival inkjet print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag paper, 59.4 × 42 cm. Courtesy the Artist; Kristina Kite Gallery, Los Angeles; Soft Opening, London. being alone (no.15), 2022 Archival inkjet print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag paper, 59.4 × 42 cm. Courtesy the Artist; Kristina Kite Gallery, Los Angeles; Soft Opening, London. being alone (no.17), 2022 Archival inkjet print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag paper, 59.4 × 42 cm. Courtesy the Artist; Kristina Kite Gallery, Los Angeles; Soft Opening, London.

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Bárbara Sánchez-Kane

Bárbara Sánchez-Kane deconstructs and dissects notions of masculinity through fashion, performance, sculpture, and painting. Having spent time in Italy studying patternmaking with a focus on menswear, her work is largely informed by the history of clothing, which she sees as “a tool used to perform identities and embody ideologies on a daily basis”. Often presenting her work through epic performative runways, Sánchez-Kane uses the familiar language and framework of the fashion industry to explore recurring tropes of shifting identities with expansive multidisciplinary ambitions. Opting for alternating pronouns, Sánchez-Kane uses the concept of the “macho sentimental” to describe her work as someone in touch with masculinity and femininity.

MÉRIDA, MEXICO, 1987 LIVES IN MEXICO CITY, MEXICO

In Prêt-à-Patria (2021), Sánchez-Kane designs and creates a new military uniform and orchestrates a performance that results in a video and sculptural installation. Taking its title from the French fashion term prêtà-porter, or ready-to-wear, and introducing the Spanishlanguage concept of patria (homeland), the work alters the military image of the state to comment on the hegemonic symbols of masculinity and power it puts forward. Based on the militia ritual of safeguarding and honouring the national flag known in Mexico as Escolta de Bandera (Flag escort), the performance features a group of men who practice this ceremony wearing Sánchez-Kane’s version of the military uniform with an open back exposing fitted lace lingerie. Juxtaposing masc and femme garments on the bodies of military men, Prêt-à-Patria presents itself as a salacious and sardonic take on Mexican nationalism, state reverence, and its violent indoctrination of identities. This is the first time the work of Bárbara Sánchez-Kane is presented at Biennale Arte. —José Esparza Chong Cuy

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Prêt-à-Patria, 2021 Fiberglass, resin, steel structure, and polyester, 560 × 63 × 170 cm. Photo Gerardo Landa / Eduardo López (GLR Estudio). Courtesy the Artist; Kurimanzutto, Mexico City / New York.

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Greta Schödl

Greta Schödl is a visual poet born who graduated from the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna in 1953. In 1959 she moved to Bologna, briefly pausing her artistic practice to focus on raising a family before returning to it in the mid-1960s. Schödl has been exhibiting her work internationally – from collaged books to large-scale installations – since the 1950s. At the end of the 1970s, she began to experiment with the effects of repeated lines on a page before moving onto words. Schödl combines this mark making with found objects – prayer books, shirts, plants, and maps. These are used as the physical support for her writing. She was included in the exhibition Materializzazione del linguaggio curated by Mirella Bentivoglio for the Biennale Arte (1978), which brought together the work of women artists whose practice explored the relationship between the body, identity, and language – themes that continue to inform Schödl’s practice.

HOLLABRUNN, AUSTRIA, 1929 LIVES IN BOLOGNA, ITALY

The recent Scritture (Scriptures) series, which includes Piccolo marmo rosato (2020), Granito rosso Serra Chica (2020), and Marmo basso calcareo (2023), is characteristic of Schödl’s long-standing approach to working. All-over writing covers the flat or curved faces of her objects, giving shape to her words. Onto these stones, chosen for their tactile quality, Schödl repeats the handwritten words marmo (marble), granito (granite), or quarzite (quartzite), distinguishing their material composition. The artist then singles out a letter in the word (“o” or “q” in these cases) onto which gold leaf is burnished. The gold highlights appear as delicate lines across the stones and create a rhythm on the surface, transforming her writing into an abstract drawing. These lines are described by the artist as “vibrations” that register the variations in the handwriting and the artist’s experience or process of making. —Teresa Kittler

Untitled - Scritture series, 2020 Ink and gold leaf on quartzite, 13.5 × ø 8.5 cm. Courtesy the Artist. © Greta Schödl. Marmo travertino piccolo, 2023 Ink and gold leaf on travertine marble, 14.5 × 8.5 × 3 cm. Photo Letizia Rostagno. Courtesy the Artist. © Greta Schödl.

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Untitled, 1980 ca Oil, ink and gold leaf on french canvas, 185 × 102 cm. Courtesy the Artist. © Greta Schödl.

366

Ana Segovia

Ana Segovia’s work challenges dominant narratives of masculinity, particularly those propagated through the lasting influence of the film industry and the enduring Western trope. In her paintings, Segovia seems to slow down and pause the film strip to transform it into vibrant stills that highlight and frame the performative nature of gender roles. Characterised by the romanticised and hypermasculine portrayal of its protagonists, the Golden Age of Mexican cinema serves as a rich source of inspiration for Segovia. Rather than perpetuating these stereotypes, she creates a new visual discourse that allows for a more nuanced exploration of identity. Through the deliberate alteration of these cinematic stills, Segovia not only critiques historical representations but also invites a profound reflection on the fluidity of masculinity.

MEXICO CITY, MEXICO, 1991 LIVES IN MEXICO CITY

In Pos’ se acabó este cantar, exhibited alongside a pair of paintings that represent Segovia’s diverse style, she also introduces her first film, giving life and movement to her fluorescent scenes. Featuring two charros (Mexican cowboys) wearing custom-made traditional suits with altered hues, Segovia’s close-up is staged almost like a screen test, revealing a certain homoeroticism amongst the actors and inviting viewers to reconsider the dynamics within male-centric environments. The charro, portrayed by Segovia in the film, is a recurring stereotype in Mexican culture and is particularly associated as a proto-masculine figure. After Segovia’s sartorial requests were denied by many tailors due to what they derogatorily referred to as “fag” fabrics, the suits featured in the film were created by the charro grandson of the tailor of Jorge Negrete – an iconic film star of the Golden Age of Mexican cinema who still embodies the idea of masculinity in the country. This is the first time the work of Ana Segovia is presented at the Biennale Arte. —José Esparza Chong Cuy

Charro Azul, 2023 Oil on canvas, 185 × 130 cm. Private Collection. Courtesy the Artist; Odette Peralta.

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Aunque Me Espine la Mano installation view at “Pos’ se acabó este cantar” exhibition, 2020 Video, 5 min 35 sec. Courtesy the Artist; Odette Peralta.

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Vámonos con Pancho Villa!, 2020 Oil on canvas, 210 × 240 cm. Private Collection. Courtesy the Artist; Odette Peralta.

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Joshua Serafin

Joshua Serafin is a multidisciplinary artist born in Bacolod, Philippines. They were educated at the Philippine High School for the Arts, Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, P.A.R.T.S. School for Contemporary Dance, and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent, Belgium. Currently based in Brussels, Serafin is artist-in-residence at Viernulvier Ghent (2023–2027). Serafin’s practice constellates various modalities – text, visual art, video, and sound, with a focus on dance and choreography – enfolding these sites of creation into queer + trans methodologies intuited from within tropical myth. They are also inspired by the dreamwork of a nonbinary cosmopolis populated by figures emancipated from colonial gender and embodied by turns in diverse states of solemnity and play. Joshua’s globally acclaimed performance is dedicated to dwelling within interstitial spaces – a deliberate refusal to participate in dimorphic structures so they can craft an idiom from which they can speak from the said in-betweenness.

BACOLOD, PHILIPPINES, 1995 LIVES IN BRUSSELS, BELGIUM

The lull summoned in VOID (2022–ongoing) is not emptiness but an interval premised on the possible, fulfilled through a nonbinary godhead imagining a newfangled world and ushering it into being by creating themself through gesture, expressivity, and movement. VOID’s tropical futurist vision of the brown body in primordial space breaches imperial patriarchy’s notions of not only power and beauty but also of existence and experience itself. Drawn from myths recounting the creation of the Philippine archipelago through queer + trans performance, VOID envisions a future that conjures embodiments of a nonbinary species of the gender-diverse realm. This vision is prefigured by a nonbinary god who dances their way into an ever-changing space. On the cusp of erasure and écriture, Serafin presents an allegory of absence to propose resonances of a certain re-presence. The void is that generative moment where being is transfigured as élan vital of the becomingopen, a paradox only willingly embraced by the queerly post-human yet also humanly trans divine. This is the first time the work of Joshua Serafim is presented at Biennale Arte. —Jaya Jacobo

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VOID, 2022 Video-performance. Photo Joshua Serafin. Courtesy the Artist.

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Kang Seung Lee

Kang Seung Lee engages in various artistic media including drawing, embroidery, installation, and appropriation of organic materials and objects. His work involves extensive research periods that are not just documentary but also integrate imagistic elements. He completed an MFA in visual arts at the California Institute of the Arts in the United States, where his interest in various historical periods compelled him to create environments that invite spectators to observe its details. He takes special interest in Asian artists and those of many Asian diasporas in the United States, as well as queer artists who are often overshadowed in the hegemonic art histories.

Choo San, Tseng Kwong Chi, Martin Wong, José Leonilson, and Joon-soo Oh, among other artists who died due to AIDS-related complications. In the environment created by the artist, the spectator is able to reconfigure queer narratives in a transnational and transhistorical way. Drawings, embroideries made with 24-karat gold-plated lines, objects hung from the ceiling, and other elements installed on the walls allow viewers to move between narratives that pay homage to essential names of queer culture in an antimonumental way. How can micro- and macro-history be found in one installation? Lee prefers a pluralistic view of history rather than an encyclopaedic narrative.

Lee’s work is an installation based on the many narrative and iconographic possibilities of artistic figures such as Goh

This is the first time the work of Kang Seung Lee is presented at Biennale Arte.

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—Raphael Fonseca

SEOUL, KOREA, 1978 LIVES IN LOS ANGELES, UNITED STATES

Untitled (Lazaro, José Leonilson 1993), 2023 Graphite, antique 24K gold thread, Sambe, pearls, piercing needle, 24K gold leaf, brass nails on goatskin parchment, 137.2 × 82.5 cm. Photo Paul Salveson. Courtesy the Artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles, Mexico City. © Lee Kang Seung. Lazarus, 2023 Antique 24K gold thread on Sambe, wood, 62.2 × 35.6 cm each (overall dimensions variable). Photo Paul Salveson. Courtesy the Artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles, Mexico City. © Lee Kang Seung.

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Yinka Shonibare

Yinka Shonibare, a British– Nigerian artist of global renown, transcends the artificial construct of culture through a body of work that has garnered international acclaim. Born in London, raised in Lagos, Nigeria, and later relocated back to London, Shonibare uses painting, sculpture, photography, film, and installation to critically explore colonialism, postcolonialism, and cultural identity within the context of globalisation. His distinctive use of patterned fabrics, imported to Africa through the Dutch trade, reflects a nuanced understanding of cultural constructs. Shonibare’s theatricality commands attention, plunging viewers into a fantastical world that challenges norms and queries the status quo. Recognising the pivotal role of identity in perception, Shonibare courageously confronts the historical subjugation faced by people of African origin in Europe and the United States.

LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM, 1962 LIVES IN LONDON

His series Refugee Astronaut (2015-ongoing) introduces a life-sized nomadic astronaut adorned with “African” fabric, equipped to navigate ecological and humanitarian crises. Carrying a mesh sack filled with worldly possessions, the figure symbolises the challenges of displacement. Originating from Shonibare’s contemplation of space as a potential refuge, the artwork serves as a cautionary tale on environmental negligence and capitalism, challenging the unsustainable pursuit of perpetual growth. It also subverts colonial connotations, presenting a refugee astronaut in stark contrast to the colonial instinct of conquering the world. In a cautionary tone, Shonibare emphasises that the artwork serves as a warning, urging contemplation of the potential consequences of inaction regarding rising water levels and the resulting displacement of people. For Shonibare, the overarching question of humanity is incredibly diverse, emphasising the recognition that there is no singular way to be human. —Sofía Shaula Reeser del Rio

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Refugee Austronaut II, 2016 Fibreglass mannequin, Dutch wax printed cotton textile, net, possessions, astronaut helmet, moon boots and steel baseplate, 210 × 90 × 103 cm. Photo Stephen White & Co. Courtesy of the artist and Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, Johannesburg, London and New York, James Cohan Gallery, New York and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and New York. © Yinka Shonibare.

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Leopold Strobl

Leopold Strobl grew up in a rural region north of Vienna, where he still lives today, and has drawn and painted since childhood, without ever pursuing formal training. From the first decade of the twenty-first century onwards, he was an occasional guest in the studio of Art Brut Center Gugging in Lower Austria. Strobl developed his distinctive, minimalist style around 2014, when he began reworking small photos, clipped from regional newspapers, in lead and coloured pencil. Each morning, he selects an image and subtly alters it with sparse, precise interventions. The results are inner landscapes resembling scenes in an aquarium, where people and traces of civilisation have largely been erased – or rather, they have been covered and cocooned in pencil strokes, transforming into monolithic blocks and mountain-like forms. The eerily charged calm of these miniatures also reflects the precarious constitution of our time. Leopold Strobl’s works are part of the Museum of Modern Art’s collection, among others.

MISTELBACH, AUSTRIA, 1960 LIVES IN MISTELBACH

Dreamlike though his scenarios may seem, they are generated from snippets of media-filtered reality. The artist detects their transformative potential as if with a divining rod, drawing it out compositionally. Tinted yellow and green, outlined with sparse strokes, landscapes emerge in ghostly monumentality, while the people in the images and their fetishes are barely perceptible as spectres beneath the dragnet drawn over them. Though his work may bring to mind Arnulf Rainer’s overpaintings and the aesthetic strategies of collage, Strobl developed his style absent any references to art history. His works are compelling not only for their diaristic, almost ritual, nature but also for their consistent orientation from an internal perspective. The curving black edges in each image resemble eye sockets, gazing towards an enigmatically luminous sky. Sometimes, when the overpainting rises like dark grey lava, only a sinuous fragment of this sky remains. This is the first time the work of Leopold Strobl is presented at Biennale Arte. —Gisela Steinlechner

Untitled, 2016 Pencil, coloured pencils on newsprint, mounted on paper, 13.3 × 9.5 cm. Courtesy Galerie Gugging.

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Untitled, 2022 Pencil, coloured pencils on newsprint, mounted on paper, 8.9 × 13.8 cm. Courtesy Galerie Gugging.

Untitled, 2022 Pencil, coloured pencils on newsprint, mounted on paper, 7 × 9.3 cm. Courtesy Galerie Gugging.

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Superflex

Superflex is a Danish art collective founded in 1993 by Bjørnstjerne Christiansen, Jakob Fenger, and Rasmus Nielsen and has since grown to incorporate a growing rotation of global collaborators. At the root of Superflex is a resilient and persistent approach to art-making that targets issues like economic inequality, environmental sustainability, and political power structures. Often blurring the lines between artist, participant, and spectator, Superflex engages a wide range of strategies to undermine or circumvent systems of exploitation. One such project was Free Beer (2004), which, along with Copenhagen IT University, applied digital principles of “open-source” methods to brewing – creating a copyright-free brand of beer to circumvent regulative legal systems. In what has

become their typical approach to problem solving, this collective finds clever and innovative workarounds to both material and ideological hindrances toward a more sustainable future. Public space has often served as one of the most fruitful and provocative places for Superflex to challenge reactionary ideologies. In perhaps their most famous use of public space, Foreigners Please Don’t Leave Us Alone With The Danes! (2002), they created a poster series that mocked the increasingly xenophobic rhetoric toward immigrants in Denmark. The poster humorously alludes to the increasing danger that anti-immigrant and nationalist ideology poses not only to immigrants but to the moral fabric of an ethnic majority in a nation. Since its initial

COPENHAGEN, DENMARK, 1993 BASED IN COPENHAGEN

release during the Danish EU Presidency in 2002, the selfdeprecating poster has become entrenched in Danish politics, emerging in restaurants, cafes, and on light-posts whenever anti-immigrant sentiment is on the rise. Over the last two decades, Superflex has reprinted and redistributed the poster not only as an ongoing political commentary but also to experiment with the public circulation of cultural objects.

Foreigners, Please Don’t Leave Us Alone With The Danes!, 2002 Poster. 70 × 50 cm. Photo SUPERFLEX. Courtesy of the Artists.

Foreigners, Please Don’t Leave Us Alone With The Danes!, 2002 Poster in Copenhagen. Photo SUPERFLEX. Courtesy of the Artists.

—William Hernandez Luege

Foreigners, Please Don’t Leave Us Alone With The Danes!, 2002 Poster.

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Maria Taniguchi

DUMAGUETE, PHILIPPINES, 1981 LIVES IN MANILA, PHILIPPINES

Maria Taniguchi’s expansive painting project, spanning over a decade and a half, forms the foundation for her large, seemingly muted monochromes. Taniguchi meticulously creates paintings that demand close examination to discern variations in her subtle depictions of bricks and which function as devices and systems. Upon careful scrutiny, darkened pooling paint, hints of purple in the depths of blackness, nearly invisible brush strokes, and glittering graphite lines emerge. The audience is invited to engage in a slow, deliberate scan, uncovering nuances that reveal the very essence of the painting process as embodied phenomena – a practice intricately tied to time, labour, and ethics. Taniguchi’s artistic repertoire extends to video, sculpture, and installations. Her exploration of the brick pattern – not as an abstract autonomous concept but as a way to point out the painting as a praxis – began during her MFA studies at Goldsmiths in the UK, after her graduation from the Philippine High School for the Arts.

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Untitled, 2023 Acrylic on canvas, 228.6 × 114.3 cm. Courtesy the Artist; Silverlens, Manila / New York.

The three paintings presented at the Biennale Arte are part of Taniguchi’s larger project devoted to abstraction. These works exist in an ambiguous realm. Despite being painted surfaces, they take on the gravity of a sculpture as they recline against a wall, creating volume in their propped state. This intentional gesture produces an unstable flux, prompting viewers to perceive them as both image and object, abstraction and representation, sculpture and painting. Taniguchi resists categorisation and inserts figuration into this cumulative project. The artist’s absent figure become present in the painting through labour, time, and scale. This is the first time that the work of Maria Taniguchi is presented at Biennale Arte. —Joselina Cruz

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Untitled, 2023 Acrylic on canvas, 274.3 × 487.7 cm. Courtesy the Artist; Silverlens, Manila / New York.

380

Evelyn Taocheng Wang

Evelyn Taocheng Wang, a native of Chengdu currently residing in Rotterdam, works across artistic media and different pictorial traditions. Initially trained in the East Asian literati tradition, she graduated from Nanjing Normal University’s Fine Art Department in 2006. While still in China, Wang was also exposed to Social Realism and Western modernism. In 2007, Wang was the recipient of a residency in Germany, which led her to study at the Städelschule in Frankfurt (2010–2012), later becoming a resident at De Ateliers in Amsterdam (2012–2014). Wang’s transnational, nomadic trajectory informs her practice in which issues of cultural traditions, multilingualism, art history, identity, authenticity, gender, and the interplay of

images become templates to be appropriated, reworked, or fictionalised. A recurrent characteristic of Wang’s work is her referencing of modernist female figures (Ingeborg Bachmann, Octavia Butler, Eileen Chang, Agnes Martin), who act as mirrors or props for the artist’s queering of the histories she appropriates. Wang’s series of paintings Do Not Agree with Agnes Martin All the Time (2022–2023) stem from her long-time fascination with the Canadianborn American painter – a “hermit-master” according to Wang – which started through an encounter with catalogues rather than Martin’s actual paintings. An émigré, both a central figure and an outsider of the Minimalist art milieu and drawing on East Asian

CHENGDU, CHINA, 1981 LIVES IN ROTTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS

thought (Taoism and Zen Buddhism), Martin’s life and work constellate tropes with which Wang identifies and upon which her own language is refracted. For this series, Wang literally followed the captions of selected Martin paintings. Although she indistinctly speaks of “imitation” and “appropriation”, her reading of the captions uncovers a repressed element, namely the amount of water used with the paint. If lightness and fluidity become connectors to the paintings of the Chinese literati tradition, they also distance it from its Confucianist–patriarchal basis, while the insertion of figurative elements within the modernist grid tease Minimalism’s universalist pretences.

This is the first time the work of Evelyn Taocheng Wang is presented at Biennale Arte. —Adeena May

Three Stage of a Corn Life and Imitation of Agnes Martin - Do Not Agree with Agnes Martin All the Time series, 2023 Acrylic, colour gesso, China ink, colour pencil, graphite on linen canvas, 185 × 185 × 2.5 cm. Photo Yan Tao. Courtesy the Artist; Antenna Space, Shanghai; Carlos/Ishikawa, London; Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam; Kayokoyuki, Tokyo; and The Rockbund Art Museum (RAM), Shanghai. © Evelyn Taocheng Wang 2023

Soymilk and Imitation of Agnes Martin - Do Not Agree with Agnes Martin All the Time series, 2022 China ink, acrylic colour, colour gesso, colour pencil on linen canvas, 185 × 185 × 2 cm. Photo Yan Tao. Courtesy the Artist; Antenna Space, Shanghai; Carlos/Ishikawa, London; Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam; Kayokoyuki, Tokyo; and The Rockbund Art Museum (RAM), Shanghai. © Evelyn Taocheng Wang 2024

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Tangerines and Imitation of Agnes Martin - Do Not Agree with Agnes Martin All the Time series, 2022 Acrylic, graphite, colour pencil on linen canvas, 185 × 185 × 2 cm. Photo Aad Hoogendoorn. Courtesy the Artist; Antenna Space, Shanghai; Carlos/Ishikawa, London; Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam; Kayokoyuki, Tokyo. © Evelyn Taocheng Wang 2023

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Mariana Telleria

RUFINO, ARGENTINA, 1979 LIVES IN ROSARIO, ARGENTINA

Dios es inmigrante (God Is an Immigrant) - detail, 2017 Bronze plaque, 1500 × 390 × 925 cm. Photo Ignacio Iasparra. Colección Bienalsur; Jorge M. Pérez Collection, Miami. Courtesy BIENALSUR, Muntref; Museo de la Inmigración, Buenos Aires, Argentina. © Mariana Telleria.

Mariana Telleria’s artwork delves into the depths of meaning aroused by objects, often manipulating everyday objects (old wooden frames, branches, beds, and crucifixes) and generating synchronicities between disparate entities. Telleria’s production is based on ambiguity, evident both conceptually and materially, a versatility that allows her to combine the wretched object with impeccable craftsmanship. For example, the interior of a car roof is transformed into a Baroque painted ceiling, masts are turned into crucifixes, and even rubbish can be made into a monument. Telleria’s El

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nombre de un país was shown as the national representation of Argentina at the 58th Biennale di Venezia in 2019. The initial edition of the work Dios es inmigrante (God Is an Immigrant) (2017) is positioned in the garden of what once was a hotel/hospital erected around the port of Buenos Aires to facilitate immigrant entry to the country in the early twentieth century (currently the MUNTREF - Museo de la Inmigración . The piece comprises ten black-painted aluminium sailboat masts of varying sizes. Stainless steel shrouds sink into a

subterranean sea and boat masts are transformed into evangelising crosses. A lavish bronze plaque underscores its status as a monument of national commemoration, while the title celebrates transnational transit. “Migratory flows are one of the forces that have shaped the world,” the artist notes. —María Amalia García

Dios es inmigrante (God Is an Immigrant), 2017 10 aluminum sailboat masts, black epoxy paint, control lines/steel cable and turnbuckles, marble and bronze plaque, 1500 × 390 × 925 cm. Photo Laura Glusman. Colección Bienalsur; Jorge M. Pérez Collection, Miami. Courtesy BIENALSUR, Muntref; Museo de la Inmigración, Buenos Aires, Argentina. © Mariana Telleria.

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Güneş Terkol

Güneş Terkol, an Istanbulbased artist, earned her MA in the Multidisciplinary Art Department after studying painting. Terkol has been featured in significant group exhibitions, and she is also a member a member of the HaZaVuZu and Alaca Heyheyler artist collectives and makes music with the GuGuOu group. Although she uses various mediums, her artistic focus for the past seventeen years has mainly focused on multilayered embroidered narratives on fabric, featuring characters that dance between the abstract and the figurative. Terkol’s works draw inspiration from her surroundings, social

conditions, relationships, the images she encounters, her personal history, and the materials she finds. Terkol employs stitching or drawing directly onto cloth to create characters existing in an uncertain realm, characterised by ambiguous borders that encourage viewers to become storytellers. She embodies a communal spirit that goes beyond individual expression. Her collective banners featured in the Biennale Arte and in others produced in Turkey, China, Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, Austria, France, and Yogyakarta unite women internationally from diverse backgrounds. Through feminist workshops, Terkol establishes a platform for

ISTANBUL, TURKEY, 1981 LIVES IN ISTANBUL

women to share experiences and address socioeconomic challenges through a collective conceptual process. By delving into each woman’s narrative and cultural context, Terkol designs the banner’s background image with expression spaces for individual stories within the collective narrative. These fabric banners, with their timeless tales, amplify women’s voices and foster a profound sense of community. Concurrently, Terkol’s artistic production undergoes a transformation through the participatory collective storytelling process, wherein women reinterpret their histories, current realities, and ways of being.

Home is my Heart, 2017 Embroidery on fabric (collectively created/Home is my Heart workshop in London, UK - Middlesex Street Estate), 200 × 300 cm. Private Collection Banu & Hakan Çarmıklı. Courtesy the Artist.

This is the first time the work of Güneş Terkol is presented at Biennale Arte. —Arzu Yayıntaş

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Against the Current, 2013 Embroidery on fabric, 200 × 265 cm. Photo Sahir Uğur Eren. Courtesy Istanbul Museum of Modern Art.

386

Salman Toor

The Lock, 2023 Oil on panel, 61 × 45.7 cm. Photo Farzad Owrang. Courtesy the Artist; Luhring Augustine, New York. © Salman Toor. The Backseat Boy, 2023 Oil on board, 45.7 × 61 cm. Photo Farzad Owrang. Courtesy the Artist; Luhring Augustine, New York. © Salman Toor.

LAHORE, PAKISTAN, 1983 LIVES IN NEW YORK, UNITED STATES

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The Beating, 2019 Oil on canvas, 119.4 × 119.4 cm. Photo Farzad Owrang. Courtesy the Artist; Luhring Augustine, New York. © Salman Toor.

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Frieda Toranzo Jaeger

Frieda Toranzo Jaeger is an artist whose paintings and installations draw inspiration from a variety of historical, iconographic, and technological sources, reimagining these influences to create new utopias that embody freedom, ecological awareness, and a sense of communal connection among marginalized groups. Influenced by her studies in pre-Columbian Mexican embroidery, fifteenth-century European altar paintings, and automotive motifs, Toranzo Jaeger’s multipanelled works offer diverse perspectives on collaborative processes. The artist merges traditional techniques with a contemporary approach, challenging conventional notions of what is considered canonical and exploring hybridity, sexuality, and autonomy as concepts within her artistic production. Movement and technology are central themes, with a meticulous exploration of the relationships between symbols of oppressive colonisation and the capitalist system’s potential for destruction, transformed

MEXICO CITY, MEXICO, 1988 LIVES IN MEXICO CITY AND BERLIN, GERMANY

into radical political imaginings of a future that resists oppressive systems while embracing queer identity. The project for the Biennale Arte expands the artist’s interest in cars, embroidery traditions, mural painting, and Western religious altars, guiding the audience through the experiences of marginalised communities in their resistance against colonial and gender issues. The artist’s fascination with machines, especially electric cars, originates from perceiving them as inherently feminine, inspiring utopian fantasies. Toranzo Jaeger accentuates the sensuality of surfaces while also creating tension through references in her work. The piece nods to the Flower Seller (1941) by Diego Rivera and Juan O’Gorman’s mural at the UNAM library (1949–1952). Additionally, the artwork pays homage to Sappho (ca. 630–604 BCE), the renowned Greek poet from the island of Lesbos, celebrated as a queer symbol for her emotionally charged poetry directed towards other women. The exaggerated size of the artist’s signature not only parodies the traditionally male authorship associated with painting but also reclaims that space for a queer female voice. This is the first time the work of Frieda Toranzo Jaeger is presented at Biennale Arte. —Amanda Carneiro

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Times Come to an End, 2021 Seven-panel polyptych, oil on canvas with embroidery and door hinges, 200 × 1000 cm Courtesy the Artist. © Frieda. Toranzo-Jaeger.

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Ahmed Umar

Ahmed Umar lives in Norway and performs his Sudanese roots shaped by a childhood in Mecca, embodying queer histories of Muslim migration. Growing up, Umar’s neighbours observed Wahhabi teachings while his family carried the voluminous legacy of Sufism beads and amulets. Wrestling with faith, freedom, and the lack thereof, Umar sought asylum in Norway in 2008 and today walks a hyphenated Sudanese–Norwegian pilgrimage. Traversing performance, sculpture, photography, and beyond, his practice procures the collective emancipation of norms, bodies, and teachings through the liberation of materials, objects, and modes of making. Autobiographical in principle and political in application, his narratives frequently revisit Sudan’s ancient kingdom of Kush, whose black pharaohs Umar studies extensively. Umar is currently devising the Nile Pride 2030 festival.

SUDAN, 1988 LIVES IN OSLO, NORWAY

Talitin, The Third (2023) enacts a Sudanese bridal dance that traditionally culminates weeklong wedding celebrations. Umar performs the bride expected to display her beauty and wealth while choreographing the newlyweds’ journey from courtship onwards. Talitin, meaning “third” in Arabic, alludes to a local insult – being “the third of the girls” – targeted at boys interested in so-called womanly activities. Through its wearables, fabrics, and braids, the artist reclaims a practice that he witnessed first hand from the women in his family – until his exclusion once he reached puberty. The songs played are a praise to the bride’s family and also the soundscape for her to showcase her new curves. For the performance, Umar increased his intake of Norwegian chocolates to enlarge his physical silhouette. The jewellery displayed comes from Cairo, a vital city in Umar’s practice and his diasporic gateway to today’s turmoiled Sudan. This is the first time the work of Ahmed Umar is presented at Biennale Arte. —Daniel Rey

Talitin (The Third), 2023 Performance, 25 min 23 sec. Photo Nadia Caroline Andersen. Courtesy the Artist. © Nadia Caroline Andersen.

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(The Third, 2023 Talitin Installation view. Photo Romana Halgošová. Courtesy the Artist.

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Unidentified Chilean artists, Arpilleristas

Named after the Spanish term for the burlap sacks that serve as their backing substrate, arpilleras are the embroidered textile artefacts created in Chile during Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship (1973–1989). They were made by women in communal workshops that also served as social support networks for the wives and mothers of individuals arrested or assassinated by the regime. Hand-sewn from pieces of fabric, often sourced from the clothing of the missing, these works served as cathartic expressions, revisiting trauma and memorialising the collective experience of loss and amnesia. Their rich iconography depicts talleres (community gatherings) and protests where the same arpilleras are made and displayed as a form of resistance. Others represent domestic settings in which the absence of the “disappeared” ones is evoked with empty spaces and signs of uncertainty.

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The group of arpilleras shown at the Biennale Arte is part of a vast collection of over two hundred works donated to New York’s El Museo del Barrio. Although their provenance remains unclear, the textiles were likely acquired by their donor at solidarity sales in the 1980s, as this was the primary mode in which US audiences encountered arpilleras at that time. They were also present internationally in the homes of Latin American exiles and their influence continues to reverberate today in the works of younger artists such as Carolina Caycedo and Maria Guzmán Capron.

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Presented one year after the fiftieth anniversary of the coup d’état and amidst political uncertainty in Chile, the arpilleras remind us of the continuous struggles for institutional change in the South American nation, still ruled by the constitution imposed by Pinochet’s regime. Each arpillera’s shining sun, however, offers a hopeful sign of change.

This is the first time Unidentified Chilean artists, Arpilleristas are presented at Biennale Arte. —Rodrigo Moura

Untitled, 1980s Embroidered and appliquéd cloth, crochet, and mixed media, 96.5 × 81.3 cm. Photo Matthew Sherman. Collection El Museo del Barrio, New York; Gift of Arthur and Dorothy Hammer. Courtesy El Museo del Barrio, New York. Untitled, 1980s Embroidered and appliquéd cloth, crochet, and mixed media, 96.5 × 81.3 cm. Photo Matthew Sherman. Collection El Museo del Barrio, New York; Gift of Arthur and Dorothy Hammer. Courtesy El Museo del Barrio, New York.

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Rubem Valentim

Rubem Valentim is a central figure in Brazilian art and a key reference in twentieth-century Afro-Atlantic production. He lived in Rome during the 1960s, a period in which he created a collection of iconic works across various mediums. Valentim devoted himself to painting, printmaking, and sculpture, reinterpreting the prevailing Geometric Abstraction, Constructivism, and Concretism in Brazilian and Latin American artistic production. By conceiving complex geometric compositions that intricately redraw and reconfigure symbols and emblems of AfroAtlantic religiosities, Valentim introduced African references into European artistic languages. Particularly notable are the patterns and designs of Yoruba deities, recalling the traditions of this people who were transplanted to Brazil during the centuries of slave trade which are an integral part of the country’s history. With this gesture, Valentim executed one of the most radical operations in the history of art within a diasporic context.

SALVADOR, BRAZIL, 1922– 1991, SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL

This body of work emerged during the artist’s “Rome Phase”, a period spent briefly in Italy. Immersed in the experience of being a foreigner, Valentim deepened his quest for a language intertwined with Brazil’s African heritage. Using symbols related to the orixás – the deities worshiped in the pantheon of the African Candomblé religion developed in Brazil – he delved into curves and geometries, decoding and exploring symmetries and dialogues between pure and synthetic forms. In his artistic alphabet, Valentim accentuated shapes and primary colours, crafting a vocabulary of forms which generated as many words as there were arrangements between them. In his works from this period we observe the influence of Valentim’s recent exploration of sculpture, accentuating three-dimensional thinking in his canvases. At the centre of the compositions, totemic forms emerges, playing a role in establishing symmetry. The equal sides allude to Xangô, the orixá of justice, portrayed with his axe, metaphorically cutting with the same weight and measure on both sides. —Amanda Carneiro

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Pintura 3, 1966 Oil on canvas, 100 × 73 cm. Photo Sergio Guerini. Private Collection. Courtesy of Almeida & Dale Galeria de Arte.

395 Pintura 26, 1965-66 Oil on canvas, 100 × 73 cm Luiz Paulo Montenegro Collection. Courtesy Almeida e Dale.

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Composição Bahia no1, 1966 Oil on canvas, 101 × 73.5 cm. Photo Sergio Guerini. Roberto Bicca Collection. Courtesy of Almeida & Dale Galeria de Arte.

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Kay WalkingStick

Kay WalkingStick, born to a mother of Scottish–Irish descent and a Cherokee father, has worked over six decades to create paintings and sculptures that reckon with America’s past – reinscribing Indigenous presence onto a history from which it has been largely erased. While most of her adult life has been spent in New York and Pennsylvania, WalkingStick has travelled extensively including time spent in Rome while teaching and a period in the Colorado Rockies that deeply influenced her and continues to inform her work. WalkingStick’s paintings cite American landscape painters such as Thomas Cole and Albert Bierstadt who imposed a settler colonial imaginary onto Indian Territory with their depictions of rugged, empty countrysides. Her paintings subvert these visions by blending sublime imagery of mountains, valleys, and bodies of water with geometric patterns drawn from the tribes who have lived on those lands since time immemorial.

SYRACUSE, UNITED STATES, 1935 LIVES IN PENNSYLVANIA, UNITED STATES

The Silence of the Glacier (2013), South Rim (2016), Galena Pass (2023), and Salmon River Valley (2023) draw from WakingStick’s memories and sketches of awe-inspiring views of the Grand Canyon, Glacier National Park, and Sun Valley. Renowned as sites of recreation and tourism, they are also ancestral homes to Native communities who were once displaced and resettled into reservations. In these works, WalkingStick overlays motifs belonging to the peoples who are the original custodians of these lands as a way to recover historical memory of their ongoing existence. Just as she has grappled with her sense of belonging as a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and her mixed heritage, WalkingStick asks viewers to confront the collision of these histories and imagine how they might coexist. This is the first time the work of Kay WalkingStick is presented at Biennale Arte. —Elena Ketelsen González

Galena Pass, 2023 Oil on panel in two parts, 101.6 × 203.2 × 3.8 cm. Photo JSP Art Photography. Courtesy the Artist; Hales, London and New York. © Kay Walkingstick. The Silence of Glacier, 2013 Oil on panel in two parts, 91.4 × 182.9 × 5.1 cm. Photo JSP Art Photography. Courtesy the Artist; Hales, London and New York. © Kay Walkingstick.

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South Rim, 2016 Oil on panel in two parts, 91.4 × 182.9 × 6.3 cm. Photo JSP Art Photography. Courtesy the Artist; Hales, London and New York. © Kay Walkingstick.

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WangShui

It is paradoxical to preface WangShui’s art with biographical information since their practice is driven by a desire to dematerialise identity. Raised between the United States and Thailand by Chinese immigrants, and later working in Nepal, South Africa, and New York – where they currently reside – their lifelong itinerancy evades narrativisation. With the same liberty and fluidity, they work across video, installation, and painting to inhabit shifting states of materiality and consciousness. This subterfuge is WangShui’s mirror to the societal hunger to consume and categorise bodies marked with difference, a seductive desire made dangerously more expedient with new technologies. Deepening their investigation of liminality, WangShui presents a newly commissioned installation comprising three large-scale aluminium paintings and an LED video sculpture.

Exploring the migration of matter and form between Latin America, Asia, and Europe, the installation builds on the artist’s interest in the transnational interpolation of form. Each work integrates haptic and mechanical processes to blur the line between mind and machine. For this new suite of paintings, WangShui manually anodised aluminium panels with cochineal – a globally traded Mexican red pigment made by grinding up parasitic insects. The multichannel video sculpture is assembled with interwoven LED mesh screens, another transmutation of image and light. The video sculpture’s pulsing lights both attract and disorient its viewers – the artist’s reminder that consciousness is formed in the latent spaces between nodes of legibility. This is the first time the work of WangShui is presented at Biennale Arte. —Wong Binghao

DALLAS, UNITED STATES, 1986 LIVES IN NEW YORK CITY, UNITED STATES

Fundamental Attribution Error, 2023 Single channel simulation, flexible LED screen, motion sensors. Photo Frank Sperling. Courtesy the Artist.

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Weak pearl, 2023 Installation view. Photo Alwin Lay. Courtesy the Artist.

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Agnes Waruguru

Agnes Waruguru’s works are constantly linked to painting and its relations with design, embroidery, sculpture, and installation through ideas of geographical belonging, time, and transience. She studied at the Savannah College of Art and Design in the US, receiving a BFA in 2017. From 2021 to 2023, she lived in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, where she attended the Rijksakademie. Recently, she returned to Nairobi. The artist’s practices often converse the surrounding architectural space as something like a fulcrum in an investigation where the notions of transparency and opacity are also of the utmost importance. Waruguru has continually researched organic materials and how they can

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be the starting point for the creation of paintings where the process is expressed in a material and organic way.

with this literary narrative and the links between the organic and the industrial, or time and space.

For the Biennale Arte, Waruguru is showing paintings in a traditional format and an installation that contains organic materials, establishing a relationship between her research and the book Vagabonds! (2022) by the Nigerian writer Eloghosa Osunde. Part of the book revolves around the relationships between spiritual life and everyday life in large cities, between what is visible and invisible. As characters move between different worlds and situations, the artist invites the spectator to move around her work and establish relations

Behind gestures and forms that seem both abstract and formally minimalist, the artist silently leads us to reflect on the passage of time and the possible future of some of these materials. To which ecosystems do these materials belong? Which of these materials, seen within the context of the Biennale Arte, can be regarded as “foreign”? In what ways can these materials be associated with life and death? This is the first time the work of Agnes Waruguru is presented at Biennale Arte. —Raphael Fonseca

I dreamed a place for you, will you visit?, 2022 Various works on paper, painted floor, ceramic and floral elements, lily of the valley scent, installation view. Photo Sander Van Wettum. Courtesy the Artist.

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Morning Dew, 2023 Indian ink, natural pigments, acrylic ink and sequence on cotton, 285 × 190 cm. Photo TomekDersu-Aaron. Courtesy the Artist.

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Susanne Wenger

GRAZ, AUSTRIA, 1915– 2009, OSOGBO, NIGERIA

Susanne Wenger was a sculptor, painter, and graphic designer who began art training in her native city and completed her studies in Vienna from 1933 to 1935. Wenger joined artists organising against the Nazis, but the war prompted a decade of travel across Europe and a private spiritual journey into esoteric mysticisms. Upon arrival in Nigeria in 1950, Wenger became fascinated with Yoruba beliefs and aesthetics and settled in Osogbo, where she remained for the rest of her life. In the mid-1950s, Wenger began a lengthy initiation process into several cults, eventually becoming an olórìṣ à, a person consecrated to a deity. She dedicated her practice to a revival of Yoruba aesthetics and the restoration of shrine groves in Osogbo, developing the New Sacred Art Movement alongside Yoruba artists. Nigerian newspapers periodically commented on the spectacle of a “White Priestess” embracing local customs, yet for many in Osogbo she remains a revered figure. During her initiation into Yoruba cults in the 1950s and 1960s, Wenger began an immersive study of the various aesthetic repertoires associated with Yoruba religious rituals: batik dyeing, mural painting, and shrine sculpting. The works selected here represent her experimentation in àdìrẹ ẹlẹ́kọ, a Yoruba technique of resist-dyeing, in which a design is applied with a cassava-starch paste before the textile is immersed in indigo dye. Conventionally used for designing women’s wrappers, Wenger adapted the technique to produce large-format, handpainted textile compositions, sometimes stitching several

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pieces of cloth together, as seen here. The angular figuration and the use of size to differentiate divine subjects from others is characteristic of Yoruba aesthetic principles, and as the titles of these six works suggest, Wenger’s batiks were inspired by Yoruba cosmology. However, her batik works were idiosyncratic rather than faithful representations of the pantheon, more representative of Wenger’s search for Jungian primordial archetypes. This is the first time the work of Susanne Wenger is presented at Biennale Arte. —Merve Fejzula Das große Fest des Ajagẹmọ, 1958 Àdìrẹ cassava-starch batik, 200 × 400 cm. Photo Martin Bilinovac. Courtesy Susan Wenger Foundation. © Martin Bilinovac.

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Die magische Frau, 1960 Àdìrẹ cassava-starch batik, 252 × 163 cm. Photo Martin Bilinovac. Courtesy Susan Wenger Foundation. © Martin Bilinovac.

Leopard, die magische Erdendimension, 1959 Àdìrẹ cassava-starch batik, 253 × 258 cm. Photo Martin Bilinovac. Courtesy Susan Wenger Foundation. © Martin Bilinovac.

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Emmi Whitehorse

CROWNPOINT, NEW MEXICO, UNITED STATES, 1957 LIVES IN SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO, UNITED STATES

Emmi Whitehorse, a Diné Indigenous artist, primarily works in abstracted large-scale poetic landscapes of the US Southwest. Whitehorse’s fortyyear relationship with painting began under the wing of her mentor Harmony Hammond in 1980. Whitehorse also learned traditional Diné weaving techniques from her close Indigenous kinfolk, who guided her painterly style and led her to explore her relationship to the surrounding native ecologies and terrains. Through a meditative practice, she is sensitive to the atmospheric psychogeographies and the relationship between cultural land use and ecological caretaking shared across Indigenous communities.

Whitehorse’s Cópia (2023) is a two-panel landscape painting that activates the beauty and chaotic tension of rupture. Whitehouse highlights the native ecologies using a traditional Diné/ Navajo concept known as Hózhó, which emphasises the interconnectedness of land and people to achieve harmony and beauty. Whitehorse’s works on paper and canvas embody the spiritual temporalities of the Diné that reads the landscape as a symphony through time. It’s a jolting score composed with natural harmonies and the discordant unnatural disruptions from rapacious postcolonial excavations on Indigenous land. In Outset, Launching, Progression (2015), Whitehorse responded to natural oil and gas fracking in Navajo territories.

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She followed the displacement and exploitation of Indigenous communities on Diné territories surrounding her upbringing. Whitehorse’s sensorial landscape mark-making techniques, presented through mystifying compositions, illuminate alternative strategies for preserving Indigeneity and resisting colonial violence and extraction. This is the first time the work of Emmi Whitehorse is presented at Biennale Arte. —Tracy Fenix

Pressed Flower, 2023 Mixed media on canvas, 129.5 × 199.3 cm. Courtesy the Artist; Garth Greenan Gallery, New York.

405 NUCLEO CONTEMPORANEO Pollinator, 2023 Mixed media on canvas, 129.5 × 199.3 cm. Courtesy the Artist; Garth Greenan Gallery, New York.

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Wild Flower, 2023 Mixed media on canvas, 129.5 × 199.3 cm. Courtesy the Artist; Garth Greenan Gallery, New York.

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Xiyadie

Xiyadie, a father, farmer, gay man, migrant worker, and artist, creates intimately crafted paper cuts that document the evolution of queer life in China since the 1980s. Raised in a family of artisans, Xiyadie learned paper cutting from his mother. This ancient folk tradition, typically transmitted through the female line, involves creating designs often displayed in windows and doorways as symbols of good luck. Xiyadie knew in high school that he was attracted to men, but family expectations led him to marry a woman and have two children. In pursuit of economic stability during the 1980s, he became a migrant worker in Xi’an and later in Beijing, where he discovered a welcoming queer community in which he could openly express himself. Also in Beijing, his intricate paper cuts were exhibited for the first time at the Beijing LGBT Center after

SHAANXI PROVINCE, CHINA, 1963 LIVES IN SHANDONG PROVINCE, CHINA

he adopted a pseudonym meaning “Siberian Butterfly”, a creature at once resilient, flamboyant, and delicate. Though Xiyadie’s paper cuts since the first decade of the twenty-first century feature queer love scenes situated in cruising sites that he discovered upon arriving in Beijing in 2005, his earlier works are set mostly within interior spaces. In Sewn (1999), Xiyadie describes his difficulty in accepting his sexuality while trapped in a heterosexual marriage. His yellow trunks hang from one leg as he sews his penis tight with a large needle and thread made of semen and blood. Tucked inside a small interior dominated by a traditional Chinese door and roof, Xiyadie looks at a photo of his first boyfriend, a train attendant named Minghui. Pain and helplessness are suggested by the sharp blade piercing

his leg, while a large snake slithering inside him represents his irrepressible desire. Significantly, the needle Xiyadie uses to sew himself up is also perforating the roof of the building, suggesting progress towards breaking free from tradition and family pressure. This is the first time the work of Xiyadie is presented at Biennale Arte. —Rosario Güiraldes

Wall, 2016 Papercut with water-based dye and Chinese pigments on Xuan paper, 140 × 140 cm. Courtesy the Artist; Blindspot Gallery; P21 Gallery. Sewn, 1999 Papercut with water-based dye and Chinese pigments on Xuan paper, 141 × 140 cm. Courtesy the Artist; Blindspot Gallery; P21 Gallery.

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Kaiyang, 2021 Papercut with water-based dye and Chinese pigments on Xuan paper, 140 × 300 cm. Photo Daniel Terna. Courtesy the Artist; Blindspot Gallery; P21 Gallery; The Drawing Center.

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Rember Yahuarcani

Rember Yahuarcani is a painter, writer, curator, and activist who belongs to the Aimeni clan (the White Heron clan) of the Uitoto Nation of northern Amazonia in Peru. He is the son of the artists Santiago Yahuarcani and Nereida López. His father taught him the preparation of natural dyes and the llanchama (tree bark used as a surface for his paintings). The stories told by his grandmother Martha López Pinedo were deeply influential to the point that most of his work honours the spiritual connection with her. He is an active voice for the rights of Indigenous people. His writings report the environmental situation in the Amazon and confront the racist and colonial cultural structures in Peru. He published various books that collect Uitoto legends and myths, including El sueño de Buinaima (2010) and El guardian de la selva (2020).

Yahuarcani’s paintings draw on the narratives of the Uitoto mythology and Western art traditions and techniques. Since 2003, his artistic vocabulary has moved from a descriptive style found in his early paintings to the creation of large-scale lyrical, oneiric landscapes like the one included in the Biennale Arte. Through delicate traces and bright colours, Yahuarcani presents scenes that invite us to immerse ourselves in Uitoto thinking, storytelling, and daily life in order to see and feel the world from a different belief system. The animals, plants, spirits, humans, and other beings of the Amazon rainforest that populate his paintings are depicted as molecularly connected to each other; the artist reclaims them as sources of wisdom. Yahuarcani paints his multiple characters perpetually in

PEBAS, PERU, 1985 LIVES IN PEBAS

motion as if they were escaping from the identities and narratives imposed by the state and the Western world. This is the first time the work of Rember Yahuarcani is presented at Biennale Arte. —Miguel López

Los Abuelos, 2021 Acrylic on canvas, 170 × 240,5 cm. Photo Juan Pablo Murrugarra. Courtesy the Artist.

Las canoas tienen sueños feroces, 2023 Acrylic on canvas, 170 × 240 cm. Photo Juan Pablo Murrugarra. Courtesy the Artist.

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El Territorio de los Abuelos, 2023 Acrylic on canvas, 300 × 300 cm. Photo Juan Pablo Murrugarra. Courtesy the Artist.

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Santiago Yahuarcani

Santiago Yahuarcani is a self-taught painter and sculptor who belongs to the Aimeni clan (the White Heron clan) of the Uitoto Nation of northern Amazonia. His mother Martha López Pinedo was a descendant of Gregorio López, the only member of the Aimeni clan who emigrated from La Chorrera (today part of the Colombian Amazon) to the Ampiyacu River region (now the northern Peruvian Amazon) as part of the trade that involved relocating Indigenous populations to work in the rubber industry. That experience was transmitted to him by his grandfather Gregorio, who was also one of the survivors of the Putumayo genocide (1879–1921), in which nearly thirty thousand Indigenous people, mainly from the Bora, Uitoto, Andoque, and Ocaina peoples, were enslaved and cruelly annihilated.

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Yahuarcani’s paintings are neither derivative nor dependent on Western art history. They collect the memories told by his ancestors, the sacred knowledge of medicinal plants, the sounds of the jungle, and the Uitoto myths that explain the multiple configurations of the universe. In his paintings, the territory and its inhabitants show consciousness, affection, memory, and intelligence, and deploy forms of communication that are audible beyond the parameters of settler coloniality. They do not narrate a rigid past but create a conversation with the present and wonder about a collective future. By reclaiming the presence and force of the spirits (guardians) of the plants, trees, and animals, who are largely ignored in the modern era, Yahuarcani stresses how climate catastrophe is

PEBAS, PERU, 1960 LIVES IN PEBAS

not a recent event but part of a long history of colonial dispossession that begins with the eradication of spiritual worlds and the powers that emanate from the close interrelation with the territory. This is the first time the work of Santiago Yahuarcani is presented at Biennale Arte. —Miguel López

Hultoto Cosmovisión, 2022 Natural pigments and acrylic on llanchama, 210 × 410 cm. Photo Juan Pablo Murrugarra. Courtesy the Artist; CRISIS Gallery. Ni vergüenza ya tienen los pucachus, 2020 Natural dyes on Ilanchama, 115 × 200 cm. Photo Juan Pablo Murrugarra. Courtesy the Artist; CRISIS Gallery.

Shiminbro, el Hacedor del sonido, 2023 Natural pigments and acrylic on llanchama, 207 × 410 cm. Photo Juan Pablo Murrugarra. Courtesy the Artist; CRISIS Gallery.

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Nil Yalter

Nil Yalter is regarded as a pioneer in the French feminist art movement. Initially, Yalter dedicated herself to paintings strongly influenced by abstract traditions, especially that of Russian Constructivism, which is still recognisable in her digital works today. After moving to Paris, the artist shifted her focus to installations, performances, films, and photography, often addressing themes such as women’s sexual liberation, the Orientalist objectification of Middle Eastern women, and people’s experiences confronting migratory movements, while intersecting issues of race, class, and gender. Her autobiographical approach intertwines personal and collective experiences, reminiscent of an anthropological methodology applied to the arts, placing underrepresented voices not only at the focal point of her art but also at the heart of society’s central concerns.

TURKISH, BORN IN CAIRO, EGYPT, 1938 LIVES IN PARIS, FRANCE

In her Biennale installation, Yalter combines two of her iconic works. Exile is a hard job (1977–2024), inspired by the words of Turkish poet Nâzim Hikmet, features fly-posted images of immigrants and exiles, with the work’s title painted over them in bold red letters, reminiscent of political phrases inscribed in urban landscapes. The video screens show testimonials of the lives and struggles of migrant individuals, addressing ideas of integration, precarity, and stigmatisation while evoking a certain nostalgia for what was left behind and the challenges ahead, woven with Turkish myths and poetry. Topak Ev (1973) references an experience of the artist in the

Bektik nomadic community, which historically lived in round tents in Central Anatolia and migrated around the tenth century. Their construction technology sheds light on the living modes of these historically misrecognised communities and complicates general perceptions. It raises awareness of gender roles and societal norms that confine women to domestic spaces, providing an exploration of women’s roles in the context of migration. She is the recipient of the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2024 Biennale Arte.

Untitled, pre-1976 Video, black and white, sound, 5 min 41 sec. Courtesy the Artist.

This is the first time the work of Nil Yalter is presented at Biennale Arte. —Amanda Carneiro Topak Ev, 1973 Metal structure, felt, sheepskin, texts, and mixed media, 250 × 300 cm. Arter Collection Istanbul.

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Exile is a hard job, 1983-2024 Video Installation, variable dimension. Courtesy the Artist.

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Joseca Mokahesi Yanomami

An artist from the Yanomami people, Joseca Mokahesi was born in the Brazilian Amazon and lives in the Watoriki (windy mountain range) community, located in the Yanomami Indigenous lands. Joseca’s childhood coincides with a particularly dramatic moment for his people, affected as it was by the first (intense and unwanted) contacts with nonIndigenous peoples and their diseases. His mother passed away when he was still a child, a victim of one of the measles epidemics; afterwards, his father, a prominent shaman, also passed away. Moved by deep hixio (grief anger), Joseca fled from his community and walked for two hundred kilometres into the woods. Years later, upon his return, he organised a school and became the community’s first teacher and health agent. After sculpting small animals in wood

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YANOMAMI INDIGENOUS TERRITORY, BRAZIL, 1971 LIVES IN YANOMAMI INDIGENOUS TERRITORY

in the early 2000s, the artist went on to draw characters, scenes, and landscapes of the Yanomami universe with everincreasing fascination.

tree – emerging from a mouth. The face and body paints that appear in Joseca’s drawings reference the first humanity, the yarori pë.

Joseca Mokahesi’s drawings present myths and shamanistic chants, as well as moments from his people’s day-today existence, accompanied by description–titles in the Yanomami language that serve an explanatory function. A large portion of the characters depicted by the artist are the xapiri, spirits left by Omama – the Yanomami creation deity – to aid shamans in their tasks. When summoned, they descend and manifest in the shamans’ bodies. Yamanaioma, the bee’s feminine spirit, is depicted as a human figure who, when walking upon the land, sees to it that food grows well. Hawahiri, in turn, is drawn as a tree – a chestnut

This is the first time the work of Joseca Mokahesi Yanomami is presented at Biennale Arte. —David Ribeiro

Xapiri Hawarihiri omamari a ithuu tëhë anë yai kiriai mahi, kuë yaro yanomãe yamaki amuku haari keai. Hwei hawarihiri omamari aka kii ani xawara a waiha ani yai waro pata a kutaeni kuë yaro hwei xapiri pata yamapë yai pihipo, 2011 Hydrographic pen, colored pencil, and graphite on paper, 30 × 42 cm. Photo Isabella Matheus. Collection Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand. Gift Clarice O. Tavares, 2021. Untitled, 2011 Hydrographic pen, graphite, and crayons on paper, 29,5 × 42 cm. Photo Isabella Matheus. Collection Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand. Gift Clarice O. Tavares, 2021.

Yamanayomani thë urihi karukai xoao tëhë wamotima thëpë raruu totihio tëhëma thëa. Yamanayoma a, 2013 Hydrographic pen, colored pencil, and graphite on paper, 30 × 42 cm. Photo Isabella Matheus. Collection Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand. Gift Clarice O. Tavares, 2021.

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André Taniki Yanomami

André Taniki is a shaman born in the region of the Upper Catrimani river, in the Brazilian Amazon. His artistic output is directly linked to the presence of Swiss-born Brazilian photographer and activist Claudia Andujar and Morroccoborn French anthropologist Bruce Albert, who have been among the Yanomami since the 1970s. Interested in establishing other image-mediated forms of communication between foreigners, Andujar encouraged Taniki to express himself visually. She and Albert, who have since become important allies to the Yanomami, furnished the necessary materials for the shaman to draw – materials that were new to the Yanomami (who had only recently been in contact with non-Indigenous people) at the time: paper and felt-tip pens.

The drawings became subject for conversation between Taniki and the napë (“foreigners” in Yanomami), who would spend hours talking about both the body paintings as well as the ones rendered on “paper skins”. These drawings by Taniki were done in the late 1970s, in conversation with Bruce Albert, when both were searching for ways to depict shamanic visions. Lushly coloured, the drawings combine abstractions and figurative schemata in structures that seem to represent the organisation of the cosmos from the point of view of the Yanomamis’ sense-universe. Thus, they may be observed as a kind of cartography of that which is visible only to the xapiri – the Yanomami shaman’s auxiliary spirits – and to the

YANOMAMI INDIGENOUS TERRITORY, BRAZIL, 1949 YANOMAMI INDIGENOUS TERRITORY

shamans themselves. Both the circumstances in which they came to being as well as the drawings themselves stand as relevant expressions of the possibilities of translation and communication between different systems of knowledge and relations.

Untitled 1, 1978-81 ca. Crayon on paper 21 × 29 cm

This is the first time the work of André Taniki Yanomami is presented at Biennale Arte.

Untitled 4, 1978-81 ca. Crayon on paper 21 × 29 cm

—David Ribeiro

Untitled 2, 1978-81 ca. Crayon on paper 21 × 29 cm Untitled 3, 1978-81 ca. Crayon on paper 21 × 29 cm

All works Collection Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain

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Kim Yun Shin

WONSAN, NORTH KOREA, 1935 LIVES IN BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA, AND YANGGU, SOUTH KOREA

Add Two Add One, Divide Two Divide One, 2001 Jasper, 39 × 61 × 29 cm. Photo KIM Mingon. Private Collection.

A pioneering figure in Korean and Argentinian art, working in sculpture, painting, and printmaking, Kim Yun Shin has travelled extensively during her life, an experience which is deeply reflected in her work. She was born in the city of Wonsan, in what is now North Korea, during the Japanese occupation, yet part of her family was able to flee to South Korea during the 1945 Division of Korea. In Seoul, she studied sculpture at the Hongik University in the 1950s and moved to Paris in the 1960s, where she studied at the École Nationale Supérieure de Beaux-Arts, Paris (1964–1969). She participated in the 1973 Bienal de São Paulo. In 1984, Kim radically shifted her trajectory when she moved to Buenos Aires and travelled throughout Latin America,

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living in Mexico (1988–1991) as well as in Brazil (2001–2002), which impacted her work and choice of materials, such as her sculptures in wood and stone. She recently relocated to the small town of Yanggu, Gangwon-do, in northern South Korea. At the Biennale Arte, Kim presents a group of eight sculptures, four made in wood between 1979 and 1984, and four in stone, produced between 1991 and 2001. Conceptually, all of Kim’s works since the late 1970s possess the same title: Add Two Add One, Divide Two Divide One. Add and Divide are connected to Chinese philosophy’s Yin and Yang, which in turn represent multiple dichotomies and opposing concepts that are closely intertwined – two that

are one, one that is two. Yin represents fragmentation, splitting, division, while Yang represents convergence, integration, addition. Kim’s operations and sculptural process are precisely those – she divides, splits, extracts from the stone and wood to construct her work. In this sense, at the core of Kim’s sculptural work in wood and stone lies the opposing relationship between art and nature, culture and landscape, geometry and the organic – which, through her laborious sculptural process, become one and two. This is the first time the work of Kim Yun Shin is presented at Biennale Arte. —Adriano Pedrosa

Add Two Add One, Divide Two Divide One, 1986 Wood, 87 × 37 × 37 cm. Photo KIM Mingon. Private Collection.

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Anna Zemánková

Self-taught artist Anna Zemánková was born in Moravia and began producing lyrical compositions in late middle age. Zemánková initially trained as a dental technician before becoming a mother to four children, one of whom died at the age of four. After sinking into a depression, she began producing the lyrical compositions she is now known for, finding their creation to be therapeutic. She would work in the early hours of the morning, embracing semiconsciousness between sleep and wakefulness and taking advantage of the calm before the onslaught of her domestic duties. Always listening to classical music as she worked, Zemánková would intuitively draw, emboss, and embroider upon her support to construct botanical abstractions in a trancelike state approaching automatism. The impact of music on her practice can be traced through the rhythmic structure of her forms, many of which are built around a visual refrain that unfolds into melodic variations.

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When viewed as a series, Zemánková’s works constitute an invented herbarium of otherworldly organisms. In her own words, she was “growing flowers that are not grown anywhere else”. While her practice has been compared to that of Hilma af Klint and other mediumistic artists, Zemánková never claimed to be informed by a mystic philosophy or communication with a spiritual realm. Instead, her works originated from a subcognitive drive rooted in her own interiority. Forms seem to metastasise with a vital force of their own, laden with fruitlike appendages and delicate arabesques. The imagery of the pieces on display straddle both microcosmic and macroscopic orders, evoking a cartography of unknown astronomical formations as well as the reproductive structures of imagined plant life. —Sybilla Griffin

OLOMOUC, MORAVIA, 1908– 1986, PRAGUE, CZECHOSLOVAKIA

Untitled, 1980 ca. Satin collage, fabric color, acrylic and ballpoint pen on paper, 62.6 × 45 cm. Courtesy Christian Berst Art Brut.

Untitled, !980 ca. Satin collage, fabric color, and ballpoint on paper, 62.6 × 45 cm. Courtesy Christian Berst Art Brut.

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Untitled, 1975 ca. Coloured pencils, ballpoint, embroidery and pearl on paper, 62.6 × 45 cm. Private Collection. Courtesy Christian Berst Art Brut.

“INTERVENTIONS: DECENTERING MODERNISM: ART HISTORY AND AVANT-GARDE ART FROM THE PERIPHERY.” THE ART BULLETIN, VOL. 90, NO. 4 (DEC., 2008).

Modernism spread worldwide because of the West’s dominance, and yet modernism’s radical message inspired non-Western regions to create their own art of resistance against the colonial order. Despite its radical agenda, the Western avant-garde failed to take into account either the progressive heterogenization of art or the richness and creativity of art practices in the peripheries. Its limitations stem from the monolithic, linear narrative of an art history that does not allow for difference, in part a reflection of the unequal power relations between center and periphery. My argument contributes to the recent debates on the need to shift the center of gravity from the originary discourse to a more heterogeneous definition of global modernism, incorporating the changes that have taken place in the twentieth century. It responds to the challenge of transnational art, calling into question the “purity” of the modernist canon and the consequent imputation of the derivative character of the periphery.

PARTHA MITTER

Tupy or not tupy, that is the question.

OSWALD DE ANDRADE

“MANIFESTO ANTROPÓFAGO.” REVISTA DE ANTROPOFAGIA, MAY 1928, SÃO PAULO.

“INCOMPLETE GLOSSARY OF SOURCES FOR LATIN AMERICAN ART.” IN CARTOGRAPHIES, EDITED BY IVO MESQUITA, PAULO HERKENHOFF, AND JUSTO MELLADO. WINNIPEG: WINNIPEG ART GALLERY, 1993.

DUALITY. Where does the Third World end and the First World begin in this world? (Or vice versa?) Is Latin American art in alignment with European and North American art? Or is it the setting of a local tradition? The Shakespearean dilemma evolves to “Tupy, or not Tupy, that is the question” (pronounce “to pe”), where the name of this Native people gives Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade the possibility of condensing in a synthesis the fundamental doubt of national identity at the crossroad of cultures and historical times.

PAULO HERKENHOFF

Adriano Pedrosa

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This section of the Nucleo Storico is devoted to portraits and representations of the human figure made in the Global South in twentieth century. It gathers over one hundred works by artists from Algeria, Aotearoa – New Zealand, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, China, Colombia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, Ghana, Guatemala, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jamaica, Korea, Lebanon, Malaysia, Mexico, Mozambique, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Singapore, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Tunisia, Turkey, Uruguay, Venezuela, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe. They are mostly paintings, but also include sculpture and works on paper, spanning the years from 1915 to 1990. It is difficult to establish a strict overarching chronology here, as the processes may be quite singular in each country or region, often following their own idiosyncratic courses. For this reason, the chronological arc is much wider than the typical modernist time frame. The selection shows how the human figure has been explored in countless ways by artists in the Global South, reflecting on the crisis of representation around that very figure, something that marked much of the art in twentieth century, posing other questions: who could be represented, by whom, and how? Most works depict nonwhite characters, which in Venice, at the heart of the Biennale Arte, becomes an emblematic feature of this large and heterogeneous group and of the International Art Exhibition itself. Many artists in the Global South encountered European modernism through travel, study, or books. Yet they bring their own highly personal and powerful reflections and contributions to their works, depicting figures from their own visual repertoires, histories, and lives – including themselves. In this process, modernism was appropriated and devoured in the region. One key concept here is antropofagia – a term coined by Brazilian modernist and intellectual, Oswald de Andrade, in his 1928 Manifesto antropófago. Antropofagia is offered as a tool for the modern intellectual working at the margins of Europe to appropriate metropolitan culture. By cannibalising it, they produce something of their own. The concept evokes the cannibalistic practice of the Indigenous Tupinambá people in pre-invasion Brazil, who ate the flesh of the enemies they defeated in order to acquire their virtues. The unique, distinct types of modernism around the Global South assume radically new figures and forms as they often dialogue with local and Indigenous narratives and references. We are all too familiar with the history of modernism in Euroamerica, yet the modernisms in the Global South remain largely unknown, and thus they assume a truly contemporary relevance – we urgently need to learn more about them. Most of the artists in the Nucleo Storico are exhibited in the International Art Exhibition for the first time, and thus a historical debt is paid to them. In this context, special attention is placed on the extraordinary lives of each individual maker, who represent vast movements and cultural transformations that are impossible to capture in a single exhibition. For this reason, the Nucleo Storico is intended as a draft, a provocation, and a speculative curatorial exercise. It seeks to challenge the boundaries and definitions of modernism, opening up new paths and possibilities for understanding twentieth century art.

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Mariam Abdel-Aleem

ALEXANDRIA, EGYPT, 1930–2010

Both an artist and educator, Mariam Abdel-Aleem, perhaps best known for her printmaking practice, experimented with a variety of media and subjects throughout her oeuvre. She trained at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cairo (1954) and obtained an MFA in graphic arts from the University of Southern California (1957), followed by a PhD from Helwan University in Cairo. She also trained at the Pratt Institute in New York. Abdel-Aleem was a founding member of the Association of Fine Artists in Alexandria and was an esteemed educator who taught at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Alexandria from its establishment in 1958. She experimented with a variety of media and subjects throughout her practice, exploring printmaking and engraving primarily, paintings on paper and on canvas, drawings, and sculpture. Her work was largely concerned with social issues drawn from daily life in Egypt. Abdel-Aleem’s painting Clinic (1958) depicts a queue of patients waiting at the door to a medical clinic as a white dove soars above them. Women stand in line with their children, each dressed in bold, patterned clothing; one carries fresh produce, while others carry bowls of food. A male nurse stands in a white uniform guarding the entrance to the clinic, marked with a sign that reads “Visit” in Arabic script. This painting is characteristic of Abdel-Aleem’s practice, featuring women protagonists

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Clinic, 1958 Oil on board, 77 × 83 cm. Collection of Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah. Courtesy Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah.

rendered in stylised figurations and gestural brushstrokes. In it, she presents a social commentary on life in 1950s’ Egypt, centring the struggles of the average Egyptian woman. She exhibited extensively in Egypt and internationally, and notably represented Egypt at numerous international biennials. Her work was presented at Biennale Arte in 1964. —Nadine Nour el Din

Affandi produced many self-portraits in different media, including ink, oil, and clay. Self-Portrait (1975) was one of the works presented in his solo exhibition in Singapore in 1975, held when Affandi was conferred an honorary doctorate from the University of Singapore. A photograph from the event shows Affandi creating this work on-site in front of an audience. Affandi donated two paintings, including this one, to the National Museum Art Gallery in Singapore after its establishment in 1976, and both were subsequently incorporated into the present National Gallery Singapore’s collection. The painting shows Affandi’s mature style: winding threads of bold yellow, red, and green form his facial features, and areas of ochre and green painted using his palm or fingers resemble a brushed wash. —Anissa Rahadiningtyas

Self-Portrait, 1975 Oil on canvas, 130 × 100.5 cm. Collection of National Gallery Singapore. Courtesy the Artist; National Heritage Board, Singapore. © Affandi Foundation.

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One of Indonesia’s most celebrated painters, Affandi was a self-taught artist who began painting in the 1930s. He was active in a guerilla movement as well as with artists’ sanggars (artist-run community spaces and studios) during the Indonesian revolutionary period (1945–1950) in Yogyakarta, Central Java. Along with other Indonesian artists of his generation, such as S. Sudjojono and Hendra Gunawan, Affandi joined the Seniman Indonesia Muda (Young Indonesian Artists) group in 1946. Sponsored by the Indian government, Affandi studied painting at Santiniketan from 1949 to 1951 before travelling and exhibiting his works in Europe. He was the Indonesian representative at the Bienal de São Paulo in 1953 and at La Biennale di Venezia in 1954. Affandi is known for painting his subject matter without sketching it beforehand; he squeezed paint from tubes directly onto his canvases, layering it spontaneously to express strong linear movement and tension.

CIREBON, INDONESIA, 1907– 1990, YOGYAKARTA, INDONESIA

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Affandi

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Miguel Alandia Pantoja

CATAVI, BOLIVIA, 1914– 1975, LIMA, PERU

Miguel Alandia Pantoja’s work must be understood both within the political history of Bolivia and in relationship to Mexican muralism. A revolutionary, painter, and fighter in the Chaco War who survived captivity in Paraguay, Alandia was a labour leader and artist who received major state commissions in La Paz after the Revolution of 1952. His murals La educación (1957) and La medicina boliviana (1957) were no doubt in conversation with works by Diego Rivera. With their dramatic chiaroscuro and anguished depictions of labouring, wounded, and grieving Indigenous and campesino bodies, Alandia’s paintings demonstrate affinities with those of José Clemente Orozco and David Siqueiros. His work was not, however, mere mimicry of Mexican masters but a potent contribution to twentieth-century political art. Alandia was forced to flee Bolivia following the 1971 military coup. He died not long after in exile in Lima, Peru. Although its title (“girl” in Aymara) is unremarkable, Miguel Alandia Pantoja’s Imilla (1960) is anything but innocuous. The figure of the seated girl fills the entirety of the nocturnal picture. Her wrapped body appears like a high peak rising out of the altiplano. The imilla’s clothing recalls that of the female militia members in Alandia’s earlier Milicianos (1957). Perfectly symmetrical, her face is as still as her body is motionless. She gazes directly at the viewer though her pupils remain hidden in shadow. She is neither a sleeping child nor a

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romantic allegory of Indigenous femininity. This imilla is waiting, watching, as vigilant as a sentry in the night. Her precipitous form seems to be more than a compositional preference – the stony solidity of her watchful presence suggests a sisterhood with her namesake: the mountain Imilla Apachita. This Aymara girl, too, is a mountain, a militant, who will defend her people. This is the first time the work of Miguel Alandia Pantoja is presented at Biennale Arte. —Lisa Trever

Imilla, 1960 Oil on pressed cardboard, 77 × 59.7 cm. Photo Michael Dunn. Collection Museo Nacional de Arte. Courtesy Fundación Cultural del Banco Central de Bolivia.

folklore, poetry, and literature as well his Assyrian, Babylonian, and Sumerian heritage. Azzawi is a humanist with a deep political engagement, and there are many works that reflect on war, conflict, human suffering, and the Palestine cause. A Wolf Howls: Memories of a Poet (1968) stands out among al-Azzawi’s first paintings, made in the 1960s, that use mythological and folklore references. It is painted in the aftermath of a turbulent period – the Six Day War in 1967 (when Syria, Jordan, and Iraq were defeated by Israel) and the Ba’ath coup, which brought the Socialist Ba’ath party back to power in Iraq. The painting is based on an unpublished poem by Muzaffar Al-Nawab – a friend of al-Azzawi a major

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figure in Arab literature, and a fierce critic of dictatorial regimes – that tells the story of a mother who lost her son during the Ba’ath coup. The intricate colourful motifs reference the kilim rugs used by peasants in the south, evoking modernist geometric abstraction. In 1969, the work illustrated the radical manifesto entitled Towards a New Vision, co-authored by al-Azzawi which argued for a transgressive and innovative art practice and for the artist to be both critic and revolutionary. —Adriano Pedrosa A Wolf Howls: Memories of a Poet, 1968 Oil on canvas, 84 × 104 cm. Collection of Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah. Courtesy Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah.

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Dia al-Azzawi is a pivotal figure in Iraqi, Arab, and Global South modernisms. He studied archaeology at the College of Arts, Baghdad, and visual arts at the Institute of Fine Arts in Baghdad, and did his military service in Mosul, with its rich history and culture – a singular background that allowed him to delve into Iraqi histories and traditions. Al-Azzawi belongs to the third generation of Iraqi modern artists: after the Pioneers, who introduced modernism to the country, and the Baghdad Modern Art Group co-founded by Jewad Selim who, next to al-Azzawi are considered the two most iconic Iraqi artists of the twentieth century. Al-Azzawi in particular was able to take advantage of his unique knowledge and life experience, drawing from Iraqi

BAGHDAD, IRAQ, 1939 LIVES IN LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM, JORDAN, AND LEBANON

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Dia al-Azzawi

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María Aranís

María Aranís was a Chilean painter, belonging to the generation of women at the beginning of the twentieth century who consolidated female access to the modern system of the arts. Little is known about the history of María Aranís. Unlike her sister, the painter Graciela (Chela) Aranís, there are few records about her artistic development and personal biography. Among the limited information we have, we know that she entered the School of Fine Arts, and her work was included in the Chilean shipment for the IberoAmerican Exhibition in Seville in 1929. She also participated in the Association of Artists of Chile, which denounced the State’s abandonment of cultural affairs, and which ultimately gave rise to the

Salón de los independientes (1931). She promoted the cooperation of her peers and advocated for a social art that granted access to the popular classes. Aranís would be the only woman of twelve on the board of directors. The appearance of a body of production among women of the period presents us with corporality as a political issue through which artists constructed their identity. La Negra (1931) responds to this angular momentum. Painted in Paris, it reveals the artist’s interest in addressing female experiences alongside the unified struggle for women’s demands, wage improvements, public health, and universal suffrage. This intersects, however, with the conjugation

SANTIAGO, CHILE, 1903– 1966, [UNKNOWN], CHILE

of social class and ethnic group present in these issues: white and middle-class women versus the experiences of racialised, working-class, and peasant women. It is precisely in this period that multiclass meetings in Chile are reinforced, with the appearance of the Popular Front and the MEMCH (Movement for the Emancipation of Women in Chile) in which various female and feminist agencies participated, creating ties of belonging in a new paradigm within the history of women. This is the first time the work of María Aranís is presented at Biennale Arte. —Gloria Cortes Aliaga

La negra, 1931 Oil on canvas, 64.8 × 54 cm. Collection Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago de Chile.

After figurative beginnings, he distinguished himself as a predominantly abstract painter, moving from brightly coloured geometric compositions to lyrical abstraction. Baigneuse [Bather] (1952) was painted the year Baroukh frequented the academy of the painter André Lhote – who is regarded as a contributor to Cubism – in Paris. The sculptural and deconstructed rendering of the body of the bather, as well as her reclining position with her legs crossed and her head resting on her folded arm, recall female nudes by Pablo Picasso. But the figure here is not naked. The canvas’s elongated format, emphasised by horizontal lines and dynamic curves, impart a restful atmosphere to the scene, despite the contrasted palette dominated by shades of red.

The bather’s eyes are closed: the painting’s actual topic seems to be sleep or, rather, dreams. Her spheric right breast, dominating the scene, conjures both a moon and the head of a possible second figure embracing the woman. Their arms merge into one. It ends in a hand with four short, rounded fingers evoking an animal’s paw. These dreamlike elements place Baigneuse at the crossroads of geometric figuration and Surrealism.

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Ezekiel Baroukh was a member of the Surrealist group Art and Liberty, formed in Egypt in 1938. Raised in Alexandria, he received a state-funded scholarship to study at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome before returning to Egypt. On the eve of World War II, Art and Liberty denounced fascism, encouraging many communists and Jews such as Baroukh and the lawyer Annette Fedida, his wife, to become involved. Baroukh was also a member of the Atelier d’Alexandrie, a key institution in twentieth-century Egypt’s cultural scene that brought together cosmopolitan artists and intellectuals. In 1946, he settled in France and exhibited regularly in Lyon with a group of artists called Contraste, initiated by Jean-Marcel HérautDumas. Baroukh received the Hallmark Art Award (1949).

MANSOURA, EGYPT, 1909– 1984, PARIS, FRANCE

This is the first time the work of Ezekiel Baroukh is presented at Biennale Arte. —Nadine Atallah

Baigneuse, 1952-54 ca. Oil on canvas, 60 × 120 cm. Photo Maria and Mansour Dib. Courtesy of Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation.

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Ezekiel Baroukh

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Baya

BORDJ EL KIFFAN, ALGERIA, 1931– 1998, BLIDA, ALGERIA

Baya Mahieddine – born Fatima Haddad, and known simply as Baya – was a selftaught Algerian artist whose creative practice extended over six decades. One may come across words such as “primitive”, “childlike”, “folk art”, “art naïf”, “feminist art”, “postwar émigré art”, “art brut”, and “Surrealism” used in connection to Baya’s work, pointing to the heterogeneity and complexity of influences that shaped her artistic trajectory. She herself defied art-historical categorisation, and humorously referred to her practice as Baya-ism. At the age of fourteen, she was introduced by the artist Jean Peyrissac to the French art dealer Aimé Maeght on the latter’s visit to Algiers. Two years later, her work was included in the Second Surrealist Exhibition in Paris, followed by a solo show at Galerie Maeght in Paris, for which André Breton wrote a preface in a special issue of the art magazine Derrière le miroir.

Baya is best known for her vibrant depictions of paradises occupied exclusively by women in ornate dresses. Her female characters appear bold and spirited, and often look directly at the viewer with their prominent, almost audaciously contoured eyes. They are usually engaged in congenial pursuits, such as playing musical instruments, carrying vases of harvested fruit or admiring butterflies. Femme à la Robe Rose (1945) is one of Baya’s earliest

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works, having been executed when the artist was only 14 years of age. Describing her own compositions as “dreamscapes”, Baya infuses them with luminous colour and bustling patterns, rendering the world through a playful, imaginary lens. Steeped in memories of her childhood, Baya’s work offered an idyllic respite from an oftentimes difficult reality of her own life. —Suheyla Takesh

Femme à la Robe Rose, 1945 Watercolour and gouache on paper, 59 × 47.2 cm. Collection of Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah. Courtesy Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah.

Femme au Paon, n.d. Gouache on paper, 103 × 70 cm. Photo Maria and Mansour Dib. Courtesy of Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation.

While undated, Ben Salem’s painting Femme au Paon reflects the vivacity, whimsicality, and cultural symbolism characterising his oeuvre. This image portrays a youthful female figure seated in a paradisiacal garden teeming with life. The woman’s tattooed forehead, hennaed hands, embroidered neckline, and jewellery meld with an environment of atmospheric and vegetal shapes, decorated plumes, and auspicious creatures. Ben Salem’s iconography, flat colour planes, and spatial imagining connect the work to the Islamic painting traditions he revered. His undulating lines and

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palette of pastel pinks, blues, greens, and oranges animate the composition with a joyful vitality reflective of his wider practice. The work’s imaginary, allegorical qualities present the artist’s philosophical journey into life and creative power in the face of colonisation and historical erasure. Believing that an artist should bring joy and avert destruction, Ben Salem painted to instil serenity, mental freedom, and love in his viewers. This is the first time the work of Aly Ben Salem is presented at Biennale Arte. —Jessica Gerschultz

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Aly Ben Salem was a modern artist who described painting as a liberatory act of love. While he spent much of his career in Sweden and France, he was committed to Tunisian cultural patrimony and political autonomy. In the 1930s, Ben Salem was among the first Arab Muslims to attend the École des Beaux-Arts in Tunis. He decorated the Tunisian pavilion at the 1937 Exposition Internationale in Paris and worked as a designer for the Musée des Arts Indigènes under the French protectorate. His reimagining of historical Tunisian art informed his aesthetic approaches and opened a field of inquiry for a generation of artists who sought to recuperate art from colonial hegemony. Moving to Stockholm after 1945, Ben Salem expressed political solidarity through his socially committed practice, which drew inspiration from miniature and reverse-glass painting. He created lyrical compositions in a quest to cultivate a love for beauty and life itself.

TUNIS, TUNISIA, 1910– 2001, STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN

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Aly Ben Salem

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Semiha Berksoy

Semiha Berksoy, a renowned dramatic soprano, painter, sculptor, actor, costume designer, and performance artist, practiced “total art” across multiple disciplines throughout her long and prolific life at the forefront of maledominated Turkish and German cultural scenes. Berksoy grew up in a family of intellectuals in the cultural heart of Istanbul’s Tepebaşı neighbourhood in the final years of the Ottoman Empire. She pursued painting and sculpture at Istanbul’s Academy of Fine Arts and voice training under Nimet Vahit, one of the first Turkish female vocalists trained in Western classical music. Berksoy was also a star of early Turkish films, which resulted in her trademark black bob hairstyle. Performing well into her nineties, she played Ariadne in Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos, Ayşim in Adnan Saygun’s Özsoy, Leonore in Beethoven’s Fidelio, Azucena in Verdi’s Il trovatore, and the lead in Puccini’s Tosca. From the 1960s on, she exhibited her art in Berlin, Bonn, Vienna, Istanbul, New York, and Luxembourg.

ISTANBUL, TURKEY, 1910–2004

Placed above her bed, Berksoy’s My Mother the Painter Fatma Saime (1965) was the key feature of her deeply biographical Semiha Berksoy Room (1994), an inhabited installation that, in her eighties, she created inside her apartment using her paintings of beloved acquaintances and their everyday objects. The portrait bust of the artist’s late mother, who died at twentyseven from Spanish flu, floats in a pale pink realm where a white halo projects uneven but life-affirming rays of light. Fatma Saime’s unusually large eyes resemble those of Fayum funerary portraits. The artist paints her mother as a beautiful corpse – and also a saint. While there is the prerequisite bloodshed, it is counteracted by the presence of an enormous blooming flower, akin to the sacred heart. The flower symbolises her mother’s boundless love and artistic legacy transmitted to her daughter in defiance of death. The indomitable black line, which appears in most of Berksoy’s paintings, is not death’s signifier, but a marker of life and afterlife. —Deniz Turker

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My Mother the Painter Fatma Saime, 1965 Oil on masonyte, 93 × 65 cm. Collection Gallerist. Courtesy Galerist and Semiha Berksoy Estate. © Galerist and Semiha Berksoy Estate.

Georgette Chen’s life can be marked by two phases: the first, a period of travel between China, the United States, and Europe, during which the two World Wars and the Chinese Civil War unfolded around her as she pursued her art; and the second, a period in which she found a new home in Singapore and taught the next generation of artists. What remained consistent throughout her life was her ability to find inspiration in the plurality of cultures that she encountered. Born to the wealthy Zhang Jingjiang family in China, Chen had the means to undergo formal art training. She trained under the Russian artist Viktor Podgursky in Shanghai, and later at art academies such as the Art Students League of New York and the Académie Colarossi in Paris. Her marriage to Trinidad-born Chinese diplomat Eugene Chen in 1930 enabled her to continue her artistic practice in France and China. Following World War II, she relocated to Malaya in 1951 and settled in Singapore in 1953, where she became an influential figure in the arts.

Self Portrait (1946) demonstrates Chen’s lifelong commitment to her art. Chen confronts the viewer with her assured gaze and her face occupies the entire canvas. The pastel colours used for her complexion are set in contrast to the muted grey and brown background, imbuing the painting with a sense of austerity. When this painting was made, Chen had just lost her husband and was in search of a quiet place to settle down where she could rehabilitate and paint. Despite her personal tragedy, Chen remained steadfast in her aspiration to be a successful artist. Between 1945 and 1947, she travelled around China, making works in preparation for her subsequent solo exhibitions in Shanghai (1947), New York (1949), Paris (1950), and Singapore (1953). This is the first time the work of Georgette Chen is presented at Biennale Arte. —Lim Shujuan

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ZHEJIANG, CHINA, 1906– 1993, SINGAPORE

Self Portrait, 1946 ca. Oil on canvas, 22.5 × 17.5 cm. Collection of National Gallery Singapore. Courtesy National Heritage Board, Singapore; Lee Foundation.

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Georgette Chen

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Saloua Raouda Choucair

BEIRUT, LEBANON, 1916–2017

Saloua Raouda Choucair was an artist with the mind of a poet, the soul of an architect, and the precision of a mathematician. Despite receiving a formal art education, she chose to forge her own path of artistic exploration. She discovered Sufi mysticism and the arithmetic foundations of Islamic art on a trip to Egypt in 1943. In 1948, Choucair furthered her art studies in Paris at the Académie des Beaux-Arts and attended the Atelier d’Art Abstrait. However, she always emphasised that her exposure to the geometrical abstraction of Islamic art shaped her artistic sensibilities prior to her encounters with Western art trends and philosophies. Choucair dedicated herself to her signature sculptures after 1957. These were composed of modular parts that could be assembled and disassembled – sculptures that captured rhythm, harmony, and perfection.

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Self-Portait, 1943 Oil on board, 44 × 32 cm. Courtesy Saloua Raouda Choucair Foundation.

In Self-Portrait (1943), Choucair boasts the natural universality of her craft. Light and shadow are seen as geometric shapes rather than hues, which creates rhythm and depth. This painting is truly at the crossroads of different eras in the artist’s body of work, proving that Choucair’s avant-gardism was not bound to any specific art history, but naturally embodied multiple histories at once. This is the first time the work of Saloua Raouda Choucair is presented at Biennale Arte. —Fadia Antar

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Chua Mia Tee, one of the leading realist artists in Singapore, painted some of the most iconic artworks in Singapore’s history, such as Epic Poem of Malaya (1955) and National Language Class (1959). Chua migrated to Singapore from China in 1937 after fleeing the Sino-Japanese War. He showed early artistic inclinations and studied art under Chen Chong Swee, another Chinese émigré who moved to Singapore, at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, where he eventually also taught. Chua was a core member of two art organisations founded in Singapore in the 1950s that espoused art for the masses: the Singapore Chinese High Schools’ Graduates of 1953 Arts Research Group and the Equator Art Society. These groups, comprising practitioners from various art disciplines, believed in portraying the reality of everyday life and creating art that uplifts society. Equator Art Society in particular developed social realist art in Singapore.

Road Construction Worker (1955) is Chua’s portrait of an unnamed labourer. The subject sits on the floor, shirtless and barefoot. Veins protrude from his arms and hands, and sweat trickles from his neck and armpit, conveying the physical strain of his work. He is unshaven, and his dark hair is tousled and unkempt. He furrows his brow and directs his haunting gaze at the viewer, seemingly pleading for compassion. Chua believes in not only capturing the physical

Road Construction Worker, 1955 Oil on canvas, 96 × 66 cm. Collection of National Gallery Singapore. Courtesy National Heritage Board, Singapore.

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SHANTOU, CHINA, 1931 LIVES IN SINGAPORE

likeness of his subjects but also their spirit, as he subscribes to the principles of “truth, virtue, and beauty” in his art. By painting this individual, Chua pays tribute to Singapore’s construction workers, many of whom were migrants, who were key to the country’s infrastructural expansion. This is the first time the work of Chia Mia Tee is presented at Biennale Arte. —Clarissa Chikiamco

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Chua Mia Tee

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Julia Codesido

Julia Codesido was not only a painter, printmaker, and educator but also – starting in the first decades of the twentieth century – a feminist activist. Codesido moved to Europe with her family in 1900, when she was seventeen years old. During the eighteen years Codesido would stay in Europe, she came into contact with the work of European masters. Back in Lima in 1918, she decided to become a painter. She was one of the first women admitted to the recently founded Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes and would later become one of the institution’s most innovative professors. Codesido’s philosophy changed course when she enrolled in classes with José Sabogal, the instigator of Pictorial Indigenism in Peru, the primary

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goal of which was to vindicate Indigenous populations and forge a broader and more inclusive vision of nationhood. Though principally a painter, Codesido explored block printing as well. Her work was frequently featured in the influential magazine Amauta. Committed to Indigenism and informed by the frequent trips she took to all corners of her native Peru, Codesido developed a unique pictorial language that redefined national identity by embracing its native roots. In her work, the artist not only explored Peruvian identity but also reworked the figure of woman. A feminist activist, Codesido was a member of a number of groups in the early 1920s that defended women’s rights

LIMA, PERU, 1883–1979

in both the private and public spheres. Painted in vibrant colours, Vendedora ayacuchana (1927) depicts a barefoot woman wrapped in a typical Peruvian blanket. Her features are striking and the look in her eye profound. This work, like all of Codesido’s production from this period, reflected her interest in the aesthetic and sensibility of the Andes. This is the first time the work of Julia Codesido is presented at Biennale Arte. —Sonia Becce

Vendedora ayacuchana, 1927 Oil on canvas, 95 × 110 cm. Museo de Arte de Lima. Comité de Formación de Colecciones 2017.

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Colson experienced a transformative phase after meeting Toyo Kurimoto, who later became his life partner. This pivotal juncture not only prompted Colson to incorporate elements from Kurimoto’s Japanese culture into his oeuvre, but it also inspired the portrayal of Kurimoto in a fragmented manner through colour layers that coalesce organically. In 1926, Colson initiated his foray into Cubism, and Japonesa (1926) serves as a precursor to his evolution within this stylistic realm. Its chromatic intensity, formal purity, and inherent organicity remain unmatched in Colson’s subsequent Cubist creations. The inclusion of black circles establishing a visual nexus between heaven and earth is noteworthy, as is the solitary, penetrating eye achieved through a pigment incision that exposes the underlying wood. Colson uses the female figure as an archetype of serene sanctity. Notable is his signature, traversing the composition from top to bottom with features reminiscent of oriental calligraphy. This is the first time the work of Jaime Colson is presented at Biennale Arte. —Sara Herman

Japonesa, 1926 Oil on cardbord, 35.5 × 41 cm. Photo Mariano Hernández. Courtesy Museo Bellapart. © Mariano Hernández 2024.

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Jaime Colson is an artist from Tubagua, situated in the northern region of Puerto Plata, in the Dominican Republic. The singularity of his birthplace, a bustling coastal town, coupled with the diverse culture of his parentage – a blend of Spanish, North American, and Dominican, each adding distinct Black and Taíno heritages – exerted a profound influence on Colson’s artistic oeuvre. Colson studied painting at the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid. Subsequently, he established himself in Barcelona, forging connections with the Catalan avant-garde. In the 1920s, Colson replicated this immersive artistic process in Paris. Throughout his fifty-year career, he traversed stylistically through realism, Cubism, Surrealism, and a variant of Neoclassicism he termed Neo-Humanism. Colson’s talent for experimenting with distinct artistic discourses is apparent in his varied creative expressions. What truly encapsulates Colson’s body of work is his unwavering commitment to painting as an ideological and emotional platform. This dedicated effort facilitated a seamless and organic transition between different artistic vocabularies.

PUERTO PLATA, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC, 1901– 1975, SANTO DOMINGO, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

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Jaime Colson

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Olga Costa

LEIPZIG, GERMANY, 1913– 1993, GUANAJUATO, MEXICO

Olga Kostakowsky, better known as Olga Costa, was a painter and influential cultural promoter of Mexican Modernism. Born in Germany in 1913, she emigrated with her family to Mexico City at the age of twelve. There, she briefly studied art at the Fine Arts School in 1933 with Carlos Mérida and Rufino Tamayo. Together with Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and María Izquierdo, among others, she was part of the inaugural exhibition of the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana in 1949. An enthusiast of arts and culture, she co-founded many galleries and art spaces and several museums in the state of Guanajuato, such as the Museo del Pueblo. With exhibitions in New York, Paris, and Stockholm, Costa was one of the most important female representatives of Mexican Modernism, engaging with questions around Mexican identity, gender roles, and everyday life.

In Costa’s Autorretrato (1947), we encounter a selfassured painter on the patio of a traditional house in the Mexican countryside. Sitting in the shade on a hot day, Olga looks at us with an unwavering gaze, scrutinising our attempts to observe her. Perhaps it is the intensity of her almost turquoise blue eyes, a distinctive trait seldom found among the people in Mexico, that elicits profound admiration. Yet, dressed in her traditional Mexican blouse and handcrafted earrings, Costa lets us know that she belongs

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to the same people, regardless of her origins. Painted in the same year that Costa became a Mexican citizen, Autorretrato shows Costa’s commitment to her new homeland and belongs to her oeuvre of depictions of Mexican culture. This is the first time the work of Olga Costa is presented at Biennale Arte. —Eva Posas

Autorretrato, 1947 Oil on canvas, 90 × 75 cm. Photo Francisco Kochen. Andrés Blaisten Collection. Courtesy Andrés Blaisten Collection. © Francisco Kochen.

Covarrubias’s painting El Hueso (1940) depicts an Indigenous man with an umbrella sitting calmly, dressed in a suit and hat – a choice of clothes befitting a “modern man” – with a bone next to him. Waiting in what seems to be a porch somewhere in rural Mexico, the man has a glimpse of sadness in his eyes. Also known as Maestro Rural, this canvas shows a teacher waiting for un hueso, which is slang for getting a job through the favour of the politician in power. In this case, the pin on the lapel of the jacket indicates that the man is waiting for

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someone at the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which was founded in 1929 and held uninterrupted control in the country for seventy-one years. While depicting daily life in the countryside, Covarrubias painted a subtle critique of the political and social state of Mexico’s modernisation. This is the first time the work of Miguel Covarrubias is presented at Biennale Arte —Eva Posas

El Hueso, 1940 Oil on canvas, 35.6 × 26 cm. Courtesy Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura; Museo Nacional de Arte, Ciudad de México.

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Miguel Covarrubias was a painter, writer, illustrator, and documentarist of Indigenous cultures with sharp humour and a satirical eye, whose ethnographic research would greatly impact Mexico’s national identity after the Mexican Revolution. He was born in Mexico City in 1904. At the age of nineteen, he travelled to New York, where he started working for magazines such as Vanity Fair. There, he met artists such as Tina Modotti, Edward Weston, Diego Rivera, and Frida Kahlo. In the 1930s, he travelled to Asia and, upon his return to Mexico in the 1940s, he explored the country on a quest for Mexican culture. The resulting books from these years were Mexico South: The Isthmus of Tehuantepec (1946) and Indian Art of Mexico and Central America (1957). Although his Art Deco evocations might have reinforced stereotypes through an outsider gaze, Covarrubias recorded non-Western cultures, admiring the yet unseen and unaccepted in his time.

MEXICO CITY, 1904–1957

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Miguel Covarrubias

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Djanira da Motta e Silva

“Painting and travelling are verbs of my destiny” – this is how Djanira da Motta e Silva defined her trajectory as an artist. A self-taught painter, Djanira, as she preferred to be called, emerged on the Brazilian art scene in the 1940s. The daughter of an Austrian mother and a father of indigenous background, the artist spent her childhood and teenage years travelling in the backlands of São Paulo. At the end of the 1930s, she moved to Rio de Janeiro, where she dedicated herself to painting, establishing professional and affective exchanges with her peers. The artistic context of the 1940s in Rio de Janeiro was marked by the presence of European war refugees, the public patronage

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of the Estado Novo (the Third Brazilian Republic), and the incorporation of the formal and thematic ruptures prompted by the modernist avant-garde of the 1920s. In this context, Djanira’s work aroused the interest of art critics, who classified her as “naive” and “primitive”, labels the artist emphatically challenged during her lifetime. With an interest in everyday life, vernacular Brazilian culture, representations of labour and workers, and the cultural diversity of her country, Djanira travelled across Brazil and translated into paintings the reality that she insisted on seeing up close. In a 1976 statement, the painter declared

AVARÉ, BRAZIL, 1914– 1979, RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL

that this experience was “richer in plastic teachings than the sterility of formalisms neither felt nor lived”. In 1960, Djanira travelled to Maranhão in north-eastern Brazil, where she spent time with the Canela people (today self-named as the Timbira). In a representation entirely void of romanticism, two children display their body paint, while their legs and feet blend in with the roots of the tree that supports them. This work reflects not only Djanira’s interest in indigenous graphism, but marks the artist’s encounter with her indigenous ancestry, partly lost in the miscegenation process but always claimed by the artist as her roots.

Crianças Kanelas, 1960 Oil on canvas, 130 × 97 cm. Photo Jaime Acioli. Courtesy Pinakotheke, Rio de Janeiro. © Jaime Acioli.

This is the first time the work of Djanira da Motta e Silva is presented at Biennale Arte. —Isabella Rjeille

NUCLEO STORICO • PORTRAITS

A precocious artist, Emiliano Di Cavalcanti began his career at the age of eighteen in the world of caricature and cartoons for magazines and newspapers. Born in Rio de Janeiro, Cavalcanti arrived to São Paulo in 1917 as groups of artists, painters, and writers were mobilising towards the Modern Art Week festival for which he even designed the poster and the cover of the catalogue. The great contradiction of Brazilian modernism was the same one that burdened Cavalcanti and his work: they defended the need to “update” Brazilian art with what was happening in the European avant-garde, especially Cubism, while they sought to reconnect Brazilian art with an idea of “national identity”, a search for lost roots, which led them to become interested in a “popular” Brazilian culture.

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RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL, 1897–1976

Três mulatas (moças do interior) (1922) seeks a representation of a typically Brazilian stereotype, that of the mulata, a term used in Brazil in a racist and prejudiced way to refer to mixed-race people. In a reference to the classic theme of the Three Graces, the woman in front turns her back on the other two, each looks in one direction and they don’t look at each other, a construction that reinforces the opposition between the sense of unity between them and the isolation in which each one finds herself. The

Três mulatas (moças do interior), 1922 Oil on canvas, 60 × 50 cm. Photo Instituto Tomie Ohtake. Igor Queiroz Barroso Collection, Fortaleza. Courtesy Instituto Tomie Ohtake.

singularity of each is also marked by the difference in skin tone, which contrasts with the colours of the dresses. As in other representations of women from this phase, the title Girls from the Countryside (moças do interior) along with the simplicity of the clothes and the absence of jewellery or any other adornment highlight the characters’ humble social origins in an idealisation of the povo (common people) typical of many Brazilian Modernists’ social class and elitism. —Fernando Oliva FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Emiliano Di Cavalcanti

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Cícero Dias

Cícero Dias was born on a sugar plantation in the Northeast of Brazil and lived between Paris and Recife, the capital of his home state. He lived the longest of all the Brazilian modernists, and his work ranged from paintings with regionalistic themes to geometric abstraction. In his figurative works, reminiscences of his childhood in the countryside blend with popular culture, occupying the surface of the canvas as if they were collages arranged according to a very particular logic, in which, according to the artist, “the law of time and space does not rule”. Even before travelling to France, Dias’s artistic production

was associated with that of Marc Chagall because of the floating and disproportionate figures in relation to the landscape. In 1948, he created an abstract mural for the Department of Finance in Recife, considered the first of its kind in the country. Negro (1920s) is a critical commentary on the condition of formerly enslaved people (who were freed by law in 1888) in the context of a stillagrarian Brazil. The sense of unbelonging, loneliness, and incommunicability is conveyed through the black and ochre tones used for the protagonist in the foreground, which contrast with the light and

ESCADA, BRAZIL, 1907– 2003, PARIS, FRANCE

vibrant tones used in the rest of the painting. Additionally, the fact that the main character is facing away from the other figures, cornered by the pair of women blocking his passage, enhances those emotions. His gaze is directed towards the viewer, but his expression indicates that his thoughts are far away. In fact, the direction of his gaze is diametrically opposite to that of the flight of the free black bird. The connection between these two antagonistic realities (the bird’s freedom and the protagonist’s confinement) is made by the observer, who witnesses this disparity. —Regina Barros

Negro, 1920s Oil on canvas, 79 × 52 cm. Photo Sergio Guerini. Courtesy Almeida & Dale Galeria de Arte. © Segio Guerini.

Like other members of the Grupo Espartaco, Diz draws from a host of formal and pictorial references, creating in Lavandera a portrait of an Indigenous woman in a static position with disproportionate features and earthy tones. Diz not only incorporates a sense of monumentality with the woman’s geometric form, from which she usually experiments with their contours, but she also crafts a decolonised representation of the female body by using the visual vocabulary of modernism.

Lavandera, n.d. Oil on canvas, 127.8 cm × 97.9 cm. Collection of Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires.

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In this painting, Diz captures a moment of introspection that interrupts the burden of work. It’s a signature characteristic of her work: women are frequently represented with vacant expressions, locked in their thoughts, memories, and dreams, perhaps experiencing a fleeting sense of freedom. This is the first time the work of Juana Elena Diz is presented at Biennale Arte. —Nicolas Cuello

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Juana Elena Diz was a painter, printmaker, and ceramicist born in Argentina in 1925, whose work focused on the general solitude of Indigenous working women. She created a singular approach to realism by moulding their bodies out of solid, almost monumental, geometric structures and building emotional intimacy from desaturated colours and empty spaces. She is known for being the only female member of the Grupo Espartaco (Spartacus Movement, 1959–1968), a collective of artists that claimed the heritage of Mexican muralism. The group promoted a view of art that privileged formal experimentation with regional motifs, positioning it as a revolutionary action against the cultural colonialism of avant-garde art during the 1960s. Along with her colleagues Ricardo Carpani, Mario Mollari, Juan Manuel Sánchez, and Carlos Sessano, among others, she participated in numerous exhibitions in Argentina, the United States, and Europe. In 1975, she migrated to the Balearic Islands in Spain, and she was never heard from again.

BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA, 1925–[UNKNOWN]

NUCLEO STORICO • PORTRAITS

Juana Elena Diz

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Tarsila do Amaral

CAPIVARI, BRAZIL, 1886– 1973, SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL

Tarsila do Amaral was one of the greatest Brazilian modernist artists of the twentieth century. Born in Capivari, in the countryside of the state of São Paulo, to a family of wealthy farmers, she studied in Barcelona and Paris. In the French capital, between 1920 and 1923, she initially had a traditional education at the Académie Julian and with the academic artist Émile Renard before continuing her studies with the Cubists André Lhote and Albert Gleizes as well as attending Fernand Léger’s studio. When she returned to Brazil, she joined the modernist group in São Paulo, made up of Anita Malfatti, Oswald de Andrade (whom she married), Mário de Andrade, and Menotti Del Picchia. Her professional career also began in Paris, where she took part in her first group exhibitions (the Salon de la Société des Artistes Français at the Grand Palais, 1922; the Salon des Indépendants at

the Palais de Bois, 1926). Her first two solo shows both took place at the Percier Gallery in 1926 and 1928. Estudo (Academia no. 2) (1923) was painted following do Amaral’s painting studies with Lhote and Gleizes, and reveals succinct Cubist influences, particularly in the volumetric and geometric constructions, as seen in the body of the woman in the centre, the furniture, the vegetation at the top right, and the framed

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landscape in the background. However, the typical luminosity characteristic of the artist’s oeuvre that was to reach its apogee in her Pau-Brasil phase (1924–1928) is already evident here in the bluish and reddish tones, but especially in the vegetation near the woman’s back, a typical tropical plant, one of those that would gain absurd representations in her Anthropophagic phase (1929– 1930). do Amaral exhibited at La Biennale di Venezia in 1964. —Fernando Olivia

Estudo (Academia no. 2), 1923 Oil on canvas, 61 × 50 cm. Photo Diego Bresani. Private Collection. Courtesy Almeida & Dale Galeria de Arte. © Diego Bresani.

Istriku [My Wife], 1953 Oil on canvas, 102 × 83 cm. Courtesy of National Gallery of Indonesia.

The painting Istriku (1953) shows Dullah’s realist-romantic superiority in depicting female figures as the subject matter. As the title suggests, the figure in this painting is the painter’s wife, Jan Jaerabby Fatima. She is seen sitting and posing as a painting model in the studio, wearing a traditional kebaya, with a folding fan in her hand. Apart from his substantial engagement with nationalist themes, humanism, and local values, Dullah is known as a portrait painter who is skilled at depicting the humanity and

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natural beauty of Indonesia and its people. Apart from Istriku, Dullah painted other figures in his paintings including Halimah Gadis Atjeh (Halimah the Atjeh girl, 1950) and Ni Samprik (1952), both of which belong to the collection of Indonesia’s first President Sukarno. This is the first time the work of Dullah is presented at Biennale Arte. —Asep Topan

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Dullah was central to the emergence of revolutionary paintings in Indonesia during the Indonesian National Revolution (1945–1949). During the Dutch occupation of Yogyakarta (1948–1949), he led a group of young artists, guiding them to directly paint and draw in order to document the history of the nation’s struggle. The event made him known as a “revolutionary painter” among his peers. A committed realist, Dullah also saw his realism as a means to champion the peasants and country people. Coming from a family of batik makers in Surakarta, Dullah learned painting from S. Sudjojono and Affandi when he was a member of Seniman Indonesia Moeda (Indonesian Young Artists) and was also known as a master of portrait painting. In 1950, he was appointed as the Indonesian presidential palace painter. While serving in that position for ten years, his special task was caring for and renovating the paintings in the collection of President Sukarno’s palace.

SURAKARTA, INDONESIA, 1919– 1996, YOGYAKARTA, INDONESIA

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Dullah

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Inji Efflatoun

CAIRO, EGYPT, 1924–1989

painted during Efflatoun’s fouryear imprisonment. Efflatoun, a woman from high society, strove to better understand the reality of the Egyptian people and described prison as an opportunity to connect with underprivileged women. Through her many portraits of her fellow inmates, Efflatoun attempted to denounce the ravages of poverty on women. Ahlam al-sitt Bahanna, or “The Dreams of Lady Bahanna”, shows a prisoner, designated by her first name, embroidering a patterned garment meant for a child she hopes to conceive. This vision of a prisoner embroidering is testimony to a specific event: women prisoners won their right to perform manual labour following a hunger strike in which Efflatoun participated. Works by Inji Efflatoun were presented at Biennale Arte in the Egyptian Pavilion in 1952 and 1968 and in the Central Pavilion in 2015. —Nadine Atallah

Inji Efflatoun was a feminist, Marxist, and anticolonialist artist and activist, born into a Turkish–Circassian aristocratic family. She learned to paint with Kamel el-Telmissany, a member of the Surrealist group Art and Liberty, which she joined in her teens. In the 1940s, she published political books and articles and travelled throughout Europe as an activist. In the 1950s, she used her art to condemn gender inequalities and war and to celebrate workers. From 1959 to 1963, Efflatoun was made a political prisoner under Gamal

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Abdel Nasser’s regime. After her release, she mainly painted rural landscapes and scenes of field labour, leaving large parts of the blank canvas visible. She called this new style “the white light”. While active in Egypt, she extensively travelled and exhibited abroad in São Paulo (1953), Paris and Rome (1967), Moscow, Warsaw, East Berlin and Dresden (1970), Belgrade (1974), Sofia (1975), Prague (1976), New Delhi (1979), and Kuwait (1988). Prisoner, also known as Ahlam al-sitt Bahanna (1963), was

Prisoner, 1963 Oil on wood, 50 × 38 cm. Photo Maria and Mansour Dib. Courtesy Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation.

NUCLEO STORICO • PORTRAITS

Uzo Egonu was described as a loner, child prodigy, and scholar of the Nigerian Nok culture. Supported by his father, Egonu arrived in England late in 1945, where he was promptly enrolled in a private school and immediately subjected to the stark experience of being the only Black person in town. Reserved and hard-working, he left Norfolk for London, registering at the Camberwell College of Arts. He graduated in 1951 and moved to Paris for a year in 1953, spending his time in museums and galleries, especially at the Musée de l’homme. In 1959, determined to further his drawing skills, Egonu took evening classes at the St Martins School of Art. He remained in the UK, attentively following events on the Continent as they unfolded. In 1983, the International Association of Art admitted him to its league of life counsellors, an honour bestowed previously to Henry Moore, Joan Miró, and Louise Nevelson, among others.

The early 1960s were independence years in Africa. For artists in exile, this was a moment of nationalist pride, and Egonu was no exception. Somewhat Fauvist in tenor, his output carries a palette of blue, yellow, and black that emerges in full force in Guinean Girl (1962). Characterised by a deliberate naiveté, a disregard for physiognomic precision, and fuelled by the determination to feel with colour, Egonu’s animated portrait stresses his subject’s features, her large

Guinean Girl, 1962 Oil on canvas, 76 × 63.5 cm. Photo Justin Piperger. Courtesy Grosvenor Gallery, London.

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ONITSHA, NIGERIA, 1931– 1996, LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM

eyes, her poise, and assertive manner. Her nationalist attire is carefully realised and her necklace, which falls casually over her shoulder, suggests that she has just moved closer. A year after producing Guinean Girl, Egonu held his first major solo show at the Woodstock Gallery in London. This is the first time the work of Uzo Egonu is presented at Biennale Arte. —Nancy Dantas FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Uzo Egonu

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Hatem El Mekki

Hatem El Mekki was born in Batavia (currently Jakarta) to a Tunisian father and an Indonesian mother of Chinese origin, moving to his father’s homeland at the age of six. He attended Le lycée Carnot de Tunis, where he mastered the Chinese aquarelle technique, before travelling to Paris on a government scholarship. In Paris, he was an artist-inresidence at the prestigious Cité Internationale des Arts, and during this time there produced illustrations, worked in film, and collaborated with the French magazine Marianne. Upon his return to Tunisia in 1939, he held his first solo exhibitions in Algiers and Tunis, which were met with great acclaim. He briefly moved to Paris again in 1947, exhibiting in various galleries and meeting leading intellectuals such as Albert Camus, Gaston Bachelard, and Gertrude Stein. After returning to Tunis in 1951, El Mekki created public murals and designed over 450 Tunisian postage stamps.

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His work La Femme et le Coq (1950s) shows a woman holding a cockerel in her arms, set against a stark black background. The female figure and the bird are both rendered as mere silhouettes, distinguished only by a white chalk-like outline and a red wattle on the cockerel’s head. The woman looks directly at the viewer, her eyes wide open and her arms – executed in

La Femme et le Coq, 1950s Oil on canvas, 64.7 × 50 cm. Collection of Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah. Courtesy Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah.

JAKARTA, INDONESIA, 1918– 2003, CARTHAGE, TUNISIA

a hurried, almost macabre manner – grasp at the bird. In many cultures, the cockerel is considered a symbol of hope and a new dawn, and in the context of El Mekki’s painting can be read as signalling Tunisia’s liberation from the French colonial protectorate in a process that took place between 1952 and 1956. —Suheyla Takesh

OMDURMAN, SUDAN, 1930 LIVES IN OXFORD, UNITED KINGDOM

After his father’s death in October 1964, Salahi began working on the group of paintings which contain The Last Sound (1964), whose title alludes to the Sufi prayer, “He who perfumes himself for Allah, most High, will be raised on the Day of Resurrection, smelling more fragrant than sweet musk”. This prayer of departure is the last sound heard as the body departs the earthly realm. In his vision of this moment, painted in the colours of

The Last Sound, 1964 Oil on canvas, 121.5 × 121.5 cm. Collection of Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah. Courtesy Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah.

Sudan’s earth – warm sienna and diaphanous ochre – Salahi presents radial lines surrounded by signature crescents, new moons, and abstracted profiles; a visualisation of something akin to a gravitational pull, suggestive of his beloved father’s passing in a composition that translates the faintness and increasing distance of the patriarch’s last breath. The Last Sound was featured in the late Okwui Enwezor’s Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965. (2016) and in Surrealism Beyond Borders (2021). —Nancy Dantas

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NUCLEO STORICO • PORTRAITS

Ibrahim Mohamed El-Salahi, known today as Ibrahim El Salahi, is one of Sudan’s most celebrated modern artists and is a distinguished member of the Khartoum School, formed in 1961 by a group of artists seeking to develop a new visual vocabulary for an independent nation. Salahi’s father was a respected cleric at the Omdurman Islamic Institute and Quranic school, where the young Salahi was raised to observe the importance and significance of the letter in Arabic calligraphy. After earning a scholarship from the Sudanese government to study in the United Kingdom, he entered the Slade School of Art (1954–1957), where he met Tanzanian artist Sam Joseph Ntiro and Portuguese-born Paula Rego. In exchange for the scholarship, Salahi agreed to teach at the School of Fine and Applied Arts in Khartoum, which he headed from 1960. With his colleagues, Salahi turned to the cultures and traditions of Sudan, organising biannual trips to the city of Wadi Halfa, Suakin, the Red Sea Hills, and the Nuba Mountains.

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Ibrahim El-Salahi

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Ben Enwonwu

ONITSHA, NIGERIA, 1917– 1994, LAGOS, NIGERIA

Ben Enwonwu is recognised as a pioneer of the second phase of Nigerian Modernism (1930– 1960), an era characterised by anti-Europeanisation and radical anti-colonialism. Born to the noble family of UmuezeAroli, Enwonwu, in 1944 he received a scholarship to study in Britian. He graduated with a Slade Diploma in Fine Art, later completing postgraduate studies in anthropology. In 1954, he became a member of the Order of the British Empire. In 1956, he was commissioned to produce a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, becoming the first African artist to produce a portrait of a European monarch. His decision to dote the queen with fuller lips, a provocative sleight of hand (termed by one art historian a “reverse imposition”) roused controversy in the imperial British art world, which accused him of “Africanising” the queen.

The Dancer (1962) returns to the theme of the African masquerade that traverses and suffuses the artist’s oeuvre. Enwonwu celebrates the Igbo performance honouring unwed girls and ancestors, the Agbogho Mmuo, which manifests a Maiden Spirit figure. Performed by men, Enwonwu captures the multiplicity and elusiveness of the Agbogho Mmuo; mobile, transfigured, and indeterminate, caught mid-flight, with an effusive headdress of multicoloured bouncing plumes, speckled with the daintiest softest down that lightly frames the spirit-carrier’s chalked face. Enwonwu captures the Agbogho Mmuo midpose – arms, legs, and hands stretched in momentary pose – suspended against a background of impressionistic blue brushwork, employed to dynamic effect. The clashing sweeping tones accentuate the dazzling dancer, calling the eye to a body densely covered in rich pattern and abounding with carnivalesque takings and accessories. This is the first time the work of Ben Enwonwu is presented at Biennale Arte. —Nancy Dantas

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The Dancer (Agbogho Mmuo - Maiden Spirit Mask), 1962 Oil on canvas, 93 × 62 cm. Photo Ben Uri Gallery and Museum. Courtesy Ben Uri Gallery and Museum. © Estate of Ben Enwonwu.

Le Gardien de la vie, 1967-68 Oil on canvas, 132 × 100 cm. Collection of Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah. Courtesy Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah.

In The Protector of Life (1967– 1968), Ewais paints an oversized soldier looming protectively over a group of Egyptian civilians engaged in a variety of daily activities – a wedding, a mother nursing, children riding bikes, a scientist performing an experiment, and a couple lovingly embracing. Painted in the crippling aftermath of the 1967 Arab–Israeli War, The Protector of Life offers an image of strength but also caution: the soldier securely holds his rifle in one hand, whereas his other tenderly shields and protects

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the people going about their daily lives. Beyond the cradle of the soldier’s enlarged hand, to the right, lies a deserted landscape and a barren tree, suggestive of Egypt’s loss of the Sinai Peninsula during the 1967 War. In the distance are depicted a plantation, a village, a factory, and a group of workers. This is the first time the work of Hamed Ewais is presented at Biennale Arte. —Suheyla Takesh NUCLEO STORICO • PORTRAITS

Hamed Ewais graduated from Cairo’s School of Fine Arts in 1944 where he trained under the pedagogue and critic Youssef el-Afifi, continuing his studies at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid between 1967 and 1969. In 1947, he co-founded the Group of Modern Art alongside artists such as Gamal el-Sigini, Gazbia Sirry, and Zeinab Abdel Hamid, and between 1977 and 1979 served as the head of the Faculty of Fine Arts in Alexandria. In 1956, he was awarded the Guggenheim International Prize. Influenced by key figures of Mexican Muralism such as Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, Ewais chose to work in an aesthetic style that reflected his socialist political leanings and to highlight the plight of Egypt’s working class. A key moment for the artist came during his visit to the 1952 La Biennale di Venezia, where he encountered Italian Social Realist painters.

BENI SOUEIF, EGYPT, 1919– 2011, CAIRO, EGYPT

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Hamed Ewais

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Dumile Feni

WORCESTER, SOUTH AFRICA, 1939– 1991, NEW YORK CITY, UNITED STATES

Dumile Feni began his career as a mural painter and apprentice in a foundry in Johannesburg in the 1960s before a selfimposed exile to London in 1968, due to threat of arrest, and his eventual move to New York City. Feni was criticised by his peers for exhibiting apartheid-related subject matter during his participation at the São Paulo Biennial in 1967 and was once labelled “Goya of the Townships” for his portrayal of the suffering of the Black population. At one point in his life considered to be the master of turbulent imagery, he evolved in the 1960s and 1970s towards a new aesthetic that celebrated the mystical as inspired by literature, dance, and music. Choosing to emphasise hope rather than despair, he reacted to the prevailing style of “township art,” which often channelled hopeless imagery, and transformed his art into a hopeful and forwardlooking aspiration.

Head (1981 ca.) presents a recurring motif in Feni’s work: focusing on the head of a male figure, the subject is characterised by an elongated face resting on a long neck. Composed with strong lines and a dedicated focus on the form of the face and head, the work is striking for its Brancusi-like balance of soft curves married with strong lines to delineate precisely rendered features. The forehead and cheekbones

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appear to also form the lines of a mask or armour of some sort, suggesting a reference to traditional headgear. Produced in bronze, the sculpture reads as a reference to traditional African wood carved masks and figures. This is the first time the work of Dumile Feni is presented at Biennale Arte. —Heba Elkayal

Head, 1981 ca. Bronze, 52 × 18.5 × 26 cm. Courtesy of Norval Foundation. Photo Amber Alcock.

Deeply affected by the Spanish Civil War, she supported the international struggle against fascism. The two series España and El Drama, produced between 1937 and 1950, signal her despair. Through the complex iconography surrounding her own figure in Autorretrato, from the El Drama series, Forner expresses the effects of war in the first person. In the foreground, Forner holds three paintbrushes; on the globe in the right-hand side of the canvas, Africa and Europe are partly hidden by the bloodstained pages of a crumpled newspaper. In the middle ground is a hand with a dead dove resting in its palm and two grieving women embracing before a corpse. In a spatial and symbolic counterpoint, the left-hand side of the canvas shows a map of Argentina with a sheaf of wheat. It is in that land of plenty that the artist made her home and formed a family. In the distance, tiny parachutists descend onto a wasteland. In this painting and others, the artist works through the trauma of her times. —Sonia Becce

Autorretrato, 1941 Oil on canvas, 186 × 141 cm. Museo Provincial de Bellas Artes Emilio Pettoruti Collection. Courtesy FornerBigatti Foundation, Buenos Aires.

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Raquel Forner, an iconic figure in Argentine art, overcame the challenges implicit in being a woman artist in her time. At the age of twelve, she and her family travelled to Spain, her father’s birthplace. It was there that she experienced an artistic awakening before Spanish masterpieces. She returned to Europe in 1929 to study art, visiting Italy, Spain, Morocco, and France. Like fellow Argentine artists in Europe – among them Lino Enea Spilimbergo, Antonio Berni, and sculptor Alfredo Bigatti, whom she would later marry – she joined the Grupo de París. Back in Buenos Aires, she began working on series that, together, would constitute a vast universe. Her genuine concern for human suffering is evident in most of her paintings that feature a central image of a woman, either alone or in a group.

BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA, 1902–1988

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Raquel Forner

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Enrique Grau Araújo

Enrique Grau Araújo was a painter, sculptor, set designer, printmaker, film director, and educator who significantly influenced Colombian modernism. Born to a wealthy family in Cartagena de Indias, Grau Araújo received an early informal training in the arts. His career took a pivotal turn in 1940 when he presented the emblematic painting Mulata Cartagenera (1940), a portrait of a Caribbean woman, at the first Salón de Artistas Colombianos. This work’s acclaim led to a scholarship from the Colombian government to study painting and graphics at the Art Students League of New York, where he immersed himself in avant-garde ideas and studied under the German Expressionist George Grosz. Upon his return to Colombia in 1943, he settled in Bogotá and joined a group of young artists, including Edgar Negret, Alejandro Obregón, and later Cecilia Porras, who were seeking to modernise the Colombian art scene, promoting the representation of national themes and the research of a local artistic identity.

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Hombre dormido (1945) depicts the monumental figure of a man curled up asleep on a white blanket. The work reveals an affiliation with the aesthetics of Mexican Muralism and the artist’s interest in representing the Indigenous and AfroColombian population in an Americanist programme. Over the following decades, Grau Araújo explored abstraction and Surrealism. With Gabriel García Márquez and Álvaro Cepeda Samudio, he codirected the pioneer Latin American surrealist film

PANAMA CITY, 1920– 2004, BOGOTÁ, COLOMBIA

The Blue Lobster (1954). In 1955, after visiting Mexico to study Muralism in person, he travelled to Florence, where he was greatly influenced by Piero della Francesca’s use of geometry on the human body. Grau Araújo’s later work matured with his figurative painting during the 1970s, when he revisited Expressionist human figures, creating symbolic theatrical scenes that included elements of humour and fantasy. —Laura Hakel

Hombre Dormido, 1945 Oil on canvas, 79 × 107 cm. Photo. Collection Banco de la República, Bogotá. Courtesy Colección Banco de la República.

Cabeza de Hombre Llorando, 1957 Oil on canvas, 105 × 70 cm. Collection Banco de la República, Bogotá. Courtesy Colección Banco de la República.

In Cabeza de Hombre Llorando (1957), a man made up of angular forms and elongated features weeps. The paint near his eyes is cracking, imbuing the figure with a deep sense of fatigue and weathering. This is only heightened by the picture’s flattened perspective which creates a sense of entrapment and anxiety. He is painted in greys, browns, blacks, and reds – earthy tones that look as if they were made of natural pigments, and which the artist associated with precontact visual cultures. The man looks defiantly back at the viewer; amidst his anguish, dignity remains. This artwork is

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emblematic of Guayasamín’s unique brand of Expressionism in which he uses colour and a distortion of form to depict downtrodden figures. While many European Expressionists used colour and form to respond to the anxieties of an increasingly industrialised society, Guayasamín used Expressionism as social protest, depicting the oppression faced by many native cultures in Latin America. This is the first time the work of Oswaldo Guayasamín is presented at Biennale Arte. —Diego Chocano

NUCLEO STORICO • PORTRAITS

Oswaldo Guayasamín was a painter and political activist whose expressionistic depictions of the plight of Indigenous populations earned him great acclaim in the mid- to late-twentieth century. In 1943, he travelled to Mexico where he worked under José Clemente Orozco, the renowned Mexican Muralist. Here he developed his idiosyncratic take on Indigenism. Through his monumental murals and series of paintings such as Huaycañán (1946–1952) – meaning “the path of tears” in Quechua, a language widespread in the Andean mountain range – Guayasamín attempts to capture Ecuador’s diverse racial composition and denounce political violence. Although the artist staunchly defended the rights of Indigenous people, his work often idealised these cultures, associating them with nature, tradition, and an innate sense of good – a flattening of heterogeneous identities that are complex and hybrid by nature.

QUITO, ECUADOR, 1919– 1999, BALTIMORE, UNITED STATES

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Oswaldo Guayasamín

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Hendra Gunawan

One of Indonesia’s most prolific and renowned painters, Hendra Gunawan’s practice began in the 1930s and spanned the period of the Indonesian Revolution to the dictatorial New Order regime. Like many other artists who emerged in this period, such as Affandi, S. Sudjojono, and Emiria Sunassa, Gunawan was largely self-taught. His practice espoused socialist principles of communal living and cooperative work. He also founded and was active in several artist groups and cultural organisations from the 1940s to 1960s, including the Seniman Indonesia Muda (Young Indonesian Painters), Pelukis Rakyat (People’s Painters), and Lembaga Kebudayaan Rakyat (LEKRA – People’s Culture Association).

Many of his paintings foreground the daily lives of the everyman in an expressive yet delicate manner, typically by focusing on the mundane activities of a tightly knit group in a tilted space. His works are often characterised by textilelike patterns, bold colours, and flowing, sinuous brushstrokes. My Family (1968) was likely painted when Gunawan was imprisoned due to his association with an alleged Communist faction in Indonesia. In the same year, the Cold War contestation in Indonesia concluded with the suppression and annihilation of Communist forces and the rise of a new dictatorial regime backed by the United States. Painted more realistically than Gunawan’s earlier works from

BANDUNG, INDONESIA, 1918– 1983, BALI, INDONESIA

the 1940s and 1950s, My Family depicts the artist sitting down in tattered pants with his wife and three children. In the backdrop, a crowd gathers in front of a nondescript building, perhaps the prison in Bandung where he was detained. After his release from prison in 1978, Gunawan moved to Bali and continued to paint until his final days, inspired by scenes from the daily lives of ordinary people. This is the first time the work of Hendra Gunawan is presented at Biennale Arte. —Anissa Rahadiningtyas

My Family, 1968 Oil on canvas, 197.5 × 145.5 cm. Collection of National Gallery Singapore. Courtesy National Heritage Board, Singapore.

This untitled, undated portrait pictures a Bedouin in traditional dress, a central subject within Hadad’s practice. She was known as the “Bedouin’s artist” as many of her portraits depicted Bedouin subjects. Rendered in bold expressive hues, with a sombre expression, emphasis is placed on this youthful protagonist, set against an abstract background. As in many of her portraits, his piercing gaze locks eyes with the beholder. Her approach has been described as Social Realism, though her painterly compositions of Lebanese subjects present figures and landscapes alike in emotive, and often dramatic, stylised forms. In representing Bedouin subjects, Hadad conjures the imagery of the Bedouin other as perceived by affluent society in Beirut and audiences of her exhibitions in France, Britain, and the United States. The first and only Lebanese artist to be admitted to the Salon d’Automne at the Grand Palais in Paris (1933–1937), Hadad exhibited extensively in Lebanon and internationally. This is the first time the work of Marie Hadad is presented at Biennale Arte. —Nadine Nour el Din

Untitled, n.d. (1930s ca.) Oil on canvas, 40 × 60 cm. Collection of Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah. Courtesy Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah.

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Marie Chiha Hadad was a prominent Lebanese artist and writer, best known for her figurative paintings of Lebanese subjects. Largely self-taught, her training involved private lessons with Polish artist Jean Kober in Beirut (1924, 1925). Hadad was born to an affluent political family with a considerable network credited for advancing her career as an artist. She painted expressive landscapes, still life compositions, and portraits of children, peasants, Bedouins, and Lebanese highlanders, with little regard for approaches to conventional European painting. Hadad was considered a pioneer of the Lebanese artistic movement and headed the Lebanese Art Society. A published writer, she wrote Les Heures libanaises (1937), a collection of short stories that included several of her paintings. Her career abruptly ended in 1945 when she stopped painting following the death of her daughter.

BEIRUT, LEBANON, 1889–1973

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Marie Hadad

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Tahia Halim

Tahia Halim was from an aristocratic Egyptian family. She studied painting with private tutors before joining the studio of the painter Hamed Abdalla in 1941. She eventually married Hamed Abdalla in 1945. From 1949 to 1951, the couple settled in Paris, where Halim studied at the Académie Julian. From 1956 to 1957, she enrolled at the Scuola Libera del Nudo attached to the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome. After discovering that Abdalla had secretly married a second wife while she was in Italy, Halim obtained a divorce, confronting the social stigma affecting divorced women in Egypt. She received the 1958 Guggenheim International Award and subsequently received support from the Egyptian government throughout her career. While

her early works’ style was close to Impressionism, Halim’s art evolved towards Cubist compositions and, from the 1960s onwards, was enriched by ancient Egyptian styles and techniques. Halim’s name is closely associated with Nubia. In 1962, she was commissioned by the Egyptian Ministry of Culture to document the region of Upper Egypt that spreads to the north of Sudan. As a result of the Aswan High Dam’s construction (1960–1970), many Nubian villages disappeared under the Nile’s waters, and their populations forced to migrate. Three Nubians features three women seated in a hilly landscape. The central figure carries a palm leaf, a recurring motif in Halim’s

DONGOLA, SUDAN, 1919– 2003, CAIRO, EGYPT

Nubian paintings, particularly in wedding scenes such as The Wedding Ceremony in Nubia (1964). The stylised faces and silhouettes of the frontal figures lend a timeless dimension to the scene. Halim presents an image of a culture with ancient and African roots. In the background, mosque domes standing alongside traditional mud-brick houses evoke the Islamisation of Nubia, originally a Christian region, reflecting a centuries-old history of its assimilation and discrimination by Egypt. Works by Halim were exhibited in the Egyptian Pavilion at Biennale Arte in 1956, 1960, and 1970. —Nadine Atallah

Three Nubians, n.d. Oil on board, 84 × 76 cm. Photo Maria and Mansour Dib. Courtesy Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation.

Her painting titled The Lotus Girl (1955) features a female protagonist in profile, dressed in a vibrant, patterned sari, wearing a flower crown, and carrying an elegant white lotus flower, native to India. The patterned backdrop of this composition takes the lotus flower as a motif, repeated and juxtaposed with bold geometric forms, pointing to the patterns of traditional batik. Painted the year that Hamdi moved to begin her studies in India, The Lotus Girl is informed by her classical training in India, Indian subjects, as well as the clothing that she herself wore as a student there. Her use of bold black outlines, flat even tones, and stylised, elongated forms can be credited to her specialisation in ancient Oriental arts, miniature painting, mural painting, painting on silk textiles, and the art of batik, which largely inspired her practice. This belongs to a series of works produced in India depicting Indian subjects, including mural paintings at the universities of Tagore and Rajasthan. Hamdi exhibited widely in Egypt and internationally. This is the first time the work of Nazek Hamdi is presented at Biennale Arte. —Nadine Nour el Din

The Lotus Girl, 1955 Oil on canvas, 70 × 50 cm. Collection of Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah. Courtesy Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah.

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Egyptian artist and educator Nazek Hamdi was celebrated for being a pioneer of the art of batik in the Arab region. She trained at the High Institute of Pedagogic Studies for Art in Cairo, graduating in 1949. She travelled to India in 1955 on the first Indian government scholarship of its kind where she earned a diploma in Fine Arts from the University of Tagore. She completed her PhD in India at the University of Rajasthan. An influential educator, she taught at the Faculty of Applied Arts at Helwan University, at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cairo and Alexandria, as well as at the American University in Cairo. She also travelled to teach in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

CAIRO, EGYPT, 1926–2019

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Nazek Hamdi

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Faik Hassan

BAGHDAD, IRAQ, 1914– 1992, PARIS, FRANCE

While Faik Hassan’s formal painting style was influenced by his studies in Europe, he was dedicated to celebrating Iraqi culture throughout his career and worked towards developing a national visual language. Hassan graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1938, after receiving a government scholarship. He returned to Iraq upon completing his studies and founded the Department of Painting at the Institute of Fine Arts in Baghdad. In 1940, he started the Société Primitive artist collective, which in 1959 was renamed the Pioneers Group. In 1967, he founded the al-Zawiya art group, alongside artists like Kadhim Haider and Muhammad Ghani Hikmat. In 1964, Hassan was awarded the Golden Prize of the Gulbenkian Foundation in Iraq.

His work Bedouin Tent (1950) depicts a scene from the daily life of Iraqi peasants residing along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Two male figures are shown sitting in a tent, surrounded by objects which include the traditional dallah and finjan (coffee pot and cups). The work is rendered in a manner that collapses spatial depth and places the figures and objects onto several distinct planes, thus simultaneously offering a number of different viewpoints in the intimate scene.

In doing so, the artist is able to accentuate the particularities of certain features in the composition, such as the shape of the yellow floor mat or the coffee pot spout, which he paints at unnatural angles. This work is part of Hassan’s broader interest in depicting everyday Iraqi life, and capturing the living conditions of villagers, workers, and farmers. This is the first time the work of Faik Hassan is presented at Biennale Arte —Suheyla Takesh

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Bedouin Tent, 1950 Oil on wood, 58 × 74 cm. Collection of Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah. Courtesy Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah.

Kadhim Hayder was an artist, printmaker, theatre set designer, and organiser whose visual arts practice contributed to the development of Iraqi Modernism. A student in the 1950s at the Higher Institute for Teachers and Institute of Fine Arts in Baghdad, he focused on literature and painting and later enrolled at the Royal College of Art, London, specialising in printmaking. An active participant in the art groups the Pioneers, Baghdad Modern, and al-Zawya (angles), Hayder was also a leading member of the Union of Arab Artists, for which he organised events and conferences. He exhibited extensively regionally and participated internationally at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Hayder also participated in the First Arab Biennial in Baghdad in 1974, the inaugural convening of pan-Arab modern art and intellectual ideas. Hayder’s artistic language incorporated both ancient and modern tropes and drew considerably from fable, mythology, and religion.

Exploring religious rituals, rites, and performance, Hayder’s artistic references borrow from the ancient Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh (ca. 2150– 1400 BCE) and the Battle of Karbala (680 CE) during which Husayn Ibn Ali, the grandson of prophet Muhammad, was martyred in a battle against the Umayyad caliph Yazid. The reverberating consequences of this battle deepened the chasm between Shia and Sunni Muslims concerning issues of succession and custodianship of Islam and led to the division of empires and nations. The battle has also been depicted in visual culture, literature, sermons,

Thalathat Ashkhas Raqm 20 [Three People no. 20], 1970 Oil on canvas, 55 × 75 cm. Photo Humayun Memon. Courtesy Taimur Hassan Collection.

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BAGHDAD, IRAQ, 1932–1985

and in Ta’ziyeh – a passion play originating in the Islamic world that centres on Husayn’s martyrdom, which is performed in Iraq, Iran, and elsewhere. Hayder’s paintings illustrated the abstract symbolism from the epic of Karbala. In his work Thalathat Ashkhas Raqm 20 (1970), imagery from Ta’ziyeh and ancient fables is evident, serving as a moral study on the transformations and divisions within modern societies. This is the first time the work of Kadhim Hayder is presented at Biennale Arte. —Sara Raza

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Kadhim Hayder

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Gilberto Hernández Ortega

BANÍ, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC, 1923– 1979, SANTO DOMINGO, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

Gilberto Hernández Ortega was mentored by the skilled Celeste Woss y Gil in painting, and he became one of the first enrolled in the National School of Fine Arts after its establishment in 1942. He met André Breton and Wifredo Lam during their time in Santo Domingo in 1941. He later became a professor at the school and over many decades guided notable Dominican artists. His pieces received awards in national biennials and contests from 1950 to 1972. As a musician and poet, he formed part of the literary movement La Poesía Sorprendida (The Surprised Poetry) – of a surrealist nature – for which he wrote and illustrated magazines. An exceptional painter of the Dominican identity, Ortega mastered brushstroke and pigment to develop a unique language from Expressionism, rooted in the space, myths, realities, and exuberance of the Antillean tropics – surreal, magical, familiar, close, strange, and distant all at once.

A student of Josep Gausachs and a multigenerational teacher of Dominican artists, Ortega creates an interpretation of the Caribbean habitat, establishing a symbiosis that expresses the unreal essence of its forest and customs through loose strokes and bold brushwork. In Marchanta (1976), he recreates a theme that has been present in Dominican painting since its incorporation by Yoryi Morel in the 1930s, blending flowers and fruits over the head of a dark-skinned woman with a long neck and a face featuring a ghostly eye through an all-white socket. The painter emphasises the white dress

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through a background of dark patinas, with glimpses of some houses painted with just a few strokes of light that guide the viewer’s gaze across the entire canvas. The tracing, pigment application, and magical aura emanating from this composition make it one of Ortega’s masterpieces. This is the first time the work of Gilberto Hernández Ortega is presented at Biennale Arte. —Myrna Guerrero Villalona

Marchanta, 1976 Oil on canvas, 117 × 88 cm. Photo Mariano Hernández. Courtesy Museo Bellapart. © Mariano Hernández 2024.

Femme et Mur, 1977-78 Oil on canvas, 162 × 130 cm. Collection of Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah. Courtesy Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah.

Woman and Wall (1977-78) depicts an Algerian woman dressed in traditional Amazigh garb, jewellery, and headdress, with downcast eyes and a sombre facial expression. Her hands are clasped together, and she stares into the distance in quiet contemplation. Haunting and almost ghostlike, she embodies an ethos of silent endurance and a spirit of resistance that was demonstrated time and again by Algerian women over the course of the twentieth century. Behind her is a wall with graffiti-like references to the Algerian War of Independence

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that took place between 1954 and 1962, featuring acronyms such as FLN, referring to Algeria’s National Liberation Front, and OAS, referring to the Organisation Armée Secrète, a French secret paramilitary organisation. Featured on the wall is also an image of hamsa, alternatively known as the hand of Fatima, which is a palm-shaped amulet widely recognised as a symbol of protection. This is the first time the work of Mohammed Issiakhem is presented at Biennale Arte. —Suheyla Takesh

NUCLEO STORICO • PORTRAITS

Mohammed Issiakhem was one of Algeria’s leading modernists, his work often reflecting the country’s anticolonial movement, personal and collective struggles, Amazigh (Barber) traditions, and portraits of ordinary people. Issiakhem lost his left arm in a grenade blast in 1943 at the age of fifteen. In 1947, he began his training with free classes at the Société des Beaux-Arts in Algiers, followed by enrolling at Algeria’s École des Beaux-Arts between 1948 and 1951, where he studied miniature painting under Omar Racim. Issiakhem, holding official “Muslim French” status, was one of the first Algerians to be admitted to the institution, which until 1945 was reserved exclusively for French students. He later studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris between 1951 and 1959, returning to Algeria after independence in 1962.

TIZI OUZOU, ALGERIA, 1928– 1985, ALGIERS, ALGERIA

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Mohammed Issiakhem

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Elena Izcue Elena Izcue was an educator, illustrator, artist, textile designer, and a pioneer in the arts related to modern indigenous and Peruvian decorative arts. Her work is part of the rise of Andean archaeology and the search for sources for the construction of a Peruvian national identity in the 1920s. Together with her sister Victoria, Izcue developed a series of projects focused on design, art, and education in Peru. Both migrated to Paris, where they experimented with ceramics, wood carving, and textile application while employing American motifs, linked, in turn, to the fashion industry in France and the United States. Izcue’s teaching activity expanded to publications such as the Arte peruano en la escuela (1926) – which was translated into

LIMA, PERU, 1889–1970

English and French – aimed at disseminating pre-Hispanic art and popular arts as a pedagogical medium. European interest in the work of Izcue coincided with the circulation of exhibitions showcasing the work of Latin American artists and that placed the indigenous inhabitant as a problem for artistic representation. Such exhibitions enabled these artists to create distinct visual languages while also questioning the canon, power relations, and the formation of a modern artistic language. Among such artists we also find Laura Rodig, Lola Cueto, Carmen Sacco, Julia Codesido, Tarsila do Amaral, and Izcue herself, who addressed these issues from their triple condition of gender (women),

racial and cultural identity (Latin Americans), as well as social subjects (non-citizens). In particular, these artists explored body themes and the cultural construction of an “other” female identity. However, the feminisation of the disciplines carried out by Izcue (design, textile, popular, and decorative arts) marginalised her incorporation into Latin American historiographical accounts. She has only recently been researched, thus compensating for her absence and highlighting her importance in the formation of the visual arts of the region. This is the first time the work of Elena Izcue is presented at Biennale Arte. —Gloria Cortés Aliaga

Mujer de Perfil, 1924 Oil on canvas, 73.8 × 66 cm. Photo. Courtesy MALI – Museo de Arte de Lima.

SAN JUAN DE LOS LAGOS, MEXICO, 1902– 1955, MEXICO CITY

NUCLEO STORICO • PORTRAITS

María Izquierdo was the first Mexican woman to exhibit work in the United States. Born in 1902 in the pilgrimage village of San Juan de los Lagos, Izquierdo grew up surrounded by Catholic folk traditions that later became leitmotifs in her paintings and characteristic elements of the postrevolutionary artistic movement. While studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Mexico City (1928–1931) just after the Revolution, she met artists such as Diego Rivera and Rufino Tamayo. Izquierdo painted a wide variety of images of devotion, traditions, and popular representation, depicting scenes from her memories of rural Mexico. At the same, she embraced the image of modern women participating in the revolutionary struggle.

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María Izquierdo

counterresponse to the Muralist movement as a way of showing other narratives beyond the nationalistic displays of state propaganda. In 1947, curator Fernando Gamboa organised the exhibition 45 Autorretratos de Pintores Mexicanos at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, where Izquierdo showed this canvas, affirming a style that captured the complexity of the role of the modern Mexican woman. This is the first time the work of María Izquierdo is presented at Biennale Arte. —Eva Posas

Autorretrato, 1947 Oil on canvas, 55 × 45 cm. Photo Francisco Kochen. Andrés Blaisten Collection. Courtesy Andrés Blaisten Collection. © Francisco Kochen.

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Izquierdo’s Autorretrato (1947) is part of a series of self-portraits she painted in the 1940s. A ruminative María wearing an ochre yellow dress is contrasted with a blue and grey background of sky and clouds. Unlike other exuberant portraits of herself with extravagant jewellery and clothes, in Autorretrato she is only crowned with a braid and matching robe, presenting an austere image that gives great prominence to her face and her possible thoughts on that gloomy day. It is considered that selfportraits might have been a

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Frida Kahlo

MEXICO CITY, 1907–1954

Frida Kahlo is an icon, and her image has widely circulated as a symbol of feminism, emancipation, and political commitment. The fascination with her aesthetic and biography has, in part, obscured the radicalism of her works, rooted in the study of popular art traditions in Mexico and Communist militancy instead of European modernist movements like Surrealism. Kahlo belonged to an intellectual milieu that supported the Mexican Revolution and sought to reimagine the country disentangled from the legacies of European colonialism and reconnected to its preColumbian heritage. A vital theme within her oeuvre is self-fashioning, which spills into considerations around gender construction. As the wife of renowned artist Diego Rivera, she was well aware of the difficulties women encountered in pursuing a career in the arts: she had only two solo exhibitions in her lifetime, one in New York and one in Mexico.

In Diego y yo (1949), Kahlo’s self-portrait takes up almost the entire canvas, and she has a portrait of Diego Rivera on her face. Kahlo gazes directly at the beholder. Her husband, Diego, on her forehead, dominates her thoughts. The three tears running down her cheeks are mirrored in Rivera’s three eyes. The third eye, symbolising visionary knowledge, shows what the anatomical eyes cannot perceive, revealing in Rivera an extraordinary psychic and creative conscience. In the portrait, Kahlo grieves her marital difficulties – her hair encircles her neck, seeming to suffocate her. Kahlo constructed her identity through her appearance, exploring the female body and its conventions. She is wearing a huipil, a typical blouse from Tehuantepec, a region of Mexico where women were protagonists in their societies. The Tehuanas embodied resistance to colonialism. Dressed like them, Kahlo affirms her Mexican identity, with the word “Mexico” emphasised next to her signature in the painting. This is the first time the work of Frida Kahlo is presented at Biennale Arte. —Florencia Malbrán

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Diego y Yo, 1949 Oil on masonyte, 30 × 22.4 cm. Eduardo F. Costantini Collection.

George Keyt’s life and career spanned the artistic and political challenges of the twentieth century, and he is recognised as one of the most important Sri Lankan painters of his generation. In the years preceding the independence of Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) in 1948, Keyt sought to embrace European modernism while reinvigorating South Asian traditions. Hailing from a Eurasian Burgher family, his art encompassed references as far ranging as Buddhist tales, Hindu erotic imagery, and Cubism. In 1943, he was one of the founding members of the ’43 Group, led by photographer and critic Lionel Wendt, which spearheaded the embrace of modernism in Sri Lanka. Keyt made a significant acquaintance with the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and struck a lasting friendship with Martin Russell, who wrote the first monograph on Keyt. Throughout his life, Keyt also spent ample time in India where he was equally recognised.

Nayika - Vasanta Raga (1943) was painted the same year as the founding of the ’43 Group in Colombo and soon after Keyt completed the murals at Gotami Vihara depicting the life of the Buddha. Lyrical in tone, the painting sets two female figures clad in simple saris in a plentiful nature. The composition is tightly focused on their heads and busts, as well as on the lush leaves and their bold contours. The affinities between the curves of the natural motifs and those of the nayika’s lascivious pose provide a sense of unity to the work. European art was a resource for Keyt but he recalibrated the use of the Cubist visual language and the art of Henri Matisse to serve South Asian themes. Among these, the nayika, or romantic heroine, would remain a feature in his work. In this instance, the title also references South Indian Carnatic music and one of its tunes known as Vasanta raga, while the abundant surroundings and the detached mood intimates an idealised village life. —Devika Singh

KANDY, SRI LANKA, 1901– 1993, COLOMBO, SRI LANKA

Nayika - Vasantha Raga, 1943 Oil on canvas, 89 × 59 cm. Photo Justin Piperger. Courtesy Taimur Hassan Collection.

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George Keyt

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Ram Kumar

Ram Kumar trained in economics and briefly worked as a banker and journalist before receiving informal art lessons in Delhi from Sailoz Mukherjee at the Sarada Ukil School of Art. He then began exhibiting his work in 1948. He lived in Paris between 1949 and 1952, studying art under André Lhote and serving as an apprentice in Fernand Léger’s studio. During this time, he met artists, poets, and writers such as Pablo Neruda and Jacques Roubaud and Indian artists such as F. N. Souza, S. H. Raza, and Akbar Padamsee, who lived in France at the time. Kumar travelled extensively across Europe and became a member of the French Communist Party before his return to India, where he began painting in the figurative mode inspired by socialist realism. Kumar is best known for his landscape and increasingly abstract paintings from the mid-1950s onwards, particularly the iconic Varanasi series.

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Kumar’s trajectory as an artist and writer is believed to reflect his own reclusive self. Parallels have been drawn between his depiction of the human figure in painting and the characters in the narrative short stories he wrote as a prolific Hindi fiction writer. Both are saturated with a sense of alienation, solitude, and pathos that Kumar considered the existential condition of contemporary urban life. In Women (1953), the four figures are shorn of any context of time and place; there is a dearth of cultural markers such as clothing and an absence of any elements other than the torsos that fill the pictorial space.

SHIMLA, INDIA, 1924– 2018, DELHI, INDIA

Kumar travelled extensively in the Global North and South, and his work was feted and exhibited internationally in solo and group exhibitions in India, Europe, the United States, and Japan, including at the Tokyo Biennale (1957, 1959), Bienal de São Paulo (1961, 1965, 1980), and La Biennale di Venezia (1958). —Latika Gupta

Women, 1953 Oil on board, 60.5 × 102 cm. Photo Justin Piperger. Courtesy Taimur Hassan Collection.

Girl in Red (Portrait of Gladys Ankora), 1954 ca. Oil on linen canvas, 76.2 × 55.8 cm. Photo Lucid Plane. Collection Pamela Clarkson Kwami. Courtesy the Estate of Atta Kwami.

Girl in Red portrays Gladys Ankora, a woman who worked for Kwami’s sister. Ankora fills the space of the canvas, suggesting physical proximity between the artist and the woman, who has dressed and suspended her activities to be painted. Ankora is likely to have carefully chosen her outfit– a 1950s custom-made red dress with a wide-set boat neckline typical of the modernist era. At a time when cloth was central to incorporating people into the state, Kwami not only pays attention to the fabric and folds, but also to her sitter’s solemn expression and features, carefully drawing

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the viewer’s attention to the small diamond-shaped earring she has chosen to wear, in addition to an intentionally understated necklace. This is the first time the work of Grace Salome Kwami is presented at Biennale Arte. —Nancy Dantas

NUCLEO STORICO • PORTRAITS

Grace Salome Kwami began her art education in 1951 at the School of Art and Craft in Achimota after several years of teaching in secondary schools. By 1953, she had graduated in painting and sculpture. The loss of her husband Robert Ashong Kwami, a pianist and senior music master at Achimota, irrevocably changed her life. Despite the vicissitudes she encountered as a widow and mother, Kwami consistently produced sculptures that indicate a span of production of about fifty years. Her penchant for human figuration manifested in both her clay figures and her paintings. Girl in Red (Portrait of Gladys Ankora) (1954 ca.) is included in African Modernism in America, a landmark traveling exhibition about the artistic networks and dialogues created between the US and Africa during the Cold War. A portrait of Kwami is featured twice in the exhibition catalogue, signalling her importance as both a painter and a prominent practitioner of the Kumasi Realism style in Ghana.

WORAWORA, GHANA, 1923–2006

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Grace Salome Kwami

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Lai Foong Moi

NEGERI SEMBILAN, MALAYSIA, 1931– 1995, SINGAPORE

Lauded as the first Malayaborn woman to hold a solo exhibition in Singapore, Lai Foong Moi’s story encapsulates how the development of artistic style was intertwined with considerations of nationhood and identity within the context of post-war, postcolonial British Malaya (a British dominion until 1963). The first graduate from the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in Singapore to further her education at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Lai garnered early acclaim for her paintings which display her unique sensitivity towards colour and composition underpinned by the modernist principles of her training. Demonstrating an initial proclivity for the empathetic portrayal of female nudes and moody renderings of cityscapes, Lai would continue to develop her interest in everyday people and landscapes following her return to Malaya in 1959. Compared to her peers, Lai’s legacy has been one of relative obscurity, despite her early success.

Labourer (Lunch Break) (1965) is an introspective portrait that exemplifies Lai’s commitment to the internal world of her subjects. The figure at the centre of the composition is presented in a moment of rest and contemplation as he gazes beyond the frame. Lai discloses his identity as a labourer by his blue outer shirt, a distinctive identifier of Chinese migrant workers, referred to as coolies, who had travelled to Malaya since the nineteenth century to work in manual occupations. Behind him, a woman is having her meal, her back turned and features comparatively obscured. Her red headscarf, which stands out as a moment of differentiated colour in the painting, signifies her identity as a Samsui woman – a female immigrant manual labourer. Although both figures occupy the same sightline within the composition, their diverging postures allow Lai to suggest a hierarchy of anonymity within this overlooked segment of society. This is the first time the work of Lai Foong Moi is presented at Biennale Arte. —Teo Hui Min

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Labourer (Lunch Break), 1965 Oil on canvas, 104 × 67 cm. Collection of National Gallery Singapore. Courtesy National Heritage Board, Singapore.

Untitled (Mujer Caballo), 1942-46 Oil on canvas, 196 × 91 cm. Photo N. Bueno. Collection Paz Illobre-Orteu Collection. Courtesy Collection Paz Illobre-Orteu.

Esoteric elements are central to Wifredo Lam’s iconography. Though he never practised Afro-Cuban Santeria himself, he did attend its rituals and ceremonies. He was a close observer of the domestic altars in Cuban homes. It was through his sister, Eloísa, that Lam first met Santeria. From 1941 to 1952 – years the artist spent in Cuba – Lam painted over one hundred works with images tied to that spiritual practise. The femme cheval (horseheaded woman), a recurring theme in Lam’s work from

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this period, represents both a woman possessed by an orisha, a supernatural entity from West African religion, and an anticolonialist spiritual force. In works such as Untitled (Mujer Caballo), the features of the figures are a cross between the human and the animal. The female figure in this work has a horse’s head and crest. Produced between 1942 and 1946, this is one of the most important works Lam painted around the theme of the Horse Woman. —Sonia Becce

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A skilled painter and draughtsman, Wifredo Lam first left his native Cuba for Madrid and Paris in 1923. His commitment to the Republican cause during the Spanish Civil War is obvious in much of his work. In Paris, he became friendly with major figures in the Cubist avant-garde and important Surrealists. Back in Havana in 1941, he found himself drawn to the vernacular Afro-Cuban aesthetics. It was in New York, where he exhibited extensively during the 1940s, that he first encountered abstract art. In 1952, he and his family settled in Paris. Widespread recognition as a painter and draughtsman by no means kept him from exploring the graphic arts or ceramicsm – he mastered them both. Thanks to his interest in ceramics, he spent extended periods in Albissola Marina, a traditional centre of ceramic making and a stimulating environment of artistic and intellectual exchange. It was there he met Lucio Fontana, Asger Jorn, and Piero Manzoni, among others.

SAGUA LA GRANDE, CUBA, 1902– 1982, PARIS, FRANCE

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Wifredo Lam

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Maggie Laubser

Maggie Laubser, born in 1886 in a rural South Africa, is credited alongside Irma Stern as a pioneer of South African modernist art. Laubser introduced Expressionism in South Africa after studying at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. Having seen examples of German Expressionism while in Berlin between 1922 and 1924, Laubser’s work evolved from sombre, Calvinistic portraiture and landscape in muted colours dominated by greys, browns, and navy to boldly coloured depictions of farm animals, farmhands, and rural inhabitants of the Western Cape. Initially she was harshly criticised, only to be accepted and acknowledged later in her life. She is most appreciated for

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her prolific output of portraits and her repeated study of local subjects. Laubser’s attention to the everyday man was a novelty and a departure from the staid, classical portrait style that was prevalent in South Africa at the time. The painting Meidjie (n.d.) was likely painted of a young girl who lived on or nearby Laubser’s family farm in Oortmanspost, where Laubser lived due to personal financial constraints after her patron’s death. Laubser painted with a sense of empathy and appreciation for the people around her, many of whom she developed a strong personal relationship with due to the many years she spent on

BLOUBLOMMETJIESKLOOF, SOUTH AFRICA, 1886– 1973, STRAND, SOUTH AFRICA

the rural farm, isolated and removed from the urban centre of Cape Town. In this tender depiction, the young girl gazes out at the viewer with bright, copper-coloured eyes. Laubser seats her subject facing the viewer with a charmingly impish and defiant air about her. The artist’s focus on such a subject speaks to the great respect she had for the people who surrounded her. —Heba Elkayal

Meidjie (Young Girl), n.d. Oil on canvas, 46 × 36.5 cm. Courtesy of Norval Foundation. Photo Amber Alcock.

Lê Phô was one of the first Vietnamese artists to graduate from the École des Beaux Arts de l’Indochine (Indochina School of Fine Arts) in Hanoi, and his work represents the ambitious artistic experiments of his generation. The school, founded by French painter Victor Tardieu and his Vietnamese collaborator Nam Sơn, aimed to modernise Vietnamese art with references to local practices as well as a European-style curriculum. Lê Phô became proficient in oil painting, which he approached with a restrained sensibility. Artworks from the Indochina School were shown in Paris, and Lê Phô’s works appeared in salon exhibitions and the Exposition Coloniale Internationale (1931). In 1937, he migrated to Paris, where he spent the rest of his life. In France, he developed a new aesthetic, painting on silk in an elegant, linear manner and creating highly stylised images of Vietnamese women, family groups, pietà, and still life.

In his Jeune fille en blanc (1931), a young woman is depicted lost in thought, in a subtle harmony of pale, silvery tones. The colophon in the upper left corner of the composition suggests the reason for her preoccupation: this extract from an eighteenth-century Vietnamese poem is the lament of a wife whose husband is away at war. While “modern women” were a popular subject in Vietnamese art and literature of the 1930s, Lê Phô chose a more traditional image of female loyalty and duty. The work’s flat, pared-down style suggests his interest in European modern art, but the restricted colour palette, the

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HANOI, VIETNAM, 1907– 2001, PARIS, FRANCE

inclusion of the calligraphic colophon, and the celadon vase in the foreground establish a link to Vietnamese aesthetics. This work was planned for exhibition in the Prima Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Coloniale in Rome (1931) as part of a policy for sending Vietnamese art abroad for sales and colonial propaganda. Works such as Lê Phô’s, however, exceeded narrow colonial ambitions and are seen as achievements within Vietnamese Modernism. This is the first time the work of Lê Phô is presented at Biennale Arte. —Phoebe Scott

Jeune Fille en Blanc (Young Girl in White), 1931 Oil on canvas, 81 × 130 cm. Collection of National Gallery Singapore. Courtesy National Heritage Board, Singapore.

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Lê Phô

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Lee Qoede

Lee Qoede, a major Korean figure painter mostly active from the 1930s through the 1950s, was best known for paintings that responded to Korea’s colonisation by Japan. His trajectory parallels Korea’s occupation by Japan (1910–1945), the country’s liberation, its partition (1945), and the Korean War (1950–1953). Trained in the 1930s in Daegu and in Japan at the Imperial School of Art, Lee first championed Western aesthetics, then later combined them with East Asian techniques, using sharp lines and contours to achieve two-dimensionality. In the late 1940s, under the umbrella of the Joseon Art and Culture Association, which he co-founded, Lee realised

paintings addressing Korea’s freedom from Japan. Towards the end of the Korean War, he was arrested and detained in prisoner-of-war camps. Choosing to side with North Korea, he defected in 1954, which led to his blacklisting. His work was rediscovered and has been re-exhibited in South Korea since 1988. Lee’s Self-Portrait in a Long Blue Coat (1948–1949) shows the artist wearing a blue durumagi, a men’s overcoat and component of traditional Korean dress. One of four selfportraits that still exist of the many Lee realised, the work is considered his masterpiece and exemplary of his hybridisation of Western and East Asian painting. This is visible in the

CHILGOK, SOUTH KOREA, 1913–1965

inclusion of diverse visual signifiers. Lee’s Korean attire is complemented by a fedora – a Western hat worn by the upper classes, referencing his status. Lee also depicts himself holding a palette with European oil paints and an East Asian ink brush called mopil. He proudly stands with a confident gaze in front of a rural landscape with women wearing the tradition hanbok in the background. Bright-coloured and innovative, Lee’s portrait endows the artist with the role and power to imagine the future of Korea and Korean arts. This is the first time the work of Lee Qoede Lee is presented at Biennale Arte. —Adeena Mey

Self-portrait in a Long Blue Coat, 1948-49 Oil on canvas, 72 × 60 cm. Private Collection, South Korea.

SCHOEMANSVILLE, SOUTH AFRICA, 1929– 1985, GA-RANKUWA, SOUTH AFRICA

NUCLEO STORICO • PORTRAITS

Simon Lekgetho is known for his still lifes and portrait paintings despite never having completed any formal art training. After receiving some mentorship and guidance from artists such as Walter Battiss, Lekgetho developed a unique oeuvre which included images of wildlife and works inspired by Bushman rock painting. This would influence him to create a unique vernacular style of drawing. His themes centred on ideas of healing, rebirth, and continuity. He emphasised these ideas with strong lines, dramatic chiaroscuro, and a focused view of his subjects on his canvas. His still lifes focus on dramatically lit scenes of objects, such as local pottery and shells, set against dark backgrounds in muted colours of browns, greys, and blacks.

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Simon Lekgetho

Self-Portrait, 1957 Oil on board, 38.5 × 38 cm. Courtesy of Norval Foundation. Photo Amber Alcock.

demonstrates an intriguing play with colour, indicative of the artist’s keen understanding of colour. Set against a muted orange background, there is the sense that the artist was painting in the Western tradition of portraiture, particularly within the tradition of selfportraiture – so much so that he has signed it with the words “self-portrait”. This is the first time the work of Simon Lekgetho is presented at Biennale Arte. —Heba Elkayal FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Self-Portrait (1957) showcases the painter’s exploration of colour, shadow, and form in a somewhat geometrically inspired manner, capturing a sombre glance directed at the viewer. He has painted each of his features strongly, perhaps amplifying certain aspects, like the pointed jut of his chin and the crown-like shape of his head. These deliberate exaggerations serve to emphasise different attributes of himself. His eyes and lips are more delicately painted, and his rendering of his skin tone in yellows and aquamarine blues

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Celia Leyton Vidal

SANTIAGO, CHILE, 1895—1975

earned her the recognition of the community with which she shared twenty-five years of her life, and she was renamed Millaküyen (“Golden Moon”). This is how Celia Leyton chooses to portray herself in this work, where she brings together the complex network of signs of the Mapuche culture and self-displaces her own identity. Thus, she bears the trarilonko (silver headband), chaway (earrings), a trapelakucha (silver pectoral), and a trariwe (woven sash). The work appears on the cover of her book Raza Araucana from 1950, a publication that is part of a series of self-published books by the artist. Celia Leyton has been displaced by art historiography and is rarely represented in museums. This is the first time the work of Celia Leyton is presented at Biennale Arte. —Gloria Cortés Aliaga

Celia Leyton was a Chilean painter, muralist, educator, writer, and cultural manager, and an indispensable figure in the history of women artists who developed their production in non-central territories in the 1930s. She studied in Santiago but lived most of her life in the south of Chile where she taught in schools for girls, creating training groups led by the students themselves, such as the Drawing Circle. In 1942, she created the Temuco Academy of Fine Arts which aimed to give visibility to local cultural values, especially those of the Mapuche culture.

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After leaving the Academy, she travelled to Europe where she exhibited at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, Spain, and donated her works to various institutions, such as the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. In 1961, upon returning to Santiago de Chile, she opened her Rucatelier (from ruca, which is “house” in Mapudungun, and atelier or “workshop”), providing spaces for the training of young people, especially those of indigenous origin. Her approach to the Mapuche people–nation and her awareness of social criticism

Millaküyén, 1950 ca. Oil on canvas, 84 × 71.8 cm. Collection Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago.

This diminutive self-portrait, painted in his twenties, reveals both his personal ambition and anxiety, which echo Singapore’s nation-building sentiments and challenges. As a representation of Lim’s coming of age, this painting graced the catalogue cover of his first solo exhibition in 1970 at the Chinese Chamber of Commerce. In the painting, Lim appears to be seated in a studio with boldly coloured abstract paintings on easels in the background. He stares out at the viewer with one eye. On the broken half of his eyeglasses, worn in front of his other eye, a reflection of the abstract paintings surrounding him may be seen. Compared to his earlier self-portrait from 1955, which depicts his youthful diffidence as a fresh art school graduate, Self-Expression (1957-63 ca.) is a more mature and selfconfident statement about embracing experimentation with modern Western art styles while maintaining an unflinchingly realist gaze on the conditions in Singapore. This is the first time the work of Lim Mu Hue is presented at Biennale Arte. —Adele Tan

Self-Expression, 1957-63 ca. Oil on board, 34.3 × 30 cm. Collection of National Gallery Singapore. Courtesy National Heritage Board, Singapore; Koh Seow Chuan. © Estate of Lim Mu Hue.

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Lim Mu Hue is one of Singapore’s leading woodblock printmakers, whose erudite artistic output includes paintings in various mediums and sculptural relief. Trained in Western painting methods at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in the 1950s, but also steeped in Chinese cultural traditions, his works bear witness to the pre- and postindependence changes taking place in Singapore. In the 1960s, Lim taught art at his alma mater before taking on an art editorial role with the Nanyang Siang Pau (Nanyang Business Daily), creating cartoons and illustrations for the newspaper’s art supplement, which often included his acute observations and wry social commentary. In the subsequent decades, Lim exhibited actively both locally and abroad, serving also as an honorary museum consultant at Nanyang University and with stints as a senior researcher and visiting professor in China.

SINGAPORE, 1936–2008

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Lim Mu Hue

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Anita Magsaysay-Ho

ZAMBALES, PHILIPPINES, 1914– 2012, MANILA, PHILIPPINES

Anita Magsaysay-Ho is a Philippine painter recognised as foundational in histories of Southeast Asian modernism. Born into a wealthy family, she studied at the University of the Philippines under Fernando Amorsolo, a key influence on her figurative style. She was later exposed to modernist traditions through her studies abroad at the Art Students League and Cranbrook Academy of Art. Magsaysay-Ho incorporated what she had learned through her representations of rural Filipina women at work, in the fields, or at the market, with many imagined or remembered from her childhood. All are rendered, whether in states of vigour or tenderness, with a dignifying hand. Despite living peripatetically due to her husband’s shipping business, the artist would return to this subject matter – an enduring source of empathy and aesthetic possibility – for the rest of her life, leaving behind an oeuvre that doubles as an ode to Filipina womanhood. This is the first time the work of Anita Magsaysay-Ho is presented at Biennale Arte. —C J Salapare

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Self-Portrait, 1944 Oil on Bristol board, 61 × 48 cm. Private Collection. Courtesy the National Museum of the Philippines.

Negro Aroused, 1935 Oil on wood, 63.5 × 43.1 × 21.5 cm. Photo Franz Marzouca. Collection National Gallery of Jamaica. Courtesy National Gallery of Jamaica.

Negro Aroused (1935), Manley’s most iconic sculpture, is emblematic of her political commitments during a vital period in Jamaican labour history. Elegantly carved from mahogany wood (the artist made a later replica in bronze), the work shows the majestic figure of a man emerging from the overwhelming oppression of colonialism. A burly mass of exaggerated proportions, the figure casts his gaze heavenward, as though aspiring towards another reality, perhaps one unencumbered by economic, social, and

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racial constraints. At the time the sculpture was made, the Caribbean was gripped by a wave of labour rebellions that saw workers throughout the region protest their low wages and dismal conditions. Negro Aroused, then, is a kind of monument to their ferment and to the revolutionary ardour that galvanised their struggle. This is the first time the work of Edna Manley is presented at Biennale Arte. —Ade J. Omotosho NUCLEO STORICO • PORTRAITS

Edna Manley was a key forebear of Jamaican art history whose work aimed to ennoble the culture and people of her adopted homeland. Born in Yorkshire in 1900, Manley came of age in colonial Britain. In her youth, she studied at various art institutions throughout the country before marrying her husband, the politician Norman Manley, and relocating to Jamaica. Sculpture was Manley’s medium, and she developed a style all her own while drawing upon a kind of internationalist aesthetic that dominated the early part of the twentieth century, one deeply informed by social issues. Though raised among the British elite, Manley stood at a remove from bourgeois politics. Her art demonstrated her great sympathy for the Jamaican people and championed the causes of the Black working class.

BOURNEMOUTH, UNITED KINGDOM 1900– 1987, KINGSTON, JAMAICA

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Edna Manley

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Josiah Manzi

Josiah Manzi was a founding member of the Tengenenge Art Community in Guruve and a pioneer of the Zimbabwean contemporary stone sculpture movement that began in the 1960s. Manzi was born in Zimbabwe to parents who had migrated from Malawi in 1918. With limited opportunities for Black people in colonial Zimbabwe, Manzi studied to be a builder. In 1967, he found work at the Tengenenge tobacco farm. As farming became less viable because of political tensions, Manzi was able to practice art full time and later become one of the most acclaimed artists of the movement. Tengenenge was conducive for art making, as it was situated in the vicinity of large serpentine and springstone dykes. When the Chimurenga War intensified in the mid-1970s, Manzi’s family was one of the few to remain Tengenenge, where he continued to sculpt until his death in 2022.

[UNKNOWN], ZIMBABWE, 1933–2022

Mfiti Woman and Snake (1990) was until recently located in the Harare Gardens, a central park that partly encircles the National Gallery of Zimbabwe. Mfiti means sorcerer in Chichewa, a language spoken in Malawi. In this work, Manzi depicts a seated woman cradling a two-legged serpent. Curiously, the snake and the woman both exhibit a fusion of zoomorphic and anthropomorphic features. Recurring motifs in Manzi’s work included cone-shaped heads, elongated necks, and beings that are part human and part totemic animals, such as the rhinoceros and bird. Manzi’s process involved listening to stone, removing the initial outer layer, and perceiving how it ought to be shaped. Much of his practice was drawn from African cosmologies and folklore. His visual pedagogy was informed by traditional Yao Malawian spirituality, for he was a chigure – a secret society masquerader who would often make wooden masks with his father. This is the first time the work of Josiah Manzi is presented at Biennale Arte. —Tandazani Dhlakama

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Mfiti Woman and Snake, 1990 Stone, black serpentine, 182 × 60 × 53 cm. Courtesy the Artist and National Gallery of Zimbabwe.

In 1945, still working abroad, the artist abandoned a certain visuality easily associated with Brazil. That year Martins referred to her sculptures as “my Goddesses and my monsters”, as she went on to create her personal mythologies centred around hybrid, fantastic, or monstrous feminine figures, in whom eroticism and desire become even more evident themes. However (1948) is an exemplary piece from that time, in which a feminine figure has her body surrounded by serpents – one restricting her legs, the other compressing her chest and breasts. In the figure’s face there is only an open mouth, insinuating a cry of pain or pleasure. Serpents are commonly associated with the feminine in Martins’s work, evoking a dynamic of both domination and threat that is external or internal to the figures. This is accomplished by referring to figures from Greek mythology, such as Medusa, or from Amazonian mythology, such as the Cobra Grande (Big Snake). However, these figures are never shown to be entirely “free” and seem to draw their strength from this dichotomy. This is the first time the work of Maria Martins is presented at Biennale Arte. —Isabella Rjeille

However, 1948 Bronze, 130 × 24 × 32.5 cm. Photo Vicente de Mello. Collection Dalal Achcar Bocayuva Cunha, Brazil.

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Maria Martins was a Brazilian sculptor known for her involvement with international Surrealism, whose work challenged ideas regarding the feminine, Brazil, and the tropics. Married to a diplomat, Martins spent a great part of her life outside Brazil. It was only in the United States in the 1940s that she would achieve recognition as an artist in the international circuit, having participated in Surrealist exhibitions in New York and Paris and at the Biennale Arte in 1954. The artist became known for bronze sculptures that depicted Amazon-based mythologies, which earned her the moniker “sculptress of the tropics”. Such a designation ended up limiting the more complex interpretations of her work, however, and locked her into the role of cultural narrator of her country abroad. Maria Martins oscillated between being “too Brazilian” for international art and “too foreign” for Brazilian art.

CAMPANHA, BRAZIL, 1894– 1973, RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL

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Maria Martins

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Carlos Mérida

Carlos Mérida was born in Guatemala City in 1891 and was one of the first artists to fuse European Modernism with a Latin American regionalism, moving Indigenous culture to the centre of visual culture. From 1910 to 1914, he lived and worked in Paris, where he mingled with avant-garde artists such as Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Paul Klee, and Latin American artists such as Diego Rivera. Moved by curiosity about the artistic post-revolution status quo in Mexico, he relocated to the capital in 1919, where he lived until his death in 1984. Although he became part of the Mexican Muralist movement, his geometric style focused on nonfigurative representations rather than political narratives. Mérida’s work was deeply influenced by the arts and culture of Indigenous people in Mexico and Guatemala, and he was committed to promoting them by incorporating symbolic elements into his murals, which included monumental mosaic works on architectural constructions in the 1950s and 1960s.

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GUATEMALA CITY, 1891– 1985, MEXICO CITY

Mérida’s painting Motivo Guatemalteco (1919) is part of a body of work that attempts to capture the essence of Indigenous people and Maya culture. Mixing painting styles from European Modernism with symbols and elements of folk art from the Americas, Mérida portrays a Maya Quiché woman posing proudly with the traditional clothes representative of her community. While the woman might be from the highlands of Quetzaltenango in Guatemala – where Mérida grew up – he made this painting in 1919, the year he moved definitively to Mexico City. The geometric and colourful traces highlight the details of her sash, headband, and huipil. Their patterns and colours symbolise the worldview of her culture, representing the natural elements that form the origins of the world. This painting guides the viewer’s attention to the textile details and so portrays an understanding of craft instead of the exoticisation of women bodies. —Eva Posas

Motivo Guatemalteco, 1919 Oil on canvas, 97.5 × 71.5 cm. Photo Juan Carlos Mencos. The Hugo Quinto and Juan Pablo Lojo Collection. Courtesy The Hugo Quinto and Juan Pablo Lojo Collection.

Mgudlandlu’s portraits often depict women or girls of the Xhosa ethnic group, and usually in pairs. In place of the shadowy figures that typically accompany these subjects, however, a white haze suggests the cold against which the titular old ladies huddle and bend – and perhaps also what Mgudlandlu regarded as the “sacred and protective power of white” which, she told her biographer Elza Miles when recalling the Peddie homesteads of her childhood, she would apply to the frames of doors and windows. Notions of the sacred saturate this littleknown, undated, and unusual work, whose broad shapes are

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suggestive of Mgudlandlu’s later style. The two women appear dressed in the uniform of what is likely a Zionist church. They are seen from the “bird’s-eye” view favoured by Mgudlandlu, who deeply identified with birds and whose portrayals of the creatures in harmonious pairs, such as in The Oystercatchers (1964), are evoked by the couple’s aesthetic symmetry and their arms’ concordant gesture. This is the first time the work of Gladys Mgudlandlu is presented at Biennale Arte. —Ruth Ramsden-Karelse

Two Old Ladies Shopping on a Cold Day, n.d. Powder paint on board, 51 × 63 cm. Private Collection.

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On the basis of the restless landscapes that she painted at night, largely inspired by her upbringing in the rural Eastern Cape, schoolteacher and selfstyled “dreamer–imaginist” Gladys Mgudlandlu became the most prominent Black female visual artist in 1960s’ South Africa. Mgudlandlu was caught between extremes, the commercial successes heralded by her first solo exhibition in 1961 belying a persistent precarity, resulting in the loss of much of her artwork. Marketed as “primitive”, Mgudlandlu was subjected to both racist denigration by the media and criticism from some Black contemporaries who deemed her work insufficiently political. In 1971, just as her selfdescribed mix of Impressionism and Expressionism gave way to abstraction, injuries sustained from a car accident caused Mgudlandlu to stop painting. Though her work has been regularly exhibited since, its true significance has only been recuperated since the first decade of the twenty-first century, with her landscape paintings now reassessed as powerful protests against settler–colonial dispossession.

PEDDIE, SOUTH AFRICA, 1917/1926– 1979, CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA

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Gladys Mgudlandlu

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Bahman Mohasses

Bahman Mohasses studied painting under the tutelage of the Russian Academy of Arts-trained teacher Seyyed Mohammed Habib Mohammedi before pursuing formal studies at Tehran University’s Faculty of Fine Arts. In Tehran, he joined the Iranian visual cultural and literary association the Fighting Cock Society. He edited the weekly publication Panjeh Khoroos (Rooster foot) before leaving for Rome to pursue his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts. After returning to Iran in the early 1960s, Mohasses became an active part of the Iranian modern arts movement that benefited from the Pahlavi-era secular cultural reforms. An eclectic

RASHT, IRAN, 1931– 2010, ROME, ITALY

and unique painter interested in exploring Surrealist dream-like abstract visions, Mohasses’s multifaceted studio practice differed from his contemporaries in that he embraced painting, sculpture, theatre design and direction, and book translation. Mohasses participated in biennials in Paris, Tehran, São Paulo, and Venice. Due to his political views, his works were destroyed after the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran. Following the turbulence brought on by the revolution, Mohasses relocated to Rome where he lived until he died in 2010.

depicts a muscular human– alien hybrid figure resembling a mythological minotaur, with no features other than hollow eyes. The minotaur is a recurring character within Mohasses’s portraits and frequently signifies his feelings of alienation while working against identity politics. The piece is also a nod to Persian fables in which animals are allegorised to convey moral tales – a tradition rooted in the ancient Sanskrit Hindu fable Panchatantra. Translated into Middle Persian in the sixth century, Panchatantra subsequently influenced Iranian theatre and performance.

Imbued with symbolism, Untitled (Personages) (1966)

—Sara Raza

Untitled (Personages), 1966 Oil on hardboard, 70 × 50 cm. Photo Justin Piperger. Courtesy Taimur Hassan Collection.

GUADALAJARA, MEXICO, 1885– 1968, MEXICO CITY

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Roberto Montenegro, a painter, illustrator, printmaker, and stage designer, was a founding member of the Mexican Muralism movement. Born into an elite family in Guadalajara, he began his artistic career as an apprentice to Félix Bernardelli, a Brazilian painter of Italian descent, and went on to enrol into the Escuela Nacional de Arte in Mexico City, where Diego Rivera was also student. Like Rivera, Montenegro spent most of the Mexican Revolution studying abroad in Europe. On his permanent return in 1921, he was one of four artists commissioned to create the first governmentsponsored murals in Mexico City. Later, he became best known for works combining a Surrealist vision with a consciously naive folk-art style. A leading figure of Mexican Modernism, Montenegro was also a passionate promoter of Mexican handcrafts and folk art and, in 1934, was appointed the first director of Mexico’s Museo de Arte Popular.

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Roberto Montenegro

Pescador de Mallorca, 1915 Oil on canvas, 100 × 97 cm. Courtesy Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura; Museo Nacional de Arte, Ciudad de México.

with reefs that cut across the dark blue sea. A far cry from the atrocities of war, the painting’s subject, along with the decorative style and sumptuous palette used to render it, anticipate the roles that fantasy and tradition would continue to play in the artist’s later work. This is the first time the work of Roberto Montenegro is presented at Biennale Arte. —Marko Ilić

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Montenegro was still travelling around Europe when World War I broke out, leading him to settle in Majorca for six years. There he painted scenes inspired by local customs, including one of the island’s main activities: fishing. Pescador de Mallorca (1915) captures its bronzed and muscular subject from behind. His face is turned towards the viewer, while his right arm clutches a large platter of fresh fish. Bare, silvery branches and lush prickly pear trees stand between him and the coastal landscape in the background,

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Camilo Mori

VALPARAÍSO, CHILE, 1896— 1973, SANTIAGO, CHILE

Camilo Mori was a painter, poster artist, and theatre designer, and one of the most prolific and multifaceted avant-garde artists in Chile. Mori graduated from the School of Fine Arts in Santiago and first travelled to Europe in the early 1920s, where he furthered his studies in the free academies and took part in the Salon d’Automne. This experience was key to his career, and upon his return he created the Montparnasse Group artistic collective (1923) and participated in the Salón de Junio (1925), which included guest artists such as Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris. In 1928, he received a grant from the government to study applied arts in Europe, where he specialised in advertising posters which he developed alongside painting, receiving international accolades. He made a third trip in 1957, when he experimented with abstraction.

The Traveller (1928) is the result of his first experiments with European trends, especially those that emerged after Cézanne. It is a portrait of his wife, the painter Maruja Vargas Rosas, whose work is barely referenced, being recognised more as the painter’s muse than as an autonomous artist. The portrait, made in Valparaíso, represents a passenger on a train in the heyday of rail travel in Chile. The train also became a place of appropriation for women, allowing them to move freely from one place to another in the midst of the struggle for women’s voting rights. Maruja Vargas also carries a book, an indication of women’s access to the cultural sphere. The artist, a member of the Communist Party and director of the National Museum of Fine Arts, was awarded the National Art Prize in 1950 and remains an emblematic figure in Chilean art history. The Traveller is Mori’s best-known work, and has been widely reproduced on postage stamps, schoolbooks, and calendars. This is the first time the work of Camilo Mori is presented at Biennale Arte. —Gloria Cortés Aliaga

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La viajera, 1928 Oil on canvas, 100.5 × 70 cm. Collection Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago.

This self-portrait from 1970 exemplifies his research as a visual artist: this image plays with painting, the human body, and depiction. The figure holds its frame in a game of metalanguage that permeates Morsi’s trajectory as a visual artist. In this painting within a painting, we notice how the artist plays with the idea of abstraction when he juxtaposes a circle and areas of colour on his body that place him in conversation with many artists interested in abstraction. It is a self-portrait of Morsi, who, more than a painter, was a commentator on his generation’s art history. This is the first time the work of Ahmed Morsi is presented at Biennale Arte. —Raphael Fonseca

Portrait of the artist with a broken mirror, 1970 Oil on wood, 124 × 81 cm. Collection of Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah. Courtesy Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah.

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Ahmed Morsi is a writer, set designer, and visual artist who has dedicated much of his practice to painting and its relationship with figuration. With a poetry practice that began in the 1940s and articulated within the framework of Egyptian Surrealism, Morsi graduated from the University of Alexandria in 1954 with a focus on English literature. In the same decade, he dedicated himself to painting and participated in group exhibitions in Egypt. Between 1954 and 1956, Morsi established contacts with the artistic scene in Baghdad, Iraq, and began to develop a career as a set designer. He later became the first Egyptian to create sets for the Cairo Opera. In 1968, alongside other intellectuals, the artist created the magazine Galerie 68, which became one of the most essential publications in cultural criticism in Egypt, especially in its reflections on literature and the visual arts. In 1974, Morsi moved to New York for family reasons, and there he continued his career not only as an artist but also as a cultural agitator, organising publications, translating texts, and establishing links between the visual arts scene in the United States and artists from the cultural diversity of the Arab world.

ALEXANDRIA, EGYPT, 1930 LIVES IN NEW YORK CITY, UNITED STATES

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Ahmed Morsi

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Effat Naghi

Effat Naghi came from a wealthy family of landowners from Alexandria and was initiated into drawing, painting, and music at a young age. She began formal arts training later in life, enrolling in the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome in 1947, where she learned the art of fresco. In Paris, she became a student and friend of André Lhote. In 1954, she married the painter Saad al-Khadem. Together, they studied Egyptian folk arts and traditions. Naghi introduced visual elements borrowed from astrology and occult sciences into her art, which would become her artistic signature. From the 1960s, she produced many assemblages of painted wood pieces and found objects. Visiting Aswan as part of government missions, she depicted the mechanisms of the High Dam and participated in the rediscovery of Nubian culture. While her brother Mohamed Naghi is considered a leading figure of early modern painting in Egypt, Effat Naghi also distinguished herself with an innovative visual vocabulary and approach to materials.

ALEXANDRIA, EGYPT, 1905–1994

In the late 1950s, Naghi’s work took a stylistic turn, nurtured by her interest in Egyptian history and folk cultures and characterised by vibrant colours and simplified forms and figures. The composition and naturalistic palette of this untitled portrait bust of a woman are more classical in nature. The vertical format, the ochre and brown shades, the model’s sophisticated hairstyle and white tunic, and the black lines accentuating her large eyes and eyebrows are reminiscent of Fayum portraits that covered the faces of upper-class mummies from Roman Egypt. However, Naghi’s use of chipboard, a material with visible particles that often served as a base for her paintings, along with the addition of bright green, blue, and pink highlights on the model’s face and hair, resulted in a modern interpretation of this ancient panel painting tradition. The background is animated by lines in black ink tracing what seems to be symbols and writings evoking the magic words that Naghi sometimes incorporated into her paintings. Effat Naghi was one of the artists representing Egypt at Biennale Arte in 1950, 1952, and 1956. —Nadine Atallah

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Untitled, 1960 Oil and ink on panel, 121.5 × 81.5 cm. Photo Maria and Mansour Dib. Private Collection. Courtesy of Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation.

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Ismael Nery, a painter, draughtsman, and poet, moved to Rio de Janeiro with his family as a child. He studied at the National School of Fine Arts, and travelled twice to Europe in the 1920s. During his first trip, he became acquainted with the work of avant-garde artists, incorporating Cubism into his painting in particular. On the second trip, he met Surrealist artists, including Marc Chagall, who would greatly influence Nery’s artistic production from then on. Nery depicted many portraits and selfportraits in which he sought to represent the essence of the human being, regardless of time or space. He conceived a philosophical system called Essentialism (1920s) that promoted the search for an original oneness long lost by humanity. He embodied his theory through painting and poetry, considered by him as an initiation into Catholicism. Nery passed away at the age of thirty-three from tuberculosis.

BELEM, BRAZIL, 1900– 1934, RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL

Reflections on the meaning of life always drove Ismael Nery’s artistic production: the self, the other and how they intersect, reflections and shadows, and the quest for wholeness are all recurring themes. In the painting Figura decomposta (1927), two schematically represented bodies – male and female torsos – are partially juxtaposed, facing forward. At the level of the neck, the figures subdivide, forming ambiguous images: are they both in profile or are they two halves of the same fragmented face? Nery illustrates the division of the primal unity of

Figura decomposta, 1927 Oil on canvas, 42 × 47.5 cm. Photo Sergio Guerini. Private Collection. Courtesy of Almeida & Dale Galeria de Arte. © Sergio Guerini.

the feminine and masculine polarities, ideally constitutive of each individual, according to his theory of Essentialism. The simplification of forms, geometrisation, fragmentation of figures into planes, and the monochromatic palette are all part of the Cubist lexicon the painter absorbed during his first trip to Paris in 1920. This is the first time the work of Ismael Nery is presented at Biennale Arte. —Regina Barros

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Ismael Nery

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Malangatana Valente Ngwenya

Malangatana Valente Ngwenya, a painter, poet, musician, intellectual, and revolutionary, gave voice to the struggles of the people of Mozambique and Africa. Born in late-colonial Mozambique, Malangatana experienced the depredations of Portuguese colonialism. In the absence of his migrant– labourer father, Ngwenya worked as a herder as a child, moving to Maputo (then Lourenço Marques) at the age of twelve. After he discovered an interest in painting, he took classes at the Núcleo de Artes, where he exhibited his work for the first time in an exhibition held in honour of the Minister of Overseas Territories (1959). From his earliest works, he used intensity of colour to signal the violence of colonialism and war. Malangatana joined the socialist political party FRELIMO in 1964 and was incarcerated by the Portuguese security police, producing a series of remarkable prison drawings during his eighteenthmonth incarceration.

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To the Clandestine Maternity Home (1961), a pictorially dense composition, speaks to female oppression under colonial rule, the regulating of women’s bodies and reproduction, and the existence of underground maternity wards and abortion networks. The crowded canvas of superimposed, entwined bodies is dominated by the faces of tormented women from all walks of life. Their piercing gazes are directed at the viewer or to the side, signalling an awareness of their surroundings and the surveillant, regulatory male gaze. One of the dominant figures is an emaciated mother; the underdeveloped child in

MATALANA, MOZAMBIQUE, 1936– 2011, MATOSINHOS, PORTUGAL

her womb is shown cradled by her mother’s hard-working hands and comforting arms. Unlike this malnourished expectant mother, their white counterparts are full-bodied. To the right, another tell-tale figure, a domestic worker with hair bound by a doek, breastfeeds an infant born of an interracial union (or rape) while quietly observing the remaining cast in the artist’s ode to maternity. This is the first time the work of Malangatana Valente Ngwenya is presented at Biennale Arte. —Nancy Dantas

To the Clandestine Maternity Home, 1961 Oil on canvas, 157 × 180 cm. Collection Universität Bayreuth, Germany. Courtesy Universität Bayreuth.

Madona de Ternura, 1946-51 Comanche granite, 28.8 × 22.5 × 32.8 cm. MAC USP Collection, São Paulo, Brasil.

neighbourhood of San Isidro is now an eponymous museum and sculpture garden that houses many of her works. Núñez del Prado’s Madona de la Ternura (1946–1951), or Madonna of Tenderness, is a sculpture in mottled granite that sits at a midpoint in the artist’s career, between her early indigenist figures in wood and stone and her later organic abstractions in metal. It is a compelling image of mother and child rendered as Indigenous tenderness. The suppleness of the two bodies swaddled cocoon-like within the stone – only the features of their faces, one nuzzled against the other, visible within the opening – demonstrates the artist’s deft handling of the lithic medium. The sculpture is monumental yet intimate, Catholic and

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Aymara. Its material – albeit a form of granite not native to either Bolivia or Peru – evokes the telluric nature of Andean mythology and cosmology, and yet, with the choice of religious subject, Núñez del Prado made a place for herself and her Aymara “daughters” within the history of art. —Lisa Trever

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Marina Núñez del Prado created works in indigenist and abstract styles in a series of media throughout her career and is celebrated among the most famous sculptors of twentieth-century South America. Born in La Paz, Bolivia, into a family fond of music and the arts, she studied painting and sculpture at the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes and later worked in the same institution as professor of sculpture and artistic anatomy. Núñez del Prado’s sculptures, which she sometimes referred to as her “daughters”, emphasise female bodily forms, even in her later turn toward abstracted shapes. Her work has been shown throughout Latin America and in the United States, Europe, and Japan. In 1971, Núñez del Prado relocated from La Paz to Lima, Peru. Her home in the elegant El Olivar

LA PAZ, BOLIVIA, 1910–1995, LIMA, PERU

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Marina Núñez del Prado

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Alejandro Obregón

BARCELONA, SPAIN, 1920– 1991, CARTAGENA, COLOMBIA

Alejandro Obregón was born in Barcelona to a Colombian father and spent his childhood between Europe and the United States. In the 1940s, he established himself as a promising young artist in Colombia’s growing art scene. Following the murder of the liberal leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in 1948, Obregón left his position as director of Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes and moved to Alba, France, where he lived for almost a decade before returning to Colombia. “It is important that Alejandro Obregón is back in Colombia”, wrote the critic Marta Traba in her column in the newspaper El Tiempo in 1959. As the co-founder of the Museum of Modern Art in Colombia and a promoter of the avantgarde, Traba often claimed that Alejandro Obregón was the first modern painter in the country. She grouped him with artists she called “los nuevos”, including Fernando Botero, Enrique Grau Araújo, Edgar Negret, and Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar, viewing their art as a fundamental step in the modernisation of local artistic practices.

In Máscaras (1952), a masked female character holds a tray with food and a conqueror’s helmet connected to a gas mask. These two objects suggest a symbolic continuity between colonisation in the Americas and the twentiethcentury post-war events that were transforming the global geopolitics of this time. Obregón explored abstraction, but his work always remained figurative and made continuous comments about political violence in Colombia. Between 1955 and 1956, he received a Guggenheim national prize, and his work entered the collections of the Organization of American States and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. At the zenith of his international recognition, Máscaras was acquired by the Museo Nacional de Colombia in 1956. The work was placed in the stairwell that separated the fine arts collection from the historical collection, weaving critical connections between them. This is the first time the work of Alejandro Obregón is presented at Biennale Arte. —Laura Hakel

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Máscaras, 1952 Oil on canvas, 210 × 107 cm. Courtesy Museo Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá.

Male Model Standing, 1959 Oil on board, 92.3 × 60.7 cm. Photo Paul Odijie. Collection of G. Hathiramani. Courtesy the Estate of the Artist.

Okeke would have been about twenty-six years of age when he painted this PostImpressionist-inspired portrait, a year before the publication of the Natural Synthesis manifesto and political independence in Nigeria. The predominant colour, Nigerian indigo, bathes the walls behind him and reflects across his chest, a reference to the ancient culture of indigo dying. From the shadows on the wall to his left,

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which appears darker, Okeke looks at us intently, relaxed, melancholic, beautiful, ready for the dawn of a new Nigeria. This is the first time the work of Uche Okeke is featured at Biennale Arte. —Nancy Dantas

NUCLEO STORICO • PORTRAITS

Uche Okeke, born in northern Nigeria to an Igbo family, founded the Zaria Art Society (1957–1961) with fellow students Demas Nwoko and Simon Okeke while he was a secondyear student at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science, and Technology. Privileging discussions on Indigenous art and culture and the documentation of legends and folk tales, the group defied the College’s colonial Eurocentric curriculum and art programme, placing their “side studies” at the heart of the work. As an outcome of the group’s sessions, Okeke penned the Natural Synthesis manifesto in 1958, advocating for the conscious and intentional deployment of new materials and techniques to imagemaking. Writing about the New Artist, Okeke voiced that this artist should be adaptable to ideas from East and West, whilst simultaneously acting as a guardian of his heritage. True to his word, Okeke hinged his research and practice on the cultural production of the Igbo. With the aid of village elders, he collected several hundred folktales (which he published in 1971) and, with his students, studied the principles of uli, a form of wall and body painting.

NIMO, NIGERIA, 1933–2016

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Uche Okeke

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Pan Yuliang

From her humble beginnings as an orphan sold into prostitution, Pan Yuliang’s peripatetic life – as a revolutionary artist, pedagogue, and “New Woman” forged during the cultural and sociopolitical reform front known as the May Fourth Movement – was intimately intertwined with modern art movements and geopolitical ruptures throughout the twentieth century. Pan Yuliang was internationally exhibited and celebrated for her exuberant colours and portraits, especially female nudes, which were often selfportraits that inspired both controversy and admiration for their vibrant sense of selfhood and agency. Among the first female students admitted to the Shanghai Art Academy in 1920, she returned in 1928 as its head of Western painting after studying in Lyon, Paris, and Rome. Friendships formed during her first European sojourn counted luminaries such as Xu Beihong, Sanyu, and Fang Junbi, who were equally committed to calibrating the rich painterly traditions of China with Western modernisms. Yuliang returned to Paris in 1937 and remained in diaspora till her passing.

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Back of Nude (1946) exemplifies Yuliang’s unique approach to female nudes that often combines the fine-line technique from the Chinese pictorial tradition – with an inherent rigour to the expressive articulation of form – with a Fauvist liberty in colour and space. The curious shimmers down the seated figure’s spine and right torso suggest a light source that seemingly contradicts the somewhat muted, open landscape of riverbank and palm trees. Existing examples of almost identical figures with different backgrounds suggest an experiment with genre and modes of storytelling, where Orientalising tendencies

YANGZHOU, CHINA, 1895– 1977, PARIS, FRANCE

– a hallmark of European modernism – intersects with the cosmopolitan imagination of a diasporic artist. Chen Duxiu, one of the key cultural and political figures in the New Culture Movement, commented in 1937 that Yuliang’s paintings “derive their spirit from European oil painting and sculptures while retaining the Chinese fine-line technique … a style that I define as new fine-line, an assessment [with which] Yuliang herself is in agreement”. This is the first time the work of Pan Yuliang is presented at Biennale Arte. —Xin Wang

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Amelia Peláez was a Cuban painter, ceramist, illustrator, and muralist who constitutes one of the most interesting and outstanding female figures of Latin American modernity. She entered the Academia San Alejandro in Cuba and continued her studies at the Art Students League in New York and subsequently in Paris. There, she enrolled at the Grande Chaumière, the École du Louvre, and the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts, where she studied painting with her friend, the Cuban writer Lydia Cabrera. In 1931, she entered Fernand Léger’s workshop where she met the Russian designer, set designer, and constructivist artist Alexandra Exter, who introduced her to new ideas on colour and design. In 1933, she had a solo exhibition at the famous Galerie Zak and at the Salon des Tuileries as part of the Latin American itinerary that enabled artists to position themselves strategically in the Parisian environment, based on the internationalist language of the avant-garde but from their own positions and ideas.

YAGUAJAY, CUBA, 1896– 1968, HAVANA, CUBA

Mujer con abanico (1931) is from this period. She returned to Cuba in 1934 and, a year later, she exhibited her works at the Female Lyceum, a cultural and social institution of great relevance to Cuba’s art history. From this moment on, Amelia Peláez gave rise to a unique work that takes from AfroCuban culture the elements associated with colour, shape, and nature, transforming them into an abstract–ornamental, personal, and political imagery. She actively participated in the magazines Orígenes and Espuela de plata, led by the poet José Lezama Lima; these

Mujer con abanico, 1931 Oil on canvas, 69.4 × 58.5 cm. Sandy and George Garfunkel Collection, Palm Beach, FL, USA. Courtesy Sandy and George Garfunkel.

publications were nationalist proposals that enabled a combination of images and written and visual aspects, within the possibilities of an identity of “origin”. Finally, the artist represented Cuba at the Bienal de São Paulo in 1951 and at the Biennale Arte the following year. With the arrival of the Cuban Revolution, Amelia remained in Havana until her death in 1968. This is the first time the work of Amelia Peláez is presented at Biennale Arte. —Gloria Cortes Aliaga FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Amelia Peláez

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George Pemba

PORT ELIZABETH, SOUTH AFRICA, 1912– 2001, EASTERN CAPE, SOUTH AFRICA

away from watercolours to oil painting because of the higher value placed on the medium by potential buyers, particularly white collectors. Pemba’s dedication to both watercolour and oil painting resulted in some of the most successful visual documentation and dedication to capturing both traditional and cultural aspects of South African life by any painter of that era. This is the first time the work of George Pemba is presented at Biennale Arte. —Heba Elkayal

George Pemba’s art has often been categorised as “Township Art”, connoting art by Black artists, but his work was ultimately recognised for its great variety of scenes of South African life and culture. He was encouraged to draw and paint by his parents from a young age and won a scholarship to study art at the age of sixteen. With a signature style of simple, unembellished drawing, strong use of colour, and compositional rigour, Pemba’s works chronicle a variety of both everyday moments – such as police raids, patients in medical clinics, and farmers tilling the fields – and

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portraits of South Africans. He was most celebrated for his mastery of watercolour, with his best works attributed to those painted between 1933 and 1947. Young Woman (1947) is an oil painting of a girl on the cusp of womanhood. Clothed in traditional dress, the figure is adorned with jewellery and a headpiece of wrapped fabric; she looks out at the viewer with a shy glance. In addition to his mastery of watercolour, Pemba used oil paints to highlight the vibrancy of colour and landscapes of South Africa. Although dissuaded by his peers, Pemba moved

Young Woman, 1947 Oil on canvas, 59 × 44 cm. Courtesy of Norval Foundation. Photo Amber Alcock.

The Argentinean son of Italian parents, Emilio Pettoruti made a formative journey to Europe, where he stayed from 1913 to 1924 and participated directly in avant-garde groups, although he did not adhere to the dicta of any movement. He had knowledge of Futurism and Cubism, and was also interested in classical art. In his own words, he sought an art that was “modern, yes, but consistent with the virtues of the art I admired most: that of the Quattrocento”. While studying the Italian Old Masters, he also exchanged ideas with Umberto Boccioni, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and Carlo Carrà, among others. Upon his return to Argentina in 1924, Pettoruti organised an exhibition of his paintings that established him as a pioneer of the avant-garde. He worked to consolidate modern art through his own work and also during his tenure as director of the Museo Provincial de Bellas Artes de La Plata, where he strove to broaden the audience for avant-garde art.

La del abanico verde o El abanico verde (1919) shows Pettoruti’s unique vision of modern art. The woman’s body is synthesised into geometric forms. She holds a fan in her hand. The curves of the fan in motion find visual resonance in the lines surrounding the lady’s head, emphasising the dynamic perception of movement, a central interest that Pettoruti shared with the Italian Futurists. The folds of the fan’s body also allowed Pettoruti to demonstrate his mastery of the fragmented and successive planes typical of Cubism. The woman’s pink dress, however, escapes the chromatic sobriety of Cubism and recalls the pink tones of the angels’ tunics painted by Fra Angelico, an artist whom Pettoruti studied. This painting was first exhibited in Milan in 1919, where Pettoruti was living at that time. —Florencia Malbran

LA PLATA, ARGENTINA, 1892– 1971, PARIS, FRANCE

La del Abanico Verde, 1919 Oil on canvas, 96 × 50 cm. Eduardo F. Costantini Collection.

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Emilio Pettoruti

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Candido Portinari

BRODOWSKI, BRAZIL, 1903– 1962, RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL

Candido Portinari, the second son of twelve siblings, was born to Italian immigrants from the Veneto region in Brodowski, a town in the São Paulo countryside. A natural talent and self-taught artist, he began drawing at the age of six. At fourteen, he took part in the restoration of the local church, invited by a group of Italian painters and sculptors. In 1928, at the age of twenty-five, again showing his precociousness, he won a prize for a study trip to Europe and travelled through Italy, England, Spain, and France before settling in Paris. In 1931 he returned to Brazil, where he became one of the most important Brazilian artists of the twentieth century. In 1939, the Museum of Modern Art acquired his painting Morro (1933). In 1940, the American museum hosted the solo show, Portinari of Brazil, with around 180 works. A politicised artist, attentive to Brazilian social problems, he joined the Brazilian Communist Party in 1945.

Cabeça de Mulato (1934) is a significant work within the context of Portinari’s portraits, one of his great skills. It showcases his technique as an outstanding draughtsman, as can be seen in his use of chiaroscuro and especially in the delicate and precise strokes that outline the eyes, nose, mouth, and chin. Throughout his life, Portinari painted more than seven hundred portraits. He was particularly interested in depicting “popular” Brazilian types, which included Black and “mulatto” field workers and humble migrants. In Brazil at that time, “mulatto” referred to someone with

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multiracial heritage – born to parents of different racial backgrounds, typically of African and European descent. However, it has since acquired pejorative and discriminatory connotations in the country, and its use is now being rejected. Here, the character looks the viewer in the face, which reinforces the power, dignity, and nobility that Portinari imprints on his portraits of the “common people”. —Fernando Olivia

Cabeça de Mulato, 1934 Oil on canvas, 73.5 x 60 cm. Photo Jaime Acioli. Igor Queiroz Barroso Collection, Fortaleza. Courtesy Igor Queiroz Barroso Collection.

Waiting, n.d. Oil on canvas, 91.44 × 66.04 cm. Photo Sebastian Bach. Courtesy Aicon, New York.

Female characters recur throughout Prabha’s paintings. Intimate in tone, the scenes she depicts are often set in everyday rural contexts. Among these, Waiting offers a striking rendition for its daring use of green. Its intense, emerald shade, worked in oil paint, merges background, flora, and the loincloth of the female figure. Time seems suspended as a result. In a slight three-quarter pose, the figure ostensibly turns the back of her slender, elongated, and half-naked body to the viewer.

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Staring into the distance, her left profile reveals refined features but also a saddened gaze, that of the woman waiting. The hypnotic character of the painting derives from this tension between the bold use of colour and the modesty and dignity of the solitary figure. This is the first time the work of B. Prabha is presented at Biennale Arte. —Devika Singh

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B. Prabha was born in a village near Nagpur in the state of Maharashtra and first trained at the Nagpur School of Art before moving to the J. J. School of Art in Bombay (now Mumbai), a city in which she would settle with her husband, the artist B. Vitthal. A sign of her early recognition, works from Prabha’s first exhibition were acquired by nuclear physicist and art patron Homi J. Bhabha for the collection of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR). Yet, throughout her career, Prabha also had to make do with social constraints and the difficulties that women artists faced in post-independence India. This was a time when art circuits in India remained predominantly male centred. Her work also focused from early on the human figure and invites comparison with the art of Amrita Sher-Gil.

MAHARASHTRA, INDIA, 1933– 2001, NAGPUR, INDIA

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B. Prabha

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Alfredo Ramos Martínez

Alfredo Ramos Martínez, often considered the “father of modern Mexican art”, was a prolific painter, muralist, and educator who played a key role in the reconfiguration of art schools and Mexican modernism during the Revolution (1910-20). Born in 1871 in Monterrey, Ramos Martínez first moved to Mexico City and then to Paris in 1897 to pursue his studies in art. There he became familiar with the Post-Impressionists and with artists and poets such as the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío. Returning to Mexico in 1913, he became the director of the National Academy, where he founded the Open Air Schools. Many students from this educational initiative would go on to become famous muralist painters, such as David Alfaro Siqueiros. Ramos Martínez relocated his family to the United States in 1930, seeking special medical attention for his daughter. Eventually based in Los Angeles, he developed a body of work with numerous murals concerning his Mexican roots.

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Ramos Martínez’s Mancacoyota (1930) renders the idea of a proud Indigenous woman, full of a nobility that stems from her native roots. With an inquisitive gaze, the woman – reluctant, serene, and suspicious at the same time – observes us with a monumental wall of cactus as a background. This portrait blends the newly found admiration for native traditions with the idea of a new national identity. A form of nationalism, embodied by a Mexican impressionistic school of painting, can be traced

MONTERREY, MEXICO, 1871– 1946, LOS ANGELES, UNITED STATES

clearly in the red blossoms in the back and the delicate strokes of her face. Probably painted after Ramos Martínez had established himself in Los Angeles, Mancacoyota shows a strong native woman that prototyped indigenous femininity as a worthy subject for the arts. This is the first time the work of Alfredo Ramos Martinez is presented at Biennale Arte. —Eva Posas

Maancacoyota, 1930 Oil on cardbord, 38.4 × 38.3 cm. Photo Francisco Kochen. Andrés Blaisten Collection. Courtesy Andrés Blaisten Collection.

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In Macuto, Reverón started desaturating his colour palette, creating tactile and almost monochromatic paintings. They fuse Post-Impressionism with an extremely gestural style in which the pigments, applied almost directly to the canvas, produced dry surfaces where his brushstrokes seem to float in the composition. Retrato de Alfredo Boulton (1934) depicts his friend and patron, the intellectual Alfredo Boulton. Boulton was a central voice among the generation engaged in discussions about modernising Venezuela and a frequent guest of Reverón in Macuto. He also organised Reverón’s retrospective at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Caracas on the anniversary of his death in 1995. Recalling his visits to Macuto, Boulton wrote in the exhibition’s catalogue: “I saw him coming out of his ranch and became blinded by the landscape’s glare”. —Laura Hakel

Retrato de Alfredo Boulton, 1934 Oil and gouache on paper adhered to a board, 120 × 85 cm. Photo John Berens. Courtesy Collection of Clarissa and Edgar Bronfman Jr.

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Armando Reverón, the only child of a wealthy couple, was raised by a second family in Valencia, Venezuela. Withdrawn due to illness from a young age, Reverón found an early interest in art and was encouraged to study painting at the Academia de Bellas Artes de Caracas. In 1911, he travelled to Spain and Paris, where he was deeply influenced by Velázquez, Goya, and the Impressionists. He returned to Caracas in 1915, where he engaged with the Círculo de Bellas Artes until the early 1920s when he and his wife Juanita Mota moved to a secluded castillete in Macuto, a coastal town in Venezuela. During this period, Reverón created landscapes and portraits, and he started crafting life-sized dolls with canvas, which he used as models and to populate his home.

CARACAS, VENEZUELA, 1889–1954

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Armando Reverón

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Emma Reyes

BOGOTÁ, COLOMBIA, 1919– 2003, BORDEAUX, FRANCE

Renowned for her magnetic storytelling, Emma Reyes’s life is the stuff of legend. While born in a destitute household in Colombia, she was able to travel across South America, get a scholarship to live in Paris, work in Washington DC for UNESCO, collaborate with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera in Mexico, and live in Rome, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv before she finally settled in France in 1960. Her early life is poignantly documented in a posthumously published autobiographical epistolary The Book of Emma Reyes (2012), which recounts the perils and poverty of her childhood. Affectionately referred to as “Mama Grande” by Latin American artists living in Paris, Reyes was a reference for many among the most influential cultural figures of the twentieth century. Across an oeuvre spanning nearly six decades, she continually returned to the human figure, and while experimenting with multiple styles, portraiture remained a constant concern. The painting on display was made when she lived in Rome from 1954 to 1960 – a time when she was close to prominent intellectuals, from authors Elsa Morante and Alberto Moravia to film director Pier Paolo Pasolini and her lover Enrico Prampolini, the PostCubist artist with whom she collaborated. Reyes’s canvases combine a visual lexicon rooted in her personal history, and a deeply experimental attitude to painting informed by Indigenism and Primitivism – tendencies she was encouraged to experiment with while training in Paris in the

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1940s. The work presents the haunting image of a woman in a figurative style that plays with abstraction, layering, and pattern. The technique anticipates a distinctive feature of her later work: painted surfaces that reproduce the textures of thread, yarn, and textile. This is the first time the work of Emma Reyes is presented at Biennale Arte. —Sofia Gotti

Untitled, 1955 Oil and oil stick on canvas, 75 × 93 cm. Collection Riccardo Boni, Roma.

Retrato de Ramón Gómez de la Serna, 1915 Oil on canvas, 110 × 90 cm. Photo Gustavo Sosa Pinilla. Malba Collection. Courtesy Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires.

In Retrato de Ramón Gómez de la Serna (1915), Rivera immediately reveals his subject’s craft: the famous writer holds a pen. His face is shown both frontally and in profile, breaking the fixed perspective. From Madrid, Rivera continued his experiments with Cubism, which he had begun in Paris before the war. He attended the Café Pombo’s tertulia, a hotbed of new ideas founded by Gómez de la Serna. In this painting, Rivera depicts El rastro, a book Gómez de la Serna dedicated to Madrid’s famous flea market, which was filled with objects the writer brought to Rivera’s studio, such as the doll and the sword

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included in the scene. Rivera portrayed Gómez de la Serna as an “anarchist who incites crime” – hence the woman decapitated by the sword – because he was “famous for his opposition to all conventional principles.” While the weapon in the foreground relates to the writer’s accumulation of objects, it could also suggest culture as a weapon or tool for spreading revolutionary ideas. —Florencia Malbran

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Diego Rivera, a protagonist of the cultural renewal favoured by the Mexican Revolution, bridged art and politics to become one of the most influential artists of the early twentieth century. Educated in Mexico, he travelled to Europe in 1907, where he continued his career as an artist. Returning to his country in 1922, he helped lead a rediscovery of the pre-Hispanic and popular past, promoting the creation of a national identity that transcended European colonisation. Murals were crucial to this task, as they presented the country’s rewritten histories on the walls of public buildings. Rivera was aligned with the “social revolution”, stating that murals should be “clear ideological propaganda for the people”. He gained widespread recognition, even painting the National Palace. Rivera was married to Frida Kahlo, and he was known for his imposing personality and radical politics.

GUANAJUATO CITY, MEXICO, 1886– 1957, MEXICO CITY

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Diego Rivera

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Laura Rodig

Laura Rodig was a Chilean educator, rural teacher, supporter of the Mapuche cause, an anti-Franco feminist activist, and a committed agent of social change in her time. As part of the initiative to modernise the education system, she carried out major educational projects by teaching drawing, orchestrating children’s art exhibitions, and training museum instructors. She was actively involved in the Movement for the Emancipation of Women of Chile (MEMCH), a feminist body of vital importance for women’s suffrage. In Europe, she played a significant part in cultural events relevant to the construction of modern art, such as her first individual exhibition in Madrid where the Museo de Arte Moderno

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acquired her Mexican Indian sculpture (1924), the Salon d’Automne in 1929, and the Première exposition du groupe latino-américain de Paris held at the Galerie Zak in 1930. That same year she exhibited at the Maison des nations américaines, donating part of her works to the Musée du Trocadero. A catalyst of queer networks, Rodig interacted with the most important intellectuals of her time, such as Gabriela Mistral, whom she met in 1916 and with whom she kept a sexual– affective relationship as well as a professional exchange. In addition to travelling together through Chile teaching, she accompanied Mistral to Mexico in 1922 to work on José Vasconcelos’s educational

LOS ANDES, CHILE, 1896/1901– 1972, SANTIAGO, CHILE

project. The Mexican trip places both women in a scenario of rich and diverse intellectual relationships, but it was also a trigger for their breakup. Although we find them travelling together on various occasions, the distance between Mistral and Rodig widened further over the years. The portrait presented here dates from this first period, reflecting the numerous instances in which Rodig painted the poet. The relationship between both women was also recorded in numerous letters, writings, poems, and notebooks, forming an emotional archive. This is the first time the work of Laura Rodrig is presented at Biennale Arte. —Gloria Cortés Aliaga

Retrato de Gabriela Mistral, 1914-16 Oil on canvas, 49 × 59.5 cm. Photo Francisco Urzua. Gabriela Mistral Museum Collection.

Tehuana, 1940 Oil on canvas, 61.5 × 51 cm. Eduardo F. Costantini Collection.

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Rosa Rolanda was a multidisciplinary artist whose varied practice included choreography, photography, and painting. In 1916, she left her native California to perform as a Marion Morgan dancer in New York City, dancing on Broadway and touring Europe. Rolanda developed her photographic practice throughout her travels and, after training with Man Ray, began experimenting with photograms, a technique popularised by Surrealist photographers that uses photographic paper, objects, and light to create prints. Through her photograms, Rolanda created a unique iconographic language, framing intimate depictions of her own body with recurring objects and symbols of personal and political importance. In 1930, she settled in Mexico after marrying the artist Miguel Covarrubias. There, she began painting and became integral to Mexico City’s artistic milieu. Her paintings, often self-portraits or depictions of rural and Indigenous women, are formally and politically influenced by Surrealism and Mexican Modernism and employ a similar iconographic language to her photograms.

AZUSA, UNITED STATES, 1896– 1970, MEXICO CITY

Although Rolanda described herself as a neo-figurative artist, it can be argued that Tehuana (1940) is influenced by the political project of Mexican Muralism – which often portrayed idealised depictions of Indigenous children, to embody a “pure” Mexican identity – and its modern style of figuration. Rolanda depicts a young girl with large almondshaped eyes, deep brown skin, and rounded facial features. The subject, a girl from the isthmus of Tehuantepec, wears a huipil, the traditional garb of Indigenous Zapotec women. Some consider the Zapotecs a matriarchal society, and Rolanda, like her friend Frida

Kahlo, wore the huipil as a symbol of feminist resistance in a patriarchal twentiethcentury Mexican society. A hummingbird, an important symbol in Mayan creation myths, hangs like a pendant around the subject’s neck. This use of precontact iconography is characteristic of Mexican Modernism, in which many artists looked to indigeneity to create a revolutionary and culturally decolonised Mexican identity. This is the first time the work of Rosa Rolanda is presented at Biennale Arte. —Diego Chocano

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Rosa Rolanda

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Jamini Roy

BENGAL, INDIA, 1887– 1972, CALCUTTA, INDIA

Jamini Roy, often described as a primitivist–modernist, is acknowledged as a pioneering artist of twentieth-century India. His work has been exhibited widely since the 1940s, including in London and New York. Though his early paintings of landscapes and portraits conformed to European academic realism and impressionism, his work underwent a dramatic transformation in the 1930s as he looked to Indigenous India as inspiration for subjects, materials, and techniques. Iconic figures drawn from Indian epics, folk tales, and mythologies were painted in flat colours with bold outlines, in a style reminiscent of Pattachitra, traditional scroll painting of Bengal. He also developed a visual vocabulary drawn from Kalighat paintings that depicted scenes from everyday life as social commentary on the hypocrisies of bourgeois urban life. Roy critiqued the idea of the singular artist as auteur, setting up a workshop–atelier where students and members of his family worked together as a crafts guild.

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Untitled - Krishna with Parrot, n.d. Tempera on canvas, 96.5 × 51 cm. Collection Sanjay Yaday, London.

The subject of the untitled painting could be identified as Krishna, a beloved Hindu deity who is recognised by his dark body and yellow garments. The parrot that Krishna holds to his chest appears often in Bengali folk paintings. Multiple versions of a similar figure were painted in the workshop and could variously be ascribed as an Indigenous Santal man or Kama, the deity of eroticism and love who typically appears with a parrot. The thick black outlines, flat colours, and folkish rendition of the frontal, monumental body filling up the picture plane are typical of Roy’s style. The “Blue God”, as he is also known, is one of the religious figures that appears often in Roy’s work, which also delved into Christian subjects. —Latika Gupta

Rómulo Rozo is a Colombian sculptor associated with Indigenism, the movement that championed the depiction of indigenous subjects in a style that blended elements of Expressionism, Cubism and Abstraction, with the intent of reframing indigenous identity and culture within the modern. Rozo studied at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes in Bogotá, in a conservative environment dominated by academicism and the influence of Spain’s Old Masters. He moved to Europe in 1923 and began to engage with avant-garde ideas, distancing himself from his traditional education. In Paris, the artist matured his visual lexicon between his own heritage and European modernism. In 1931, he moved to Mexico, where he would spend the rest of his life. Though the work of many Latin American Indigenists like Rozo have been criticised for its romanticising of Indigenous cultures, his search for an autochthonous visual language was greatly influential.

This sculpture depicts the creation myth of the Muisca people of central Colombia. The sculpture is divided in two distinct parts: from the torso upwards, Bachué – a mother deity – wears a crown consisting of nine snail shells, one for each month of pregnancy; above her, a boy is nestled in a conical shape. In the myth, Bachué and the boy create humanity from a lagoon before Bachué turns into a water serpent, depicted in the bottom half of the sculpture by a descending serpentine spiral. The sculpture, modern in its form and expression of motion, is indebted to the aesthetic languages of many Indigenous cultures across Colombia. In 1930, after seeing a photograph of this artwork published in a newspaper, a generation of young artists decided to break from their academicist formation towards new forms of making, inspired by modernism and Indigeneity. These artists, considered the first movement of modern art in Colombia, named themselves the Bachués. This is the first time the work of Rómulo Rozo is presented at Biennale Arte. —Diego Chocano

BOGOTÁ, COLOMBIA, 1899– 1964, MÉRIDA, MEXICO

Bachué, Diosa Generatriz de los Chibchas, 1925 Granite, 177 × 44 × 40 cm. Courtesy Proyecto Bachué, Colombia.

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Rómulo Rozo

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José Sabogal

One of the most influential figures in twentieth-century Peruvian culture, José Sabogal was a painter, draughtsman, and printmaker who also designed architectural projects. José Sabogal had an intense desire to travel and paint the world from a young age. When he was twenty years old, he visited a number of European countries. From 1912 to 1918, he lived in Argentina where he attended the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires before moving to Jujuy, one of the country’s northern Andean provinces. He visited Mexico in 1922, where he met the primary figures of the incipient Muralist movement. The overpowering influence on his art, though, was the period from 1918–1919 spent in Cusco and the southern Peruvian Andes which was instrumental for his embrace of Indigenism – a social, political, and cultural movement of the 1920s and 1930s that would redefine Peruvian national identity. As the founder of Pictorial Indigenism, Sabogal articulated the ideas of his time and helped expand the nation’s vision of itself to include its cultural diversity.

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Sabogal was crucial to the construction of Peru’s collective imaginary. After teaching at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes from 1920 to 1932, he became that institution’s director until 1943. His prints were used for most of the covers of Amauta, a magazine published from 1926 to 1929 central to the social, cultural, and political dimensions of Indigenism. It was in the 1920s that his artistic vision truly came together with the introduction of Andean

El Recluta, 1926 Oil on canvas, 60 × 60 cm. Courtesy Centro Cultural UNI.

CAJABAMBA, PERU, 1888– 1956, LIMA, PERU

landscapes and Indigenous figures in his painting. El recluta (1926) protests the exploitation of Indigenous labour in military construction projects. The figure in this work, like other subjects in Sabogal’s paintings, is solemn; his striking features and determined gaze are painted in vivid colours. This is the first time the work of José Sabogal is presented at Biennale Arte. —Sonia Becce

LUntitled (Lady with Diya), 1950s-60s Oil on canvas, 91.4 × 60.9 cm. Photo Humayun Memon. Courtesy Taimur Hassan Collection.

Untitled (Lady with Diya), 1950s–1960s, is characteristic of the formally reduced style Sadequain developed early on in his career. Painted in dark subdued tones and bearing thinly hatched lines, a nude female figure with an oblong face and elongated body occupies the centre of the composition. She holds up a diya – a traditional South Asian oil lamp – in her right hand. The audaciousness of the subject matter, with its overt sexual connotation, is reinforced by her assertive, upright pose. But the work also opens up other

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readings. A crescent moon appears through a window to the right. At a symbolic level, the nude figure holding a diya evokes Hindu rituals, while the crescent moon can be interpreted as a reference to Islam. This syncretism and the sexualised rendering of the work attest to the daring that would sustain Sadequain throughout his creative life. This is the first time the work of Syed Sadequain is presented at Biennale Arte. —Devika Singh

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Syed Sadequain’s life and career traverse the birth and history of Pakistan. Born in 1930 in British India into a family of calligraphers, Sadequain moved as a young man to Delhi and worked for All India Radio before studying at the University of Agra. After partition and independence in 1947, he joined the Progressive Artists’ and Writers’ Movement in Pakistan. His exhibition in 1955 at the residence of the soon-to-be Prime Minister Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy was a turning point in launching his career. Yet Sadequain departed for Paris in 1960. There, he was the recipient of one of the Biennale de Paris’s prizes (1961) and was commissioned to illustrate Albert Camus’ L’Étranger (1942). After his return to Pakistan in 1967, his prolific career would include the creation of impressive, largescale murals at the Mangla Dam and at the Lahore Museum and Frere Hall in Karachi, as well as works that contributed to the transnational development of calligraphic abstraction.

AMROHA, INDIA, 1930– 1987, KARACHI, PAKISTAN

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Syed Sadequain

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Mahmoud Saïd

Mahmoud Saïd resigned from his role as judge at the Mixed Courts in Alexandria in 1947 to dedicate his life to artmaking. From a prominent Egyptian family, he graduated from the French Law School in Cairo in 1919 but had earlier trained in the studios of Italian painters established in his hometown, such as Amelia Daforno Casonato and Arturo Zanieri. Later, he took art classes in Paris at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and the Académie Julian between the summers of 1919 and 1921. While visiting the cultural centres of Europe, Saïd demonstrated a vivid fascination for the art of the Venetian Renaissance and the works of the Flemish Primitives. The artist would

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also find inspiration in the arts of Ancient Egypt and from local Egyptian traditions, which turned into the heart of his paintings. Saïd’s oeuvre illustrates modern Egyptian society, capturing its cultural and historical richness. Throughout his career, Saïd produced a significant series of portraits of women, such as Haguer (1923). The work was exhibited for the first time in a group show for modern Egyptian artists in 1924 in Cairo. Here, Saïd depicted a woman sitting on the floor with her back resting against a wall and staring at the viewer. Contrary to the women from the Westernised local elite, the character doesn’t wear

ALEXANDRIA, EGYPT, 1897–1964

any jewellery and is attired in a simple dark dress with light blue headwear. The Alexandrian painter thus reveals that the model comes from the working class, as she is also posing in a humble manner, her hands clasped. However, he gave this ordinary woman a sacred aspect by reflecting a golden external light on her tanned complexion. Saïd liked to celebrate the lives and customs of ordinary Egyptian folk, who personify the essence of the Egyptian identity. —Arthur Debsi

Haguer, 1923 Oil on canvas, 81.2 × 64.7 cm. Photo Hamad Yousef. Courtesy Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar.

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Painted during his prolific Eastwood period (1945–1947), Self-Portrait exemplifies the oil technique Sekoto had developed since the late 1930s, expressed in assured brushstrokes and powerful colour and contrast. Dated “14.10.47” on its reverse, Self-Portrait was apparently completed days before his arrival in London en route to Paris, after a two-week voyage from Cape Town. On the verge of exile, having sensitively recorded the ordinary lives of those he refused to cast as victims, Sekoto turns his gaze, in this first known self-portrait, towards the observing artist. Sekoto typically captured subjects engaged in activity, always moving; here, he glances back into the darkness, as his body turns towards the light, evoking the bright future to which powerfully reimagined workers progress in his celebrated and contemporaneous painting Song of the Pick: “I am looking into the future of our country with much anxiety, yet fully determined to live this life as everybody does”. This is the first time the work of Gerard Sekoto is presented at Biennale Arte. —Ruth Ramsden-Karelse

Self-Portrait, 1947 Oil on canvas on board, 45,7 × 35,6 cm. Photo Kristian Tobin Photography. The Kilbourn Collection.

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In the 1930s and 1940s, Gerard Sekoto’s paintings of South Africa’s urban working classes refused white audiences’ exoticising desires, instead advancing a mode of Social Realism characterised by empathy and a lack of sentimentality. Unlike many contemporaries, Sekoto was recognised during his lifetime, exhibiting regularly from 1939 and, in 1940, becoming the first Black artist to have a work purchased by the Johannesburg Art Gallery. In 1947, driven by increasing social segregation, Sekoto left for Paris, never to return to South Africa after having his citizenship stripped in 1966 while spending the year in Senegal. Pre-exile, Sekoto captured the spirit of celebrated cultural hubs in which he lived before their physical destruction under apartheid – Johannesburg’s Sophiatown and Cape Town’s District Six, as well as Pretoria’s Eastwood – in paintings later adopted among powerful, anti-apartheid iconography. In Paris, Sekoto’s paintings remained predominantly concerned with South African life, though now coloured by his physical distance.

BOTSHABELO, SOUTH AFRICA, 1913– 1993, NOGENT-SUR-MARNE, FRANCE

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Gerard Sekoto

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Lorna Selim

Lorna Selim née Hales was born and raised in the United Kingdom, but never detached from her roots in Iraq. In 1945, she enrolled at the Slade School of Art in London where she studied art and design and encountered Iraqi artist Jewad Selim. After completing their studies, they relocated to Baghdad where they married in 1950. Lorna Selim was a lecturer at the Girls’ College and taught landscape paintings at the College of Engineering at Baghdad University. The Iraqi people became the fundamental subject of her oeuvre, and she depicted their daily lives. Selim adopted an abstract-figurative style in which she adapted Iraqi artistic traditions into a modern visual language, employing very

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few colours and emphasising lines and shapes. Back in England in 1971, Selim produced works mainly inspired by the architecture in Baghdad, filling them with nostalgia. In Baghdad in 1950, Selim was captivated by the Iraqi countryside and its people. In the artwork Untitled (1958), the painter depicted a trio that might represent a mother carrying her son on her shoulder, standing next to her daughter. Using a twodimensional perspective, Selim chose a style that reduces the main body parts to almost abstract elements. The almond-shaped eyes of the protagonists, who are fixed in hieratic postures, are a clear stylistic reference to the art of

SHEFFIELD, UNITED KINGDOM, 1928– 2021 ABERGAVENNY, UNITED KINGDOM

sculpture from the Sumerian period in the third century BCE. The Iraqi artist also applied a limited palette of colours – including ochre, brown, and beige – whose tones recall the earthy colours of Mesopotamian artefacts. The image of the peasant family symbolises the traditions on which the modern nation of Iraq was founded and which are passed down from one generation to another. This is the first time the work of Lorna Selim is presented at Biennale Arte. —Arthur Debsi

Unknown, 1958 Oil on canvas, 83 × 70.5 cm. Photo Hamad Yousef. Courtesy Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar.

In Woman and a Jug (1957), Selim demonstrates the confluence of modern geometric abstraction at the intersection of Islamic, ancient Mesopotamian, and Western styles. In this work, the curved circular outlines of the figure’s face, arms, a coffee pot, and adjacent plant leaves convey the waxing stages of the moon from crescent to full, alluding to traditions associated with the Sumerian moon god Nanna, an important deity connected to fertility. In Islam, the moon represents spiritual wayfinding, and it is the system upon which the Muslim lunar calendar is based. Furthermore, in Islamic

Woman and a Jug, 1957 Oil on canvas, 72 × 52 cm. Photo Anthony Dawton. Private Collection. Courtesy Meem Gallery, Dubai.

scriptures, the moon, or Qamar, references the miracle of the moon splitting performed by Prophet Muhammad, which foreshadows the day of judgement and division between believers and nonbelievers. Correspondingly, the angular properties of the dresser, atop which the figure and coffee pot rest, equate to 360 degrees, symbolising the concept of a complete circle.

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Jewad Selim, a forerunner of Iraqi modernism, was born to a middle-class military family. He was influenced by his officer father, who had trained as a landscape painter in the Ottoman Military Academy. After his family relocated to Baghdad in the early 1920s, Selim’s formative years coincided with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, which had governed over Arab nations for four centuries, paving the way for independent nation–states. Between 1938 and 1949, Selim pursued his studies in painting and sculpture in Paris, Rome, and London and returned to Baghdad to establish his studio practice. There he created a visual cultural vocabulary that reflected the spirit of independent Iraq, which actively sought to incorporate the sociopolitical art and ideas of the twentieth century without abandoning the country’s epic past. In 1951, he co-founded the prominent Baghdad Modern Art Group with fellow artist Shakir Hassan Al Said.

ANKARA, TURKEY, 1919– 1961, BAGHDAD, IRAQ

—Sara Raza

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Jewad Selim

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Amrita Sher-Gil

Amrita Sher-Gil was born in 1913 in Budapest to Umrao Singh Sher-Gil – a Sikh aristocrat, scholar, and selftaught photographer – and Marie Antoinette Gottesman, a Hungarian opera singer. Amrita Sher-gil trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and lived and worked in Hungary and Shimla before settling down in Lahore. She achieved considerable recognition as an artist before India’s independence but died tragically young at the age of twenty-eight, on the cusp of a major exhibition. In a selfproclaimed quest to discover her Indian roots, Sher-Gil travelled across the country and was deeply influenced by the ancient and premodern art of the subcontinent. From the mid-1930s, her work evinces a decisive shift from her early paintings, which are grounded in her academic training in Europe. She painted scenes and figures from rural India in dark, earthy colours in tableau-like compositions; her subjects, with large eyes and brooding expressions, recall the mural paintings at Ajanta and classical Indian sculptures, in a unique confluence of the East and West.

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BUDAPEST, HUNGARY, 1913– 1941, LAHORE, INDIA

The Head of a Girl (1937) follows the style of her later work, though the subject is not specifically Indian. The head and shoulders of a young girl with large almond-shaped eyes and an oval face framed by a heavy fringe bears an uncanny similarity to a black-and-white photograph of a young Sher-Gil taken between 1920 and 1924, possibly by her father. While she painted several self-portraits in the early years, there are none of her as a young girl, and though she does not ascribe it as such, it is likely that the photograph served as a reference for the painting. In 2007, the Tate Modern showed thirty paintings by Amrita Sher-Gil in one of its first major exhibitions of an Indian artist. —Latika Gupta

Head of a Girl, 1937 Oil on canvas, 29 × 33 cm. Photo Justin Piperger. Courtesy Taimur Hassan Collection.

DERBY, UNITED KINGDOM, 1954 LIVES IN HARARE, ZIMBABWE

NUCLEO STORICO • PORTRAITS

Doreen Sibanda is an artist, curator, administrator, and art education activist. Born 1954 in England to Jamaican parents, Sibanda studied art education and was always an avid supporter of the arts. She moved to Zimbabwe at the cusp of its independence in 1980 and became the National Gallery of Zimbabwe’s (NGZ) first educational officer. Sibanda’s husband was part of the diplomatic corps, and they lived in Russia in the 1990s. She continued to pursue her work and exhibited in the Czech Republic, Russia, and Sweden. After returning to Zimbabwe in 2004, she rejoined the NGZ as its executive director until 2021. In this role, she contributed to developing the country’s national curriculum, commissioned the first Zimbabwe Pavilion at the Biennale Arte, facilitated global convenings, and supported generations of artists and curators.

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Doreen Sibanda

Reclining Woman, 1978 Oil on canvas, 60 × 60 cm. Courtesy National Gallery of Zimbabwe.

simultaneously enthused by classical African art and its simplification of form and space. Drawn to Diana’s boldness, self-assuredness, and facial features, Sibanda immediately thought to document this essence through painting. This work is part of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe’s permanent collection. This is the first time the work of Doreen Sibanda is presented at Biennale Arte. —Tandazani Dhlakama FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Reclining Woman (1978) depicts a serene woman in repose, resting on her hand while reclining and looking away. Painted with broad strokes in bright, contrasting tones and gestural shapes, the painting is economically detailed to depict sharp facial features. Dramatic light highlights the angles of the face. Sibanda intended to portray the strength and character of the sitter, Diana, who had recently migrated from Jamaica. At the time Sibanda was interested in how modernist painters captured emotion through gesture and colour. Additionally, she was

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Gazbia Sirry

CAIRO, EGYPT, 1925–2021

Gazbia Sirry was a Cairo-born artist who came to prominence in the 1950s, having lived through the 1952 Free Officers Revolution in Egypt and the Socialist and Pan-Arabist ideologies ushered in by President Gamal Abdel Nasser. She trained at the Higher Institute of Art Education for Women Teachers in Cairo (currently known as the Faculty of Art Education, Helwan University), graduating in 1950. She later earned government scholarships to study in Europe – with Marcel Gromaire in Paris in 1950, at the Egyptian Academy in Rome in 1952, and at the Slade School in London in 1953. Her early work addressed the political transformations of her time and the collective struggles of modern Egyptian society, often emphasising strong female figures.

In her work Portrait of a Nubian Family (1962), referring to the Nilo-Saharan ethnic group indigenous to parts of Sudan and Egypt, Sirry paints a mother surrounded by four children. The woman wears a brightly coloured, patterned dress, while her hair and body are adorned with elaborate items of jewellery. The family stands in front of what appears to be an arched doorway into a mud-brick house, common in Nubian villages. The outer walls of the house are adorned

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with geometric, floral, and animal motifs. The inclusion of the ornamental elements in the painting reflects Sirry’s interest in heritage, mythology, and symbolism drawn from folk culture. The work was painted during the construction of the Aswan High Dam, which resulted in the flooding of large swaths of Lower Nubia and over one hundred thousand people being resettled. —Suheyla Takesh

Portrait of a Nubian Family, 1962 Oil on canvas, 72 × 53 cm. Collection of Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah. Courtesy Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah.

The Guitarist, 1988 Ironwood, 136 × 49 x 24 cm. Private Collection.

One among a number of his renderings of musicians, The Guitarist (1988) is recognisable as the work of Sithole by its profile and complex, extended form, exemplifying the use of proportion acclaimed by fellow sculptor Sydney Kumalo as a “synthesis” of “African and Western traditions”. Gracefully elongated, evocatively tilting, yet with an emaciated, snakelike character, the distorted figure invokes striking contrasts. The wood’s solidity is troubled by the articulation of negative space, and a play of light and shadow conjured

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by the textural juxtaposition of rough, pitted surfaces common to Sithole’s early work. Likened by Sithole to a longing for the divine, his favoured attenuated shapes and slender, writhing spirals appear as though revealed in the grains and long fibres of the indigenous woods that he preferred to other materials he worked in: stone, clay, bronze, and steel. In 1968, Sithole’s Tornado (Antediluvian Animal) (1968) was featured in the South African entry at the Biennale Arte. —Ruth Ramsden-Karelse

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Lucas Sithole, regarded as one of South Africa’s foremost sculptors, is best known for his distinctive, semi-abstract depictions of animals, people, and Swazi and Zulu mythological beings, carved from dead trees that the artist searched for himself. After training in carpentry and working in manual labour, Sithole participated in painting and sculpture workshops at Johannesburg’s Polly Street Art Centre from 1959 to 1960. Then directed by Cecil Skotnes, the Centre was one of the first alternative educational facilities at which Black artists, legally barred from formal arts education under apartheid, were able to receive training. Following his first solo show in Johannesburg in 1966, Sithole’s work was exhibited as far afield as London and New York, though the artist himself never travelled beyond South Africa, Lesotho, and Eswatini.

KWATHEMA, SOUTH AFRICA, 1931– 1994, SPEKBOOM, SOUTH AFRICA

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Lucas Sithole

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Francis Newton Souza

F N Souza was a lifelong rebel and arguably one of India’s most significant artists. Born in 1924 in Goa – then a Portuguese colony – he was expelled from the Sir J J School of Art in Bombay in 1945 for his involvement with the Indian independence movement. Souza held his first solo exhibition the same year, followed by a second in 1946. Brought up in a strict Roman Catholic family, Souza was critical of the morality and hypocrisy of the priests and their followers. Much of his subject matter focused on the institution of the Church and served as a searing commentary on contemporary society. In 1947, Souza formed the influential Progressive Artists Group with K H Ara, S K Bakre, H A Gade, M F Husain,

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and S H Raza, which rejected the sentimental revivalism of the Bengal School of Art and instead looked to formulating an Indian avant-garde that was premised on internationalism. In 1949, Souza moved to London (and later to New York) and, in the following years, his work was exhibited across Europe, including in the Biennale Arte in 1954, and later in North and South America. Souza championed complete freedom of expression in content and technique and developed a stark, recognisable style in both his painting and writing. His work in the mid1950s often featured male figures – eyes set high on the forehead, bearded and pockmarked, their bodies delineated by thick black lines.

SALIGAO, INDIA, 1924– 2002, MUMBAI, INDIA

Often the men are archetypes of priests or Catholic saints. Untitled (1956) could be read alongside Souza’s writing in Words and Lines (1959): The eyes in the brow the better to see with the brain Stars in the face are the scars of smallpox Arrows in the neck like flies mean affliction The grinding of teeth is not in the day of Resurrection, but today The jacket, tie and stiff collar are signs of respectability. —Latika Gupta

Untitled, 1956 Oil on board, 91 × 127 cm. Photo Justin Piperger; Grosvenor Gallery, London. Collection Jane and Kito de Boer Collection. Courtesy Grosvenor Gallery, London.

SCHWEIZER-RENEKE, SOUTH AFRICA, 1894– 1966, CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA

NUCLEO STORICO • PORTRAITS

Irma Stern was born to wealthy German–Jewish immigrants and travelled frequently between Africa and Europe throughout her life. In 1910, the Sterns relocated from the hamlet of Wolmaransstad to the cosmopolitan Kurfürstendamm in Berlin, which gave her access to Berlin’s top art venues. At nineteen, Stern enrolled into art classes at Weimar Academy. By 1918, the year of her first solo exhibition, she had met mentor Max Pechstein, who connected her to Expressionist circles – a milieu fixated on primitivist ideas. She had close to one hundred solo exhibitions in her lifetime, and she benefited tremendously from state support. In the 1950s, Stern represented South Africa at biennials in São Paolo and Venice. A strong interest in ethnic diversity characterises her ethnographic portraits, which she traversed great distances across sub-Saharan Africa to capture.

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Irma Stern

Stern’s Watussi Princess (1942) was painted while she was in Rwanda for the royal coronation. This portrait depicts Emma Bakayishonga, the sister of King Mutara III Rudahigwa.

Watussi Princess, 1942 Oil on canvas, 69 × 55 cm. Private Collection. Courtesy Sotheby’s.

echoed by a lyre-shaped headband that sits elegantly on her brow, elongating her features and accentuating her regal status. This portrait is a sharp departure from Stern’s colourful ethnographic portraits. The harmonious interplay of colour and character in this depiction bestows upon the princess a sense of depth and dimension, evoking reverence. —Zamansele Nsele

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The princess is painted seated at a three-quarter angle; her eyes pensively look away from the viewer. A loose white cloth, almost touching either side of the frame, flows across her slanted shoulders, pronouncing her majestic stature. Diagonal lines are reiterated in Stern’s entire composition signalling an Expressionist delineation of form. The sitter’s black, oval-shaped coiffure points upwards away from her face. This long shape is

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Emiria Sunassa

TANAHWANGKO, INDONESIA, 1894– 1964, LAMPUNG, INDONESIA

Emiria Sunassa’s life was surrounded by ambiguity, and her works tend to concentrate on the diverse peoples of the Indonesian archipelago, whom she brought into view for the Javanese audience in Batavia. She lived across the Indonesian archipelago, working in various roles, reportedly including nurse, plantation administrator, and cabaret singer. With no formal training in painting, she became part of the landmark artist group PERSAGI (Persatuan Ahli-Ahli Gambar Indonesia, or Association of Indonesian Draughtsmen), active in Batavia (presentday Jakarta) in the 1930s and 1940s. This progressive group advocated for modern painting that is tied to the realities of life in Indonesia and criticised the hackneyed, picturesque works that dominated the market. In the postindependence period, she continued to exhibit her artworks, holding solo exhibitions and participating in group presentations of Indonesian art in Amsterdam and New York.

Consistent with the raw, expressive quality of Sunassa’s body of work, the figure in this painting is rendered in bold, sweeping lines, while the face is mask-like, highlighted in a startling green against a darkened ground. In the image, an Irian (Papuan) man is shown holding birds-of-paradise to his chest. Birds-of-paradise are sacred to the Indigenous people in Papua, but their feathers were also a prized commodity among foreign hunters and traders. Thus, they can be seen a symbol of the exploitation of Papua’s natural resources. Sunassa claimed descent from the

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Sultan of Tidore, an island in the Maluku archipelago, which had historically ruled parts of West Papua. As a result, at a crucial time when both Indonesia and West Papua were struggling for their independence (from the late 1940s to the early 1960s), Sunassa claimed to be the rightful ruler of the region. Her status was never officially accepted but has complex implications for her paintings of Papuan scenes. This is the first time the work of Emiria Sunassa is presented at Biennale Arte. —Phoebe Scott

Orang Irian dengan Burung Tjenderawasih [Irian Man with Bird of Paradise], 1948 Oil on canvas, 67.2 × 54.5 cm. Collection of National Gallery Singapore. Courtesy National Heritage Board, Singapore.

The canvas painting Imilla (1946) – meaning “girl” in Aymara, the language spoken by communities in Bolivia and Southern Peru – is a fine example of Armodio Tamayo’s paintings of Indigenous and mestizo subjects. The mountainlike, triangular composition is formed by the young woman’s striped mantle, which the painter created with loose brushwork. The mantle does not bear the deep red cochineal colour of other Aymara textiles but consists primarily of earthen tones like the minimally defined background. The chromatic focus lies instead on the red ties of the green and whitetrimmed bodice of her dress – a colourful contrast between traditional weaving and more modern fashion. Visual attention ultimately comes to rest on the luminous face of the imilla – reddened by sun and polished by perspiration and focus – whose bright eyes refuse to meet our gaze as she narrows them intently on her own subject of interest beyond the frame. This is the first time the work of Armodio Tamayo is presented at Biennale Arte. —Lisa Trever

Imilla, 1946 Oil on canvas, 54 × 43 cm. Photo Michael Dunn. Courtesy Museo Nacional de Arte - Fundación Cultural del Banco Central de Bolivia.

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Armodio Tamayo trained as a painter at the Academia de Bellas Artes in La Paz, Bolivia, and studied with leading Indigenist painter Cecilio Guzmán de Rojas. He was the son of Luisa Galindo and the prominent Bolivian intellectual Franz Tamayo who wrote Creación de la pedagogía nacional (1910). Armodio (or Harmodio) was named after the ancient Athenian antityrannical martyr Harmodius. The elder Tamayo considered Harmodius, along with his lover Aristogeiton, a democratic ideal for modern South American politics. Armodio Tamayo’s works, which are not as wellknown as those of some of his contemporaries, consist mainly of Indigenous Aymara and mestizo Bolivian portraits and allegorical figures such as Cristo indio (n.d.) and Justicia del sol (1952). His paintings have been described as the “plastic version of the literary work” of Franz Tamayo, but it would be a mistake to reduce the son’s oeuvre entirely to the motivations of the father.

LA PAZ, BOLIVIA, 1924–1964

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Armodio Tamayo

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Lucy Tejada

PEREIRA, COLOMBIA, 1920– 2011, CALI, COLOMBIA

Lucy Tejada was a pioneer who helped consolidate modernism in Colombia and was among the first women to be recognised as a professional artist in her country. Born to arts-loving intelligentsia, Tejada studied at the National School of Fine Arts in Bogotá and was the only woman in her class. An active participant in bohemian intellectual circles frustrated with stale institutional academicism, Tejada moved to Spain in 1952, where she studied modern art and printmaking at the San Fernando Fine Art Royal Academy in Madrid. Tejada embraced the expressive potential and pictorial experimentation she observed in European avant-gardes. But in her native Colombia, to which she returned in 1956, Tejada never entirely abandoned figuration, directing her attention to regionally specific landscapes and customs, often painting groups of women, to capture the beauty and hardship that lived in her country.

A timeless image of agricultural fecundity, El sembrador (1958) was created during a period of professional success and international recognition. In 1958, Tejada was selected to represent Colombia at the First Interamerican Painting Biennial in Mexico City and the 1958 Venice Biennale, alongside a solo exhibition at the Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango and a series of public commissions. To communicate both the fertility of her native land and its burgeoning modernity, Tejada represents man and earth in harmony with a modernist vocabulary of geometricised forms. With a pale, almost translucent palette, Tejada simplifies the body to the blunt contours of its outlines, recalling her training as an engraver. Blurring figure into ground, composed of flat planes of vivid colour, Tejada gestures to geometric abstraction but retains narrative symbolism: the natural landscape is miniaturised in the form of the shooting sprout nurtured by human hands. —Lucia Neirotti

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El Sembrador, 1958 Oil on canvas, 130 × 70.5 cm. Colección Banco de la República, Bogotá. Courtesy Colección Banco de la República.

Retrato de VP, 1941 Oil on canvas, 77 × 66 cm. Courtesy the Estate of Joaquín Torres-García.

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Joaquín Torres-García was born and died in Montevideo, Uruguay, where, after fortythree years spent amongst European avant-gardes, he became one of Latin America’s leading advocates of abstraction. As a classically trained artist in turn-of-thecentury Barcelona, Torres, who served as an assistant to Antonio Gaudí, transitioned from the decorative arts and Art Nouveau to a painterly practice focused on formal synthesis. Introduced to Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian while living in Paris, Torres discovered a deep affinity for Concretism and became a leading contributor to their publication Cercle et Carré (1929–1930). After returning to Uruguay in 1934, Torres developed his own style, Constructive Universalism, along with a pedagogical practice that, through hundreds of lectures and workshops, formed what became known as the School of the South. Although best known for his geometric, grid-like arrangements of pictograms, Torres was an artist with eclectic and expansive vision who produced both abstract and figurative art contemporaneously until his death in 1949.

MONTEVIDEO, URUGUAY, 1874–1949

Retrato de V. P. (1941) was painted during a period of intense activity. Recently named an honorary professor of art by the Uruguayan government and broadcasting his lectures on the radio, Torres consolidated his role as a leading exponent of modernism in Latin America. While developing his theory and practice of Constructive Universalism, Torres continued to paint in other styles. The heavy impasto and murky palette of this painting of an unknown woman echoes earlier portraits, painted on commission while Torres was

still struggling to live off his art in Europe. In Portrait of V. P., however, Torres integrated that figurative practice with structural elements of his idiosyncratic Constructivist style. Like his gridded canvases, Torres built form out of thickly applied planes of primary colours, modulating them with white and black to create textural tonal gradations. He based his composition on the golden section, a mathematically derived system of proportions that underlies the paint surface. —Lucia Neirotti

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Joaquín Torres-García

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Twins Seven-Seven

Twins Seven-Seven belonged to a group of Oshogbo painters who came together as Nigeria was undergoing political and economic upheaval. Born in Ijara, Twins Seven-Seven was not only an ibeji, a twin, but an abiku – a child in possession of spiritual powers, born to die. His father came from a royal house in Ibadan, making him a prince; his mother was a highly regarded member of the Ogboni. Twins SevenSeven arrived at the Mbari Club in Ibadan as a frontman for sellers of Superman Tonic. Known for wearing a shirt with his name emblazoned across the back, his sartorial choices, magnetism, and highlife style caused quite a stir. Invited to stay as an entertainer at the advent of the club’s third summer school, Twins began drawing, experimenting with gouache and etching, evincing a command of pattern and expressive delicate linework, which he employed to convey his and others’ stories. As a musician, he recorded two albums that were perceived as critical of the government, for which he was arrested. In 1981, he ran for office, but was disqualified. A master of radical juxtaposition, Twins wove stories within stories and dreams with reality, evoking exchanges between the spiritual and cultural in both his oral and visual tellings.

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IJARA, NIGERIA, 1944– 2011, IBADAN, NIGERIA

In the highly detailed The Architect (1989), a transfer of drawing to wood, Twins presents a host of female figures in celebration of the visual language of Úli, a female body and wall painting tradition from south-eastern Nigeria based on sinuous, natural forms. The mother architect, who occupies almost the entirety of the frame with her yogi-like pose, holds ideas of symmetry, reflection, and boundedness through the double-headed serpent that crowns her head. Of particular note are the clusters of pitched thatch roofs that appear behind her. Although disparate units, Twins draws the individual houses, a reference to precolonial architecture, politically interlocking them into a whole. This is the first time the work of Twins Seven-Seven is presented at Biennale Arte. —Nancy Dantas

The Architect, 1989 Ink on plywood, glued and carved, 61 × 41 cm. Photo Maurice Aeschimann. The Jean Pigozzi African Art Collection. Courtesy The Jean Pigozzi African Art Collection.

Conversation, 1981 Oil on canvas, 127.5 × 91 cm. Photo National Gallery of Jamaica. Courtesy National Gallery of Jamaica.

The Conversation (1981) is one of Watson’s best-known portrayals of Jamaican women, his abiding subject. The painting shows a trio of young women as they relish a lull in their workday, their tin buckets propped behind them as they regard one another attentively. Clad in skirts, shirts, and headscarves, they stand in eloquent contrapposto, perhaps bantering, venting their frustrations, or amusing one another with details of the latest neighbourhood

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drama. Though women have long played a pivotal role in the Jamaican labour force, their contributions are often overlooked. Watson’s sensitivity to this moment of everyday life lends the women’s activities a heroic resonance. This is the first time the work of Barrington Watson is presented at Biennale Arte. —Ade J. Omotosho

NUCLEO STORICO • PORTRAITS

Barrington Watson rendered lush paintings of his country’s history and culture throughout his life. He studied at the Royal College of Art in London, where he honed a style in the social realist manner. Upon returning to his homeland in the 1960s, he became an educator and created a body of work filled with portraits and landscapes that tell of his fondness for Jamaican life. The works for which Watson is best known are his sensuous depictions of women. These pictures often show women at work: mothers tending to their children, laundresses wringing out the wash, domestic workers depleted by their labour.

LUCEA, JAMAICA, 1931– 2016, KINGSTON, JAMAICA

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Barrington Watson

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Osmond Watson

The painter and sculptor Osmond Watson captured the stirring cultural transformations of postindependence Jamaica. He cultivated his precocious interest in art at major academies in the city. His ambition carried him, like so many Caribbean artists of his generation, to London, where he studied at Central Saint Martins. Watson’s time in Europe refined his style, which melds histories of Western art with those of the African diaspora. Jamaican popular culture is Watson’s great subject, and his work often depicts scenes of everyday life as well as the country’s vibrant festivals and religious traditions.

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Johnny Cool (1967) is an exercise in the brooding palette of blues and greens that recurs in Watson’s oeuvre. The portrait shows a young man posed casually before a dark, almost smoky bluegreen backdrop. He sports a crisp blue polo with its buttons fastened, snugly tucked into a pair of trousers. Streetwise and self-possessed, he is a picture of boyish nonchalance. The prep flair of his outfit is consistent with the staples of the rude boy subculture that reverberated throughout Jamaica in the 1960s. The stark, stylised contours of his face and his lustrous complexion are characteristic

KINGSTON, JAMAICA, 1934–2005

of Watson’s style, hinting at his facility with sculpture. While the sitter’s expression withholds the details of his inner life, his bearing evinces his faith in the possibility of making a mark on the world through style. This is the first time the work of Osmond Watson is presented at Biennale Arte. —Ade J. Omotosho

Johnny Cool, 1967 Oil on canvas, 85.1 × 72.1 cm. Photo National Gallery of Jamaica. Courtesy National Gallery of Jamaica.

NUCLEO STORICO • PORTRAITS

Selwyn Wilson, considered a founding figure of Māori modernism, enrolled at the Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland in 1945 and became the first Māori to graduate from a New Zealand art school. By 1951, his paintings had been exhibited at the National Art Gallery in Wellington. Two of his earliest figurative paintings were acquired by Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki in 1948 and 1950, the first works by a contemporary Māori artist to be acquired by a public gallery in New Zealand. In 1957, Wilson was awarded the Sir Āpirana Ngata Memorial Scholarship to study at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London. Upon returning, he dedicated himself to teaching positions in remote Northland to include Māori arts and crafts in mainstream curriculum.

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TAUMARERE, NEW ZEALAND, 1927– 2002, KAWAKAWA, AOTEAROA, NEW ZEALAND

Study of a Head (1948) is said to be a portrait of Wilson’s nephew Ponga Pomare Kingi Cherrington at their family homestead in Taumarere. The portrait’s success was confirmed when it won first prize in an Elam School of Art and Design competition in 1948. It would have been notable for its pastel colour palette and brushwork. His early works show the influence of director of the art school, Archibald Fisher, an advocate of form and design who challenged contemporary taste by insisting that painters should comment on life. This shift guided Wilson towards Māori subjectivity. In 1993, he

commented, “What I always aimed to give to all students was an awareness of the place where they live … and an eye for design of all functional things around us”. Study of a Head is the first contemporary Māori artwork to enter any art collection in New Zealand. This is the first time the work of Selwyn Wilson is presented at Biennale Arte. —Natasha Conland

Study of a Head, 1948 Oil on board, 52 × 52 × 2.5 cm. Courtesy Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. © Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.

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Selwyn Wilson

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Chang Woosoung

CHUNGJU-SI, SOUTH KOREA, 1912– 2005, SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA

A leading artist of the Korean ink painting tradition, Chang Woosung depicted a new kind of realism in his figure paintings. Unlike his contemporaries, Chang did not go abroad to Japan for art training but studied in Korea with Kim Eun-ho (1892–1979), whose expertise in portrait painting and coloured ink was already well-known. As early as 1922, Chang’s works were selected for the annual Joseon Fine Art Exhibition 선미술전람회 (朝鮮美術展覽會), an official art competition established by the Japanese Government-General during the colonial period in Korea (1910–1945). After liberation, he was a professor of fine arts at both Seoul National University (1946–1963) and Hongik University (1971–1974), taking time in between to exhibit his works in the US and to establish the Oriental Art School in Washington, DC, in 1965 to share the teachings of Korean ink. His talent was recognised through numerous awards during his lifetime, including the Republic of Korea Order of Merit.

Chang’s work Atelier (1943) depicts the artist himself in his studio with a female model. He portrays himself as a modern man wearing Western-style clothing, casually smoking a pipe, and using the ladder as a seat. The presence of the female model evidenced the growing popularity of depicting women in art, a drastic change from tradition. She is dressed in a white Korean traditional dress (hanbok), perusing a magazine. The work represents modernised urban life. While under colonial rule, the country was challenged culturally by being forced to adopt Japanese names

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and ban all Korean speech and publications. While there are varied interpretations, the white hanbok alludes to the ubiquitousness of white clothing worn during precolonial times, and the empty background distinguishes Korean coloured-ink works from Japanese ones, in which the background was often completed with patterns. This is the first time the work of Chang Woosung is presented at Biennale Arte. —Virginia Moon

Atelier, 1943 Ink and color on paper, 210.5 × 167.5 cm. Photo Kim Hyunsue. Collection Leeum Museum of Art. Courtesy Leeum Museum of Art.

Desnudo, 1948 Oil on canvas, 59 × 46 cm. Photo Mariano Hernández. Courtesy Museo Bellapart. © Mariano Hernández 2024.

In portraits and nudes, Celeste Woss y Gil is considered a master. Her nudes are rendered with notable poise and rigor and display her accomplished corporeal and muscular foreshortening. Desnudo (1948) stands out for its modelling and solidity, valuing opulence and the beauty of the flesh. It exemplifies anatomical mastery, technical ease, and intentionally preserved realism. Woss y Gil is an artist who made the transition from the academic tradition to modernism. Edward Sullivan relates her work to Latin

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American painters such as Tarsila do Amaral, María Izquierdo, Amelia Peláez, and Anita Malfatti. This is the first time the work of Celeste Woss y Gil is presented at Biennale Arte. —Myrna Guerrero Villalona

NUCLEO STORICO • PORTRAITS

Celeste Woss y Gil was a modern woman artist and feminist icon within Dominican painting. She and her family were exiled to Paris in 1902 following the overthrow of her father, President Alejandro Woss y Gil. In 1903, they moved to Santiago de Cuba and, from 1922 to 1924, Woss y Gil was enrolled in the National Academy and the Art Student League at New York. Woss y Gil returned to Santo Domingo in 1924 to open a studio–school, displaying the first solo woman exhibition in the Dominican Republic. She became an active participant in the suffragist and feminist movements. As a pioneering artist and teacher, she introduced drawing the human figure in its natural state, moving away from any idealisations. The 1940s marked her period of maturity. During this time, she created her formidable nudes – both feminine and masculine – highlighting their multiracialism through a full spectrum of forms and colours with a realism both sensual and vigorous. She focused on the Caribbean in her approaches to the human figure, portraits, and still lifes, in which tropical flowers and fruits are elevated to the status of portraits.

SANTO DOMINGO, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC, 1891–1985

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Celeste Woss y Gil

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Yêdamaria

SALVADOR, BRAZIL, 1932–2016

Yêdamaria’s production in painting, collage, and engraving mostly thematised still lifes with motifs of her daily life, Afroreligious deities, the seascape of Salvador – the capital of the state of Bahia, Brazil – as well as nods to Black and feminist movements. After receiving her undergraduate degree in fine arts in Bahia, she also worked as a professor and developed an MFA project in the United States, where she lived in the late 1970s. The survey of her work can be understood as an account of Black middle-class lives in the second half of the twentieth century in Brazil.

Her self-portrait Proteção de Yemanjá (1978) gathers elements from traditional portraiture with imaginary and subjective ones. Her serene, symmetrical face is centred in the canvas, and she wears a pink coat that contrasts with the background’s predominant blue. Behind her, there is a balustrade, then a boat, and a solid blue that suggests the sea and the sky. This juxtaposition of elements contrasts an architectural space and the landscape. In the turban on her head, there is an alternation of textured and solid colours, sometimes suggesting two BIENNALE ARTE 2024

people flanking the red star in the centre; sometimes gathering the image of two mermaids, with the fish tails and long hair that allude to Yemanjá, the orisha (a Yoruba deity) of the seas present in the work’s title. It is unclear if the mermaids are a print on the turban or the representation of a psychic projection – as if one could see inside the artist’s head. This is the first time the work of Yêdamaria is presented at Biennale Arte. —Leandro Muniz Proteção de Yemanjá, 1978 Oil on canvas, 91 × 80 cm. Photo Márcio Lima, Salvador - BA. Courtesy Coleção Ayrson Heraclito, Salvador.

MINYA, EGYPT, 1913– 1966, CAIRO, EGYPT

NUCLEO STORICO • PORTRAITS

A painter, writer, and critic, Ramsès Younan was born in Upper Egypt and grew up in a modest Coptic family. Younan enrolled in the School of Fine Arts in Cairo in 1929 but dropped out in 1933 before receiving his degree. In 1934, he obtained a teaching certificate from the Syndicate of Higher Education in Egypt and began working as a secondary school art teacher in Tanta and Port Said. In 1939, he and Georges Henein co-founded the Art and Liberty Group, which consisted of artists and intellectuals who developed a distinctly Egyptian Surrealist movement. Younan was also one of the co-signatories of the 1938 manifesto Long Live Degenerate Art. He was forced to flee Egypt to Paris in 1947 due to his anarchist political views. However, his protests against France’s role in the Suez Crisis of 1956 led to his return to Cairo.

two images, Younan divulges his Surrealist fascination with dreamlike compositions, the subconscious mind, and distorted, biomorphic shapes. Younan’s work frequently featured tortured or dismembered bodies as a commentary against repression and in support of women’s rights. —Suheyla Takesh FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

His work Portrait (n.d.) features two superimposed silhouettes of faces rendered in an abstracted fashion. The frontal face stretches out into voluminous coils, reminiscent of a seashell that has been sliced open or an enlarged section of the inner ear. The face in the back, on the other hand, is shadow-like and flat. Separated from one another and looking in opposite directions, the faces appear estranged and alienated. Juxtaposing the

Portrait, n.d. Oil on canvas, 50 × 35 cm . Collection of Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah. Courtesy Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah.

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Ramsès Younan

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Bibi Zogbé

SAHEL ALMA, LEBANON, 1890– 1975, MAR DEL PLATA, ARGENTINA

Bibi Zogbé was born in Sahel Alma, a coastal city in Lebanon, and became known throughout South America as “La pintora de flores” (the flower painter). At the age of sixteen, she moved to San Juan, Argentina, before later relocating to Buenos Aires, where she studied painting under the Bulgarian artist Klin Dimitrof. Zogbé began her artistic career with three consecutive solo exhibitions: Buenos Aires (1934), Paris (1935), and Chile (1939). Constantly travelling between Argentina, Senegal, and Paris, Zogbé found inspiration in various landscapes, fauna, and flora. Her paintings often merged elements from different art movements, such as the vibrant colours of Fauvism and the elegance and sensuality of Art Deco. Her predominant motif of flowers transcended mere decorative aesthetics and conveyed profound symbolism.

In Femme aux fleurs (n.d.), Zogbé brings forth the mythical aspect of the female subjects in the Art Deco movement but imbues it with humility and a connectedness to nature rather than the grandiosity of industrialism. The artist also erases the male gaze from Gauguinesque primitivism, gently complimenting her sitter rather than exoticising her. The unified background alludes to Byzantine icons or other early art styles in which the holiness of the subject was emphasised by placing them on a separate plane, outside of space and time. In fact, a focus on the bust of the painted woman reminds one of the early Coptic funeral portraits of Fayum, Egypt, whose identifying characteristics were large eyes representing the soul and an eternal calmness in their expression. Zogbé’s rendering of the woman lies between symbol and human, but it is also womanhood itself: strong yet soft and humble, a rich and fertile aura, framed with blooming and thriving plants, rendered in Zogbé’s harmonious colour palette. This is the first time the work of Bibi Zogbé is presented at Biennale Arte. —Fadia Antar

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Femme aux Fleurs, n.d. Oil on board, 69.5 × 50 cm. Photo Maria and Mansour Dib. Courtesy of Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation.

“INTRODUCTION.” IN DISCREPANT ABSTRACTION, EDITED BY KOBENA MERCER. LONDON: INSTITUTE OF INTERNATIONAL VISUAL ARTS: THE MIT PRESS, 2006.

Discrepant abstraction is hybrid and partial, elusive and repetitive, obstinate and strange: it includes almost everything that does not neatly fit into the institutional narrative of abstract art as a monolithic quest for purity. […] While artists from non-Western and minority backgrounds were frequently written out of the official narrative on account of creative discrepancies that went against the grain of institutional preferences, the cross cultural perspectives brought together in this volume do not just aim to ‘add in’ those who were once overlooked, but seek to reconceptualise the overall field of debate by reopening the story of abstraction to a wider understanding of twentieth–century art and culture.

KOBENA MERCER

“THE OTHERWISE MODERN. CARIBBEAN LESSONS FROM THE SAVAGE SLOT.” IN CRITICALLY MODERN: ALTERNATIVES, ALTERITIES, ANTHROPOLOGIES, EDITED BY BRUCE KNAUFT. BLOOMINGTON: INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2002.

“Modernity” is a murky term that belongs to a family of words we may label “North Atlantic universals.” By that, I mean words inherited from what we now call the West – which I prefer to call the North Atlantic, not only for the sake of geographical precision – that project the North Atlantic experience on a universal scale that they have helped to create. As part of the geography of imagination that constantly recreates the West, modernity always required an Other and an Elsewhere. It was always plural, just like the West was always plural. This plurality is inherent in modernity itself, both structurally and historically. Modernity as a structure requires an other, an alter, a native – indeed, an alter-native. Modernity as a historical process also created this alter ego, as modern as the West, yet otherwise modern.

MICHEL-ROLPH TROUILLOT

THE DARKER SIDE OF WESTERN MODERNITY: GLOBAL FUTURES, DECOLONIAL OPTIONS. DURHAM AND LONDON: DURKE UNIVERISTY PRESS, 2011.

The first decolonial step is delinking from coloniality and not looking for alternative modernities but for alternatives to modernity.

WALTER D. MIGNOLO

The Brazilian midcentury neoconcretismo movement could have been included in this group, and perhaps it should be included in a larger cross-section devoted to abstractions in the Global South. However, given our scope and the fact that the Brazilian neoconcretistas are by now well known internationally, and three of the most significant figures – Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, and Lygia Pape – have already participated at the Biennale Arte, I decided to privilege other exceptional figures in the Global South.

Adriano Pedrosa

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This section of the Nucleo Storico is devoted to abstraction, a term that encompasses vast and varied productions, which has been largely understood as quintessential to twentieth-century European modernism. Yet abstraction is found in the visual repertoire of many cultures beyond Europe and predates the twentieth century, when and where it was supposedly born. It seems unfathomable to attempt to draw a comprehensive map or all-encompassing history of abstraction in Euroamerica, let alone in the Global South. In this sense, this section focusses on how abstraction was reinvented, reinterpreted, and reenergised in the Global South during the twentieth century, presenting a small sample from a much larger panorama, featuring works by thirty-seven artists from various countries, including Argentina, Aotearoa – New Zealand, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, Guatemala, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Jordan, Korea, Lebanon, Mexico, Morocco, Pakistan, Palestine, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, South Africa, and Turkey. What is of interest here is a certain type of abstraction that detaches itself from the European constructivist abstract geometric tradition, with its rigid orthogonal grid of verticals and horizontals and its palette of primary colors, its pretensions towards purity and otherworldliness, in order to privilege more sinuous, curvilinear shapes and forms, bright colors, in striking compositions, at times working on supports other than the canvas – from wool threads and textiles to bamboos. Although seemingly geometric, the works gathered in this section often resist or question the notion of the hard edge, as they explore the quality of the handmade as well as the unevenness of the sharply demarcated straight line. A key reference is the extraordinary Casablanca School of painters who emerged in postindependence Morocco in the 1960s. Their abstract paintings, murals, and graphics are often characterised by vivid colours, sensual compositions, and undulating lines, drawing on elements from their rich Afro-Berber tradition, such as patterns and designs found in ornaments, decorative elements, textiles, and calligraphy. Works by four members of the group are presented: Mohamed Chebaa, Mohamed Hamidi, Mohamed Kacimi, and Mohamed Melehi. Thus, artists in this section have drawn inspiration from many different sources, memories, narratives, and repertoires beyond European canonical abstract, geometric, or constructivist references: ancient and Indigenous weavings and pottery; textiles and patchworks; calligraphy, writing, and script; landscapes and cityscapes; maps and aerial views; the cosmic and the celestial; the moon, the crescent, and the sun; rainbows, waves, and flames; biomorphism and the cellular; the body and racial taxonomies; and sacred and esoteric diagrams and symbols.1 Given the presence of many intensely figurative and Indigenous elements and sources, one must necessarily think of abstractions against the grain, impure abstraction, “counternarratives of abstraction,” as Devika Singh proposes, or “discrepant abstractions,” in Kobena Mercer’s terms – all of which reflect, in some way, a strong anticolonial position. In this diverse and plural group, abstraction has been radically cannibalised and devoured and now prompts us to rethink the boundaries and limitations of the term abstraction itself.

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Etel Adnan

BEIRUT, LEBANON, 1925– 2021, PARIS, FRANCE

Etel Adnan was a poet, essayist, and visual artist whose artistry spanned painting, tapestry, drawing, and filmmaking. Her life was permeated by constant moves and periods of study in different countries. In 1950, Adnan moved to Paris and studied philosophy at the Sorbonne before travelling to the United States, where she studied at UC Berkeley and Harvard and taught at the Dominican University of California. In the 1970s, she returned to Lebanon and worked as a newspaper editor, dealing with the nuances of territorial conflicts. In 1977, she published the book Sitt Marie Rose, which received an award from the FrancoArab Solidarity Association. Her practice as a visual artist began in the 1960s when Adnan started experimenting with colour. Adnan frequently collaborated with her life partner, artist Simone Fattal.

Because she was interested in the contrast between tones, many of Adnan’s works speak to different landscape painting traditions and her growing interest in the relationship between calligraphy, drawing, and abstraction. Adnan worked with many scales and materials, and her career exemplifies the first institutionalised generation of Arab American artists. This untitled painting initially draws attention due to its small scale. Although its size prohibits any suggestion of monumentality, Adnan generates a contrast of colours

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that seems to go beyond the physical constraints of this object. Extremely engaged throughout her career as a writer and visual artist, Adnan always seems to remind us that even in a world permeated by conflict, the pleasure provided by art, colour, and painting is essential and grounds us in our complexity as individuals and agents of difference. This is the first time the work of Etel Adnan is presented at Biennale Arte. —Raphael Fonseca

Untitled, 1965 Oil on canvas, 50 × 43.1 cm. Courtesy the Estate of the Artist; Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut and Hamburg.

NUCLEO STORICO • ABSTRACTIONS

Raised amongst the traditions of painted meeting houses on the east coast of New Zealand, Sandy Adsett’s artistry and teachings can be found in marae, churches, art museums, and government buildings across the country. Adsett attended Ardmore Teachers College (1958) a decade after artist Fred Graham, when there was a drive to increase teaching staff to compensate for the post-war baby boom. The national supervisor for art education, Gordon Tovey, introduced the group to renowned Ngāti Porou master carver Pine Taiapa, who profoundly influenced the new contemporary Māori art movement. Adsett was drawn to explore painted forms, inspired by the kōwhaiwhai (painted scroll ornamentation) that flourished around his region of Raupunga, Hawke’s Bay, from the nineteenth century. Taiapa taught him to foster knowledge and control over his exploration of these interconnected fluid forms. The painting Waipuna (1978), which translates as “spring”, comes from a period when Adsett created his most elaborate arrangements of kōwhaiwhai, typically on square board. Here the spatial composition orientates around a central axis and breaks the painted frame to create energy and the feeling of water currents. For Adsett, the break with the border is an important detail that focuses our attention on the role of negative space crucial to understanding kōwhaiwhai. The lavish forms of patterning, which might otherwise be interpreted as geometric abstraction, function within Māori genealogical

Waipuna, 1978 Acrylic on board, 101.7 × 101.7 × 3.5 cm. Courtesy Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. © Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.

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WAIROA-NEW ZEALAND, 1939 LIVES IN HASTINGS, AOTEAROA, NEW ZEALAND

traditions as a record of history, place, and whakapapa. It is at once visual communication, treasured knowledge, and painterly prowess. Adsett’s profound understanding of kōwhaiwhai has been explored by him in the architectural space of the meeting house and on painted boards. This art form has been developed over time through the important roles he has had in restoring and painting houses. This is the first time the work of Sandy Adsett is presented at Biennale Arte. —Natasha Conland

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Sandy Adsett

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Zubeida Agha

LYALLPUR, INDIA, 1922– 1997, ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN

Zubeida Agha is counted among the women artists who began building a counternarrative of abstraction in the post-war decades. She first earned a degree in philosophy and political science from Kinnaird College in Lahore before training under artist B. C. Sanyal. In 1946, she was introduced to Mario Perlingieri, an Italian prisoner of war who had studied with Pablo Picasso. Under his mentorship, Agha’s work turned decisively towards abstraction and embraced the use of vivid colours. In the late 1940s, Agha exhibited her work in Pakistan to great acclaim. She then received a scholarship in 1950 to study at Central Saint Martins in London and soon made it to Paris to attend classes at the École des BeauxArts. On her return to Pakistan, she regularly exhibited her paintings and served as the director of the Contemporary Art Gallery in Rawalpindi for sixteen years prior to settling in Islamabad in 1977. Composition (1988) was made towards the end of Agha’s career. Unlike her earlier works that featured surreal landscapes and still bore narrative features, it is an example of pure geometric abstraction. An assemblage of asymmetric shapes modelled in black, yellow, and different shades of red – evocative of a three-dimensional arrangement – converges at the centre of the work. These emphasise the modular aspect of this central element made of triangles and other diagonal line segments. Contrary to expectations,

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there is no sharp edge; lines are deliberately uneven. Some seem abbreviated and almost distorted. The result is magnetic, but also contained in its partial use of the surface. Obstructed by a brown band that runs across the foreground, the composition eschews pictorial resolution. It is a study in form and the possibilities it holds. This is the first time the work of Zubeida Agha is presented at Biennale Arte. —Devika Singh

Composition, 1988 Oil on canvas, 91.4 × 76.2 cm. Photo Justin Piperger. Courtesy Taimur Hassan Collection. Photo Justin Piperger.

Untitled, 1971 Pigment on plywood, 100 × 105.5 cm. Photo Hamad Yousef. Courtesy Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar.

In the 1970s, Rafa al-Nasiri employed the Arabic letter in his works, as seen in Untitled (1971). He chose a diamondshaped canvas, on which he painted strips of bright colours that extend diagonally across the canvas from one corner to another. On top of these strips, he applied thick black lines, which resemble Arabic calligraphic forms. The artist used straight and curved lines to create a composition whose abstract style recalls the decorative patterns from the Arabic–Islamic art practice. Rafa al-Nasiri and his peers considered the use of the

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Arabic script to be the foremost artistic expression that they inherited from the Arab–Islamic civilisation. Yet, the artist gives importance only to the shapes of the Arabic letters, rather than to their literal meaning. These shapes corresponded with his experimentation in abstraction, which served to reconnect the Iraqi and Arab communities with their common artistic heritage. This is the first time the work of Rafa al-Nasiri is presented at Biennale Arte. —Arthur Debsi

NUCLEO STORICO • ABSTRACTIONS

Rafa al-Nasiri is remembered as the first artist in Iraq to specialise in graphic art. He studied painting at the University of Baghdad, and after graduating from the Institute of Fine Arts in 1959, he specialised in printmaking while pursuing his education abroad in China and Portugal. For over twenty-five years, al-Nasiri taught at the Institute of Fine Arts in Baghdad and, during his tenure, founded and headed the Department of Graphic Art from 1974 to 1989. After the 1990 Gulf War broke out, the artist relocated permanently to Amman and was appointed director of Darat al-Funun from 1993 to 1995. Al-Nasiri was particularly involved in the development of Jama’at alBu’d al-Wahid (One Dimension Group) in the 1970s. Delving into the artistic heritage of the Arab–Islamic world, al-Nasiri experimented with abstraction to create a contemporary aesthetic, which would use the Arabic script as a starting point.

TIKRIT, IRAQ, 1940– 2013, AMMAN, JORDAN

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Rafa al-Nasiri

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Margarita Azurdia

Margarita Azurdia, born in 1931 to a Catalonian mother and Guatemalan father, rejected the restraints of conservative society to develop an interdisciplinary practice, reclaiming space for feminine and Indigenous cosmologies observed in her native Guatemala. Married young to a wealthy businessman, Azurdia began her artistic career with three young children and no formal artistic training. Finding refuge and emancipation in art making, Azurdia developed a richly diverse oeuvre that encompassed gestural and geometric abstraction, installation, performance, and poetry. Azurdia quickly achieved international renown, exhibiting in El Salvador, New York, and the Bienal de São Paulo within five years of her first exhibition. In the three decades that followed, Azurdia remained committed to women’s liberation and to her native Guatemala, integrating Indigenous traditions and cosmologies into even her most abstract works.

ANTIGUA, GUATEMALA, 1931– 1998, GUATEMALA CITY

Untitled (1968) belongs to the series Pinturas geométricas (Geometric paintings), which Azurdia painted in the decade after travelling alone to California to study welding and modern art. Borrowing from Op Art, Colour Field painting, and geometric abstraction, the diamond composition characteristic of Azurdia’s Geométricas is built up in sharply delineated fields of flat colour. Although these works became amongst her best known, they were immediately implicated in a debate that polarised the Guatemalan art world. Torn between socially engaged “new figuration” and geometric abstraction, whose internationalism was tainted in a Cold War context, many criticised Azurdia as, at best, apolitical. The lozenge shapes and unusual combinations of solid colour that recur in this series make reference, however, to Indigenous Maya huipils (woven shawls), which were designed, created, and worn by women. Interweaving modernist painting with a tradition of Indigenous women’s labour and performativity, Azurdia’s painting presents an alternative politic. This is the first time the work of Margarita Azurdia is presented at Biennale Arte. —Lucia Neirotti

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Untitled (serie geométricas), 1976 Acrylic on canvas, 218 × 162 × 5 cm. Collection Margarita Azurdia. Courtesy Asociación Milagro de Amor.

BEIRUT, LEBANON, 1931–2019

NUCLEO STORICO • ABSTRACTIONS

Huguette Caland, daughter of the first president of the Lebanese Republic, trained under Beirut-based Italian artist Fernando Manetti. Caland established a painting studio in her garden in Kaslik, prior to enrolling at the American University in Beirut in 1964 to receive a proper training in Fine Arts. In 1970, Caland left Lebanon for Paris, where she collaborated with French designer Pierre Cardin to design a collection of caftans in 1979. After more than a decade in France, she relocated to Venice, California, and stayed there until 2013, when she returned to Beirut after her husband died. Caland’s oeuvre navigates between art, fashion, and design, exuding joy and profound sensuality. The female body was her main source of inspiration, and its eroticism scandalised the public of the time.

fashion design, she imbricated these shapes as if she had stitched them together. The composition looks like a patchwork through which the artist created an imaginary urban landscape. The negative space makes the elements float with a hint of fantasy. Caland demonstrates her appetite for freedom in her practice, escaping from reality to let her emotions guide her. —Arthur Debsi

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In the 1960s, Huguette Caland invested more and more of her time in making art and exploring the Lebanese artistic scene. Her work Suburb (1969) was displayed in her solo show Huguette Caland: Faces and Places at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, in Doha in 2020. On a beige background, Caland used a palette of bright colours to paint abstract shapes, filling them with black lines, dots, squares, and circles. Revealing a quiet sensitivity to

Suburb, 1969 Oil on canvas, 100.5 × 100.5 cm. Photo Hamad Yousef. Courtesy Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar.

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Huguette Caland

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Mohammed Chebaa

Mohammed Chebaa was a founding member of the Casablanca Art School. His concept of the three pillars of art, architecture, and artisanat (crafts) was conceived from his study of the Italian Renaissance and the Bauhaus school while at the Fine Art Academy in Rome (1962–1964). In his quest for a national Moroccan art, Chebaa would look to architecture, as it had historically been the vehicle to the greatest genius of local creativity. Chebaa’s work is closely related to space and design: dedicated to gestural and geometric abstraction, he built his forms and elements into structures that insinuate his devotion to architecture. Moreover, the movement of his lines often convey lyrical interpretations of architectural forms. Chebaa published numerous writings on Moroccan art. He held round tables and conferences at which he spoke on the democratisation of art and the impact of art on society and the individual.

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Blending traditional Moroccan art with a modern approach to geometric abstraction, Chebaa’s Composition (1974) flows into the canvas from the right and pours out of it on the lower left side. Both its movement and direction allude to the curves and lines found in Arabic script, giving the artwork a sense of almost being readable. Chebaa introduces a sense of depth and threedimensionality by employing realistic perspective in the stair-like sections located in the middle of the composition.

TANGIER, MOROCCO, 1935– 2013, CASABLANCA, MOROCCO

seen in woven baskets and ceramic tile works. Additionally, Chebaa’s approach to studying space in this work reminds one of architectural blueprints. This is the first time the work of Mohammed Chebaa is presented at Biennale Arte. —Fadia Antar

However, alongside this Western influence, the composition embraces the flatness of Eastern art traditions, in that it exists primarily on a single, vertical plane. Chebaa seamlessly invokes confusion – a limbo between depth and flatness, near and far. The repeating parallel lines with alternating colours pays homage to Moroccan craftsmanship

Composition, 1974 Acrylic on canvas, 94 × 220 cm. Photo Maria and Mansour Dib. Courtesy of Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation.

to her signature sculptures after 1957. These were composed of modular parts that could be assembled and disassembled – sculptures that captured rhythm, harmony, and perfection. Rhythmical Composition with White Sphinx (1951) was created after her stay in Paris, during which she frequented artists of the French post-war period, most importantly Fernand Léger. The modern landscape is extremely present in this piece, although the subject matter – a mythical creature – hails from an ancient civilisation almost diametrically opposed to that of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, the artist’s study of line and the relationship between motifs gesture

Rhythmical Composition with White Sphynx, 1951 Oil on canvas, 88 × 116 cm. Photo Hamad Yousef. Courtesy Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar.

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towards the principals of Islamic art without employing the aesthetics of arabesque or calligraphy. This is the first time the work of Saloua Raouda Choucair is presented at Biennale Arte. —Fadia Antar

NUCLEO STORICO • ABSTRACTIONS

BEIRUT, LEBANON, 1916–2017

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Saloua Raouda Choucair

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Monika Correa

BOMBAY, INDIA, 1938 LIVES IN MUMBAI, INDIA

Monika Correa trained in microbiology and began weaving in the 1960s after a visit to Finland where she encountered rya rugs. She received basic training in Boston from Marianne Strengell and for four months at the Weavers’ Service Centre in Bombay (1964–1965). While learning from traditional weavers, Correa was inspired by the renowned artist– pedagogue K G Subramanyan’s use of hand-spun wool from Saurashtra to create large abstract fibre sculptures. She also observed the work of the American textile designer Jack Lenor Larsen who briefly visited the centre. Correa uses fine and coarse hand-spun wool from Panipat in North India, which she combines with cotton yarn, using the textural qualities the material affords. She developed a technique working with a bespoke traditional loom with a removable reed, experimenting with the warp and twill to create dynamic lines that depart from the structured form of traditional weaving.

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No Moon Tonight, 1974 Warp: unbleached cotton, weft: unbleached cotton, dyed coloured wool, 180 × 93 cm. Photo JUDDartINDEX. Lorenzo Legarda Leviste and Fahad Mayet Collection.

No Moon Tonight (1974) has a plain vertical weave that is similar to earlier tapestries such as Original Sin (1972), in which she worked on large circular forms in abstract compositions that became emblematic of her mature style. The sharpness of the vertical line is broken by meandering patterns that are created by pulling out the reed. Correa speaks extensively about the depiction of nature, especially the sky, in Persian and Central Asian paintings. The title of the work and the circle hint at an abstraction drawn from nature – a moon rising or being eclipsed in an interplay of dark and light, the upper monochromatic panel balanced by the coloured panels in the lower half. This is the first time the work of Monika Correa is presented at Biennale Arte. —Latika Gupta

Muro tejido terruño 3, 1969 Wool, 210 × 137 cm. Courtesy Lisson Gallery. © Olga de Amaral.

In 1969, Amaral’s work was featured in Wall Hangings at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, which also included textile sculptures by Magdalena Abakanowicz, Sheila Hicks, and Lenore Tawney. This exhibition proved highly influential in the ongoing reevaluation of fibre art as a significant site of artistic enquiry, refusing the widespread dismissal of its associations with labour and use and instead recognising these elements as part of the medium’s creative potential. Muro tejido terruño 3 (1969) is an early example of Amaral’s formal experimentation with textile as sculpture. Using

multiple registers of vertical threads spirally wrapped, plaited, and bound together, Amaral modulates surface, depth, and negative space to create a pulsating structure that appears at once architectonic and organic. In their rhythmic arrangement, the clusters of cord bunched together and set apart at intervals seem to be encoded with a subliminal or haptic metric, evoking the Incan practice of recordkeeping through the knotting and grouping of fibres on a quipu. —Sybilla Griffin

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Olga de Amaral is a key figure in the vanguard of artists who contributed to the growing acceptance of fibre art as a legitimate and consequential category of art making, deserving of critical attention. While many of her European and American contemporaries actively cited Andean textiles as influences on their approach to fibre, Amaral’s work osmotically synthesises elemental forms, pre-Columbian processes, and a post-Minimalist sensibility through intuition rather than stated intention. After training in architectural design in Bogotá, Amaral left Colombia in 1952 to study textiles at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, USA, precipitating a creatively generative period of travel across the United States and Europe. Over the next six decades, Amaral’s work continued to expand in scope and ambition, and she remains one of the most prolific Colombian artists working today.

BOGOTÁ, COLOMBIA, 1932 LIVES IN BOGOTÁ

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Olga de Amaral

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Saliba Douaihy

Saliba Douaihy was born in 1915 in Ehden, northern Lebanon, and showed artistic talent from a young age, developing his career between Lebanon, Paris, and New York. At the age of fourteen, he moved to Beirut as an apprentice for the painter Habib Srour, whom he assisted in the execution of large church murals. Funds were raised by the community of Ehden to send Douaihy to Paris in 1932 when he was aged seventeen to study at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris. He studied oil painting for two years and exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Français. He returned to Lebanon in 1936 and was granted a teaching role in 1947 at a local college, which he performed in tandem with his painting commissions. He moved to the United States in 1950 and has been exhibited as part of the Lebanon Pavilion in the World’s Fair in New York (1938), at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1952), and the Guggenheim Museum (1967).

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Church commissions in Beirut played a role in the abstract works that Douaihy would develop and paint at a later point in his career. Regeneration (1974) is a prime example of the flat, Minimalist style Douaihy arrived at after a few years living and painting in New York City. Inspired by Joseph Albers, he reduced all forms to simple yet strong lines. His paintings from the early 1960s onwards are characterised by lines that meet neatly and precisely, and focus on the exploration of the themes of form and space,

EHDEN, LEBANON, 1915– 1994, NEW YORK CITY, UNITED STATES

alluding to the landscapes of his home country in the lines and horizontal bands of colours that ran across some of his paintings. Sky, distant fields, trees, and mountains are alluded to but never explicitly drawn. He is said to have also been inspired by the linear form of church architecture and Christian iconography. This is the first time the work of Saliba Douaihy is presented at Biennale Arte. —Heba Elkayal

Regeneration, 1974 Acrylic on canvas, 152 × 202 cm. Courtesy Taimur Hassan Collection. Photo Justin Piperger.

Ehsaei’s untitled 1974 work is one of his earliest calligraphic abstractions, created shortly after his graduation from Tehran University, where he served (while still a student) as one of the founders of the Graphic Design Department. Its bright palette and flat masses are unusual compared to later work, as is the degree to which it departs from traditional calligraphic forms. The rhythmic curves, repeated vertical strokes, and diamond-shaped dots strongly evoke Persian script, but they do not form readable words. Ehsaei has spoken of this inaccessibility as a critique of the historic abuses of language – the ways that writing so often serves the powerful, whether in legal documents or historiography. Illegibility is also an invitation to engage: “Viewers who speak the language might find a word they can read here or there, so they will keep looking for the rest, but they will never find it. That search is what I am after”. This is the first time the work of Mohammad Ehsaei is presented at Biennale Arte. —Media Farzin

Untitled, 1974 Oil on canvas, 120 × 79 cm. Courtesy the artist.

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Mohammad Ehsaei is an acclaimed artist, calligrapher, designer, and educator, as well as one of the founding practitioners of naqqashi-khat (calligraphic painting), a 1960s approach to modernist painting that made innovative use of traditional Persian scripts. He is often affiliated with Iranian Saqqakhaneh artists such as Faramarz Pilaram, Hossein Zenderoudi, and Parviz Tanavoli, whose paintings and sculptures of the 1960s incorporated popular elements of Shia Muslim iconography. Ehsaei’s paintings draw on his classical training in nastaliq calligraphy but emphasise their abstraction, entangling Persian letterforms in unreadable, often colourful gereh (knots). Not all of his work is unreadable: an ongoing series begun in the 1970s, Eternal Alphabet, features words and phrases derived from Muslim liturgy. He has also produced public murals (Tehran University, 1977 and National Museum of Iran, 1986) and manuscripts of traditional calligraphy (the Divan of Hafez, 2010 and the Koran, 2021).

QAZVIN, IRAN, 1939 LIVES IN TEHRAN, IRAN AND VANCOUVER, CANADA

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Mohammad Ehsaei

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Samia Halaby

JERUSALEM, PALESTINE, 1936 LIVES IN LIVES IN NEW YORK CITY, UNITED STATES

Samia Halaby, born in Jerusalem and currently living in New York, is an abstract painter, academic, and former professor. She was the first woman to be hired as an associate professor at Yale School of Art from 1972 to 1982. She studied art in the United States and has long been active as an artist, activist, and teacher in the US and Middle East. After relocating to Lebanon in 1948 due to the establishment of Israel, Halaby produced figurative works linked to her political activism for Palestinian liberation movements. Primarily known for her abstract style, she has cited the principles of Russian Constructivists, Islamic architecture, and traditional Middle Eastern art as the foundational blocks of her painting. She has also cited childhood memories of Palestine as inspiration points for compositional elements and abstracted motifs including the sun, sky, and landscape. Her interest in technology led her to machine-generated paintings that were simulated by the use of an Amiga computer in the early 1980s. The painting Black is Beautiful (1969) is part of a body of work produced to explore the limitations of seeing objects as they are, a habit she argued was forcibly taught through academia. In this painting, Halaby explores perspective, prompting the viewer to examine rounded edges. The painting directs the eye to consider the rounded curves of the cross shape. Once the eye settles on the liminal edge of the curve, it is invited to linger – the viewer’s gaze is held by specific points on the canvas.

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The exploration of form, shape, and the nuanced quality of edges was academically motivated, resulting in an abstract painting that adheres to the artist’s exploration of both formal and conceptual elements of abstract art. This is the first time the work of Samia Halaby is presented at Biennale Arte. —Heba Elkayal

Black is Beautiful, 1969 Oil on canvas, 167.5 × 167.5 cm. Courtesy the Artist; Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut and Hamburg.

Harmonie, 1969 Acrylic on canvas, 158 × 99 cm. Photo Maria and Mansour Dib. Courtesy Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation.

Harmonie (1969) is often mentioned as evidence of Hamidi’s inspiration from Moroccan rugs, due to its reddish colours, composition, the painted frame that borders the piece, and the diamond shape seen in the centre. Hamidi’s visible brushstrokes add an intentional texture to the work and convey the woolly, tactile feel of a rug. With his intricate mastery of colour, Hamidi can illuminate and shade any section he wishes to, creating a visually pleasurable collage-like composition. While circles are not typically found in traditional weaving, they may

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serve here as a subtle hint at the eroticism to come in his later works. Additionally, they could be interpreted as a deconstruction of the linear blending that combines the traditional jagged line seen on Moroccan weaving with the undulating forms popular amongst members of the Casablanca School movement. These undulations would later become a recurrent motif across the works of the group. This is the first time the work of Mohamed Hamidi is presented at Biennale Arte. —Fadia Antar

NUCLEO STORICO • ABSTRACTIONS

Mohamed Hamidi began his artistic journey at the Casablanca School of Art and later explored Paris – immersing himself in its art movements and museums, enrolling at its art schools, and graduating from the École Supérieure des Beaux Arts. Upon returning to Casablanca in 1966, Hamidi sought to strengthen his connection with Moroccan popular art traditions and acknowledge their aesthetic values. The artist’s brilliant interplay of colours, the optical games he created with positive and negative space, and the colourful abstractions he rendered in large flat colours and sharp geometrical forms hinted sometimes at Moroccan carpets and occasionally took an implicit erotic shape. From 1969 onwards, Hamidi delved into the exploration of sensuality leading to his iconic Eros paintings with interpenetrating shapes, for which he is best known. Hamidi continues to engage in his daring and playful art production to this day.

CASABLANCA, MOROCCO, 1941 LIVES IN AZEMMOUR AND CASABLANCA

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Mohamed Hamidi

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Carmen Herrera

HAVANA, CUBA, 1915– 2022, NEW YORK CITY, UNITED STATES

Carmen Herrera was a Cubanborn American artist whose Minimalist geometries broke new ground in histories of global abstraction. Born and raised in a wealthy family in Havana, Herrera lived between France and Cuba in her early years, studying art, art history, and architecture in Havana, New York, and Paris. After marrying Jesse Loewenthal in 1939, Herrera moved to New York, and would later catalyse her practice during a key period spent among artistic circles in post-war Paris. In 1954, the artist settled permanently in New York and refined her characteristic play of colour, symmetry, and perception until her death in 2022. In her eighties, she became widely recognised for the distilled style and disciplined sensibility that she had been sharpening for decades.

The visual syncopation in Herrera’s Untitled (Halloween) (1948), made during Herrera’s formative years in post-war Paris, is an early example of the rigorous Minimalist language for which she would later become known. Living in Paris from 1948 to 1956, Herrera was exposed to various styles of abstraction – sourced from European, Latin American, and South American traditions – that she distilled into her developing practice. Her paintings from this period, given the post-war shortage of materials, were often made on burlap and executed in

acrylic, with Herrera being the first artist to use the medium in Europe. In this painting, her economy of curve and line yields a field of reactive shapes and contrasting colours, an interplay between alternating orange and black forms. Composed within a squared oval shape, these choices offer a pictorial exercise in rhythm and variation, all while evoking the holiday that gives the painting its namesake. This is the first time the work of Carmen Herrera is presented at Biennale Arte. —C J Salapare

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Untitled (Halloween), 1948 Acrylic on burlap, 96.5 × 123.2 cm. Private Collection. © Estate of Carmen Herrera.

Composition in Red, Green and Yellow, 1963 Oil on canvas, 91 × 71.5 cm. Photo Justin Piperger. Courtesy Taimur Hassan Collection.

Composition in Red, Green, and Yellow (1963) belongs to the Square Compositions series Shemza began in 1963. Vibrant colours and shades of blacks are orchestrated in rhythmic shapes and patterns. The work consists of crescents, semicircles, and circles wedged into square and rectangular units. Yet, despite its seeming repetitive nature, the gridlike arrangement provides many variations. Its lines are also imperfect, sagging and irregular, and its rendering deliberately uneven, thus emphasising the composition’s handmade character. Upturning the conventions of minimalism, Shemza’s painting is imbued,

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as in the case of his Meem and Roots series, with subtle cultural references – beginning with his consistent use of Urdu to date and sign his geometric works. This is the first time the work of Anwar Jalal Shemza is presented at Biennale Arte. —Devika Singh

NUCLEO STORICO • ABSTRACTIONS

Anwar Jalal Shemza was active in both artistic and literary circles, publishing novels in Urdu and editing the periodical Ehsas. He was also a founding member in the early 1950s of the Lahore Art Circle that pioneered modern art in Pakistan. In 1956, he went to London to study at the Slade School of Fine Art. While productive, this initial period in Britain also provoked a crisis in Shemza, and one that was not only artistic. “The search was for my own identity,” he later explained. After eventually attempting to resettle in Pakistan in 1960 in order to contribute to the country’s art education, Shemza returned to Britain and moved to the West Midlands where he accepted a teaching position. Throughout, Shemza’s remarkable work contributed as much to the development of Pakistani art as to transnational forms of modernism.

SHIMLA, INDIA, 1928– 1985, STAFFORD, UNITED KINGDOM

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Anwar Jalal Shemza

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Mohammed Kacimi

Mohammed Kacimi was a painter, poet, educator, intellectual, and political activist. He first started painting in the Open Workshops programme sponsored by the Moroccan Ministry of Youth and Sports and helmed by Jacqueline Brodskis. He studied briefly at the University of Fez and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris before embarking on a nomadic education, travelling extensively throughout Europe, North Africa, and West Asia and befriending many leading artists, literary figures, and intellectuals. This experience abroad, combined with the repressive political climate in Morocco during the reign of King Hassan II, marked his long and varied artistic career that blurred figurative and abstract modes. Throughout his oeuvre, he was preoccupied with the politics of liberty, decolonisation, signs and mark-making, depictions of the body, slippages between visibility and invisibility, and materials. He also produced sculptures, graphic design, site-specific installations, earthworks, and public art.

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Kacimi’s Nomadic Signs – Abstract Composition (1979) is a play between geometric abstraction and corporeal representation. The strong use of curvilinear lines and flat fields of unmodulated colours are evocative of signs, patterns, and symbols. Meanwhile, the geometric shapes appear to be rendering the form of human arms, one coming from the bottom right corner and the other from the top left corner; the arms may be coming into contact at the central circular area, as if they are shaking hands, but this is obscured and left ambiguous. This painting also plays with notions of positive and negative space as well as figure-ground relationships, where the background eggshell colour breaks up the shapes that make up the arms.

MEKNES, MOROCCO, 1942– 2003, RABAT, MOROCCO

The title refers to Kacimi’s nomadic experiences while travelling, as well as his interest in signs as systems of communication. This particular period resonates closely with the work of Jewad Selim that Kacimi saw in exhibitions of Iraqi modernism in Baghdad, Beirut, and London. This is the first time the work of Mohammed Kacimi is presented at Biennale Arte. —Riad Kherdeen

Nomadic Signs - Abstract composition, 1979 Oil on canvas, 75.5 × 116 cm. Photo Maria and Mansour Dib. Courtesy Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation.

Acervo 290, concreto 18, 1954 Glaze on hardboard, 72 × 60 cm. Photo Sergio Guerini. Private Collection. Courtesy Almeida & Dale Galeria de Arte. © Sergio Guerini.

Acervo 290, Concreto 18 (1954) is part of the initial period of Lauand’s Concretist experimentation, after she had put aside her academic and figurative beginnings. Here the artist works with the relationship between shapes and planes of colour and develops complex structures from simple figures, repeated systematically. The combination of elements sometimes breaks down the figures and sometimes creates new polygons and more organic structures, bringing rhythm and dynamism to the canvas. The triangle and lozenge take

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centre stage, unfolding and reappearing in different ways, lending a discreet and elegant character to the internal movement of the composition. This mathematical dynamic is tempered by the use of colours and their contrasts and by the solitary presence of a circle at the bottom right of the canvas, creating an unsuspected vanishing point in a typically Lauandian formal operation. This is the first time the work of Judith Lauand is presented at Biennale Arte. —Fernando Olivia

NUCLEO STORICO • ABSTRACTIONS

Judith Lauand was born to Lebanese immigrants and spent her childhood and youth in Araraquara, an important economic and cultural centre in the countryside of São Paulo. In 1952, she moved to the state capital, and alongside Waldemar Cordeiro, Geraldo de Barros, and others, became the only woman to take an active part in the pioneering Ruptura group, whose 1952 manifesto laid the foundations for Concretism in Brazil. In her figurative and pop phase of the 1960s, Lauand’s work traversed political issues related to violence, sexuality, submission, and female freedom, addressing the repression of the military dictatorship in Brazil, the Vietnam War, and the condition of women in Brazilian society.

PONTAL, BRAZIL, 1922– 2022, SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL

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Judith Lauand

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Esther Mahlangu

At the age of eighty-eight, the legendary Dr Esther Mahlangu has outlived the legal institution of South Africa, and witnessed the dissolution of apartheid. Her distinctive and prolific artwork has come to represent the resilience of the evolving Ndebele culture that she has uplifted and preserved. Mahlangu achieved international recognition in 1989 after recreating the intricately painted exterior of her rural Mpumalanga home for the Centre Pompidou’s anti-ethnocentric exposition of contemporary art, Magiciens de la Terre. While she has since exhibited worldwide, Mahlangu’s art remains unconfined by the gallery. Since she created the first African Art Car for the prestigious BMW series in 1991, Mahlangu’s geometric paintings have graced diverse items from rooibos tea tins to luxury sneakers to the tail of a Boeing jet, while continuing to adorn the house from which she teaches Ndebele techniques of painting, sculpture, and beadwork.

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Untitled (1990) represents an early example of Mahlangu’s signature transposition of Ndebele techniques for painting buildings to new surfaces, including, most commonly, canvas. Mahlangu typically paints as per Ndebele custom, learned from her mother and grandmother from the age of ten: freehand, without a ruler nor prior sketches, and with a chicken-feather brush, prioritising straight lines and balance. Although bound by the canvas, the bright shapes and vivid white lines set against thick black borders evoke the symmetry and repetition of large-scale,

MIDDELBURG, SOUTH AFRICA, 1935 LIVES IN MPUMALANGA, SOUTH AFRICA

abstract Ndebele murals, as well as the contradictory sense of movement induced by cumulative gestures of angle and pattern. While nodding to the subdued earth tones customarily created through the mixture of clay, soil, and cow dung, this work’s bold, flat colours prioritise the blue and purple hues and vibrant shades made realisable during Mahlangu’s childhood and continue to characterise her style. This is the first time the work of Esther Mahlangu is presented at Biennale Arte. —Ruth Ramsden-Karelse

Untitled, 1990 Acrylic on canvas, 123 × 190 cm. Photo Maurice Aeschimann. The Jean Pigozzi African Art Collection. Courtesy The Jean Pigozzi African Art Collection.

Mancoba’s affiliation with Danish Linien artists and his visit to the British Museum, where he explored a collection of Central African masks, underpin his crossover into the medium of painting and his adoption of abstraction. Evident in the top half of Composition (1940) is a distinctive diamond pattern, which is coupled with a V-shape and chevron repetitions. Together, these motifs bear a striking resemblance to the Kuba Mbwoom helmet-masks from the Congo. It is believed he saw this kind of mask while at the British Museum. Composition was created eight years before Mancoba joined the international CoBra art collective. In its abstract style, it is strikingly apparent that Mancoba had already done away with the realistic representations that typify the earlier sculptural work he had produced before leaving South Africa. This is the first time the work of Ernest Mancoba is presented at Biennale Arte. —Zamansele Nsele

Composition, 1940 Oil on canvas, 59 × 50.5 cm. Private Collection.

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Ernest Mancoba, a descendant of the migrant Mfengu people, was born to an Evangelist miner and educator mother. He received a missionary Anglican education before discovering his talent for sculpture. Faced by grim prospects as a Black artist in South Africa, Mancoba left for Paris and London after obtaining a scholarship and a bachelor’s degree in 1937. He visited the collections of African art at the British Museum, which left a lasting impression. In France, he studied sculpture at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs and connected with Danish classmates who shared his outsider status and interest in African art. They introduced him to the sculptor Sonja Ferlov, whom he married in 1942 while he was confined in an internment camp during World War II. By 1948, Mancoba had become an active yet marginalised member of the avant-garde art collective CoBrA.

JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA, 1904– 2002, CLAMART, FRANCE

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Ernest Mancoba

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María Martorell

It was not until she was thirtythree years old that María Martorell, an artist from the traditional Salta province in northern Argentina, delved into her artistic practise. Starting in the mid-1940s, she travelled to Buenos Aires frequently. Her contact with the new abstract avant-garde there gradually led her away from the figurative work characteristic of her early years. She was particularly interested in the tenets of the Arte Concreto-Invención group led by Tomás Maldonado. In 1952, she travelled to Madrid and then to Paris, where she studied at the Sorbonne. After returning to Argentina, her work reflected the influence of her studies in France, particularly the sociology of art and the psychology of perception. Her research on and interest in the syntax of colour and the development of forms in space proved steadfast. In the mid-1960s, she opened a textile research and design workshop in her native Salta. The tapestries she designed and produced with local women evidence her attempt to bring together ancestral iconography on the one hand and contemporary geometry on the other.

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Despite their economy of colours, the hexagonal shapes in Martorell’s paintings from the late 1950s produce a sense of three-dimensionality. These shapes give way first to ellipses and then to the waving bands characteristic of her work from the mid-1960s. During those years, she began producing in series, a choice undoubtedly informed by her admiration of Josef Albers. She also expanded her palette and made use of configurations such as the diptych and triptych. Painted in 1968, the diptych Ekho Dos forms part of a larger series of the same name. In this

Ekho Dos, 1968 Oil on canvas, 170 × 160 cm. Photo Otilio Moralejo. Collection Museo de Artes Plásticas Eduardo Sívori, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Courtesy Museo de Artes Plásticas Eduardo Sívori, Buenos Aires, Argentina. © Otilio Moralejo.

SALTA, ARGENTINA, 1909–2010

painting, the dynamic waves of vibrant colours moving across the monochrome background generate deviations on the surface. The waves extend even to the border of the canvas stretcher, yielding an effect of rhythm and motion and an overall sense of calm. This is the first time the work of María Martorell is presented at Biennale Arte. —Sonia Becce

rainbows, flames, and waves. Notably, Melehi diversified these symbols’ orientations, giving way to dynamic and rhythmic compositions. Melehi passed away in Paris in 2020. Melehi incorporated waves into the works he created. They sometimes take the shape of human body parts or burst upwards like magma, and at other times they are fully abstracted and deconstructed. However, at their origin, these waves are Melehi’s interpretation of woven tribal products known as Glaoua rugs, which are crafted from a broad range of textile techniques that form bands on elongated flatweaves, common in Amazigh tribal tradition. As early as 1970, he started using lacquered cellulose car paint to apply flat and bright colours to wooden surfaces. He sought to achieve flatness

in the composition and a subtle absence of the artist and therefore left no visible brushstrokes on his work. In Composition (1968), Melehi approaches his desired flatness even when using oil paint on canvas. The artist’s deliberate manipulation of continuity and discontinuity in the painting engages the viewer in a playful experience: they can choose to follow the vibrant flow of the wave from one side to another or to gaze at the whole image, embracing its animated motion and optical bliss.

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Mohamed Melehi was cofounder of the Casablanca School in Morocco, a postcolonial modern art movement from the 1960s. Melehi was born in Asilah, northern Morocco, in 1936. He graduated from the National Institute of Fine Arts of Tetouan in 1956 and pursued additional education in Seville, Madrid, and Rome (1956–1960). Upon receiving a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, he studied at New York’s Columbia University (1962–1964). In 1963, he participated in the Hard Edge and Geometric Painting and Sculpture exhibition at MoMA and Formalists at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art. Inspired by the energetic spirituality of his heritage, Melehi turned to geometric abstract forms. Furthermore, he integrated into his works Arabic calligraphy and a range of symbolic elements like

ASILAH, MOROCCO, 1936– 2020, PARIS, FRANCE

This is the first time the work of Mohammed Melehi is presented at Biennale Arte. —Fadia Antar

Composition, 1968 Oil on canvas, 89.8 × 199.6 cm. Photo Hamad Yousef. Courtesy Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar.

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Mohamed Melehi

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Tomie Ohtake

Tomie Ohtake arrived in São Paulo from Kyoto in 1936, during a third major phase of Japanese migration to Brazil. In 1952, as a mother of two, Ohtake took her first painting classes and joined Seibi, a group of artists of Japanese descent formed in 1935 and active until 1970. In 1957, critic Mário Pedrosa, a lifelong friend and interlocutor for Ohtake, invited her to exhibit her work at the Museu de Arte Moderna in São Paulo in her first solo exhibition. While her early work is mostly comprised of landscapes or cityscapes, by 1959 she turned to abstraction, positioning herself adjacent to the ebullient abstract tendencies like Concretism and NeoConcretism that dominated avant-garde production in Brazil. Her first series of abstract canvases – named the Blind Series because she painted them while blindfolded – immediately garnered acclaim for their rich layering, textures, and unexpected chromatism: defining features of her later practice.

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Intentionally cultivating the image of a withdrawn persona, Ohtake left all her works untitled and shied away from offering any interpretation in public or private. From her technique and preparation, however, we can learn much about her creative process. This untitled abstraction from 1978, for example, is emblematic of a turning point within her production, traceable to the early 1970s, when she moved away from an expressionist style into hard-edged, graphic, and optical compositions. At this time, Ohtake experimented with silkscreen and used

KYOTO, JAPAN, 1912– 2015, SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL

magazine cut-outs and other ephemera to make preparatory collage studies for her canvases. The vibrant colour juxtapositions of her works also invited unexpected juxtapositions with artists like Claudio Tozzi and Antônio Henrique Amaral – notably associated with Pop Art and new figuration – with whom she shared an exhibition at São Paulo’s Bonfiglioli Gallery in 1977. We might consider the powerful corporeality of Ohtake’s oeuvre through sheer scale and chromatic vibrancy. —Sofia Gotti

Untitled, 1978 Acrylic on canvas, 124.8 × 134.8 cm. Photo Erika Mayumi. Courtesy the Artist’s Estate and Nara Roesler.

NUCLEO STORICO • ABSTRACTIONS

Marco Ospina was a painter, writer, and graphic designer who taught in the arts faculty of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia for four decades and at the Escuela del Bellas Artes, which he also directed in 1948. While Ospina was long considered a “transitional figure” between figurative academicism and modernism, a reassessment of his oeuvre demonstrates that he was a pioneer of abstraction. In 1947, he participated in the national Salón de artistas jóvene with a painting considered to be one of the first approximations towards abstraction in Colombia’s history. That same year, he published El arte de la pintura y la realidad, an influential text that defended nonfigurative art from a conservative art ecosystem that viewed abstraction as “imported” and non-Colombian. In 1955, Ospina participated in and wrote the catalogue essay for the country’s first group show of abstraction. In the 1980s, Ospina moved to Mexico, where he lived and worked during his final years.

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BOGOTÁ, COLOMBIA, 1912–1983

In the 1940s, as the influence of an Indigenist, figurative style of art waned, many Colombian painters began experimenting with a more abstract pictorial language. As a result, a paring down of line and shape towards more elemental forms becomes evident in Ospina’s work. Still, Ospina – who would often paint landscapes – continues to reference nature and tangible objects. It was not until the 1950s that he severed his work’s connection with the outside world, directing his focus primarily towards form. Abstracto (n.d.) is arguably

Abstracto, n.d. Oil on canvas, 110 × 90 cm. Courtesy Proyecto Bachué, Colombia.

characteristic of this period of Ospina’s production. In this painting, rounded, organic forms and hues of purple, blue, green, and cream are abruptly and pronouncedly broken by line, forming three separate sections. The perspective is far flatter than his previous work, becoming two-dimensional – a key feature of abstraction. This is the first time the work of Marco Ospina is presented at Biennale Arte. —Diego Chocano

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Marco Ospina

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Samia Osseiran Junblatt

SAIDA, LEBANON, 1944 LIVES IN BRAMIYEH, LEBANON

Samia Osseiran Junblatt steeped herself in Western art theory in Europe and then went East to explore a completely different philosophy centred on power through simplicity and subtlety. The artist moved to Florence to pursue her MFA from the Pius XII Institute, graduating in 1967. In 1975, she obtained a degree in graphic art from the University of Fine Arts in Tokyo. The artist combines complexity and simplicity in the lines in her work, infusing them with a raw spirituality characteristic of Beirut’s women’s art scene in the 1960s. Osseiran’s recent burst of creativity re-examines the themes and periods she has traversed throughout her career. With a shaky hand, she attempts to discover the essence of her own practice.

In Sunset (1968), Osseiran paints a narrow, elongated path stretching vertically across the canvas, leaving room for a setting sun on the restricted sky. Among the multitude of lines following the traditional singlepoint perspective, one single curvy line shatters the illusion of perfection. This subtle curviness within an otherwise rigid geometric rendering infuses an organic feel into the abstract landscape. Osseiran skilfully manipulates perspective and geometry, immersing the viewer in a captivating experience in which they are left contemplating whether what they behold is merely a landscape. Her earthy tones are simultaneously vibrant and grounded. Her play of light and shadow comes from no single light source, as if each object emits its own radiance. The sunset, which is by nature quick and fleeting, stands in stark contrast to the path below, where time itself seems to linger. This is the first time the work of Samia Osseiran Junblatt is presented at Biennale Arte. —Fadia Antar

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Sunset, 1968 Oil on canvas, 109.5 × 69 cm. Photo Maria and Mansour Dib. Courtesy of Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation.

MADHYA PRADESH, INDIA, 1922– 2016, DELHI, INDIA

NUCLEO STORICO • ABSTRACTIONS

S. H. Raza was born in rural Central India and studied art in Nagpur and Bombay before moving to Paris in 1950 to study at the École des BeauxArts on a scholarship. In 1947, Raza co-founded the iconic Progressive Artists’ Group with F. N. Souza and M. F. Husain with a goal of developing a modern, internationalist artistic idiom for a newly independent India. Raza’s early work in France was influenced by European styles such as Impressionism and Cubism. From the 1960s onward, Raza made frequent visits to India, and his travels across the country ushered in the next phase in his work, which distilled his experience and memory of Indian landscapes, colour, and light in increasingly abstract compositions.

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Sayed Haider Raza

Offrande, 1986 Acrylic on canvas, 100 × 100 cm. Courtesy Grosvenor Gallery, London.

also demonstrates his selfdeclared enquiries that were “aimed at pure plastic order, form-order . . . [and] the theme of nature”. Raza’s paintings have been exhibited widely in India, Europe, Japan, and North America, including at the International biennals in Dakar, Senegal (1992), Havana, Cuba (1987), São Paulo (1958), and Venice (1956). —Latika Gupta

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From the late 1970s, Raza developed a unique visual vocabulary with leitmotifs such as squares, triangles, and circles appearing in symbolic paintings that referred to Indic spiritual and philosophical traditions. Offrande (1986) is emblematic of Raza’s oeuvre with a distinct earthy colour palette of ochres, greens, burnt umbers, deep reds, and dense black reminiscent of the scorched, sun-baked land and dense forests of Madhya Pradesh where he grew up. The geometric composition, featuring horizontal and vertical bands of colour and an inverted triangle, draws upon the symbolism of yantras – sacred esoteric diagrams. It

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Freddy Rodríguez

Freddy Rodríguez was born in Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic, and his painting practice cycled through different styles such as geometric abstraction and expressive figuration, addressing his personal identity and a history of migration and displacement. Rodríguez grew up during the violent regime

of dictator Rafael Trujillo and, fearing for his life as a young activist, Rodríguez migrated to New York at the age of eighteen. There, Rodríguez studied at the Art Students League and the New School for Social Research with Abstract Expressionist Carmen Cicero. Drawing from the geometry of New York architecture,

SANTIAGO DE LOS CABALLEROS, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC, 1945– 2003, NEW YORK CITY, UNITED STATES

modern art history, and Latin American writers such as Julio Cortázar, Rodríguez developed a diverse body of work that combines Caribbean culture and history with Western art historical references. The painting Mulato de tal (1974) takes its title after the 1963 novel Mulata de tal by Nobel Prize-winning Guatemalan writer Miguel Ángel Asturias, which tells the story of a poor Guatemalan farmer who makes a pact with the devil. Mulato de tal, like many other paintings belonging to this series, was initially sketched with pen and coloured pencil on graph paper. The work references a mulato, a mixed-race man, through geometric forms that suggest a body in movement. The warm colour palette suggests a relationship between land and body, but also the racial taxonomies that rule Dominican life. Through its dynamic lines and gestural strokes, the painting alludes to the rhythms of Latin music that became popular in New York during the 1970s. A twin painting titled Mulata de tal (1974) was lost during Rodríguez’s displacements between the Caribbean and New York. This is the first time the work of Freddy Rodriguez is presented at Biennale Arte. —Carla Acevedo Yates

Mulato de tal, 1974 Acrylic on canvas, 203.2 × 101.6 cm. Courtesy Hutchinson Modern & Contemporary. © Estate of Freddy Rodriguez.

In the late 1960s, Sabri became increasingly interested in the relationship between art and science. Influenced by David Alfaro Siqueiros’s text Towards a Transformation of the Plastic Arts (1934), Sabri’s shifting approach to painting echoed the Mexican artist’s words: “Our art must have a real scientific basis. [...] For the first time in history, we shall find scientific truths which can be proved, either physically, chemically, or psychologically. In this way, we will be able to forge a strong connection between

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art and science”. In 1971, Sabri published a manifesto titled Quantum Realism, in which he called for an “application of the scientific method in the field of art”. His subsequent work consisted of colour compositions, presenting an indexed codification of reality, devoid of figures and recognisable objects, as can be seen in his painting Water (1970 ca.) This is the first time the work of Mahmoud Sabri is presented at Biennale Arte. —Suheyla Takesh

Water (Quantum Realism Series), 1970 ca. Oil on canvas, 87 × 87 cm. Collection of Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah. Courtesy Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah.

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In the mid-1940s, Mahmoud Sabri obtained a degree in social sciences at Loughborough University in Leicestershire, England. In 1947, still largely self-taught as an artist, he participated in an exhibition at the Embassy of Iraq in London, showing alongside Hafidh al-Droubi, Jewad Selim, Fahrelnissa Zeid, and several others who would soon become some of the Middle East’s leading figures in the field of modern art. On his return to Iraq, Sabri joined the Société Primitive art collective, later renamed the Pioneers Group, and worked closely with the artist and educator Faiq Hassan. The group’s guiding principle was to take art outside the studio and into the streets, painting directly from the surroundings. In 1960, he travelled to Moscow to study at the Surikov Art Institute under the mentorship of Socialist Realist painter Aleksandr Deyneka, and moved to Prague in 1963, joining the Committee for the Defence of the Iraqi People.

BAGHDAD, IRAQ, 1927– 2012, MAIDENHEAD, UNITED KINGDOM

NUCLEO STORICO • ABSTRACTIONS

Mahmoud Sabri

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Nena Saguil

Nena Saguil was a Filipino painter best known for her pioneering cosmic abstractions. Rejecting her family’s wishes to attend Catholic school, Saguil opted instead to pursue a career in painting, graduating in 1949 from the University of the Philippines. She then became active with the Philippine Art Gallery, a regional locus for post-war modernism, gaining acclaim for her figurative work while developing a growing interest in abstraction. A scholarship enabled Saguil to leave in 1954 for France and Spain, where she studied abstract art before settling in Paris for the next four decades. Living a modest and reclusive lifestyle, Saguil often worked as a maid to support her artmaking – a daily, often meditative practice of configuring circles, orbs, and spheres into mesmerising compositions. Bridging the cellular and celestial, these compositions reflect her spiritual beliefs in the ofteninvisible patterns that underlie day-to-day existence.

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Saguil’s Untitled (Abstract) (1972) highlights her protean handling of circular forms to cosmic ends. The circle is mobilised in various ways upon the canvas: small textured dots encrust the surface, encircling and often comprising larger organic forms – themselves clustered, concentric, and/or overlapping. Within this composition, the shape is at once a prime element, a means of relation, and a governing structure, all rendered in gradients of colour to disorienting effect.

MANILA, PHILIPPINES, 1914– 1994, PARIS, FRANCE

This proliferation shows the porosity of sight, sense, and scale that Saguil’s treatment achieves: as one’s reading shifts between atomic and planetary associations, the artist’s singular geometries offer possible insights into the patterns undergirding worlds small and large. This is the first time the work of Nena Saguil is presented at Biennale Arte. —CJ Salapare

Untitled (Abstract), 1972 Oil on canvas, 126.9 × 127.5 × 5.5 cm (framed). National Fine Arts Collection of the National Museum of the Philippines. Courtesy Bengy Toda III and the National Museum of the Philippines.

NUCLEO STORICO • ABSTRACTIONS

Kazuya Sakai was a visual artist, designer, critic, translator, and scholar who worked at the juncture between the East and the West. An expert in contemporary music and jazz, Sakai was a professor at universities in Argentina, the United States, and Mexico. His parents sent him from his native Buenos Aires to Tokyo when he was seven years old. He began to paint when he returned to Buenos Aires at the age of twenty-three. Geometric abstraction was the first visual language he adopted before embracing Informalism. After a stint in New York at the height of the Pop art movement, he settled in Mexico City, where he is recognised as a pioneering figure in geometric art. He would become known as an illustrator and critic for Plural, the cultural magazine founded by Octavio Paz. After moving to Texas in 1977, his painting drew inspiration from his Asian roots.

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BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA, 1927– 2001, DALLAS, UNITED STATES

Pintura No. 9 (1969) is one of the works Sakai produced during his years in Mexico, when he encountered artists like Gunther Gerzso, Vicente Rojo, Mathias Goeritz, and Carlos Mérida. It was during that period that Sakai gradually veered away from the gestural and towards compositions with angular geometric shapes intersected by stripes and fields of intense saturated colour. The variations in texture and brightness within the painting are a result of experimentation with acrylic resin. The artist would apply multiple layers

Pintura No.9, 1969 Acrylic on canvas, 130 × 130 cm. Marina Pellegrini Collection.

of it to some sections of the painting and use masking tape on others to obstruct the resin, thus yielding varying degrees of thickness on the pictorial surface. In this richly varied chromatic work, for example, he used the tape for the black and white areas. The abrupt cuts, sharp points, and slanted perspective lines give sections of the piece an illusion of three-dimensionality. A harmonious and balanced synthesis of spatial relations and simple shapes forges a truly unique language. —Sonia Becce

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Kazuya Sakai

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Ione Saldanha

Ione Saldanha boldly explored new media for her painting with a vigorous and distinguishing use of colour. Born in a small town in the south of Brazil, she moved to Rio de Janeiro in the 1930s, where she developed her artistic work for more than five decades. Although she attended open courses, Saldanha was not traditionally educated, which allowed for the unpretentiousness and freshness of her work. Her early paintings feature interior spaces, townhouses, façades, and skylines, capturing the imagery of a city in bloom. Verticality became a key structural element as her painting style grew more synthetic. From 1967, she began to paint on ripas (thin wooden slats), which were

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used to produce the frames of canvases. In the same period, Saldanha began to produce her Bambus and later tackled other three-dimensional objects such as spools of electrical cables and stacked blocks of wood. Saldanha’s Bambus (1960s-70s) are a radical way of pushing the boundaries between artistic languages, giving body and liveliness to painting. By appropriating an element from nature, the very organicity of the support claims its sculptural properties. To produce the Bambus the artist went through several distinct stages. After harvesting the bamboo and allowing it to dry for more than a year, Saldanha sanded it and applied five preparatory coats of white paint. When the

ALEGRETE, BRAZIL, 1919– 2001, RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL

time came to fill them with colour, she executed this step all at once. The Bambus invite us to experience colour as we surround them. Hanging from the ceiling, they move subtly, like mobiles, evoking a playful and dynamic feel. The visible light brushstrokes in the thin acrylic paint evidences the sequenced, meticulous movement of the artist’s hand. When arranged in groups, each Bambu is both unique and part of the larger compositional whole. This is the first time the work of Ione Saldanha is presented at Biennale Arte. —Laura Cosendey

Installation view of thirty five individual Bambus, 1960s-70s. Acrylic on bamboo. At the exhibition Ione Saldanha: The Invented City, Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, 2021-22. Courtesy Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand.

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Zilia Sánchez blurs boundaries between media with an idiosyncratic practice of sculptural canvases. Trained as a painter in Havana, Sánchez initially tended towards gestural abstraction and political engagement as the set designer for the guerrilla theatre group Los Yesistas (The Plasterers). Taking advantage of early career success, Sánchez left Cuba in 1959 to study first at the Museo del Prado in Madrid and then at the Pratt Institute in New York. While in New York, Sánchez visited the Primary Structures exhibition at the Jewish Museum and witnessed the emergence of Minimalism. She then began stretching canvas into three dimensions, redefining the relationship of wall-hung painting to real space in a format she would refine in subsequent decades from Puerto Rico. Openly gay, with a keen and critical understanding of modern art, Sánchez transformed the hard, unforgiving edges of Minimalist art into corporeal curves and fissures.

HAVANA, CUBA, 1926 LIVES IN SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO

In Lunar (1980), representation is reduced to its abstract essentials. Playing with the intersection of real and pictorial depth, Sánchez paints concentric circles in a gradation of grey hues, which mimic the waxing and waning of the moon as the viewer walks around the work. The cool tones of Sánchez’s minimal palette are augmented by real shadow at the axial cleft between the two almost symmetrical hemispheres. The precise matte finish, cool

Lunar [Moon], 1980 Acrylic on stretched canvas, 118 × 121.9 × 29.9 cm. The Mende Collection.

tones, and protruding profile of Lunar are all characteristic of the shaped-canvas format for which Sánchez was best known. Treating the fabric as a screen and skin, Sánchez would pull it taut over wooden armatures that she first moulded by hand. Lunar swells out into curves and crevices that resemble lips or breasts, an abstract biomorphism that encodes female sexuality in the round face of the moon. —Lucia Neirotti

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Zilia Sánchez

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Fanny Sanín

Bogotá-born, New Yorkbased Fanny Sanín worked with the pictorial language of abstraction since the late 1960s, becoming known for her dedication to hard-edge geometries. A master of composition and experimentation with colour, Sanín is heir to the American abstract geometric painters she encountered in the Art of the Real exhibition held at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1968 while living in Europe in the late 1960s. She is also heir to a notable tradition of geometric abstraction in her native Colombia, although some question its commitment to depicting violence. Artists such as Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar and Édgar Negret are but two examples of artists who were especially close to the her. Sanín holds a pivotal role in the ample panorama of Latin American and international abstraction, and her legacy is beginning to be acknowledged on a wide international scale.

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Oil No. 7 (1969) was created during a crucial period in Sanín’s career. At this time, her oeuvre transitioned from the gestural abstraction with which she inaugurated her practice in the late 1950s, following her graduation from the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, to the carefully crafted sophistication of her constructed geometries post1969. In the painting, welldefined fields of dark, warm colours signal the flattening of the pictorial space. This marks the initial stages of the geometrisation process, a transformation that would later give rise to the severe symmetrical compositions for

BOGOTÁ, COLOMBIA, 1938 LIVES IN NEW YORK CITY, UNITED STATES

which she is best known today. The painting also hints at her hallmark layered use of colour as well as the vertical lines and areas that structure most of her mature work. Oil No. 7 is a work that speaks to the artist’s search for a personal language, revealing Sanín’s innate inclination and skill for colour while awaiting her definitive compositional approach, which would determine her lasting career. This is the first time the work of Fanny Sanín is presented at Biennale Arte. —Emiliano Valdes

Oil No. 7, 1969 Oil on canvas, 165 × 175 cm. Collection of Steven and Olga Immel, New York. Courtesy the Fanny Sanín Legacy Project. © Fanny Sanín, 2024.

Dinamika Keruangan IX [The Dynamic of Space IX], 1974 Oil on canvas, 80 × 60 cm. Courtesy National Gallery of Indonesia.

Sidik’s painting The Dynamic of Space IX (1974) is an example of his distinctive style of abstract painting called Dinamika Keruangan. In this painting, Sidik arranged simple shapes with contrasting colours, giving a biomorphic impression, trying to negotiate the space on the canvas. During this period, Sidik entered a mature period as an abstract painter, which began in the 1960s. His experience living in Bali from 1957 to 1961 influenced how he approached abstract painting. Initially, he only felt like painting “industrial objects” and then felt the need to create other forms as pure expression.

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Accordingly, Sidik offered a new aesthetic proposition in the age of urbanisation and industrialisation. At this point, he began to develop his series of abstract paintings to include other imagery such as abstractions of animal and natural forms, as well as decorative compositions with contrasting and rhythmic colours recalling hand-drawn batik. This is the first time the work of Fadjar Sidik is presented at Biennale Arte. —Asep Topan

NUCLEO STORICO • ABSTRACTIONS

Fadjar Sidik developed his body of works Dinamika Keruangan (Space Dynamics) over four decades, which depicted simple compositions that evoke the vibrant pulse and movement of changing nature. One of the most prominent and celebrated Indonesian abstract painters, Sidik’s pictures typify his emotional impulses and inner thoughts. Sidik studied painting at the Indonesian Academy of Fine Arts (ASRI) in 1954 and at Sanggar Pelukis Rakyat (People’s Painting Studio) under the tutelage of Hendra Gunawan and Sudarso in 1952. Sidik was also known as a teacher at his alma mater ASRI, from 1966–1995. During his lifetime, Sidik organised several solo exhibitions, from 1957 to 1993. He participated in the KIAS (Indonesian Arts in America) travelling exhibition in the United States (1990– 1991), and recently the Asia Art Center in Taipei held his first solo exhibition overseas entitled Fadjar Sidik: Space Dynamics (2020).

SURABAYA, INDONESIA, 1930– 2004, YOGYAKARTA, INDONESIA

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Fadjar Sidik

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Eduardo Terrazas

Before beginning his career as a visual artist, Eduardo Terrazas studied architecture at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and worked extensively in design. One of his first contributions was participating in the team responsible for the visual programming of the 1968 Olympic Games held in Mexico. A few years earlier, between 1964 and 1965, Terrazas was a professor of architectural drawing at Columbia University. Between 1969 and 1970, he taught at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1972, he joined the team at Mexico’s Instituto de Acción Urbana e Integración Social and was involved in architecture and urban planning projects in Mexico and abroad. His career as a painter began in the early 1970s with the study and admiration of different craft traditions developed by the Wixárika people (also known as Huichol) in the territory we now call Mexico. The many articulations between an expressive and expansive use of colour with geometric experimentation characterise his first works, which also experiment with the materials with which they are made. Terrazas paints on a wool surface and then applies a layer of wax commonly called Campeche wax, referring to a region in eastern Mexico.

GUADALAJARA, MEXICO, 1936 LIVES IN MEXICO CITY

From the beginning of his career, 1.1.91 (1970–1972) exemplifies his experimentation with materials and his early work interested in recoding craft traditions. Working with the square and its contrast with the curvilinear aspect of the circle, Terrazas proposes strong chromatic contrasts that appeal to the eyes and to the physicality of the human body. The artist refers not only to modernist and European discussions regarding the place of abstraction in art history but also to Indigenous traditions and those associated with the working class in Latin America and elsewhere. This is the first time the work of Eduardo Terrazas is presented at Biennale Arte. —Raphael Fonseca

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1.1.91, 1970-72 Wool threads on a wooden board covered with Campeche wax, 121 × 121 cm. Photo Eduard Fraipont. Courtesy Galeria Luisa Strina. © Eduard Fraipont.

Nil Yalter received her first artistic training at the age of five from her grandmother, who taught her to invent and draw fairy tales in cartoonish vignettes. As a teenager, Yalter learned about European modernism through books given to her by her father and became passionate about the Russian avant-gardes. She was known for her geometric abstractions, and she designed sets and costumes for the theatre to support herself financially. Driven by an indomitable spirit, eighteenyear-old Yalter travelled across Asia before settling in Paris. By the early 1970s, her artistic focus shifted from painting to installation, film, and photography. She returned to storytelling by documenting the lives of migrants marked by dispossession and hardship, but also resilience and adaptability. Immersed in a counter-artworld of activists and feminists throughout her youth, especially after 2000 Yalter has been exhibited and celebrated within major institutions worldwide.

Pink Tension (1969) is a canvas that Yalter still keeps with her in Paris. At first glance, the work reflects her early dedication to geometric abstraction, influenced by Russian Constructivism and ideals of social participation embodied by figures such as Kazimir Malevich, El Lissitzky, and the Istanbul-based painter Serge Poliakoff. Yet she created the canvas in the seven-year period following her relocation to Paris, which Yalter remembers as one of seismic change. Immersed in the city’s art scene and receptive to its avant-garde tendencies, her palette transformed in response to the vibrant commercial colours of Pop Art; meanwhile, her compositions harkened

Pink Tension, 1969 Acrylic on canvas, 120 × 180 cm. Courtesy of the Artist.

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CAIRO, EGYPT, 1938 LIVES IN PARIS, FRANCE

back to the everyday, the primary source material for Nouveau réalisme. This period was importantly defined by the May 1968 revolts, the strengthening of women’s liberation movements, and the Turkish “coup by memorandum”, which drove Yalter to refocus her practice onto the lived experience of political oppression and social marginalisation. She is the recipient of the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievementat the 2024 Biennale Arte. This is the first time the work of Nil Yalter is presented at Biennale Arte. —Sofia Gotti FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Nil Yalter

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Fahrelnissa Zeid

BÜYÜKADA, TURKEY, 1901– 1991, AMMAN, JORDAN

Fahrelnissa Zeid hailed from an elite Ottoman family and was one of the first artists of her generation to study at the İnas Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi, the Academy of Fine Arts for Women in Istanbul, which coincided with the decline of the Empire and the birth of the new Turkish Republic. She was an important figure in the creative modern art milieu in Istanbul and an active member of the modern art D Group. She exhibited her distinctive abstract paintings in Istanbul and travelled extensively throughout Europe, exhibiting in London, Paris, and Berlin, where she lived in the 1930s with her second husband, Prince Zeid AlHussein, the Iraqi ambassador to Germany. Following the turbulence of World War II, they relocated to Baghdad and later settled in Amman, where she founded the Royal National Jordanian Institute Fahrelnissa Zeid of Fine Arts in 1976. Zeid’s paintings regained newfound attention following her death in 1991. Although Zeid painted several figurative works, she later abandoned this style in favour of abstraction. She outlined shapes of various sizes onto canvases, which she then meticulously painted in oils. In Untitled (1955), Zeid combined both geometric and abstract shapes that took the forms of squares, triangles, circles, crescents, and swirls to create a kaleidoscopic composition. Richly hued in a majestic colour palette, this work resembles an alternative example of early conceptual land art, which became more widely practiced in the 1960s and 1970s, and

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incorporated interventions, photography, and mapping. Zeid’s painting is reminiscent of an aerial landscape in which the outlines of buildings, fields, hills, mountains, and trees are defined by the black and white negative spaces that seek to highlight the complexity of the overall composition. This is the first time the work of Fahrelnissa Zeid is presented at Biennale Arte. —Sara Raza

Untitled, 1955 Oil on canvas, 187 × 174 cm. Courtesy of Taimur Hassan Collection. Photo Justin Piperger.

“ON ALTERNATIVE MODERNITIES.” IN ALTERNATIVE MODERNITIES, EDITED BY DILIP PARAMESHWAR GAONKAR. DURHAM: DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2001.

Modernity has travelled from the West to the rest of the world not only in terms of cultural forms, social practices, and institutional arrangements but also as a form of discourse that interrogates the present.

DILIP PARAMESHWAR GAONKAR

Adriano Pedrosa and Sofia Gotti

591 NUCLEO STORICO • ITALIANS EVERYWHERE FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

This section of the Nucleo Storico gathers works by Italian artists who travelled and lived abroad, developing their careers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, as well as in the United States and Europe. In an edition of Biennale Arte focused on the subject of the foreigner, the immigrant, the expatriate, and the exiled, it makes sense to consider both first- and second-generation Italian immigrants who themselves became foreigners in the Global South and beyond during the twentieth century. Many were deeply influenced by, or became embedded into, native cultures, often contributing significantly to the development of local modernist narratives. If diaspora and migration are understood as cultural formations inextricable from modernity, the mass emigration of Italians worldwide reveals some of the unexpected transnational textures of modernity itself. The artists featured here left Italy for a variety of reasons. At the turn of the twentieth century, Orientalists, who thrived on foreign commissions, were privileged to travel to North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. While they habitually produced exoticised and eroticised visions of the places they visited, their work and research also played an important role in the development of artistic tendencies in Italy, which were adopted by artists who had never travelled themselves. Other artists were part of convoys sent during Italy’s brief but brutal colonial endeavours in Africa, which began in the late eighteenth century and continued intermittently until 1941. Their influence is still visible in the architecture of some African cities and often in the art academies they helped establish or manage there. Still others were forced to emigrate due to Italy’s dire economic conditions during and after World War II. Some sought fortune abroad, while others responded to calls from the Americas for skilled and semi-skilled labourers. South America was a major destination for Italian emigrants in the twentieth century, particularly Brazil and Argentina, which today have populations of approximately 32 million and 25 million people, respectively, with some degree of Italian ancestry. This is reflected in this section, where half of the artists are from those two countries. Priority here is given to the work of artists who naturalised in the Global South, while also acknowledging those who were forced to escape fascism’s terror and antisemitic laws, finding refuge in the US or the rest of Europe. Notably, the works in the section are displayed in Lina Bo Bardi’s cavalete de vidro display system. Bo Bardi herself was an Italian who moved to Brazil, where she worked as an architect, designer, and exhibition maker. She won the Special Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in memoriam of the Biennale Architettura 2021. Her cavalete de cristal, or glass easel, is a legendary device in the history of exhibition displays. It was specially conceived for the collection of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP) and unveiled in 1968 at the opening of the museum’s new headquarters in São Paulo, also designed by Bo Bardi. The cavalete consists of a thick glass plate inserted into a concrete cube, forming a self-supporting transparent panel onto which a picture is hung. The artwork’s label is affixed to the back, so that the visitor may first encounter the work without any historical contextualisation. Bo Bardi sought to present works as the product of labour, aiming to desacralise them. The easel challenges traditional frontal viewing by allowing works to be seen from the back, revealing their materiality and international provenance through the stamps and stickers left on their frames from previous exhibitions. Drawing from brutalism, Bo Bardi was attracted to the rawness of concrete, glass, and wood. These elements contrast with and complement the rich materiality and palimpsestic quality of the Corderie in the Arsenale, characterized by its exposed brick walls and columns, which bear the layered exhibition histories of many past Biennale Arte editions.

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Libero Badií

Italian-born Argentine artist Libero Badií arrived in Buenos Aires with his family when he was eleven years old. It was in the family’s marble workshop that Badií began experimenting with stone, carrying on a tradition that began with his sculptor grandfather. The artist studied at a number of different art schools, which afforded him rigorous training. In his academic sculptures from the 1940s, the relationship between the concave and convex volumes carved in stone is as harmonious as their relationship to the surrounding space. In the 1950s, he travelled around South America for the first time, visiting northern Argentina, Ecuador, Peru, and

Bolivia. The Indigenous cultures he encountered on that trip had a major impact on him. This is when colour exploded in his work, and he began exploring new materials such as wood, metal, and plaster. The multifaceted Badií was not only a sculptor, draughtsman, painter, ceramicist, and printmaker, but also the maker of over fifty artist’s books. Arte Siniestro [uncanny art] emerged in the mid-1960s in reaction to the avant-gardes of the time. Though developed by Badií and Argentine painter Luis Centurión, Badií was the one who placed the uncanny at the centre of his artistic production from the late 1960s

AREZZO, ITALIA, 1916– 2001, BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA

through the 1970s. For Badií, the idea of the uncanny in art is bound to forms unknown – or, perhaps, soon to be known – by the simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar Indigenous cultures of the Americas, as opposed to the classic European aesthetic tradition. Like his other works from this period, the production process for the polychrome Autorretrato siniestro (1978) entailed assembling wooden boards and rods and placing scraps of wood on the work’s surface. The figure brings to mind the Indigenous cult ures that had made such an impact on the artist during his trip to the South American Altiplano. —Sonia Becce

Autorretrato Siniestro, 1978 Paint on wood, 200 × 45 x 45 cm. Photo Pablo Messil. Collection Arthaus Foundation, Argentina.

593 NUCLEO STORICO • ITALIANS EVERYWHERE

Gianni Bertini was a maverick artist and a tireless traveller. Educated as a mathematician, he developed an interest in post-Cubism and Expressionism in the 1940s. In Milan, he joined the Movimento Arte Concreta and was close to the Arte nucleare (art for the nuclear age) painters. After moving to Paris in 1952, he shifted to informal painting, explored Pierre Restany’s Nouveau réalisme (new realism), and became involved in the Mec art (a sort of European Pop art) movement in the 1960s. His prolonged trips to Europe, New York, Tangier, and cities in Senegal and Latin America made him highly aware of the international political and cultural dynamics of his time. He exhibited at the Biennale Arte in 1950, 1958, and in 1968 with a personal room and served as a commissioner in 1970. With his actions, artworks, poems, and extensive critical writings, he constantly challenged the cultural establishment.

PISA, ITALY, 1922– 2010, CAEN, FRANCE

La Toile de Penelope (1959), a textile collage created in collaboration with his wife Licia Monesi, represents a departure in technique from Bertini’s usual style, possibly influenced by Alberto Burri. The artwork is part of Espaces imaginaires, an informal painting series spanning from 1953 to 1960. Abstract and gestural, these works feature significant titles referencing mythological characters like Oedipus, Dido, Artemis, Mars, and others. Ancient myths served as a means for Bertini to reconstruct a modern shared humanism after the war and to interpret his own

La Toile de Penelope, 1959 Textile collage, 146 × 165 cm. Courtesy of Thierry Bertini and Frittelli Arte Contemporanea.

feelings, views, and personal life. Mimicking the immediacy of brushstrokes, various fabric scraps are sewn together with wide and intentionally irregular stitches so that the artwork, seen from a distance, bears an expressionist quality, which is contradicted by the painstaking assembly of patches and threads. The incorporation of fabrics and threads alludes to Penelope’s actual web, adding an additional layer of meaning to the artwork. —Antonella Camarda

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Gianni Bertini

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Lina Bo Bardi

Lina Bo Bardi studied architecture in her native Rome and, after marrying the Italian critic Pietro Maria Bardi in 1946 at the age of thirty-two, moved to Brazil the same year, where she spent the rest of her life, becoming a citizen of the country in 1951. Bo Bardi was not only an architect; she also worked as a magazine editor, graphic designer, furniture designer, set designer, curator, and writer. In Brazil, she lived mostly in São Paulo but also spent time in Salvador, immersing herself in the local culture, with a keen interest in the country’s rich cultura popular, from folk and vernacular traditions to Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian cultures. Indeed, her most extraordinary contributions connect European modernism and Brazilian cultura popular in multiple ways. For many years, Bo Bardi worked in

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architecture, museum displays, and exhibitions at Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP), where her husband was director for forty-five years. Two of her most iconic buildings are in São Paulo and are landmarks of Latin American modernism: the headquarters of the MASP on Avenida Paulista and the SESC Pompéia, a “leisure centre”. In 2021, she won the Biennale Architettura’s Gold Lion for Lifetime Achievement in Memoriam. Bo Bardi’s “glass easel” is a legendary device in the history of exhibition displays. It was specially conceived for MASP’s picture gallery and was first revealed at the museum’s opening in 1968. It consists of a thick glass plate inserted into a concrete cube, forming a self-supporting transparent panel onto which a picture is

ROME, ITALY, 1914– 1992, SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL

hung. The artwork’s label is affixed to the back, so that the visitor may first encounter the work without any historical contextualisation. Bo Bardi sought to present works as the product of labour, aiming to desacralise them. Rough, raw, and industrial materials were employed in both the building’s construction and the easels, which function as a counterpoint to the museum’s refined classical European collection – it now also includes contemporary art. In a space of 2,000 square metres, the easels are distributed in rows as if in a parade or mimicking a forest of artworks. Removed from the walls, the artworks become more accessible, and the visitor can establish a closer and more direct relationship with them. Bo Bardi’s system was influenced by Franco Albini’s exhibition displays at the Pinacoteca di Brera in

Milan in the 1940s and inspired the Louvre-Lens’s Galerie du Temps, designed by SANAA, which opened in 2012. This is the first time the work of Lina Bo Bardi is presented at Biennale Arte. —Adriano Pedrosa

View of the MASP picture gallery on Paulista Avenue with the glass easels designed by Lina Bo Bardi, 1970s. Photo Paolo Gasparini. Courtesy Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand.

To deepen her knowledge of woodblock printing in the 1960s and 1970s, Bonomi trained at the Pratt Institute with Seong Moy. She also travelled to Japan and Maoist China, and studied the techniques practiced in the Amazon. Pedra Robat (1974) is part of a series made in the period after these transformative journeys. Departing from conventional woodblock printing methods, she used two unusually large and heavy wooden matrices. These were engraved using techniques inspired by jade stone carvings she observed in Beijing, which were the product of skills honed across generations of stonecutters. The print is achieved by layering each matrix’s impression. The result is not typically hardedged. Instead, it seems to vibrate with kinetic energy, a distinctive characteristic of the artist’s printmaking style. Crucial elements of the work are the woodblocks exhibited at the print’s base. Her endless research on the engraved surface led Bonomi to elaborate the vision for an “expanded woodcut”, turning matrices into monumental sculptural installations for public commissions. —Sofia Gotti

Pedra Robat, 1974 Woodblock print, 132 × 95 cm. Courtesy of the Artist.

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The engraved matrix of the woodblock print is the keystone of Maria Bonomi’s practice as a printmaker and sculptor. Bonomi left Italy in 1944 and settled with her family in São Paulo in 1946. She started training in painting and drawing in Brazil, but thanks to her family’s intellectual prestige, she also collaborated with renowned painters of the European avant-garde, including Emilio Vedova and Enrico Prampolini. Her commitment to printmaking matured in 1952 thanks to modernist Livio Abramo, with whom she also founded the experimental Estúdio Gravura (printmaking studio), active from 1960. Bonomi’s artistic style transitioned from figurative to geometric abstract, aligning with the tendencies of the Brazilian avant-garde in the 1950s. Over time, she developed a more corporeal and sculptural approach to printmaking through technical experimentation, using multiple matrices (up to one hundred for a single print) in various scales and materials. In addition to being an artist and an educator, Bonomi has also been a unionist and activist.

MEINA, ITALY, 1935 LIVES IN SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL

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Maria Bonomi

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Victor Brecheret

Victor Brecheret is the most celebrated sculptor of the first half of the twentieth century in Brazil. Born in Italy, Brecheret migrated to São Paulo with his family when he was still a child. At the age of nineteen, he moved to Rome, where he worked as an assistant to the sculptor Arturo Dazzi. He returned to Brazil in 1919 and, the following year, he met artists and intellectuals who were enthusiastic about the non-academic forms of his works, influenced by sculptors such as Ivan Meštrović and Auguste Rodin. However, the formal simplification for which his sculpture is best known

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occurred during his years in Paris (1921–1936) under the influence of Constantin Brancusi and the Art Deco movement. The religious themes and female figures gave way to national motifs in the late 1940s. In 1921, Brecheret was awarded a scholarship to study in Paris and his sculpture soon underwent significant changes. The dramatic twists of heroic figures in his previous production were replaced by synthetic forms and wellpolished surfaces that reflect light, as seen in Vierge à l’enfant (Virgin and Child) (1923–1924).

FARNESE, ITALY, 1894– 1955, SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL

Although the religious theme and the marble belong to the repertoire of classical sculpture, the construction of the figures with cylinders and rounded forms, the rhythm established by their connections, and the subtle reliefs and incisions that define the shape of the bodies are all elements that attest to Brecheret’s commitment to modern art. —Regina Barros

Vierge à l’enfant, 1923-24 Marble, 142 × 34 × 27 cm. Photo Fabrice Gousset. Courtesy Almeida & Dale Galeria de Arte.

Maternidad (1971) belongs to the extended series of paintings, created around the same time her son was born, in which Cerrato investigates the mysterious figure of the Beta Being (1967–1973). This being is an abstract creature who possesses a cluster of supernatural qualities and who uses erotism as a language to move through reality. Through the suggestive use of circles and ovals, with which Cerrato symbolically alludes to fertility, Maternidad announces the Beta Being’s imminent landing and depicts its displacement from a colourful geography to the turbulent reality of Argentina. Around the arrival of this energetic entity, Cerrato created a universe of geometric abstraction, soft forms, and nonexistent organisms, which was influenced by Surrealist poetry, ancestral knowledge, science fiction, and her long-standing curiosity about life from outer space. Simultaneously, she used avant-garde languages to synthesise a spiritual criticism of the ascendant political violence in Latin America. This is the first time the work of Elda Cerrato is presented at Biennale Arte. —Nicolas Cuello

Maternidad, 1971 Acrylic on canvas, 115.8 × 81.8 cm. Photo Diego Spivacow. Ama Amoedo Collection. Courtesy Ama Amoedo Collection.

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Elda Cerrato was a painter and educator born in Asti, Italy, who migrated to Argentina in 1940. Her work focused on the mystery of being, the immensity of outer space, and human organisation. To accomplish this, she used an abstract language in which geometric structures, biological forms, and phenomenological experimentations with colour coexisted – a set of interests into which she delved after 1954, when she met with the composer Luis Zubillaga. In 1960, during her first trip to Venezuela, she came in contact with avant-garde artists linked to Marxism and started her journey as an educator. Once again in Argentina in 1964, her tendency towards mysticism was radicalised after sighting a flying saucer and learning about magical practices in rural towns. She joined the Peronist militancy in the 1970s and later had to exile again to Venezuela and other European countries. Once the military dictatorship ended in 1983, she returned to Buenos Aires, and her art started to reflect on memory, democratic stability, and political violence.

ASTI, ITALY, 1930– 2023, BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA

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Elda Cerrato

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Galileo Chini

Galileo Chini was at once a painter, restorer, ceramicist, and theatrical scenographer, moving between Symbolism, Divisionism, and Art Nouveau. In Florence in 1896, he was among the founders of the Arte della Ceramica factory. In 1909, he decorated the dome of the octagonal vestibule at the Biennale Arte, which impressed King Chulalongkorn (Rama V) of Siam, who commissioned him to decorate the Throne Palace in Bangkok. Chini’s stay in Siam (present-day Thailand) between 1911 and 1913 is documented by his photographic reports, sketches, studies, and paintings depicting life in Siam and his visits to temples, ceremonies, and festivities. At the 1914 Biennale, he executed the decoration of the central exhibition hall and exhibited the works he created in Siam, establishing himself among the most

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important painters of Italian Orientalism. His collection of ethnographic objects from Siam, which often appear in his paintings, was donated to the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology in Florence. Galileo Chini painted La notte al Watt Pha-Cheo during his stay in Bangkok in 1912. He leads the viewer outside the temple, allowing a glimpse of a row of monks from behind. In this nocturnal vision, Chini’s “impression” prevails over the figurative narrative, which is barely sketched. He captures the opalescence, the stars, the iridescent colours of the materials, and the glare of the lights on the fabrics. The painter himself assigned the title to the work, writing it on the back of the painting along with the date. He recorded his memory of Watt Pha-Cheo in 1948:

FLORENCE, ITALY 1873–1956

The monks of this temple keep the time With psalms they make a path always the same and rhythmic so that they always take the same time so they are every half-hour at the indicated point where there is a GONGH, which they strike – the time is thus marked. —Carmen Belmonte

La Notte al Watt Pha Cheo, 1912 Oil on plywood, 79.5 × 65.5 × 1.5 cm. Photo Marzio De Santis, Padova. Courtesy Galleria Gomiero.

ROME, ITALY, 1925– 1973, SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL

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Waldemar Cordeiro migrated to Brazil in 1946 and soon became the leader of the Concrete Art movement in São Paulo (1952–1959). He drafted the Manifesto Ruptura (Rupture Manifesto) in 1952, which asserted that art must be autonomous (an object in itself, without references to the external world) and should be conceived with mathematical principles, given that maths (in theory) is a universal language and should therefore be accessible to everyone. With the emergence of Pop Art, Cordeiro produced a series of Popcretos (Pop + Concrete Art). They were wall canvases to which he assembled everyday elements such as bicycle wheels and bottles – a reference to Marcel Duchamp’s readymades (1887–1968). From 1968 onwards, he pioneered the exploration of computer art, in addition to creating more than 150 landscaping projects for public and private spaces.

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Waldemar Cordeiro

Untitled, 1963 Oil on canvas, 75 × 74,5 cm. Courtesy Waldemar Cordeiro’s Estate and Luciana Brito Galeria, São Paulo. Photo © Edouard Fraipont

this composition, he is no longer interested in demonstrating his skills in applying mathematics to construct optical illusions but rather he simply enjoys the pleasure of painting. Still using mathematical symbols, he creates a freehand pattern, where he simultaneously marks his presence and depicts a decorative image, both approaches he would once have found inconceivable. This is the first time the work of Waldemar Cordeiro is presented at Biennale Arte. —Regina Barros FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Although Waldemar Cordeiro is better known for the radicalism with which he advocated for geometric abstraction devoid of subjectivity (achieved with industrial paint to eliminate traces of handmade brushstrokes), one of the most interesting moments in his artistic trajectory is the period of transition to the next phase of his art, when he would begin to add three-dimensional objects onto his paintings. Untitled (1963) was created during this brief transition. Here, the plus sign (+) and the multiplication sign (x), as well as the circles, are hand-painted on a solid green background. In

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Victor Juan Cúnsolo

Victor Cúnsolo, born in Vittoria, Italy, arrived in Argentina in 1913 and became one of the most important painters of La Boca, a popular neighbourhood on the outskirts of Buenos Aires inhabited mostly by workingclass immigrants, bohemian artists, and prostitutes. Cúnsolo joined cultural associations that helped him adapt to Argentine society, such as the Academia de Pintura de la Unione e Benevolenza, El Ateneo Popular, and the Agrupación de Gente de Artes y Letras. Besides the collective exhibitions that he shared with his group colleagues, he had two major solo shows at the renowned Asociación Amigos del Arte in 1928 and 1931, in which he shared a series of paintings that documented his emotional devotion to the marginal neighbourhood of

La Boca, the precariousness of its architecture, and the struggling life of the workingclass immigrants, bohemian artists, and prostitutes who lived there. He expressed his sensitive appreciation through a nostalgic language that resonated with the new realisms of Italian painting. In the early 1930s, due to severe health complications, Cúnsolo had to migrate to La Rioja, a province in northern Argentina. There he continued his characteristic style of refined forms, austere details, and geometric spaces seen in his portrayal of La Boca, which reflected the resonances of the Metaphysical painting of Giorgio di Chirico and Carlo Carrà. In Paisaje de La Rioja (1937), one of his last paintings, Cúnsolo

VITTORIA, ITALY, 1898– 1936 LANUS, ARGENTINA

expanded those structured landscapes marked by the absence of human figures in a rural setting with closed doors, darkened windows, and shuttered bars followed by a colourful sequence of historic buildings that contrast with the shadow of the mountains. In the foreground, graffiti promoting an upcoming Creole circus accentuates Cúnsolo’s ability to work with the ambivalence between the beauty of a humble scenario and the desolation of an unreal atmosphere in which culture seems out of time. This is the first time the work of Victor Cúnsolo is presented at Biennale Arte. —Nicolas Cuello

Paisaje de La Rioja, 1937 Oil on hardboard, 69 × 58 cm. Colección Neuman, Buenos Aires

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Abstracción con material (1934) is one of Del Prete’s first after his stay in Paris that reflected the early resonances of the non-figurative experimentation into which he ventured during his trip. It was included in two consecutive exhibitions at the Asociación Amigos del Arte in 1933 and 1934, along with many other paintings, collages, and sculptures. In particular, this piece embraced an abstract vocabulary that mixed dense fillings of pigments with discarded materials such as coloured papers, strings, scraps of fabric, wires, and metal objects. This piece documents a key moment in Del Prete’s art practice in which he, like Yente, decided to abandon any kind of link with reality and social meaning to privilege an imperfect abstraction centred on the treatment of shapes and the use of unusual colours – especially pink. —Nicolas Cuello

Abstracción con material, 1934 Oil, cement, copper, bronze and zinc plates on cardboard, 69 × 49 cm. Courtesy Roldan Moderno Gallery. © Archivo Yente Del Prete.

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Juan Del Prete was an Italianborn, self-taught painter, draughtsman, and sculptor who migrated to Argentina in 1909 with his family. After his first solo exhibition in 1926, he was awarded a scholarship to study abroad in Paris, France. There, he got in touch with Hans Arp, Massimo Campigli, Raquel Forner, Joaquín Torres García, Jean Hélion, and Georges Vantongerloo, and also joined the Abstraction-Création, Art Non-Figuratif group. Once he returned to Buenos Aires in 1933, he showed the abstract paintings and collages he had produced during his trip, marking the first non-figurative art exhibition ever mounted in Argentina. Later, with artist Eugenia Crenovich (known as Yente), he travelled back to Italy to show in Genoa and Milan, among other cities. His work was characterised by voracious experimentation with precarious everyday objects, irregular geometric forms, and unusual colours, in a large range of modernist styles and focusing on the expressive potentiality of popular materials.

VASTO, ITALY, 1897– 1987, BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA

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Juan Del Prete

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Danilo Di Prete

Danilo Di Prete was an Italian immigrant to Brazil and a self-taught figurative artist and publicist who joined Abstractionism and pioneered kinetic art in Brazil during the post-World War II period. He adopted Italian Futurism’s propaganda techniques to bolster his career in both countries, but when this was disregarded by critics, his legacy was obscured. While still in fascist Italy during the war, he participated in the Artisti italiani in armi (1942), an exhibition of works by Italian army soldiers that reported the experiences on the battlefield. In São Paulo (1946), he soon moved in Italian–Brazilian circles and was close to Francisco Ciccillo Matarazzo Sobrinho, founder of the Museu de Arte Moderna and the Bienal de São Paulo. Indeed, Di Prete won two awards for Brazilian painting at the Biennale Arte – the first for his Cubist still lifes at its inaugural edition in 1951, and in 1965 for his abstract paintings series, Paisagem Cósmica.

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Di Prete was attentive to international artistic movements, studied Cubism and abstraction, and was one of the pioneers of kinetic art. In the mid-1970s, he adopted a “metapsychic” figurative style, which he associated with cosmic voyages through an individual’s interior. The painting Untitled (1954) is representative of Di Prete’s first abstraction. The composition provokes a dispute between the darker, wavy section at its base and the yellowish tones in the upper part of the painting, with three hovering circles. Three other rectangular elements stand out, in addition to the small

ZAMBRA, ITALY, 1911– 1985, SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL

geometric shapes dispersed among different colour fields. The horizontal format, associated with landscapes, suggests a distant and blurred aerial view. This painting announces Di Prete’s enduring interest in new technology leading to his 1960s Paisagem Cósmica (Cosmic landscape) series, where he explores the impact of outer space voyages on art and life. —Luiza Interlenghi

Untitled, 1954 Oil on canvas, 59 × 72 cm. Photo Sergio Guerini. Private Collection. Courtesy Almeida & Dale Galeria de Arte. © Sergio Guerini.

Me Chani Ballerina della Regina, 1925 Oil on canvas, 95 × 73 cm. Giovanni Ferro Milone Collection, Vicenza.

Cesare Ferro Milone’s portrait Me Chani Dancer of the Queen (1925) is related to his second stay in Siam (1923–1924). Me Ciani, a celebrated dancer of the Siamese court, is seated on the floor in a graceful and sinuous pose in an interior decorated with wall paintings. Milone, who had also portrayed Queen Savang Vadhana, captures the proud gaze of the dancer, directly aimed at the viewer. The painter dwells on the precious Siamese fabrics, detailing the workmanship and the glitter

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of the metals, and interrupts the figure at the bottom right in a photographic cut-out. The work, which the artist signed and dated 1925, was probably painted in Turin using sketches, photographs, and memories collected during his stay, according to a common practice of travelling artists. Strongly fascinated by Siamese dance and theatre, Milone also portrayed himself in the mirror among Siamese theatre masks and other objects. —Carmen Belmonte

NUCLEO STORICO • ITALIANS EVERYWHERE

Cesare Ferro Milone spent his life in Turin and Bangkok, focusing on portraiture and mural paintings. After studying at the Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti in Turin, in 1904 he left for Siam (present-day Thailand), which in 1870 had signed a friendship treaty with Italy. During two different stays (1904–1907 and 1923–1924), he created mural paintings for the temple of Wat Arun and for Villa Ambara and Villa Norasingh, experimenting with appropriate techniques for the conservation of works in humid environments. In addition to painting the portraits of Siamese dignitaries, court dancers, musicians, and children, he also practised photography – capturing the local population, daily life, and architecture. At the 1911 Turin Exhibition dedicated to Siam and its industrial production (silk weaving, mother-of-pearl screens, minerals, and precious stones), ninety-six works by Milone shaped the image of the country for the Italian and European audience. He was president of the Accademia Albertina from 1930 to 1933. In 1940, a room was dedicated to his works at the Biennale Arte.

TURIN, ITALY, 1880–1934

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Cesare Ferro Milone

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Simone Forti

FLORENCE, ITALY, 1935 LIVES IN LOS ANGELES, UNITED STATES

Simone Forti, recipient of the prestigious Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2023 Biennale Danza, is a trailblazer in the realms of dance, performance, and experimental art. Forti grew up in Los Angeles, forced to leave Italy to escape Mussolini’s antiSemitic laws in 1938. She first honed her understanding of dance while training under Anna Halprin in Northern California. In 1959, Forti relocated to New York, where she took classes with Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham, which she found restrictive and overly reliant on dancerly skill. Forti debuted as a choreographer in 1960 with performances such as See-Saw and Rollers, which went on to constitute the revolutionary series Dance Constructions in 1961, first performed in Yoko Ono’s loft. Forti returned to Italy in 1968, spending about a year in Rome, where she collaborated with Fabio Sargentini at Galleria L’Attico, a springboard for Forti’s research and its influence on dance in Italy. Huddle (1961), part of the Dance Constructions series, involves approximately seven performers holding each other in a tight huddle. In turns, each dancer climbs over the others for a moment, creating a shape “like a small mountain”, in the artist’s words. The work turns the performers’ bodies into a sculpture, playing with the boundaries between subject and object. The metaphor relates to interpersonal bonds and collectivity, as well as the cycle of individually overcoming challenges, physically expressed in modes of weightbearing and weight-sharing. Alongside choreographies, Forti developed an expansive

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drawing practice. In 1966, she made the Red Hat watercolour series, named after a hat she owned, which became metonymic of herself: “Somehow [the red hat] became the signature for this character, me, running over mountains, sometimes pursued by dark figures”. In assonance with her performances, her drawings tread the line between subject and object, emphasising a convergence between life and art. This is the first time the work of Simone Forti is presented at Biennale Arte. —Sofia Gotti Adventure of Red Hat, Red Hat Pursued with Yellow, 1966 Watercolor on paper, 45.5 × 38 cm. Courtesy Collezione Malagoli, Modena; Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Milano e Albisola; The Box, Los Angeles.

Miliciano, Trinidad, Cuba (1961/2014-15) is a photograph shot in Cuba during Gasparini’s stay there between 1961 and 1965. As he had in Caracas, in Cuba he continued to work with communist publications such as Lunes de Revolución and organisations such as El Consejo Nacional de la Cultura Cubana to document the statesponsored literacy campaign, as well as scenes of everyday life in urban and rural contexts in the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution. This photograph is the portrait of an armed guerilla wearing a soiled uniform. The title of the series this image belongs to, Serie Cuba, de la utopia al desencanto (Cuba series, from utopia to disenchantment, 1961–1996), underscores the harsh realities experienced on the island that Gasparini sought to expose, unsweetened by ideology. From this, Gasparini developed one of his earliest books of photographs, La ciudad de las columnas (Havana, 1970), prefaced by renowned Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier. —Sofia Gotti

Miliciano, Trinidad, Cuba, 1961/2014-15 Gelatin silver print, 60 × 49 cm. Courtesy of the Artist.

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Paolo Gasparini first trained in photography in the studio of Aldo Mazucco in Gorizia. His early work shares a concern with Italian neorealist cinema in portraying the harsh social realities of the post-war period. In 1954, he moved to Caracas at the height of developmentalism and modernisation during the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez (1952–1958). Gasparini photographed Venezuela’s modernism via public buildings designed by architects such as Carlos Raúl Villanueva. Meanwhile, he collaborated with magazines and leftist publications. In 1976, Gasparini and María Teresa Boulton founded La Fototeca (1976– 1979), the first photography gallery and bookshop in Venezuela. Combining his political commitment and artistic impetus, Gasparini travelled across Latin America to document the continent’s social textures and disparities, often working alongside prominent figures such as artistic adviser to UNESCO Damián Bayón, celebrated sociologist Néstor García Canclini, and author Edmundo Desnoes, among many others.

GORIZIA, ITALY, 1934 LIVES IN TRIESTE, CARACAS, VENEZUELA, AND MEXICO CITY

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Paolo Gasparini

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Umberto Giangrandi

Umberto Giangrandi, Italianborn artist, activist, and teacher, has spent half a century documenting social realities in Colombia, his home since 1966, and pioneering multimedia representations of the body. Raised in Lucca, Italy, during the turbulence of post-war reconstruction, Giangrandi felt an early affinity for the visceral figuration of Giorgio de Chirico, Francis Bacon, and Pablo Picasso. Once installed as an arts professor in the National University of Colombia, Giangrandi developed a career that wedded pedagogy with political commentary. With the Giangrandi Workshop (established in 1968), he pioneered the study of printmaking in Colombia. As a co-founder of the Taller 4 Rojo (1972–1976), Giangrandi directed the expressive potential and serial, mechanical reproduction of the print toward urgent socio-political struggles. Throughout his long career, Giangrandi has returned obsessively to the subject of the marginalised body, made grotesque and libidinous, without censoring the violence of its repression or the freedom in its eroticism.

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In Bodegón erótico (1989), Giangrandi reworks and paints over an earlier print. In the monochromatic fruit in the foreground and in the irregular hatching of the framing wall, Giangrandi exposes the printed paper ground of the work, echoing the multimedia collages he produced for the radical Taller 4 Rojo. Painting over a bowl of fruit that originally sat to the right of the glass bottle, Giangrandi makes space in the composition for a couple embracing in the verdant landscape that stretches behind the interior.

PONTEDERA, ITALY, 1943 LIVES IN BOGOTÀ, COLOMBIA

Referencing his earlier series of sexually explicit nocturnes, Giangrandi juxtaposes the unambiguous representation of sex in an open, public space with a suggestive still life. The encoded symbolism in this arrangement of halved fruit and long-necked decanter points to a repression of desire to which Giangrandi responds with a scene of uninhibited freedom. This is the first time the work of Umberto Giangrandi is presented at Biennale Arte. —Lucia Neirotti

Bodegón Erotico, 1989 Acrylic on silkscreen on paper, 50.7 × 69.2 cm. Courtesy Proyecto Bachué, Colombia.

Indian and Girl with Ethnic Clothes from Cusco, 1917 ca. Gelatin-silver and paper, 24 × 18 cm. Diran Sirinian Collection, Buenos Aires.

At first glance, Indian and Girl with Ethnic Clothes from Cusco (1917) is reminiscent of earlier representations of ethnic “types”. In this studio photograph, Gismondi chose to depict individuals in typical Quechua dress of Cusco, Peru, instead of that of Aymara communities local to La Paz and the city’s surroundings. The painted backdrop is distinctly non-Andean – evoking instead a sentimental dreamscape of European gardens and Tuscan hills. The man seated upon the studio bricks holds a shell trumpet and a staff of political authority. Art historian Pedro

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Querejazu has identified the “girl” as the photographer’s son Luis Antonio. The child holds a cord that mimics the form of a drop spindle and thread. Upon closer inspection, the absence of the spinning tools becomes clear, as does the central presence of the small pale hand of the boy who participates with patient focus in the creation of this fiction. This is the first time the work of Luigi Domenico Gismondi is presented at Biennale Arte. —Lisa Trever

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Italian-born Luigi Domenico Gismondi was Bolivia’s most important early twentiethcentury photographer and one of many European migrants who settled in South America during the late nineteenth century. He married Inés Morán Gandarillas in Mollendo, Peru, in 1901. Several of their children appear in Gismondi’s photographs – not only in family portraits but also in monumental views of the ancient ruins of Tiwanaku and in various other settings. Gismondi’s practice encompassed landscape, cityscape, and studio work. His commissions included projects for railroad and mining companies and official portraits of members of Bolivia’s political elite. Gismondi created photographs that demonstrate exceptional technical skill and a fine artistic eye, especially in creating sensitive portraits of Indigenous individuals that resist the flattening effects of costumbrista or indigenista caricatures of the time. Gismondi’s studio in La Paz continues to be run by his descendants, 114 years after its founding.

SANREMO, ITALY, 1872– 1946, MOLLENDO, PERU

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Luigi Domenico Gismondi

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Linda Kohen

MILAN, ITALY, 1924 LIVES IN MONTEVIDEO, URUGUAY

Linda Kohen fled from fascism as an adolescent in 1939, and the Italian-born Jewish artist began her six-decade-long career in Montevideo, Uruguay. Supported by her family, Kohen first embraced painting as her vocation in the studios of Pierre Fossey and Horacio Butler, both active in interwar Paris, then as one of the few female members of Taller Torres-García. In 1973, with the advent of military dictatorship in Uruguay, Kohen abandoned early career cityscapes and Constructivism. She turned to almost monochromatic, intimate studies in what Augusto Torres, son of Joaquín Torres García and among Kohen’s mentors, termed her “white period”. Expressing what Kohen called a need to “fix my whole world, which I felt was going to disappear”, the artist continued to paint quotidian objects and spaces in a uniquely reserved, confessional style during years spent in Brazil – the second political exile of her life – and after returning permanently to Uruguay in 1985.

In El Sillón (1999), one in a series of studies, Kohen constructs a plain white armchair from curving volumes, foreshortened but unambiguous. The subdued palette of whites and ochres and the sketchy translucency of diluted paint pare the subject down to its essentials. Painted from memory, Kohen’s minimalist approach to representation communicates the ordinariness of the everyday and the intimacy of private life. Kohen’s idiosyncratic style, born out of an anxiety to record and remember, was developed after decades of forced displacement and loss. Empty chairs, beds, and dining room BIENNALE ARTE 2024

tables in uninhabited interiors recur in Kohen’s work like portraits of absent sitters. Stark and silent, El sillón was painted only months after the death of Kohen’s mother in 1998. With a deceptively simple composition, Kohen paints absence, observing the transformation of familiar domestic settings by memory into spaces charged with solitude and longing. This is the first time the work of Linda Kohen is presented at Biennale Arte. —Lucia Neirotti El Sillón, 1999 Oil on canvas, 93 × 65 cm. Courtesy of the Artist.

BERGAMO, ITALY, 1905– 1943, MANILA, PHILIPPINES

The Legong Dancer (1939) was painted during Locatelli’s stay in Bali, Indonesia. He depicts the sinuous movement of a young dancer holding a fan. The luminous brushstrokes suggest the musicality of the Legong dance while the isolated figure is interrupted by the photographic cut given to the painting. Legong is a secular Balinese dance genre from the nineteenth century originally associated with the royal palace and successively performed in villages and at temple ceremonies. Since the 1920s, Legong dances have featured in overseas Legong Dancer, 1939 Oil on canvas, 113 × 95 cm. Courtesy Philippe Augier Collection, Museum Pasifika.

tours, becoming an iconic image of the Balinese culture. When Locatelli attended Legong spectacles, the dance was still only performed by prepubescent girls who usually retired after marrying. Child dancers and young maidens are recurring subjects in Locatelli’s production around 1939 (Barong Dancer; Javanese Dancer; Young Balinese) They are depicted in suspended and exotic scenarios that inevitably recall Gauguin’s experience in Tahiti. —Carmen Belmonte

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Romualdo Locatelli began painting in his family workshop in Bergamo, completing his training at the Academy of Carrara. Fascinated by local traditions, he travelled to Sardinia, Abruzzo, and Tuscany. After a trip to Tunisia in 1927, he started painting Orientalist subjects: landscapes, scenes of daily life, and portraits of local populations filtered through the European colonial gaze. By the time he moved to Rome, he was an established Orientalist painter and an esteemed portraitist: King Umberto di Savoia commissioned him to portrait his children Vittorio Emanuele and Maria Pia. In 1939, he went to Java, where local authorities commissioned several portraits. After a few months, he moved to Jakarta and then to Bali. Here, his artistic production focused mainly on local traditional dances and young maidens depicted according to the canons of exoticism. His paintings were exhibited at the Doughitt Gallery in New York in 1941. At the outbreak of World War II, he moved to Manila, where, in 1943, he disappeared during a hunting trip.

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Romualdo Locatelli

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Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato

Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato was born in 1900 in Belo Horizonte, Brazil’s first planned city. Lorenzato’s family migrated from Italy and worked on the construction of the new capital city of the state of Minas Gerais. As a teenager, he was an apprentice to painters and decorators before moving to Italy to flee the Spanish influenza pandemic that had reached Brazil from Europe (1918–1919). Lorenzato was employed in the reconstruction of the cathedral of Arsiero after World War I and attended the Reale Accademia delle Belle Arti in Vicenza. He moved back to Brazil in 1948 and worked in civil construction before dedicating himself exclusively to easel painting from the early 1960s until his death in 1995. Lorenzato is known for his landscape paintings that

document the transformation of Belo Horizonte and its natural surroundings, as well as his unique painterly technique that employs combs to apply paint, merge colours, and create textures. While nature has often offered Lorenzato formal inspiration that connects him with a lineage of European painters, from Giotto to Matisse, in his oeuvre it is often linked to larger social contexts. The frontal composition of Araucárias (1973) shows a rigidly arranged line of trees that cast their nearly abstract shadows along a rough, earthy path on the bottom portion of the painting. The coniferous evergreens represented are of an indigenous species from Southern Brazil, widely used in the construction of settlers’

BELO HORIZONTE, BRAZIL, 1900–1995

houses during the country’s European immigration boom in the late nineteenth century. These trees, featured in early twentieth-century Brazilian craft iconography, were sought after by the elite as symbols connecting them with European taste. If Lorenzato’s use of this motif is evocative of immigration and diaspora histories, it is also part of a larger body of work in which he represents other Brazilian plants of historical importance. —Rodrigo Moura

Araucárias, 1973 Oil on hardboard, 61.5 × 45.5 cm. hoto Edouard Fraipont. Private Collection. Courtesy Gomide & Co. © Edouard Fraipont.

SCALEA, ITALY, 1942 LIVES IN SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL

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Throughout her six-decade career, Anna Maria Maiolino has explored various media, including painting, drawing, woodblock printing, photography, video, performance, and sculpture. Her geographic and emotional journey took a transformative turn in 1954 when she migrated from her native Italy to Venezuela with her parents and siblings. In 1960, Maiolino found a new home in Rio de Janeiro, where she swiftly connected with a vibrant community of young artists. While training with Ivan Serpa at the Museum of Modern Art, she experimented with woodblock printing, a medium associated with popular traditions in Brazil, which marked the beginning of her exploration into identity. Remembering this period, she recounted, “For us, approaching the popular meant looking for our roots”.

the year of her birth in Italy. Among the multiple pieces in the series that reconstruct the map of Italy, this is the only one that scorches it entirely. This violent act evokes the unprecedented bombing of Italy by Allied forces in 1942 and expresses the artist’s abstract sense of alienation from her country of origin. This is the first time the work of Anna Maria Maiolino is presented at Biennale Arte. —Sofia Gotti FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

A search for roots is a poignant metaphor for Maiolino’s work. Year 1942 (1973) is part of the Mental Maps series, which she began in 1971 upon her return to Rio de Janeiro from a three-year stay in New York. There, she encountered Latin American artists who had escaped military dictatorships across the Southern Cone, including Brazil, and who were dealing with their fraught histories through the language of Conceptual art. While using similar formal devices, like grids and language, the Mental Maps series layers the political with the personal. Year 1942 recalls

Anno 1942 - from Mapas Mentais series, 1973-99 Ink, transfer type and burn marks on paper in wooden box, 50 × 42 cm. Courtesy the Artist and Hauser & Wirth. © Anna Maria Maiolino.

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Anna Maria Maiolino

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Anita Malfatti

Anita Malfatti is considered a ground-breaking artist of modernism in Brazil. The daughter of a painting teacher, Malfatti was encouraged to pursue artistic training abroad. Her formative years in Berlin (1910–1914) and New York (1914–1916) resulted in a series of Expressionist portraits and landscapes presented in São Paulo in 1917. The psychological force of non-naturalistic colours caused a great deal of polemic in the press at the time. The blowback upset Malfatti to the point where she gave up Expressionist painting, and the anti-academic intellectuals turned her into a martyr of the modernist cause. In the 1920s, she studied in Paris and absorbed the prevailing naturalistic trends of the time. Over the years, she introduced new subjects and techniques into her paintings, such as scenes of popular festivities and countryside life, intentionally depicted as if she were an untrained painter.

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During her early artistic training in Berlin and New York, Anita Malfatti produced Expressionist portraits in which she captured the psychological characteristics of her models. In A mulher de cabelos verdes (1915), she constructs the figure by alternating patches of red and green, thus, creating a vibrant contrast. The anatomy of the face is distorted by elongated features (forehead, chin, ear, and nose), and by rounded lines that emphasise the model’s advanced age (cheeks and double chin) and resonate in the abstract background of the painting. The

SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL, 1889–1964

arched eyebrows, the intriguing gaze, and the uncertain smile contribute to the enigmatic and even eerie expression of the model. This work was displayed at the exhibition that Malfatti held in São Paulo in 1917, considered a watershed moment in the history of art in Brazil. This is the first time the work of Anita Malfatti is presented at Biennale Arte. —Regina Barros

A mulher de cabelos verdes, 1915 Oil on canvas, 61 × 51 cm. Photo Sergio Guerini. Airton Queiroz Collection, Fortaleza, Brazil. Courtesy Almeida & Dale Galeria de Arte. © Sergio Guerini.

Falce, Pannocchia e Cartucciera, 1928 Gelatin silver print, 17 × 13.5 cm. Photo Riccardo Toffoletti. Courtesy Maria Domini; Comitato Tina Modotti.

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At once worker, revolutionary, migrant, and exile, Tina Modotti shot some of the most iconic photographs characterising the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1917). Coming from a working-class background, she migrated in 1912 with her family from her native Italy, first to Austria and then to California. In her late teens, she worked as an actress and artist model before moving to Mexico City in 1923, where she quickly developed an independent photographic practice while becoming immersed in Communist intellectual and militant circles, occupied by such notables as Frida Kahlo, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, André Breton, and Leon Trotsky. Subverting the male gaze placed on her across her career, Modotti’s oeuvre is propelled by a desire to counter the conditions of inequality she experienced and suffered. Her images insistently denounce exploitation, regardless of whether her subjects are women or labourers she met on the streets, comrades during political meetings, objects or cityscapes.

UDINE, ITALY, 1896– 1942, MEXICO CITY, MEXICO

Modotti’s photograph Falce, Pannocchia e Cartucciera (1928) belongs to one of the photographic series shown at the only solo exhibition to take place during her lifetime, held at the National Library of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico in 1929. Capable of intersecting formalist photography with revolutionary politics, the images juxtapose items evocative of Communist militants and workers: sickles, bandoliers, guitars, and corn. The exhibition was widely commended by the press and figures such as the muralist Siqueiros, who proclaimed it “the first revolutionary

photographic exhibition in Mexico”. Other works on show included photos named after the articles in the Mexican Constitution dealing with labour rights and land ownership. Just weeks after her exhibition, Modotti was deported from Mexico for her dissident activity and alleged involvement in the attempted assassination of President Pascual Ortiz Rubio. This is the first time the work of Tina Modotti is presented at Biennale Arte. —Sofia Gotti

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Tina Modotti

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Costantino Nivola

Costantino Nivola fled Italy in 1937 and relocated to the United States, where he lived until he died. Exploring the social function of art through sculpture, he created monumental concrete basreliefs and sculptures, more intimate works in terracotta, and, in his later years, iconic marble and bronze idols, inspired by prehistoric Mediterranean cultures. Born in Orani, a small Sardinian village, Nivola trained as a graphic designer in Monza and Milan under Marino Marini and the architects Giuseppe Pagano and Edoardo Persico and was soon hired by the advertising office of Olivetti. An anarchist and anti-fascist married to a Jewish woman, Nivola became a pivotal figure in transatlantic cultural exchanges after World War II. A crucial encounter with Le Corbusier in 1946 prompted his creative shift to sculpture, which led to fruitful collaborations with modern architects such as José Luis Sert, Eero Saarinen, Marcel Breuer, Joseph Allen Stein, and others, for public and private projects.

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ORANI, ITALY, 1911– 1988, EAST HAMPTON, UNITED STATES

The opening of the Olivetti Showroom on Fifth Avenue in New York in 1954 marked both the affirmation of the “Italian style” in the United States and Nivola’s recognition as a sculptor. The monumental basrelief dominating the space – crafted using the unique sandcasting technique developed by the artist while playing with his children on Long Island beaches – drew inspiration from prehistoric Sardinian figurines, the island’s traditional carnival masks, and the New York School’s interpretation of totemic Native American cultures. Integrating seamlessly with the architectural elements designed by the Milan studio BBPR, the bas-relief, now at Harvard University’s Science Center, emanates a timeless Mediterranean aura. This maquette, which Nivola also exhibited as an autonomous work of art, possesses an unsettling quality: the spiky chest and the blackmasked face evoke both humour and menace. —Antonella Camarda

Bozzetto per lo show-room Olivetti a New York, 1953 Plaster casting on sand and polychromy, 123.5 × 76 × 7 cm. Courtesy Fondazione Nivola.

An Italian migrant to São Paulo, Fulvio Pennacchi developed a figurative painting style that reflected everyday popular life, and which deviated from early twentieth-century trends towards abstractionism. After graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Lucca, he arrived in Brazil in 1929, where he lived until his death in 1992. He worked as a teacher, created advertising pamphlets, and stood out as a fresco painter. With a mastery of drawing, colour harmonisation, and an incorporation of elements from Italian and Brazilian cultures, he was the only trained artist to join the collective Grupo Santa Helena, as it came to be known. They shared the studios at Palacete Santa Helena, in the centre of São Paulo, and participated in several exhibitions. They did not agree with academicism, nor with innovative trends in the arts, but they did not develop a common artistic language.

In O Circo (1942), Pennacchi uses ochre tones to address the central theme of traditional Brazilian rural entertainments. A tent occupies the centre of the painting, comprising a green and brown circular structure on which “CIRCO” is written. Next to the entrance door, there is a notice for the public to wait and, in front of this, two clowns with white painted faces look at the viewer. Other characters appear from the back or in profile, mostly Black people and several animals. A peasant riding a donkey crosses the scene and the floor is made of “red earth” – characteristic of some Brazilian regions, which Italian immigrants who worked on coffee plantations

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VILLA COLLEMANDINA, ITALY, 1905– 1992, SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL

called “terra rossa”. Mountains, houses, and a church appear in the background, under the twilight. Pennacchi absorbed what he directly saw in his surroundings, painting as an interpreter of a bucolic and popular Brazil. This is the first time the work of Fulvio Pennacchi is presented at Biennale Arte. —Daniela Rodrigues

O Circo, 1942 Oil on wood, 50 × 70 cm. Photo Sergio Guerini. Maria Cecilia Capobianco Collection. Courtesy Almeida & Dale Galeria de Arte. © Sergio Guerini.

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Fulvio Pennacchi

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Claudio Perna

Claudio Perna, a conceptual artist and geographer, was born in Milan, Italy, and migrated to Venezuela in 1955, where he explored conceptual practices based on performance, film, photocopies, and photography. After he became a geography professor at the Universidad Central in Caracas, he made his first trip to New York in 1963, where he encountered the field of Abstract Minimalism and adopted Conceptualism as a medium to explore social coexistence, human geography, and science in relation with ancestral knowledge, popular culture, and mass media communication. In the early 1980s, he founded RADAR, A Center for Art and Ecology, in which he expanded his explorations around the role of archives, memory, and pedagogy in the complex relations between subjects and their surroundings, both urban and rural, particularly regarding the determination of social identity.

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As its title announces, Venezuela – Map Series belongs to a prolific set of works (1970–1990) in which Perna expressed, through the insistent use of maps, his desire to achieve a comprehensive knowledge of Venezuelan territory. These systems of geographical representation were transformed into collages incorporating magazine clippings, newspapers, drawings, and objects such as cigarettes, identity cards, and personal photographs. In this piece, the artist assembles photocopies of traditional threads used in Venezuelan

MILAN, ITALY, 1938– 1997, HOLGUÍN, CUBA

textiles, a picture of a hand holding an open scissor, and an isolated vertebra, elements whose meaning are defined by their linear functionality. They are confronted with a close image of the lines created by an open shirt that slowly reveals a hairy chest, right next to the representation of the frontier between Colombia and Venezuela. An exemplary case of how, through the study of the land, he looked for the possibility to know himself, creating a link between art, territory, and subjectivity. —Nicolas Cuello

Venezuela - Map Series, n.d. Photocopies, photos on paper map, 62.2 × 85.1 cm. Photo Arturo Sanchez. Courtesy Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA).

Bona Pieyre de Mandiargues (born Tibertelli), niece and pupil of Filippo de Pisis, accompanied him to Paris in 1947. There she embraced Surrealism and delved into magic, dreams, sexuality, and the occult. She experimented throughout her life with textile assemblages and abstract and figurative painting. She married art critic and writer André Pieyre de Mandiargues. By the late 1950s, she began using dense mixtures of earth and powder in her work to represent the fiery cosmos. She created artworks from male garments, laden with personal symbols and alchemical references, and was influenced by travels to Mexico, India, and Afghanistan. Reuniting with de Mandiargues in 1967, she embarked on a series of neo-metaphysical paintings and psychologically

charged assemblages. Straying from the stereotypical Surrealist portrayal of women as muses or childlike figures, de Mandiargues identified with the snail – an androgynous symbol which signified her complex mind and the spiralling universe. Her artistic journey was punctuated by periods of clinical depression after her daughter Sibylle’s birth, leading to alternating phases of creative inertia and frenzied activity. Toro nuziale (1958), a pivotal early textile assemblage in Bona’s oeuvre, integrates shreds from a man’s suit with an essential palette of reds, greys, browns, and whites. De Mandiargues creates a symmetrical, threedimensional composition, invoking the symbol revered by

the Surrealists: the bull’s head. However, by subtly suggesting a Dionysian dismembering of the male body through a metonymic figure of speech (wherein the suit substitutes for the man) and through the artwork’s title referencing the ritual bull sacrifice made in medieval Spanish weddings, de Mandiargues subverts the virile imagery typically associated with the bull. She presents instead a domesticated, submissive creature, yielding to the woman-artist’s will. In 1962, the artwork appeared on the catalogue cover of de Mandiargues’s solo exhibition at Arturo Schwarz in Milan, showcasing its enduring significance for the artist. This is the first time the work of Bona de Pieyre Mandiargues is presented at Biennale Arte. —Antonella Camarda

Toro Nuziale, 1958 Assemblage, 90 × 116 × 2.5 cm. Private Collection. Courtesy Sibylle Pieyre de Mandiargues.

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ROME, ITALY, 1926– 2000, PARIS, FRANCE

NUCLEO STORICO • ITALIANS EVERYWHERE

Bona Pieyre de Mandiargues

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Ester Pilone

After arriving in Argentina in 1939, Ester Pilone developed a personal style within Abstract Expressionism characterised by informalist tendencies. Her work aimed at achieving nonfigurative dense materiality and chromatic sobriety. Although from 1954 she participated in numerous editions of the Salón Nacional, it wasn’t until the 1960s that her work gained greater recognition. In 1963, she made a trip to Europe to visit countries such as France, Italy, and Spain, with the aim of studying and perfecting her work as an artist. In that same period, she had a series of solo exhibitions in the most recognised galleries and museums of the avant-garde art circuit of Buenos Aires, such as Lirolay (1961, 1962), Van Riel (1965, 1969), and the Museum of Visual Arts of Buenos Aires (1979), among many others.

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Pilone’s painting Luz Amarilla (1970) is a clear example of the unique combination of techniques practised by the artist in her work, from which she managed to create abstract scenarios in which different kinds of emotional temperaments coexisted. In this piece, we can see how the monochromatic purity of the yellow colour creates a luminous spatiality. Within this space, Pilone inserts a mysterious abstract form whose trembling edges create a formal contrast, amalgamating the diverse vocabulary of non-figurative painting. In Luz Amarilla, the symbolic ambivalence resulting from these contrasting attitudes is further accentuated by the uneasy coexistence of opposing modern techniques. This included the cohabitation of ascetic

CUNEO, ITALY, 1920–[UNKNOWN]

geometric precision and the heart-breaking expression of kinetic brushstrokes created using loaded spatulas, which she usually spread with her hands – a characteristic approach to painting that defines the expressive power of her abstraction. This is the first time the work of Ester Pilone is presented at Biennale Arte. —Nicolas Cuello

Luz Amarilla, 1970 Oil on canvas, 50.1 × 112.1 cm. Collection of Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires.

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Maria Polo graduated from the Istituto d’Arte di Venezia in 1955. She moved to Rome before settling in Rio de Janeiro in 1962, when abstraction and objecthood were foremost concerns for local avant-garde groups. The paintings she showed in the Cento Pittori art fair on Via Margutta (Rome, 1958) attracted the attention of Pietro Maria Bardi, the Italian–Brazilian founder of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, who invited her to do a solo exhibition there in 1960. Polo’s works were informed by her tragic experience of growing up during World War II. Her series of landscapes of Venice and São Paulo were predominantly black. The light and colours of Brazil eventually brightened her palette, including more white, yellow, red, and blue. When Polo moved to Rio, she was already an abstract artist who tested the borders of her compositions. She participated in the Bienal de São Paulo in 1963 and 1965.

Untitled (1962) belongs to the series that Maria Polo presented at the eleventh Modern Art Salon in Rio de Janeiro. The painting combines dense and fragmented forms that appear to have exploded against a grey background. Luminous gaps compete with irregular geometries in sanguine and black tones, at times aligned with the edge of the canvas, at times thrown against its limits. Later, Polo developed increasingly colourful abstractions, combining circles with irregular shapes that defy their hardness (1970–1983). Polo’s work evokes the movement Untitled, 1962 Oil on canvas, 81 × 60 cm. Photo Sergio Guerini. Courtesy Almeida & Dale Galeria de Arte. © Sergio Guerini.

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VENICE, ITALY, 1937– 1983, RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL

and transformation she experienced as a migrant and the condition of being a foreigner in different cities (Venice, Rome, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro). Her brand of abstraction stood apart from the geometric tendencies that characterised avant-garde production in São Paulo and Rio. Instead, her brushstrokes evoke Expressionism and her impasto nods to the materiality of Informalism. This is the first time the work of Maria Polo is presented at Biennale Arte. —Luiza Interlenghi

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Maria Polo

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Lidy Prati

RESISTENCIA, ARGENTINA, 1921– 2008, BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA

Lidy Prati (Lidia Elena Prati) was a painter, designer, and art critic known to be one of the few women that practised Concrete art in the 1940s. She studied in the province of Chaco, where her family of Italian and Swiss-German immigrants settled, but it was not until she moved to Buenos Aires that she became interested in art. Alongside Tomás Maldonado and many others, Prati played a leading role in the 1944 edition of the avant-garde magazine Arturo and was a founding member of the Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención in 1945. After her trip to Europe in 1952, where she contacted concrete artists like Max Bill and Georges Vantongerloo, her work, known for its vast repertoire of geometric forms and colour strips, started to include deconstructed shapes and an experimental sense of the rhythm and vibration of colours. In the mid-1950s, she abandoned painting and devoted herself to graphic, textile, and jewellery design.

Prati’s Composición serial (1946-48) illustrates her interest in experimenting with the tension between geometric shapes – which usually included circles, rectangles, and squares – based on the exaltation of the surface of the pictorial space. The artist produced this tension from the intermittency of colours, sizes, and rhythms with which she perceptually organised the geometric forms on the canvas. Composición serial not only documents the influence that gestalt theory had on her work, but also a turning point in Concrete art in Argentina: a new period

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marked by interruption of the theoretical formula of the cut frame in favour of the recovery of the orthogonal format. In this format, Prati recognised greater possibilities to expand her research on the expressive power of painting, the autonomy of forms, and inventive values, ultimately ignoring the descriptive function of meaning. This is the first time the work of Lidy Prati is presented at Biennale Arte. —Nicolas Cuello

Composición serial, 1946-1948 Oil on hardboard, 75.5 × 55.8 cm. Photo Nicolás Beraza. Malba Collection. Courtesy Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires.

Tekkà (1948) was made when Sanguineti Poggi settled back in Eritrea following the Treaty of Paris of 1947, coinciding with a time when the soonto-be Federation of Ethiopia and Eritrea (1952–1962) was welcoming foreign enterprise to relaunch its economy. The work depicts Tekkà (or Tekké), who was of the Beni-Amer people from the western lowlands towards the border with Sudan. Stylistically, the painting echoes Art Deco and Expressionism, and its relationship to exoticism is a concern. A review of an exhibition of paintings held in Addis Ababa in 1975 considers how the work’s composition reflects the affect tying the painter to her subject, which saves it from an “empty aestheticism”. Indeed, across her life, Sanguineti Poggi questioned her role as a privileged Italian woman active in formerly colonial territories. She explained: “[F]or me the problem was to express a great love for the poor. ‘Destitute are Christ’s folk’ has rung in my ears forever”. This is the first time the work of Nenne Sanguineti Poggi is presented at Biennale Arte. —Sofia Gotti

Tekkà, 1948 Oil on canvas, 49 × 44 cm. Courtesy Estate of Nenne Sanguineti Poggi. © Estate of Nenne Sanguineti Poggi.

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Nenne Sanguineti Poggi left a lasting mark on Ethiopian and Eritrean art and architecture. She was born into an Italian aristocratic family of intellectuals, and readily established her artistic profile in the region of Liguria in the 1930s. In 1937, upon marriage by proxy to an engineer employed by the Agip oil corporation, she moved to Eritrea, which had been colonised by Italy in the nineteenth century. After spending years of World War II in Italy, Sanguineti Poggi chose to return to Eritrea and Ethiopia where she lived until the mid-1970s. In this period, the artist developed her distinctive Coptic–Byzantine painterly style, leaving behind the influences of the European avant-garde. Under the auspices of Hailé Selassié, Emperor of Ethiopia, and thanks to an outstanding zeal for work, she was able to secure numerous public commissions. She contributed murals in mosaic, ceramic, and concrete relief for government buildings, schools, banks, hotels, and churches.

SAVONA, ITALY, 1909– 2012, FINALE LIGURE, ITALY

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Nenne Sanguineti Poggi

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Aligi Sassu

Aligi Sassu, a painter and sculptor, led a long life spanning Milan, Sardinia, and Mallorca, blending artistic exploration with political activism. Born into a leftist family, Sassu developed an early passion for art and made his debut at the Biennale Arte in 1928, invited by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. His style transitioned from Futurism to the influence of the Italian Primitives and young Picasso, seen within the praised Red Men series (1930–1933). In April 1937, he was imprisoned for fourteen months due to his anti-fascist involvement. He aligned with the Corrente group of artists creating socially charged artworks after World War II. In Albissola, he delved into ceramics, crafting magmatic sculptures centred around his beloved wild horses, a theme intertwined with his memories of rural Sardinia. The move to Mallorca in 1964 marked a new phase, rich in mythological and Mediterranean references. A prominent figure in Italian post-war art, Sassu made subsequent appearances at the Biennale Arte in 1948, 1952, and 1954.

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Sassu’s interpretation of a classic Renaissance biblical scene, depicting the eventful encounter between the young fisherman Tobias and the archangel Raphael, echoes Arturo Martini’s 1934 bronze sculpture of the same subject. Stripping away anecdotal details, Sassu places his subjects in front of a cove, focusing on a fishing net, amplifying the intense, erotically ambiguous relationship between the angel – an older, physically robust figure – and Tobias, portrayed as if ensnared in the angel’s net. Both figures fixate upon

Tobiolo, 1965 Oil on canvas, 81 × 96 × 1.5 cm. Courtesy Archivio Aligi Sassu, Monza. © Archivio Luigi Sassu.

MILAN, ITALY, 1912– 2000, POLLENÇA, SPAIN

the viewer with an unwavering gaze. The painting draws inspiration from Sassu’s earlier Red Men series, wherein he evoked a mythic realm of male nudes – Argonauts, Centauries, and Dioscuri but also pubescent, indistinct figures – suspended in a timeless, ethereal, yet sensually charged ambiance. Simultaneously, the vibrant hues and the maritime backdrop echo the newfound Mediterranean landscape Sassu encountered after his relocation to Mallorca the year prior. —Antonella Carmada

CORTONA, ITALY, 1883 – 1966, PARIS

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Gino Severini In 1901, the 18-year-old Gino Severini discovered and assimilated the dictates of Divisionist painting in the presence of Balla’s works. In 1906 he moved to Paris and came into contact with the exponents of the artistic avantgarde. He adhered to Futurism in 1910, and in 1916 his pictorial research led him to Synthetic Cubism, and later to the principles expressed by Valori Plastici. A renewed classicism now characterises Severini’s painting, introducing subjects from the Commedia dell’Arte into his works. The artist also theorised the new pictorial phase with the publication of the essay “Dal cubismo al classicismo”.

Natura Morta, 1918 Oil on canvas, 60 × 73 × 2 cm. Roberto Casamonti Collection.

In 1918, Severini painted Still life, which later became part of the collection of Léonce Rosenberg, promoter of the Cubist group. The painting is situated within the theoretical debate that brings Severini’s art closer to the results of Synthetic Cubism. The artist’s research is aimed at investigating pictorial space as a vision capable of combining the dynamism of line with a rigorous canon of composition. The answer lies in the creation of a visual arrangement that entrusts geometry with the principle and measure of

the spatial organisation of objects. The resulting dialogue describes a painting structured in a perfect balance between the expressiveness of colour, the sensitivity of perception, and the rigor of form that represents the outline of the pictorial elements by contrast. The aesthetic principle adopted by Severini is interpreted as a synthesis of objects in space and time, capable of originating images that in painting are translated into harmonic law. —Sonia Zampini

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In 1924, he was in Switzerland to execute a cycle of frescoes with a sacred theme. In the last decade, his painting returned to the Futurist period. Severini’s intense artistic activity also included important theoretical contributions that the artist published during his career. He also played an important connecting role between Italy and France.

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Joseph Stella

Joseph Stella was an Italianborn American artist best known for his representations of American modernity in the early twentieth century. Born in Muro Lucano, Stella migrated to New York in 1896 at eighteen, finding himself among the city’s growing Italian-American community. He briefly studied medicine before enrolling at the Art Students League, where he studied with William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri. A return to Italy in 1909 sparked decades of living between New York and his native country, with formative stints in Paris spent absorbing the styles of the time: Cubism, Fauvism, Futurism, and Surrealism. Bringing these influences to bear, Stella became wellregarded for his dynamic depictions of New York. Spurred by his recurring travels and nostalgic longings, the artist was also equally invested in exploring the spirituality of nature and the centrality of his Italian identity – a counterpoint and antidote to American modernity’s strains.

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Fountain (1929) is a key example of Stella’s exuberant paintings – highly stylised and festooned with birds, plants, and flowers – that reflect the abiding spiritual connection he felt with nature. If the artist’s cityscapes reflected their modern milieu, his paintings of nature were rooted in more primordial and picturesque origins, influenced in large part by the romantic views that he held of his Italian homeland. This composition places a fountain at its core, its arching streams echoed by a tree growing from – and towering

MURO LUCANO, ITALY, 1877– 1946, NEW YORK CITY, UNITED STATES

above – its tranquil base of rock and water. The tree’s leafed branches cascade downward and frame the Edenic scene at hand, populated by a reclining nude figure, a swan, and a lotus flower. Stella’s recurring motifs and romantic views lend themselves to possible allegorical readings of nature as escape and oasis, especially against the suffocating conditions of modern life, and as a site of creative regeneration. —C J Salapare

Fountain, 1929 Oil on canvas, 124.5 × 101.6 cm. Photo Dale M. Peterson. Private Collection. Courtesy Schoelkopf Gallery.

NUCLEO STORICO • ITALIANS EVERYWHERE

Clorindo Testa was born in Italy and lived in Argentina, where he designed audacious buildings with a strong visual presence. He was an architect and artist, and actively participated in the cultural scene of the twentieth century. In Buenos Aires, Testa built the Biblioteca Nacional (1962–1992) (with Francisco Bullrich and Alicia Cazzaniga) and the headquarters of the Banco de Londres y América del Sud (1959–1966) (with the SEPRA studio.) The bank building features an impressive reinforced concrete frame, in which Testa created openings or geometric perforations that result in a powerful visual play. These vivid forms reveal the freedom with which Testa approached his projects. “In him, humour is an antibody,” wrote his friend, the poet Julio Llinás, proposing humour as a reaction to the rigidity imposed by adherence to any aesthetic system. Testa’s freedom is also evident in his paintings of the 1960s, in which he departed from the exactness and rationality valued so highly by the Concrete Art movement. In Pintura o Circulo negro (1963), Testa painted a black sphere on a square canvas. The circle is loose, not a precise geometric figure, and it does not respond to the dogmas of Concrete Art. Two halos rendered in shades of grey surround this black nucleus, imparting a sense of lightness to the figure, as if it were levitating above a white surface. Two vertical segments, however, fix it to the background. The pictorial layer is dense in the black core and Testa took advantage of this thickness, making incisions,

Pintura o Circulo negro, 1963 Oil on canvas, 150.3 × 150.1 cm. Photo Gustavo Sosa Pinilla. Malba Collection. Courtesy Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires.

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BENEVENTO, ITALY, 1923– 2013, BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA

scraping, moving his hand quickly. This gestural graphism displays his characteristic freedom or humour. Testa was a three-time recipient of Argentina’s prestigious Konex Award. Pintura o Circulo negro was previously exhibited at the Biennale Arte in 1964. —Florencia Malbran

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Clorindo Testa

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Horacio Torres

LIVORNO, ITALY, 1924– 1976, NEW YORK CITY, UNITED STATES

Horacio Torres, son of the Uruguayan painter Joaquín Torres-García, was born in 1924 in Livorno, Italy. After years of travelling, the family left Europe to finally settle in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1934. Due to the influence of his father, Torres quickly became a member of the Association of Constructivist Art and The Taller TorresGarcía. In 1942, he travelled to Peru and Bolivia to study Pre-Columbian art, where his interest in monumental representation intensified. After his father’s death in 1949, Torres explored Europe, visiting renowned museums in search of inspiration. Once he moved to New York in 1969, he left behind his Constructivist principles and began painting large-scale obscure figurative portraits with classical reminiscences, for which he gained international attention.

In his early career, Horacio Torres pursued in an exemplary way the principles of Torres García’s art theory (1944) through the use of geometric figures, primary colours, and an imagery culturally associated with a childish innocence, which he linked with complex regional symbols. Although The White Ship (1950 circa) could be considered as part of the slow transition of his interest towards figuration, we can observe that in this narrative depiction of a travelling subject, easily associated with the history of his family’s own

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migration, geometric shapes and strong reticular lines remain as a constructive scheme of organisation within the painting. In that sense, this piece not only materialises his father’s artistic theory but also marks a point of departure for his own study of the connections between avant-garde repertoires and Latin American symbolic traditions. This is the first time the work of Horacio Torres is presented at Biennale Arte. —Nicolas Cuello

The White Ship, 1950 ca Oil on canvas, 82 × 69 cm. Photo Arturo Sánchez. Courtesy Cecilia de Torres, Ltd.

NUCLEO STORICO • ITALIANS EVERYWHERE

Carrying a modern idea of classicism, Tozzi’s painting developed in a constant dialogue between Italy and France. In 1919, Tozzi settled in Paris where he began his artistic career, immediately achieving great success. In 1926, he participated in the first exhibition of the Novecento group in Milan. He adhered to the theoretical instances of the movement centred on the desire to build a renewed artistic identity based on the recovery of the figurative component and the Italian pictorial tradition, to be set against the experimentation of the avant-garde. In 1928, he founded the Groupe des Sept, known as Les Italiens de Paris, a heterogeneous movement that introduced a new Mediterranean classicism in dialogue with metaphysical suggestions. Painting in the 1930s saw a gradual move away from Novecento outcomes. Later, Tozzi’s language became more stylised, painting female subjects as presences absorbed in a suspended timeless dimension. In 1932, Tozzi’s The Painter (1931) was exhibited at the 17th Biennale Arte Venezia. The painting, which belonged to the collection of Margherita Sarfatti, a theorist of the Novecento movement, is characterised by symbolic references that describe a visual arrangement in which the volumetry of forms holds in itself a purely intellectual order. The entire visual composition presents a marked structural rigor dictated by a clear scanning of shadows and planes that limit physical space in favour of an exclusively mental openness.

Il Pittore, 1931 Oil on canvas, 116 × 89. Roberto Casamonti Collection.

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FOSSOMBRONE, ITALY, 1895— 1979, SAINT-JEAN-DU-GARD, FRANCE

The presence of the triangle emphasises the geometrisation of the scene, which appears to be able to accommodate a forthcoming condition of nascent life. The shadow of the nail is the expectation of an event such as the imminent pictorial action the painter is about to undertake. He is entrusted with the task of uniting ideality with the praxis of art, one as the condition of the other, eternally and cyclically like the infant and the adult portrayed and, like the sphere, without beginning and without end. —Sonia Zampini

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Mario Tozzi

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Edoardo Daniele Villa

Edoardo Daniele Villa’s gift for sculpture was manifested early in his birth town of Bergamo, when he was awarded numerous commissions to create bas reliefs for people’s homes before he was twenty years old. Encouraged by his mother to become a sculptor, Villa consequently attended the Scuola d’Arte Andrea Fantoni and then later enrolled at the Bergamo academy. While conscripted in the Italian infantry in Cairo, he was captured and placed in an imprisonment camp in South Africa as a prisoner-of-war. At the end of the war, he decided to settle in Johannesburg. Notably, while awaiting release, Villa sculpted uninterrupted in isolation, completing sixtyfive artworks, which would be exhibited in Johannesburg upon his release in 1947. In 1963, Villa joined Amadlozi (“the Ancestors” in Nguni languages), an art collective prominently influenced by African classical art. His abstract sculpture Atmosfera Africana was exhibited at La Biennale di Venezia in 1964.

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Amadlozi’s driving ethos was to reflect their surroundings by creating distinctly Africaninspired artworks. Villa’s sculptures emphasise the verticality of the human figure, as revealed in the allegorical work Mother and Child. In its abstract and purist simplicity, Villa’s rendering evokes the compositional structure of stereometric forms. Columnlike in its upright stance, Mother and Child is an unbroken geometric flow of lines, which conspicuously accentuates

BERGAMO, ITALY, 1915– 2011, JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA

the style of its African-inspired formal elements. Villa prioritises lines, shapes, and spherical dimensions over distinguishable facial expressions, connoting a universalist principle. In Johannesburg in the 1960s, Villa had access to public and private collections of African art. During this period, stylistic similarities were made between his work and the arts of Central Africa. —Zamansele Nsele

Mother and Child, 1963/2010 Bronze, 201 × 66 × 51 cm. Private Collection.

Autorretrato, 1902 Oil on canvas, 64 × 48 cm. Photo Sergio Guerini. Visconti Hirth Collection. Courtesy Almeida & Dale Galeria de Arte. © Sergio Guerini.

629 NUCLEO STORICO • ITALIANS EVERYWHERE

Eliseu Visconti was an Italian immigrant – an artist between two continents – who merged Brazilian academicism with Parisian fin-de-siècle modernism. A skilled draughtsman, Visconti migrated to Brazil in 1876 and entered the Academia Imperial de Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro (1885). Right after the dissolution of the Brazilian Empire in 1889, he joined insurgent students and teachers against academicism, who all entrenched at the Atelê Livre (Free Studio). He was the Brazilian Republic’s first scholarship recipient and was trained in Paris’s modern art schools, the Académie Julian and the École Guérin. When Visconti presented his European work back in Brazil, he was commissioned to create monumental paintings for the Theatro Municipal do Rio de Janeiro. Visconti made landscapes which included his wife and children amid nature. He also designed posters, stained glass, and lamps. Moving between Provence, Parisian parks, and the beaches and backyards of Rio, Eliseu Visconti distilled a modern sense of light in painting.

GIFFONI VALLE PIANA, ITALY, 1866– 1944, RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL

In Autorretrato (1902), Visconti’s defiant gaze confronts the viewer. The painting was produced soon after he returned to Brazil from seven years of training in Paris, where his works were ignored by the public but celebrated by critics. He wields his brushes like weapons against an empty backdrop, which echoes the raw canvas he is transforming. His left side is realistic, while his right is sketchy and Post-Impressionistic. In the background, positioned between his eyes and the top of his head, the sky and

clouds outline a horizon, calling attention to the forces that guide him between tradition and modernity: a keen eye and self-awareness. At least forty self-portraits made over five decades testify to Visconti’s pride in the craft. As a reader of Goethe, he reflected on innovation outside of tradition and constructed his own image as an artist. This is the first time the work of Eliseu Visconti is presented at Biennale Arte. —Luiza Interlenghi

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Eliseu Visconti

630

Alfredo Volpi

Alfredo Volpi, the son of Italian immigrants (his mother was from Lucca and his father from Bologna), arrived in Brazil in 1897 when he was just one year old. Born to a proletarian family, like most of the foreigners who arrived in Brazil between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, he abandoned his formal studies and began working as a painter and wall decorator at the age of fifteen. Ignored by the modernist mainstream of the 1920s, he produced both decorative panels and easel paintings, only holding his first solo exhibition in 1944, when he was 47, at Galeria Itá in São Paulo. In the 1950s, he made a surprising transition to geometric abstractionism, creating the works that became his trademark: bandeirinhas (little flags), façades, houses, and flagpoles from Brazilian June festivals. In spite of his close connection to the popular style, Volpi was a modernist celebrated by institutions late in his life.

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In the 1950s, during a trip to Italy, Volpi encountered Giotto’s frescoes and became interested in the use of tempera, a paint made with egg white. Fachada marrom (1950–1960s) is representative of this moment, in which he also created his first works using geometric patterns from the bandeirinhas – an element that established dialogues with the geometric abstractionism of Brazilian Concretist artists. In this phase of Volpi’s work we observe a notable tension: the

LUCCA, ITALY, 1896– 1988, SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL

little flags are placed against building façades, another element drawn from the folk universe. Suspended by fine horizontal lines like in folk festivals, the small flags seem to float above the solid, stable façades. Fachada marrom is also emblematic of how Volpi began to treat canvas space from then on, with segmented fields of colour, maintaining discreet yet irregular contours. —Fernando Oliva

Fachada marrom, 1950-60s Tempera on canvas, 118 × 77.5 cm. Photo Sergio Guerini. Private Collection. Courtesy Almeida & Dale Galeria de Arte. © Sergio Guerini.

A TERRA DÁ, A TERRA QUER. SÃO PAULO: UBU EDITORA/ PISEAGRAMA, 2023.

A river does not stop being a river because it converges with another river, on the contrary, it becomes itself and other rivers, it becomes stronger. When we come together, we don’t stop being us, we become us and other people – we surrender.

ANTÔNIO BISPO DOS SANTOS

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Beatriz Milhazes

Beatriz Milhazes is the most relevant Brazilian artist investigating colour in the expanded field of painting today and, in her work, she breaks the limits between abstract and figurative, high and low art. She studied painting at the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage in Rio de Janeiro (1980–1982), near her current studio. Since the 1980s she has been developing her own visual lexicon and method, a combination of painting, monotype, collage, and monoprint, with which she defies modernist flat space pioneered by artists such as Matisse, Sonia Delaunay, and Mondrian. Milhazes manipulates a diverse collection of motifs that include Latin American and Brazilian Baroque elements, flowers, Carnival decorations, lace, luxury design, pop icons, and Op Art patterns. In her work, she includes references

to Brazilian artists such as Tarsila do Amaral and Ione Saldanha or movements such as Neo-concretism. She combines these, building saturated layers and highly dynamic compositions. Since 2000, Milhazes has been exhibiting in Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, the US, Japan, France, Germany, and the UK. She has also created vinyl murals and stained glass in public spaces. Milhazes’s five large-scale paintings, specially created for the V&A Pavilion, refer to the palette and patterns of a variety of traditional woven textiles from different cultures, many of which are displayed in the gallery. For Milhazes, their complex structures create “an incredible source of motifs” based on the human observation of nature’s inner regularity. In Memórias do

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL, 1960 LIVES IN RIO DE JANEIRO

Futuro I, her own repertoire of targets, rays, waves, and florals intersects with the hues and patterns appropriated from these textiles. Spectacular colour clusters are made up of short brushstrokes on monoprint colour fields. These vibrant compositions result from an underlying grid and calculated decisions, mirroring the intricacy of the knots in the monumental tapestry featured in the Pavilion. Its title, Pindorama (2020–2022), is the Tupi-Guarani peoples’ word for the Brazilian territory before colonisation.

PROMOTERS

La Biennale Di Venezia with the Victoria and Albert Museum, London CURATOR

Adriano Pedrosa ARTIST

Beatriz Milhazes

Beatriz Milhazes represented Brazil at Biennale Arte in 2003. —Luiza Interlenghi

The Golden Egg, 2023 Acrylic on linen, 280 × 300 cm. Photo Pepe Schettino. Private Collection. © Beatriz Milhazes.

SPECIAL PROJECT

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Colorido Cósmico, 2023 Acrylic on linen, 280 × 320 cm. Photo Pepe Schettino. Private Collection. © Beatriz Milhazes.

APPLIED ARTS PAVILION

Meia-noite, meio-dia, 2023 Acrylic on linen, 280 × 300 cm. Photo Pepe Schettino. Private Collection. © Beatriz Milhazes.

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BEATRIZ MILHAZES

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637 SPECIAL PROJECT APPLIED ARTS PAVILION

Pindorama, 2020-22 Tapestry in wool and silk, 321 × 750 cm. Courtesy Art in Embassies, US Department of State.

STRANGERS TO OURSELVES. NEW YORK: COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1988.

Foreigner: a choked up rage deep down in my throat, a black angel clouding transparency, opaque, unfathomable spur. The image of hatred and of the other, a foreigner is neither the romantic victim of our clannish indolence nor the intruder responsible for all the ills of the polis. Neither the apocalypse on the move nor the instant adversary to be eliminated for the sake of appeasing the group. Strangely, the foreigner lives within us: he is the hidden face of our identity, the space that wrecks our abode, the time in which understanding and affinity founder. By recognising him within ourselves, we are spared detesting him in himself. A symptom that precisely turns “we” into a problem, perhaps makes it impossible. The foreigner comes in when the consciousness of my difference arises, and he disappears when we all acknowledge ourselves as foreigners, unamenable to bonds and communities.

JULIA KRISTEVA

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Pacita Abad Haitians Waiting At Guantanamo Bay, 1994 Oil, painted cloth, buttons and beads on stitched and padded canvas 238.8 × 175.3 cm Pacita Abad Art Estate With the additional support of Tina Kim Gallery Filipinas in Hong Kong, 1995 Acrylic on stitched and padded canvas 270 × 300 cm Art Jameel Collection With the additional support of Silverlens Galleries You Have to Blend In, Before You Stand Out, 1995 Oil, painted cloth, sequins, buttons on stitched and padded canvas 294.6 × 297.2 cm Pacita Abad Art Estate With the additional support of Tina Kim Gallery

Mariam Abdel-Aleem Clinic, 1958 Oil on board 77 × 83 cm Collection of Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah With the additional support of Barjeel Art Foundation

Etel Adnan Untitled, 1965 Oil on canvas 50 × 43.1 cm The Estate of the Artist With the additional support of Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut / Hamburg

Sandy Adsett Waipuna, 1978 Acrylic on board 101.7 × 101.7 Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki

Zubeida Agha Composition, 1988 Oil on canvas 91.4 × 76.2 cm Taimur Hassan Collection With the additional support of Taimur Hassan

Dia al-Azzawi A Wolf Howls: Memories of a Poet, 1968 Oil on canvas 84 × 104 cm Collection of Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah With the additional support of Barjeel Art Foundation

Claudia Alarcón Fwokachaj kiotey [Armadillo ears], 2023 Hand-spun chaguar fibre, natural dyes from the native forest, woven fabric, antique stitch 133 × 122 cm Estrellita B. Brodsky Collection Kates tsinhay [Star women], 2023 Hand-spun chaguar fibre. Natural dyes from the native forest. Woven fabric, “yica” stitch 175 × 181 cm Antonio Murzi & Diana Morgan Collection

Claudia Alarcón & Silät Chelhchup [Autumn], 2023 Hand-spun chaguar fibre, natural dyes and aniline dyes, woven fabric, “yica” stitch 160 × 142 cm Fwuyetil [Winter], 2023 Hand-spun chaguar fibre, natural dyes and aniline dyes, woven fabric, “yica” stitch 133 × 108 cm Ifwala [The day], 2023 Hand-spun chaguar fibre, natural dyes and aniline dyes, woven fabric, “yica” stitch 105 × 108 cm Honatsi [The night], 2023 Hand-spun chaguar fibre, natural dyes and aniline dyes, woven fabric, “yica” stitch 145 × 127 cm Paola Creixell Collection

Yachup [Summer], 2023 Hand-spun chaguar fibre, natural dyes and aniline dyes, woven fabric, “yica” stitch 136 × 122 cm

ESTRANJEROS EN TODAS PARTES

Self-Portrait, 1975 Oil on canvas 130 × 100.5 cm Gift of the artist / Collection of the National Gallery Singapore With the additional support of the National Gallery Singapore & Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth of Singapore

Inawop [Spring], 2023 Hand-spun chaguar fibre, natural dyes and aniline dyes, woven fabric, “yica” stitch 159 × 104 cm Private Collection

Rafa al-Nasiri Untitled, 1971 Acrylic on canvas 100 × 105.5 cm Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar With the additional support of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar

Miguel Alandia Pantoja Imilla, 1960 Oil on pressed cardboard 77.4 × 59.5 cm Museo Nacional de Arte - Fundación Cultural del Banco Central de Bolivia

Aloïse Cloisonné de théâtre, 1941-1951 Partially watercoloured coloured pencils and geranium juice on ten sheets of paper sewn together 1404 × 99 cm L’Angleterre – Trône de Dehli, 1951-1960 Coloured pencils on two sheets of paper sewn together 70 × 98 cm Luxembourg bal Sylvestre, 1951-60 Coloured pencils on five sheets of paper sewn together 156 × 91 cm Noël, 1951-60 Mixed media on 4 sheets of paper sewn together 82 × 117 cm Ben Hur à Paris, 1960-63 Oil pastels on paper 69.5 × 49.5 cm Cléopâtre Pape - was bitten gold, 1960-63 Oil pastels on paper 61 × 47 cm Gloria in excelsis Deo Chanteuse Bornod, 1960-63 Oil pastels on paper 101 × 72 cm

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All works are Courtesy the Artist, unless otherwise stated. Dimensions are given in centimeters, height × width × depth. If exhibition copies, the dimensions of the original are given. The list was complete and finalized as of 19 February 2024. The captions and credits of the images in this publication have been compiled with the utmost care. Any errors or omissions are unintentional, and we will be glad to include appropriate captions and credits in future editions if new information comes to the attention of La Biennale.

Affandi

Liberté Patrie, 1960-63 Oil pastels on paper 91 × 71 cm All works Collection Christine et Jean-David Mermod

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List of works in the exhibition

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Giulia Andreani Pretty Vacant (Diva Derelitta), 2014 Acrylic on canvas 130 × 97 cm La Scuola di Taglio e cucito, 2023 Watercolor on paper 140 × 300 cm Conservative Ghost (Aetas Ferrea), 2024 Acrylic on canvas 130 × 97 cm L’inconnu.e de la scène (aire mauve pâle, aire vert pâle), 2024 Murano glass 30 × 30 × 50 cm (approx) In collaboration with Fonderia Artistica Brollo and Nicola Moretti Murano Le Fanciulle Laboriose, 2024 Acrylic on canvas 150.5 × 200 cm Pour elles toutes (Myrninerest), 2024 Acrylic on canvas 190.5 × 400.5 cm All works with the additional support of Institut français

LIST OF WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION

Claudia Andujar Catrimani, from the series A casa, 1974 Gelatin and silver analog enlargement on Ilford Multigrade Classic fibre based matte paper, with selenium toning 40 × 60 cm Catrimani, from the series O reahu, 1974 Gelatin and silver analog enlargement on Ilford Multigrade Classic fibre based matte paper, with selenium toning 40 × 60 cm Convidados enfeitados para festa com penugem de gavião, fotografado em múltipla exposição, Catrimani, from the series O reahu, 1974 Gelatin and silver analog enlargement on Ilford Multigrade Classic fibre based matte paper, with selenium toning 40 × 60 cm Untitled, from A casa series, 1974 Gelatin and silver analog enlargement on Ilford Multigrade Classic fibre based matte paper, with selenium toning 40 × 60 cm

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Xirixana Xaxanapi thëri mistura mingau de banana em cocho suspenso, capaz de armazenar até 200 litros de alimento para as festas, Catrimani, from the series A casa, 1974 Gelatin and silver analog enlargement on Ilford Multigrade Classic fibre based matte paper, with selenium toning 40 × 60 cm

Yanomami, from the series A casa, 1974 Gelatin and silver analog enlargement on Ilford Multigrade Classic fibre based matte paper, with selenium toning 40 × 60 cm All works with the additional support of Galeria Vermelho

María Aranís La negra, 1931 Oil on canvas 64.8 × 54 cm Collection Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago de Chile With the additional support of Ministry of Culture, Arts and Heritage and Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Government of Chile

Aravani Art Project Diaspore, 2024 Mural painting 2715 × 600 cm

Iván Argote Paseo, 2022 4K video 23 min 30 sec Descanso, 2024 Carved sandstone, migrant plants, and local weeds from the region where the work is presented 180 × 3300 × 900 cm With the support of Albarrán Bourdais; Perrotin and Vermelho All works with the additional support of Institut français

Karimah Ashadu Machine Boys, 2024 HD digital video 16:9, colour, single channel, 5.1 surround sound 8 min 50 sec Produced by Fondazione In Between Art Film With the additional support by MOIN Filmförderung Hamburg Schleswig-Holstein Wreath (Machine Boys), 2024 Brass 100 × 100 × 10 cm All works with the additional support of ifa — Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen

Dana Awartani Come, let me heal your wounds. Let me mend your broken bones, 2024 Darning on medicinally dyed silk 520 × 1250 × 297 cm With the additional support of Diriyah Biennale Foundation

Aycoobo (Wilson Rodríguez) Amanecer, 2022 Acrylic on paper 70 × 100 cm Bahia del amazonas, 2022 Acrylic on paper 70 × 100 cm Laguna misterioso, 2022 Acrylic on paper 70 × 100 cm Madre naturaleza, 2022 Acrylic on paper 70 × 100 cm Mandalas, 2022 Acrylic on paper 50 × 70 cm Naturaleza 2, 2022 Acrylic on paper 70 × 100 cm Vibración, 2022 Acrylic on paper 70 × 100 cm Calendario, 2023 Acrylic paint on Fabriano paper 70 × 100 cm All works with the additional support of Instituto de Visión

Margarita Azurdia Untitled, from the series Geométricas, 1976 Acrylic on canvas 218 × 162 cm Asociación Milagro de Amor / Collection Margarita Azurdia

Leilah Babirye Rukirabasaija from the Kuchu Western Bunyoro Kingdom, 2023 Wood, metal teapots, welded metal and found objects 320 × 96.5 × 63.5 cm Inhebantu from the Kuchu Eastern Busoga Kingdom, 2023-2024 Glazed ceramic, wire, bicycle tyre inner tubes and found objects 254 × 81.3 × 68.6 cm Oyo Nyimba Kabamba Iguru from the Kuchu Western Tooro Kingdom, 2023-2024 Wood, wax, aluminum, nails, bolts, nuts and washers 249 × 68.6 × 61 cm Ssangalyambogo from the Kuchu Central Buganda Kingdom, 2023-2024 Wood, bicycle tyre inner tubes, nails, welded metal and found objects 320 × 81.3 × 68.6 cm

Autorretrato Siniestro, 1978 Paint on wood 200 × 45 × 45 cm Andrés Buhar With the additional support of Arthaus Foundation Buenos Aires

Ezekiel Baroukh Baigneuse, 1952-54 ca. Oil on canvas 82 × 142 cm Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation With the additional support of Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation

Aly Ben Salem Femme au Paon, n.d. Gouache on paper 122 × 89 cm Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation With the additional support of Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation

Semiha Berksoy My Mother The Painter Fatma Saime, 1965 Oil on masonite 93 × 65 cm With the additional support of Galerist, Istanbul

Gianni Bertini La Toile de Penelope, 1959 Textile collage 146 × 165 cm Thierry Bertini Collection With the additional support of Thierry Bertini and Frittelli Arte Contemporanea

Lina Bo Bardi Cavaletes de vidro, 1968/2024 Concrete, glass, wood, neoprene and stainless steel 240 × 75cm; 240 × 100cm; 240 × 150cm; 240 × 210cm Based on the original design by architect Lina Bo Bardi Reproduction authorized by Instituto Bardi

Pedra Robat, matriz, 1974 Matrix of a very special wood (Pau D’Alho), used in woodblock print 97 × 86 × 11 cm Pedra Robat, matriz, 1974 Matrix of a very special wood (Pau D’Alho), used in woodblock print 97 × 86 × 11 cm All works with the additional support of Maria Bonomi

Bordadoras de Isla Negra Untitled, 1972 Embroidered canvas 230 × 774 cm Collection Centro Cultural Gabriela Mistral With the additional support of Ministry of Culture, Arts and Heritage and Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Government of Chile

Victor Brecheret Vierge à l’enfant, 1923-24 Marble 142 × 34 × 27 cm Private Collection With the additional support of Almeida & Dale Galeria de Arte

Huguette Caland Suburb, 1969 Oil on canvas 100.5 × 100.5 cm Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar With the additional support of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar

Sol Calero Pabellón Criollo, 2024 Mixed media Dimensions variable With the additional support of The Bukhman Family Foundation; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo; Cristalfarma; Museo Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid; Collection Silvia Fiorucci, Monaco; Mauvilac; Saikalis Bay Foundation; Charlotte Meynert and Henrik Persson; Gruppo Bardelli; Colorobbia; Terreal San Marco; Antonio Murzi & Diana Morgan; Tiqui Atencio Demirdjian; Rebiennale | R3B; Anna Guggenbuehl; Diego Grandi; Leslie Ramos; Francesca Minini, Milan; Crèvecœur, Paris; ChertLüdde, Berlin

Maternidad, 1971 Acrylic on canvas 115 × 81 cm Ama Amoedo Collection

‫פרעמדע אומעטום‬

Pedra Robat, 1974 Woodblock print, 132 × 95 cm

Elda Cerrato

Mohammed Chebaa Composition, 1974 Acrylic on canvas 101 × 237 cm Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation With the additional support of Dalloul Art Foundation

Georgette Chen Self Portrait, 1946 ca. Oil on canvas 22.5 × 17.5 cm Gift of Lee Foundation / Collection of the National Gallery Singapore With the additional support of the National Gallery Singapore & Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth of Singapore

Galileo Chini La notte al Watt Pha Cheo, 1912 Oil on plywood 79.5 × 65.5 cm With the additional support of Galleria Gomiero

Kudzanai Chiurai We Live in Silence, 2017 Single Channel film 41 min 40 sec What more can one ask for?, 2017 Theodolite, security fence, and red earth 200 × 200 × 200 cm Black Vanguard Comunique 1, 2024 Oil paint and oil pastels 180 × 220 cm Black Vanguard Comunique 2, 2024 Oil paint and oil pastels 180 × 220 cm Black Vanguard Comunique 3, 2024 Oil paint and oil pastels 180 × 220 cm Black Vanguard Comunique 4, 2024 Oil paint and oil pastels 180 × 220 cm Black Vanguard Comunique 5, 2024 Oil paint and oil pastels 180 × 220 cm

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Libero Badii

Maria Bonomi

Black Vanguard Comunique 6, 2024 Oil paint and oil pastels 180 × 220 cm All works with the additional support of Goodman Gallery 645

Ugangi from the Kuchu Acholi Region, 2024 Ceramic, wire, metal electrical conduit, bicycle tyre inner tubes and found objects 273 × 84 × 84 cm All works with the additional support of Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and New York; Gordon Robichaux, New York

BIENNALE ARTE 2024

Isaac Chong Wai Falling Reversely, 2021-24 Video installation Variable dimensions Falling Reversely, 2021-24 Performance Performers: Isaac Chong Wai, Ichi Go, Ryota Maeda, Vasundhara Srivastava, and others Sound: Nobutaka Shomura All works with the additional support of Hong Kong Arts Development Council; Burger Collection and the TOY family; Sunpride Foundation; Ammodo; Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office, Brussels; Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong | Zilberman, Istanbul, Berlin and Miami; Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion; ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen

Saloua Raouda Choucair

LIST OF WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION

Self-Portrait, 1943 Oil on canvas 44 × 32 cm Saloua Raouda Choucair Foundation Rhythmical Composition with White Sphinx, 1951 Oil on canvas 88 × 116 cm Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar With the additional support of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar

Chaouki Choukini Paysage au clair de lune, 1979 Wenge 63.5 × 59.5 × 28 cm Collection Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan bin Khalifa Al Nahyan Colonne, 1983 Wenge 82 × 33 × 13 cm Collection Olivier Georges Mestelan Villages Lointanes, 1993 Wenge 55 × 79 × 24 cm Frontale, 1996 Iroko 84 × 50 × 15 cm Dame de coeur, 2007 Oak and bubinga 42.5 × 43.5 × 19 cm Collection Sharjah Art Foundation Vol d’Oiseau, 2008 Iroko 84 × 39 × 7 cm

646

Blessure de Gaza, 2009 Oak 80 × 36 × 15 cm Collection Fairouz and Jean-Paul Villain

Claire de lune, 2011-12 Iroko 97 × 19 × 19 cm Collection Sharjah Art Foundation Transcendance 2, 2013-14 Iroko 102 × 39 × 20 cm Obscure 2, 2014-15 Iroko 77 × 18 × 19 cm Collection Yasmin Al Atassi Chardon, 2015 Sipo 160.5 × 57 × 23 cm Collection Anurag Khanna Mirage, 2018 Iroko 96 × 40 × 14 cm Improvisation 3, 2020 Sipo 58.5 × 17 × 13 cm All works with the additional support of Green Art Gallery, Dubai; Institut français

Chua Mia Tee Road Construction Worker, 1955 Oil on canvas 96 × 66 cm Collection of the National Gallery Singapore / adopted by Seah & Siak With the additional support of the National Gallery Singapore & Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth of Singapore

Claire Fontaine Foreigners Everywhere / Stranieri Ovunque (60th International Art Exhibition / 60. Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte), 2004-24 Sixty suspended, wall or window mounted neons, framework, transformers, cables and fittings Dimensions and colours variable Foreigners Everywhere (Selfportrait), Stranieri Ovunque (Autoritratto), 2024 Double sided, wall or window mounted neon, framework, transformers, cables and fittings Dimensions and colours variable Stranieri Ovunque (Autoritratto), Foreigners Everywhere (Self-portrait), 2024, Double sided, wall or window mounted neon, framework, transformers, cables and fittings Dimensions and colours variable All works with the support of Dior, Paris

Manauara Clandestina Building, 2021-2024 Video 5 min 37 sec Manauara Clandestina in collaboration with Luiz Felipe Lucas Migranta, 2020-23 Video 17 min All works with the additional support of Inclusartiz; Delfina Foundation; Pirámidon Centre d’Art Contemporani

River Claure Botas, from the series Warawar Wawa, 2019 Pigment prints on cotton matte paper 308 gsm 33 × 22 cm Capa, from the series Warawar Wawa, 2019 Pigment prints on cotton matte paper 308 gsm 33 × 22 cm Cordero, from the series Warawar Wawa, 2019 Pigment prints on cotton matte paper 308 gsm 108 × 72 cm Estrella, from the series Warawar Wawa, 2019 Pigment prints on cotton matte paper 308 gsm 63 × 42 cm San Cristobal, from the series Warawar Wawa, 2019 Pigment prints on cotton matte paper 308 gsm 63 × 42 cm Villa Adela, from the series Warawar Wawa, 2019 Pigment prints on cotton matte paper 308 gsm 162 × 108 cm Yatiri, from the series Warawar Wawa, 2019 Pigment prints on cotton matte paper 308 gsm 108 × 72 cm 800 bs, from the series Warawar Wawa, 2019 Pigment prints on cotton matte paper 308 gsm 75 × 50 cm Cerro 4, from the series Warawar Wawa, 2023 Pigment prints on cotton matte paper 308 gsm 88 × 70 cm Don Raymundo, from the series Mita, 2023 Pigment prints on cotton matte paper 308 gsm 113 × 90 cm Km 168, from the series Mita, 2023 Pigment prints on cotton matte paper 308 gsm 88 × 70 cm

Virgen cerro 3, from the series Mita, 2023 Pigment prints on cotton matte paper 308 gsm 175 × 140 cm 7 adultos y un niño en el paisaje, from the series Mita, 2023 Pigment prints on cotton matte paper 308 gsm 175 × 140 cm 26, from the series Mita, 2023 Pigment prints on cotton matte paper 308 gsm 135 × 108 cm All works with the additional support of Fundación Simon I. Patiño

Julia Codesido Vendedora Ayacuchana, 1927 ca. Oil on canvas 95 × 110 cm Museo de Arte de Lima. Comité de Formación de Colecciones 2017

Liz Collins Rainbow Mountains: Moon, 2023 Woven textile 340 × 373 cm Rainbow Mountains: Weather, 2023 Woven textile 340 × 425 cm All works with the additional support of Candice Madey

Jaime Colson Japonesa, 1926 Oil on cardboard 39.5 × 32 cm Colección Museo Bellapart

Waldemar Cordeiro Untitled, 1963 Oil on canvas 75 × 74.5 cm With the additional support of Luciana Brito Galeria, São Paulo

Monika Correa No Moon Tonight, 1974 Unbleached cotton, dyed coloured wool 180 × 93 cm Collection of Lorenzo Legarda Leviste and Fahad Mayet

Olga Costa Autorretrato, 1947 Oil on canvas 90 × 75 cm Colección Andrés Blaisten, México

Miguel Covarrubias El Hueso, 1940 Oil on canvas 77.2 × 61.6 cm Museo Nacional de Arte / INBAL

Victor Juan Cúnsolo Paisaje de La Rioja, 1937 Oil on hardboard 69 × 58 cm Colección Neuman, Buenos Aires With the additional support of Colección Neuman

Andrés Curruchich Procesión: patrón de San Juan está en su trono, 1966 Oil on canvas 43.5 × 48.3 cm Collection of El Museo del Barrio, New York. Gift from Gale Simmons, Craig Duncan and Lynn Tarbox in memory of Barbara Duncan, 2007

Rosa Elena Curruchich Cada año le regala a la gente un su escapulario de hilo bendecido po el Cofrade Mayor, 1980 ca. Oil on canvas 17.2 × 16.5 cm Campesinas van hacer una Fiesta. Las muchachas que cortan árboles, 1980 ca. Oil on canvas 13.1 × 15.1 cm El muchacho le gusta hacer de madera las fotos de los pájaros, 1980 ca. Oil on canvas 13.1 × 16.8 cm El señor Padrino del Imagen, 1980 ca. Oil on canvas 11.5 × 16.4 cm Escuela mixta, 1980 ca. Oil on canvas 13.3 × 19.2 cm

Fueron a traer dinero enterrado, 1980 ca. Oil on canvas 13.9 × 16 cm

ËY OMÃ JÊ AKÃTSTÊ

Stela XX (Absence), 2024 Welded steel approx. 246 × 102 × 60 cm With the additional support of Commonwealth and Council Gallery; the College of Letters and Science, University of California, Davis; Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, UC Davis; Mohn Family Trust

Estan esperando esposa de un alcalde de otro pueblo, 1980 ca. Oil on canvas 14.2 × 16 cm

Iglesia San Marcos, 1980 ca. Oil on canvas 15 × 16.4 cm La procesión de la resurrección, 1980 ca. Oil on canvas 14.3 × 20.5 cm Las dos Mujeres Llevan su Semilla de Maiz a la Iglesia, 1980 ca. Oil on canvas 14.3 × 12 cm Las Patojitas las tres en su cumpliaño hace una ceremonia de ellas, 1980 ca. Oil on canvas 14.2 × 18.2 cm La señora presentando su imagen ante la gente, 1980 ca. Oil on canvas 12.6 × 15.7 cm Mi tio Pablo. Pintando Rosa Elena, 1980 ca. Oil on canvas 12 × 15.6 cm Procesión de los patojos visitando Bebes si no tienen Bebe solo adorna tu casa, 1980 ca. Oil on canvas 17.8 × 18.7 cm Palo encebado, 1980 ca. Oil on canvas 19.7 × 18.5 cm Rosa Elena carriando agua, 1980 ca. Oil on canvas 14.2 × 14 cm Rosa Elena van a tejer río chiperen, 1980 ca. Oil on canvas 15.3 × 16.4 cm Rosa Elena Curruchich vendiendo comidas. Mi hermanita, 1980 ca. Oil on canvas 14.3 × 16.9 cm Un casamiento al monte, 1980 ca. Oil on canvas 15.1 × 14.5 cm Un mi hermano muy travieso solo en la calle están varias veces se han perdido, 1980 ca. Oil on canvas 14.2 × 17.8 cm

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Untitled, from the series Mita, 2023 Pigment prints on cotton matte paper 308 gsm 100 × 75 cm

Beatriz Cortez

Van a escoger capitana del nuevo año, 1980 ca. Oil on canvas 14.3 × 19 cm

647

Ruinas sin titulo, from the series Mita, 2023 Pigment prints on cotton matte paper 308 gsm 88 × 70 cm

BIENNALE ARTE 2024

Djanira da Motta e Silva Crianças Kanelas, 1960 Oil on canvas 130 × 97 cm Collection of Max Perlingeiro

Olga de Amaral Muro tejido terruño 3, 1969 Wool 82 × 53 cm With the additional support of Lisson Gallery

Filippo de Pisis La bottiglia tragica, 1927 Oil on cardboard 53.8 × 66 cm Collection Gallerie d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea: Museo Filippo de Pisis Nudo maschile, 1927 Oil on canvas mounted on masonite 36 × 45.6 cm With the additional support of P420 Gallery

LIST OF WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION

Il nudino rosa, 1931 Oil on canvas 45 × 26 cm Collection Gallerie d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea: Museo Filippo de Pisis Volto di ragazzo, 1931 Watercolor on paper mounted on canvas 40.9 × 25.9 cm With the additional support of P420 Art Gallery Ragazzo con cappello, mid-1930s Colored pencil on tissue paper 42.4 × 25.5 cm With the additional support of P420 Art Gallery Pugile, 1940s Watercolor on paper 48.5 × 35 cm With the additional support of P420 Art Gallery Vaso di fiori con ventaglio, 1942 Oil on canvas 80.5 × 59.5 cm With the additional support of P420 Art Gallery Vaso di fiori, 1952 Oil on canvas 51 × 41 cm With the additional support of P420 Art Gallery

Juan Del Prete

648

Abstracción con material, 1934 Oil, cement, copper, bronze and zinc plates on cardboard 69 × 49 cm Archivo Yente Del Prete With the additional support of Galería Roldan Moderno

Pablo Delano The Museum of the Old Colony, 2024 Installation Variable dimensions With the additional support of Trinity College, Offices of the President and of the Dean of Faculty; Laura Roulet and Rafael Hernandez; Center for Caribbean Studies at Trinity College; Center for Urban and Global Studies at Trinity College

Simone Cangelosi Una nobile rivoluzione. Ritratto di Marcella Di Folco, 2014 Video 85 min

Cinéastes pour les sans-papiers Les Sans-Papiers parlent: Madjiguène Cissé, 1997 35mm film transferred to video 3 min 3 sec

Emiliano Di Cavalcanti Três mulatas (moças do interior), 1922 Oil on canvas 60 × 50 cm Coleção Igor Queiroz Barroso, Fortaleza

Danilo Di Prete Untitled, 1954 Oil on canvas 59 × 72 cm Private Collection, São Paulo, Brazil With the additional support of Almeida & Dale Galeria de Arte

Cícero Dias Negro, 1930s Oil on canvas 79 × 52 cm Antonio Almeida and Carlos Dale Jr Collection, São Paulo, Brazil With the additional support of Almeida & Dale Galeria de Arte

Disobedience Archive (The Zoetrope) – Marco Scotini With the additional support of Open Care - Servizi per l’Arte, Milan and the MA in Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies students of NABA, Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti campus in Milan and Rome

Ursula Biemann Sahara Chronicle, 2006 – 2009 Anthology of 12 videos 33 min 13 sec

Black Audio-Film Collective Handsworth Songs, 1986 16mm colour film, transferred to video 58 min 33 sec

Seba Calfuqueo Nunca serás un weye. You will never be a Weye, 2015 Video documentation of a performance 4 min 46 sec

Critical Art Ensemble Gender-Crash, 1995 Video 2 min 28 sec

Snow Hnin Ei Hlaing Queens’ Palace, 2013 Video 10 min 46sec

Marcelo Expósito with Nuria Vila Tactical Frivolity + Rhythms of Resistance, 2007 Video 39 min

Maria Galindo & Mujeres Creando Revolución Puta, 2022 Video 52 min

Barbara Hammer History of the World According to a Lesbian, 1988 Video 16 min Estate of Barbara Hammer and Electronic Arts Intermix

mixrice 21st Century Light of the Factory, 2016 Video 10 min

Khaled Jarrar Notes on Displacement, 2022 Video 74 min

Sara Jordenö KIKI, 2017 Video 94 min

Spectres are haunting Europe, 2016 Video 99 min

Pedro Lemebel Desnudo bajando la escalera, 2014 Video documentation of a performance 2 min 10 sec Colección Il Posto Documentos Pisagua, 2006 Video documentation of a performance 3 min 29 sec Colección Il Posto Documentos

LIMINAL & Border Forensics (Lorenzo Pezzani, Jack Isles, Giovanna Reder, Stanislas Michel, Chiara Denaro, Alagie Jinkang, Charles Heller, Kiri Santer, Svitlana Lavrenchuk, Luca Obertüfer) Asymmetric Visions: Aerial Surveillance and border control in the Central Mediterranean, 2023 Video 10 min 54 sec

Angela Melitopoulos Passing Drama, 1999 Video 66 min

Jota Mombaça The birth of Urana remix, 2020 Video 21 min 17 sec

Carlos Motta Corpo Fechado: The Devil’s Work, 2018 Video 24 min 47 sec

Zanele Muholi Difficult Love, 2010 Video 48 min

Pınar Öğrenci Inventory 2021, 2021 Video 15 min 56 sec

Thunska Pansittivorakul Damnatio Memoriae, 2023 Video 108 min 11 sec

Anand Patwardhan Bombay, our city, 1985 Video 75 min

Pilot TV Collective A Call and An Offering: Pilot TV: Experimental Media for Feminist Trespass, 2006 Documentary by Na Mira and Latham Zearfoss Video 24 min

Queerocracy and Carlos Motta A New Discovery, Queer Immigration in Perspective, 2011 Video 9 min 58 sec

Oliver Ressler and Zanny Begg The Right of Passage, 2013 Video 19 min

Carole Roussopoulos Le FHAR (Front homosexuel d’action révolutionnaire), 1971 Black and white, 1–inch video tape 26 min Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir

Güliz Sağlam 8 Mart 2018 - İstanbul / 8th of March 2018, 2018 Video 3 min 35 sec

Irwan Ahmett & Tita Salina B.A.T.A.M (Bila Anda Tiba Anda Menyesal) - When You Arrive You’ll Regret, 2020 Video 43 min 52 sec

Tejal Shah Between the waves, Channel 1, 2012 Video 26 min 14 sec

Requiem (Internationale, Goodbye Malaya), 2017 Video 12 min 34 sec

Hito Steyerl

ÉTRANGERS PARTOUT

Maria Kourkouta & Niki Giannari

The Brightness of Greedy Europe, 2022 Video 27 min 48 sec

Chi Yin Sim

Universal Embassy, 2004 Video 6 min 36 sec

Sweatmother Transmissions Protest: Gender Inclusive Fashion, 2019 Video 3 min 15 sec Transmissions Protest: Witness the Real Angels (Anti-Victoria Secret Demo), 2019 Video 1 min 17 sec Pissed Off Trannies: Zap 1, 2022 Video 2 min 24 sec Pissed Off Trannies: Stigmata, 2022 Video 21 min 41 sec Pissed Off Trannies: Zap 3, 2023 Video 4 min 09 sec

Raphaël Grisey and Bouba Touré Xaraasi Xanne (Crossing Voices), 2022 Video 123 min

Nguyễn Trinh Thi Everyday’s the Seventies, 2018 Video 15 min

James Wentzy Fight Back, Fight AIDS: 15 Years of ACT UP!, 2002 Video 75 min

Želimir Žilnik Inventur - Metzstrasse 11, 1975 16mm colour film, transferred to video 8 min 57 sec

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Transit(s): our traces, our ruin, 2016 Video 40 min

Daniela Ortiz

Juana Elena Diz Lavandera, n.d. Oil on canvas 126 × 96 cm Colección Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires 649

Bani Khoshnoudi

BIENNALE ARTE 2024

Tarsila do Amaral Estudo (Academia no 2), 1923 Oil on canvas 61 × 50 cm Private collection With the additional support of Almeida & Dale Galeria de Arte

Saliba Douaihy Regeneration, 1974 Acrylic on canvas 152 × 202.5 cm Taimur Hassan Collection With the additional support of Taimur Hassan

Dullah Istriku, 1953 Oil on canvas 102 × 83 cm National Gallery of Indonesia

Inji Efflatoun Prisoner, 1963 Oil on wood 56.5 × 43.5 cm Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation With the additional support of Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation

LIST OF WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION

Uzo Egonu Guinean Girl, 1962 Oil on canvas 76 × 63.5 cm The Estate of the Artist, London With the additional support Grosvenor Gallery, London

Mohammad Ehsaei Untitled, 1974 Oil on canvas 120 × 79 cm

Hatem El Mekki La Femme et le Coq, 1950s Oil on canvas 64.7 × 50 cm Collection of Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah With the additional support of Barjeel Art Foundation

Aref El Rayess Toli’ al Bader Alaina (Moonrise), 1982 Oil on canvas 60 × 91 cm The Estate of the Artist

650

Untitled, from the series Deserts, 1986 Oil on canvas 92 × 122 cm The Estate of the Artist

Untitled, from the series Deserts, 1986 Oil on canvas 61 × 91.5 cm The Estate of the Artist Untitled, from the series Deserts, 1988 Oil on canvas 75.5 × 121.5 cm The Estate of the Artist Untitled, from the series Deserts, 1988 Oil on canvas 76 × 121.5 cm The Estate of the Artist Untitled, from the series Deserts, 1988 Oil on canvas 75.5 × 122 cm The Estate of the Artist Untitled, from the series Deserts, 1988 Oil on canvas 76 × 121.5 cm Taimur Hassan Collection All works with the additional support of Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut / Hamburg

Ibrahim El-Salahi The Last Sound, 1964 Oil on canvas 121.5 × 121.5 cm Collection of Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah With the additional support of Barjeel Art Foundation

Elyla in collaboration with Milton Guillén Torita-encuetada, 2021 Video 9 min 42 sec

Ben Enwonwu The Dancer (Agbogho Mmuo Maiden Spirit Mask), 1962 Oil on canvas 93 × 62 cm Ben Uri Gallery and Museum

Romany Eveleigh Pages 9, 1973 Oil and printer’s ink on paper, mounted on linen canvas 37.5 × 35 cm Collection of Beth Rudin DeWoody, New York Tri-Part, 1974 Oil and printer’s ink on paper, mounted on linen canvas 78 × 70 cm each Collection Liz Sterling, New York

1/2 Eight, 1974 Paint and printer’s ink on paper, mounted on linen canvas 123 × 131.5 cm Tia Collection, Santa Fe, New Mexico All works with the additional support of Richard Saltoun Gallery

Hamed Ewais Le Gardien de la vie, 1967-68 Oil on canvas 132 × 100 cm Collection of Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah With the additional support of Barjeel Art Foundation

Dumile Feni Head, 1981 ca. Bronze 52 × 20 × 27 cm Norval Foundation With the additional support of Norval Foundation

Alessandra Ferrini Gaddafi in Rome: Anatomy of a Friendship, 2024 Video installation Variable dimensions

Cesare Ferro Milone Me Chani Ballerina della Regina, 1925 Oil on canvas 95 × 73 cm Collezione Giovanni Ferro Milone, Vicenza

Raquel Forner Autorretrato, 1941 Oil on canvas 186 × 141 cm Museo Provincial de Bellas Artes Emilio Pettoruti / Forner-Bigatti Foundation of Buenos Aires

Simone Forti Adventure of Red Hat, Red Hat Pursued with Yellow, 1966 Watercolors on paper 45.5 × 38 cm Collezione Malagoli, Modena With the support of Galleria Raffaella Cortese | Milano Albisola; The Box, Los Angeles Huddle, from the series Dance Constructions, 1961 Performance 10 min The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Committee on Media and Performance Art Funds. © 2024 The Museum of Modern Art, New York. With the support of Galleria Raffaella Cortese | Milano Albisola; The Box, Los Angeles

Gioia, 2023 Glazed ceramic and gold 45 × 35 × 40 cm All works with the additional support of P420 Gallery

Louis Fratino I keep my treasure in my ass, 2019 Oil on canvas 217.8 × 165.1 cm Private collection Metropolitan, 2019 Oil on canvas 152.4 × 240.7 cm Collection Tom Keyes and Keith Fox My Meal, 2019 Oil on canvas 109.2 × 119.4 cm Private collection Eggs, dishes, coreopsis, 2020 Oil on canvas 106.7 × 106.7 cm Private collection An Argument, 2021 Oil on canvas 177.8 × 165.3 cm Collection David Bolger Kissing my foot, 2024 Oil on canvas 144.8 × 198.1 cm Cosmos and miscanthus, 2024 Oil on canvas 152.4 × 88.9 cm April (after Christopher Wood), 2024 Oil on canvas 200.7 × 157.5 cm Alessandro in a seersucker shirt, 2024 Oil on canvas 55.9 × 43.2 cm Wine, 2024 Oil on canvas 195.6 × 210.8 cm All works with additional support of Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

Paolo Gasparini Miliciano,Trinidad, Cuba, 1961/2014-2015 Gelatin silver print 60 × 49 cm

Sacrifice for iroko, god and tree, 2012 Batik 180 × 248 cm Akíntúndé Ṣàngóṣakin Àjàlá

Unknown title (Ògún, hunters), n.d. Batik 126 × 82 cm Augustine Merzeder-Taylor Unknown title (pidán dancing, dancer stepping on a nail), n.d. Batik 114 × 91 cm Edith Lukesch Unknown title (Ṣọ̀npọ̀nná, also known as Ọbalúayé), n.d. Batik 135 × 88 cm J. & W. Druml Unknown title (abstract batik motif around palm wine tapper scene), n.d. Batik 125 × 93 cm Lucia and Helmut Wienerroither, Austria Unknown title (Ọya pẹlu àṣẹ rẹ, Ọya with her symbols of sacred force), n.d. Batik 148 × 235 cm Lucia and Helmut Wienerroither, Austria Unknown title (a night scene under the moon), n.d. Batik 212 × 168 cm Martha Denk Unknown title (Ṣọ̀npọ̀nná, also known as Ọbalúayé), n.d. Batik 130 × 93 cm Wolfgang and Sieglinde Entmayr All works with additional support of Susanne Wenger Foundation

Umberto Giangrandi Bodegón Erotico, 1989 Acrylic on silkscreen on paper 50.7 × 69.2 cm Proyecto Bachué Collection With the additional support of Proyecto Bachué

Madge Gill Crucifixion of the Soul, 1934 Coloured inks on calico 147.3 × 1061.7 cm London Borough of Newham Heritage and Archives

Marlene Gilson

Building the Stockade at Eureka, 2021 Acrylic on linen 100 × 120 cm Collection Martin Browne

ΞΕΝΟΙ ΠΑΝΤΟΥ

Veglia, 2023 Glazed ceramic and gold 22 × 60 × 42 cm

Ṣàngódáre Gbádégẹsin Àjàlá

Happy Families – time when we all lived together, 2022 Acrylic on linen 76 × 100 cm Collection Michael Kendall Market Day, 2022 Acrylic on linen 76 × 100 cm Collection Wesfarmers Culture Learning, 2023 Acrylic on linen 76 × 100 cm Private Collection Moorabool Falls, 2023 Acrylic on linen 100 × 76 cm Collection Mark and Louise Nelson Wadawurrung Kurrung (Camp), 2023 Acrylic on linen 60 × 76 cm Collection Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton William Buckley Interpreter, 2023 Acrylic on linen 60 × 76 cm Collection Amelia and Andrew Salter All works with the additional support of Martin Browne Contemporary and Creative Australia

Luigi Domenico Gismondi Indian and Girl with Ethnic Clothes from Cusco, 1917 ca. Gelatin-silver and paper 24 × 18 cm Exhibition copy Diran Sirinian Collection, Buenos Aires

Domenico Gnoli Sous la Chaussure, 1967 Acrylic and sand on canvas 185 x 140 cm Collezione Fondazione Prada

Gabrielle Goliath Personal Accounts, 2024 Video and sound installation Variable dimensions With the additional support of Goodman Gallery - Johannesburg, Cape Town, London, New York; Galleria Raffaella Cortese | Milano - Albisola; Kamel Lazaar Foundation; Talbot Rice Gallery and the Scott Collins Biennial Commission, in partnership with Outset Contemporary Art Fund.

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Malinconia, 2020 Glazed ceramic and gold 37 × 25 × 30 cm

651

Victor Fotso Nyie

BIENNALE ARTE 2024

Brett Graham Wastelands, 2024 Wood, synthetic polymer paint 300 × 1600 × 360 cm With the additional support of Creative New Zealand

Fred Graham Whiti Te Rā, 1966 Oil stick on board 55 × 129 cm Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki Ngā Tamariki a Tangaroa (Children of the Sea God), 1970 Mahogany wood 76 × 245 × 12 cm Colleen Hill Collection Maui Steals the Sun, 1971 Mahogany wood 33 × 105 × 2.5 cm Inder and Chris Lynch Collection Tinirau and the Whale, 1971 Mahogany wood 33 × 105 × 2.5 cm Inder and Chris Lynch Collection All works with the additional support of Creative New Zealand

Enrique Grau

LIST OF WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION

Hombre Dormido, 1945 Oil on canvas 79 × 107 cm Colección de Arte del Banco de la República de Colombia

Oswaldo Guayasamín Cabeza de Hombre Llorando, 1957 Oil on canvas 105 × 70 cm Colección de Arte del Banco de la República de Colombia

Nedda Guidi Scultura Oggetto V, 1965-66 Terracotta in metalized dark gray enamel and deep dark red 35.5 × 33 × 24.5 cm Private collection, Rome

652

Scultura Oggetto II, 1966 Mat granulated enamel on terracotta 48 × 46 × 24.5 cm Collection Biffi, Rome

Modulare I, 1968 Enamelled ceramic in sèvre blue and ruby red 4 elements, overall 168 × 28 × 28 cm Private collection, Rome Residui, 1971 White enameled terracotta or unglazed terracotta 90 elements, 10.5 × 19 × 15.5 cm each Private collection, Rome Ritmo Esagonale, 1971 Blue-gray enameled ceramic 16 elements, overall 36 × 46 × 220 cm ca. Private collection, Italy Dieci A ( 10A ), 1974 Terracotta Overall 50 × 240 cm – each elements 8 × 36 × 45 cm Archivio Nedda Guidi, Rome Otto B “NaturaleArtificiale”, 1974 Unglazed terracotta and pink enameled terracotta 8 elements, overall ø 90 cm ca. Museo Internazionale delle Ceramiche in Faenza Tavola di Campionatura n. 1, 1976 Terracotta and oxides in wooden case 50 × 50 cm Collection Boni, Rome De-posizione (o De-positione), 1977 Terracotta and oxides 6 × 66 × 155 cm Private collection, Rome Raccolta di campionature, 1976 – 1991 Terracotta and oxides in wooden case 51 × 51 cm Archivio Nedda Guidi, Rome Grande Arco, 1977 Terracotta and oxides 39 elements, variable height, overall 342 × 82 cm ca. Archivio Nedda Guidi, Rome Tavola di Campionatura n° 2, 1977 Terracotta and oxides in wooden case 50 × 50 cm Collection Costantini, Todi

Speculare, 1967 Enamelled ceramic in white demimat and sèvre blue 2 elements Collection Montaini, Arezzo

Tavola di campionatura n. 8 (al cobalto), 1977 Terracotta and cobalt oxides in wooden case 51 × 51 cm Archivio Nedda Guidi, Rome

Modulare III, 1967-68 Enamelled ceramic in rubin red and sèvre blue 4 elements, 29 × 34.5 × 26.5 cm each Collection Mingori, Parma

Tavola di Campionatura dei residui (o frammenti), 1976-1991 Terracotta and oxides in wooden case 50 × 50 cm Collection Cusimano, Palermo

Vasi rovesciati or Morandiana, 1988-1996 Terracotta and oxides 27 individual elements Variable dimensions Multiple collections

Hendra Gunawan My Family, 1968 Oil on canvas 197.5 × 145.5 cm Collection of the National Gallery Singapore With the additional support of the National Gallery Singapore & Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth of Singapore

Antonio Jose Guzman & Iva Jankovic Orbital Mechanics, from the Electric Dub Station series, 2024 Ajrakh Hand Block Printed Indigo Dyed Fabrics printed Site Specific Installation Variable Dimensions With the additional support of Sufiyan Khatri Ajrakh Workshop, Ajrakhpur, India Messengers of the Sun, from the Dub Waves & Interferences series, 2024 Performance Performers: Antonio Jose Guzman & Puppets Family Dance Academy, Treviso Percussionists: Elisa “Helly” Montin and Moulaye Niang Music: Transillumination #1 / EDS Bass Mash Up Vol. 5 by Guzman & Jankovic All works with the additional support of Mondriaan Fund; Ammodo; The Daphne Oram Trust. The Daphne Oram Collection, Special Collections & Archives, Goldsmiths, University of London

Marie Hadad Untitled, n.d. (1930s ca.) Oil on canvas 40 × 60 cm Collection of Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah With the additional support of Barjeel Art Foundation

Samia Halaby Black is Beautiful, 1969 Oil on canvas 167.5 × 167.5 cm With the additional support of Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut / Hamburg

keepers of the krown (antoinette grace halsey), 2024 Glass fiber reinforced concrete and mixed media 125 × 125 × 665 cm keepers of the krown (susan burton), 2024 Glass fiber reinforced concrete and mixed media 125 × 125 × 665 cm keepers of the krown (patrice rushen), 2024 Glass fiber reinforced concrete and mixed media 125 × 125 × 665 cm keepers of the krown (dr. rachel eubanks), 2024 Glass fiber reinforced concrete and mixed media 125 × 125 × 665 cm keepers of the krown (suzette johnson), 2024 Glass fiber reinforced concrete and mixed media 125 × 125 × 665 cm keepers of the krown (robin daniels), 2024 Glass fiber reinforced concrete and mixed media 125 × 125 × 665 cm With the support of David Kordansky Gallery and Gagosian

Nazek Hamdi The Lotus Girl, 1955 Oil on canvas 70 × 50 cm Collection of Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah With the additional support of Barjeel Art Foundation

Mohamed Hamidi Harmonie, 1969 Acrylic on canvas 162.5 × 103 cm Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation With the additional support of Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation

Faik Hassan Bedouin Tent, 1950 Oil on wood 58 × 74 cm Collection of Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah With the additional support of Barjeel Art Foundation

Thalathat Ashkhas Raqm 20 [Three People no. 20], 1970 Oil on canvas 55.5 × 75 cm Taimur Hassan Collection With the additional support of Taimur Hassan

Gilberto Hernández Ortega Marchanta, 1976 Oil on canvas 117 × 88 cm Colección Museo Bellapart

Carmen Herrera Untitled (Halloween), 1948 Acrylic on burlap 96.5 × 123.2 cm Private Collection

Evan Ifekoya The Central Sun, 2022 Single-channel sound installation (speakers, wood, acrylic glass, styrodur, motor, cork, carpet) Variable dimensions Sammlung Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst. Commissioned by Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst

Julia Isídrez Buo, 2017 Ceramics, 60 × Ø 63 cm Jorge Enciso Collection, Paraguay El mundo de Julia, 2017 Ceramics 87 × 46 cm Denver Art Museum El pez gordo de la buena suerte, 2023 Ceramics 125 × 43 × 40 cm Comma Foundation, Belgium Ginea (Diseño de Juana Marta), 2017 Ceramics 110 × ø 48 cm Grito de libertad, 2019 Ceramics 102 × ø 55 cm Vasija base tinója con tapa dos ranas, 2023 Ceramics 77 × 35 × 35 cm All works with the additional support of Gomide & Co.

Mohammed Issiakhem Femme et Mur, 1977-1978 Oil on canvas 162 × 130 cm Collection of Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah With the additional support of Barjeel Art Foundation

Elena Izcue Cobián

Mujer de Perfil, 1924 Oil on canvas 73.8 × 66 cm Museo de Arte de Lima. Donación Marcela Vidal Layseca

María Izquierdo Autorretrato, 1947 Oil on canvas 55 × 45 Colección Andrés Blaisten, México

ESTRANXEIROS EN TODAS PARTES

Lauren Halsey

Kadhim Hayder

Nour Jaouda Roots in the sky, 2023 Hand-dyed textile, steel 250 × 300 cm If the Olive trees knew…, 2023 Hand-dyed textile, steel 250 × 300 cm Silent Dust, 2023 Hand-dyed textile, steel 250 × 300 cm

Rindon Johnson For example, collect the water just to see it pool there above your head. Don’t be a Fucking Hero!, 2021–ongoing Rawhide, paracord, rainwater Coeval Proposition #1- Tear down so as to make flat with the Ground or The*Trans America Building DISMANTLE EVERYTHING, 2024 Redwood 520 × 125 cm Commissioned by SculptureCenter, Valeria Napoleone (VNXXSC), and Chisenhale Gallery With thanks to Rennie Collection, Vancouver, Canada. All works with additional support of Max Goelitz, Munich and Berlin; ifa — Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen

Joyce Joumaa Memory Contours, 2024 Multimedia Installation Variable dimensions Biennale College Arte, La Biennale di Venezia

Mohammed Kacimi Nomadic Signs - Abstract composition, 1979 Oil on canvas 116 × 75.5 cm Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation With the additional support of Dalloul Art Foundation

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Three Nubians, n.d. Oil on board 101.5 × 93.5 cm Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation With the additional support of Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation

653

Tahia Halim

BIENNALE ARTE 2024

Frida Kahlo

Diego y Yo, 1949 Oil on masonite 30 × 22 cm Colección Eduardo F. Costantini

Nazira Karimi Hafta, 2024 Audio Video Installation, variable dimensions Biennale College Arte, La Biennale di Venezia

George Keyt Nayika - Vasantha Raga, 1943 Oil on canvas 89 × 59 cm Taimur Hassan Collection With the additional support of Taimur Hassan

Bhupen Khakhar Fisherman in Goa, 1985 Oil on canvas 168 × 168 cm With the additional support of Chemould Prescott Road

Bouchra Khalili

LIST OF WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION

The Constellations series, 2011 8 silkscreen prints on paper 60 × 40 cm each The Mapping Journey Project, 2008-2011 Video installation, 8 singlechannel videos, color, sound Variable dimensions Sea-Drift, 2024 Embroidery on natural indigo-dyed linen 470 × 170 cm All works with the additional support of mor charpentier; Institut français

Kiluanji Kia Henda A Espiral do Medo [The Spiral of Fear], 2022 Iron sculpture, variable dimensions around 400 × 400 cm Collection Jahmek Contemporary Art The Geometric Ballad of Fear, 2015 Inkjet print on cotton paper 70 × 100 cm each With the additional support of Galeria Filomena Soares

654

The Geometric Ballad of Fear (Sardegna), 2019 Inkjet print on fine art paper 100 × 120 cm each With the additional support of Galeria Filomena Soares

Linda Kohen

El Sillón, 1999 Oil on canvas 93 × 65 cm

Shalom Kufakwatenzi Mubatanidzwa (Adjoined), 2023 Hessian fabric, wool, tobacco twine, leather, upholstery canvas 240 × 186 cm Under the sea, 2023 Hessian fabric, wool, tobacco twine, fishing line 96 × 216 cm

Ram Kumar Women, 1953 Oil on board 60.5 × 102 cm Taimur Hassan Collection With the additional support of Taimur Hassan

Fred Kuwornu We Were here: The Untold History of Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, 2024 Video 45 min With the additional support of University of Minnesota, Africa No Filter, OSF

Grace Salome Kwami Girl in Red (Portrait of Gladys Ankora), 1954 ca. Oil on linen canvas 76.2 × 55.8 cm Collection of Pamela Clarkson Kwami

Lai Foong Moi Labourer (Lunch Break), 1965 Oil on canvas 104 × 67 cm National Gallery Singapore With the additional support of the National Gallery Singapore & Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth of Singapore

Wifredo Lam Untitled (Mujer Caballo), 1942-46 Oil on canvas 106 × 91 cm Collection Paz Illobre-Orteu With the additional of Silvia Paz Illobre de Orteu

Judith Lauand

Acervo 290, concreto 18, 1954 Glaze on hardboard 72 × 60 cm Private Collection, São Paulo, Brazil With the additional support of Almeida & Dale Galeria de Arte

Maggie Laubser Meidjie (Young Girl), 1960 ca. Oil on canvas 63 × 52.5 cm Norval Foundation With the additional support of Norval Foundation

Simon Lekgetho Self-Portrait, 1957 Oil on board 38.5 × 38 cm Norval Foundation With the additional support of Norval Foundation

Celia Leyton Vidal Millaküyén, 1950 ca. Oil on canvas 84 × 71.8 cm Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago With the additional support of Ministry of Culture, Arts and Heritage and Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Government of Chile

Lim Mu Hue Self-Expression, 1957-63 ca. Oil on board 34.3 × 30 cm Gift of Koh Seow Chuan / Collection of the National Gallery Singapore With the additional support of the National Gallery Singapore & Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth of Singapore

Romualdo Locatelli Legong Dance, 1939 Oil on canvas 113 × 95 cm Philippe Augier Collection, Museum Pasifika

Bertina Lopes Os meninos de mafalala [The Mafalala Boys], 1963 Oil on canvas 137 × 60 cm The Estate of Bertina Lopes The Last Supper Per omnia saecula saeculorum amen [For ever and ever, amen], 1964 Oil on board 50 × 180 cm The Estate of Bertina Lopes

Rais Antica 2 – Una historia verdadeira, 1972 Oil and collage on canvas 150 × 130 cm The Estate of Bertina Lopes Tia Collection, Santa Fe, New Mexico Totem, 1983 Oil on canvas 120 × 100 cm The Estate of Bertina Lopes All works with the additional support of Richard Saltoun Gallery

Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato Araucárias, 1973 Oil on hardboard 61.5 × 45.5 cm Private Collection With the additional support of Gomide & Co.

Anita Magsaysay-Ho Self-Portrait, 1944 Oil on Bristol board 61 × 48 cm Private Collection With the additional support of National Museum of the Philippines

MAHKU (Movimento dos Artistas Huni Kuin) Kapewe Pukeni [Bridgealligator], 2024 Site-specific installation 750 m2 With the support of Bloomberg; Fundação Bienal de São Paulo; LUMA Foundation

Esther Mahlangu Untitled, 1990 Acrylic on canvas 123 × 190 cm The Jean Pigozzi African Art Collection With the additional support of Jean Pigozz

INDO & VINDO, 2024 Site-specific installation consisting of: Ao finito [To infinity] from the series Terra Modelada (Modeled Earth), 1994/2024 Installation with 10 tons of molded clay in-situ and vegetation Adjacentes da intuição [Adjacent to intuition], soundscape from the series Da boca e com a boca [From the Mouth and with the mouth], 2024 Uma estória [A story], 2010/2024 Digital video 4 min 33 sec With the support of Hauser & Wirth; Luisa Strina, São Paulo, Brazil; Galleria Raffaella Cortese | Milano - Albisola; Lisa and Tom Blumenthal; Eliane and Alvaro Novis; SIO-2 | Ceramica Collet

Anita Malfatti A mulher de cabelos verdes, 1915 Oil on canvas 61 × 51 cm Airton Queiroz Collection, Fortaleza, Brazil With the additional support of Almeida & Dale Galeria

Ernest Mancoba Composition, 1940 Oil on canvas 59 × 50.5 cm Private collection

Edna Manley Negro Aroused, 1935 Oil on wood 63.5 × 43.1 × 21.5 cm The National Gallery of Jamaica

Josiah Manzi Mfiti Woman and Snake, 1990 Stone, black serpentine 182 × 60 × 53 cm National Gallery of Zimbabwe

Teresa Margolles Tela Venezuelana, 2019 Human imprint on cloth 210 × 210 cm

Maria Martins

However, 1948 Bronze 130 × 24 × 32.5 cm Collection Dalal Achcar Bocayuva Cunha, Brazil With the additional support of Almeida & Dale Galeria de Arte

SVUGDJE STRANCI

Anno 1942, from Mapas Mentais series, 1973-99 Gouache on ink, transfer type, and burn marks on paper 50.5 × 42.3 cm With the support of Hauser & Wirth

María Martorell Ekho Dos, 1968 Oil on canvas 170 × 160 cm Museo de Artes Plásticas Eduardo Sívori de la Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, Argentina

Mataaho Collective Takapau, 2022 Installation (polyester hi-vis tiedowns, stainless steel buckles and j-hooks) Site specific reconfiguration Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa Tongarewa With the additional support of Creative New Zealand

Naminapu Maymuru-White Mayaŋura malaŋu miḻŋ’miḻŋ (Stars reflected in the River), 2023 Multi-panel bark painting appr. 300 × 1100 cm With the additional support of Creative Australia; Sullivan+Strumpf; Sydney and Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre, Yirrkala

Mohamed Melehi Composition, 1968 Oil on canvas 89.8 × 199.6 cm Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar With the additional support of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar

Carlos Mérid Motivo Guatemalteco, 1919 Oil on canvas 97.5 × 71.5 cm The Hugo Quinto and Juan Pablo Lojo Collection

Gladys Mgudlandlu Two Old Ladies Shopping on a Cold Day, n.d. Powder paint on board 67 × 79 cm Private Collection

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Griddo grand [Big cry], 1970 Oil on canvas 150 × 150 cm The Estate of Bertina Lopes

Anna Maria Maiolino

655

Totem, 1968 Oil on canvas 150 × 130 cm The Estate of Bertina Lopes Collection of Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn

BIENNALE ARTE 2024

Omar Mismar

Ahmad and Akram Protecting Hercules, from the series Studies in Mosaics, 2019-20 Mosaic 130 × 200 cm Hunting Scene (Still from a YouTube video of a barrel bomb falling on Daraya), from the series Studies in Mosaics, 2019-20 Mosaic 282.5 × 158 cm Fantastical Scene [sic], from the series Studies in Mosaics, 2019-20 Mosaic 126 × 190 cm Parting Scene (with Ahmad, Firas, Mostafa, Yehya, Mosaab), from the series Studies in Mosaics, 2023 Mosaic 151 × 201 cm Spring Cleaning, from the series Studies in Mosaics, 2022 Mosaic 200 × 220 cm Two unidentified lovers in a mirror, 2023 Mosaic 130 × 130 cm With the additional support of Adbel Moneim Barakat

LIST OF WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION

Sabelo Mlangeni Faith and Sakhi Moruping Thembisa Township, from the series Isivumelwano, 2004 Hand-printed silver gelatin print 60 × 50 cm Contestants at Miss Queen of Queens, from the series Country Girls, 2008 Hand-printed silver gelatin print 60 × 50 cm Bigboy, from the series Country Girls, 2009 Hand-printed silver gelatin print 60 × 50 cm Oupa ‘Konke enginakho nengiyikho kuyintando KaJehova’, from the series Country Girls, 2009 Hand-printed silver gelatin print 60 × 50 cm Palisa, from the series Country Girls, 2009 Hand-printed silver gelatin print 60 × 50 cm Miss Black Pride, from the series Black Men in Dress, 2010 Hand-printed silver gelatin print 50 × 40 cm

656

Tumi the singer, Soweto, from the series Black Men in Dress, 2010 Hand-printed silver gelatin print 50 × 40 cm

Identity, from the series Black Men in Dress, 2011 Hand-printed silver gelatin print 50 × 40 cm Iduku, from the series Black Men in Dress, 2011 Hand-printed silver gelatin print 50 × 40 cm “EXACT SCIENCE” Kigoma, Lubumbashi, DRC, from the series Lubumbashi, 2017 Digital ultrachrome archival print 60 × 50 cm Jenine, Kigoma, from the series Lubumbashi, 2017 Digital ultrachrome archival print 60 × 50 cm A roof top photoshoot with the dancers; Tonnex, (Ruby, Nonso and Oshodi), from the series The Royal House of Allure, 2019 Digital ultrachrome archival print 50 × 60 cm James Brown, from the series The Royal House of Allure, 2019 Digital ultrachrome archival print 50 × 60 cm Olalere’s body painting shoot (make up artist Thom Smith and Daniel), from the series The Royal House of Allure, 2019 Digital ultrachrome archival print 50 × 60 cm Uche, all dressed up, from the series The Royal House of Allure, 2019 Digital ultrachrome archival print 50 × 60 cm All works with the additional support of blank projects

Tina Modotti Falce, Pannocchia e Cartucciera, 1928/1985-1995 ca. Gelatin silver print 17 × 13.5 cm Exhibition copy printed by Riccardo Toffoletti upon concession by Vittorio Vidali Collection Maria Domini, Comitato Tina Modotti

Bahman Mohasses Untitled (Personages), 1966 Oil on hardboard 70 × 50 cm Taimur Hassan Collection With the additional support of Taimur Hassan

Roberto Montenegro

Pescador de Mallorca, 1915 Oil on canvas 100 × 97 cm Museo Nacional de Arte / INBAL

Camilo Mori La viajera, 1928 Oil on canvas 100.5 × 70 cm Collection Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago de Chile With the additional support of Ministry of Culture, Arts and Heritage and Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Government of Chile

Ahmed Morsi Portrait of the artist with a broken mirror, 1970 Oil on wood 124 × 81 cm Collection of Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah With the additional support of Barjeel Art Foundation

Effat Naghi Untitled, 1960 Oil and ink on panel 138.5 × 99.5 cm Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation With the additional support of Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation

Ismael Nery Figura decomposta, 1927 Oil on canvas 42 × 47.5 cm Private Collection, São Paulo, Brazil With the additional support of Almeida & Dale Galeria de Arte

Malangatana Valente Ngwenya To the Clandestine Maternity Home, 1961 Oil on canvas 157 × 180 cm Universität Bayreuth, Germany

Paula Nicho Camino a xejul, 2005 Oil on canvas 102 × 122 cm Mi piel y sombrero, 2023 Oil on canvas 64 × 84 cm

Tejiendo mi segunda piel, 2023 Oil on canvas 64x 84 cm

Costantino Nivola Bozzetto per lo show-room Olivetti a New York, 1953 Plaster casting on sand and polychromy 123.5 × 76 × 7 cm Collezione Museo Nivola, Orani, Nuoro

Taylor Nkomo Herdboy, 2022 Springstone 32 × 15 × 37 cm Singing blues, 2022 Cobalt 27 × 11 × 48 cm Wish I could fly, 2022 Verdite 32 × 28 × 19 cm Fashion Girl, 2023 White opal 33 × 25 × 10 cm Shy Girl, 2023 White opal 24 × 17 × 36 cm Thinker, 2023 Cobalt 27 × 23 × 46 cm

Marina Núñez del Prado Madona de Ternura, 1946-51 Comanche granite 28.8 × 22.5 × 32.8 cm MAC USP Collection (Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil)

Centenaire du Pont du Haut du Cap, 1947 Oil on masonite board 48.25 × 56.51 cm Colección Chocolate Cortés Deux Deguisés du Carnaval, 1947 Oil on masonite board 38.1 × 47 cm Colección Chocolate Cortés Missionaire, 1951 Oil on wood board 58.5 × 71 cm Josh Feldstein Collection Habitiacion Bayuex, 1957 ca. Oil on masonite 40.7 × 50.8 cm John Branca Collection Carnaval, 1958 Oil on masonite 50 × 60 cm Josh Feldstein Collection

Sénèque Obin L’union fait la force, 1954 Oil on masonite 63.5 × 93.3 cm John Branca Collection Marché Poissons, 1956 Oil on masonite 42 × 53.5 cm Josh Feldstein Collection Marché Clugny, 1950s-1960s ca. Oil and/or gouache on Masonite 69.2 × 87 cm Collection of El Museo del Barrio, New York. Gift of Drs. Roslyn and Lloyd Siegel, 2011 Eglise Sacré-Coeur, 1961 Oil on masonite 60 × 76 cm Josh Feldstein Collection Reception Marriage Interieur, 1966 Oil on canvas 43 × 94 cm Josh Feldstein Collection Funerailles Maçonniques, 1968 ca. Egg tempera on Masonite 60.4 × 76.2 cm Collection of El Museo del Barrio, New York. Gift the Daniela Chappard Foundation, 2012

Alejandro Obregón

Máscaras, 1952 Oil on canvas 210 × 107 cm Collection of the National Museum of Colombia

Tomie Ohtake

FREMMEDE OVERALT

Fete de la Garde Place St Victor, 1945 Oil on masonite 61.6 × 51.4 cm Lawrence Kent

Untitled, 1978 Acrylic on canvas 124.8 × 134.8 cm With the additional support of National Center for Art Research, Japan

Uche Okeke Male Model Standing, 1959 Oil on board 92.3 × 60.7 cm Collection of G. Hathiramani

Marco Ospina Abstracto, n.d. Oil on canvas 110 × 90 cm Proyecto Bachué Collection With the additional support of Proyecto Bachué

Samia Osseiran Junblatt Sunset, 1968 Oil on canvas 117 × 77 cm Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation With the additional support of Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation

Daniel Otero Torres Aguacero, 2024 Mixed media 655 × 1100 × 1100 cm With the support of Paprec; MDB-Métiers du bois; Trampoline, Association in support of the French art scene Paris; Ministère de la Culture-DRAC Ile-de-France dans le cadre du déploiement des Résidences d’artistes en entreprise; mor charpentier, Bogotá and Paris, Institut français Donde llueve y se desborda, 2024 Ceramic Variable dimensions With the support of mor charpentier, Bogotá and Paris

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Saludo al Sol, 2023 Oil on canvas 64 × 84 cm

Philomé Obin

657

Mi segunda piel chichicastenango, 2023 Oil on canvas 64 × 84 cm

BIENNALE ARTE 2024

Lydia Ourahmane

21 Boulevard Mustapha Benboulaid (entrance), 1901–2021 Metal door, wooden door, 9 locks, concrete, plaster, brick, steel frame 220 × 200 × 16 cm Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam Lydia Ourahmane in collaboration with Daniel Blumberg sync, 2022-24 24 hour performance Commissioned by KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin With the additional support of Ammodo

Pan Yuliang Back of Nude, 1946 Oil on canvas 65 × 50.2 cm Private Collection

Dalton Paula Chico Rei, 2024 Gold leaf and oil on canvas 210 × 110 cm Nã Agotimé, 2024 Gold leaf and oil on canvas 210 × 110 cm

LIST OF WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION

Ganga Zumba, 2024 Gold leaf and oil on canvas 210 × 110 cm Pacífico Licutan, 2024 Gold leaf and oil on canvas 210 × 110 cm Tereza de Benguela, 2024 Gold leaf and oil on canvas 210 × 110 cm All works with the additional support of Sé Galeria, Cerrado Galeria and James Fuentes Gallery

Amelia Peláez Mujer con abanico, 1931 Oil on canvas 69.4 × 58.5 cm Collection of Sandy and George Garfunkel, Palm Beach, USA

George Pemba Young Woman, 1947 Oil on canvas 58 × 42.5 cm Norval Foundation With the additional support of Norval Foundation

Fulvio Pennacchi

O circo, 1942 Oil on wood 50 × 70 cm Maria Cecilia Capobianco Collection With the additional support of Almeida & Dale Galeria de Arte

Claudio Perna Venezuela - Map Series, n.d. Photocopies, photos on paper map 62.2 × 85.1 cm Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA)

Emilio Pettoruti La del Abanico Verde or El abanico verde, 1919 Oil on canvas 96 × 50 cm Colección Eduardo F. Costantini

Lê Phổ Jeune Fille en Blanc [Young Girl in White], 1931 Oil on canvas 81 × 130 cm Collection of National Gallery Singapore With the additional support of the National Gallery Singapore & Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth of Singapore

Bona Pieyre De Mandiargues Toro Nuziale, 1958 Assemblage 90 × 116 × 2.5 cm Private Collection

Ester Pilone Luz Amarilla, 1970 Oil on canvas 50.1 × 112.1 cm Colección Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires

María y el Cóndor, from the Serie Virgenes Cholas, 2023 Watercolor, acrylic, ink colors on paper 200 × 152 cm Inmaculado corazón de Travo, from the Serie Virgenes Cholas, 2022 Watercolor, acrylic, ink colors on paper 200 × 152 cm La Virgen Mulata, from the Serie Virgenes Cholas, 2022 Watercolor, acrylic, ink colors on paper 200 × 152 cm Pachamama, from the Serie Virgenes Cholas, 2023 Watercolor, acrylic, ink colors on paper 200 × 152 cm Virgen de la Misericordia, from the Serie Virgenes Cholas, 2023 Watercolor, acrylic, ink colors on paper 200 × 152 cm Purple María, from the Serie Virgenes Cholas, 2023 Watercolor, acrylic, ink colors on paper 200 × 152 cm Sin título, 2024 Textile 140 × 90 cm All works with the additional support of Barro, Buenos Aires and New York

Charmaine Poh Kin, 2021 Video 2 min 45 sec What’s softest in the world rushes and runs over what’s hardest in the world, 2024 Video 14 min With the additional support of Vega Foundation

La Chola Poblete Il Martirio di Chola, 2014 Photograph 170 × 100 cm Virgen Evita Madre Reconciliadora de todos los Pueblos y las Naciones, from the Serie Virgenes Cholas, 2023 Watercolor, acrylic, ink colors on paper 200 × 152 cm

Maria Polo Untitled, 1962 Oil on canvas 81 × 60 cm Antonio Almeida and Carlos Dale Jr Collection, São Paulo, Brazil With the additional support of Almeida & Dale Galeria de Arte

Candido Portinari

658

Cabeça de Mulato, 1934 Oil on canvas 73.5 × 60 cm Coleção Igor Queiroz Barroso, Fortaleza

B. Prabha Waiting, n.d. Oil on canvas 91.44 × 66.04 cm With the additional support of Aicon Gallery, New York

Lidy Prati Composición serial, 1946-1948 Oil on hardboard 75.5 × 55.8 cm Colección Malba, Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires

Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo) A sculpture for Trans Women. A sculpture for the Non-Binary Femmes A sculpture for TwoSpirit People. I am a woman. I don’t care what you think. (Transphobia is everywhere and everyone is susceptible to enacting it at any moment) (Unlearn the transphobia brewing within) I am a Trans Woman. I am a Two-Spirit Person. I am a Woman. This is for my sisters and siblings everywhere. History erased many of us but we are still here. I will fight for our rights until the day I die. Exile me and I’ll keep fighting, 2022 Bronze cast on engraved brass base 190 × 60 × 60 cm With the additional support of Galerie Balice Hertling; Galerie Barbara Weiss; Hannah Hoffman Gallery; Galerie Francesca Pia Electric Dress (Atsuko Tanaka), 2023 LED-dress made from textile and plastic, draped on mannequin, 12 lithium-ion batteries in cases in textile pockets, Madrix programmed micro SD-card 81 × 66 × 63 cm Hartwig Art Foundation With the additional support of Galerie Francesca Pia; Ammodo

The Hommage to Ana Mendieta (“On Giving Life”) and Marina Abramovic (“Nude with skeleton”) Transitions into Daily Make-up Application, 2024 Performance With the additional support of Galerie Balice Hertling; Galerie Barbara Weiss; Hannah Hoffman Gallery; Galerie Francesca Pia; Ammodo

Lee Qoede Self-portrait in a Long Blue Coat, 1948-49 Oil on canvas 72 × 60 cm Private Collection With the additional support of the Samsung Foundation of Culture

Agnes Questionmark Cyber-Teratology Operation, 2024 Installation Silicon, metal and resin sculpture with video screen 180 × 190 × 270 cm Biennale College Arte, La Biennale di Venezia

Violeta Quispe El matrimonio de la chola, 2022 Mixed polychrome, natural pigment with application of gold leaf on MDF 150 × 170 cm Apu Suyos, 2024 Mixed polychrome, natural pigment on MDF 200 × 200 cm Jorge M. Perez Collection, Miami

Alfredo Ramos Martínez Maancacoyota, 1930 Oil on cardboard 38.4 × 38.3 cm Colección Andrés Blaisten, México

Sayed Haider Raza Offrande, 1986 Acrylic on canvas 100 × 100 cm With the additional support of Grosvenor Gallery, London

Armando Reverón

Retrato de Alfredo Boulton, 1934 Oil and gouache on paper adhered to a board 120 × 85 cm Collection of Clarissa and Edgar Bronfman Jr.

Emma Reyes

VREEMDELINGEN OVERAL

My heart is beating as I lip sync to this song, 2024 Performance Hartwig Art Foundation With the additional support of Galerie Francesca Pia; Ammodo

Untitled, 1955 Oil and oil stick on canvas 75 × 93 cm Collezione Riccardo Boni, Roma

Diego Rivera Retrato de Ramón Gómez de la Serna, 1915 Oil on canvas 110 × 90 cm Colección Malba, Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires

Juana Marta Rodas Untitled, 1993 ca. Modeled ceramic 18.5 × ø 55 cm Untitled, 1993 ca. Modeled ceramic and red engobe 11 × 19 cm Untitled, 1993 ca. Modeled ceramic and red engobe 18.5 × ø 55 cm Untitled, 1993 ca. Modeled ceramic and red engobe 10 × ø 11 cm The Musicians (series), 1993 ca. Modeled ceramic and red engobe 12.5 × 8.5 × 14 cm The Musicians (series), 1993 ca. Modeled ceramic and red engobe 13 × 10 × 16 cm The Musicians (series), 1993 ca. Modeled ceramic and red engobe 13.5 × 9 cm The Musicians (series), 1993 ca. Modeled ceramic and red engobe 11.5 × ø 8.5 cm The Musicians (series), 1993 ca. Modeled ceramic and red engobe 11 cm × ø 9.5 cm All works Collection of the Centro de Artes Visuales/Museo del Barro

Laura Rodig Pizarro Retrato de Gabriela Mistral, 1914-16 Oil on canvas 49 × 59.5 cm Gabriela Mistral Museum Collection With the additional support of Ministry of Culture, Arts and Heritage and Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Government of Chile

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Onde o Asfalto Termina, e a Terra Batida Começa, 2024 Installation Discarded cardboard, corn starch and plywood installation with video projections Variable dimensions Biennale College Arte, La Biennale di Venezia

659

Sandra Poulson

BIENNALE ARTE 2024

Abel Rodríguez Centro el terreno que nunca se inunda, 2022 Ink on paper 70 × 100 cm El arbol de la vida y la abundancia, 2022 Ink on paper 151 × 150 cm La centro montaña, 2022 Ink on paper 100 × 70 cm La montaña centro y sus animales nativos 5 especies, 2022 Ink on paper 70 × 100 cm Sin título, 2023 Ink on paper 30 × 20 cm each Chorro de araracuara, 2017 (with Aycoobo, Wilson Rodriguez) Acrylic and ink on paper 63 × 83 cm La montaña alta y firme, 2022 (with Aycoobo, Wilson Rodriguez) Acrylic and ink on paper 70 × 100 cm

LIST OF WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION

Montaña firme de centro, 2022 (with Aycoobo, Wilson Rodriguez) Acrylic and ink on paper 70 × 100 cm Terraza vajá, 2022 (with Aycoobo, Wilson Rodriguez) Acrylic and ink on paper 70 × 100 cm All works with the additional support of Instituto de Visión, Bogotá

Aydeé Rodriguez Lopez El Negro Yanga, 2011 Oil on canvas, mounted on handcarved dyed poplar wood frame 117 × 135.5 cm Cazadores de hombres, 2013 Oil on canvas, mounted on handcarved dyed poplar wood frame 157 × 137 cm Ex Hacienda de Guadalupe Collantes, 2014 Oil on canvas, mounted on handcarved dyed poplar wood frame 171.5 × 221 cm Hacienda Trata Negra, 2017 Oil on canvas, mounted on handcarved dyed poplar wood frame 115 × 132.5 cm

660

Migración, 2018 Oil on canvas, mounted on handcarved dyed poplar wood frame 110 × 153.5 cm All works with additional support of Proyectos Monclova

Freddy Rodriguez Mulato de tal, 1974 Acrylic on canvas 203.2 × 101.6 cm Estate of Freddy Rodríguez

Miguel Ángel Rojas El Imperador 1, 1973-1980 Vintage silver gelatin print 20.3 × 25.2 cm El Imperador 5, 1973 Vintage silver gelatin print 20.3 × 25.2 cm El Negro, 1979 4 Vintage silver gelatin print 20.3 × 25.4 cm each All works with the additional support of Sicardi Ayers Bacino Gallery

Rosa Rolanda Tehuana, 1940 ca. Oil on canvas 61.5 × 51 cm Colección Eduardo F. Costantin

Jamini Roy Untitled - Krishna with Parrot, n.d. Tempera on canvas 96.5 × 51 cm Collection Sanjay Yaday, London With the additional support of Grosvenor Gallery, London

Rómulo Rozo Bachué, Diosa Generatriz de los Chibchas, 1925 Granite sculpture 177 × 44 × 40 cm Proyecto Bachué Collection With the additional support of Proyecto Bachué

Erica Rutherford Rubber Maids, 1970 Gouache on paper 71 × 56 cm The Estate of Erica Rutherford Self Portrait with Red Boots, 1974 Acrylic on canvas 137.2 × 132.1 cm The Estate of Erica Rutherford Collection of Beth Rudin DeWoody The Coat (the mirror), 1970 Acrylic on canvas 122 × 127.2 cm The Estate of Erica Rutherford The diver, 1968 Acrylic on canvas 176 × 120 cm The Estate of Erica Rutherford

Yellow Stockings, 1970 Gouache on paper 61 × 52.5 cm The Estate of Erica Rutherford All works with the additional support of Richard Saltoun Gallery

José Sabogal El Recluta, 1926 Oil on canvas 60 × 60 cm Centro Cultural UNI, Lima

Mahmoud Sabri Water (Quantum Realism Series), 1970 ca. Oil on canvas 87 × 87 cm Collection of Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah With the additional of Barjeel Art Foundation

Syed Sadequain Untitled (Lady with a Diya), 1950s-60s Oil on canvas 91.4 × 60.9 cm Taimur Hassan Collection With the additional support of Taimur Hassan

Nena Saguil Untitled (Abstract), 1972 Oil on canvas 126.9 × 127.5 cm National Fine Arts Collection of the National Museum of the Philippines With the additional support of National Museum of the Philippines

Mahmoud Saïd Haguer, 1923 Oil on canvas 81.2 × 64.7 cm Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar With the additional support of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar

Kazuya Sakai Pintura No.9, 1969 Acrylic on canvas 130 × 130 cm Marina Pellegrini Collection With the additional support of National Center for Art Research, Japan

Untitled from the series Bambus, n.d Acrylic on bamboo 193 × Ø 14 cm Antonio Almeida and Carlos Dale Jr Collection, São Paulo With the additional support of Almeida & Dale Galeria de Arte Untitled from the series Bambus, n.d Acrylic on bamboo 173 × Ø 17 cm Antonio Almeida and Carlos Dale Jr Collection, São Paulo With the additional support of Almeida & Dale Galeria de Arte Bambu, 1966 Acrylic on bamboo 197 × Ø 18 cm Ronie and Conrado Mesquita Collection, Rio de Janeiro With the additional support of Ronie and Conrado Mesquita Bambu, 1970 Acrylic on bamboo 179 × Ø 13 cm Ronie and Conrado Mesquita Collection, Rio de Janeiro With the additional support of Ronie and Conrado Mesquita Bamboo, 1960s Tempera on bamboo 178 × Ø 12 cm Collection of Heitor Martins and Fernanda Feitosa, São Paulo Bamboo, 1960s Tempera on bamboo 127 × Ø 14 cm Collection of Heitor Martins and Fernanda Feitosa, São Paulo Bamboo, n.d. Tempera on bamboo 216 × Ø 12 cm Collection of Heitor Martins and Fernanda Feitosa, São Paulo Bamboo, n.d. Tempera on bamboo 152 × Ø 17 cm Collection of Heitor Martins and Fernanda Feitosa, São Paulo

Untitled, Bamboo, 1960s Acrylic painting on bamboo 257.5 × Ø 4 cm With the additional support of Simões de Assis

Untitled, 1960s Paint on bamboo 225 × Ø 5 cm Collection of Heitor Martins and Fernanda Feitosa, São Paulo

Untitled, Bamboo, 1960s Acrylic painting on bamboo 215 × Ø 6.5 cm With the additional support of Simões de Assis

Bambu, n.d. Acrylic on bamboo 210.5 × Ø 9 cm Collection Paula and Marcelo Medeiros

Untitled, Bamboo, 1969 Acrylic painting on bamboo 273 × Ø 8.5 cm With the additional support of Simões de Assis

Bambu, n.d. Acrylic on bamboo 186.5 × Ø 17 cm Collection Paula and Marcelo Medeiros

Untitled, Bamboo, 1960s Acrylic on bamboo 233 × Ø 14 cm With the additional support of Simões de Assis

Bambu, n.d. Acrylic on bamboo 170 × Ø 9 cm Collection Paula and Marcelo Medeiros Bambu, n.d. Acrylic on bamboo 174 × Ø 14.5 cm Collection Paula and Marcelo Medeiros Bambu, n.d. Acrylic on bamboo 167 × Ø 14 cm Collection Paula and Marcelo Medeiros Bamboo II, 1960s Painting on bamboo 147.7 × Ø 16.8 cm With the additional support of Simões de Assis Bamboo, 1960s Painting on bamboo 176.5 × Ø 16.5 cm Paulo Setúbal Collection With the additional support of Simões de Assis Untitled, Bamboo, 1960s Tempera on bamboo 265 × Ø 8.5 cm With the additional support of Simões de Assis Bamboo, 1970s Tempera on bamboo 161 × Ø 15 cm Leonardo Lopes Rocha Leite Collection With the additional support of Simões de Assis Untitled, Bamboo, 1960s Acrylic painting on bamboo 243.5 × Ø 4.5 cm With the additional support of Simões de Assis

FREMDULOJ ĈIE

Bamboo, 1960s Tempera on bamboo 153 × Ø 14 cm Collection of Heitor Martins and Fernanda Feitosa, São Paulo

Dean Sameshima Anonymous Homosexual, 2020 Acrylic on canvas 30 × 40 cm Anonymous Faggot, 2020 Acrylic on canvas 31 × 40 cm being alone, 2022 10 Archival inkjet print on Hahnemuhle photo rag paper 59.5 × 42 cm each All works with the additional support of Kristina Kite Gallery, Los Angeles; Soft Opening, London; ifa — Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen

Zilia Sánchez Lunar, 1980 Acrylic on stretched canvas 118 × 121.9 × 29.9 cm The Mende Collection With the additional support of Galerie Lelong, New York

Bárbara Sánchez-Kane Prêt-à-Patria, 2021 Fiberglass, resin, steel structure, and polyester 560 × 63 × 170 cm Prêt-à-Patria, 2024 Performance Performers: Jhoav Stuart Molina Garcia; Kevin Adrian Beltran Villa All works with the additional support of kurimanzutto, Mexico City / New York; Ammodo

Nenne Sanguineti Poggi

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Untitled from the series Bambus, n.d Acrylic on bamboo 170 × Ø 11 cm Antonio Almeida and Carlos Dale Jr Collection, São Paulo With the additional support of Almeida & Dale Galeria de Arte

Tekkà, 1948 Oil on canvas 49 × 44 cm Vincenzo Sanguineti/ NSPART With the additional support of the Estate of Nenne Sanguineti Poggi 661

Ione Saldanha

BIENNALE ARTE 2024

Fanny Sanín

Oil No. 7, 1969 Oil on canvas 165 × 175 cm Collection of Steven and Olga Immel, New York With the additional support of the Fanny Sanín Legacy Project

Aligi Sassu Tobiolo, 1965 Oil on canvas 81 × 96 cm Archivio Aligi Sassu, Monza

Greta Schödl Untitled, 1980 Oil on canvas, india ink and gold leaf 185 × 102 cm Quarzite, from the series Scritture, 2020 India ink and gold leaf on quartzite 13.5 × Ø 8.2 Granito rosso Sierra Chica, from the series Scritture, 2020 India ink and gold leaf on red granite 13 × 20.2 × 10 cm

LIST OF WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION

Piccolo marmo rosato, from the series Scritture, 2020 India ink and gold leaf on pink marble 16 × 12 × 2 cm Schrift auf Seide, 2021 India ink and gold leaf on C.Dior silk 132 × 127 cm Marmo basso calcareo, from the series Scritture, 2023 India ink and gold leaf on marble 7.5 × 25 × 4 cm Marmo rosso, from the series Scritture, 2023 India ink and gold leaf on marble 9.5 × 12 × 8 cm Marmo rosso di Trani, from the series Scritture, 2023 India ink and gold leaf on red marble from Trani 13.5 × 12 × 9.6 cm Marmo rosso piatto, from the series Scritture, 2023 India ink and gold leaf on red marble 20 × 34 × 2 cm Marmo travertino, from the series Scritture, 2023 India ink and gold leaf on marble 10 × 20.5 × 5 cm

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Marmo travertino piccolo, from the series Scritture, 2023 India ink and gold leaf on marble 8.5 × 14.5 × 3 cm

Untitled, from the series Scritture, 2023 India ink and gold leaf on travertine marble 18 × 18 × 4 cm All works with the additional support of Phileas – The Austrian Office for Contemporary Art

Ana Segovia Vámonos con Pancho Villa!, 2020 Oil on canvas 210 × 240 cm Colección Mario y Begoña Pasquel With the additional support of kurimanzutto, Mexico City / New York Pos’ se acabó este cantar, 2021 Video installation 5 min 35 sec With the additional support of kurimanzutto, Mexico City / New York Charro Azul, 2023 Óleo sobre lienzo 185 × 130 cm Colección Rocío y Boris Hirmas With the additional support of Boris Hirmas

Gerard Sekoto Self-Portrait, 1947 Oil on canvas on board 45.7 × 35.6 cm The Kilbourn Collection With the additional support of The Kilbourn Collection

Jewad Selim Woman and a Jug, 1957 Oil on canvas 50 × 70 cm Private Collection

Lorna Selim Unknown, 1958 Oil on canvas 83 × 70.5 cm Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar With the additional support of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar

Joshua Serafin VOID, 2022 Video 9 min 14 sec VOID, 2023-2024 Performance All works with the additional support of Ammodo

Kang Seung Lee Constellation (blood moon hands), 2023 Graphite and watercolor on goatskin parchment, Sambe, sealing wax, feather, antique 24k gold thread, pearls, silver wire, pebble, shell button, laser engraved walnut veneer, walnut frame Approx. 133 × 92 × 6 cm Constellation (everything circulate), 2023 Graphite, watercolor, Sambe, sealing wax, jacaranda seed pod, feather, silver wire, piercing needle on goatskin parchment, antique 24k gold thread, pearls, shell button, wood, laser engraved walnut veneer, walnut frame Approx. 133 × 92 × 17 cm Constellation (my love has green lips), 2023 Graphite and watercolor on goatskin parchment, antique 24k gold thread, pearls, fossilized leaf, fossilized copper, shell button, laser engraved walnut veneer, walnut frame Approx. 133 × 92 × 6 cm Constellation (rain ocean sun), 2023 Graphite, watercolor, piercing needle, Sambe, sealing wax, feather, silver wire, dried plant on goatskin parchment, antique 24k gold thread, pearls, fossilized leaves, pebble, fossilized copper, laser engraved walnut veneer, walnut frame Approx. 133 × 92 × 7 cm Constellation (the blind rose), 2023 Graphite and watercolor on goatskin parchment, antique 24k gold thread, pearls, feather, fossil, silver wire, pebble, shell button, acorn, laser engraved walnut veneer, walnut frame Approx. 133 × 92 × 6 cm Constellation (when the winds blow), 2023 Graphite and watercolor on goatskin parchment, shell button, wood, laser engraved walnut veneer, walnut frame Approx. 133 × 92 × 17 cm Untitled (Constellation), 2023 Graphite, watercolor, antique 24K gold thread, Sambe, indigo dyed Sambe, pearls, 24K gold leaf, brass nails, goatskin parchment, walnut frame, dried plants and seeds from Elysian Park and Fort Road Beach in Singapore, pearls, feathers, silver wire, fossilized leaves from Pennsylvanian to Eocene eras, meteorite, fossilized copper, pebbles, wood, paper, mulberry paper, lacquered mulberry paper Approx. 15 × 300 × 750 cm Lazarus, 2023 Single-channel 4K video, color, sound 7 min 52 sec All works with the additional support of Arts Council Korea; Samsung Foundation of Culture

Head of a Girl, 1937 Oil on canvas 29 × 33 cm Taimur Hassan Collection With the additional support of Taimur Hassan

Anwar Jalal Shemza Composition in Red, Green and Yellow, 1963 Oil on canvas 91 × 71.5 cm Taimur Hassan Collection With the additional support of Taimur Hassan

Yinka Shonibare Refugee Astronaut VIII, 2024 Fibreglass mannequin, Dutch wax printed cotton textile, net, possessions, astronaut helmet, moon boots and steel baseplate 194.4 × 94 × 114 cm With the additional support of Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, Johannesburg, London and New York, James Cohan Gallery, New York and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and New York.

Doreen Sibanda Reclining Woman, 1978 Oil on canvas 60 × 60 cm National Gallery of Zimbabwe

Fadjar Sidik Dinamika Keruangan IX [The Dynamic of Space IX], 1974 Oil on canvas 80.5 × 60 cm National Gallery of Indonesia

Gazbia Sirry Portrait of a Nubian Family, 1962 Oil on canvas 72 × 53 cm Collection of Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah With the additional support of Barjeel Art Foundation

Lucas Sithole The Guitarist, 1988 Ironwood 136 × 49 × 24 cm Private Collection

Joseph Stella Fountain, 1929 Oil on canvas 124.5 × 101.6 cm Private Collection With the additional support of Schoelkopf Gallery, New York

Irma Stern Watussi Princess, 1942 Oil on canvas 69 × 55 cm Private Collection

Leopold Strobl Untitled, 2015 Pencil, coloured pencils on newsprint, mounted on paper 5.3 × 9.8 cm Untitled, 2015 Pencil, coloured pencils on newsprint, mounted on paper 6.7 × 12.9 cm Untitled, 2015 Pencil, coloured pencils on newsprint, mounted on paper 11.2 × 10.3 cm Untitled, 2015 Pencil, coloured pencils on newsprint, mounted on paper 6.2 × 10.6 cm Untitled, 2016 Pencil, coloured pencils on newsprint, mounted on paper 13.3 × 9.5 cm Untitled, 2021 Pencil, coloured pencils on newsprint, mounted on paper 20.1 × 10.2 cm Untitled, 2021 Pencil, coloured pencils on newsprint, mounted on paper 7.4 × 10.2 cm Untitled, 2021 Pencil, coloured pencils on newsprint, mounted on paper 8.5 × 8.8 cm Untitled, 2021 Pencil, coloured pencils on newsprint, mounted on paper 6.8 × 9.6 cm Untitled, 2021 Pencil, coloured pencils on newsprint, mounted on paper 9.6 × 14.6 cm Untitled, 2021 Pencil, coloured pencils on newsprint, mounted on paper 5.4 × 9.6 cm

Untitled, 2021 Pencil, coloured pencils on newsprint, mounted on paper 8.7 × 14.5 cm Untitled, 2021 Pencil, coloured pencils on newsprint, mounted on paper 5.9 × 9.6 cm

KANPOTARRAK NONAHI

Amrita Sher-Gil

Untitled, 1956 Oil on board 91 × 127 cm Jane and Kito de Boer Collection, London With the additional support of Grosvenor Gallery, London

Untitled, 2022 Pencil, coloured pencils on newsprint, mounted on paper 8.9 × 13.8 cm Untitled, 2022 Pencil, coloured pencils on newsprint, mounted on paper 9.3 × 11.6 cm Untitled, 2022 Pencil, coloured pencils on newsprint, mounted on paper 7 × 9.3 cm All works with the additional support of galerie gugging; Phileas – The Austrian Office for Contemporary Art

Emiria Sunassa Orang Irian dengan Burung Tjenderawasih [Irian Man with Bird of Paradise], 1948 Oil on canvas 67.2 × 54.5 cm Collection of the National Gallery Singapore With the additional support of the National Gallery Singapore & Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth of Singapore

Superflex Foreigners Please Don’t Leave Us Alone With The Danes!, 2002 Poster 70 × 50 cm With the additional support of Danish Arts Foundation

Armodio Tamayo Imilla, 1946 Oil on canvas 54 × 43 cm Museo Nacional de ArteFundación Cultural del Banco Central de Bolivia

Maria Taniguchi Untitled, 2023 Acrylic on canvas 228.6 × 114.3 cm Untitled, 2023 Acrylic on canvas 274.32 × 487.6 cm Untitled, 2023 Acrylic on canvas 274.3 × 121.9 cm All works with the additional support of Silverlens, Manila/ New York; carlier | gebauer Berlin/Madrid; and Taka Ishii, Tokyo/Hong Kong

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Natura Morta, 1918 Oil on canvas 60 × 73 cm Collezione Roberto Casamonti

Francis Newton Souza

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Gino Severini

BIENNALE ARTE 2024

Evelyn Taocheng Wang

Colored Cotton Candies and Imitation of Agnes Martin, 2023 Acrylic, gesso, pencil on linen canvas 185 × 185 cm Diamond, Gem and Imitation of Agnes Martin, 2023 Calligraphy ink, acrylic, gesso, pencil on linen canvas 185 × 185 cm Makeup Remover Cotton Pads and Imitation of Agnes Martin, 2023 Calligraphy ink, acrylic, gesso, pencil on linen canvas 185 × 185 cm Sugar Powder Bamboo and Imitation of Agnes Martin, 2023 Acrylic, gesso, pencil on linen canvas 185 × 185 cm Tulip in Whisky and Imitation of Agnes Martin, 2023 Acrylic, gesso, pencil on linen canvas 185 × 185 cm All works with the additional support of Antenna Space, Shanghai; Carlos/Ishikawa, London; Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam; Kayokoyuki, Tokyo and Mondriaan Fund

LIST OF WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION

Lucy Tejada El Sembrador, 1958 Oil on canvas 130 × 70.5 cm Colección de Arte del Banco de la República de Colombia

Mariana Telleria Dios es inmigrante (God Is an Immigrant), 2017/2023 10 aluminum sailboat masts, black epoxy paint, control lines/ steel cable and turnbuckles, marble and bronze plaque. 1500 × 390 × 925 cm Collection Jorge M. Pérez Collection, Miami With the additional support of Collection Bienalsur, Muntref; Museo de la Inmigración, Buenos Aires

Güneş Terkol

A song to the world -1, 2024 Embroidery on fabric 188 × 304 cm A song to the world -2, 2024 Embroidery on fabric 198 × 321 cm All works with the additional support of SAHA Association; Ammodo; CO.GE.S Don Lorenzo Milani; Casa Punto Froce; Ferda Art Platform

Eduardo Terrazas 1.1.91, 1970-72 Wool threads on a wooden board covered with Campeche wax 121 × 121 cm Luisa Strina

Clorindo Testa Pintura o Circulo negro, 1963 Oil on canvas 150.3 × 150.1 cm Colección Malba, Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires

Salman Toor The Beating, 2019 Oil on canvas 119.4 × 119.4 cm Collection Ilan Cohen, New York The Lock, 2023 Oil on panel 61 × 45.7 cm Backseat Boy, 2023 Oil on board 45.7 × 61 cm Chance Gathering, 2023 Oil on panel 45.7 × 61 cm Boy with Shoe, 2023 Oil on panel 121.9 × 91.4 cm Night Grove, 2024 Oil on panel 195.6 × 267 cm The Ceremony, 2024 Oil on panel 122 × 152.5 cm All works with the additional support of Luhring Augustine, New York

Frieda Toranzo Jaeger

664

Rage Is a Machine in Times of Senselessness, 2024 Oil and embroidery on canvas 1500 × 480 cm With the additional support of Galerie Barbara Weiss; Bortolami Gallery; Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo; ifa — Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen

Horacio Torres The White Ship, 1950 ca. Oil on canvas 82 × 69 cm

Joaquín Torres-García Retrato de VP, 1941 Oil on canvas 77 × 66 cm

Mario Tozzi Il Pittore, 1931 Oil on canvas 116 × 89 cm Collezione Roberto Casamonti

Twins Seven Seven The Architect, 1989 Ink on plywood, glued and carved 61 × 41 cm The Jean Pigozzi African Art Collection With the additional support of Jean Pigozzi

Ahmed Umar Talitin ‫( َتَالـِـِتِن‬The Third), 2023-24 Performance Talitin ‫( َتَالـِـِتِن‬The Third), 2023-24 Video 25 min 37 sec Talitin ‫( َتَالـِـِتِن‬The Third), 2023-24 Objects installation Variable dimensions All works with the additional support of Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA); Ammodo

Unidentified Chilean artists, Arpilleristas Arpillera, 1980s Embroidered and appliqued cloth, crochet, mixed media 80 × 99.1 cm Arpillera, 1980s Embroidered and appliqued cloth, crochet, mixed media 78.1 × 94 cm Arpillera, 1980s Embroidered and appliqued cloth, crochet, mixed media 76.2 × 96.5 cm Arpillera, 1980s Embroidered and appliqued cloth, crochet, mixed media 76.2 × 99.1 cm Arpillera, 1980s Embroidered and appliqued cloth, crochet, mixed media 76.8 × 94 cm

Rubem Valentim Pintura 2, 1964 Tempera on canvas 70 × 50 cm Ana Paula and José Luiz Vianna Collection, São Paulo, Brazil Pintura 7, 1965 Tempera on canvas 70 × 50.2 cm Roberto Bicca Collection Pintura 15, 1965 Tempera on canvas 100 × 73 cm Private Collection Composição Bahia n. 1, 1966 Tempera on canvas 101 × 73.5 cm Roberto Bicca Collection Pintura 3, 1966 Oil on canvas 100 × 73 cm Private Collection Pintura 26, 1965-66 Oil on canvas 100 × 73 cm Luiz Paulo Montenegro Collection All works with additional support of Almeida & Dale Galeria de Arte

Edoardo Daniele Villa Mother and Child, 1963-2010 Bronze 201 × 66 × 51 cm Private collection

Eliseu Visconti Autorretrato, 1902 Oil on canvas 64 × 48 cm Visconti Hirth Collection With the additional support of Almeida & Dale Galeria de Arte

Alfredo Volpi Fachada marrom, 1950-60s Tempera on canvas 118 × 77.5 cm Private Collection, São Paulo, Brazil With the additional support of Almeida & Dale Galeria de Arte

The Silence of Glacier, 2013 Oil on panel in two parts 91.4 × 182.9 × 5.1 cm

Das große Fest des Ajagemo, 1958 Àdìrẹ cassava-starch batik 200 × 400 cm

South Rim, 2016 Oil on panel in two parts 91.4 × 182.9 × 6.3 cm The Collection of Max and Pamela Berry

Ọbàtálá fängt Ṣàngós Pferd, 1958 Àdìrẹ cassava-starch batik 214 × 171 cm

Buffalo Spring, 2020 Oil on panel in two parts 40.6 × 101.6 × 5.1 cm Galena Pass, 2023 Oil on panel in two parts 101.6 × 203.2 × 3.8 cm Salmon River Valley, 2023 Oil on panel in two parts 101.6 × 203.2 × 5.1 cm The Shah Garg Collection All works with the additional support of Hales Gallery

WangShui Lipid Muse, 2024 Live multichannel simulation Cathexis III, 2024 Oil on aluminum Cathexis II, 2024 Oil on aluminum Cathexis I, 2024 Oil on aluminum All works with the additional support of kurimanzutto, Mexico City / New York and The Island

Agnes Waruguru Incomprehensible Weather in The Head, 2024 Acrylic ink, acrylic paint, indian ink, natural pigments, saffron, soft pastel and charcoal on cotton and glass beads 990 × 600 cm

Barrington Watson Conversation, 1981 Oil on canvas 127.5 × 91 cm The National Gallery of Jamaica

Osmond Watson Johnny Cool, 1967 Oil on canvas 85 × 71 cm The National Gallery of Jamaica

FREMDE ÜBERALL

Susanne Wenger

Leopard, die magische Erdendimension, 1959 Cassava starch batik 253 × 258 cm Die magische Frau, 1960 Àdìrẹ cassava-starch batik 253 × 163 cm Mythos Odùduwà Schöpfungsgeschichte, 1963 Cassava starch batik 194 × 334 cm All works Susanne Wenger Foundation All works with the additional support of Phileas – The Austrian Office for Contemporary Art

Emmi Whitehorse Typography of Standing Ruins #1, 2024 Mixed media oil, graphite, pastel, collage on paper affixed to canvas 151.1 × 227.3 cm Typography of Standing Ruins #2, 2024 Mixed media oil, graphite, pastel, collage on paper affixed to canvas 151.1 × 227.3 cm Typography of Standing Ruins #3, 2024 Mixed media oil, graphite, pastel, collage on paper affixed to canvas 151.1 × 227.3 cm World Upside Down, 2024 Mixed media oil, graphite, pastel, collage on paper affixed to canvas 151.1 × 227.3 cm All works with the additional support of Garth Greenan Gallery

Selwyn Wilson Study of a Head, 1948 Oil on board 52 × 52 cm Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki

Chang Woosoung Atelier, 1943 Ink and color on paper 210.5 × 167.5 cm Collection Leeum Museum of Art With the additional support of the Samsung Foundation of Culture

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Arpillera, 1980s Embroidered and appliqued cloth, crochet, mixed media 80 × 100.3 cm All works Collection of El Museo del Barrio, New York. Gift of Arthur and Dorothy Hammer, 1994

Kay WalkingStick

Celeste Woss y Gil Desnudo, 1948 Oil on canvas 59 × 46 cm Colección Museo Bellapart

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Arpillera, 1980s Embroidered and appliqued cloth, crochet, mixed media 80 × 97.8 cm

BIENNALE ARTE 2024

Xiyadie Wall, 2016 Papercut with waterbased dye and Chinese pigments on Xuan paper 140 × 140 cm Sewn, 1999 Papercut with waterbased dye and Chinese pigments on Xuan paper 140 × 140 cm Don’t Worry, mom is spinning thread in the next room (A love scene when high school student is at home writing homework), 2019 Papercut with waterbased dye and Chinese pigments on Xuan paper 140 × 140 cm All works with the additional support of P21 Kaiyang, 2021 Papercut with waterbased dye and Chinese pigments on Xuan paper 140 × 300 cm With the additional support of Blindspot Gallery

Rember Yahuarcani

LIST OF WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION

Los Abuelos, 2021 Acrylic on canvas 200 × 200 cm El territorio de los abuelos, 2023 Acrylic on canvas 300 × 300 cm Aquellos otros mundos, 2023 Acrylic on canvas 250 × 500 cm Las canoas tienen sueños feroces, 2023 Acrylic on canvas 170 × 240.5 cm El río, 2023 Acrylic on canvas 300 × 170 cm

Santiago Yahuarcani Aquì esta caliente, 2023 Natural pigments and acrylic on llanchama 279 × 524 cm Shiminbro, el Hacedor del sonido, 2023 Natural pigments and acrylic on llanchama 207 × 410 cm

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El Mundo del Agua, 2024 Natural pigments and acrylic on llanchama 283 × 671 cm

Nil Yalter

Pink Tension, 1969 Acrylic on canvas 120 × 180 cm Topak Ev,1973 Metal structure, felt, sheepskin, texts, and mixed media 250 × 300 cm Arter Collection Istanbul Exile is a hard job, 1983-2024 Video Installation Variable dimension All works with the additional support of SAHA Association; Institut français

Joseca Mokahesi Yanomami Xapiri yamaki urihipë taamuu totihi, xapiri yamaki urihipë taamu wawë totihi, xapiri yamaki urihipë taamu axihi totihi, xapiri ya ithuuha ya hwesikaki pooro pata araxina pë xatiti totihi, xapiri ya puru usipë araruu kupere. Maimasiki ni pata taamu axi xatitoma. Xapiri ya urihi pë taamu patiai totihoma, 2013 Graphite, color pencils and felt-tip pen ink on paper 30 × 42 cm Poriporiwë a, 2011 Graphite, color pencils and felt-tip pen ink on paper 30 × 42 cm Xapiri Parahorioma yani wahariomapë, roko ahikini pata hore riã reëri ehuhua kurarkiri, roko ahiki pata hore wakara praayaria kurakiri. Awei kami xapiri yamaki urihipë hõximaimi, yamakirihipë hore horepë siprërëhe xatiti totihi. Kuë yaro kami xapiriurihi a xamio pëha yamaki ithoimi, 2013 Graphite, color pencils and felt-tip pen ink on paper 30 × 42 cm Mamuruna hapa mahi a pata pirioma, hwei Mamuruna a pirio pëha ethë urihi wawë oxe totihitaoma. Mamuruna a pirio pëha, ai yanomãe e thë pë pairionimi. Yami mahi Mamuruna a pirioma. Mamuruna a piriawi yano e preonimi wãisia yano waiha a pirioma. Mamuruna a pirio piha pata e uhuanimi, Wãisia wai uwaiha a pirioma. Kama yano e sipoha puu e hanapë kuoma, hanapë hoaiwi. Inaha thë kua, hwei thuë Mamuruna aka kiinë, hapa mahi nara xiki raramariiwi a yai. Ihi anë wakëmamotima thë raramarema. Puu hanamuuwi thë raramarema, ama akanamuuwi thë raromarema. Mamuruna anë thëpë raroa thamarepë maha thëpë thapuu hikia. Nara e xihi kua, ama ehi kua, puu e hanaki kua, xote ehekua. Mamuruna pata thuë a yai, wakëmamatima thë yaika raramareni, 2017 Graphite, color pencils and felt-tip pen ink on paper 30 × 42 cm

Yaweresiri a, 2013 Graphite, color pencils and felt-tip pen ink on paper 30 × 42 cm Yãpimarinë ihurupë pë komi tei, pë komi ha tënë pë kae heri õsema awai miproiminë õhotaai thëpëka kuuwi tëhë, ihurupë kae heriihe Yãpimaripënë, ihurupë komi tearariihe, Yãpimari pë pata huu mahiopëha pë toai makurahiha ihuru a toarahita yamaki pihi kuimi!, 2011 Graphite, color pencils and felt-tip pen ink on paper 30 × 42 cm Kami xapiri yamaki hwãithaki yayoa nikere, inaha xapiriyamaki pihi kuënëhë maimi, ai yamaki hwãithaki rapenikere, ai xapiri yamakihe marokoxi. Kami xapiri yamakinë në wari yama a xëi maprario tëhë, yamaki tirei xoao tëhë, inaha yamaki imiki kuo, kuë yaro yamaki areremorayu, 2011 Graphite, color pencils and felt-tip pen ink on paper 30 × 42 cm Hwei thuë pëka kii, xapiri yãmanãyõma pë thëëpë. Yãmanãyõma inãha pë thëëpë kuë, pë hwãi thakisi utiti mahi, pë nãranã pë totihi. Kuë yaro përiã yai riëri mahi tohiti, inahã kuë yaro ai xapiri komi pë pihi irãa maihi pei përiãma kiini. Hwei yãmanãyôma pë thëëpë kakii, ahete kamë pë ithoimi, kihaamë puu tha urihi praaka kure hamë pë ithoa kukiyoma, 2013 Graphite, color pencils and felt-tip pen ink on paper 30 × 42 cm Yawarioma kupë, 2013 Graphite, color pencils and felt-tip pen ink on paper 30 × 42 cm Në wãri Yurikori apata ni ihiru a tei tëhë, xapiri Potiri pëni, Kãnari pëni, Ioari peni, Konari pëni, ai xapiri pë paixipë waiowi pëxë ihuru a kõrii he. ihi tëhë a haroa xoarayu. inaha xapiri pë kuai. Mau pata u hamë xapiri pë wai thiri huuwi kama kanoa e ahipë pree kua, kuë yaro xapiri ë horimaimi, 2013 Graphite, color pencils and felt-tip pen ink on paper 30 × 42 cm Xapiri Hawarihiri omamari a ithuu tëhë anë yai kiriai mahi, kuë yaro yanomãe yamaki amuku haari keai. Hwei hawarihiri omamari aka kii ani xawara a waiha ani yai waro pata a kutaeni kuë yaro hwei xapiri pata yamapë yai pihipo, 2011 Graphite, color pencils and felt-tip pen ink on paper 30 × 42 cm Untitled, 2011 Graphite, color pencils and felt-tip pen ink on paper 30 × 42 cm

Untitled 1, 1978-81 ca. Crayon on paper 21 × 29 cm Untitled 2, 1978-81 ca. Crayon on paper 21 × 29 cm Untitled 3, 1978-81 ca. Crayon on paper 21 × 29 cm Untitled 4, 1978-81 ca. Crayon on paper 21 × 29 cm Untitled 5, 1978-81 ca. Crayon on paper 21 × 29 cm Untitled 6, 1978-81 ca. Crayon on paper 21 × 29 cm Untitled 7, 1978-81 ca. Crayon on paper 21 × 29 cm Untitled 8, 1978-81 ca. Crayon on paper 21 × 29 cm Untitled 9, 1978-81 ca. Crayon on paper 21 × 29 cm Untitled 10, 1978-81 ca. Crayon on paper 21 × 29 cm Untitled 11, 1978-81 ca. Crayon on paper 21 × 29 cm Untitled 12, 1978-81 ca. Crayon on paper 21 × 29 cm Untitled 13, 1978-81 ca. Crayon on paper 21 × 29 cm Untitled 14, 1978-81 ca. Crayon on paper 21 × 29 cm Untitled 15, 1978-81 ca. Crayon on paper 21 × 29 cm Untitled 16, 1978-81 ca. Crayon on paper 21 × 29 cm

Yêdamaria Proteção de Yemanjá, 1978 Oil on canvas 91 × 80 cm Coleção Ayrson Heraclito

Ramses Younan Portrait, n.d. Oil on canvas 50 × 35 cm Collection of Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah With the additional support of Barjeel Art Foundation

Kim Yun Shin Add Two Add One, Divide Two Divide One 1979, 1979 Korean red pine wood 130 × 30 × 25 cm Add Two Add One, Divide Two Divide One 1979, 1979 Walnut wood 45 × 22 × 18 cm Add Two Add One, Divide Two Divide One 1984-84, 1984 Wood 145 × 38 × 35 cm Add Two Add One, Divide Two Divide One 1986, 1986 Wood 87 × 37 × 37 cm Add Two Add One, Divide Two Divide One 1989-209, 1989 Onyx 47 × 40 × 27 cm Add Two Add One, Divide Two Divide One 1991-422, 1991 Onyx 68 × 54 × 34 cm Add Two Add One, Divide Two Divide One 1991-418, 1991 Onyx 38 × 58 × 43 cm Add Two Add One, Divide Two Divide One 2001-719, 2001 Jasper 39 × 61 × 29 cm All works Private Collection All works with the additional support of Art Council Korea, Kukje Gallery and Lehmann Maupin.

Untitled, 1995 Oil on canvas 187 × 174 cm Taimur Hassan Collection With the additional support of Taimur Hassan

ชาวต่่างชาต่ิอยู่่่ทุุกสถานทุี

Untitled 18, 1978-81 ca. Crayon on paper 21 × 29 cm All works Collection Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain

Fahr El Nissa Zeid

Anna Zemánková Untitled, 1980 ca. Satin collage, fabric color and ballpoint pen on paper 62.6 × 44.8 cm Untitled, 1980 ca. Satin collage, fabric color and ballpoint pen on paper 62.6 × 44.8 cm Untitled, 1980 ca. Satin collage, fabric color and ballpoint pen on paper 62.5 × 45 cm Untitled, 1980 ca. Satin collage, fabric color and ballpoint pen on paper 67.7 × 51 cm Untitled, 1980 ca. Satin collage, fabric color and ballpoint pen on paper 62.5 × 45 cm Untitled, 1980 ca. Satin collage, fabric color and ballpoint pen on paper 62.5 × 45 cm Untitled, 1980 ca. Satin collage, fabric color and ballpoint pen on paper 62.6 × 45 cm Untitled, 1975 ca. Coloured pencil, ballpoint, embroidery and pearl on paper 62.5 × 45 cm Collection Emmanuelle et Guy Delcourt All works with the additional support of christian berst art brut

Bibi Zogbé Femme aux Fleurs, n.d. Oil on board 80.5 × 61 cm Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation With the additional support of Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

André Taniki Yanomami

Untitled 17, 1978-81 ca. Crayon on paper 21 × 29 cm

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Yamanayomani thë urihi karukai xoao tëhë wamotima thëpë raruu totihio tëhëma thëã. Yamanayoma a, 2013 Graphite, color pencils and felt-tip pen ink on paper 30 × 42 cm All works Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand. Doação [Gift] Clarice O. Tavares, 2021

BIENNALE ARTE 2024

APPLIED ARTS PAVILION Beatriz Milhazes Chocolat Noir, 2013 Collage of various papers and sweets’ wrappers on paper 70 × 50 cm Private Collection Small Red Tree, 2014 Collage of various papers and sweets’ wrappers on paper 89 × 58.5 cm Private Collection Manga e Maracujá em lilás e violeta, 2016 Collage of various papers on paper 55 × 50 cm Private Collection Cumaru, 2018 Collage of various papers on paper 43.2 × 38 cm Private Collection Cor de pele, 2019 Collage of various papers, shopping bags, sweets’ wrappers and artist’s prints cutouts on paper 96.5 × 88.5 cm Private Collection

LIST OF WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION

Flor de Margarida em Vermelho, Pink e Lilás, 2019 Collage of various papers on paper 33 × 29.4 cm Private Collection Oxalá, 2021 Collage of various papers and artist’s prints cutouts on paper 70 × 90 cm Private Collection Pindorama, 2020-22 Wool and silk tapestry 321 × 750 cm Collection Art in Embassies, U.S. Department of State Memórias do Futuro I, 2022 Acrylic on linen 180 × 200 cm Private Collection Colorido Cósmico, 2023 Acrylic on linen 281 × 320 cm Private Collection Meia-noite, Meio-dia, 2023 Acrylic on linen 280 × 302 cm Private Collection

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O Céu, as Estrelas e o Bailado, 2023 Acrylic on linen 281 × 280 cm Private Collection

The Golden Egg, 2023 Acrylic on linen 279 × 302 cm Private Collection Alegria Celestial, 2023-24 Acrylic on Linen 281 × 280 cm Private Collection La Biennale di Venezia with the Victoria and Albert Museum, London

“BONDING IN DIFFERENCE: INTERVIEW WITH ALFRED ARTEAGA (1993–1994).” IN THE SPIVAK READER, EDS. DONNA LANDRY AND GERALD MACLEAN. LONDON AND NEW YORK: ROUTLEDGE, 1996.

I am not in exile. I am not a migrant. I am a green-card-carrying critic of neocolonialism in the United States. It’s a difficult position to negotiate, because I will not marginalize myself in the United States in order to get sympathy from people who are genuinely marginalized.

GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK

CURATORIAL ACTIVISM. LONDON: THAMES & HUDSON, 2018.

We cannot claim to live in a post-queer world when in some countries being queer, gay, bisexual, and transgender is punishable by death, and in many more it is a criminal offence.

MAURA REILLY

The four finalists of the Biennale College Arte 2024 are:

Biennale College Arte

Biennale College is the project by La Biennale di Venezia dedicated to the practice and support granted to young artists in all the Artistic Departments and in the specific activities of La Biennale’s organisational structure. Operating in the Art, Architecture, Cinema, Dance, Music, Theatre Departments and the Historical Archive of Contemporary Arts (ASAC), Biennale College is conceived with the ambition to promote young talents, offering them the opportunity to work closely with international mentors to develop “creations” that become part of the programmes of the Artistic Departments.

Joyce Joumaa

Beirut, Lebanon, 1998. Lives in Montreal, Canada

Nazira Karimi

Dushanbe, Tajikistan, 1996. Lives in Almaty, Kazakhstan and Vienna, Austria

Sandra Poulson

Angolan, born in Lisbon, Portugal, 1995. Lives in Luanda, Angola and London, UK

Agnes Questionmark

Rome, Italy, 1995. Lives in Rome and New York City, USA

Amanda Carneiro, Fulvia Carnevale, Sofia Gotti, Candice Hopkins, Adriano Pedrosa, María Inés Rodríguez are the Tutors of the Biennale College Arte 2024.

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The four artists received a grant of 25,000 euros for the realisation of their projects. The artworks are presented, out of competition, in the Biennale Arte 2024.

Special Projects Supporters

Iván Argote

Isaac Chong Wai

Descanso, 2024

Falling Reversely, 2021 / 2024

With the support of: Albarrán Bourdais Perrotin Vermelho Institut français

With the additional support of: Hong Kong Arts Development Council Burger Collection and the TOY family Sunpride Foundation Ammodo Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office, Brussels Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong | Zilberman, Istanbul, Berlin and Miami Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen

Leilah Babirye Rukirabasaija from the Kuchu Western Bunyoro Kingdom, 2023 Inhebantu from the Kuchu Eastern Busoga Kingdom, 2023-2024 Oyo Nyimba Kabamba Iguru from the Kuchu Western Tooro Kingdom, 2023-2024 Ssangalyambogo from the Kuchu Central Buganda Kingdom, 2023-2024 Ugangi from the Kuchu Acholi Region, 2024 With the additional support of: Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and New York Gordon Robichaux, New York

Sol Calero Pabellón Criollo, 2024 With the additional support of: The Bukhman Family Foundation Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Cristalfarma Museo Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid Collection Silvia Fiorucci, Monaco Mauvilac Saikalis Bay Foundation Charlotte Meynert and Henrik Persson Gruppo Bardelli Colorobbia Terreal San Marco Antonio Murzi & Diana Morgan Tiqui Atencio Demirdjian Rebiennale | R3B Anna Guggenbuehl Diego Grandi Leslie Ramos Francesca Minini, Milan Crèvecœur, Paris ChertLüdde, Berlin

Claire Fontaine Foreigners Everywhere / Stranieri Ovunque (60th International Art Exhibition / 60. Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte), 2004 - 2024 Foreigners Everywhere (Selfportrait), Stranieri Ovunque (Autoritratto), 2024 Stranieri Ovunque (Autoritratto), Foreigners Everywhere (Self-portrait), 2024 With the support of: Dior, Paris

Simone Forti Adventure of Red Hat, Red Hat Pursued with Yellow, 1966 With the support of: Galleria Raffaella Cortese | Milano - Albisola The Box, Los Angeles Huddle, from the series Dance Constructions, 1961 With the support of: Galleria Raffaella Cortese | Milano - Albisola The Box, Los Angeles

Lauren Halsey keepers of the krown (antoinette grace halsey), 2024 keepers of the krown (susan burton), 2024 keepers of the krown (patrice rushen), 2024 keepers of the krown (dr. rachel eubanks), 2024 keepers of the krown (suzette johnson), 2024 keepers of the krown (robin daniels), 2024

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With the support of: David Kordansky Gallery Gagosian

MAHKU (Movimento dos Artistas Huni Kuin) Kapewe Pukeni [Bridge-alligator], 2024 With the support of: Bloomberg Fundação Bienal de São Paulo LUMA Foundation

Anna Maria Maiolino Anno 1942, from Mapas Mentais series, 1973-99 INDO & VINDO, 2024 With the support of: Hauser & Wirth, Luisa Strina, São Paulo Galleria Raffaella Cortese | Milano - Albisola Lisa and Tom Blumenthal Eliane and Alvaro Novis SIO-2 | Ceramica Collet

Daniel Otero Torres Aguacero, 2024 Donde llueve y se desborda, 2024 With the support of: Paprec MDB-Métiers du bois Trampoline, Association in support of the French art scene, Paris Ministère de la Culture-DRAC Ile- de-France dans le cadre du déploiement des Résidences d’artistes en entreprise mor charpentier, Bogotá and Paris Institut français

Arts Council Korea Kang Seung Lee Kim Yun Shin

Giulia Andreani Chaouki Choukini Bouchra Khalili Nil Yalter Iván Argote Daniel Otero Torres

Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar Rafa al-Nasiri Huguette Caland Saloua Raouda Choucair Mohamed Melehi Mahmoud Saïd Lorna Selim

National Museum of the Philippines Anita Magsaysay-Ho Nena Saguil

Office For Contemporary Art Norway (OCA) Ahmed Umar

Phileas – The Austrian Office for Contemporary Art Greta Schödl Leopold Strobl Susanne Wenger

Creative Australia Marlene Gilson Naminapu Maymuru-White

Creative New Zealand Brett Graham Fred Graham Mataaho Collective

Danish Arts Foundation Superflex

Diriyah Biennale Foundation Dana Awartani

Hong Kong Arts Development Council Isaac Chong Wai

ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen Karimah Ashadu Isaac Chong Wai Dean Sameshima Frieda Toranzo Jaeger Rindon Johnson

Ministry of Culture, Arts and Heritage and Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Government of Chile María Aranís Bordadoras de Isla Negra Celia Leyton Vidal Camilo Mori Laura Rodig Pizarro

SAHA Association Güneş Terkol Nil Yalter

Institutions Supporting the Artists

Isaac Chong Wai Antonio Jose Guzman & Iva Jankovic Lydia Ourahmane Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo) Bárbara Sánchez-Kane Joshua Serafin Güneş Terkol Ahmed Umar

Institut français

Mondriaan Fund Antonio Jose Guzman & Iva Jankovic

National Center for Art Research, Japan Tomie Ohtake Kazuya Sakai

National Gallery Singapore & Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth of Singapore Affandi Georgette Chen Chua Mia Tee Hendra Gunawan Lai Foong Moi Lê Phổ Lim Mu Hue Emiria Sunassa

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Ammodo

60. INTERNATIONAL ART EXHIBITION STRANIERI OVUNQUE – FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA Editorial Activities and Web Head Flavia Fossa Margutti Vol. 1 Editor Adriano Pedrosa Managing Editors Amanda Carneiro Sofia Gotti Editorial Coordination Maddalena Pietragnoli Editorial Staff Francesca Dolzani Giulia Gasparato Ornella Mogno Caterina Moro Sofia Pellegrini Pietrangelo Buttafuoco Foreword translated by John Francis Phillimore

Texts Carla Acevedo Yates, Michela Alessandrini, Saira Ansari, Fadia Antar, Carolina Arévalo Karl, Nadine Atallah, Regina Barros, Sonia Becce, Carmen Belmonte, Vic Brook, Antonella Camarda, Raphael Chikukwa, Diego Chocano, Jessica Clark, Natasha Conland, Gloria Cortes Aliaga, Laura Cosendey, Joselina Cruz, Nicolas Cuello, Nancy Dantas, Matheus de Andrade, Glaucea Helena de Britto, Arthur Debsi, Luce deLire, Tandazani Dhlakama, Sebastián Eduardo, Julia Eilers Smith, Heba Elkayal, Ticio Escobar, José Esparza Chong Cuy, Media Farzin, Merve Fejzula, Tracy Fenix, Raphael Fonseca, Mariella Franzoni, María Amalia García, Jessica Gerschultz, Guilherme Giufrida, Lorenzo Giusti, Natalia Grabowska, Sybilla Griffin, Myrna Guerrero Villalona, Rosario Güiraldes, Latika Gupta, Laura Hakel, Sara Herman, Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz, Teo Hui Min, Marko Ilić, Luiza Interlenghi, Dana Iskakova, Jaya Jacobo, Elena Ketelsen González, Riad Kherdeen, Teresa Kittler, Lex Morgan Lancaster, Lim Shujuan, Joleen Loh, Miguel Lopez, William Hernandez Luege, Florencia Malbrán, Adeena May, André Mesquita, Virginia Moon, Rodrigo Moura, Leandro Muniz, Khushi Nansi, Lucia Neirotti, Nadine Nour el Din, Zamansele Nsele, Fernando Oliva, Ade J. Omotosho, Amanda Pinatih, Eva Posas, Anissa Rahadiningtyas, Ruth Ramsden-Karelse, Sara Raza, Sofía Shaula Reeser-del Rio, Daniel Rey, David Ribeiro, Isabella Rjeille, Xavier Robles Armas, Daniela Rodrigues,

C J Salapare, Rasha Salti, Marco Scotini, Phoebe Scott, Juan Manuel Silverio, Devika Singh, Britte Sloothaak, Kostas Stasinopoulos, Gisela Steinlechner, Suheyla Takesh, Adele Tan, Asep Topan, Lisa Trever, Deniz Turker, Emiliano Valdes, Xin Wang, Wong Binghao, Arzu Yayıntaş, Sonia Zampini Editorial English Management Karen Marta, Todd Bradway, KMEC Books English Copyediting Flatpage Graphic Design and Layout Estudio Campo Paula Tinoco Roderico Souza Carolina Aboarrage Translations and Layout Liberink srls, Padova Stefano Turon Coordinator Livio Cassese Layout Copyediting Rosanna Alberti Caterina Vettore Translations Salvatore Mele and Giuliana Schiavi for Alphaville Roberta Prandin Ismar Tirelli Neto Photolith and Print Grafiche Antiga Spa via delle Industrie 1, Crocetta del Montello (Treviso) By SIAE 2024 Etel Adnan, Dia al-Azzawi, Rafa al-Nasiri, Giulia Andreani, Iván Argote, Gianni Bertini, Lina Bo Bardi, Victor Brecheret, Chaouki Choukini, Claire Fontaine, Liz Collins, Olga Costa, Filippo de Pisis, Emiliano Di Cavalcanti, Cícero Dias, Ibrahim El-Salahi, Evan Ifekoya,

Mohammed Issiakhem, María Izquierdo, Frida Kahlo, Bouchra Khalili, Wifredo Lam, Judith Lauand, Maggie Laubser, Mohamed Melehi, Carlos Mérida, Malangatana Valente Ngwenya, Daniel Otero Torres, George Pemba, Claudio Perna, Lê Phổ, Candido Portinari, Sayed Haider Raza, Diego Rivera, Fanny Sanín, Aligi Sassu, Gerard Sekoto, Gino Severini, Anwar Jalal Shemza, Yinka Shonibare, Francis Newton Souza, Irma Stern, Twins Seven Seven, Ahmed Umar. © La Biennale di Venezia 2024 The captions and credits of the images in this publication have been compiled with the outmost care. Any errors or omissions are unintentional, and we will be glad to include appropriate credits and solve any copyrightrelated issues in future editions if new informationcomes to the attention of La Biennale di Venezia. All Rights Reserved under international copyright conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. ISBN 9788898727889 La Biennale di Venezia First Edition April 2024

Participating Countries and Collateral Events

Biennale Arte Foreigners Everywhere

2024

Participating Countries 6 8 10 12 14 16 18

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

STRANIERI OVUNQUE

20 22 24 26 28 30 32 34 36 38 40 42 44 46 48 50 52 54 56 58 60 62 64 66 68 70 72 74 76 78 80 82 84 90 92 94 96 98 100 102

Albania Argentina Republic of Armenia Australia Austria Republic of Azerbaijan People’s Republic of Bangladesh Belgium Republic of Benin Plurinational State of Bolivia Bosnia-Herzegovina Brazil Bulgaria Republic of Cameroon Canada Chile People’s Republic of China Democratic Republic of Congo Croatia Cuba Republic of Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Egypt Estonia Ethiopia Finland France Georgia Germany Great Britain Greece Grenada Holy See Hungary Iceland Islamic Republic of Iran Ireland Israel Italy Ivory Coast Japan Republic of Kazakhstan Kenya Republic of Korea Republic of Kosovo Latvia

104 106 108 110 112 114 116 118 120 122 124 126 128 130 132 134 136 138 140 142 144 146 148 150 152 154 156 158 160 162 164 166 168 170 172 174 176 178 180 182 184

Lebanon Lithuania Grand Duchy of Luxembourg Malta Mexico Mongolia Montenegro The Netherlands Nigeria Nordic Countries (Sweden, Finland, Norway) Republic of North Macedonia Sultanate of Oman Republic of Panama Peru Philippines Poland Portugal Romania Republic of San Marino Saudi Arabia Senegal Serbia Republic of Seychelles Singapore Slovak Republic Republic of Slovenia Republic of South Africa Spain Switzerland United Republic of Tanzania Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste Türkiye Uganda Ukraine United Arab Emirates United States of America Uruguay Republic of Uzbekistan Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela Republic of Zimbabwe Venice Pavilion

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A Journey to the Infinite: Yoo Youngkuk A World of Many Worlds Above Zobeide, Exhibition from Macao, China All African People’s Consulate Andrzej Wróblewski (1927–1957). In the First Person Berlinde De Bruyckere: City of Refuge III Catalonia in Venice | Bestiari | Carlos Casas Cosmic Garden Daring to Dream in a World of Constant Fear Desde San Juan Bautista... Elias Sime: Dichotomy ፊት አና jerba Ernest Pignon-Ernest: Je Est Un Autre Ewa Juszkiewicz: Locks With Leaves And Swelling Buds Jim Dine – Dog on the Forge Josèfa Ntjam: swell of spæc(i)es Lee Bae — La Maison de La Lune Brûlée Madang: Where We Become Us Passengers In Transit Per non perdere il filo. Karine N’guyen Van Tham – Parul Thacker Peter Hujar: Portraits in Life and Death Rebecca Ackroyd: Mirror Stage Robert Indiana: The Sweet Mystery Seundja Rhee: Towards the Antipodes Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior South West Bank Landworks, Collective Action and Sound The Endless Spiral: Betsabeé Romero The Spirits of Maritime Crossing Trevor Yeung: Courtyard of Attachments, Hong Kong in Venice Ydessa Hendeles: Grand Hotel Yuan Goang-Ming: Everyday War

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List of Participants

191 193 195 197 199 201 203 205 207 209 211 213 215 217 219 221 223 225 227 229 231 233 235 237 239 241 243 245

Contents

Collateral Events

Participating Countries

Albania

Commissioner Blendi Gonxhja, Minister of Economy, Culture and Innovation Curator Antonio Grulli Artist Iva Lulashi Project Manager Alessandra Biscaro Assistants Viola Cenacchi Benedetta Zannoni Exhibition Project VERLATO+ZORDAN studio architettura Installation GREEN SPIN With the Support of Ministry of Economy, Culture and Innovation Doris Alimerko (Coordinator for MECI)

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

In her project for the Albanian Pavilion, the painter Iva Lulashi evokes the “glass of water theory”. This theory, dating back to the Russian pre-revolutionary period and linked to the feminist thinker Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952), is based on the idea of a sexual revolution where impulses are seen as a simple necessity that must be satisfied with the same carefreeness that a glass of water is drunk with. It had a great influence on the artistic circles of those years but was immediately opposed by the revolutionary political establishments. Water is the basic condition of life, just like love, and both of them move in a continuous state of fragility. Love, sex and desire can give meaning or ruin our lives, and are still today the last great eternally revolutionary force. Lulashi’s work revolves around these universal subjects capable of transcending differences and overcoming borders, not just geographical ones. The images of her paintings are taken from film and video stills. They are mainly populated by female bodies, and suggest situations potentially linked to the erotic act — almost as if they were “immediately before” or “immediately after” — without explicitly showing it and thus provoking a state of tension and ambiguity.

PARTICIPATING COUNTRIES

Her style blends the Albanian pictorial tradition with the Italian and Venetian one. At first sight the paintings emerge for their “photographic” attitude, while at a more careful look they appear strongly pictorial, made of a livid liquidity, of synthetic brushstrokes devoid of any affectation, which leave many parts of the painting deliberately unresolved and almost abstract. They are an ode to feminine desire, encompassing strength, fear, hope, a desire for freedom, some dark sides, and vitality. Born in Albania, the artist trained as a painter in Venice, the city of water and glass, attending the local Academy of Fine Arts. The spaces of the pavilion are created following the architectural plan of the artist’s home/studio, stylized, simplified, free of objects and transformed into a functional exhibition space. In this way, visitors will be able to admire the works among the spaces in which they are born and live, between intimacy, voyeurism and institutional critique. Antonio Grulli

Love as a Glass of Water

Iva Lulashi, Amari rossori, 2024. Oil on canvas, 100 × 120 cm. Photo courtesy Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy the Artist.

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Iva Lulashi, Bed of light, 2024. Oil on canvas, 100 × 150 cm. Photo courtesy Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy the Artist.

Argentina

Commissioner Mtro. Alejandra Pecoraro Curator Sofía Dourron Artist Luciana Lamothe Collaborators Silvia Badariotti Guillermo Mirochnic Nicolás Panasiuk Ana Inciarte With the Support of Ministry of Foreign Affairs, International Trade and Worship

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

Hope the Doors Collapse explores the boundaries separating the human from the non-human, the natural from the built, and the known from the unknown. Situated in this liminal region of indetermination, Lamothe intertwines pieces of wood and pipes, people and structures, and mutability and permanence to create spaces inside spaces that modulate forms of violence and care in a tense balance of interdependent bodies. The work establishes matter as the principle of the real and a common horizon of everything there is to effect a series of changes in traditional construction methods and as a result, in the relationships we form with our environments and with each other. In search of a new sense of kinship, the artist extends her earlier research into the functions, limitations, and potentials of materials and their interactions with architecture to subvert some of its imperatives and usages. The tangle of steel and wood thus positions us in an environment whose material forces manifest their agency and erode the anthropocentric ontology of modernity. Lamothe’s sculptures address objects (human, infrastructural, industrial, and “natural”), their latent potentials, and the spatial medium in which they exist to test alternatives to their known modes of interaction. The scaffolding and phenolic wood plates infiltrate architectural and infrastructural systems, revealing the layers of techno-textures, information, histories, and relationships that comprise their quasi-industrial, quasi-natural bodies. By displaying the dismantled innards of our constructions and reshaping them in unexpected spatial formulations, the project insists on the possibility of transforming our built environments and the networks of relationships that shape the world as we experience it.

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Each of the four sculptures that make up the work serves as an enveloping and habitable space proposing a different way of conceiving our connection with the material world. They contain both forms of care and aggression which appear in the cuts, slashes, assemblages, and twists required for the work to maintain its shape: a series of wounds and sutures that recognize the weight of centuries of social, spatial, and material conditioning. The work’s entanglement enunciates an ecology in which bodies, objects, and structures fracture the borders between culture and nature, human and non-human, to imagine material alliances for other possible ways of life: symbiotic, queer, and caring lives. Sofía Dourron

Hope the Doors Collapse FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Luciana Lamothe, Hope the Doors Collapse, 2024, detail. Plywood, scaffolding and wood, dimensions variable. Photo Catalina Romero.

Republic of Armenia

Commissioner Svetlana Sahakyan, Head of Modern Art Department The Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sport of the Republic of Armenia Curator Armen Yesayants Artist Nina Khemchyan Organisation and Support The Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sport of the Republic of Armenia The Cafesjian Center for the Arts

Echo is a multi-dimensional multi-media project by Armenian artist Nina Khemchyan. The pavilion encapsulates concepts drawn from Medieval Armenian cultural heritage and diverse spiritual universal principles. Echo features two major artworks related to and fulfilling one another. Inventor of the Armenian alphabet, philosopher, theologian, priest, and poet, Mesrop Mashtots is a fundamental figure in the history and culture of his country: a spiritual leader, founder of Armenian sacred music, a true enlightener. For a long time, Khemchyan has been immersed in his work. Eventually, she encountered the enigmatic voice of the singer Hasmik Baghdasaryan-Dolukhanyan who had been performing Mashtots’ sharakans, sacred hymns, written in the fifth century, and this gave birth to Echo—a delicate and contemporary interpretation of an essential piece of Armenian heritage. Eleven blue ceramic spheres, each adorned with golden incrustations, represent a specific selection of Armenian sharakans, Mashtots’ eleven chants of repentance. The installation is supplemented by an a capella performance of the hymns by Baghdasaryan-Dolukhanyan: an artistic fusion of physical sculpture and music, blending the tangible and auditory to represent Armenian sacred music in an evocative way. The words transform into visual codes, creating a meditative environment.

The exhibition complemented with the project Seven Deadly Sins by Nina Khemchyan: a 50-metre single-piece paper roll artwork divided into seven distinct parts, each representing one of the sins: Pride, Envy, Wrath, Sloth, Greed, Gluttony, and Lust. Black ink on white paper not only provides a stark, graphic quality but also symbolizes the polarity of morality and immorality inherent in the concept of sins. Each episode is crafted with graphic, grotesque visuals that are both captivating and thought-provoking. One should pave a way through this serpentine of sins to enter the space of meditative self-reflection and forgiveness resonating in medieval spiritual hymns, finally culminating in a profound connection with the essence of all existence. The two projects enhance and intensify each other, intertwining the themes of human sinfulness with the quest for spiritual redemption. In one case, sins are depicted as visual texts filled with imagery, whereas in the other, literal texts (the sharakans) are transformed into visual codes on the spheres. This interplay leads to a profound narrative where visual codes and textual elements enrich each other’s meaning. The Armenian Pavilion also reflects the title of the Biennale Arte, Foreigners Everywhere - Stranieri Ovunque, featuring Nina Khemchyan, an Armenian female artist living in France. Although based in Europe, her oeuvre is deeply rooted in Armenian medieval heritage, endangered today, transcending geographical and temporal boundaries to address universal themes of identity, memory, and belonging. Armen Yesayants

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

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Echo

Nina Khemchyan, Echo, 2022. Clay, gold, brass, metal, paint, 11 pieces, diameter 45–50 cm. Photo Asatur Yesayants. Courtesy Cafesjian Center for the Arts.

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Nina Khemchyan, Seven Deadly Sins, 2018. Ink on paper, 70 × 5000 cm (detail 70 × 400 cm). Photo Zaven Khachikyan. Courtesy Nina Khemchyan.

Australia

Commissioner Creative Australia Curator Ellie Buttrose Artist Archie Moore With the support of Robert Morgan (Chair) Alenka Tindale Alexandra Dimos Marie-Louise Theile Terry Wu Contributors Djon Mundine OAM Erika Scott Grace LucasPennington Jeremy Virag Kevin O’Brien Larissa Behrendt OA Lucille Paterson Luke O’Donohoe Saida Bondini Sam Bloor Sebastian Adams Stuart Geddes Žiga Testen Articulate Clony di Vistosi Carlotta & C. COXS Servicio Know How Production Pelham University of Queensland Art Museum Education Partner University of Melbourne Exhibition Partner Arup Lighting Design BVN Architecture Terraslate The Commercial Programming Partners ArtReview Fondazione Querini Stampalia With gratitude to Australia at the Biennale Arte 2024 supporters and contributors

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

First Nations peoples of Australia are some of the oldest continuous living cultures on Earth. Archie Moore’s kith and kin is both evidence and reminder of this fact, tracing the artist’s Aboriginal relations (from the Kamilaroi and Bigambul nations) over 65,000+ years up walls and across the ceiling, engulfing audiences. Archie’s choice of materials for this celestial map of names — fragile chalk on blackboard — refers to the transmission of knowledge and how what is taught and what is left out of the prevailing education system reverberates into the future with consequence. This taxonomy traces the artist’s personal history from himself to close kin, to distant relatives, segueing through generic and racist slurs, extending to countless generations of ancestors. The mural reaches so far into time that it captures the common ancestors of all humans. The diagram once used by anthropologists to document Archie’s relations is superseded by the complexity of Indigenous kinship systems. The use of Kamilaroi and Bigambul words in kith and kin celebrates Indigenous language revival initiatives. Holes occur in the family tree, the voids signalling colonial invasions, massacres, diseases, and displacement that sever familial ties. A reflective pool occupies the centre of the room, another black void and a memorial for the hundreds of First Nations deaths in state custody. Indigenous Australians are one of the most incarcerated people globally. Coroners’ reports documenting these deaths are cradled by the reflection of the family tree, commemorating that each of these deceased are part of this vast web of relation.

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Archival records amongst the reports show how colonial laws and government policies have long been imposed upon First Nations peoples. Tying these wider histories back to his family story, Archie includes documents that specifically reference kin, such as his second cousin’s removal to Boggo Road Gaol or the government denying his grandparents access to the benefits of national citizenship. The artist uses his family history to make systemic issues uncomfortably tangible to audiences while providing a prescient reminder that we are all kin. Ellie Buttrose, Archie Moore

Archie Moore, Valerie Jean Moore in kith and kin, 2024. Found photograph, Australian Pavilion, Biennale Arte 2024. Graphic design work Žiga Testen and Stuart Geddes. Courtesy the Artist and The Commercial. © the Artist.

kith and kin FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Archie Moore, Fredrick Noel Clevens in kith and kin, 2024. Found photograph, Australian Pavilion, Biennale Arte 2024. Graphic design work Žiga Testen and Stuart Geddes. Courtesy the Artist and The Commercial. © the Artist.

Austria

Commissioner The Arts and Culture Division of the Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport of Austria Curator Gabriele Spindler Artist Anna Jermolaewa Artistic Consultants Scott Clifford Evans Manfred Grübl Anastasia Jermolaewa Exhibition Design Manfred Grübl, Vienna Project and Production Management section.a, Vienna Technical Coordination Venice M+B Studio, Venice Media Partner Esteban, Vienna Event Planning Venice Solmarino, Venice On Behalf of The Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, Civil Service and Sport – Division Arts and Culture General Partner Land Oberösterreich

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

With the Support of Land Niederösterreich City of Linz With the Additional Support of Phileas – The Austrian Office for Contemporary Art Friends of the Austrian Pavilion Partners Erste Stiftung BIG Bundesimmobiliengesellschaft Energie AG Oberösterreich Eva and Christoph Dichand Geyer & Geyer Zumtobel Barta M.A.I. Kontakt Collection evn Collection Steffi and Leo Störk Friends Habau Arbeiterkammer Freunde der bildenden Künste Wolfgang Schuster With the Contribution of Bioweingut Lenikus artbook Move On Bösendorfer Vöslauer A1 Media Partner Collectors Agenda

For its pavilion at Biennale Arte 2024, Austria presents conceptual artist Anna Jermolaewa. In her work, the artist — born in Leningrad (USSR) and living in Vienna since 1989 — proves to be an astute observer of human coexistence, its social conditions and political requisites. For the Austrian contribution, Jermolaewa draws an arc from her personal experience of migration as a political refugee to signifiers of nonviolent resistance against authoritarian regimes. After fleeing the Soviet Union, Anna Jermolaewa spent her first nights in Vienna on a train station bench. Her memories of the time are the departure point for the presentation at the pavilion, as the artist reenacted the trauma of these sleepless nights seventeen years later in Research for Sleeping Positions. In her artistic practice, Jermolaewa manages time and again to connect individual memories to collective ones, developing them into haunting works of art. In Ribs, she addresses the fact that western music — especially pop, jazz, and rock — was prohibited in the Soviet Union. Resourceful tinkerers transferred the music onto used X-ray film, which led to the term “music on ribs”. While Ribs undermines a governmental ban, The Penultimate shows specific uprisings against political regimes in various countries, most of which resulted in an overthrow of leadership. The different plants — a bouquet of carnations, a cedar, or a little orange tree — symbolise the eponymous revolutions.

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For the artist, who has close biographical ties to Ukraine, the recent Russian invasion constituted a rift, both personally and regarding her artistic practice. From this stance emerged Rehearsal for Swan Lake, presented for the first time at the Austrian Pavilion, in collaboration with Ukrainian choreographer Oksana Serheieva. The starting point for this work is a memory from Jermolaewa’s teen years. In times of political unrest, for instance the death of a head of state, Soviet television replaced their regularly scheduled broadcast with Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake in a loop for days. In Soviet cultural memory, the famous ballet became code for a change in power. Jermolaewa and Serheieva turn the ballet from a tool of censorship and distraction into a form of political protest — here, the dancers rehearse for regime change in Russia. Gabriele Spindler

Anna Jermolaewa

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Anna Jermolaewa, Oksana Serheieva, Rehearsal for Swan Lake, 2023. Photo Anna Jermolaewa. © Bildrecht Vienna, Anna Jermolaewa, Oksana Serheieva.

Republic of Azerbaijan

Commissioner Ambassador Rashad Aslanov Curators Luca Beatrice Amina Melikova Artists Vusala Agharaziyeva Rashad Alakbarov Irina Eldarova Executor Heydar Aliyev Foundation, Azerbaijan in collaboration with the Embassy of the Republic of Azerbaijan in Italy and the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Azerbaijan Curators’ Assistants Giorgia Achilarre Nazrin Ismaylova Exhibition Design Ostudio Coordinators Paolo De Grandis Carlotta Scarpa PDG Arte Communications Consultant Lana Sokolova

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

Inspired by the title of the Biennale Arte proposed by the curator Adriano Pedrosa, the artists of the Azerbaijan pavilion have created site-specific works reflecting on the meaning of the expression “Foreigners everywhere”, considering it a fundamental cultural urgency of our time. Vusala Agharaziyeva investigates the theme of estrangement, emphasising the emotional intensity of always feeling like a stranger in one’s own life. Moving from home to home, relocating, travelling, and migrating always bring momentous changes that affect one’s personal identity and art. Investigating the concept of migration – from major displacement to the scrutiny of minimal human space – Agharaziyeva recounts her own experience and transforms it into a universal value for her country, Azerbaijan, whose history has been closely connected to and shaped by the dynamics of migration. Rashad Alakbarov offers a significant perspective on the concept of birthplace, emphasising how this gradually shapes our identity over time. His work describes how, through the succession of different transformations, individuals are configured as metaphorical doors, windows, walls, or roofs. In particular, walls (symbols of closure, separation, protection) can hide intriguing secrets. To unveil these secrets, Alakbarov suggests approaching and observing the work from different perspectives. Mirrors, factual reflections of the present, confirm the presence of each individual. His research, which deploys different media and languages, culminates in the affirmation of both personal and collective presence, emphasising the profound bond that is created between individuals and the places where they have lived.

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Irina Eldarova has created a series of paintings that draw on personal episodes. Growing up in a country as rich in traditions as Russia, the artist interacts with different cultures. The move to Azerbaijan was a crucial milestone in her life. Through an analysis of the concept of place as a centre of exchange and fusion between peoples, Eldarova emphasises the importance of respectfully welcoming “the other”, highlighting the universal idea of mutual understanding and comradeship. Luca Beatrice Amina Melikova

Rashad Alakbarov, I Am Here, 2024. Mixed media (white walls, carpets, mirror), 370 × 270 × 270 cm. Courtesy the Artist.

From Caspian to Pink Planet: I Am Here

Vusala Agharaziyeva, Pink Planet, 2023–24. Acrylic on canvas, 130 × 130 cm. Photo Nigar Rzayeva. Courtesy the Artist.

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Irina Eldarova, Offer, 2013. Oil on canvas, 152 × 152 cm. Photo Irina Eldarova. Courtesy the Artist.

People’s Republic of Bangladesh

Commissioner Liaquat Ali Lucky Curator Viviana Vannucci Artists Shahid Kabir Mini Karim Abdur Rab Shahjahan Ahmed Bikash Claudia De Leonardis Anna Carla De Leonardis Roberto Saglietto Nataliia Revoniuk Patrizia Casagranda DoJoong Jo Jiyoon Oh Franco Marrocco Marco Nereo Rotelli Mirko Demattè Other Collaborators Giovanni Serradifalco Natalia Gryniuk With the Support of Shilpakala Academy Serradifalco Editore Musa International Zero Otto Srl Un

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

The Contact is an exhibition set in a distant future where we imagine the landing of aliens on earth, the arrival of creatures who come into contact with the inhabitants of the blue planet. The exhibition project thus develops starting from the impact that the so-called extraterrestrials have on humanity, considering the effects and reactions that the UFO phenomenon can cause on the fate of human beings. At the basis of this meeting is the concept of diversity determined by the unequivocal contrast between the alien gender and the human gender, an idea that can be a reason for conflict, fear, marginalization, discrimination, but at the same time can constitute an interesting food for thought. In other words, the contact with the UFO world, told by the different artistic expressions of the exhibitors, can be interpreted as an invitation to explore the theme of diversity, which now becomes a more concrete and tangible phenomenon than ever. The knowledge of the other inhabitants of the cosmos can represent an idea of reflection on the relativism of the concept of different and foreigner, explaining itself in the question of who the different ones are, whether terrestrials or aliens. Furthermore, the exhibition project can be an opportunity to focus on the concept of belonging which on the one hand concerns the relationship between humanity and the earth, and on the other hand the relationship between all living beings and the universe.

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This artistic project develops through a variety of media, including painting, sculpture, photography and installations. Each artist depicted this futuristic scenario inside a spaceship from which aliens observe life on Earth. The pavilion was designed to reproduce the interior of an alien spaceship, creating a futuristic and surreal setting, where visitors can immerse themselves in the extraterrestrial experience to better understand the alien point of view. The works created for the exhibition represent the forms of extraterrestrial life that inhabit the spaceship, including the mirror paintings that depict aliens and at the same time reflect the images of the visitors who are mirrored. There are also paintings that simulate the windows of the spaceship from which the Martians observe life on Earth or extraordinary images from the universe. Viviana Vannucci

The Contact

Franco Marrocco, COSA, 2024, detail. Enamelled terracotta, overall dimensions, 400 × 400 × 400 cm, detail 30 × 40 × 25 cm.

Marco Nereo Rotelli, in collaboration with Space Architect Valentina Sumini, Pietro Grandi and Antonio Alfano, Gondola Aerospaziale, 2024. NFT video installation and iron window frame, 120 × 75 cm. Courtesy of the Artist. © Marco Nereo Rotelli.

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Roberto Saglietto, Senza titolo, 2022. Mixed media on canvas, 100 × 160 cm. Courtesy the Artist.

Belgium

Commissioner Wallonia-Brussels Federation Artists Denicolai & Provoost Antoinette Jattiot Nord Spec uloos Structural Partner Wallonia-Brussels International Institutional Partners BPS22 Charleroi FRAC Dunkerque Young Curators Programme ArBA ESA KASK, Ghent Academic Partners La Cambre (ENSAV) Esä / DunkerqueTourcoing With the Support of Degroof Petercam Private Banking The Merode LMNO Brussels Eeckman Art & Insurance MOBULL Sigma PPG Coatings The Navigator Company visit.brussels Paolo Boselli (Q3RN_ Brussels) and all the SuperFriends & Friends of the Belgian Pavilion

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

Cross-mixing art, curating, architecture, typography and cartography, the collective (Denicolai & Provoost, Antoinette Jattiot, Nord, Spec uloos) displaces the traditional exhibition format, in a collaborative and horizontal mode, through successive chapters and a fictional potential. The members of the collective gathered for the Biennale Arte 2024, with as their theme the physical and symbolic crossing of boundaries, are linked by long-term collaborations and their roles as intermediaries and critics inside and outside the field of art, from which they interrogate the way we view collective, popular, alternative organisations and their modes of sharing. Petticoat Government is a multidisciplinary scenario based on existing folkloric giants from various communities in Belgium, France, Spain. The performative journeys in the direction of Italy, passing through the Resia Pass on 9 March 2024 and then returning to Charleroi and Dunkirk in 2025, inject a joyful disturbance into reality using the variety of plays of scale and tensions between the human and non-human, landscape and architecture, borders and their transgression. Unlike a closed work, the Belgian Pavilion is imagined as a place of passage, with a kaleidoscope perspective. By way of the place given to orality and the co-construction of stories, and the “above ground” aerial and sound staging of the gigantic figures, it is the origin of contemporary mythologies and centuries-old stories that is interrogated.

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Derived from a historical expression of a reversal of power relations, the title suggests a still ongoing process of disruption. PG imagines a paradigm shift by blurring the frontiers between artistic and popular disciplines and cultures. The collective and its many accomplices activate the potential of mixing genres and attitudes as opportunities to question complexity and to make contact with the worlds with which they relate. Beyond stigmatizing individually based practice, the project underlines the feasibility of a collective “doing together” as a potential vector of transformation. PG sees folklore as a vector of stories, knowledge and circulation in its living dimension, through actual events, transmission and encounters, rather than its territorial limits or artifacts. Giants create and fertilize grounds for the empowerment of the communities that support them, in a direction that gives everyone the power to act.

Petticoat Government Petticoat Government #7, 2023. Bic pen and pencil on elemental chlorine-free paper, 28 × 38 cm. Courtesy Petticoat Government (Denicolai & Provoost, Antoinette Jattiot, Nord, Spec uloos) and LMNO, Brussels.

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Petticoat Government, Portraits. 1 Sophie Boiron; 2 Valentin Bollaert; 3 Simona Denicolai; 4 Pauline Fockedey; 5 Pierre Huyghebaert; 6 Antoinette Jattiot; 7 Ivo Provoost. Courtesy Petticoat Government (Denicolai & Provoost, Antoinette Jattiot, Nord, Spec uloos).

Republic of Benin

Commissioner José Pliya Curator Azu Nwagbogu Artists Moufouli Bello Chloé Quenum Ishola Akpo Romuald Hazoumè Associate Curator Yassine Lassissi Scenographer Franck Houndégla Organisation ADAC – Agence de Développement des Arts et de la Culture Ministère du Tourisme de la Culture et des Arts

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

Everything Precious Is Fragile emerges from a deep exploration of Gelede traditions, an ancient philosȯ of ̇ Yoruba ̇ phy cultures. This curatorial endeavour addresses the fragile state of today’s world, marked by ecological challenges, conflicts, political unrest, social inequalities, and cultural shifts. In collaboration with traditional rulers in the Republic of Benin, the curatorial team initiated a dialogue shaping the pavilion’s concept. This concept humbly embraces fragility and the ephemeral nature of existence. Gelede philosophy unveils ecological, ̇ ̇ ̇ cultural, and social dimenpolitical, sions, celebrating indigenous wisdom’s resurgence as a powerful tool against contemporary challenges and highlighting the vital role of women in preserving core values. The chosen artists — Romuald Hazoumè, Chloé Quenum, Ishola Akpo, and Moufouli Bello — embody this indigenous ethos, advocating Beninese ideas of regeneration, rebirth, and [re]matriation. Benin’s historical legacy, influenced by feminist iconography like Agojie Warriors, vodunsis, and figures resisting slavery, forms the backdrop for the exhibition. Everything Precious Is Fragile is rooted in Benin’s commitment to promoting its artistic and cultural scene since 2016. The recent restitution of twenty-six royal treasures looted by France led to the exhibition Art du Bénin d’hier et d’aujourd’hui: de la restitution à la révélation, exploring three centuries of Benin art history.

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The pavilion invites viewers to explore resilience and wisdom, foundational elements of Beninese culture, envisioning a compassionate future. It challenges perceptions of fragility and strength through the works of the four visionary artists. The Arsenale’s Beninese Pavilion will feature a library on colonial legacy, Indigenous knowledge marginalisation, African continent representation, and biodiversity loss — highlighting the paradox of fragile knowledge enduring despite colonial exploitation and epistemic injustices. The Beninese Pavilion at the Biennale Arte 2024 addresses contemporary issues, revealing shared vulnerabilities and emphasising the need to draw inspiration from traditional philosophies for a more enlightened and compassionate world. It prompts the question: what is the opposite of fragility? Strength, hardness, durability, or a blend including kindness and compassion? This intangibility is what the pavilion tries to capture. Azu Nwagbogu

Everything Precious Is Fragile

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Plurinational State of Bolivia

Commissioner Juan Carlos Cordero Nina Curator Ministry of Culture of the Plurinational State of Bolivia Artists Elvira Espejo Ayca Oswaldo “Achu” De León Kantule Yanaki Herrera Duhigó Zahy Tentehar Lorgio Vaca Maria Alexandra Bravo Cladera Rolando Vargas Ramos Edwin Alejo Cristina Quispe Huanca Martina Mamani Robles Prima Flores Torrez Laura Tola Ventura María Eugenia Cruz Sanchez Faustina Flores Ferreyra Pamela Onostre Reynolds Guillermina Cueva Sita Magdalena Cuasace Claudia Opimi Vaca Olga Rivero Díaz Reina Morales Davalos Silvia Montaño Ito Ignacia Chuviru Surubi Ronald Morán Humberto Velez

Drawing on Andean ancestral cosmovision, this project invites us to dwell on the reparative power of walking and carrying. It is a reflection on time and the ways to win it away from the propulsive onslaught of contemporary monoculture. The famous Aymara saying “Quipnayra uñtasis sarnaqapxañani” — loosely translated as “Looking behind and in front we’ll make our way” — presents a distinctive spatio-temporal outlook in which the future is figured to be behind, as a burden best shouldered upon the back, so as not to obstruct the view of the past before our eyes or divert the focus from the present. This interplay of future-past, where the past can be envisioned as the future, melds the two temporal dimensions into a cohesive unity, disrupting the linear trajectory of time and outlining the emergence of a densely layered present. In this intricate web of temporalities, traces of ancient epochs intertwine with myriad perspectives and narratives, weaving a tapestry of existence beyond mere linear progression.

Opening Performances Los Thuthanka (ChuquimamaniCondori, Joshua Chuquimia Crampton) Orquesta Experimental de Instrumentos Nativos (OEIN) (Romina Quisbert, Andrea Alvarez, Pablo Olmos, Ariel Laura, Ethan Olmos, Gabriela Saravia, Alvaro Cabrera, Tatiana Lopez, Einar Fuentes, Adriana Escobar)

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

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The exhibition is a journey through the contemporary artistic scene of Latin America, delving into the creative, aesthetic, cultural, and social realities of artists hailing from different countries who converge to narrate the pluricultural world of Abya Yala (“living land” or “land that flourishes” in the Kuna language) — a term reclaimed by Amerindian peoples to redefine their connections to ancestral lands. The showcased works weave diverse narratives, advocating for a “mutual nurturing” of sensibilities, exploring the symbolic complexity of motherhood, crafting counter-hegemonic narratives, and resisting historical erasure and dispossession. They offer different strategies to disarticulate the protocols of colonial domination and epistemic violence while simultaneously shaping a repertoire of imaginaries that eschew extractive recuperation.

looking to the futurepast, we are treading forward

Oswaldo “Achu” De León Kantule, La fuga Niños Rojos, 2023. Acrylic on canvas, 122 x 91 cm.

Lorgio Vaca, La Gesta del Oriente, 2016. Real-size sketch, pencil on kraft paper.

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Duhigó, Tacape, 2014. Acrylic on canvas, 23.5 x 53.5 cm. Image courtesy Bruno Tuma Sierra Collection.

Bosnia-Herzegovina

Commissioner and Curator Marin Ivanović Artist Stjepan Skoko Organisation University of Mostar Museum of Modern Art Mostar With the Support of Ministry of Civil Affairs of Bosnia and Herzegovina Federal Ministry of Culture and Sports of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina Herzegovina-Neretva Canton City of Mostar

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

Stjepan Skoko’s artistic project deals with reading the layered meaning and symbolism of the sea, its depth and spaciousness, civilisational conditioning and role in the identity of the individual. According to Fernand Braudel, the Mediterranean preserved its continuity more in the hinterland than along the coast. This cultural space belongs to Herzegovina, which is the homeland of Stjepan Skoko, so the authenticity of his work is manifested in the inherent belonging to the sea, which is physically just within reach. The first part of the sculptural ensemble consists of square sections formed from aluminium, painted in a bright blue colour with some elements that are covered with rust or sandblasted in raw aluminium. These square elements represent the “Measure of the Sea”, the eternal human need to know the world by means of categorisation, organisation, calculation — the sea is divided into latitudes and longitudes, geographical coordinates that are drawn with regular lines on nautical charts and form “quadrants”; distances are measured by nautical miles, speed is expressed in knots, and the direction of movement is determined with a compass, and the rose of winds is inextricably linked to it, which are the greatest help and greatest threat to a man at sea.

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The second part of the sculptural ensemble evokes the undersea, mussels and other shells. These sculptural elements are made of iron forged in a traditional forge in Kreševo, and with this, the author connected the sea with the deep interior of our country, very close to the geographic centre of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Individual circular elements are welded to each other and are shaped like verticals, thus referring to the method of growing mussels on vertically placed ropes. The spatial sculptural unit is completed with sound elements, reinterpreted sounds of the sea and human activity, which creates a link with the forging of sculptural components, the welding of metal (which is also the sounds of the shipyard) and the sounds created by sea creatures.

The Measure of the Sea

Stjepan Skoko, The Measure of the Sea, 2023. Aluminium and iron, 120 × 120 × 120 cm. Photo Miho Skvrce. © Museum of Modern Art Mostar.

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Stjepan Skoko, The Measure of the Sea, 2023. Aluminium and iron, 120 × 120 × 120 cm. Photo Miho Skvrce. © Museum of Modern Art Mostar.

Brazil

Commissioner Andrea Pinheiro, President of the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo Curators Arissana Pataxó Denilson Baniwa Gustavo Caboco Wapichana Artists Glicéria Tupinambá with the Tupinambá Community of Serra do Padeiro and Olivença, Bahia Olinda Tupinambá Ziel Karapotó Organisation Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, Ministry of Culture, Ministry of Foreign Affairs Embassy of Brazil in Rome

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

Ka’a Pûera, or capoeira, are areas of field that, after the harvest, lie dormant and covered with low-lying vegetation. At a glance, they look like an infertile-strange-anomalous terrain when, in fact, they boast a great variety of sacred and medicinal plants. Ka’a Pûera is also a bird of brown, orange and grey plumage that is able to camouflage itself in the undergrowth. The capoeiras call on us to learn that we are interconnected, and that diversity and gender-dilution, human-bird-memory-nature, bodies in transformation, the visible and the invisible, coexist so that life can perpetuate itself. The Hãhãwpuá Pavilion, as we refer to the Brazilian Pavilion, presents an exhibition bringing together the Tupinambá Community and artists originating from coastal peoples — the first to be transformed into foreigners in their own Hãhãw (ancestral territory) — in order to express another perspective on the vast territory where over 300 Indigenous peoples live (Hãhãwpuá). Glicéria Tupinambá summons the mantles of her people, with their “bones”, presences, and absences, forming Okará Assojaba, the council of listening elders. In Dobra do tempo infinito [Fold of Infinite Time], the artist presents a video installation with trawls (fishing traps) that create connections between their weaves and traditional costumes. The work was produced after meetings with Grupo Atã — formed of Tupinambá youths and elders from the Serra do Padeiro and Olivença villages in Bahia. Ziel Karapotó presents Cardume [School of Fish], an installation that combines maracas and fired cartridges, confronting colonial processes. Olinda Tupinambá, in turn, presents a video installation that amplifies the voice of Kaapora, a spiritual entity that watches over our relationship with the planet.

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The Hãhãwpuá Pavilion tells a story of Indigenous resistance in Brazil, the strength of the body present in the retaking of territory, and adaptation to climate emergencies. The exhibition is being held in the year that one of the mantles returns to Brazil after a long period in European exile, where it had been held since 1699 as a political prisoner. The garment spans times and updates the issues of colonization, while the Tupinambá and other peoples continue their anti-colonial struggle in their territories — like the Ka’a Pûera, birds that walk over resurgent forests. Arissana Pataxó Denilson Baniwa Gustavo Caboco Wapichana

Ka’a Pûera: We Are Walking Birds

Glicéria Tupinambá, Céu tupinambá [Tupinambá Sky], 2022. Drawing. Courtesy the Artist.

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Glicéria Tupinambá, Manto tupinambá [Tupinambá Mantle], 2023. Photo Glicéria Tupinambá. Courtesy the Artist.

Bulgaria

Commissioner Nadezhda Dzhakova Curator Vasil Vladimirov Artists Krasimira Butseva Julian Chehirian Lilia Topouzova

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

The Neighbours explores the silenced memories of survivors of political violence during Bulgaria’s communist era (1945 to 1989). Employing found objects, video, and sound design, the installation conveys the stories of those who endured Bulgarian Gulag camps and prisons. This multidisciplinary project, rooted in extensive scholarly research and more than forty interviews conducted by the practitioners, reimagines the survivors’ homes — the spaces where the interviews occurred — inviting audiences to inhabit them and bear witness. The exhibition focuses on the intricacies of the ways individuals remember and articulate their experiences in the aftermath of traumatic events. Lilia Topouzova’s theoretical framework identifies three methods of remembering that appear within the exhibition as three rooms — a living room, a bedroom, and a kitchen. In the living room are the voices of those who remember and are vocal about their experiences. The bedroom reflects the survivors who do not speak, whether out of fear or simply because they have never been asked. The third room is dedicated to those who do not remember and remain silent or never had the chance to speak. The Neighbours examines how the period of socialism is publicly remembered, but also how some of these memories unfold distinctly in private spaces. In the absence thus far of Bulgarian institutional engagement with the history and legacy of state violence, the project plays a crucial role in the process of unsilencing. It also reflects on the evolving function of museums and cultural institutions in providing a platform for individual and minority stories, contributing to discussions on truth, reconciliation, and collective memory.

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The installation enacts a space of care and collective healing, employing the language of absence to nurture remembrance as an act of resistance against oblivion. Video projections, ambient sounds, and recovered items from forced labour camps visually connect the material world of the camps with the space of the home, evoking the ways traumatic memories permeate daily existence. Responding to the Biennale Arte’s theme of reflecting on the “foreign”, The Neighbours unveils the stories of “domestic foreigners” who faced persecution for deviating from the regime’s ideals. It serves as a poignant memorial, while critically examining its enduring impact on the present and emphasising art’s vital role in engaging with complex realities. Vasil Vladimirov

The Neighbours

Krasimira Butseva, Julian Chehirian, Lilia Topouzova, The Neighbours, 2022. The bedroom: cabinet with found objects from the former forced labour camp sites. Photo Krasimira Butseva. Studio Benkovski 40. © Krasimira Butseva, Julian Chehirian, Lilia Topouzova.

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Krasimira Butseva, Julian Chehirian, Lilia Topouzova, The Neighbours, 2022. The living room, multimedia installation: found objects, video. Photo Krasimira Butseva. Studio Benkovski 40. © Krasimira Butseva, Julian Chehirian, Lilia Topouzova.

Republic of Cameroon

Commissioner Serge Achille Ndouma Curators Paul Emmanuel Loga Mahop Sandro Orlandi Stagl Artists Jean Michel Dissake Hako Hankson Kendji & Ollo Arts Patrick-Joël Tatcheda Yonkeu Guy Wouete Angelo Accardi Julia Bornefeld Cesare Catania Adélaïde Laurent-Bellue Franco Mazzucchelli Rex and Edna Volcan Giorgio Tentolini Liu Youju In Collaboration with Massimo Scaringella Project Manager Chiara Modìca Donà dalle Rose Organisation Origini Events Afran (Francis Nathan Abiamba) Gianluca Balocco David Berkovitz Sonia Cristoph Tony d'Amico Marzia Ratti David Sirota Alice Valenti Alexandros Yorkadjis Special Thanks to Marthe Beatrice Happi Paolo Mozzo Filippo Bontempi Ji Xiaofeng

The Latin adage “Nemo propheta in patria” (No prophet in his own land) signifies the condition in which an individual rarely attains prestige and recognition in their birthplace, where everyone knows them, whereas this frequently occurs elsewhere, far away among strangers. In this context, a prophet is fundamentally someone misunderstood by their contemporaries and fellow countrymen owing to their dissonant nature. They stand out for something (not necessarily extreme or of genius-level) due to their capacity to look beyond, to perceive what others do not, as they anticipate the times and think differently from the masses. This is why they are seldom comprehended, particularly in their original community, where there is a greater expectation for them to adhere to the group’s “norms.” Historical instances abound of enlightened individuals being forced to relocate due to opposition to their ideas or beliefs, or only acquiring recognition posthumously. Art has consistently been at the forefront of eliminating discrimination and disseminating ideas across social and geographical boundaries. In essence, the Latin adage reflects a universal truth about the challenge that many innovators face in gaining appreciation and understanding in their native environment, where conformity is often the prevailing expectation.

With the Support of Fondazione Donà dalle Rose BIAS Institute The Doge Venice Red Carpet Cometh

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

PARTICIPATING COUNTRIES

As part of an Exhibition dedicated to foreigners and their diasporas, the Cameroon Pavilion will shine an international spotlight on some Cameroonian artists and other artists from all over the world, outside their native contexts but as part of a broader vision project. The project celebrates all those who have had to leave their communities in search of work, attention, and perhaps success elsewhere. This applies to millions of migrants across all eras; it can be said that no nation has been immune to this phenomenon, both in contributing to it and experiencing it. The Cameroon Pavilion will be the “pavilion of wonders”, where projects by local and international artists will coalesce to commemorate the bravery of those who never gave up and pursued their ideas and projects independently of the recognition obtained locally, while aiming for a well-deserved and ambitious international horizon. It will be a pavilion where differences are regarded as a source of richness, and where no one feels like an outsider. Sandro Orlandi Stagl

Nemo propheta in patria

33 From left to right: Patrick Joël Tatchenda Yonkeu, Kendji & Ollo Arts, Hako Hankson and Jean Michel Dissake Dissake. Installation in the centre: Guy Wouete.

From left to right: Liu Youju, Franco Mazzucchelli, Rex and Edna Volcan, and Adélaïde Laurent-Bellue.

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

From left to right: Angelo Accardi, Cesare Catania, Giorgio Tentolini.

Canada

Commissioner National Gallery of Canada Curator Gaëtane Verna Artist Kapwani Kiwanga Partners National Gallery of Canada Foundation Canada Council for the Arts Canada Pavilion Patron Reesa Greenberg Canadian Artists in Venice Endowment Patrons Donald R. Sobey Family The Michael and Sonja Koerner Charitable Foundation The Michelle Koerner Family Foundation Jackie Flanagan The Jack Weinbaum Family Foundation Hon. Bill Morneau & Nancy McCain Rosamond Ivey Stonecroft Foundation for the Arts Robin & Malcolm Anthony The DH Gales Family Charitable Foundation of Toronto Nadir & Shabin Mohamed The Freybe Family Private family foundation

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

Kapwani Kiwanga is a multi-disciplinary artist who considers how diverse forms of power are manifested, how the histories they suppress are often overlooked, and their impact on everyday life. Her works function as experiential archives that offer temporary ruptures in established conventions, allowing audiences to both experience and imagine alternative ways of relating and being. Kiwanga transforms the Canada Pavilion by way of a site-specific sculptural installation. She invites visitors into an immersive environment through an ambitious intervention on the building’s interior and exterior. Viewed from its facade, the building becomes a large-scale tableau: where distinctions between inside and outside dissolve through transparency, layering, and transgressing of the building’s original boundaries. Kiwanga’s work is anything but static: as one moves through the helical architecture, it unfolds, multiplying the visitors’ perspectives. The principal material employed in the installation consists of conterie, also known as seed beads. Historically employed as both currency and items of exchange, these tiny glass units are used by Kiwanga to deftly construct the monumental out of the minute.

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The same seed bead could be considered as an archive or a witness to past transactions that indelibly transformed the socioeconomic landscape of the sixteenth century and beyond. Conterie were dispersed from Murano in the Venetian archipelago and incorporated into various material cultures throughout the world. Kiwanga’s installation addresses the often-destructive history of commerce, yet the work pushes further and asks one to consider how the trade of these beads for varied materials shaped our current world. Other materials are integrated in nearly raw states. Whether in free-standing sculptures or within the exhibition space, Kiwanga selected these specific elements after researching transoceanic trade involving conterie. Rising from the floor onto the walls and spilling out into the courtyard, these materials emerge to encounter the beads. The meeting of these distinct materials with the beads formalises a place of exchange, asking one to reflect on questions of inherent value, aesthetics and the complexity of global economic relations.

Trinket

Kapwani Kiwanga, Retenue, 2023. Cotton rope, wood, steel, water, variable dimensions. Exhibition view, Retenue, Capc, Bordeaux, 2023. Production Capc. © Photo Marc Domage. Courtesy the Artist.

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Kapwani Kiwanga, On Growth, 2023. Aluminium, dichroic glass, steel, 305 × 183 × 183 cm. High Line, New York, 2023. Commissioned and produced by High Line Art, presented by the High Line and NYC Parks. © Photo Timothy Schenck. Courtesy the Artist and Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, Johannesburg, London.

Chile

Commissioner Florencia Loewenthal Curator Andrea Pacheco González Artist Valeria Montti Colque Organisation Ministry of Culture, Arts and Heritage and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Government of Chile In Co-production with Bonniers Konsthall, Sweden

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

One of the greatest challenges facing governments in the coming decades will be to address the problems associated with the archaic construct of the nation with contemporary tools. Although a solid European intellectual architecture has defended this unity of territorial organisation since the seventeenth century, it is nationalism that remains a political pathology that emerges time and again and becomes an obstacle to the evolution of our civilisation. After four centuries, the nation continues to be a “cultural artefact” (as in Comunidades Imaginadas by Benedict Anderson) that feeds on fantasy and is sustained by emotion. Valeria Montti Colque was born in Stockholm, in 1978, two years after her parents fled the Chilean military dictatorship and settled there as a result of Sweden’s institutional commitment to Salvador Allende’s overthrown government. She grew up outside of Stockholm, in a municipality that in the mid-1990s was home to a diverse displaced community from different continents. The particular way of life and social coexistence that characterised this “diasporic enclave” (as in The Postdiaspora Condition by Michel Laguerre), full of cultural richness, was the source that fuelled her work from the beginning. Her actions, drawings, murals, sculptures, or installations, abound with unidentifiable entities, collage-bodies, mestizo subjectivities that create animated objects, traversing colourful landscapes, in constant transit, always travelling.

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We have borrowed the term “cosmonation” from the anthropologist Michel S. Laguerre, who states that diasporic communities do not sever relations with their homeland, but remain linked to their ancestral places by material, affective and spiritual ways. In this sense, they inhabit a cosmonation that unifies geographically distant territories. Cosmonación disrupts the notion of national representation — Montti Colque would be the first Chilean artist not born in Chile to participate in its pavilion — and proposes to enter a cosmonational space where the visitor will find “a set of interconnected sites” (Laguerre) through the artist’s biography. These different places and identities are connected through Mamita Montaña (Mother Mountain), the pavilion’s centrepiece, which suggests a symbolic collective shelter to the displaced communities, the inhabitants of this other imagined community that is the nation outside the nation, in which each member of the diaspora lives. Andrea Pacheco González

Cosmonación

Valeria Montti Colque, Apu Jokerita, 2024. Video still frame. Photo courtesy of filmmaker Alexis Zeiss. Photo edition Daniel Takacs.

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Valeria Montti Colque, Piedra Volcano, 2024. Digital collage printed on aquarelle paper. Courtesy the Artist.

People’s Republic of China

Commissioner China Arts and Entertainment Group (CAEG) Curators Wang Xiaosong Jiang Jun Artists Che Jianquan Jiao Xingtao Shi Hui Qiu Zhenzhong Wang Shaoqiang Wang Zhenghong Zhu Jinshi The project team of “A Comprehensive Collection of Ancient Chinese Paintings” Assistant Curators Wang Jingchao Wang Dan Huang Xue Zhou Jie Lou Zhe Zhou Yi Zhang Yan Zeng Chaowei Academic Support Zhejiang University Organisation Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the People’s Republic of China

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

The character “集”, in its ancient form “ ”, depicts three birds perched on a single tree. As a verb, it encompasses meanings including to gather, converge, collect, or assemble. In this exhibition, “集” is employed to underscore the concept of integration. This character acts as an invitation, embodying absorption and acceptance, fostering opportunities for dialogue, communication, and mutual understanding. In Chinese, the term “集” can be translated as “atlas”. Its essence lies in facilitating intercommunication among a broader audience group, and even forming a sense of “community”. This is the transition of “集” (collection) to “展” (exhibition). Therefore this exhibition is divided into two main sections: “集 (collect)” and its extension, “ 传 (translate)”. The “Collect” section displays digital documentation of 100 Chinese paintings currently held overseas, all sourced from the digital archive of “A Comprehensive Collection of Ancient Chinese Paintings” project. Spanning eighteen years, this project has compiled a collection of 12,405 pieces. We selected 100 of these paintings from the collection in a data visualization format. It delves into the history of their dispersion and circulation, using images to chronicle history and demonstrating the journey from the physical loss to digital reclamation — encapsulating the process of “collecting.”

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The “Translate” section emphasizes “inheriting” and disseminating. Here, seven contemporary artists display seven sets of artworks in response to the digital archives of “A Comprehensive Collection of Ancient Chinese Paintings”, in an endeavour to balance the traditional with the contemporary, and the regional with the global. The curatorial team draws inspiration from Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, juxtaposing a multitude of images, linking Chinese historical paintings with contemporary artworks. A century ago, Warburg placed images from different regions and eras side by side on panels to study the logic of human historical evolution and emotional expression, seeking to uncover the “commonality” in human behaviour and cognition behind the images. In today’s world, this approach undoubtedly remains a pressing need for humanity amidst division and conflict. This exhibition seeks to facilitate a paradigm shift — from “difference” to “coexistence” — by reactivating and disseminating the wisdom embedded in traditional Chinese culture, which advocates for “harmony in diversity”, “harmonious coexistence”, and “shared beauty”. Jiang Jun

Wang Xiaosong

Atlas: Harmony in Diversity

Shi Hui, Writing-Non-Writing Series, 2021–24. Xuan paper, paper pulp, cotton thread, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo © Shi Hui.

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Project Team, A Comprehensive Collection of Ancient Chinese Paintings, 2005–2024. Archives, digital visualization, dimensions variable. Photo IN DESIGN GROUP.

Democratic Republic of Congo

Commissioner Joseph Ibongo Gilungula, Head of Cabinet of the Minister of Culture Curators James Putnam Michele Gervasuti Artists Aimé Mpane Eddy Kamuanga Ilunga Eddy Ekete Mombesa Jean Katambayi Mukendi Cédric Sungo Mome Steve Bandoma Kongo Astronauts (Eléonore Hellio, Michel Ekeba) Opening Performance 5:50 Firmitas Utilitas Venustas. A new paradigm, curated by Federica Forti and coordinated by Changbei Wu Artists: Primoz Bizjak Centre d’Art Waza (group) Alessandro Librio Faustin Linyekula Scuola di Santa Rosa (Francesco Lauretta, Luigi Presicce) Tao Qiu Kay Zevallos Stephan Zimmerli Deputy Commissioner of the Pavilion Nathalie Kutika Nzamba, Assistant for Cultural Diplomacy of the Ministry of Culture Arts and Heritage of the DRC Organisation Ministry of Culture Arts and Heritage Gervasuti Foundation London-Venice & Sourire de femmes (ONG)

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

With the Support of Axis Gallery, New York, NY, USA Nomad Gallery, Brussels, Belgium October Gallery, London, UK Wouters Gallery, Brussels, Belgium KinAct - Les Rencontres International de la performance / MetaCritikOpera association, Paris, France TIN MAN ART, London, UK Area35 Art Gallery, Milan, Italy Serigrafia Fallani, Venice, Italy Ebanisteria Gervasuti, Venice, Italy The METROPOLE Hotel, Venice, Italy Out of Africa A.C., Native Indigeneous Venetians, Venice, Italy BRUCHIUM, A.C., Venice, Italy Foundamentalis, Ass No Profit, Venice, Italy LE FONDAMENTA NOVE DELL’ARTE, Venice, Italy CANNAREGIO DISTRICT, Venice, Italy Special Thanks to Nathalie Kutika Nzamba, Assistant for Cultural Diplomacy of the Ministry of Culture Arts and Heritage of the DRC Tim Wouters Walter De Weerdt Elisabeth Lalouschek Lisa Brittan Simona Amelotti

Lithium is a provocative title for this exhibition by artists whose land and people are being exploited by foreigners. Foreign companies are “rushing” to extract lithium because it is a crucial component in rechargeable batteries powering everything from smartphones to electric vehicles and is also used in solar-storage systems. The world’s largest undeveloped resource of lithium has recently been discovered in the Manono region of Congo. This area will be heavily mined by a foreign company who plan to build a plant to process the ores. This will cause vast ecological damage and violate human rights by subjecting workers including children to extract lithium in slave-like conditions. Cobalt, a key raw material for lithium-ion batteries, is also mined extensively. It is lethal for the workers to touch and breathe while the surrounding air and water have been contaminated with toxic dust and waste matter from the processing. Congolese artists express their concerns about the terrible damage mining is doing to their environment in paintings, sculptures, photography and performance that reflect their cultural heritage. They have developed artworks and dynamic performance art collectives using costumes and masks made from industrial debris and discarded consumer electronics to draw attention to the exploitation by the mining industry. Their paintings may also depict bodies scarified with motifs resembling electronic circuits produced from the cobalt and coltan extracted.

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Other artists make costumes from vegetation to draw attention to the massive deforestation from building these processing plants. Their works show how the forced labour and plundering of natural resources for the rubber and ivory trade in the colonial era are replaced by the renewed exploitation of the “Lithium rush”. Their works have both aesthetic values and symbolic meanings combined with an inherent ability for storytelling that relate to an oral tradition of myths narrated in festivals and rituals. Although the mining of lithium and cobalt is proclaimed to provide clean energy to fuel luxury cars like Tesla, the disposal of lithium-ion batteries is problematic as they contain toxic metals that can contaminate water supplies and ecosystems. Foreign pharmaceutical companies are also after lithium since its compound is widely used for the treatment of bipolar depression. Through various art forms such as visual arts, music, literature, and performance, artists highlight the struggles of affected communities, shed light on environmental degradation, and challenge the dominant narratives perpetuated by the mining industry.

Lithium FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Croatia

Commissioner Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia Curator Antonia Majača Artist Vlatka Horvat Organisation Apoteka - Space for Contemporary Art With the Support of Luma Foundation Unstable Object Centrala

Vlatka Horvat’s project for the Croatian Pavilion — By the Means at Hand — exists as both a dynamic, accumulating exhibition of artworks by a large group of international artists living “as foreigners”, reflecting on questions and urgencies of diasporic experience, and as a compelling, intimate, social, and performative exchange between them, unfolding across the duration of the Biennale Arte 2024. The pavilion also doubles as Horvat’s temporary artist’s studio, with the artist in residence in Venice over the course of the event. The installation at the heart of the project is continuously produced through processes of encounter and exchange: Horvat has invited a large number of artists living in diaspora in different countries to engage with her in a series of reciprocal exchanges of artworks and other materials, all of which will be sent between Venice and other places by improvised means — via various friends, travellers, and

strangers who will be enlisted as informal couriers for the project. The title of the project refers to improvised transport systems whereby individuals activate informal networks of friends, acquaintances, and even strangers to deliver letters, parcels, documents, money, and other material goods to family members and others who live in cities or countries far away. While such networks often arise through family connections, or national, regional, or other identity groupings, they also build effectively on wider principles of solidarity, shared struggle, mutual support, and friendship — factors that the project emphasises as prerequisites for co-existing with others and as key elements in the toolkit for those living “in foreign lands”. Taking its cue from such improvised transport systems and more broadly from various methods of improvisation in daily life, By the Means at Hand speaks to practices born out of social dispersal, migration, and displacement. The project also points to a wide range of other, broader themes such as alternative logistics, spontaneous production of social relations, informal and gift economies, and the idea of trustfulness. On a more subtle, yet crucial, infrastructural level, the project takes off from a recognition of the state of emergency when it comes to the climate crisis, and the substantial environmental footprint of institutionalized modes of production of contemporary art. Vlatka Horvat Antonia Majača

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

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By the Means at Hand FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Vlatka Horvat, Venice (at Hand) #9, 2024. Collage on inkjet photo.

Cuba

Commissioner Daneisy García Roque Curator Nelson Ramirez de Arellano Conde Artist Wilfredo Prieto Collaborators Massimo Minini Prats Nogueras Blanchard kurimanzutto With the Support of EMINENTE

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

The fact of the representative similarity between opposites is placed in crisis when it ceases to remain static, expands towards difference and revolves around indifference itself. For Wilfredo Prieto, the contrast of materials, concepts and forms reveals a discourse far removed from technical canons, where the idea is the matrix of language. The syntax of the concept dominates the work and that is why his actions are always more poetic than sculptural. Ordinary objects become living matter to reflect incisively on contemporary society. Curtain, displayed in the space of a theatre, questions from what perspective and how we understand what is part of our context, from a position that assumes a heterogeneous core of historical, philosophical and geographical knowledge. The exhibition surprises by the simplicity of the installation, Illuminated Stone and Unilluminated Stone, which points out the weight of the responsibility implied by integration, and the (non)feeling of being part of some place. The narrative synthesis of this work confronts the type of fate that each one has in evolution and the process of natural selection represented in the changes, diversity, social, racial, ethnic, political and economic differences; establishing an analysis of reality reflected between opposites, between the tangible physical level and the level that is represented, which is nothing more than an allusion to ourselves.

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Far from any stereotype, this work contrasts its evident morphological relationship with the essentials of thought, giving value to difference, insertion, assimilation and intercultural encounters. In the face of saturation and the ephemeral rhythm of existence, Prieto proposes to communicate, with the essential and simple, respect for the other as a social and cultural entity. Even when we do not think alike, feel differently and act differently, we are part of the same thing.

Curtain

Wilfredo Prieto, Illuminated Stone and Unilluminated Stone, 2012–2024. Stones and light, dimensions variable. Photo Mauricio Chávez. Courtesy Wilfredo Prieto Studio.

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Wilfredo Prieto, Illuminated Stone and Unilluminated Stone, 2012–2024. Stones and light, dimensions variable. Photo Mauricio Chávez. Courtesy Wilfredo Prieto Studio.

Republic of Cyprus

Commissioner Louli Michaelidou Curators and Artists Forever Informed: Lower Levant Company (Peter Eramian, Emiddio Vasquez) Endrosia (Andreas Andronikou, Marina Ashioti, Niki Charalambous, Doris Mari Demetriadou, Irini Khenkin, Rafailia Tsiridou, Alexandros Xenophontos) Haig Aivazian Organisation Cyprus Deputy Ministry of Culture – Department of Contemporary Culture Production Manager Charles Gohy Project Manager Ioulita Toumazi Project Coordinator Marco Scurati Graphic Design Miquel Hervás Gómez Doris Mari Demetriadou Andreas Andronikou With the Support of psi foundation Pylon Art & Culture The Kerenidis Pepe Collection Niki Hadjilyra

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

On a wildflower-lined gravel track off a quiet thoroughfare… …a parked black van scans its surroundings for personal devices to send out a thumbnail from the account of a recently deceased person. Captioned “OMG! Have you seen this?!”, it reaches three unsuspecting acquaintances. In disbelief, the first recipient takes the bait and clicks the link. The second fails to see the notification as it drowns in a sea of information debris. The third — no longer friends with the “sender” and unaware of their passing — sees the message and opts not to answer, effectively ghosting them. From this seemingly benign anecdote and through layers of parafictional schemes, Lower Levant Company, Endrosia Collective and Haig Aivazian sidestep the superstitious origin of ghosts to speculate on the current sociotechnical and material forms of ghosting. Alongside diffracted modes of spectatorship, a “vigil workspace” revives the labour of invigilation, invisible within the art industry, to hold a space for reflection and remembrance. As agitators of social memory, ghosts insist on unresolved grievances, rewriting them until retribution. The pavilion focuses on Cyprus’ vicinity in the Middle East, itself a factory of revenants, to re-examine the island’s orientation visà-vis the Levant.

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“OMG! Have you seen this?!”— a fourth recipient receives the link, forwarded via the first. They decide to investigate. Scrolling through Reddit, they come across a thread by user shaba7-el-adna linking to a 2019 “Forbes” article about a covert spyware operation, conducted by an Israeli company out of a black van in Larnaca. One link follows another, traversing histories of transmissions and interferences, with Cyprus at once an “antenna island” for covert transmissions and a “quiet thoroughfare” complicit in clandestine regional operations. The tension between proxy and proximity, sender and receiver, friend and foe, comes to a critical breakpoint. So our ghost story goes, and so it echoes: On which side of the screen lies the ghost? Through the front of a start-up agency, the pavilion conjures a portal into histories, narratives and myths that linger within new modes of communication, computational logics and platform economies. The exhibition proposes ghosting as a paradoxical act of withdrawal and persistence. This form of vigilance requires an adjustment of attention; a recalibration of the senses; a commitment not only to staying with the problem of ghosts, but to drawing alliances with them and, entrusted with their agitation, dismantling and building worlds anew. Forever Informed

“On a wildflower-lined gravel track off a quiet thoroughfare…”

Image (sourced from Multimillionaire Spyware Dealer and His $9 Million WhatsApp Hacking Van, “Forbes”, 2019) run through Stable Diffusion AI. Courtesy Forever Informed, 2024.

Curtain antennas at Akrotiri, Cyprus, run through Stable Diffusion AI. Courtesy Forever Informed, 2024. FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Image (sourced from Multimillionaire Spyware Dealer and His $9 Million WhatsApp Hacking Van, “Forbes”, 2019) run through Stable Diffusion AI. Courtesy Forever Informed, 2024.

Czech Republic

Commissioner Michal Novotný Curator Hana Janečková Artists Eva Kot’átková in collaboration with Himali Singh Soin and David Tappeser Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures and groups of children and older people Organisation National Gallery Prague Head of the Czech Participation Radka Neumannová Project Manager Barbora Lesáková With the Support of Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic (Czech Recovery Plan) European Union (Next Generation EU) J&T Banka hunt kastner Prague Meyer Riegger Berlin/ Karlsruhe/Basel

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

Lenka the giraffe was captured in Kenya in 1954 and transported to Prague Zoo to become the very first Czechoslovak giraffe. She survived only two years in captivity, after which her body was donated to the National Museum in Prague where it was exhibited until 2000. In the museum’s taxidermy workshops, her insides were dissolved, to leave only her skin, and released into the public sewer system. The heart of a giraffe in captivity is twelve kilos lighter, Eva Kot’átková’s collaborative project, reimagines Lenka’s story as a poetic, embodied encounter for the audience, invited collaborators and the artist, but also as a place of critical intervention in the relationship between institutions and the natural world. The exhibition aims to question hierarchies, violence and extractive practices embedded in the way we encounter, view and learn about animals, suggesting different modes of engagement, where care, imagination and emotion are as important as historical narrative. The installation comprises multiple renderings of the giraffe’s body parts: cast 3D scans of Lenka in museum storage and a gigantic tunnel neck of the animal in the extreme vulnerability of sleep. In the soundscape “the world of the free” — a collaboration with the artists and composers Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser — poetry is composed entirely from historical records of Lenka’s journey and accounts of her death and afterlife as a museological object. The giraffe, while eating acacia twigs, often damaged telegraph lines. Here, language itself is eaten into, and the messages that remain are those that tell a counter-story of repatriation and reparation. The low nocturnal hum of the sleeping animal is interspersed with subtle renditions of the national anthems of all the countries Lenka visited on her journey.

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What is the difference between Lenka, the animal displayed in the zoo and Lenka, the museum object with glass eyes? Interpreted by children, educators and older people who were Lenka’s contemporaries, the installation is conceived of as a collective body facilitating multiple forms of storytelling. Together with a contribution by the collective Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures, it sets a ground for decolonial pedagogy. This collaborative approach stages The heart of a giraffe in captivity is twelve kilos lighter as a place where belonging can be formed through emotional attachment and ecological relations instead of fixed notions of identity, borders and nation. Hana Janečková

The heart of a giraffe in captivity is twelve kilos lighter; Eva Kot’átková (left) and Hana Janečková (right) with Lenka the giraffe. Photo Aleksandra Vajd, 2024.

The heart of a giraffe in captivity is twelve kilos lighter

Eva Kot’átková, The heart of a giraffe in captivity is twelve kilos lighter, 2023. Mixed media on paper. Courtesy the Artist, hunt kastner Prague and Meyer Riegger Berlin/Karlsruhe/Basel.

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser (Hylozoic/Desires), “The world of the free” (behind the scenes), 2023. Collage. Courtesy the Artists.

Denmark

Commissioner Danish Arts Foundation Curator Louise Wolthers Artist Inuuteq Storch Organisation Danish Agency for Culture and Palaces Head of Project Anne Marie Fjord Abildskov Project Managers Lotte Sophie Lederballe Pedersen Ane Bülow With the Support of New Carlsberg Foundation Kvadrat Kalaallit Nunaat Arts Foundation Danish Agency for Culture and Palaces

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

The sun, along with metaphors of colour, light, and shadows revolving around it, is fundamental in Inuuteq Storch’s work. As a photographer, he writes with light. His main subject is Greenlandic life, where the sun — both when present and absent — is essential. The sun also holds a central place in one of Greenland’s official national symbols, namely the flag, where a red semicircle represents the sunset over the ice. This shape is central in Rise of the Sunken Sun. Inuuteq Storch’s photography conveys contemporary Greenlandic identity and everyday life in an expression that is intuitive, poetic, and playful. This is evident in the series “At Home We Belong” and “Keepers of the Ocean”, primarily shot in his hometown, Sisimiut. In “Necromancer”, Storch creates an otherworldly atmosphere to point to more spiritual connections to nature and other spheres. “Soon Will Summer Be Over” was created in 2023 in Qaanaaq, where homes and interiors reveal traces of Danish influences and the colonial past, blending in among local artefacts and a strong presence of Inuit culture. Magnificent outdoor photographs bear witness to the struggle to maintain hunting and fishing traditions in a time when nature and climate are changing.

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Storch highlights photography’s potential as a cultural, social, and historical document, hoping to contribute to the establishment of a Greenlandic photo museum in the future. In the work Mirrored, Storch has digitised a selection of images by Greenland’s first photographer, John Møller (1867–1935), offering a unique insight into the Greenlandic society of the time of Danish colonization. Storch juxtaposes them with his own photographs, and in the meeting between past and present, details emerge that otherwise escape attention. Storch has also compiled an archive of amateur photographs from his own family in the “Sunsets of Forgotten Moments” series. His grandparents came from very different socio-economic and geographical backgrounds, reflected in their family photos. While Storch’s work transcends a limited focus on Greenland’s colonial history and the still contested relationship with Denmark, decoloniality is an underlying theme, enforced in Rise of the Sunken Sun through elements like text, music, and other sounds. Welcome to Inuuteq Storch’s Kalaallit Nunaat. Louise Wolthers

Rise of the Sunken Sun

Inuuteq Storch, Sunsets of Forgotten Moments, 2024. Photography, digitised version of original photography, variable dimensions. Photo Peter Storch. Courtesy Inuuteq Storch. © Inuuteq Storch.

Inuuteq Storch, Mirrored – Portraits of Good Hope, 2019 (original c. 1900). Photography, digitised version of original glass plate negative, variable dimensions. Photo John Møller (1867–1935). Courtesy Nunatta Katersugaasivia Allagaateqarfialu (Greenland National Museum & Archives). © Nunatta Katersugaasivia Allagaateqarfialu (Greenland National Museum & Archives).

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Inuuteq Storch, Soon Will Summer Be Over, 2023. Photography, variable dimensions. Photo Inuuteq Storch. Courtesy Inuuteq Storch. © Inuuteq Storch.

Egypt

Commissioner Ministry of Culture Egypt Accademia d’Egitto a Roma Curator and Artist Wael Shawky Scientific Partners Reem Fadda Andrea Viliani Sebastien Delot Yasmine El Rashidi Special Thanks to Barakat Contemporary Lia Rumma Gallery Lisson Gallery Sfeir Semler Gallery

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

Egyptian artist Wael Shawky works across film, sculpture, performance and drawing to examine and invert common notions of national and religious identity by recasting existing viewpoints of history. Characterized by rigorous research, Shawky’s practice is rooted in his deep relationship to the history and cultural heritage of the Arab world. His work premises history to be a record of subjectively depicted sequences rather than indisputable facts, which he posits to create elaborately choreographed re-stagings and interpretations of historic events. His multi-layered films and installations immerse chronicled accounts of reality into worlds of his own creation. In El Araba El Madfuna (2012) children come to pay homage to an ancient archaeological city and its surrounding mythologies, while in Cabaret Crusades (2013) the medieval clashes between Muslims and Christians become a Homeric trilogy told from an Arab perspective through puppets and marionettes. Meticulously blurring the boundaries between recorded facts and possible fictions, and carefully weaving spirituality and whimsy, Shawky’s work offers poetically alternate prisms with which to consider pivotal moments in history.

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In Drama 1882, Shawky continues his ongoing practice of historical renditions. He takes the year 1882 and Egypt’s seminal Urabi revolution (1879–1882) against imperial rule as a starting point to excavate the 1882 bombardment of Alexandria by British forces as they sought to upend Urabi’s reign. Filmed in a fabled theatre in Alexandria, and set against the backdrop of a rose-pink Dadaesque set, this epic, eight-part musical using actors, recasts the narrative lens on the dramatic events that unfolded that summer leading to the historic Battle of Tel El Kebir and Urabi’s capture. Based on accounts from primary sources, Shawky complicates the traditional western colonial war narrative by intervening in the gaps of this chaotic, decisive moment in Egyptian history. He probes and casts doubt and shadows over a series of historically minor events as possibly premeditated by Britain to justify their assault. With Drama 1882, the Egyptian Pavilion becomes the centre stage for a timely and critical conversation around the necessity of revisionist histories and the futility of war. Yasmine El Rashidi

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Drama 1882 -

Estonia

Commissioner Maria Arusoo, Estonian Centre for Contemporary Art, CCA

Communication Kaarin Kivirähk, CCA Keiu Krikmann, CCA Stina Pley Alexia Menikou

Artist Edith Karlson

Commissioned and Produced by Estonian Centre for Contemporary Art

Dramaturge Eero Epner Graphic Design Jojo & me (Johanna Ruukholm and Martina Gofman) Head of Production Sten Ojavee, CCA Project Coordination Mikk Lahesalu, CCA Marika Agu, CCA Technical Team Tõnu Narro and Mihkel Lember, Technical Director Johannes Säre, Dream Team Artist’s Team Art Allmägi Sander Haugas Kirsti Kaubi Loora Kaubi Ats Kruusing Erik Liiv Maria Luiga Eva Mahhov Liisi Põllumaa Nikolai Saaremets Elo Vahtrik the artist’s dogs Iti and Kusti

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

With the Main Support of Estonian Ministry of Culture With the Support of Postimehe Fond Taavet+Sten Tulevikufond Cobalt Law Firm Cultural Endowment of Estonia DSV Global Transport and Logistics Põhjala Beer Selver Uus Rada Galerii Tallinn Zoo Estonian Museum of Natural History Müürileht Estonian Academy of Arts Pallas University of Applied Sciences

Edith Karlson’s exhibition at the church of Santa Maria delle Penitenti explores primitive human urges in their banality and solemnity, while also asking about the possibility of redemption in a world that is never worthy of it. The interior of the church builds up the emotional atmosphere around the exhibition. Here, everything is left unchanged, even the dust of the centuries remains. The space, lying in abandonment, is a metaphor for being human, equally sad and incomplete, full of cracks and fissures, through which eventually, perhaps, a redeeming light will shine. The spaces of the exhibition are filled with clay and concrete sculptures by Karlson, evoking the inevitable misfortune of being born and the always-endeavouring nature of human. It is not the civilized citizen’s knowledge of current events that is given priority but their impulses, sensations, wants and desires, hidden not too deep under their well-pressed suit. The central series of the exhibition is composed of hundreds of clay self-portraits, created by people who surround the artist: children and elderly people, state officials and common workers. It is a gallery of contemporary faces that will someday soon become their memorial. The sculptures are inspired by hundreds of fourteenth-century terracotta sculptures in St. John’s Church in Tartu, Estonia, most likely depicting townspeople from that time, maybe a memorial ensemble commemorating the victims of the plague.

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In Karlson’s work, alongside humans we also see human-animal hybrids, mourning women and bright white storks. A large sanctuary with paintings, candelabras, retables and giant creatures playing dangerous games among the items. A room that has become a resting place to a flock of birds. A chamber holding broken cupboard doors and silent figures, covering their faces with aging hands. A claustrophobic bedroom, left empty, except for a small and loyal dog. A room with collapsing floor, where the waves created by passing vaporetti spill into the space through the gaping hole in the floor and splash the weremermaids, perching on the verge of the opening. And so, an existential narrative of the animalistic nature of humans takes shape at the church of Santa Maria delle Penitenti — the sincerity and bluntness of instinct, which sometimes takes a brutal and violent, other times a poetic and a little ridiculous, or a gentle and melancholic form.

Hora lupi

Edith Karlson, Hora lupi, works in progress. Photo Anu Vahtra/Estonian Centre for Contemporary Art.

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Edith Karlson, Hora lupi, works in progress. Photo Anu Vahtra/Estonian Centre for Contemporary Art.

Ethiopia

Commissioner Demitu Hambisa Bonsa, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Ethiopian Embassy and Permanent Representative to FAO, WFP and IFAD in Italy, Rome Curator Lemn Sissay, OBE, FRSL Artist Tesfaye Urgessa Organisation Ministry of Tourism of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia Ambassador Nasise Chali-Minister, Ministry of Tourism Sileshi Girma-State Minister, Ministry of Tourism Assefa Abiyu-Deputy Head of Ethiopian Embassy in Rome Abebaw Ayalew, Director General of F.D.R.E. Heritage Authority Tamirat Haile, Director General of Unity Park Biskut Behabtu, Coordinator Ethiopian Embassy in Rome Teklewoini Abrha, Coordinator Ethiopian Embassy in Rome Local Production Zuecca Projects (Alessandro Possati, Maria Caterina Denora)

Tesfaye Urgessa collects “things” and places them in a conceptual “basement”, tiny images, large ideas, a hand, a torso, turned feet, a song. It is an eternal space of precious objects and ideas. “The basement is where you keep what is important to you”. The artist is in his studio in Addis Ababa. He is encouraged by the focus of Lucian Freud and the “natural way and attitude to working” of Philip Guston. In Prejudice and Belonging Tesfaye Urgessa paints a number of canvases at the same time, say five or ten. “I look at my paintings and then kind of imagine in which painting this particular certain image might work, so I try on one canvas, sometimes it works and I continue and sometimes it doesn’t work and I have to destroy it.” He moves around the studio from one canvas to the other seeking “the chemical reaction” to initiate a “chain reaction”. Between eleven and seventeen Tesfaye avidly, devotedly, copied church paintings. In Ethiopia religious iconography is often the first connection to art. With the encouragement from his family Tesfaye attended The Ale School of Art and Design at Addis Ababa University. Many of the teachers studied in Russia and taught Russian realism, anatomy, colour, composition.

Special Thanks to Saatchi Yates, London

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

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From Ethiopian iconography to Russian realism Urgessa graduated on a scholarship to continue art studies at the Staatlichen Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart under Professor Cordula Güdemann. Upon graduating in 2014 he was awarded the Akademie’s Fine Arts Prize. Although he was making his name across the nation, Urgessa was still coming to terms with being a professional painter: “For me the most important thing was to draw as well as possible but being an ‘artist’ or to be called an artist was very abstract to me.” Prejudice and Belonging arises from a particular experience over the thirteen years spent in Germany, helping with translation in immigration camps, hearing stories of being an immigrant. “People tend to think I am painting victims in my canvases but it’s completely different. The figures hold all kinds of emotions, fragility as well as confidence. It is the figure presented without any judgement. It is saying this is who I am, this is what I am.” In Prejudice and Belonging Urgessa is “not following natural laws” but the laws of painting. His figures are not defined by their scars but by the incredible ability to heal. Lemn Sissay

Prejudice and Belonging

Tesfaye Urgessa, The Guardians, 2024, diptych. 249 × 250.5 cm. Photo Justin Piperger. Courtesy the Artist and Saatchi Yates.

Tesfaye Urgessa, Love and curse, diptych, 2023. Oil on canvas, 249 × 248.5 cm. Photo Matt Spour. Courtesy the Artist and Saatchi Yates.

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Tesfaye Urgessa, Lineage Frost, diptych, 2023. Oil on canvas, 248.5 × 248 cm. Photo Justin Piperger. Courtesy the Artist and Saatchi Yates.

Finland

Commissioner Raija Koli, Frame Contemporary Art Finland Curators Yvonne Billimore Jussi Koitela Artists Pia Lindman Vidha Saumya Jenni-Juulia WallinheimoHeimonen Architectural Design Kaisa Sööt Organisation Frame Contemporary Art Finland Project Manager Ellinor Zetterberg Project Coordination Francesco Raccanelli Head of Communications Rosa Kuosmanen Graphic Design Samuli Saarinen With the Support of The Ministry of Education and Culture in Finland Kone Foundation The Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland AVEK The Promotion Centre for Audiovisual Culture The Church Media Foundation Finnish Federation of the Visually Impaired Embassy of Finland in Rome

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

The pleasures we choose is a multifaceted collaboration by artists Pia Lindman, Vidha Saumya, Jenni-Juulia Wallinheimo-Heimonen, curators Yvonne Billimore and Jussi Koitela, and architectural designer Kaisa Sööt. The exhibition speaks to the inseparability of art and life. It brings together three artists whose practices are acutely informed by their embodied experiences of structural, environmental and social imbalances in the world. In Lindman’s, Saumya’s and Wallinheimo-Heimonen’s practices, art, life and activism are consciously intertwined. Articulated across a wide range of materials and processes — including drawing, stitchwork, sculpture and healing — their artworks celebrate the pleasure of the personal as a powerful means of inhabiting, imagining and remaking more plural worlds. Pia Lindman’s work explores the world of the subsensorial — a realm of experience that is beyond the capabilities of our everyday human sensory perceptions — and transforms it into material manifestations that allow her to attune to atmospheres, toxicities and materiality in different spatial and social conditions. Often engaging with the intricate relationship between human presence and the environment, Vidha Saumya’s work shows an interplay of desire, intimacy, and (home) land, offset by the heteronormative demands of utility, time and (dis)placement. Jenni-Juulia Wallinheimo-Heimonen’s artworks point to the hate speech people with disabilities are subjected to. Her intricately fabricated realities celebrate a world in which a diversity of human bodies have won the right to choose a pleasurable life over mere existence.

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Lindman, Saumya and Wallinheimo-Heimonen’s specific experiences of the world, responsive approaches and relationships with materials, saturate their artworks. Embraced as a collective project, The pleasures we choose evolved through the exchange of shared and individual experiences to create areas of diverse occupancies where visitors are encouraged to reassess and (re)consider societal expectations. Reimagining the pavilion and the kind of art, bodies and experiences it can support, the exhibition introduces “access architecture” which considers access and bodily needs across registers whilst encouraging multi-sensorial experiences. The pavilion is dedicated to those who, through their embodied experiences of the world, cannot afford to differentiate life and art, even if they might never have the opportunity to pass through these walls. Yvonne Billimore Jussi Koitela

The pleasures we choose

Pia Lindman, Collectivities Cycle: Embodied wefts, animation still, 2024. High-resolution animation, 4 h 4 min. Image courtesy the Artist.

Vidha Saumya, To all the barricades… the rumour got you, detail from drawing, 2024. Ballpoint pen on silk, 1023 × 300 cm. Photo Commercial Art Engravers Pvt. Ltd. Image courtesy the Artist.

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Jenni-Juulia Wallinheimo-Heimonen, How Great is Your Darkness, 2024. Still from 2-channel video installation, 5 min 22 sec. Photo Rasoul Khorram.

France

Commissioner Institut français on behalf of The Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs The Ministry of Culture Curators Céline Kopp Cindy Sissokho Artist Julien Creuzet Creative Collaborators Chadine Amghar Sofía Bonilla Otoya Émilien Bonnet Serge Damon Antoine Camus Julien Coetto Émilien Colombier Scarlett Chaumien Iris Fabre Benjamin Fagnère Maïlys Lamotte-Paulet Ismaïl Lazam Ari Lima Noémi Michel Makeda Monnet Mukashyaka Nsengimana Ana Pi Louis Somveille Maboula Soumahoro Jean Thevenin Executive Producer ARTER Graphic Design Alliage With the exceptional support of CHANEL Culture Fund and the support of Luma Foundation With the Partnership of IDzia La Collectivité Territoriale de Martinique Millénaire de Caen La Fondation des Artistes

Attila cataracte ta source aux pieds des pitons verts finira dans la grande mer gouffre bleu nous nous noyâmes dans les larmes marées de la lune These words create sounds — they exist through an assertive presence of poetry and hold a world of possibilities. This text is a refusal for us to give away interpretative freedom. It claims the right to be, to make space for deep feelings: Attila cataract your source at the feet of the green peaks will end up in the great sea blue abyss we drowned in the tidal tears of the moon. The sight of the matoutou falaise is a gift when it appears in dense forests, on the bark of the Zamana trees or the rocks of the Martinique shores. It requires a deep connection to the environment; an eye that sweeps the contours and glides over the textures. It is about appearances and disappearances, what is given, protected, and also unseen… This way of seeing is undoubtedly what Julien Creuzet strives to offer through the experience of his work. It describes an immersion in a poetry of forms and sounds, volumes and lines in movement, colourful encounters forming new languages: an experience to be lived deeply.

With the Participation of French Embassy in Italy Institut Français Italia

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

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This tarantula, endemic to Martinique, could well be the symbol of a way of being with art that history has yet to write. It nourishes, and protects, in the teaching of a sensible and poetic understanding of the world it offers a softer gaze to approach the many ecologies of life. Creuzet’s forms stem from a locus of emancipation, which must be felt to truly see. It is a moment of learning and unlearning as a reconciliation with our senses, as well as a space to be untranslated and liberated. Céline Kopp Cindy Sissokho

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Attila cataracte ta source aux pieds des pitons verts finira dans la grande mer gouffre bleu nous nous noyâmes dans les larmes marées de la lune

Julien Creuzet, 2024 © Julien Creuzet. Courtesy the Artist and DOCUMENT, Chicago | Lisbon; Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York; Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo, Brussels, Paris, New York.

Georgia

Commissioner Magda Guruli Curators Julia Marchand David Koroshinadze Artists Nikoloz Koplatadze Grigol Nodia Juliette George Rodrigue De Ferluc Iliazd Max Ernst Ernst Wilhelm Tempel Project Manager Ana Jorjiashvili Furniture Design Associate Nestan Vardiashvili Assistant Curator Elisa Francesconi Graphic Design Fabien Chaminade Film Producer and Production Design Lasha Zambakhidze Composer Ben Wheeler Local Partner VeniceArtFactory Partners Tbilisi City Hall François Maire & Iliazd Club Tbilisi State Academy of Art With the Support of The Ministry of Culture and Sport of Georgia

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

The Art of Seeing – States of Astronomy is a collaborative project presented by a team of Georgian and French curators and artists. It takes its full inspiration from 65 Maximiliana or the Illegal Practice of Astronomy, a 1964 work by Georgian artist, poet, and editor Ilia Zdanevich (1894–1975) and Max Ernst (1891–1976), along with its related archives. This book is dedicated to Wilhelm Ernst Tempel (1821–1889), a German astronomer and lithographer who lived and worked in Italy and France. Tempel advocated for an unconventional, sensual astronomy, and his discoveries were overlooked by his contemporaries, due in part to his lack of academic training. Zdanevich traced his own history back to Tbilisi, where his publishing house, “41 degrees”, was named after the latitude Tbilisi shares with Rome, Madrid, New York, and other cities, promoted a futurist poetic language known as “ZAUM”. He adopted the name Iliazd soon after arriving in Paris in 1921 and brought out several major books, including Maximiliana, a landmark project that spans four countries and three languages, merging poetry and astronomy to highlight the experience of exiles in both physical and metaphysical senses. The exhibition, held at Palazzo Palumbo Fossati, features Maximiliana along with materials from Iliazd’s archive that document his journey to Venice and Marseille and his persistent efforts to recover Tempel’s biography.

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Curator Julia Marchand (France) and Associate research curator David Koroshinadze (Georgia) have crafted an original concept for a living archive, inviting the audience to engage with the fascinating story of how the friends conveyed Tempel’s biography through typography and painting that brought the language of the cosmos to life. French artists Rodrigue De Ferluc and Juliette George have created unique furniture inspired by Iliazd’s typography in Maximiliana to establish a visual and spatial identity for the exhibition. Georgian artist Nika Koplatadze reinterprets Maximiliana through a contemporary art lens in a series of artistic books informed by his readings of star maps and other cosmic matters. Grigol Nodia’s video art, titled In-between, takes viewers on a meditative voyage in search of an innocent rhythm. Wilhelm Tempel’s drawings and letters, included in the exhibition, provide a unique context for understanding and approaching the history behind Maximiliana and Iliazd’s journey. Julia Marchand

The Art of Seeing – States of Astronomy

Nika Koplatadze, Conjunction, 2021. Canvas grounded with concrete and sand, pigments, metal paper, metallic paint, collages, 28 × 32.5 × 4.5 cm. Photo George Shioshvili. Courtesy the Artist.

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Fabien Chaminade, Study for a Constellation of Stargazers, 2024. Digital composition based on archival materials. Courtesy the Artist.

Germany

Commissioner Ellen Strittmatter, ifa – Institut für Auslands beziehungen

Assistants Adi Nachmann (Yael Bartana) Lorenz Stöger (Ersan Mondtag)

Curator Çağla Ilk

Production Assistant Dmitry Ryabkov

Artists Yael Bartana Ersan Mondtag Michael Akstaller Nicole L’Huillier Robert Lippok Jan St. Werner

Composers Dani Meir (Yael Bartana) Benedikt Brachtel (Ersan Mondtag)

Chroniclers Doreet Le Vitte Harten Louis ChudeSokei Georgi Gospodinov Dramaturge Ludwig Haugk Assistant Curator Sandeep Sodhi Deputy Commissioner Dorothea Grassmann Project Manager Friederike Klussmann (ifa) Communication Henriette Sölter, Miriam Kahrmann (ifa) Accounting Tanja Spiess (ifa)

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

Technical Management and Architectural Supervision Clemens F. Kusch Martin Weigert Realized by ifa – Institut für Auslands beziehungen in cooperation with the German Federal Foreign Office Partners German Savings Banks Association ifa Freunde des Deutschen Pavillons / Biennale Venedig e.V. Ministry of Science, Research and Arts of the State of Baden Württemberg Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalt Berlin

Thresholds stands for the present as a place where no one can stay and that only exists because one thing has occurred and another still awaits. For people with biographies characterized by migration, the temporal perception of the present as a threshold between the retrospective and the prospective is paired with a fundamental spatial and physical experience of living at the intersection of different belongings. Under the title Thresholds, the German contribution explores history and the future in three scenarios: In the first scenario, Yael Bartana enters the threshold of a present perceived as catastrophic; a world on the brink of total destruction. In search of a way out, she imagines possibilities of future survival through a multifaceted series of works poised between dystopia and utopia. In her work for the German Pavilion, Bartana constructs alternative histories that allow for imagined and shared futures. In the second scenario, the theatre and opera director Ersan Mondtag creates a theatrical cosmos of representation and remembrance with a fragmentary, seemingly minor narrative. For his work Mondtag uses sound and performance in combination with architecture to open windows into past decades. The overarching narrative of the work is based on the life story of Mondtag’s grandfather, who came to Germany from Turkey in the 1960s. His migration story is symbolic of the untold stories of millions of others who shaped the post-war era. In this respect, Mondtag opens up a space for the historiography of underrepresented groups that continue to receive little attention in a global discourse.

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In a third scenario, the contribution engages in building a bridge to another location outside the Giardini: the island of La Certosa. By moving beyond the pavilion, Thresholds focuses on the significance of the moment of temporal and spatial transition. On La Certosa the artists Michael Akstaller, Nicole L’Huillier, Robert Lippok, and Jan St. Werner create a resonant space in a natural setting which transcends territorial concepts of borders. Their works contrast the monumentality of the German Pavilion while emphasizing the idea of passage through a threshold space. Çağla Ilk Ludwig Haugk Sandeep Sodhi

Thresholds

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Tree in the ruins of the Augustinian cloister on the island of La Certosa, Venice. Photo Çağla Ilk.

Great Britain

Commissioner Skinder Hundal, Global Director of Arts, British Council

Digital Partner Bloomberg Philanthropies

Curator Tarini Malik

Special Thanks to Aarti Lohia Shane Akeroyd

Artist John Akomfrah

Benefactors Luma Foundation

Deputy Commissioner Miranda Stacey, Director of Programmes, Visual Arts, British Council Organisation The British Council Production Ashitey Akomfrah Lina Gopaul David Lawson Smoking Dogs Films

Founders Glenn Earle Robert A. Seder & Deborah Harmon Westridge Foundation Principals The John Browne Charitable Trust Lizbeth & George Krupp David & Sophie Ziyambi

With Kind Assistance from The Venice Patrons Board, our Patrons Exhibition Design and Associate Jessica Reynolds, vPPR Supporters The Ambassador Circle, Headline Sponsor the Global Circle and Burberry the UK Circle And those who wish to Commissioning Partners remain anonymous Lisson Gallery Fundación TBA21 Exhibition production kindly supported by With the Support of LG Oled LG Oled UniFor Frieze Kvadrat Christie’s ArtAV Art Fund Ford Foundation

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

“There is still water at the bottom of each memory.” Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos John Akomfrah is an artist and filmmaker whose work is an investigation into memory, racial injustice, the experiences of migrant diasporas and climate change. Akomfrah’s 2024 commission for the British Pavilion, entitled Listening All Night To The Rain, interprets the fabric of the building in order to subvert and interrogate relics and monuments of colonial histories. Listening All Night To The Rain continues the artist’s preoccupation with themes of post-colonialism, ecology and the politics of aesthetics with a renewed focus on the act of listening and the sonic. The exhibition is seen as a manifesto that encourages the idea of listening as activism and positions various progressive theories of acoustemology: how new ways of becoming are rooted in different forms of listening. Conceived as a single installation with eight interlocking and overlapping multimedia sound and time-based works that are organised into song-like movements or “cantos”, bodies of water are a central motif in Akomfrah’s exhibition and form a connective tissue that holds the many layered visual and sonic narratives together. Through depictions of mist and fog, still and running water, streams, rivers, floods and rain, the imagery and signature of the aquatic seeps into every frame and note of the artwork. Together with the sonic, Akomfrah explores the role of water in understanding our world and holding memory.

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Open-ended in structure, the exhibition is reflective of the artist’s abiding interest in non-linear forms of storytelling and collage. Working with newly filmed material from locations all around the world, a mix of archives that have figured in Akomfrah’s research over decades and new material sources, this commission repositions the role of art in its ability to write history in unexpected ways. As an example, Akomfrah draws parallels between the legacies of police brutality in the north of England, the devastating effects of climate change in South Asia and South America, and the liberation movements in the west of Africa. The exhibition probes into the ways in which addressing and connecting vast historical narratives across the five continents can then be reflected in the experiences of diasporic people in Britain. Tarini Malik

Listening All Night To The Rain

John Akomfrah, Listening All Night To The Rain, 2024. Still. Courtesy Smoking Dogs Films and Lisson Gallery. © Smoking Dogs Films.

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John Akomfrah, Listening All Night To The Rain, 2024. Still. Courtesy Smoking Dogs Films and Lisson Gallery. © Smoking Dogs Films.

Greece

Commissioner EMΣΤ | National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, Katerina Gregos, Artistic director Curator Panos Giannikopoulos Artists Thanasis Deligiannis Yannis Michalopoulos Elia Kalogianni Yorgos Kyvernitis Kostas Chaikalis Fotis Sagonas Collaborators Athina Ioannou, Administrative and financial director EMΣΤ | National Museum of Contemporary Art Yannis Arvanitis, Head of production of the Greek Pavilion, ΕΜΣΤ | National Museum of Contemporary Art With the Support of The Ministry of Culture, Hellenic Republic

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

Xirómero/Dryland is a hybrid audio-visual installation that is the result of a collective artistic endeavour. The project’s creative team consists of artists and theorists while the work showcased comprises fragments of research, performances, sounds sequences and video installations. Using water as its focal point, Xirómero/Dryland explores the political potential of sound and music as well as the impact of technology on rural landscapes and cultural diversity. The artists explore the experience of a provincial fair (panegyri), following its course and movements from the village square all the way out to the land. The work draws from the local traditions of central Greece and of the Xirómero region, which also lends the project its title. Between ritual and entertainment, these local folk festivals convey information about agricultural activities, defining time and generating — as well as being generated by — the internal temporality of the community during planting, watering or harvesting times. They produce meaning, create forms and help the community forge its own image. At the same time, however, antithetical notions constantly collapse into each other: spectators turn into participants, onstage to offstage, performance to everyday activity.

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This incessant interplay between performance and reality is brought into the work. Xirómero/Dryland taps into the architectural features of the Greek Pavilion to suggest associations between storage facilities and religious architecture. Moreover, a semi-automatic watering machine transported from Greece and integrated into a video, sound and light installation, brings the community’s meeting space — the square, the public assembly — from the outdoors to the indoors. As the watering system unfolds, it sets a rhythm delineating time like a clock or a tape directing the bodies and viewpoints of the visitors. Gender relations also come into focus: artists examine the possibilities of revelation or concealment, sexualization or sanctification of the female body, but also the reversibility of roles and the interpersonal dichotomy between the Self and the Other, punctuating the ambiguous gesture of withdrawing from the celebration. Xirómero/Dryland aims to relate the experience of local customs to the global condition where aesthetic directions change, traditions shift, rural life and celebration take on different forms, whilst the political dimensions of these processes remain an open subject of inquiry.

Ξηρόμερο / Dryland

The irrigation machine ARMATHA, artistic research during the Margaroni Residency, powered by Onassis Culture. Photo Pinelopi Gerasimou. © Onassis Culture.

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Grenada

Commissioner Susan Mains Curator Daniele Radini Tedeschi Artists Frederika Adam BREAKFAST Jason deCaires Taylor Antonello Diodato Guardigli (ADGART) Alma Fakhre Suelin Low Chew Tung Gabriele Maquignaz Lorenzo Marini Benaiah Matheson The Perceptive Group Nello Petrucci Collaborators Bollani Feofeo Ivan Caccavale Luciano Carini Carlo Ciucchi Picchio Fiorangela Filippini Giorgio Gregorio Grasso Asher Mains Gina Marziale Silvana Mascioli Luca Ripamonti Michele Rosa Salvatore Scaramozzino Emilio Sgorbati Fedora Spinelli Giulia Rustichelli

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

With the Support of Judith and Timothy Adam Georgia Taylor Aguilar Isabelle Morley Richard Nixon of Hideaway apartments Nick Browne Grenada Arts Council Grenada Tourism Authority National Lottery Authority Grenada Grenada Enterprises Group Art and Soul Gallery Grenada Act: Art and Design Grenada Century 21 Grenada Insurance Consultants Grenada Ltd Laluna Boutique Hotels and Villas BREAKFAST McGuinness Foundation Venice Documentation Project The British Council The Tetley Exhibitions and Artist Development Curator The Tetley Creative Minds Art Students of T. A. Marryshow Community College Galleria Alfieri Galleria DuePuntoZero Contemply Start srl NCART Studio C, Luciano Carini

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main […]. Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls: it tolls for thee”. These are the poet John Donne’s verses that summarize a humanity bound by a web of stories, to the extent that one man’s death becomes a collective, communal mourning. Furthermore, Édouard Glissant, in Poétique de la Relation, states: “We travel on the surface, in the expanse, weaving our imaginary structures and not filling up the voids of a science, but rather, as we go along, removing boxes that are too full so that in the end we can imagine infinite volumes.” In Le discours antillais, the Martinican writer describes the Caribbeans as a population that doesn’t have a single-rooted identity but rather one in constant transformation. Moreover, it is interesting to note that the term “discourse” is derived from “discurrō”, meaning “running back and forth”. Relation and movement would thus imply knowledge, openness to the other and mutual exchange, while still maintaining the right to opacity, that is, to one’s own singularity inspired by coexistence and perpetual evolutions. In line with this position appears to be the statement of the curator Adriano Pedrosa, regarding the theme of the 2024 edition Foreigners Everywhere, whose title carries a double meaning: “First of all, it means that wherever you go and wherever you are, you will always meet foreigners: they are/we are everywhere. Secondly, that regardless of one’s location, deep down one is always, truly, a foreigner.”

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The foreignness of each individual becomes a community as one “practices” knowledge — a concept opposed to “having” knowledge — through the attention paid to the relationships between things or simply by telling their stories in the context of a mutual “correspondence” (Tim Ingold), in order for the community to signify a “giving of self together”. Therefore, No Man Is an Island will embody an exhibition path in which the centrality of “relationship” will be a fundamental requirement for the individual and collective growth. Daniele Radini Tedeschi, Asher Mains

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Jason deCaires Taylor, Alveopora Verrilliana (Extract from Vicissitudes), 2023. Bio-receptive cement and live marine life, 160 × 40 × 25 cm. Courtesy the Artist. © Jason deCaires Taylor.

Holy See

Commissioner Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça, Prefect of the Dicastery for Culture and Education of the Holy See Curators Chiara Parisi Bruno Racine Artists Maurizio Cattelan Bintou Dembélé Simone Fattal Claire Fontaine Sonia Gomes Corita Kent Marco Perego & Zoe Saldana Claire Tabouret Conversations Hans Ulrich Obrist Exhibition Design COR arquitectos & Flavia Chiavaroli Production COR arquitectos & Flavia Chiavaroli Organisation Dicastery for Culture and Education of the Holy See Coordination Cristiano Grisogoni

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The Holy See Pavilion is presented as a new and unprecedented reality for the Biennale Arte, thanks to the physical and conceptual opening of Venice’s women’s prison on the Giudecca, where the object of discussion will be art, poetry, humanity, and caring. Con i miei occhi (With mine eyes), the title of the Holy See Pavilion, is taken from a fragment of poetry that echoes an ancient sacred text and an Elizabethan poem. “I do not love thee with mine eyes” (Shakespeare, Sonnet 141) resonates with verses 42:5 of the Book of Job: “now mine eye seeth thee”. A cross-fade, gradually becoming an action where seeing is synonymous with touching, with the gaze, embracing with the eye, bringing sight and perception into a dialogue with each other. The pavilion, a collective of artists, becomes a transformational ground for the personal experience of encountering each other and invites the meaning of the word care through art, with pragmatic projects that are intertwined with the creativity of usually parallel worlds that are foreign to each other, that never converge. The universe beyond opens up to prison isolation for an encounter charged with possible synergies, where art is made manifest through tangible gesture and shared vision that, if only for a limited while, breathe the same air of a time without measure. The time that remains.

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The project is distinguished by the coexistence of an ensemble, an artistic community that comes into being through the defying of convention, a new entity reflecting the diversity and unity of distant lives in which the names of the artists are united with those of the detained participants through the use of real names, pseudonyms, heteronyms, noms de plume... a constellation of creative minds, formed instinctively and desiring to collaborate. Every initiative – workshop, installation, dance, film, performance, painting – is an expression of this shared energy, in keeping with the urgency of the multifaceted dialogue proposed by Pope Francis. Visits to the pavilion, which will be by reservation and led by the prisoners–conferencers, challenge the desire for voyeurism and judgment toward artists and prisoners themselves, erasing the boundaries between observer and observed, judge and judged, inviting us to also reflect on power structures within art and within institutions. This is the birth of a cosmos with diverse stories and voices woven into a poetic tapestry.

Con i miei occhi

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Female prison in Giudecca, Venice. Photo Marco Perego.

Hungary

Commissioner Julia Fabényi Curator Róna Kopeczky Artist Márton Nemes Organisation Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest Graphic Design Dániel Kozma Project Coordination Géza Boros Anna Bálványos Zsigmond Lakó Technical Manager Béla Bodor With the Support of Hungarian Ministry of Culture and Innovation

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Márton Nemes’s work is greatly influenced by techno subcultures; the explosion and rearrangement of the pictorial field gives a distinctive psychedelic character to his paintings that extend into abstract domains and evoke the visual atmosphere and lighting of today’s nightclubs. Combining painterly and sculptural elements, his paintings and multimedia installations create a hypnotic spatial dynamic that propels the viewer from the harshness of the real world into a fluid, dizzying, fluorescent colour field. Techno Zen was designed by Nemes as an immersive environment, a painting-based Gesamtkunstwerk, that highlights the expansion of the genre of painting, its extension to other media and the crossing of its boundaries in the artist’s recent practice. In his earlier works, Nemes approached rave culture from an escapist perspective, and formulated the idea of freeing oneself from hopeless, depressive situations by visual means. The ensemble displayed in the pavilion now marks a turning point: defiance of reality is replaced by a transcendental experience, and the vibrancy of techno is transformed into a Zen resonance. The term techno also refers to techné and technological art; the fusion of industrial technologies and materials with a more conventional approach unfolds as a painting-object, an installation or a moving painterly environment. Laser-cut steel, car paint, enamelled steel plate, projection, DMX lights, speakers and coloured fans are the tools Nemes integrates in his practice in order to reinterpret the palette of painting. By doing so, the environment he creates becomes multisensory: its optical, acoustic and haptic content unfolds through the combined effects of light, colour, movement and sound.

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The project is structured in three main parts and groups of works, meant to be fully understood, perceived and experienced when the visitor stands in the middle of the space, the courtyard that links left, right, front and back spaces. This position — being in the middle — is both physical and ontological, while carrying a symbolic meaning. In an era of extremely polarised societal phenomena that lack or exclude nuances, the project conveys a humanistic message that we, albeit its simplicity, should keep reminding ourselves of. Róna Kopeczky

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Márton Nemes, Techno Zen, 2024. 3D visualisation of the installation by Bernadett Tóth. Courtesy the Artist.

Iceland

Commissioner Auður Jörundsdóttir, Icelandic Art Center Curator Dan Byers Artist Hildigunnur Birgisdóttir Project Coordinator Þórhildur Tinna Sigurðardóttir Production Manager Á. Birna Björnsdóttir Graphic Design Hrefna Sigurðardóttir Funded by Ministry of Culture and Business Affairs With the Support of Business Iceland National Gallery of Iceland i8 Gallery

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Two small plastic sculptures, one made from the dislocated control panel of a home printer and the other from a refrigerator panel, blink incessantly, falling in and out of sync. These are the kind of blinkings that signal a paper jam. Or a door left open. Something for you to deal with. Patronizing messages our products won’t let us ignore. As in life, every so often each sculpture produces the short-burst hum-rattle of a cell phone vibration, that familiar little shudder of anxiety and dopamine. Tiny LED pinprick lights and the hum of a silenced message delivery play out the ways our world of mass-produced stuff, built for obsolescence, nonetheless bonds to us — and us to them — with nearly telepathic powers. Hildigunnur Birgisdóttir divines the charisma in the objects that exist because of a million material limitations, aesthetic decisions, longings, social expectations, mistakes, deals, production conditions, moral codes, and the wild succession of behaviours and events that came before them. She distils her artworks from this charisma, embracing the capacities and cultures of the manufacturers, fabricators, and commercial firms she folds into her artistic process. The social life of these interactions permeates the artworks.

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Dolls’ toys blown up to human scale have surfaces of uniform saturated colour. They infer a weight, a smooth, dumb heft. The gallery walls hold them, so you cannot. They present the sculptures as brand ambassadors would at a trade show. Teaching objects. Designed to convey only as much information as will communicate their function. A lesson in editing. In abstraction. In producing desire. A gallery container full of blunt appropriations of the materials, products, and language of mass-production. They create pleasure — even wonder — from their lightness, their beautiful absurdity. And simultaneously they pull back layers of agreed-upon reality and meaning, opening sometimes uncomfortable spaces of philosophical and political quandary. Spaces of tension between one’s own personal reverie in their world of things and the collective complexity and consequences of millions of such worlds of things. Taking in Birgisdóttir’s tweaked, winking displays, these simultaneous realities play out amongst works that call attention to the things that most often exist at periphery of our vision and thinking.

That’s a Very Large Number — A Commerzbau

Detail from the Commerzbau That’s a Very Large Number by Hildigunnur Birgisdóttir, 2024. Photo Vigfús Birgisson.

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Hildigunnur Birgisdóttir, That’s a Very Large Number, 2024. Archival pigment print on cotton paper and a sticker. Photo Vigfús Birgisson.

Islamic Republic of Iran

Commissioner Mohammad Khorasanizadeh Curator Amir Abdolhoseini Shoaib Hoseini Moghadam Artists Abdolhamid Ghadirian Gholamali Taheri Kazem Chalipa Morteza Asadi Mostafa Goudarzi Organisation The Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance The Office of Deputy of artistic affairs General Department of Visual Arts Office The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art The Visual Art Office of Hozeh Honari of Islamic Revolution

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2024

We, as humans, are all descendants of Adam and Eve, sharing a common root and family bond, thus considered as brothers and sisters to one another. Our joys and sorrows are shared; the sorrow, pain and oppression faced by any nation are bitter to us, and the success and happiness of any nation, without infringing upon the rights of others, bring joy to all. As the Iranian poet, Saadi Shirazi, eloquently penned: Of one Essence is the human race, Thusly has Creation put the Base; One Limb impacted is sufficient, For all Others to feel the Mace The theme “Foreigners Everywhere” at the Biennale Arte provided an appropriate platform for us to select the title Of One Essence Is the Human Race for our official exhibition, as a reminder that true art holds a higher value, recognizing the dignity of individuals, depicting justice, integrity, and fairness vividly, and not easily brushing aside the bitterness experienced by other humans. The establishment of distinct domains and the delineation of contractual boundaries between nations have led to the classification of some individuals as citizens and others as foreigners. However, this does not negate the significance of borders in ensuring security and confronting national adversaries. Now, imagine breaking down the barriers that separate us from each other and even from our own existence, using the tools of art, and opening doors to everyone. Undoubtedly, the moment when anyone decides to transcend these self-imposed limitations will be a moment of sensitivity, courage, and magnificence, just as overcoming doubt and fear transforms individuals into the heroes of their own life stories.

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In our exhibition, we have endeavoured to transcend borders and invite spectators to witness the unity of humanity. Sometimes achieved through arrangements that place the audience in different contexts, other times through virtual reality technology that challenges physical boundaries, and occasionally through visual artworks that creatively express fresh narratives on this subject. However, all these represent merely a small corner of the artistry of Iranian artists who have shattered borders and walls, conveying a message from the heirs of the eight-thousand-year-old civilization of Iran, seated on the walls of ancient Venice. The day will come when these unreal borders will collapse, and all humans will become one nation. Mohammad Khorasanizadeh

Of One Essence Is the Human Race

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Ireland

Commissioner Culture Ireland Curators Sara Greavu Project Arts Centre Artist Eimear Walshe Ireland at Venice is a partnership between Culture Ireland and the Arts Council Ireland / An Chomhairle Ealaíon. With principal sponsorship from Dublin City Council for Ireland at Venice 2024 Artistic Collaborators Amanda Feery (composer) Mufutau Yusuf (lead choreographer, performer, camera, co-direction) Lisa Godson (research consultant) Amie Egan (costumes) Faolán Carey (production photographer) Ghaliah Conroy (performer, camera, co-direction) Ailbhe W. Drohan (performer, camera, co-direction) Ethan Soost (performer, camera, co-direction) Cillian Byrne (performer, camera, co-direction) Rima Baransi (performer, camera, co-direction) Kieran Ferris (set build manager) Andreas Kindler von Knobloch (architectural modelling) Alex Synge (The First 47 – designer)

With the Support of Dublin Port Company The National Museum of Ireland Longford County Council The Limerick School of Art and Design Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art Design and Technology (IADT) The UCD School of Art History The Embassy of Ireland Italy Ireland Invites and our patrons and donors: Keith & Yvonne Browne Peter Crowley Anne Devlin & Paul Gannon Gerard & Monica Flood Emma & Fred Goltz Helen Kinsella Adrian & Jennifer O’Carroll Louise Church Paul & Liz Duggan Niall Ennis Kathy Gilfillan Simone Janssens Anne Kennedy Lochlann Quinn Dave Raethorne Odette Rocha Richard Whelan

ROMANTIC IRELAND comprises a multi-channel video installation and an operatic soundtrack housed in an immersive sculpture. Set on the site of an unfinished earth build, the video stages soapy, dramatic encounters between character archetypes from nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. These figures occupy an abstracted ruin, a site under simultaneous construction and demolition. The pavilion soundtrack is a five-voice opera describing the scene of an eviction, composed by Amanda Feery with a libretto by Walshe. Eimear Walshe’s work traces the legacies of late nineteenth-century land contestation in Ireland. Walshe’s project for Venice explores the complex politics of collective building through the Irish tradition of the “meitheal”: a gang of workers, neighbours, kith and kin who come together to build, harvest and cooperate in mutual aid. It depicts a frenzied and fraught engagement with the ancient labour-intensive practice of earth building, a form of construction with an 11,000-year history and local iterations across the world. The video work was shot on location at sustainable skills centre, Common Knowledge, on Ireland’s west coast. Led by choreographer Mufutau Yusuf, a group of seven performers, including the artist, enact characters in constantly rupturing historical dyads. This was filmed on four mobile phones passed between each actor, blurring the traditional distinction between director, performer and camera person.

Collaborators Common Knowledge (production partner) Drop Everything (launch event partner) eo/a – architects (build partner)

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Made in the shadow of the ongoing housing crisis in Ireland, the installation becomes, variously, a building site of possibility, a wrestling ring for Ireland’s generational and class antagonisms, a space of tender care, and a structure made into a cold ruin by the social death of eviction. The exhibition forces encounters between historic moments, and draws out their parallel power dynamics and affective registers; their forms of labour, conflict and pleasure; the entangled histories of sexuality, property and the state.

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Israel

Commissioners Michael Gov Arad Turgeman Curators Mira Lapidot Tamar Margalit Artist Ruth Patir Organisation The Israel Ministry of Culture & Sports The Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs With the Special Support of Israel Antiquities Authority Tel Aviv Museum of Art CCA Tel Aviv-Yafo With the Support of The Israel Lottery Council for Culture & Arts Daniel Howard Foundation Elital and Jason Arison Jan Fischer Artis Bruce and Ruth Rappaport Foundation Ghila and Zvi Limon The Philip & Muriel Berman Foundation Albi Braverman Gallery: Adi Gura and Yaffa Braverman Daniella and Alma Luxembourg Tova and Sami Sagol Wix

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In video works that weave together documentary and 3D animation, Ruth Patir investigates her own lived experiences. Having been diagnosed as a carrier of the BRCA2 gene mutation in her mid-thirties, which puts her at high risk for breast and ovarian cancer, the artist faced the reality that her reproductive organs — typically thought of as a source of life and pleasure — were self-destructive. She was first pushed towards freezing her eggs for a future pregnancy through fertility preservation treatments, a course of action that was both painful and demanding. In Israel, these notoriously expensive treatments are state funded. Although clearly a privilege, it only complicated matters for Patir, as she increasingly resented the vested interests of the State in her most personal decision. Did she even want to be a mother? Was there a real, viable option to not have children in a society obsessed with demographics? Patir had previously examined inherited narratives by animating archaeological artefacts. In the process, she became intrigued by female figurines dating from 800–600 BCE, prevalent in the ancient Levant. Palmsized and posing with arms clasped beneath their bulging bosoms, these figurines were unearthed in masses, yet their function remains unknown. Researchers debate whether they served as portrayals of goddesses, as votive offerings or protective charms, or even as objects of erotica. The fact that these small statuettes were mass produced and found in residential sites rather than in places of worship suggests, however, that they were in common domestic use — an embodiment

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of the hopes and anxieties of women who lived three millennia ago. In (M)otherland, Patir harnesses these figurines as avatars in her personal odyssey. As she navigates her way through the indignities of a male-dominated medical establishment, she documents the invisible labour and pain associated with its procedures. Forlorn women of a past civilization, the figurines in (M)otherland reach us across time, silent remnants of ancient wars and bloodshed. They evoke the enmeshed experience of womanhood, rupture and grief, an experience made all the more acute in the face of the ravages of war tearing the region apart. Mira Lapidot Tamar Margalit

(M)otherland Ruth Patir, Petah Tikva (Waiting), 2024. Video still.

Ruth Patir, Motherland, 2024. Video still.

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Ruth Patir, Intake, 2024. Video still.

Italy

Ministry of Culture

Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity

Italian Pavilion Due qui / To Hear

Minister of Culture Gennaro Sangiuliano

Director-General Angelo Piero Cappello

Commissioner Angelo Piero Cappello

Executive Project Riccardo Rossi

Under Secretaries of State Lucia Borgonzoni Gianmarco Mazzi

Director Unit 1 Cultural and creative industries, fashion and design Maria Luisa Amante

Curator Luca Cerizza

Planning and Set-up Yari Andrea Mazza

Artist Massimo Bartolini

Director Unit 2 Contemporary art Fabio De Chirico

In collaboration with Caterina Barbieri Gavin Bryars Kali Malone

Organ Builders Massimo Drovandi Samuele Frangioni Samuele Maffucci Valerio Marrucci

Secretary-General Mario Turetta Chief of Staff Francesco Gilioli Head of Press Office and Communication Andrea Petrella

Director Unit 4 Peripheries and urban regeneration Maria Vittoria Marini Clarelli General Coordination Luciano Antonino Scuderi Technical Coordination Matteo Piccioni Technical Coordination - Support Staff Valentina Fiore Secretariat Roberta Gaglione Secretariat - Support Staff Edoardo Cedrone Antonella Lucarelli Claudia Vitiello Administration Graziella D’Urso Communication and Press Office Silvia Barbarotta Francesca Galasso

With the special involvement in the Public Program of Nicoletta Costa and Tiziano Scarpa Assistant Curator Francesca Verga Curatorial assistant for Public Program and Reader Gaia Martino General Organisation and Institutional Relations Chiara Bordin Administrative Office Anna Vercellotti Communication and Social Media Strategy Alpha Bravo Charlie Carlotta Poli Press Office Lara Facco P&C Lara Facco Marianita Santarossa Andrea Gardenghi Creative Direction and Graphic Design Studio Folder Marco Ferrari and Elisa Pasqual with Giulia Tomasi Anna Magni Gresi Balliu

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Lights Carlo Pallieri Rendering Martin Pividori Publications Electa Timeo Translations Johanna Bishop Teresa Albanese Video Documentation Matteo Frittelli per Alto/ Piano Photography Agostino Osio per Alto/ Piano Matteo de Mayda Production La Biennale di Venezia

Due qui / To Hear FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Preparatory drawing by Massimo Bartolini for Pensive Bodhisattva on A Flat, 2024. Photo Lorenzo Lessi.

La Biennale di Venezia is one of the most prestigious cultural institutions in contemporary Italy and has been an avant-garde international stage for the promotion of new artistic trends ever since it was founded in 1895. That “never ending dream of Beauty”, as Gabriele d’Annunzio defined it at the end of the first edition of this art exhibition in Venice, is still today an unmissable appointment for the world of culture and an opportunity for artists, curators, critics and art lovers to meet and share ideas. It is also a unique opportunity for participating countries to present their cultural offerings to the rest of the world and to create deep and lasting relationships. Because culture is, without a doubt, the most important instrument of dialogue and diplomacy that a country like ours possesses and contributes to building “bridges” between nations, promoting peace and understanding between peoples. And it is no coincidence that this event is being held in Italy, in a city as unique in the world as Venice. Culture is an indispensable element of the Italian national identity and represents a material and immaterial heritage that can be drawn upon to face the challenges of the contemporary world. Italy, with its long tradition of cultural diplomacy rooted in the Renaissance of Ludovico Ariosto, plays a fundamental role on the international scene, not only thanks to its extraordinary historical and artistic heritage, but also thanks to the creativity of its artists, architects, designers, arti-

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sans and all the protagonists of the contemporary cultural proscenium. Cultural promotion is an essential part of Italy’s foreign policy and constitutes one of the main instruments of global visibility, also supported by Italy’s centrality in the dynamics of cultural cooperation. In order to promote Italian creativity in the international context, the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture organises and supports Italian participation in La Biennale di Venezia: for this edition, the Italian Pavilion is curated by Luca Cerizza with the project Due qui / To Hear by Massimo Bartolini, which includes interventions by other creatives with a view to a collaborative and multidisciplinary practice. The title in itself makes explicit what lies at the heart of the exhibition, namely the reflection on how, together, encounter and active listening help us to develop a greater awareness of the diversity and complexity of the world around us. Angelo Piero Cappello Commissioner of the Italian Pavilion Director-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture

Due qui / To Hear

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Preparatory drawing by Massimo Bartolini for Due qui and Conveyance, 2024. Photo Lorenzo Lessi.

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Preparatory drawing by Massimo Bartolini for Audience for a Tree, 2024. Photo Lorenzo Lessi.

Luca Cerizza

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Playing on the homophones “two here” (in Italian, due qui) and “to hear”, the title points to the eminently relational nature of sound. The acoustic paradigm should be seen here as a physical experience, but also a metaphor: it invites us to pay attention, to listen to the Other, be it a human being, a machine, or a natural form. In Bartolini’s view, art is a path to knowledge, and “lending an ear” is a tool for self-improvement within the world. Through sculptures, installations, sound works, and performances, with a range often found in this artist’s practice, the project describes a collaborative approach and a context of experience. Visitors can enter the exhibition at more than one point, moving through three spaces built around different acoustic experiences and encounters. One entrance leads into a nearly empty room where they are welcomed by the small sculpture of a Pensive Bodhisattva, a Buddhist figure who prefers thought to action. The drone of an organ pipe creates a sense of frozen time, a space of waiting. In the central room, a large structure of scaffolding pipes has been transformed into an organ playing a constant melody composed by Caterina Barbieri and Kali Malone. Visitors can walk through and sit down on a circular bench. At its centre is a pool where a wave constantly rises and falls, encouraging a form of meditation, even a trance state. Coming out of this tangled, forest-like space, visitors can move into the more open setting of the Giardino

delle Vergini. Here, they are greeted by a new acoustic element: a choral work for three voices, bell plates, and vibraphone, composed by Gavin Bryars in collaboration with his son, Yuri. It sings of a human being who feels like a tree, of an osmotic relationship with the Other, “as if everything were born in me / or as if I were born in everything.” Like the Bodhisattva’s stillness, this seeming immobility is, in point of fact, a more attentive form of listening and interaction.

Due qui / To Hear

“Experience is due to a giving and receiving. Its medium is listening.” Byung-Chul Han, Vita Contemplativa: In Praise of Inactivity, trans. D. Steuer, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2024

Ivory Coast

Commissioner Illa Ginette Donwahi Curator Simon Njami Artists Jems Robert Koko Bi Sadikou Oukpedjo François-Xavier Gbré Franck Abd-Bakar Fanny Marie Claire Messouma Manlanbien Organisation Ministry of Culture and Francophonie of the Ivory Coast Françoise Remarck, Minister Donwahi Foundation for Contemporary Art Other Collaborators Amah Ayivi Jean-Servais Somian Youssef Khouly Fatoumata Tandjan N’Diaye Thierry Messou Josué Comoe Marie-Charles Piardon

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It don’t mean a thing, if it ain’t got that swing. Duke Ellington Ivory Coast is a part of Africa which itself is a part of the world. Its identity, since independence, has been built, not on a withdrawal into itself, but on an assumed and enlarged pan-Africanism. A national flag should not be reduced into a fixed identity. And even if it is about what is named a “national representation”, the most important notion here, on African soil, does not refer to a political and geographical claim, but to the sensitivity and expression of a common language. In Venice, the common language is art and each group or individual uses it with particular accents, with idiomatic forms that are impossible to translate, but which can be understood in their singularities. This singularity is part of a history that is both local and global, fluid and complex. Did Africans deported to the Americas and elsewhere feel despair when they realized that the path of return was forever closed to them? That they would have to survive in hostile land? Maybe. Some died. But others resisted. Have transformed their despair into a form of absolute resilience. They found a palliative for the motherland by inventing, in their music, the blue note. The note was a necessary tool for those people deprived of everything, including their identity, but of course, the way European specialists first described was as a form of “anomaly”. However, this supposed anomaly created the blues, jazz and all their derivatives. It is the blue note that brings to life this particular colour that was missing from the western tonal system. It is what allows us to express solitude and the vicissitudes of life but also hope.

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The former slaves of America knew how to transform this deadly impulse caused by despair into something vital and vibrant. They have chosen to transform their fate into the expression of a fierce struggle against all odds. Naturally, fighting against fate is a lost battle. But in this equation, it is not so much the victory that counts but the fight. And it is perhaps in the very essence of this challenge that hope is created. It is this same spirit that allowed all the exiles to resist and stand up against their status of unwanted strangers. It is this fierce and inalienable will that has enabled the peoples of Africa to overcome the horrors of a hostile history, and it is this intact will that we intend to activate through the Ivorian Pavilion. Simon Njami

The Blue Note

Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien, Garden Ladies #14, 2023. Rice paper, ink and raffia fibre, 66 × 56 cm. Gregory Copitet. © Adagp Paris 2023, Galerie Cécile Fakhoury and the Artist.

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Sadikou Oukpedjo, Mythe universel 5, 2023. Mirror etching, natural pigments, 108 × 166 cm. Courtesy the Artist. © Mira Mariani.

Japan

Commissioner The Japan Foundation Curator Sook-Kyung Lee Artist Yuko Mohri

Exhibition Production Management Yui Yoshizumi Coordination Shintaro Tokairin Local Coordination Harumi Muto Academic Advisor Gaku Kondo Production Koshiro Shikine Kazme Egawa Takayuki Ito Kinoshita Lab. Photography Yasuhide Kuge Graphic Design Natsuko Yoneyama Development Natsu Tanabe

With the Special Support of Ishibashi Foundation With the Support of Takeo Obayashi Hiroyuki Maki, Buffalo Yukiko Ito Lîn (Eric) Huang RongChuan Chen, RC Foundation Jenny Yeh, Winsing Arts Foundation Hideaki Fukutake, Minamigata Holdings Taku Hoshina, Arflex Japan Yoshiko Mori Obayashi Foundation Izumi Ogino regist Art Masami Shiraishi Tetsuaki Kobata Haruo Nakamura Nomura Foundation Toshiaki Ogasawara Memorial Foundation Miwa Taguchi Chizuko Yashiro Yoshihisa Kawamura Yui Matsushima Tatsuo Fujiwara, Fumiko Suzuki Kyoko Hattori Jun Hori Fumio Nanjo Yuko Tadano Eri Takane Kankuro Ueshima Project Fulfill Art Space mother’s tankstation Yutaka Kikutake Gallery Tanya Bonakdar Gallery In Cooperation with Miyake Design Studio Re-tem Corporation

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Someday we’ll evaporate together. Yoko Ono Yuko Mohri is known for her installations and sculptures centered on “events” that change with their environment. In this exhibition, she presents two works. They are ecosystems that fill the space with sound, light, movement, and smell. Moré Moré (Leaky) is inspired by various ad hoc efforts seen in Tokyo subway stations to stop water leaks. The staff often use everyday items to cope with such small “crises”, widespread in this city with frequent tectonic activity. The artist will artificially create leaks and then attempt to fix them, improvising with a variety of common household goods available in the vicinity of the Biennale Arte site. As water, diverted into several small passages and circulated by a pump, escapes from the leaks, the work begins to resemble a kinetic sculpture. In a world where floods affect the environment, and especially in Venice, a city constantly threatened by flood, the last one in 2019, Moré Moré acquires multiple meanings. Decomposition generates sounds and light by inserting electrodes into fruits and converting their moisture into electric signals. The work’s distinctive speakers and flickering light bulbs will adorn the wall. The fruits’ internal state shifts constantly, modulating the pitch of the drone and the intensity of the light. Over time, the fruit begins to wither, giving off the sweet smell of decay.

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Here, the artist’s reference is the classic theme in Buddhist painting known as “Nine Stages of Decay,” which depicts the gradual decomposition and transformation of a corpse. Decomposition thus symbolizes the way in which life delineates a great circle. The installation is also based on live electronics, the improvisational music practiced since the 1960s by artists such as John Cage and David Tudor, who let chance shape their work. With a title that etymologically signifies “to place together (com+pose)”, the exhibition asks what it means for people to be and work together in a world facing multiple global crises. Paradoxically, the crises bring out the greatest creativity in people — this is the primary idea behind Mohri’s project, initially inspired by the Tokyo subway workers’ resourceful measures against water leaks. The water leaks are never fully fixed, and the fruits end up in the compost to rot in Mohri’s installations, but these apparently futile endeavours indicate the glimpses of the solutions our humble creativity might bring about. Sook-Kyung Lee

Compose FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Yuko Mohri, Composition for Compose, 2023. Watercolour, pen, pencil. Courtesy the Artist.

Republic of Kazakhstan

Commissioner Aida Balayeva, Minister of Culture and Information, Kazakhstan Curators Danagul Tolepbay Anvar Musrepov Artists Lena Pozdnyakova and Eldar Tagi Yerbolat Tolepbay Kamil Mullashev Anvar Musrepov Saken Narynov Sergey Maslov Academic Consultant Kulshat Medeuova With the Support of Viled Fashion Qazaq oil Universal energy Kazakhstan

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

Jerūiyq is a promised land from Kazakh legend, passed down to the present through generations of oral tradition, serving as a metaphor for searching, exploration, improvement, and invisible knowledge. Ancient tales about the philosopher Asan Kaigy tell of his efforts to lead the nomadic people to lands free from disease and hunger, where time grants eternal life. The word “kaigy” translates from Kazakh as “sorrow”. Common expressions such as “fall into asan kaigy” use this name as a synonym for sorrow. Sorrow, like a thin veil, hangs over the memory of the many utopias that have failed to be realized in the endless steppe, through traumatic encounters with the dark side of modernity: the tragic famine of the 1930s, craters carved out by nuclear test sites in Semey, the desiccation of the Aral Sea, and other scars on the body of the Kazakh land. The exhibition is based on a chronology of key artworks of the utopian imagination of Kazakh artists since the 1970s (Above the White Desert, Kamil Mullashev), through the works of the period of the emergence of contemporary art in Kazakhstan (Baikonur-2, Sergey Maslov) to the present day — including works based on artificial intelligence (Presence, Lena Pozdanykova and Eldar Tagi).

PARTICIPATING COUNTRIES

With independence, Kazakh art received a new impetus to reimagine and decolonize the future without deferring to Soviet censorship and the approval of the metropolis. This exhibition presents a collection of works by artists projecting their vision of ideal worlds, where spirits and mystical rituals meet (Alastau, Anvar Musrepov), where nomadism is transformed into space stations (Mobile Unit, Saken Narynov), and highlight of the exhibition is a visionary large-scale painting created recently which reveals portals to look beyond the horizon of events (New Child. Rebirth, Yerbolat Tolepbay). In our time, with its permanent turbulent state, Jerūiyq becomes a guiding star on the path to overcoming the crisis of imagination.

Jerūiyq: Journey Beyond the Horizon

Yerbolat Tolepbay, New Child. Rebirth, 2024 (captured in process). Acrylic on canvas, 300 × 660 cm. Photo courtesy the Artist. © Yerbolat Tolepbay.

Saken Narynov, Mobile Unit, 1979. Screen print graphic, 84.1 cm × 118.9 cm. Photo courtesy the Artist family. © the Artist family.

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Sergey Maslov, Baikonur 2, 2001. Installation: wood, felt, digital collage, sound, text. Photo courtesy Yelena Vorobyeva. © Yelena Vorobyeva.

Kenya

Commissioner Milka Mugo Curator Edward Mwaura Ndekere Artists Peter Kenyanya Oendo Mzee Elkana Ong’esa Gerard Oroo Motondi Robin Okeyo Mbera Charles Duke Kombo John Tabule Ogao Abuya

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

The Kenyan Pavilion at the Biennale Arte 2024, titled Roots of Return, delves into the nuances of global migration and culture through a lens that intertwines environmental consciousness and artistic expression. Aligned with the overarching theme Foreigners Everywhere, the exhibition navigates the complexities of northward migration by the Global South and especially by Sub-Saharan Africa in search of pastures perceived as “greener” in the Global North amidst a backdrop of climate change and pollution. Acknowledging the multifaceted reasons behind human migration, the exhibition emphasises the irony of Africans moving northward in pursuit of a better life and environment, which is paradoxically polluted and lacking in natural resources compared to Africa. It sheds light on the interconnectedness of global conflicts, Global North industrialisation, and its repercussions, such as global warming, leading to forced migrations due to droughts, floods, and diseases, as well as the importance of the Global South and particularly Sub-Saharan Africa, for providing naturally occurring solutions and remedies to these repercussions. The exhibition addresses the paradoxical but complementary relationship between extracting basalt rock and stones from mines in Kenya and creating sculptural art that has actively absorbed and removed carbon from the environment. This narrative resonates with the ongoing but unresolved discourse on the repatriation of African sculptural art housed in western museums and private collections.

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The exhibition also serves as a record of the unique and evolving geological supply of mineral rock and stones resident in Kenya. Artists, including Kenya’s master sculptors — Gerard Motondi Oroo, Peter Kenyanya Oendo, Robin Okeyo Mbera, John Abuya Tabule Ogao, and the virtuoso Elkana Onge’sa —, are exploring deeper into the soil, discovering and utilizing harder, more difficult mineral rock and stones like basalts with unique colours, textures, and chemical compositions. The exhibition encapsulates a profound and multilayered narrative, intertwining sculptural art, environment, science and cultural heritage in a thought-provoking multidisciplinary exploration of migration and sustainability. Mwaura Ndekere

Roots of Return

Gerald Motondi Oroo, Between the Clouds.

John Tabule Abuya Ogao, Madonna (Mother and Child).

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Peter Kenyanya Oendo, Sleeping Bull.

Republic of Korea

Commissioner Arts Council Korea Curators Seolhui Lee Jacob Fabricius Artist Koo Jeong A

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

Koo Jeong A (they/them) is constantly in orbit, living and working everywhere. In their practice, architectural elements, texts, drawings, paintings, sculptures, animations, sound, film, words, and scents play a significant role. Throughout the years, Koo has investigated and blurred the lines between their artwork and the space it occupies. The artwork adds new layers to any given space and Koo manages to merge small intimate experiences and large-scale immersive works. The curatorial approach for the Korean Pavilion 2024 has been to combine some of the key subjects and sculptural elements that Koo Jeong A has worked with during the last three decades. With the new commission Odorama Cities, created especially for the Korean Pavilion, Koo delves into the nuances of our spatial encounters, investigating how we perceive and recollect spaces, with a particular emphasis on how scents, smells, and odors contribute to these memories. With the pavilion itself, Koo explores an expanded tactility. Some of the prominent interests in Koo’s art, such as immaterialism, weightlessness, endlessness, and levitation, are keywords throughout the Korean Pavilion. They are embedded and engraved as infinity symbols directly into the new wooden floor, manifested as two floating wooden möbius-shaped sculptures and a levitating, scent-diffusing bronze figure, and last but not least symbolized in the scents that transforms the pavilion into a collection of olfactory memories.

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These scent memories are a cornerstone in Odorama Cities. During the summer of 2023, Koo collected them with the aim of making a scent portrait of the Korean peninsula. Through social media, advertisements, press releases, and personal one-on-one meetings, the team behind the Korean Pavilion has reached out to Koreans and non-Koreans — to anyone who has a relationship to Korea — and asked: “What is your scent memory of Korea?” This open call has generated more than 600 written statements about Korean scents. Selected keywords and scent memories were given to sixteen perfumers based in Paris, Shanghai and Singapore. The perfumers, armed with the stories, took on the task of interpreting and making sixteen distinct scent experiences for the pavilion and a single commercial fragrance.

Koo Jeong A - Odorama Cities FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Koo Jeong A, KANGSE SpSt, 2023–24. Bronze, plywood metal, pigment paint, scent diffuser, sensor, 317 × 74 × 162 cm. Courtesy the Artist. © Koo Jeong A.

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Republic of Kosovo

Commissioner Hana Halilaj Curator Erëmirë Krasniqi Artist Doruntina Kastrati Organisation Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sport of the Republic of Kosovo

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

The sculptural installation The Echoing Silences of Metal and Skin addresses feminized labour and workplace inequality. Investigating the joint deindustrialization of the economy and deregulation of the labour market, Doruntina Kastrati encounters the (im)material forms of precarious employment in light industries in the aftermath of the 1999 Kosovo War, a period marked by a radical and abrupt transition from a socialist to free-market system. Partaking in wage labour has granted women a measure of financial independence and social enfranchisement. Alas, far from being emancipatory, the feminization of labour in industries like food production has perpetuated traditional gender roles. Further, since such jobs offer dim prospects for upward mobility, this development has rendered women economically vulnerable and pushed them to the political margins. The Echoing Silences of Metal and Skin brings women’s narratives into public view. The project draws on oral histories that the artist conducted with female employees of a Turkish delight factory in Prizren, Kosovo’s second largest city and the artist’s hometown. Kastrati brings to the forefront the perspectives and experience of these women, who produce approximately ten thousand boxes of the sweets in question on a daily basis. The work at the factory is repetitive and performed from a standing position. Nearly one third of the women working at this factory undergo knee replacement surgery. The metal objects that are implanted in their knees are traces of the long hours they work for low wages. Intending to prompt critical reflection on why and how exploitative labour practices have persisted, the artist engages with the embodied characteristics of materials, particularly metal.

PARTICIPATING COUNTRIES

The installation consists of four freestanding sculptures modelled after the shells of different types of nuts that are used as ingredients in Turkish delights. Activated by a sound, the sculptures build a distinctive rhythm in the exhibition space. Made from various metals, they simultaneously allude to surgical implants and industrial manufacturing. Through her choice of materials, Kastrati recreates the machinic coldness of the Turkish delight factory and the eerie coolness of the foreign metal on the workers’ knees. Charged with symbolic meaning while referencing the estrangement of working-class women, the pavilion’s constituent parts honour first-person narratives and create incisive associations. Erëmirë Krasniqi

The Echoing Silences of Metal and Skin

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Doruntina Kastrati, The Echoing Silences of Metal and Skin, 2024. Photography (research material). Photo Majinda Hoxha. Courtesy the Artist.

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Doruntina Kastrati, The Echoing Silences of Metal and Skin, 2024. Photography (research material). Photo Majinda Hoxha. Courtesy the Artist.

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Latvia

Commissioner Daiga Rudzāte Curator Adam Budak Artist Amanda Ziemele Architect Niklāvs Paegle, ĒTER Organisation INDIE Culture Project Agency in cooperation with The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Latvia The Investment and Development Agency of Latvia The Investment and Tourism Agency of Riga With the Support of The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Latvia Jānis Zuzāns, Alfor Tet - IT & innovation company VV Foundation Latvijas Finieris Arctic Paper Antalis

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

This is Amanda Ziemele’s newly defined painting as a spatial extravaganza of irregular geometry and organic volume. A space of an imaginary encounter, and broken memories; as it actively unfolds and opens in an uncontrolled rhythm and suspense, it orchestrates a ritual of a form-in-becoming, a celebration of cosmic multidimensionality, staged in a cubicle of historical legacy. Precision and modesty equal poetry in Ziemele’s painterly environments, which are choreographed in a masterful way across all parameters of a given space. Amanda’s is a generous gesture — towards the painting itself, towards space, as well as (and perhaps most importantly) towards the viewer. The artist keeps activating the viewer’s attention, guiding the gaze in an almost cinematic manner, a single long-takecamera movement, comparable to the painterly move. The simplicity of an elemental form, along with the basic brushstroke act, makes it an unusual proposal which seduces the viewer with its freshness and certain wickedness, a sense of humour, allure of temptation. The painting appears as a sensual practice, with care for materiality, with a focus on a texture, with gentle narrative nods towards childhood, memory, a need of protection, a critical nostalgia. Amanda Ziemele transforms the pavilion’s interior into a living organism, taming space, animating dimensions, letting us develop a romance of polyphonic space. This is a space of a desired welcome, a habitat of hospitality. Here, the space is both a promise and a doubt, “upward, and yet not northward”, or as yet another poet would say: “hinauf und zurück”, a heterotopic zone of movement and exploration, a transition towards wondrous simultaneity of a (hyper) spatial experience.

PARTICIPATING COUNTRIES

Following Edwin A. Abbott’s 1884 novella Flatland’s Shakespearian thread: “O day and night, but this is wondrous strange... and therefore as a stranger give it welcome”, Ziemele unfolds the mysteries of three dimensions in a fluid transition from flatland to thoughtland by creating a microcosm of embrace and unconditional hospitality under threat. This is Amanda’s version of a mature space, a counter-phantasmagoria, resisting exhaustion and fatigue, a space with an attitude, ready to think and host the irregular world of contemporary society. The healing — the necessity of healing — is what Amanda’s project ultimately offers to us. Adam Budak

O day and night, but this is wondrous strange... and therefore as a stranger give it welcome

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Amanda Ziemele, Zephyr, 2023. Oil on canvas, plywood, 224 × 149 and 152 × 70 cm overlapping. Sun Has Teeth, exhibition view. Photo Kristīne Madjare. Courtesy the Artist. © Amanda Ziemele.

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Amanda Ziemele, O day and night, but this is wondrous strange… and therefore as a stranger give it welcome, 2023. Work in progress. Photo Kristīne Madjare. Courtesy the Artist. © Amanda Ziemele.

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Lebanon

Commissioner and Curator Nada Ghandour Artist Mounira Al Solh Organisation Lebanese Visual Art Association – LVAA Associate Curator Dina Bizri Scenography Architect Karim Beckdache Scenography and Exhibition Design Coordinator Ibrahim Kombarji Lighting Design and Supply UNILUX Group Graphic Design Lara Nader Mouawad Project Team Chérine Assouad Nadine Katabi Charles Simon Thomas Advisors Charbel Abou Charaf, White & Case Nicole Araygi, Araygi& Maalouly Dania Bazzy, Visionbuz Main Support Tariq & Diane AlGhussein Basel Dalloul, Ramzi & Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation (DAF) The Elie Khouri Art Foundation (EKAF) Raffy Manoukian Rana & Riad Zein Additional Support Catawiki Commercial Insurance Ziad & Monique Ghandour Tania Issa Semaan Sfeir-Semler Gallery Beirut/Hamburg

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

The Lebanese Pavilion invited artist Mounira Al Solh to create a bridge between myth and reality. Her multimedia installation A Dance with her Myth – combining painting, drawing, sculpture, embroidery, and video – plunges visitors in ancient Phoenicia through modern plastic and visual techniques. Facing a blinding and raw reality, the timeless Graeco-Phoenician myth offers a new perspective on current events, with a particular focus on the challenges faced by women in our contemporary world. Al Solh’s installation is rooted in a mythical tale: the abduction of Princess Europa on a beach of the city of Tyre by the god Zeus, who took the form of a white bull. Within her installation, Al Solh creates unforeseen connections and parallels across time. Revisiting mythological tales allows critical reflection and the emergence of alternative perspectives. This is precisely why the interpretation of myths has been used frequently for protest, mobilisation, and subversion. Al Solh’s installation encapsulates all these dimensions, having deliberately chosen the myth of Europa for its inherent quality: its capacity to allow public discourse. Mirroring Europa’s enforced journey, there are today’s forced exile, lost resources, and the echo of nearby and distant conflicts. However, the journey that Al Solh invites us to pursue, following in the footsteps of Princess Europa, leads to the realisation of a feminine destiny, liberated from the influence of the “Gods”—one that embraces the role and responsibilities typically associated with men without being subjected to them, and whilst aspiring to a different state of being.

PARTICIPATING COUNTRIES

Al Solh’s reinterpretation of the myth creates a rhetorical and visual space celebrating emancipation, freedom, equality, commitment, and solidarity. It serves as a platform for bold dialogue across time in a land that is more resilient than ever. The Lebanese Pavilion presents this exhibition to the public, aiming to nurture the collective social and political awareness through the transformative power of art. Nada Ghandour

A Dance with her Myth

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Mounira al Solh, A Dance with her Myth, 2023. Watercolour, marker, charcoal, ink, acrylic, oil pastels and paper stitched on papyrus, 57 × 55 cm. Photo Quinn Oosterbaan. Courtesy the Artist; SfeirSemler Gallery Beirut/Hamburg. © Mounira Al Solh.

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Mounira Al Solh, A Dance with her Myth, 2023. Charcoal, collage and oil on canvas, 200 × 210 cm. Photo Quinn Oosterbaan. Courtesy the Artist; Sfeir-Semler Gallery Beirut/Hamburg. © Mounira Al Solh.

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Lithuania

Commissioner Arūnas Gelūnas Curators Valentinas Klimašauskas João Laia Artists Pakui Hardware Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė Exhibition Environment and Landscape Architects Išora x Lozuraitytė Studio Organisation The Lithuanian National Museum of Art With the Main Support of Lithuanian Council for Culture With the Additional Support of Nord Cranes Systems Plasta Group Piritas Exterus LRT JCDecaux Lietuva artnews.lt carlier | gebauer Girteka Glassic Linen Tales Noewe

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

This project brings together the distinct experiences of artists belonging to two generations and explores the inflammation of (post) human bodies under today’s economic and social conditions. Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė’s paintings and a sculptural installation by Pakui Hardware (with assistance from the architectural duo Išora x Lozuraitytė) are connected by themes of medicine and hospitals, as well as natural, cosmic, and industrial landscapes. The combined presentation conveys the interconnectedness of bodies and environments in crisis while offering a metabolic balance, helping to “cool” the burning human and planetary bodies. The fused aluminium and glass sculptures by Pakui Hardware resemble enlarged nervous systems and swollen organs. They were molded on scorched earth (the aluminium elements) and shaped in sweltering heat (the glass elements). Like bodies, they come to life when touched by a burning beam that resembles spatial or organ scanning. The prosthetic motif – using silicone membranes and medical or laboratory materials – is further expanded by the connections between the individual elements, which merge into a larger unified installation, a techno-organism. In the paintings by Rožanskaitė, unnamed diseases, sterile operating theatres and medical consultation rooms, visceral-themed assemblages, and machine-like objects irradiate a chronic inflammation of the cosmic flesh. The works refer to abandoned, exploited carcasses— well-being ripped from human life.

PARTICIPATING COUNTRIES

The project draws direct inspiration from Rupa Marya’s and Raj Patel’s 2021 book Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice, which invokes inflammation as a metaphor for the systemic harm being inflicted on humanity and the planet. According to the authors, inflammation is the body’s normal response to toxic conditions, and the most urgent things to be “treated” are not individual unhealthy organs but the very systems – economic and social – that cause chronic ailments to be passed from one generation to the next. Accordingly, in this delirious post-landscape, it is difficult to distinguish between what is attributed to nature and what is considered a human creation. Objects referring to human bodily systems in a state of inflammation, architecture, a post-natural landscape of plastic soil, light, and other technologies merge into a unified hybrid techno-organism. Valentinas Klimašauskas João Laia

Inflammation FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

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Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė, Heart Surgery, 1974. Oil on cardboard, 240 × 170 cm. Photo Antanas Lukšėnas. Courtesy the Lithuanian National Museum of Art.

108

Grand Duchy of Luxembourg

Commissioner Kultur | lx – Arts Council Luxembourg, on behalf of the Ministry of Culture Curator Joel Valabrega, Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean Artists Andrea Mancini and Every Island (Alessandro Cugola, Martina Genovesi, Caterina Malavolti and Juliane Seehawer) Assistant Curator Nathalie Lesure Organisation Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean With the Support of Œuvre Nationale de Secours GrandeDuchesse Charlotte LuXembourg – Let’s Make it Happen The Loo & Lou Foundation Under the aegis of Fondation de Luxembourg Acknowledgement Luxembourg Embassy in Rome Performing Artists Bella Báguena Selin Davasse Stina Fors Célin Jiang Visual Identity Lorenzo Mason Studio Production Team ARTER

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

A Comparative Dialogue Act, a project by the Luxembourgish artist Andrea Mancini and the multidisciplinary collective Every Island has been conceived as an infrastructure for the transmission of sound. Throughout the duration of the Biennale Arte 2024, the pavilion hosts four guest artists who produce and present new sound performances. In this context, the notion of openness is not bound to the absence of limits, but rather to the appropriation of “the other” and its contribution to collective and open-ended scenarios. The spatial elements – floor and walls – are turned into sound devices, progressively shaping an immersive experience. Technology is used to develop this localised experiment through which artists and audience consider the conditions under which knowledge is transmitted and shared. The title encapsulates the nature of this experimental project—an exploration of diverse sonic languages and a contemplation of dialogue, into the immersive world of sound as a tool for negotiation. The pavilion is at once the space where the soundscape is produced, and where it is played – the studio and the stage – in a gesture of radical transparency. An unprecedented collaboration by four emerging artists from diverse backgrounds, it brings together Spanish musician and performer Bella Báguena, French transdisciplinary artist Célin Jiang, Turkish artist Selin Davasse and Swedish artist Stina Fors to offer four intersecting approaches to the multiple ways identity, performance and sound can meet.

PARTICIPATING COUNTRIES

The artists are invited to explore the elements that define their individual practices and artistic methods. Each of them is asked to create a sound library representing their unique approach by the start of the Biennale Arte 2024, to be made available in the pavilion space as a shared tool, used in turn to create a soundscape for each. The aim being to stimulate cooperation and community through an understanding and interpreting of what was made available. Exploring gender identity, Báguena weaves sounds inspired by intuition, motivation and a tableau of influences from pop culture to personal experiences; Jiang adopts a decolonial cyberfeminist approach, intertwining arts, technology and digital humanities; Davasse makes research-based performances to envision alternative pasts, presents and speculative futures; and Fors, who works with choreography, performance, drums and vocals, explores the depths of a “sounding body”, showcasing the complexities of the self. Both libraries and residencies’ productions are constantly absorbed and integrated anew – challenging notions of authorship and appropriation. Each artist engages in a series of performances, as part of the collaborative artwork the moment when each artist presents his/her contribution in public. The resulting sequence of pieces is published as a vinyl record, released at the end of Biennale Arte’s run. A Comparative Dialogue Act offers a rich composition of singular voices brought together in a blurred sound artwork that pushes the boundaries of contemporary art production.

A Comparative Dialogue Act FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

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110

Malta

Commissioner Arts Council Malta Curators Elyse Tonna Sara Dolfi Agostini Artist Matthew Attard Project Managers Maria Galea Michela Rizzo Software Development Joey Borg Organisation Mary Ann Cauchi Romina Delia Celine Portelli Frank Psaila Architect Vincenzo Casali Studio Graphic Identity 2point3 Studio Technical Production We Exhibit Patrons Chiara Ave & Luca Donati Claudia Baggio Agostino Basco Francesco Berti Riboli Alvise & Daniela Braga Illa Joanna Delia Onofrio di Caprio Marcello Forin Fabio & Catia Marangon Agostino & Matilde Menditto Noel Pace James Scicluna Alessandro & Francesca Trevisan With the Main Support of Bank of Valletta Malta Tourism Authority Galleria Michela Rizzo Villa Montallegro recobel by Hal Mann Vella

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

Matthew Attard investigates the versatility of contemporary drawing, exploring its performative and time-based nature, generating intersections between physical reality and digital input. Attard shares the authorship of his art with an eye-tracker—an advanced technological device conceived as a scientific tool, recently appropriated by corporate entities. The eye-tracker captures eye movements and transforms them into data points. To the artist, the eye-tracker is an extension of himself, offering a platform to explore the hybrid territory between humans and machines. It becomes a smart collaborator in the production of contemporary drawings. Additionally, it challenges notions of agency at a time when automatisation and commodification seem to redefine all forms of self-expression. In I Will Follow the Ship, the artist further intertwines contemporary drawing and digital technology with historical imagery. Seeking to dissect humanity’s relationship with technological progress, the title hints at the interplay between “I” and “eye”, symbolising both the objective and subjective nature of Attard’s work. The pavilion unfolds as an exploration of the legacy and meanings of ship graffiti; humble drawings specifically found on the facades of wayside chapels in Malta. These vernacular etchings in stone are linked to ex-voto practices, possibly because of the spiritual significance and political immunity that these buildings offered. Their wide dissemination is representative of seafaring activity across the Mediterranean, and speaks of ancient local tales of faith and salvation.

PARTICIPATING COUNTRIES

The meanings of these anonymous ship drawings reverberate today, where computer technology and the internet have propelled mass artistic emancipation and overturned traditional local centres of power. A parallel is thus drawn between these tangible drawings on stone and contemporary digital drawing. Both leave traces, sometimes unintentional, always ephemeral or immaterial, of human existence and passage through time. In the pavilion, the ships captivate the audience, enabling digital interaction and shared speculative thought. They metamorphose into symbols of hope at a time marked by humanity’s confrontation with climate change, surging sea levels and an ever-growing technological interdependence. Ultimately, they uncover concealed truths that lie beneath forecasts, emotions and convictions.

I Will Follow The Ship

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Matthew Attard, Study 1 (I Will Follow The Ship), 2023. Eye-tracking drawing, 3D scan. Digital image, Variable dimensions. Courtesy the Artist and Galleria Michela Rizzo. © Matthew Attard and Galleria Michela Rizzo.

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Matthew Attard, Eye-tracking study (I Will Follow The Ship), 2023. Eye-tracking drawing, 3D scan, Pen drawing, 29 × 42 cm. Courtesy the Artist and Galleria Michela Rizzo. © Matthew Attard and Galleria Michela Rizzo.

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Mexico

Commissioner Ana Catalina Valenzuela González Curator Tania Ragasol Artist Erick Meyenberg Organisation Ministry of Culture National Institute of Fine Arts Collaborators Roberto Velázquez was bleibt kollektiv | Gentian Doda Martha Uc Miguel González Carmen de la Parra Daniel Ricaño Rosella Pelliccioti Fjorald Doci Julien Klopfenstein Ardi Asllani Laura Vieco Mariana Calderón Félix Blume Fernando de la Rosa Raúl Vizzi Natalia Pérez-Turner Cesar Aliaj Alejandro Flores Frank López Óscar Garduño Marianne Wasowska

In 2019, Erick Meyenberg, a Mexican artist of German and Lebanese descent, gathered the Doda family at a table in the countryside in northern Italy. The family had migrated over thirty years ago from Tirana, Albania, to Italy, where they integrated without losing their cultural ties and traditions. The Doda family thus gave rise to another identity—that of the foreigner: a condition that carries intrinsic the pain of loss and the constant and irremediable return to the memory of what will never be again. The artist observes the peculiarities of their journey and personal customs, both acquired and deeply rooted: ways of honouring, loving, and missing others; universal gestures and emotions that are primal to us all. Out of that record and the constant dialogue with Gentian Doda, four years in emerges this installation, as an interpretation of the dual condition and the migrant’s construction of identity as a foreigner. A reflection on memory and the lived experiences from two different perspectives: the emotional and historical filter of someone who has been reborn in a new homeland, and that of the interlocutor who has experienced the trials of exile firsthand.

At the centre of the Mexican Pavilion is a table, a possibility for encounter and memory, framed by corner screens showing footage of the family gathered around that other table. The video installation seeks to poetically evoke the displacement of the migrant and, at the same time, the rootedness represented by family gatherings—the exchanges that happen there, gratitude, pain, what is adopted, and what is missed. When “the land”, our place of origin or upbringing, is far away or becomes an impossibility, food and music become carriers of meaning and creators of belonging. As we marched away, we were always coming back... is a tribute to those who are not here and the desire for simple things, like life itself, to transcend the physical and symbolic boundaries outlined by humans. Some questions that accompany this project are: When does one cease to be a foreigner? What constitutes an emigration? What does it consist of and what does it entail? If we are all foreigners, where are we from? What anchors us? Perhaps assimilation and permanence, what goes and what stays – what is gained with what is lost – together, is what gives identity to the foreigners and their descendants. It doesn’t matter from where or in which place. Tania Ragasol

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

PARTICIPATING COUNTRIES

Erick Meyenberg, As we marched away, we were always coming back, 2023. HD Video still. Variable sizes. Courtesy the Artist.

As we marched away, we were always coming back… FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

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Erick Meyenberg, As we marched away, we were always coming back, 2023. HD Video still. Variable sizes. Courtesy the Artist.

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Mongolia

Commissioner Nomin Chinbat Curator Oyuntuya Oyunjargal Artist Ochirbold Ayurzana Co-curator Gregor Jansen Curatorial assistance & Communication Zultsetseg Oyunjargal Coordinator for Fundraising Damdinsuren Khurelbaatar Coordinator in Italy Marco Scurati Organisation Ministry of Culture of Mongolia Embassy of Mongolia in the Republic of Italy Arts & Media Project Management & Consulting NGO Press & Communication Kathrin Luz Lisa Balasso Marketing & Media Production Sukhzorig Bayansan Design SIX Studio With the Main Support of Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Mongolia With the Support of MIAT Mongolian Airlines ARD Financial Group Sound of Mongolia UB Art Gallery

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

Ochirbold Ayurzana’s Discovering the Present from the Future in the Mongolian Pavilion explores the deeper levels of consciousness through interactive sculpture installations. Inspired by the Buddhist deity Citipati, these sculptures, including the three-eyed skull, serve as reminders of the impermanence of life, fostering spiritual transformation and symbolising the search for higher consciousness and enlightenment. Their movements illustrate the fragile balance between nature and humanity. Their collective dances symbolise bridge-building between cultures, embodying the idea of global interconnectedness and collaboration in an increasingly intercultural world. Citipati may be a guardian of technology in the transition to the digital age, or a guardian of the environment, pointing to challenges such as climate change. The interactive installation at Castello 2127A – opposite the main entrance to the Arsenale – invites visitors to explore the theme of the “Stranger within Myself”, and to interact and shape their own journeys of consciousness. By merging Buddhist wisdom with modern techniques, the artist aims to bridge the gap between the present and the future, providing thought-provoking insights and inspiring individuals to explore the present through the lens of the future.

PARTICIPATING COUNTRIES

Mongolian artist Ochirbold Ayurzana, born in 1976, has been exploring societal and behavioural changes in the globalised world since 2014. Questioning how consciousness evolves amid the deluge of information, he creates socially and critically reflective works exhibited internationally, allowing individual interpretations by viewers. The artist emphasises the importance of interactivity in his work. His sculptures provide viewers with the opportunity to discover hidden beauty despite critical ideas. The larger-than-life, gender-neutral figures representing “Consciousness” are in a meditative posture facing the spiraled centre, as symbols of the mental realm and the intermediate world. Crafted from delicate, oxidised steel wire mesh, the artworks convey transcendence through permeability. In particular, his concept of “Consciousness” reflects the desire for expanded awareness and a connection to the spiritual dimension. Oyuntuya Oyunjargal, Gregor Jansen

Discovering the Present from the Future

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Ochirbold Ayurzana, Consciousness, 2020-22. Sculpture installation, iron wire, 260 × 2500 × 2000 cm. Photo the Artist. © AMPMC NGO/MongolianArt.

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Ochirbold Ayurzana, Discovering the present from the future, 2024. Sculpture duo installation, aluminium & iron wire, each 260-350 × 800 × 300 cm. Photo Sukhzorig Bayansan. © 2024mongolian-pavilion.org.

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Montenegro

Commissioner Vladislav Šćepanović Curator Ana Simona Zelenović Artist Darja Bajagić Organisation Museum of Contemporary Art of Montenegro With the Support of Ministry Of Culture and Media of Montenegro

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

Darja Bajagić’s project, It Takes an Island to Feel This Good, curated by Ana Simona Zelenović and organised by the Museum of Contemporary Art of Montenegro, presents a critical consideration of the culture of collective memory and our relationship to shared historical heritage. The artist reflects upon these topics through painting and sculpture, focusing on the complex and multidimensional history of the Montenegrin island of Mamula. Its fort, built in 1853 by the Austro-Hungarian general Lazar Mamula, was repurposed as a concentration camp by the fascist forces of Benito Mussolini’s Kingdom of Italy during World War II. It was subsequently transformed into a luxury hotel with the aid of foreign investments, beginning in 2015. Bajagić’s research-based project combines archival material with distinctive referential and symbolical interventions. Throughout her decade-long practice, Bajagić has explored the ambivalence of the image, that is, dualistic representation, symbolism, and meaning. Her research-driven work investigates our reception, perception, and experience of images and other visual representations, negotiating the absence or presence of their corresponding historical or social contexts—or both. By experimenting with the construction and circulation of symbolic systems of meaning, the artist explores how meaning is generated through visualisation and how opinions gain traction in a contemporary, image-based society.

PARTICIPATING COUNTRIES

It Takes an Island to Feel This Good raises critical and pertinent philosophical questions about the position of the Other, investigating how the determination of this position determines power relations in society as well as over discourse. Bajagić’s work reflects on Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s politico-philosophical analysis of modernity—that the paradigm and nomos of modernity is the concentration camp: where the sovereign has complete authority over homo sacer (sacred and potentially sacrificial), to the point of acting upon his or her own natural life. By addressing complex contemporary and historical issues, Bajagić fearlessly tackles questions such as whether the precondition for evil lies in the neglectful disregard of history or in its commodification.

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Darja Bajagić, Frustum — Numero 11: Komadat Logora Mamula (Piece of Mamula Camp) or Komandant Logora Mamula (Commander of Mamula Camp), 2024. Acrylic and UV print on canvas; steel frame, 246 (height) × 273.5 (width) × 4 (depth) cm. Photo Marijana Janković. Courtesy the Artist; Museum of Contemporary Art of Montenegro. © Darja Bajagić.

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Darja Bajagić, Artist’s scan of an undated xeroxed image of Mamula from the State Archives of Montenegro, 2022. Scan. Courtesy the Artist; Larry Gagosian. © Darja Bajagić.

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The Netherlands

Commissioner Mondriaan Fund Curator Hicham Khalidi in collaboration with Renzo Martens Artists Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC): Djonga Bismar Alphonse Bukumba Irène Kanga Muyaka Kapasa Matthieu Kasiama Jean Kawata Huguette Kilembi Mbuku Kimpala Athanas Kindendi Felicien Kisiata Charles Leba Philomène Lembusa Richard Leta Jérémie Mabiala Plamedi Makongote Blaise Mandefu Daniel Manenga Mira Meya Emery Muhamba Tantine Mukundu Olele Mulela Daniel Muvunzi René Ngongo Alvers Tamasala Ced’art Tamasala

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC) is an artists’ collective of Congolese plantation workers, based in Lusanga in the heart of the Democratic Republic of the Congo on a plantation formerly owned by the British-Dutch multinational Unilever. CATPC holds companies like these responsible for exploiting their forests and societies, causing extreme poverty and destroying biodiversity. Since 2014, CATPC has been buying back ancestral lands, confiscated in 1911 by European companies. With the proceeds from art collectively created and sold abroad, they have already bought back 200 hectares of former plantation lands and are currently transforming them into biodiverse agroforests. They call this undertaking the “post-plantation”. CATPC holds art institutions accountable for their ties to plantations: both their buildings and their programmes are financed by the very same corporations that exploited plantation labour. That’s why in 2017, CATPC – together with Dutch artist Renzo Martens – opened an OMA-designed art centre in Lusanga and called it the White Cube. By doing so, they placed an art institute exactly where the proceeds were obtained to fund white cubes all over the world.

PARTICIPATING COUNTRIES

For the Biennale Arte 2024 CATPC presents simultaneously new artworks in the Dutch Pavilion and the White Cube. The sculptures are made of clay as well as palm oil and cacao: the very same fruits that are grown on commercial plantations. Alongside the sculptures, the Dutch Pavilion presents the performance film The Judgement of the White Cube. In this film, CATPC confronts the White Cube: as it stands trial before the community, all white cubes are condemned to ask for forgiveness and return the land. The ancestral sculpture Balot plays a central role in both exhibitions. This wooden statue of a Belgian colonial agent, made in 1931 for protection from the plantation regime, is sacred to the community. The sculpture has been part of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts collection since 2015. For CATPC this sculpture is of great significance, connecting the past with the present. By temporarily bringing Balot to Lusanga, it supports communities on former plantations in their resistance today. Artist Ced’art Tamasala on behalf of CATPC: “Questions of care, repair, healing and restitution become unavoidable, as no white cube can claim to be decolonised as long as the plantations are not.”

The International Celebration of Blasphemy and the Sacred FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

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Jean Kawata and Ced’art Tamasala (CATPC), White Cube Lusanga, 2020. Cacao, palm fat, sugar, 63 × 60 × 51 cm. Photo Koos Breukel 2023.

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Nigeria

Commissioner His Exellency Godwin Obaseki, Governor of Nigeria’s Edo State Curator Aindrea Emelife Artists Tunji Adeniyi-Jones Ndidi Dike Onyeka Igwe Toyin Ojih Odutola Abraham O. Oghobase Precious Okoyomon Yinka Shonibare CBE RA Fatimah Tuggar Organisation MOWAA (Museum of West African Art) Production D.H. Office Exhibition Architecture Philipp Krummel Graphic Design A.M. With the Main Support of Qatar Museums Arijiju With Major Support of Gbenga Oyebode Tope Lawani Phillip Ihenacho With the Support of White Cube Jack Shainman Gallery Cristea Roberts Gallery Goodman Gallery James Cohan Gallery Stephen Friedman Gallery Corvi-Mora Arcadia Missa Vlisco The Christian Levett Collection Christie’s Afrinvest Kuramo Capital Management ART X Lagos The Scott Collins Biennial Commission, in partnership with Outset Contemporary Art Fund Myma Belo-Osagie Sundeep and Anshu Bahanda David Ladipo Geralyn Dreyfous Paolo and Aud Cuniberti Oba Nsugbe

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

Contributors to the Christie’s x MOWAA Auction Yinka Shonibare CBE RA Tunji Adeniyi-Jones Zizipho Poswa Ibrahim El-Salahi Stefania Tejada Victor Ehikhamenor Johnson Eziefula Lakwena Maciver Olafur Eliasson Kwesi Botchway ruby onyinyechi amanze Sthenjwa Luthuli Niyi Adenubi Osayu Ozigbo Odili Donald Odita Option Dzikamai Nyahunzvi Osinachi Àsìkò Lanre Ishola Emma Stern Oli Epp Oluseye Femi Lijadu Thanks to Andrew Solomon Wally Bakare Aki Abiola

Nigeria Imaginary takes inspiration from two points of departure. The exhibition explores the role of both great moments in Nigeria’s history – moments of optimism – and the Nigeria of the mind—a Nigeria that could be and is yet to be. Presenting different perspectives and constructed ideas, memories, and nostalgias of Nigeria, Nigeria Imaginary leverages an intergenerational and multidisciplinary lens that agitates nationhood and seeks to imagine a new Nigeria. These voices are articulated via diverse mediums, from painting, photography, and sculpture, to AR, sound, and film. Nigeria Imaginary is a restless investigation of the past. Yinka Shonibare CBE RA hones in on the Benin Expedition of 1897 and presents a new way to understand the historic, artistic excellence of the looted objects, whereas Toyin Ojih Odutola reimagines a new world centred around the Mbari House. Onyeka Igwe and Abraham O. Oghobase explore the colonial hangover and question the future of this legacy whilst Tunji Adeniyi-Jones looks to the history of Nigerian modernism to evoke an alternative art historical future. Fatimah Tuggar presents a utopic vision for a new Nigeria that reasons with colonial pressures which de-prioritised artisanal tradition and looks to a conceptual and cultural hybridity. Ndidi Dike, then, pushes us back into the state of things by assessing the intersection between the 2020 EndSARS protests in Nigeria and the global movement of Black Lives Matter, producing a memorial that is simultaneously a cautionary tale and beacon of hope for the future. Precious Okoyomon invites us into a dream state, immersing us in a poetic, cultural, oral history and placing us into the minds and perspectives of contemporary Nigerians so we can reimagine Nigeria with them.

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Drawing on the model of the Mbari clubs of post-independence Nigeria, Nigeria Imaginary also presents historical artefacts and ephemera to immerse the viewer in a rich cross-section of Nigerian material culture. The Mbari were designed as a “laboratory for ideas”, serving as sites for the paradoxical entanglements of folkloric myths, experiences of colonial modernity, moral education, and utopian fantasy. Their creators considered art making a duty to a burgeoning nation and a vital public matter. It is here where Mbari and Nigeria Imaginary shake hands, passing on this duty to a new school of artists to reimagine a nation once more. Aindrea Emelife

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Yinka Shonibare CBE RA, Monument to the Restitution of the Mind and Soul (detail), 2024. Pyramid structure with clay objects and fibreglass bust with hand-painted Dutch wax pattern, 400 × 300 × 300 cm. Photo Tom Bennett. Courtesy the Artist; Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, Johannesburg, London and New York; James Cohan Gallery, New York; Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and New York. © Yinka Shonibare CBE RA.

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Toyin Ojih Odutola, Lẹhin Mgbede (Before + After the Evening’s Performance), 2023-24. Pastel and charcoal on linen, diptych: 203.5 × 203.5 × 3.2 cm (each painting); 211 × 211 × 8 cm (each framed). Courtesy the Artist; Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. © Toyin Ojih Odutola.

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Nordic Countries (Sweden, Finland, Norway)

Commissioners Gitte Ørskou, Moderna Museet Leevi Haapala, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art / The Finnish National Gallery Ruben Steinum, Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA)

Video Installation Eidotech

Curator Asrin Haidari

Production Team Martin Christensen Fredrik Eriksson Ingela Hermansson Tanny Lam Hasse Möller Zoltan Schnierer Felicia Troedsson Friberg Jun-Hi Wennergren Nordling

Artists Lap-See Lam with Kholod Hawash and Tze Yeung Ho Artists’ Collaborators Maya Abdullah Katerina Anagnostidou Jónas Ásgeir Ásgeirsson Linnéa Sundfær Casserly Ivan Cheng Jesper Strömbäck Eklund David Hackston Bruno Hibombo Sofia Jernberg Suvi Kajas Steve Katona Linda Kokkonen Ping-Kwan Lam Johanna Larsson Tiina Majabacka Lawen Mohtadi Anja Nedremo Maren Sofie Nyland Johansen Iris Oja Þórgunnur Anna Örnólfsdóttir Jenni Räsänen Hilla Ruuska Josh Spear Fredrik Storsveen Hsiao-Tung Yuan Axel Winquist The Gong Strikes One Project Manager Luba Kuzovnikova Audio Production Julia Giertz Giovanni Onorato

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

Bamboo Scaffold Installation Ho Yeung Chan Film Production Egerstrand & Blund Fredrik Egerstrand Lisabi Fridell

Local Production M+B Studio Partners Berengo Studio Elektronmusikstudion EMS Gröna Lund Högmarsö Varv Kåver & Mellin AB Sidenkompaniet Studio Voltaire The Power Plant Vega Foundation With the Support of Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation Galerie Nordenhake Berlin | Stockholm | Mexico City Genelec Göteborgs Stad The Nordic Circle IASPIS the Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s International Programme for Visual and Applied Arts The Swedish Film Institute

Vast ocean beneath a misty sky. A creature of both water and land is praying to the sea goddess Ma-Zhou when he accidentally summons a dragon ship that takes her on a journey beyond time and space. The Altersea Opera is an audiovisual installation, a drama where an epic quest at sea suggests the existential implications of displacement and belonging. The Altersea Opera is conceived and conceptualised by artist Lap-See Lam (Sweden) and realised in collaboration with experimental composer Tze Yeung Ho (Norway) and textile artist Kholod Hawash (Finland). A richly layered production, the work embraces an international ensemble of collaborators ranging from a bamboo scaffold engineer, interpreters, an amateur singer, costume designers to opera performers and filmmakers. Working both with contemporary technology and traditional references and techniques, Lap-See Lam’s generative practice both claims and complicates the notion of cultural heritage. Upon entering the Nordic Countries Pavilion, visitors become passengers on a ship, inspired by Floating Restaurant Sea Palace, a three-storey vessel in the shape of a dragon, which travelled from Shanghai to Gothenburg in 1991. At the centre of the story, we find the Cantonese mythological figure Lo Ting – half fish, half man – as reimagined by Lap-See Lam in a libretto that tells the tale of his longing to return to a former home, Fragrant Harbour—only to find it transformed beyond recognition.

Special Thanks to Johan Wang

PARTICIPATING COUNTRIES

The score, composed by Tze Yeung Ho, merges Baroque ornamentation and unexpected instruments in melancholic melodies, interspersed with lullabies and poetry that draw on the multilingual background of the artists. Kholod Hawash’s textile works form a sculptural installation in the pavilion. Her jodaleia and tatreez (Arabic for quilting and embroidery) conjure a distinctive world of motifs, and are sewn by hand, stitch-bystitch, with elements from personal experiences, folktales, and archaeological landscapes. In the spirit of the travelling opera company the Red Boat Troupes, which popularised Cantonese opera in the 19th century, this 21st century troupe presents a story that veers between the real and the imaginary while telling a story about generational loss, diasporic experience, and negotiating a desire to stay with the need to move on.

Lap-See Lam, The Altersea Opera, 2024. Film still: Lisabi Fridell/Egerstrand&Blund. Courtesy the Artist; Galerie Nordenhake; Moderna Museet. © Lap-See Lam.

The Altersea Opera Lap-See Lam, The Altersea Opera, 2024. Photo Lisabi Fridell. Textile work © Kholod Hawash. Courtesy the Artist; Galerie Nordenhake; Moderna Museet. © Lap-See Lam.

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Lap-See Lam, The Altersea Opera, 2024. Film still: Lisabi Fridell/ Egerstrand&Blund. Textile work © Kholod Hawash. Courtesy the Artist; Galerie Nordenhake; Moderna Museet. © Lap-See Lam.

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Republic of North Macedonia

Commissioner Dita Starova Qerimi, Director of the NI National Gallery of the Republic of North Macedonia Curator Ana Frangovska, Curator Advisor at the National Gallery of the Republic of North Macedonia Artist Slavica Janešlieva Project Holder NI National Gallery of the Republic of North Macedonia With the Support of The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of North Macedonia

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Can we substitute the word “beauty” with the words “respect”, “freedom”, “love”, “tolerance”, “approval”? Can we accept someone for all that he/she/it is and because we know their essence? The transmedial and transnarrative project Inter Spem et Metum by Slavica Janešlieva represents a visually cleansed and conceptually envisaged spatial installation, which casts us into the civilisational debris in a rather sensitive and imaginative manner. Through multidimensional media platforms and materials, such as feathers, LED-neon signs, projections, mirrors, Janešlieva launches us into several conceptual-narrative matrices, where she urges us to face the feeling of being a stranger, the one present everywhere: in me, in you, in them, in us. Namely, she challenges us with acceptance or non-acceptance of labels distinct from the ones familiar and ordinary to the masses; encompassing differences based on gender, sexual orientation, appearance, demeanour, attitude, illness, nationality, religion, language, political orientation… She tickles our feelings of self-stigma, self-censorship, self-criticism, due to self-imposed expectations.

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However, being different carries the potential for transformation. Just as in the process of natural selection, mutation increases the likelihood of either a failure in the adaptation or the emergence of a new variant, much superior to its predecessor. Alternatively, the transformational power of “the other” can be understood to derive from the psychological pain and suffering, as alternative sources of inspiration and motivation to rise above the criticism and denunciation, common societal effects of “being different”. It is up to each of us to find the swan within. Ana Frangovska

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FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Slavica Janešlieva, Inter Spem et Metum (detail view of installation), 2024. 60 kg of duck feathers and LED-neon sign, dimensions variable. Photo Robert Jankuloski.

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Sultanate of Oman

Commissioner Sayyd Saeed bin Sultan bin Yarub Al Busaidi, Undersecretary of the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Youth Curator Alia al Farsi Artists Alia al Farsi Ali al Jabri Essa al Mufarji Adham al Farsi Sarah al Olaqi Organisation Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Youth

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

Oman, a land where civilisations have converged for centuries. This year, the Omani Pavilion embarks on a journey through time, unraveling the rich tapestry of Oman’s past as a melting pot of diverse ethnicities. To celebrate the theme of this year’s Biennale Arte, Foreigners Everywhere, our artists come together from varied backgrounds to encapsulate the essence of Oman’s multicultural legacy. Entitled Malath – Haven, our exhibition draws inspiration from the very heart of Oman, a haven for sailors, merchants, and immigrants. Just as Oman has historically offered shelter to travelers from distant lands, Malath invites visitors to embark on a sensory and artistic voyage. The central theme of “Malath” finds its expression through a multitude of artistic mediums, including a culinary journey, using food as a symbol of unity and a reminder of how family recipes hold the essence of one’s roots. Each of the five rooms of the pavilion features the work of one individual artist. Renowned Omani sculptor Ali al Jabri (Room 1) has crafted five cylinder-shaped marble artworks, each representing different parts of the world. What makes these sculptures exceptional is the fusion of Omani stones and dead tree wood, which fill the hollow space within the cylinders. Alia al Farsi (Room 2), was inspired by the rich cultural tapestries of Eastern African cultures, India, and the Arabian Peninsula. Her creations are not limited to conventional fabric displays but rather extend into the realm of optical illusion—an immersive experience that transports visitors into a world of patterns and reflections.

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Sarah al Olaqi’s Spoonful of Tradition (Room 3) is a celebration of cultural heritage and the power of art to transcend everyday objects. The use of spoons in the installation serves as a metaphor for the collective strength and resilience of Omani women, who have gracefully embraced their traditions while navigating a changing world. Essa al Mufarji’s cylinder-shaped shadow/light installation (Room 4) features quirky Arabic calligraphy that is inspired by poetry about immigration and foreignness written more than 1,000 years ago. Adham al Farsi’s immersive video installation (Room 5) will seamlessly transport guests to a beach-like environment infused with elements from Oman’s coastal history, providing a holistic and engaging encounter with world and life of turtles, the very symbol of the foreigner.

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Adham al Farsi, Symbol of Foreigner, 2024. Screen grab of video. Dimensions variable. Courtesy the Artist.

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Republic of Panama

Commissioner Itzela Quirós Curators Ana Elizabeth González Mónica Kupfer Artists Brooke Alfaro Isabel De Obaldía Cisco Merel Giana De Dier Project Director Luz Bonadies Graphics Director Mariana Núñez Exhibition Team Román Florez Mirielle Robles Rendering Abdair Arauz Graphic Designer Jorge Bustamante Project Assistants Anna Elena González Jeffrey Barboza With the Support of Ministerio de Cultura Museo del Canal Ciudad del Saber Fundación Arte & Cultura

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

The Panama Pavilion considers the enduring traces of migration on individuals and their surroundings through the works of four Panamanian artists. Due to its geographical position and its Canal, Panama serves as a transcontinental bridge and gateway between two oceans. It is a place of transit, trade, and cultural contact, shaped by the arrival and passage of human beings, from pre-Columbian times to the present. Recently, it has gained attention due to the migrants crossing the “Darien Gap”, a 26,000km2 tropical jungle between Colombia and Panama. It is the only land route connecting South America with Central America, a harrowing journey – without roads, infrastructure, or services; and without security against violence, dangers, or abuses – which asylum seekers and migrants heading to the United States and other northern destinations traverse on foot. In 2023 alone, over 500,000 people, a third of them children, crossed the Darien, fleeing adversities that drove them to walk halfway across the continent. The artworks come together as testimonies of an often ignored reality—to the point of being rendered invisible. Giana De Dier explores the history of Afro-Antillean migration to Panama in the early 20th century through collage, examining its influence on the construction of national identity. Brooke Alfaro paints impressive scenes of human beings in hostile conditions, whether crowded into boats on turbulent seas or in dense tropical jungles. Isabel De Obaldía creates an immersive and overwhelming jungle in an installation that combines landscape drawings, sound effects, and glass sculptures of human beings. Finally, Cisco Merel reflects on the mirage of a better future by shaping mud-covered surfaces into a large sculptural installation.

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The artworks shed light on the overlooked experiences of migrants, serving as a poignant reminder and urging the viewer not to relegate to oblivion the stories of those who face unimaginable violence and hardships in their efforts to find a better life. The exhibition aims to establish a connection between art and a current crisis that we only understand in an incomplete and fragmented way. It endeavours to create an echo within the viewers as they consider the lives of others who are forced to carve out arduous journeys—the kind that leave indelible traces on the land and on the body.

Traces: On the Body and on the Land

Brooke Alfaro, The Earth Shook and the Sea Raged, 2021. Oil on canvas. Courtesy Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Panamá.

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Isabel De Obaldía, Selva, 2024. Installation, mixed media drawings, glass sculptures, and sound. Photo Sebastián Icaza.

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Peru

Commissioner Armando Andrade de Lucio Curator Alejandro León Cannock Artist Roberto Huarcaya Advisory Curators Amanda Antunes Andrea Jösch Krotki Joan Fontcuberta Guest Artists Antonio Pareja Mariano Zuzunaga Production Patronato Cultural del Perú Coordination in Venice eiletz ortigas | architects Graphic Design Daniela Svagelj Patronage El Comercio Fundación Wiese Lighting Consultant ERCO With the Support of Instituto Cultural Peruano Norteamericano ICPNA Galería Rolfart Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú PUCP Pikimachay de Ayacucho Peruvian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Doña Gumi Fundación Cultural del Banco de la Nación Banco de la Nación Power Technology SA

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

For more than a decade, photographer Roberto Huarcaya has roamed Peru, creating monumental photograms that – in the junction of photography, installation, and land art – question our way of (re)presenting and comprehending our environment. Both the photograms (large format, singular, abstract, material) and the production process (experimental, immersive, heuristic, unhurried) evince a creative method that consciously operates against what Flusser describes as the programme of the photographic apparatus. Huarcaya’s oeuvre runs counter to Western modernity’s extraction project, which encourages using “advanced” technologies (such as AI) to employ images (and their users) as a means to its ends: knowing, controlling, exploiting and consuming the world. Huarcaya, on the contrary, reclaims a craft, one that acknowledges a time/space idiosyncrasy, admits that matter resists and accepts experience as irreducible. He operates as a medium, embracing the world’s unavailability, bringing together heterogeneous elements (light, dust, water, plants, insects) on a photosensitive surface to elicit traces (images). This method – which begets an organic (Deleuze would say, rhizomatic) relation of forces between materials, circumstances, the artist and his collaborators – expresses a humble acknowledgment of existence as uncertain (foreign). Huarcaya’s critical-creative stance questions the power modern humans have claimed on/over the world, restoring to the cosmos the agency denied by Western culture (defined by a naturalist ontology and by a politics of reification).

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Through the assemblage of the works (a photogram of a tree, a sculpture of a canoe and a composition for piano), and of the pavilion’s structural and environmental elements, the installation Huellas Cósmicas (Cosmic Traces), conceived especially for Biennale Arte 2024, places spectators in an undetermined experiential space/time, challenging their attention habits (perceptive, emotional and cognitive), usually adapted to the imperatives of the neoliberal system. Rather than a representational artistic proposal (it does not talk about this or that), it is performative: its presence creates an immersive, transitive event. It transforms the space into a ritual haven to spark awareness, stoke the imagination and encourage meditation, inviting spectators to reassess their environment by taking a sensitive, non-instrumental stance. Alejandro León Cannock

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Roberto Huarcaya, Rencontres de la Photographie d’Arles, France, 2023.

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Roberto Huarcaya, Palm Amazograma (Detail), Lima, Peru, 2020.

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Philippines

Commissioner National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) in partnership with Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) and the Office of Senate President Pro Tempore Loren Legarda Curator Carlos Quijon Jr. Artist Mark Salvatus

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

Bird trills flit past us. Curtains of translucent textile calm the light that cascades into the space of the pavilion. The sound of breath is discernible as instruments transform it into the rich density of drone or bright staccatos of pulsing sound. Steep stone formations stretch this scene: crests peeking behind curtains, peaks adorned with brass instruments. The Philippine Pavilion presents Sa kabila ng tabing lamang sa panahong ito / Waiting just behind the curtain of this age, a solo presentation of the work of Mark Salvatus (b. 1980, Lucban). Through a newly commissioned video work, a mise-en-scène of textile, fibreglass stone sculptures, and a reworking of an existing artwork, Salvatus explores the ethno-ecologies of Mt. Banahaw, a three-peaked forested mountain located on the boundary between Laguna and Quezon, and Lucban, the artist’s hometown. The pavilion’s title is taken from Apolinario de la Cruz (popularly, Hermano Puli) who founded a religious brotherhood for the natives. In a speech rallying the members of the brotherhood in anticipation of an armed confrontation against the Spanish military and ecclesiastical authorities, Puli declared that the “abrupt events” that were about to transpire “can be anticipated by the faithful through certain signs.” Puli advised them to always discern the “meaning of the times” and that “Victory [is] just behind the curtain of this age (Nasasa cabila nang tabing lamang sa Panahong yto).”

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The pavilion is an assemblage of vernacular and popular histories that sketches out the contours of the contemporary at the cusp of a post-pandemic world. It weaves together Salvatus’s ongoing research on the vernacular histories of Mt. Banahaw and Lucban, convened from family archives, popular materials, and different historical moments and mythical motifs. It looks at several trajectories of discourses on millenarian renewal that converge in Mt. Banahaw as mystical topos, from: ecological crises, the cosmic and cosmological aspects of extraterrestrial life, ideological imaginations in anti-colonial movements; to: accounts of earthly transformation and reconfiguration and how these are embodied in imaginations of locality and the vernacular lifeworlds of musicians and other cultural actors based in Lucban, including Salvatus himself.

Mark Salvatus, Kolorum, 2024, detail. Fiberglass, used musical instruments, sound. Photo Elvert Bañares. Courtesy NCCA - PAVB.

Sa kabila ng tabing lamang sa panahong ito / Waiting just behind the curtain of this age

Mark Salvatus, Still from Kung ang Makagiginhawa ay Matingnan ng Ating mga Mata (Should the Source of Fulfillment Be Seen with Our Eyes), 2024. 4K video, color, sound. Courtesy NCCA - PAVB.

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Mark Salvatus, Still from Kung ang Makagiginhawa ay Matingnan ng Ating mga Mata (Should the Source of Fulfillment Be Seen with Our Eyes), 2024. 4K video, color, sound. Courtesy NCCA - PAVB.

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Poland

Commissioner Bartłomiej Sienkiewicz, Minister of Culture and National Heritage Curator Marta Czyż Artists Open Group (Yuriy Biley Pavlo Kovach Anton Varga) Organisation Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, Justyna Szylman Interim Director with the Support of The Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland Polish Pavilion Office Anna Kowalska Michał Kubiak Aga Mandziuk Partners Orlen Adam Mickiewicz Institute dela.art collection Istituto Polacco di Roma DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program Paradyż Vogue Poland

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

Repeat after Me II is an audiovisual installation created by the Ukrainian Open Group collective. The group’s work is focused on the creation of open situations, through performativity and cooperation with participants and viewers. They have tackled the subject of war since 2014, when the Russian Armed Forces began their military operations in the south-east of Ukraine. Repeat after Me II is a collective portrait of witnesses of the ongoing war in Ukraine. The videos were created in 2022 and 2024. All the protagonists are civilian refugees speaking of the war through the sounds of weapons they remember, then inviting the audience to repeat after them. The artists use the karaoke format. Yet here the accompaniment is not hit songs: it is shots, missiles, howling, and explosions, and the lyrics are descriptions of deadly firearms. This is the soundtrack of the war. The juxtaposition of works from 2022 and 2024 shows the drastic perseverance of memory, as well as the changes in technology. The first video was shot in a camp for “domestic refugees” outside of Lviv. The second was created outside of Ukraine, in locations that were safe for the participants. Yet even beyond the reach of the marathon of sirens, the sounds of war remain part of their trauma and symbolically widen their scope.

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A few weeks before the Russian invasion, the Centre for Strategic Communication and Information Security of the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy began distributing brochures titled In Case of Emergency or War, explaining how best to behave in a zone of military activity. The instructions differ depending on whether the attack is coming from automatic rifles, artillery fire, multiple rocket launchers, or an air raid. The ability to tell the difference can save lives. Repeat after Me II shows war as a collective experience, regardless of age, background, professional and social status, giving witnesses the floor and calling attention to individual experiences of this catastrophe. Viewers can repeat the firearm sounds after the witnesses, learning the language of their experiences, or withdraw into the safe space designed to resemble a karaoke bar. Yet this is no ordinary bar: it is an instructional karaoke venue forecasting an even more militarised future. This spectre will remain with us for so long as nationalist imperialist policies will be accepted as part of a diplomatic compromise. Marta Czyż

Repeat after Me II

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136

Portugal

Commissioner Américo Rodrigues, Direção-Geral das Artes Curators and Artists Mónica de Miranda Sónia Vaz Borges Vânia Gala On-site Production Raul Betti Production Team Ana de Almeida, Anca Usurelu, Magda Bull, Marcela Canadas, Studio Mónica de Miranda Exhibition Design Paulo Moreira Architectures Landscape Architecture and Design Clinica Botanica, Paulo Palma Exhibition Display Manufacturer ArtWorks Satellites HANGAR - Centro de Investigação Artística (Portugal) Batalha Centro de Cinema (Portugal) INSTITUTO (Portugal) The Showroom (United Kingdom) SAVVY Contemporary (Germany)

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

Partners Fundação EDP FAS - Forward Art Stories Jahmek Contemporary Art Mercedes Vilardell Carlos Carvalho Contemporary Art Sabrina Amrani Gallery Hangar - Centro de Investigação Artística ArtWorks Batalha Centro de Cinema Blue Dimension Grafica Maiadouro The Funambulist Museu de Arte Contemporânea MAC / CCB Fundação PLMJ Media Partners RTP – Rádio e Televisão de Portugal Contemporânea Gerador Electra e-flux Antena 1 Supporting Institutions FCT - Foundation for Science and Technology University of Lisbon, Faculty of Letters, Centre for Comparative Studies Department of History, Drexel University University of WisconsinMadison Museu Nacional de História Natural e Ciência

Greenhouse proposes the creation of a “Creole garden” inside Palazzo Franchetti, combining sculpture, stage, installation and assembly spaces. Initially created by enslaved people for their own survival, Creole gardens blend a wide range of plant species. They are instances of resistance, exercises in freedom. These multi-layered arrangements were cultivated and cared for so that different trees and aromas protected one other. The Greenhouse exhibition space facilitates experimentation and reflection and is grounded in four actions: GARDEN (Installation, Space and Time), LIVING ARCHIVE (Movement, Sound and Performance), SCHOOLS (Education, History and Revolution), ASSEMBLIES (Public and Communities). The curatorial and artistic team – a visual artist, a researcher and a choreographer – organises collective actions, using pedagogy, sound and movement, to reflect on the relationship between nature, ecology and politics. 2024 marks the fiftieth anniversary of Portugal’s Carnation Revolution and the centenary of Bissau-Guinean and Cabo Verdean freedom fighter Amílcar Cabral. Drawing on the revolutionary gesture of placing flowers in gun barrels and on Cabral’s linking agronomy and liberation, we centre soil as a transversal element that carries not only the memory of geomorphological transformations, but also the violence of Empire, the traces of those who passed through it, and their stories of resistance, difference and liberation.

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Greenhouse asks how soil, land and borders connect with the politics of the body today. It integrates land as a way of understanding the processes of liberation and self-discovery in order to create ecologies of care in the present ecosystem. We witness these dynamics in the migrant body, the diasporic being in constant movement and transition. Proposing a collaborative decolonial discursive space, Greenhouse challenges curatorial hegemonies. The garden becomes a space for continuous, dialogical creation between the artists and the public, a collective place that bridges dichotomies between curator and artist, thought and practice, human and nature. The artwork is a space for action, an instigator of discussions and movements. We create a living archive with the development of a school, performative actions and a web of encounters between artists, publics, and communities, within a constantly growing garden. Mónica de Miranda Sónia Vaz Borges Vânia Gala

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FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Mónica de Miranda, Creole Garden, 2024. Inkjet print on cotton paper, 120 × 80 cm. Courtesy the Artist. © Mónica de Miranda.

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Romania

Commissioner Ioana Ciocan Curator Ciprian Mureșan Artists Șerban Savu and Atelier Brenda (Nana Esi Sophie Keij) Organisation Idea Foundation Project Manager Cristian Alexandru Damian With the Support of Galeria Plan B, Berlin The Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw S.M.A.K., Ghent The National Museum of Contemporary Art of Romania The National Art Museum of Moldova Kunsthalle Bega, Timișoara Cluj Cultural Centre “George Enescu” National University of Arts, Iași The Academy of Music, Theatre and Fine Arts, Chișinău Nicodim Gallery Dawid Radziszewski Gallery UniCredit Bank, Bucharest Blue Line Energy, Electroglobal Crama La Salina

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

Bringing together paintings and mosaics, Șerban Savu’s project for the Romanian Pavilion and the New Gallery of the Romanian Cultural Institute intervenes in the representational history of the labouring body, composing an iconography of work and leisure inspired by historical realism and the propaganda art of the communist Eastern Bloc. Rather than contest or dismantle those discourses, Savu rearranges the tropes of revolutionary élan and cohesion, of workers united in both political aspirations and the choreographic rhythms of building the future, to capture the unadorned reality of a historical limbo, moments of suspension, perplexity and inertia as microcosms of ampler societal shifts or crises. At the pavilion, a monumental polyptych-like installation brings together about 40 paintings in a multi-faceted study of a social scene increasingly emptied of shared meaning, where different ideologies erect their scenographies and emit their proclamations. The paintings are populated by disoriented protagonists and lethargic extras, all seemingly caught in a lull between work and rest, in a collective reverie where doing something or giving everything up appear as equally likely outcomes. Socialist Realism is here reversed into a modality of portraying disassembled utopias, eroded frameworks for communal action and fragile social bonds.

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An architectural installation presents scale models displaying mosaics far from the metaphors and tonalities that the medium conveys in religious contexts, or in the Socialist cosmogonies of labour. At the project’s other venue, one of these mosaics is realized at a monumental scale. The New Gallery is both a workshop and a space of debate. Teams of professors and students – from two art schools in the Republic of Moldova, a country with an exceptional tradition of public art – work, over the duration of the Biennale Arte, on a mosaic measuring 4 × 5 metres; meanwhile the project with host a range of public conversations on its art-historical and political themes. At both venues, the Brussels-based graphic design studio Atelier Brenda respond to Savu’s project via textual and visual works which think through the abstraction of labour as foundation for the definition of a capitalist self. In the terms of counter-propaganda, they investigate the tangled relations between subjectivity and productivity, between positions that are within and without social factories which make objects out of souls. Mihnea Mircan

What Work Is

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Șerban Savu, The City is Being Built and Flourishes, 2017. Oil on canvas, 148 × 185 cm. Courtesy Galeria Plan B, Berlin.

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Șerban Savu, Saint Christopher, 2022. Oil on canvas, 138 × 195 cm. Courtesy Galeria Plan B, Berlin.

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Republic of San Marino

Commissioner Paolo Rondelli Curator Alison M. Gingeras Artist Eddie Martinez Deputy Commissioner Riccardo Varini Scientific Committee Alessandro Bianchini Roberto Felicetti Vincenzo Rotondo Riccardo Varini Organisation FR Istituto d’Arte Contemporanea SpA Collaborators Università degli Studi della Repubblica di San Marino With the Support of CEFI C.O.M.A.C. International AM D’Amico ELENKA M.G.M.

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

In keeping with the tradition of inviting artists of various nationalities to represent their pavilion at the Biennale Arte, for this edition the Republic of San Marino has elected to feature Nomader, a new body of work by the American artist Eddie Martinez. This gesture pays homage to the Republic’s history of providing refuge to foreign nationals throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, and highlights the spirit of diplomacy that has characterised the country since its birth, setting it apart as a beacon of freedom and hospitality. Both Eddie Martinez’s biography and the conceptual underpinnings of his oeuvre relate to the multiplicity of meanings suggested by the Biennale Arte 2024 main curatorial theme, Foreigners Everywhere. Martinez was marked by an extremely itinerant childhood. He was born at the Groton Naval Base where his father was briefly enlisted. During his peripatetic following years, Martinez moved back and forth between opposite regions of the United States, bouncing from coast to coast, sometimes being uprooted more than once a year. Martinez’s magpie style of appropriating fragments of imagery and themes emanates from his nomadic background. Drawing was the one thing that gave Martinez continuity throughout his life, having begun his practice at a young age. Even while constantly on the move, portable materials made drawing a grounding force and became the generative motor of his practices. His background fueled Martinez’s compulsion to roam freely between abstraction and figuration over his two-decade career. Nomader is not a literal illustration of his lived experience, but a spirit that permeates his practice.

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Just as this Biennale’s curatorial theme embraces the notion of “Homo Migrans” – the concept that to be human is to migrate, to physically move, mentally change, and traverse cultures and identities – so does the visual universe of Martinez’s œuvre. Martinez has allowed his work to formally and conceptually migrate from the legacy of automatic drawing and abstraction as practiced by the CoBrA group, to his distinctive take on post-Philip Guston cartoony figuration, and finally his unusual revisitation of various art-historical genres such as still life and portraiture. His experimental, heterogeneous practice is ever-changing—deploying different media as if he were always trying to make his visual language foreign to himself. Alison M. Gingeras

Nomader

141 Eddie Martinez, Clown Fish, 2024. Oil, acrylic and spray paint on linen, 152.4 × 182.9 cm. Photo JSP Art Photography. Courtesy the Artist.

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Eddie Martinez, Borderlord, 2024. Oil, acrylic and spray paint on linen, 152.4 × 182.9 cm. Photo JSP Art Photography. Courtesy the Artist.

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Saudi Arabia

Commissioner Visual Arts Commission, Ministry of Culture Curators Jessica Cerasi Maya El Khalil Artist Manal AlDowayan Assistant Curator Shadin AlBulaihed

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

Manal AlDowayan’s installation, Shifting Sands: A Battle Song, is inspired by the evolving role of women in Saudi Arabia’s public sphere and their ongoing journey to assert their place and to reshape the narratives that have historically defined them. It is a symbolic action that articulates and examines what it means to be a Saudi woman today. While AlDowayan’s work has taken on many different forms over the past two decades, her unrelenting commitment to empower and uplift the voices of Saudi women has remained at the heart of her practice. Across a wide-ranging body of work spanning photography, sculpture, video, and installation, AlDowayan has long documented the lived experience of the women of her homeland with sensitivity and pride. Shifting Sands: A Battle Song claims the space of the pavilion through sculpture and sound. Visitors are invited to wind their way through a maze of large-scale, printed silk, petal-like sculptures that take their forms from the “desert rose”, a crystal commonly found in the desert sands near the artist’s hometown of Dhahran, in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. The surface of these sculptural elements is silkscreened with texts about Saudi women, a cacophony of media opinions, that have had a profound impact on their perception and obscured their own self-representation.

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Yet, at the centre of the work, a shift occurs. Following the structure of national folkloric dances historically performed by men, the various components shape themselves around a central motivating element. In the case of these traditional dances, this is a dancer or poet. Here, it is the voices of Saudi women boldly proclaiming themselves. Through a series of participatory workshops held in Dhahran, Riyadh, and Jeddah, AlDowayan has offered women and girls a platform to assert their own voices and desires, both individually and collectively. Shifting Sands: A Battle Song is a rallying cry for solidarity, and an experience designed to inspire courage. In AlDowayan’s words: “I hope this artwork will encourage women to look within themselves and to lean on their community of women, to find their voice and their space within this new chapter in history, much of which is still unwritten.”

Shifting Sands: A Battle Song FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

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Manal AlDowayan, O Sister | The Eternal Return of the Same series (detail), 2021. Tussar silk, silkscreen ink, acrylic paint. 160 × 195 × 55 cm. Courtesy the Artist.

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Senegal

Commissioner Marième Ba Curator Massamba Mbaye Artist Alioune Diagne Organisation and Support by TEMPLON, Paris – Brussels – New York WE ART PARTNERS Ministry of Culture, Creative Industries, Historical Heritage, and Leisure of Senegal

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

For its first-ever participation at Biennale Arte, Senegal is unveiling its inaugural pavilion with a rising star, the Franco-Senegalese artist Alioune Diagne. Born in Kaffrine in 1985 and trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Dakar, Diagne has been developing a unique technique where small modules, which he calls “unconscious signs”, cluster together to form a coherent figurative image. A socially engaged artist, he has used over the years this complex sign process to create dynamic paintings depicting daily life scenes in Senegal as well as the major challenges the world is facing, from ecology to gender equality, racism, and the notions of transmission and heritage. The project, titled Bokk – Bounds, conceived by Alioune Diagne and curator Massamba Mbaye is a response to the theme of the 60th Biennale Arte, Foreigners Everywhere. In Wolof, Bokk means “what is shared”, “held in common”, as well as family ties. The term Mbokk, linguistically related to Bokk and denoting kinship and brotherhood, is also central to their reflections. A selection of paintings together forming a four-by-twelvemetre puzzle-like display calls to unite and to cultivate bonds by connecting through universal challenges and values. From clandestine Mediterranean migrations to escalating poverty, resources depletion, racism and mutual dependence, some poignant scenes emerge from the works, shedding light on contemporary disasters happening in total international indifference.

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These striking representations stand in stark contrast to the joyful life scenes depicted and celebrating the artist’s cherished values: the education of children, the legacy of traditions, and the sense of community. It is in the portraiture of women that the painter finds the embodiment of these profound ideals. To further interlink the scenes through a common thread, Diagne has subtly added in the background a faded and inverted worldknown progression from monkey to man, a discreet watermark of naturalist Charles Darwin’s evolutionary diagram. Adding a slight immersive twist to the show, Diagne brought to the centre of the piece a traditional canoe wrapped in a Senegalese-made textile painted by the artist, thus echoing humankind’s history marked by major migration waves, responsible for a growing separation from each other and foreshadowing climate change’s future migratory phenomena.

Bokk – Bounds Alioune Diagne, I can’t Breathe, 2023-24. Acrylic on canvas, 100 × 100 cm. Courtesy the Artist; TEMPLON, Paris – Brussels – New York. © Laurent Edeline.

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Alioune Diagne, Immigrant Children, 2023-2024. Acrylic on canvas, 200 × 200 cm. Courtesy the Artist; TEMPLON, Paris – Brussels – New York. © Laurent Edeline.

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Serbia

Commissioner Jelena Medaković Curator Ksenija Samardžija Artist Aleksandar Denić Project Production Ivan Milošević Marija Stošić Construction Management CDPC doo Belgrade, Arch. Rade Mihajlović Project Art Department Assistant Danilo Mlađenović Artist’s Assistant Nebojša Antešević Curator’s Assistant Ljubica Milovanović Visual Identity Isidora Nikolić Advisory Board Radoš Antonijević Nikola Šuica Dragan Zdravković Ivana Bašičević Antić Mileta Poštić Production and Organisation Belgrade City Museum I Muzej grada Beograda Foundation of the Belgrade City Museum I Fondacija Muzeja grada Beograda CDPC doo Belgrade Technical Installation and Support CDPC doo Belgrade KAI Architecture Interiors Special Project Adviser Christopher Yggdre

The title of the exhibition, Exposition Coloniale, immediately recalls the consequences of the colonial era. This historical context sets the stage for Denić’s exploration of the contemporary ramifications of colonialism, and the ongoing impact of the division and subjugation of peoples and cultures. Through his artistic experience in the theatre, Denić used his skills to delve into complex and pressing issues. By employing symbolic inversion within the exhibition, he challenges viewers, placing them in a setup to reexamine their understanding of power dynamics, consumerism, and multiplied bitter realities in the current state of affairs. In today’s world, the themes of usurpation, division, and control continue to be pertinent, not only in the realm of politics and finance but also in the sphere of basic human values. The exhibition is placed in a national pavilion that architecturally includes a monumental façade inscription—Jugoslavia; the territory that was geo-politically dissolved as a result of the conflicts that ravaged the region in the early 1990s. Located in the right corner of the Giardini, the pavilion epitomises the grandeur and sophistication of Italian Novecento. In this instance, architecture becomes an emotive sequence, confirming that it is not just about form and function, but also about the social and cultural context in which it exists. In this way, the national pavilion is not just a representative building, but a living monument of the fragmented country and vanished identity. This historical note serves to highlight the complexity and sensitivity of every future context.

Under the Auspices Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Serbia

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

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By evoking the ambiance of transit – temporary residence or spaces such as hotel rooms, toilets, public baths, or phone booths, Denić invites the viewer to consider the multitude of social significance accumulated within these environments. These structures and spatial conglomerates, as Denić suggests, are imbued with the anxieties of the society in which they exist. They act as social memorabilia, capturing the essence of human sojourn and reflecting the lost sensibility and intimacy of our interactions within them. Ksenija Samardžija

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Exposition Coloniale

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Republic of Seychelles

Commissioner Emmanuel D’Offay, Creative Seychelles Agency Curator Martin Kennedy Artists Juliette Zelime (aka Jadez) Danielle Freakley Ryan Chetty Jude Ally Assistant Curator Raimundas Malasauskas Exhibition Partner European Cultural Centre, Venice With the Support of School for Cultural Studies, Venice

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

The Seychelles Pavilion features the work of four Seychellois artists: Jude Ally, Ryan Chetty, Danielle Freakley and Juliette Zelime (aka Jadez). The exhibition’s title – Pala - references the mythical utopia in Aldous Huxley’s 1962 novel Island. In response to this Biennale Arte’s curatorial theme of Foreigners Everywhere, the Seychelles Pavilion explores issues of national, cultural and social identity. Despite exploring this rich vein discretely, the artists will create a presentation of mutuality in terms of principal considerations: the concept of nationality and “belonging”; communication across different nationalities and utilising different modes; stereotyping and stylistic cliché; categorisation and status determination rooted in the administration systems of nations (e.g. immigration); and, finally, the role of formal and informal language systems which impact upon our use and understanding of the above. Jude Ally presents mixed media works on canvas; the concept for this installation relates to the way people within society are frequently stranded due to its many and rapid transitions. Identified or unidentified groups of people find themselves and their relevance tainted through

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these transitions and are, inevitably, alienated. Ryan Chetty exhibits video onto multi-layered panels. This installation is essentially a message of gratitude and homage to the Seychelles nation and its people. It celebrates the genesis of our nation, which is home to diverse, striking individuals who hail from a multitude of racial and ethnic backgrounds. Danielle Freakley invites people to communicate through a new speech mode on sculptures of the Seychelles’ underwater continent. Ribbons are distributed to audiences with further instructions on how to participate in this conversation mode. Freakley has been working with social practice curator Raimundas Malašauskas and Rory Macbeth as performance producer on this piece. Jadez exhibits video incorporated into an installation of surreal hammock forms and through the exploration of the formula The Piñata Effect – Adapt or Perish, which explores the ideology associated with traveling, migration and, essentially, the movements from one place to another. In search for freedom, peace of mind and better pastures.

Pala

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Jude Ally, Floating Installation, 2022. Mixed Media. Photo Marsha Dine.

Ryan Chetty, Birth and Death without a Rationale (detail), 2022. Interactive video installation. Photo Marsha Dine.

Juliette Zelime (aka Jadez), One Year One Day, Video installation (detail). 2022. Photo Marsha Dine.

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Danielle Freakley, Induction, Video still.

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Singapore

Commissioner Low Eng Teong, National Arts Council - Singapore Curator Haeju Kim Artist Robert Zhao Renhui Organisation Singapore Art Museum Associate Producer James Jordan Tay Graphic Design Moonsick Gang Technical Management Nic Tan Sound Designer and Composer Jang Young-gyu Script Writer Joel Tan Actors Umi Kalthun Yazid Jalil Editor Adeline Chia Film Production Unit Arrvinraj Balasubramaniam Lewis Choo Ge Xiaocong Goh Chun Aik Hong Shuying Carpenters Teo Teah On Ah Fai Project Consultant SP Tan With the Support of Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth, Singapore CHARLES & KEITH Group Foundation Monsoon Southeast Asia Collection ShanghART Gallery

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

In Seeing Forest, artist Robert Zhao Renhui offers an evocative exploration of secondary forests—forested areas that have regrown over land previously disturbed by human intervention. These areas have become the threshold between undisturbed primary forests and developed urban environments. One of the hallmarks of Zhao’s work is the patient observation of a natural world—one that is often never fully comprehended. Since 1998, under the auspices of his own fictitious Institute of Critical Zoologists, Zhao’s many and varied projects have served as a lens to highlight the resilience of nature and nature’s interactions with human life and society. This exhibition presents Zhao’s accumulated observations from various secondary forests in Singapore and explores their multifaceted lives, as well as the manifold worlds within them. The central work, The Owl, The Travellers, and The Cement Drain (2024), displays scenes of the secondary forest—its trees and animals; tents abandoned by migrant workers; migratory birds, and an unstable, fluctuating narrative of two human characters in the forest. In conversation with this two-channel video is a sculptural installation. Entitled Trash Stratum (2024), the installation comprises multiple screens that show various creatures visiting the forest displayed alongisde objects Zhao found and collected during these expeditions. Arranged around a deconstructed cabinet of curiosities, the work alludes to and destabilises colonial natural history classification systems.

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Seeing Forest invites audiences to experience the layered complexities and realities of the world around us. Audiences are invited to see how the island of Singapore has evolved, revealing some of the ways in which human urban development has influenced the natural world and how the natural world has responded. Seeing Forest reveals how these transitional spaces are points of intersection for history, discovery and sustainability. The edge of a city – especially one that is so carefully planned – may be the most intense frontier in existence. Haeju Kim

Seeing Forest

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Robert Zhao Renhui, Thermal image of a walker in the forest, still from The Owl, The Travellers, and The Cement Drain, 2024. Courtesy the Artist. © Robert Zhao Renhui.

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Robert Zhao Renhui, An eagle drinks from a trash can in a secondary forest, still from The Owl, The Travellers, and The Cement Drain, 2024. Courtesy the Artist. © Robert Zhao Renhui.

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Slovak Republic

Commissioner Monika Krčmárik Curator Lýdia Pribišová Artist Oto Hudec Sound Piece and Performance Fero Király Performers Eva Šušková Anna Čonková Ivanka Chrapková Peter Mazalán Marek Kundlák Vojtěch Šembera Poeticisation of Tree Stories Juliana Sokolová Choreography Petra Fornayová Costume Designer Michaela Bednárová Visual Identity and Graphic Design Samuel Čarnoký Architecture and Exhibition Design Tomáš Boroš Boat Construction and Installation Róbert Bernáth Sarah Hreščáková Oto Hudec Mural Viktor Fehér Oto Hudec Michal Turkovič Pine Cone Stone Carving Juraj Parák Maroš Parák Technical Assistance Peter Beňo

“The world we want is a world in which many worlds fit.” —Isabelle Fremeaux and Jay Jordan, We Are “Nature” Defending Itself. Civil protests have made history. Floating Arboretum is inspired by protests over the destruction of trees. Oto Hudec has created an archive of stories relating the efforts of these activists, several of whom built dwellings in trees and lived in them. Much as Italo Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees, whose life choice speaks of a determination to fight for an egalitarian world. Oto Hudec relates the fragile stories of trees as primordial ties that bind all forms of life. An inspiration for Oto’s painting of trees on rafts was the story of a Georgian billionaire politician who bought the most beautiful trees in Georgia and transported them to his island. The artist contemplates an arboretum, a symbolic utopian place, a sanctuary for trees threatened by human extractivism. The project is an imaginative glimpse into a dystopian future in which we select and save trees by moving them to a safe (fictional) arboretum. Anti-deforestation protests. Climate crisis. Migration. The theme of Biennale Arte 2024, Foreigners Everywhere, is common in Hudec’s work. His Floating Arboretum analogously contemplates the migration of trees in turbulent times, trees as strangers in their new home.

Organisation Slovak National Gallery With the Support of The Ministry of Culture of the Slovak Republic In Collaboration with Kunsthalle Bratislava Gandy Gallery

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

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Recurring motifs in Oto’s work are escape from a world of intertwining crises and a desire to save the almost unsalvageable. The trees of the Giardini, and Venice itself, formerly home to more botanical gardens than any other city, are endangered by climate change. The arboretum is an ideological power construct that needs to be viewed from a decolonising perspective. Hudec inverts this concept into salvation from the collapse of native ecosystems. In front of the Czech and Slovak Pavilion, a barge allegorically floats, carrying a cone of the Arolla pine. Become involved in Floating Arboretum via https://floatingarboretum.sng.sk. Lýdia Pribišová

Floating Arboretum

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Oto Hudec, Floating Arboretum, 2024. Fabrics, digital print on MDF, acrylic paint, 390 × 240 cm. Photo Adam Šakový. Courtesy Gandy Gallery.

Oto Hudec, Floating Arboretum, 2024. Detail of an installation wood, plywood, paper, digital print on wallpaper, acrylic paint, aquarell. Photo the Artist. Courtesy Gandy Gallery.

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

Oto Hudec, All We Could Do Together, 2024. Video still from Full HD video. Photo the Artist. Courtesy Gandy Gallery.

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Republic of Slovenia

Commissioner Martina Vovk Curator Vladimir Vidmar Artist Nika Špan Organisation Moderna galerija, Ljubljana With the Support of Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

At the Biennale Arte 2024, Slovenia presents Garden Secret for You, a project by the conceptual artist Nika Špan, curated by Vladimir Vidmar. This is the first time that the Slovenian Pavilion has taken the form of a project in a public space, thus addressing two underlying preoccupations: the lack of a permanent national pavilion and the curatorial theme of this Biennale Arte, Foreigners Everywhere. Both a sculpture and a piece of architecture, the strange nomadic structure thus serves both as a country’s pavilion and as a paradigmatic foreigner, oddly out of place in the historic cityscape of Venice. Garden Secret for You is ushered into the historical context of Venice as a foreign body, an alien and unexpected element. An enigmatic entity of a highly specific exterior, recognisable as something unnamable, it speaks about itself, recounting the story of its entry into the sphere of art, while at the same time (indirectly) addressing something else. Garden Secret for You is both an object of sculptural quality and a functional one, a piece of architecture acting as a sort of clandestine Slovenian national pavilion.

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Both an abstract, aesthetic entity and a usable one, the object is a paradigmatic nomad, switching from one register to another, simultaneously functioning in different systems and resisting its reduction to one particular context or meaning. In this way it synchronously represents an unusual parallel with what is at the centre of the paradigm of art: it is an object alien to itself, alienating as a consequence the experience of everyone who encounters it. Garden Secret for You speaks of the constitutive foreignness that is at the heart of the practice of art, both in its creation and experience. For this reason, the experience of its interior formally repeats the impression of its exterior, that is, the interior of the object alienates and confounds the visitor. By experiencing it the visitor must become something or someone else, the same as the object in question, a stranger to him/herself, able to withstand the tantalising task of ambivalence. Vladimir Vidmar

Garden Secret for You FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

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Nika Špan, Garden Secret for You, 2024. Mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo the Artist. Courtesy the Artist. © Nika Špan.

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Republic of South Africa

Commissioner Nosipho Nausca – Jean Jezile, Ambassador of South Africa Curator Portia Malatjie Artists MADEYOULOOK (Molemo Moiloa & Nare Mokgotho) Assistant Curator Siwa Mgoboza Artistic Collaborators Nozuko Mapoma Modise Sekgothe João Orecchia Project Director Institute for Creative Repair Project Team Makgati Molebatsi, Veronica King (Project Direction) Dawn Robertson (Event management) Liesl Potgieter (Project Coordination) Percy Mabandu (PR & Communication) Saul Molobi (Stakeholder Relations) Exhibition Production Team Office 24|7 Architecture PLNTH eiletz ortigas | architects

Quiet Ground is a meditation on the political, social, ontological and spiritual histories of land and water. It advocates the subjectivity and agency of land through an invocation of its hushed contemplative state in the aftermath of struggle. By understanding the relationship to land as a way of being, the pavilion explores the secret life of land and water and examines how we are shaped by them, and how in turn, they are shaped by our socio-political climate. Rooted in ongoing legacies of forced migration in South Africa, we are invited to pay attention to how the dispossessed reconnect with land across multiple iterations of displacement. The pavilion presents MADEYOULOOK’s newly commissioned sound installation Dinokana (2024) that explores themes of land and water displacement, sovereignty, and rehabilitation. Focusing on perennial strategies of repairing severed relationships to the land, the artists consider the symbolism of the resurrection plant – which in apparent death reanimates upon receiving water – to draw attention to how two communities in the north of South Africa have approached cycles of loss and repair.

Visual Identity and Graphic Design softwork studio With the Support of Sappi

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

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MADEYOULOOK signals various histories of Black and indigenous people’s relationship to their surroundings, and examines how their access to natural resources has been instrumentalised as forms of capture and alienation. They contemplate the political and social capacity of water and draw on it as an infrastructure of repair. Their immersive multi-channel installation marries sonic motifs comprising traditional songs about rain, harvest, and water divination with snippets of interviews with growers and land-workers from different generations and communities to consider the cyclical and insistent cross-generational forms of reconstitution. Visitors are invited to inhabit the installation as a sanctuary of rest and refuge. The exhibition compels us to ask: what can the land and water teach us about repair and restoration? What strategies can we employ to reconnect materially, ontologically, and spiritually to our surroundings? What future possibilities might emerge from the agricultural practices of our ancestors? And, what might happen when we listen to the whispers and reverberations of everyday gatherings with land and with water?

Quiet Ground

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FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

MADEYOULOOK, 3D rendering of Dinokana, 2024. Installation for the 60th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia. Render by 24|7 Architecture. Courtesy the Artist. © MADEYOULOOK.

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Spain

Commissioners AECID (Spanish Agency for lnternational Development Cooperation) AC/E (Acción Cultural Española) Curator Agustin Pérez Rubio Artist Sandra Gamarra Heshiki

Migrant Art Gallery is a site-specific installation, transforming the Spanish Pavilion into a historical museum of Western painting. The hegemonic Western concept of a museum is reversed, exposing a range of narratives that have been silenced. Migrants are the protagonists here—both humans and nonhumans that have journeyed back and forth, often under duress. Sandra Gamarra Heshiki’s extensive research is manifested in new works based on paintings that belong to the national heritage of Spanish art collections from colonial times to the Enlightenment. Within this field of study, sociology, politics, art history, and biology intertwine to provide a reinterpretation, where too often ignored consequences of history connect to present-day racism, migration, and extractivism in relation to both the ecological and museological crises.

Migrant Art Gallery is composed of five adjacent rooms that shed light on classical painting genres such as landscape, still life, scientific illustration, and portraiture as tools with political agendas that foster monolithic constructions of nation-states based on the destruction of other forms of social organisation: Virgin Land appropriates and intervenes in landscape paintings with quotations by theorists and eco-feminists that underline the catastrophic consequences of the mismanagement of primary resources – the climate crisis – while illuminating remedial solutions offered by the Indigenous care of land; Cabinet of Extinction links colonialism to the extractivism of European botanical expeditions; Cabinet of Enlightened Racism relates how anthropology and science served as tools of racial discrimination to maintain a false narrative of hegemonic superiority over the Global South; Miscegenation Masks exposes ways in which societies situate or marginalise their subjects along gender lines; Dying Life Altarpiece is a metaphor of the economic acceleration and overproduction responsible for the countless environmental and humanitarian challenges ahead. Finally, the open space Migrant Garden proposes a counter-narrative to the historical museum: a garden inhabited by painted copies of monuments that are not in Spain but form part of the historical patrimony of the ex-colonies, it suggests a new model of institutionality that breaks with perpetual coloniality in favor of a diverse museum. Agustin Pérez Rubio

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

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Migrant Art Gallery

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Sandra Gamarra Heshiki, Miscegenation Masks I (Portrait of an Indigenous Woman from Quito with Fruit), 2023. Oil, 3 brass masks and gold leaf on canvas, 185 × 230 cm. Photo Oak Taylor-Smith.

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Sandra Gamarra Heshiki, The Framing of the Landscape IV (Plastic Waste Landfill in Almería), 2023. Oil and black iron oxide on canvas, 175 × 310 cm. Photo Oak Taylor-Smith.

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Switzerland

Commissioners Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia: Sandi Paucic (Project Leader) Rachele Giudici Legittimo (Project Manager) Curator Andrea Bellini Artist Guerreiro do Divino Amor Steering Committee Pro Helvetia Philippe Bischof, DirctorJérôme Benoit, Deputy director Anna Arutyunova, Head of Global Network and International Affairs Katharina Brandl, Head of Visual Arts Ines Flammarion, Communications Manager Assistants to the Commissioners Anita Magni Jacqueline Wolf Executive Producer Larisa Oancea Fundraising Andrea Bellini Marie Debat Manuela Schlumpf Pavilion Manager and Local Coordinator Tommaso Rava Architectural Consultant Alvise Draghi Technical Director Pedro Zaz Technical Assistant Alessandro Vangi Mechatronics Director Klaus Kellermann Scenography Co-producer Giovanna Bellini Set-up and installation Julien Girard Rebiennale (Alice Bazzoli, Tommaso Cacciari, Alberto Marsilii, Davide Mozzato, Matteo Pavan, Mirko Pedrotti, Jacopo Povelato, Alessandra Tirel)

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

Masters of Artificial Classicism Rinaldo Rinaldi (Rinaldo Rinaldi, Mariagrazia Rinaldi, Anita Accorsi, Davide Piacentini, Ilaria Piccirillo, Francesca Paltrinieri, Letizia Ballotti) Hologram Holovisio Dome Front Pictures Panorama & Marbles Elio Stile Film and Music Roma Talismano Screenplay, Direction, Editing and Animation Guerreiro do Divino Amor Director Assistant Diego Paulino Musical Director Beà Ayòólà Cast Ventura Profana Adriana Carvalho Amanda Seraphico Costume Designer Andy Roba The Miracle of Helvetia Screenplay, Direction, Editing and Animation Guerreiro do Divino Amor Assistant Director Natasha Bandeira Director (Brazil set) Lorran Dias Cast Jenna Hasse Fleur André Moïra Pitteloup Ventura Profana Gaëlle Deneuvy Charlotte Maas Leticia Ramos Maria Theresa Michelle Wollny Juliette Mancini Sallisa Rosa Maria Sabato Lyz Parayzo Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro

With the Support of Archivorum Fluxum Foundation Burger Collection Hong Kong Fondation Jan Michalski Spada Partners République et canton de Genève Stiftung Temperatio Georg e Josi Guggenheim-Stiftung Allianz Co-Production Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève Arsenic – Centre d’art scénique contemporain Lausanne Patrons Anne-Shelton Aaron Leticia Antunes Maciel Ana Barata Antonie and Philippe Bertherat Olivier Bizon and Andrea Preiss Monique Burger Natalie Cohen Laurence and Simon Collins Mario Cristiani Yolande de Ziegler Vanessa and Maurice Ephrati Céline and Charles Fribourg Dominique and Pierre Gillioz Electa and Nasri Nohra Karma Liess-Shakarchi Vera Michalski Pierre Mirabaud Xavier Oberson Cynthia Odier Marilia Razuk Mia Rigo and Alfredo Saitta Senayt and Vito Santoro Roberto Spada Della Tamari Cristina Tolovi Amina Valentini Olivier Varenne Special Thanks to Embassy of Foreign Artists Istituto Svizzero di Roma ISR Media Partner Il Giornale dell’Arte

Narrator Christiane Kolla

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A curious documentarist with a baroque imagination and an extraordinary world-builder, Swiss-Brazilian artist Guerreiro do Divino Amor has created for the Swiss Pavilion his most complex and ambitious installation yet: Super Superior Civilizations. Divided into two parts, The Miracle of Helvetia and Roma Talismano – chapters six and seven of his Superfictional World Atlas saga – the exhibition plays with the national logic of celebratory self-representation through culture, at the very origin of the national pavilions at the Giardini della Biennale over a century ago. In 2005, whilst pursuing a Master’s in architecture at the University of Brussels, Guerreiro created the first episode of the World Atlas, dedicated to the capital of Belgium. Applying the practical and theoretical tools he used as a student of experimental architecture at the School of Architecture of Grenoble and during his Master’s in Contemporary Urban Environments, Guerreiro began to question the relationships between urban space and collective imagination, between architecture and ideology, and between political propaganda and national identity. His artistic practice, based on study and research and on the idea of cartography as an instrument of power, initially took shape through complex installations made up of designs, blueprints, photos, publications, and short films. Over time, the artist began to use increasingly complex special effects and animations, drawing on a popular and mass aesthetic, from the samba schools of the Rio de Janeiro carnival to telenovelas, from rap to punk rock and dance music, from historical reenactments to neo-Pentecostal rituals, and from natural sciences to the aesthetics of large corporations. The various episodes of the World Atlas were created according to the canons of TV entertainment and corporate marketing, and therefore have an aesthetic that makes them accessible to a broad, diversified audience, not necessarily experts in contemporary art. Through his cartographic and allegorical reading of a disenchanted civilisation – as fictitious as it is real – Guerreiro do Divino Amor invites us to laugh in a benevolent spirit at our chauvinism and at those clichés with which we represent the world and ourselves. The latter attitude seems to us of fundamental importance in a period of increasing polarization of politics and radical oppositions such as the one we are currently experiencing. Andrea Bellini

Super Superior Civilizations Guerreiro do Divino Amor, Roma Talismano, 2023. Still image with performers Ventura Profana, Adriana Carvalho and Amanda Seraphico. Courtesy the Artist & Diego Paulino.

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Guerreiro do Divino Amor, Roma Talismano, 2023. Still image with performers Ventura Profana, Adriana Carvalho and Amanda Seraphico. Courtesy the Artist & Diego Paulino.

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United Republic of Tanzania

Commissioner Leah Elias Kihimbi, Deputy Director Ministry of Culture, Arts and Sports Curator Enrico Bittoto Artists Haji Chilonga Naby Happy Robert Lutengano Mwakisopile (Lute) Music Kuseka - Full Stretch by The Zawose Queens Conceived by Peter Gabriel Produced by Katie May Original production, recorded and mixed by Oli Barton-Wood & Tom Excell Written by Pendo Zawose, Leah Zawose, Oli BartonWood, Tom Excell Published by Real World Works Ltd /Domino Publishing/ Faber Alt Music Publishing © 2024 Real World Records Ltd Organisation Uf-O Archivio e Collettivo artistico ultimi futuristi Technical Director Giuseppe Rando – Studio Tecnico Rando

Photographs Marco Ravenna With the Scientific Collaboration of Museo degli Sguardi – Raccolte etnografiche di Rimini With the Main Support of Ministry of Culture, Arts and Sports of the United Republic of Tanzania Mahmoud Thabit Kombo Ambassador of the United Republic of Tanzania in Rome Honorary Consulate of the Republic of Tanzania With the Special Support of CEFA ETS Onlus With the Support of S.G. C.I.I.P. Cavallari Stefanelli1952 Balboni CICA Consulenze Fondazione Dott. Carlo Fornasini

A flight in reverse mirrors (the discovery of the Other) consists of four imaginary rooms, each representative of an era of Tanzania’s history, from the late 19th to the first two decades of the 21st century—and on to a hypothetical and decontextualised future/present. The last room is self-hybridising, a kind of invisible spirit in the form of an anthropomorphic moth, whose metaphorical flight traverses the other rooms gathering sensations and moods, undergoing a continuous cycle of death and rebirth. The exhibited works, including paintings, woodcuts, and site-specific installations, engage with themes of travel, migration in opposite directions (colonisation versus economic emigration); the inevitability of human and animal nomadism guided by emotions or needs; and the transformations imposed on individuals by environmental changes. The pavilion aims to explore the principles behind the curatorial theme of this Biennale Arte: the birth of the concept of the “Other”. As one of the “Cradles of Humanity”, Tanzania provides a privileged point of observation to the first relationships between humans and nature, and humans and animals, developed through the hands of the early “Conscious Creators”.

Collaborators Jacopo Soranzo Dario De Nicola Massimo Golinelli Jubilata Shao Giancarlo Bittoto Romano Berto Carlo Montanaro Mirko Bizzarri Christian Barbieri Ariberto Carboncini

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

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The subsequent and archetypal figure of the trickster, initially born to explain natural phenomena, over time becomes the new starting point for this exchange. It initially takes on supernatural tones in various historical periods, eventually embodying “in between” beings – hybrids between man and God – until completely humanised and forming the priestly castes, the “observers” of humanity. Ultimately culminating in the birth of the idea of diversity, and conflict, and a sense of belonging – and, therefore, exclusion. Today, the task of explaining reality and mediating between “shifting” demands (community, gender, cultural, etc.) can return to the artists, or rather the primal creatives. Through the creation of works, the most understandable and genuine ones, they must once again take on the responsibility of explaining to the “Other” their own past, sharing the present, and perhaps even predicting a common future. This mirrors exactly what our ancestors did thousands of years ago within those primordial communal spaces conceived as true secular cathedrals. Enrico Bittoto

A flight in reverse mirrors

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left: Haji Mussa Chilonga, From dark to the light, 2023. Acrylic on canvas, 40 × 40 cm. Courtesy the Artist.

left: Lutengano Mwakisopile (Lute), Chief Mkwawa, 2024. Woodcut, 64 × 50 cm. Courtesy the Artist.

right: Naby, The everlasting present n. 5, 2023. Plexiglass, paper, 50 × 70 cm. Courtesy the Artist. Photo Marco Ravenna.

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right: Happy Robert, The story about past life n. 1, 2023. Oil on canvas, 40 × 40 cm. Courtesy the Artist. Photo Marco Ravenna.

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Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste

Commissioner Jorge Soares Cristovão Secretary of State for Arts and Culture of the Democratic Republic of TimorLeste Curator Natalie King Artist Maria Madeira Organisation Ministry of Youth, Sports, Arts and Culture, Democratic Republic of TimorLeste Advisors Anna Schwartz AM Kim McGrath and Simon Fenby

Returning to her homeland after the Timorese voted for independence from Indonesia in 1999, artist Maria Madeira slept in a bedroom with red markings along the walls at knee height. After gaining trust from neighbours, Madeira learned that the red marks were the remains of lipstick. During the Indonesian occupation (1975-1999), Timorese women were forced to wear lipstick and kiss the walls. Madeira slept surrounded by clear visible impressions of hundreds of lipstick marks, imprinted stains of torment. Madeira honours these women in her site-specific installation by drenching the walls in drips of paint and betel nut that resemble blood. She works with tais, the traditional textile from Timor-Leste woven by women. Redolent with pain and anguish, Madeira smears red earth from her birthplace in Timor-Leste onto tais, canvas and floor, imbuing the performative installation with sorrow and memories. Embroidered lips are layered across the textured painting highlighting both tenderness and trauma also reflected in Madeira’s poetic title, Kiss and Don’t Tell. Here the intimacy of a kiss is contrasted with secrets, silencing and hidden stories. Madeira adeptly melds ancestral influences, traditional crafts with contemporary concerns for the plight of the voiceless.

During the opening days of the Biennale Arte 2024, Madeira kisses the walls with lipstick markings while singing traditional songs from her village in the Indigenous language Tetun. In particular, she will sing a haunting Timorese song, Ina Lou, literally meaning “Dear Mother Earth”. It is a spiritual mourning song known from the youngest generation to the oldest members of society with lyrics that refer to the cycle of birth and the journey of life and death: When we are born We call the earth Dear Mother Earth Ai lai lai lai Dear Mother Earth Ai when we are born we call the earth for her responsibility Lai lai ai lai lai Dear Mother Earth while tired do not stray from responsibility Ai lai lai lai Dear Mother Earth Ai tired do not stray from responsibility A film of Madeira’s performance is presented alongside her vast painting completing the cycle of Kiss and Don’t Tell. An act of resistance, survival and resilience, Madeira’s cultural activism pays homage to the women of Timor-Leste and the suffering of women globally. She offers solace and a murmur of hope and healing. Natalie King

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

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Kiss and Don’t Tell

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Maria Madeira, Kiss and Don’t Tell, 2024. Tais (traditional East Timorese cloth), red earth, glue, sealer on canvas. Performance stills. Photo Juventino Madeira. Courtesy the Artist; Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne, Australia.

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Türkiye

Commissioner Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV) Artist Gülsün Karamustafa Manager Duygu Şengünler Exhibition Architect Aslı Esra Kocamaz Venue and Project Coordinator Göksu Aydoğan Production Consultant Ali Uluç Kutal Opening Programme Coordinator Tuna Ortaylı Kazıcı Lighting Consultant Erinç Tepetaş Sound Design Consultant Furkan Keçeli Web Developer Özhan Binici Artist Assistant Ceylan Toraman Intern Sude Köseliören Editor Melis Cankara Graphic Design Esen Karol

Gülsün Karamustafa, one of the most influential artists for the younger generations, focuses on modernisation of Türkiye, uprooting and memory, migration, locality, identity, cultural difference and gender over fifty years. Through media as diverse as painting, installation, photography, video and performance, she calls into question historical injustices in the social and political fields. At the Biennale Arte 2024, the artist presents her installation Hollow and Broken: A State of the World. “What I am dealing with,” she says of this work, “is the state of a world hollowed out to the core by wars, earthquakes, migration and nuclear peril unleashed at every turn, threatening humankind while nature is ceaselessly scathed and the environment made sick. I attempt to physically and emotionally summon into existence this phenomenon: the emptiness, the hollowness, the brokenness produced by the devastation that has become commonplace, whose pace becomes ever more impossible to keep up with, by the unimaginable grief that keeps on striking again and again at relentless intervals, by empty values, identity struggles and brittle human relationships.

Exhibition Design Consultant Yelta Köm With the Support of Republic of Türkiye Ministry of Culture and Tourism Republic of Türkiye Ministry of Foreign Affairs Turkish Airlines SAHA Association

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

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On the other hand, I am drawn by the backdrop of this edifice, once a symbol of Venice’s military might over land and sea, by how it almost swathes the matter at hand, and, without a doubt, I am compelled to bring the two ancient cities, Venice and Istanbul, between which I kept pacing back and forth throughout the whole process, to congregate. The columns – embodiments of the ‘force’ that, in the context of architecture, represents stability, prowess, durability and victory, the same force which, down the ages, has kept the world on guard by dint of wars and plunder – are replaced by hollow moulds, which can only stand in place with the help of propping devices. Wheeled carts, gliding down rails without a beginning or end, are loaded up with broken glass shards. Chandeliers made of smashed Venice glassware, alluding to the three monotheistic faiths that, throughout history, have never ceased fighting one another, are only visible through a cloud full of pain. The sound that emanates from the black-and-white images running on the screen persistently dogs the spectator’s every footstep. The light struggles to land on and brighten any particular element. The world, a battlefield, is an endlessly shifting ground…”

Hollow and Broken: A State of the World FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

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Gülsün Karamustafa, Sketches for Hollow and Broken: A State of the World, 2023. Courtesy the Artist; BüroSarıgedik. © Gülsün Karamustafa.

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Uganda

Commissioner Juliana Akroyo Naumo Curator Acaye Kerunen Artists Artisan Weavers Collective Sanaa Gateja Jose Hendo Taga Nuwagaba Xenson Ssenkaaba Odur Ronald

Wan Acel invites you to de-classify art through the work of a diverse group of thirty-one intergenerational artists. Working both individually and in a collective, they examine their contexts of art production, interrogating prevailing narratives that serve to construct and maintain hierachies of art creation. The title, Wan Acel, is in Luo, a language spoken in Uganda and across wider Africa. Tuli Bamu is in Oluganda, a Bantu language spoken in Uganda; Turibamwe is in Runyakitara / Nkore, also a Bantu language, spoken in south-western Uganda, United Republic of Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi. These languages are representative of the borderless origins of the exhibiting artists. In acts of visual cadenza that are inspired by primary African architectures, the artists of Wan Acel collectively propose radically alternative ways to see and to be. Through explorations of collective memory, Wan Acel reveals and offers an intimate, multisensory kaleidoscope of materiality and artisanship. We invite you to ask: “How are you?” instead of “Who are you!?, Why are you here!?”

Library of Weaving (LOW) is a body of work by a coalition of twenty-six leading artisan weavers, consisting of patterns of weaving and shapes found in mats and basketry. The exhibition is an encyclopedic catalogue of texture, colour, and form found both within Uganda and beyond its borders. Sanaa Gateja AKA Bead King exhibits a trio of circular paperbead illustrations mounted on barkcloth and a performative work of jewelry, showcased opposite the paperbead work of The Acholi Quarters collective of Banda. Jose Hendo demonstrates restorative memory through the use of barkcloth in avant-garde, wearable artworks. Alongside Sanaa and Xenson Ssenkaaba, his work forms part of a choreographed audience-participatory parade through Venice before hanging in the pavilion: works made of recycled paper beads, barkcloth, bamboo, upcycled wedding gowns and rubber. Taga Nuwagaba suggests alternatives to deforestation in his use of Dendrocalamus Black Asper bamboo to frame his watercolour paintings in which he responds to the Artisan Collective— itself symbolic of market women who negotiate space and value daily in their trading of merchandise. Odur Ronald installs his memory of unrest and border crossings using recycled aluminium plates and copper wire. Through Wan Acel, I propose that we say, one to the other, in shared humanity: Welcome here! You belong! Acaye Kerunen

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

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Jose Hendo, The Common Threads, 2020. Barkcloth, 111.7 × 218 cm.

Wan Acel | Tuli Bamu | Turibamwe | We Are One

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Ukraine

Commissioner Taras Shevchenko, Deputy Minister for European Integration Curators Viktoria Bavykina Max Gorbatskyi Artists Katya Buchatska Oleksandr Burlaka Andrii Dostliev and Lia Dostlieva Andrii Rachynskyi Daniil Revkovskyi Organisation Ministry of Culture and Information Policy of Ukraine NGO Ukrainian Photography With the Support of USAID/ENGAGE Bickerstaff.721 Ukrainian Institute Open Eye Gallery Goethe-Institut British Council Galeria Labirynt The University of Liverpool PEN America Artists at Risk Connection Grynyov Art Collection LAW NET Documenting Ukraine Institute for Human Sciences atelienormalno

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

Net Making is both a real-life practice and a metaphor. People in Ukraine and abroad, often strangers, gather to weave together camouflage nets. It’s a practice driven by tragedy and a national necessity, but it can also function as therapy or social occasion. It is the epitome of self-organisation, horizontality and joint action, ushering in the emancipation of all participants. Working with different Ukrainian communities, the artists acted as mediators and facilitators in this framework of joint action, as the various experiences of Ukrainians were being collected within their homeland and beyond. Following her long-time practice, Katya Buchatska created Best Wishes by working with fifteen neurodiverse artists as an attempt to rethink the conventions of greetings and wishes—clichés often dictated by linguistic rules rather than actual communication needs. The work explores language transformations amid life-threatening conditions, emphasising the imperative to resist violence. Oleksandr Burlaka’s Work embodies the traditional practices of home textile weaving, characteristic of Ukrainian culture, while simultaneously forming a backdrop for the narrative of personal experiences, recent events and cataclysms. Civilians. Invasion by Andrii Rachynskyi and Daniil Revkovskyi features archival videos collected from open sources, shot by civilians before and during the Russian invasion. Such precarious and authentic footage risks being lost in the flux of video content; collected together, these films attempt to communicate the people’s experiences while serving as preserved evidence of crime.

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Comfort Work by Andrii Dostliev and Lia Dostlieva investigates the stereotypes and expectations laid upon refugees in Europe. With the help of local professional actors, the work playfully allows Ukrainians with the experience of displacement to reclaim their agency and throw those stereotypes back in the faces of those who created them. The consolidation of various experiences of otherness allows these projects to reinforce each other. All four works are less the results of artistic imagination than manifestations of reality speaking vehemently for itself. In a dialogue with this year’s Biennale’s theme, Foreigners Everywhere, the Ukraine Pavilion addresses the theme of otherness—through diverse personal experiences of war, emigration, and social integration. Viktoria Bavykina Max Gorbatskyi

Andrii Dostliev and Lia Dostlieva, Comfort Work #2, 2023–24. Video still. Courtesy the Artists.

Net Making FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

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Anna Sapon, “Adriano Pedrosa, I congratulate you on the opening of the doors of La Biennale”, from the project Best Wishes by Katya Buchatska, 2024. Carpet, 130 × 200 cm. Photo Oleksandr Popenko. Courtesy the Artist.

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United Arab Emirates

Commissioner Salama bint Hamdan Al Nahyan Foundation Curator Tarek Abou El Fetouh Artist Abdullah Al Saadi Curatorial Assistant Masha Refka Exhibition Design Hussein Baydoun Graphic Design Hani Charaf, Kemistry Design Supporter UAE Ministry of Culture

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

Artist Abdullah Al Saadi is a wanderer, chronicler, cartographer, poet, decipherer, alchemist, memory carrier and storyteller. For the UAE Pavilion, his solo exhibition features eight artworks that were produced on his journeys in the wilderness and proposes to look at his creative process in relation to the practices of Arab poets centuries ago. During his journeys, Al Saadi starts to draw, paint, or write once he feels immersed in nature. Similarly, classical Arab poets described this immersion as the process leading up to the composition of their poems. He travels alone, in the company of a book, music, domestic animal, or means of transportation. The presence of these travel companions significantly impacts his artworks, as they join him in exploring the land and humankind’s place in it. Al Saadi’s map-like drawings and paintings do not include all the spatial components of the landscapes he depicts, nor do they exclude elements of contemporary life. He chooses the sites to retain, and others to forget, in a creative process that is simultaneously intellectual and aesthetic, sensorial and affective, and is the territory of art par excellence. Sites of memory are essentially paired with sites of amnesia, both necessary to the formation process of individual and collective memory, representing parallel histories alongside officially documented ones. For over forty years, Al Saadi has been creating singularly subjective narratives, and through a process of assiduous archiving, he keeps his maps, stones, scrolls and drawings in tin boxes of various shapes and sizes. They are all stored in big metal chests like treasure boxes, numbered, dated and coded, as if he is creating and preserving a collective memory for the future.

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The exhibition is an invitation to enter Abdullah Al Saadi’s singular world and to wander among its unique and rich features. This is a journey where visitors move along a path discovering both the displayed artworks and hidden art pieces in metal chests. In a re-enactment of the artist’s ritual with visitors in his studio, the concealed works are revealed by performers, who are constantly present in the space. They interact with visitors, telling them stories and giving them clues about the artist’s journeys and the collective memory that Al Saadi summons into the present, and meticulously preserves for a future.

Abdullah Al Saadi: Sites of Memory, Sites of Amnesia

Abdullah Al Saadi, The Sufi’s Journey by Bicycle, Tin 67, 2019. Graphite pencil on canvas scroll, tin box, 17 × 13 × 5 cm. Photo Roman Mensing. Courtesy National Pavilion UAE – La Biennale di Venezia.

Abdullah Al Saadi, The Slipper’s Journey, Rock 24.1, 2015. Acrylic paint on rock, 33 × 17 × 6 cm. Photo Roman Mensing. Courtesy National Pavilion UAE – La Biennale di Venezia.

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Abdullah Al Saadi, A Journey in the Footsteps of Camar Cande by Car, Box 16, 2017. Tin container, graphite pencil and oil paint on canvas, 28 (d) × 6 cm (h). Photo Roman Mensing. Courtesy National Pavilion UAE – La Biennale di Venezia.

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United States of America

Commissioners Kathleen Ash-Milby Louis Grachos Abigail Winograd Curators Kathleen Ash-Milby Abigail Winograd Artist Jeffrey Gibson Organisation Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe, New Mexico Educational Partners Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico Bard College, Annandale-onHudson, New York In Partnership with Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Department of State Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice Presenting Support Ford Foundation Mellon Foundation Leadership Support The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Major Support Agnes Gund Arison Arts Foundation Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art The Hearthland Foundation Henry Luce Foundation Sotheby’s Terra Foundation for American Art The project team and artist are grateful to the many additional generous foundations and private supporters of this project not listed here.

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

Jeffrey Gibson’s the space in which to place me combines multimedia sculptures, mixed-media paintings, site-specific murals, a multichannel video installation, and an extensive exterior installation to transform the U.S. Pavilion into an embodiment of his radically inclusive vision for the future: a space in which Indigenous art and a broad spectrum of cultural expressions and identities are central to the human experience. A member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent, Gibson is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice is informed by his international upbringing in South Korea, Germany, and the United States. His hybrid visual language draws from American, Indigenous, and queer histories, with references to popular subcultures, literature, and global artistic traditions. Gibson reveals how taste, notions of authenticity, and persistent stereotypes of Indigenous and Queer people are used to delegitimise cultural expressions that exist outside the mainstream. Within his multimedia work, intertribal aesthetics, beadwork, textiles, and found objects from the past two centuries commingle with the visual languages of global modernism. Expanding Indigenous traditions of painting and weaving, Gibson’s use of pattern and abstract geometries confronts the chromophobia of contemporary art. He combines these myriad influences in artworks that reflect the vibrant realities of Indigenous communities in the United States, a form of cultural critique that engages with complex histories rather than erasing them.

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The exhibition honours this complexity by incorporating the voices of writers, poets, and songwriters, as well as excerpts from the founding documents of the United States. Gibson probes the distance between the ideals of democracy and the ways it has been enacted. In so doing, he wrestles with his own complicated relationship to his American identity as a Queer, Indigenous person. By setting the stage for joyful and participatory engagement, Gibson’s installation embodies his ethos of acceptance and love and extends the space of catharsis to all of us. Kathleen Ash-Milby Abigail Winograd

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Jeffrey Gibson, if there is no struggle there is no progress (detail), 2024. Glass beads, rose quartz, nylon thread, acrylic felt, polyester fill, cold-rolled mild steel, 58.4 × 88.9 × 45.7 cm. Photo Brian Barlow. Courtesy Jeffrey Gibson Studio. © Jeffrey Gibson.

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Uruguay

Commissioner Facundo de Almeida Curator Elisa Valerio Artist Eduardo Cardozo Organisation Ministry of Education and Culture of Uruguay National Directorate of Culture of Uruguay Uruguay Culture Foundation National Institute of Visual Arts Collaborator, Light Designing, Art Handling and Photography Álvaro Zinno Restoration Advisor Mechtild Endhardt Claudia Frigerio Collaborators Ministry of Foreign Affairs Embassy of Uruguay in Italy Honorary Consulate of Uruguay in Venice Agency Uruguay XXI Fondos de Incentivo Cultural

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Eduardo Cardozo presents Latent, an immersive installation that creates a relational act between two painters from a distance: the Uruguayan Cardozo and the Venetian Tintoretto. This dialogue consists of three moments: the nude, the wall of Cardozo’s workshop, transferred to Venice through the stacco technique; the vestments, an interpretation that Cardozo makes of one of the sketches for Tintoretto’s Paradise; and the veil, a fabric sewn from the scraps of gauze used for transferring the atelier wall. First, Cardozo exposes the skin of his workshop and removes the surface layers of the walls of his atelier through the stacco. He shows the most intimate portion of him as an artist, the nude, the space in which he conceives and produces his works. This peeling wall highlights the fragility of the artist and his work, exposes his rootlessness; the artist doesn’t exist without his context or a frame that contains him. In this prismatic room with pure cold lines, the workshop walls stop being enveloping and become a graft on a single wall in linear form. They stand out in their otherness when changing location. The wall becomes an act of foreignness in Venice: a Uruguayan wall inhabiting a Venetian one. Second, Cardozo moves in space and time to investigate Venice. In this research he finds one of the sketches of Tintoretto’s Paradise. This large canvas, located in the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, went through an extensive process of restoration between 2012 and 2013.

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It is precisely this process that captivated Cardozo, who decided to remake the clothing of the characters in the painting by carrying out a volumetric reinterpretation in modelled lightweight bleached cotton, canvas, and linen. With his interpretation he doesn’t seek to imitate the original in another format, but rather to extract these sets of fabrics, which appear as floating clusters with great fluidity and harmony. Venetian colors dance in a dialogue of organic shapes. Finally, the veil hangs in the middle of the room. A light and translucent fabric composed of the pieces of sewn gauze used to transfer the walls of the atelier. A gauzy feel prevails that shows as much as it hides. It proposes a seduction game between the other two pieces, allowing us to unravel them under a diffuse light. This semi-permeable membrane invites us to know the artist and ourselves in its reflection. In this relational act, Cardozo learns as much about Tintoretto and Venice as about himself. Elisa Valerio

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Eduardo Cardozo, sketch of the Installation Latent, 2024. Mixed technique. Photo Álvaro Zinno. Courtesy Álvaro Zinno. © Álvaro Zinno.

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Eduardo Cardozo, sketch of The Vestments interpretation of The Paradise by Tintoretto, 2024. Fabrics dyed and moulded with acrylic and oil paint. Photo montage Álvaro Zinno. Courtesy Museo Nacional ThyssenBornemisza.

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Republic of Uzbekistan

Commissioner Gayane Umerova, Chairperson of the Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation under the Cabinet of Ministers of the Republic of Uzbekistan Curator Centre for Contemporary Art Tashkent Artist Aziza Kadyri Associate Artists Qizlar collective Project Managers Laziza Akbarova, Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation Malika Zayniddinova Bekzod Ulmasov, Centre for Contemporary Art Tashkent Graphic Design Francesca Biagiotti Pupilla Grafik Exhibition Design Sofia Bengebara Adra Studio Exhibition Installation We Exhibit Collaborators Elmurod Najimov Svetlana Chistiakova Anastasia Sinitsyna

How do we perform belonging? How do we embody the character of a “foreigner”? Uzbek diasporic artist Aziza Kadyri draws attention to the experiences of Central Asian women and how they construct and reconstruct their identities in the process of migration, both internal and external. Dissecting visual and bodily memories, the artist turns to both her personal and collective memory of women’s experiences in the contemporary Uzbek community; she explores gender and cultural tricksterism used to construct Central Asian female identity that manifests through polyvocality, hybridity, and mythmaking. Oscillating between extreme visibility and complete invisibility, a spectrum amplified in the age of digital media, women become both the spectacle and the spectators of their own lives. The project immerses visitors in a deconstructed theatre backstage, reminiscent of the Houses of Culture from the early 20th century across Eurasia. Costumes transform into sculptures, complemented by audiovisual material from a collaboration with Qizlar, a Tashkent-based collective co-founded by the artist. Rooted in women’s narratives, it explores embodied memories, collective practices, and the relationship between the body and its environment.

With the Special Support of Saida Mirziyoyeva, Assistant to the President of the Republic of Uzbekistan

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The installation builds the relationship between Central Asian handmade embroidery, commonly referred to as Suzani, and a fine-tuned AI image generator. By reimagining Suzani patterns, it brings to light the biases present in technology that fail to recognise the intricacies of Central Asian culture. The pavilion prompts inquiries into how the development of AI is transforming the creation of shared memories in a globalised world. Do we still actively remember, or has something else taken on the role of remembering for us? The installation challenges viewers to embrace potential discomfort and embody both the observer and the observed, shifting between states of exposure—changes perceptible only to the onlookers beyond this space of accidental performance. Centre for Contemporary Art Tashkent

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Aziza Kadyri, Suzani embroidery transformation sequence created by a generative model, part of Don’t Miss the Cue, 2024. Mixed media. Courtesy the Artist; Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation; Uzbekistan State Museum of Arts.

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Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela

Commissioner Reinaldo J Landaeta Díaz Curator Edgar Ernesto González Artist Juvenal Ravelo Deputy Commissioners Paola Posani Urdaneta Daniel Suárez Bustamante Deputy Curator Tarím Susana Goís Cárdenas Press Coordinator Mary Pemjean Graphic Designers Tatum Goís Cárdenas Álvaro Arocha Exhibition Infografic Juan Carlos Hernández Museographers Edgar Ernesto González Daniel Suárez Bustamante Photographer Roiner Ross Researchers Tarím Goís Edgar Ernesto González Daniel Suárez Reinaldo Landaeta

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Digital Animation Daniela Tovar Daniel Jiménez Juvenal Ravelo Edgar Ernesto González Eduardo León Daniel Suárez Artistic conceptualization Ingeniería Creativa Global Art & Construction OBA art With the Support of Ministry of People’s Power for Culture Ministry of People’s Power for Foreign Affairs Banco de Desarrollo Social y Económico de Venezuela (Bandes) Banco Central de Venezuela (BCV) Banco de Desarrollo de América Latina y el Caribe (CAF) Industria Venezolana de Aluminio C.A (CVG VENALUM) Fundación Daniel Suárez Centro de Arte

This project is a tribute to the master of kinetic art who, in 1965, began his studies in the sociology of art at La Sorbonne with professors such as historians and researchers Pierre Francastel and Jean Cassou. Juvenal Ravelo, like other foreign artists, came to Paris to consolidate his studies in an effervescent environment full of socio-political and cultural changes. His relationship with intellectuals and art theorists, such as Frank Popper, allowed him to recognise the socially intervening factors in creation as a fundamental part of contemporary artistic thought. His skills and new interactions led him to focus his research on the experiences of visual perception, which Ravelo defines as the fragmentation of light and colour. The artist has an extensive and diverse career with more than 70 years of national and international research and production. On a two-dimensional level, his proposal focuses on the decomposition of light through optical illusions taking place in real-time through the interrelation between colour and visual appearances. The artworks in the Venezuela Pavilion are installations conceived and designed ad hoc. Each artwork integrates the fragmentation of light and participatory art through which the artist proposes the activation of urban space as a result of the community’s collaboration in the construction of the artwork; a concept born in 1975 in his hometown of Caripito. At the Biennale Arte 2024, a mural invites the visitors to create collectively an ongoing artwork using the colors of the Sustainable Development Goals.

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Juvenal presents a kinetic installation in the Main Hall offering an immersive, participatory, and sensory journey in which the visitor experiences, from the perception of space and time, the three-dimensional representation of the artwork. In the Minor Room, the artist uses new technologies to compare digital art with the concepts he developed between 1965 and 2024: the effect of double exposure; optical instability; fragmented light; the environment of colour activity; light and color in the new millennium. The exhibition is an encounter with the physical experience of light and colour through dynamic interactions that make art perceived not as a contemplative object but as a social and aesthetic event. Edgar Ernesto González

Participatory Experience. Juvenal Ravelo.

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Juvenal Ravelo, Participation Art, 2024. Acrylic painting on canvas, 240 × 960 cm. Courtesy Fundación Daniel Suárez Centro de Arte (CADS). © Juvenal Ravelo.

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Juvenal Ravelo, Chromatic activation environment, 2024. Automotive acrylic paint on aluminium with reflective elements, 3400 (linear) × 200 cm. Courtesy Fundación Daniel Suárez Centro de Arte (CADS). © Juvenal Ravelo.

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Republic of Zimbabwe

Commissioner Raphael Chikukwa, National Gallery of Zimbabwe Curator Fadzai Veronica Muchemwa Artists Komborerai Chapfika Sekai Machache Troy Makaza Victor Nyakauru Gillian Rosselli Moffat Takadiwa Assistant Curator F. Zvikomborero Mandangu With the Support of Government of the Republic of Zimbabwe Ministry of Sport, Recreation, Arts and Culture

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The Zimbabwe Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia harnesses the concept of kududunuka. Kududunuka becomes an exploration of ideas of the unravelling of the world. The exhibition can be read as thinking about reimagining a potential future. It hearkens to being unfaithful to imposed ideas of time, geography, space, identity, nationhood, humanity, migration, and the suppleness of the ever-changing landscape of what we call home. We stand on the cusp of centuries-old impact of human action. This exhibition provides a space for reflection, building what does not exist yet and looking towards a new horizon. We hope to build constructs around invented cartography and pay homage to historical figures, fuel discussion and interrogate the state of the world, make historical information often lost or displaced physically present and present it in new thought-provoking ways, and rethink the global politics of aesthetics and epistemology. The six artists, Komborerai Chapfika, Sekai Machache, Troy Makaza, Victor Nyakauru, Gillian Rosselli and Moffat Takadiwa, elaborate an orientation capable of diagnosing, undoing and building ways of governing, living, and doing things differently.

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Gillian Rosselli, Heritage is a Pattern, 2024. 150 × 200 cm. Photo David Brazier.

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Venice Pavilion

Commissioner Maurizio Carlin Curator Giovanna Zabotti Artists Safet Zec Pietro Ruffo Vittorio Marella Franco Arminio Accademia di Belle Arti (Gaia Agostini Besnik Lushtaku) Artefici del Nostro Tempo Organisation Comune di Venezia, Direzione Sviluppo, Promozione della Città Tutela delle Tradizioni e del Verde Pubblico Fondaco Italia Main Partner BPER Banca La Galleria Corporate Collection Institutional Partners Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia Fondazione Teatro La Fenice Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia Iuav, Università Iuav di Venezia Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia ITS Academy Marco Polo Nonsoloverde Venezia Ve.La, gruppo AVM Venis Scientific Committee Marco Mastroianni Chiara Squarcina Elisabetta Barisoni Riccardo Caldura Valentina Galeotti Chiara Grandesso Alessandro Pedron Marco Tosato

BIENNALE ARTE

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We are in need of a place: it calls for a hand, a house, a smile, something we can make into a perimeter. —F. Arminio The Venice Pavilion aims to be an exploration of a condition not geographical, not of language, not social but affective, of a search for self and its emotional and sentimental completeness. Being at home is undoubtedly a feeling, but often, in the common imagination, uniquely linked to a place or different places where you feel free to be yourself. The home is the moral event par excellence. Before being an architectural artifact, according to the philosopher Emanuele Coccia it is a psychic artifact, which makes us live better than nature would allow. It is the effort to adapt ourselves to our surroundings and vice versa, a form of mutual domestication between things and people. It is the extension of what we begin to do when we are born: to build intimacy with what is next to us. That is why it coincides with the self and shows us that to be able to say “I” we need others. The project tackles this dynamic in an intimate way by choosing the languages of poetry and painting in which visitors can immerse themselves: as in real life, every detail has its own reason. Entering the exhibition space means penetrating the roots of one’s own nature, to seek an awareness of what cannot represent “home” because it is distant and foreign.

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Home Sextant is, therefore, a tool for research through history and our own self, nature and love, among the works of Pietro Ruffo, Safet Zec, Vittorio Marella, the young artists of the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice, with a particular observatory thanks to the “departing artists” guests of the pavilion through the competition Artefici del Nostro Tempo (Creators of Our Time) and the work of Koen Vanmechelen located outside. Home Sextant is meant to be a counterpoint of view. Art, that rebuilds time and space, leads us to find the fixed point in our “Home Sextant”: working with feeling, treating something with love transforms it into “home”, whatever it may be. Giovanna Zabotti

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Vittorio Marella, studio per Il ritrovamento, Under the weight of a heavy sun series, 2023-2024. Mixed media on paper, 19 × 27 cm. © Vittorio Marella.

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Collateral

Events

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Although Yoo Youngkuk was initially drawn to the fundamental concepts of abstract art from Europe through Japan, he ultimately tried to find his own unique approach. Above all, he drew from his personal experience to develop his own notion of the “order of nature”, which was rooted in the Korean perspective of the natural world. He was particularly inspired by the landscapes of his hometown of Uljin, with its towering mountains and deep sea. Yoo Youngkuk viewed nature not as a potential conquest, but as a mysterious and ineffable source of sublimity. This distinctly Eastern attitude is especially evident in his works from the 1960s and 1970s, which are featured in this exhibition, which showcase his unparalleled ability to capture the ever-changing beauty of the quintessential “mountain” through various pictorial languages. This is the first special exhibition outside of Korea to present a comprehensive collection of Yoo Youngkuk’s paintings from his peak period, accompanied by a wealth of archival materials that reveal his thoughts and personal life.

Curator Inhye Kim Artist Yoo Youngkuk Coordinators Myeong-jee Kim Soohyun Park Rebecca Riegelhaupt Media Support Brunswick Group Exhibition Design Jiyo Architects Graphic Design Byul.org

Yoo Youngkuk Art Foundation

Yoo Youngkuk (1916–2002) was born in the village of Uljin in 1916, while Korea was under Japanese colonial rule. After leaving his high school in Seoul, due to a conflict with a Japanese teacher’s unfair treatment, he went to Tokyo and studied art at Bunka Gakuin University. Bunka Gakuin University generally welcomed foreign students from Korea and other areas colonised by Japan, and cultivated an education system that encouraged free and diverse forms of artistic expression. During his student days, Yoo Youngkuk was strongly influenced by the works of Piet Mondrian, and became actively involved with various Japanese artists and art groups. In this environment, Yoo became one of the first Korean artists to explore abstract art. After experiencing the First World War, Mondrian came to believe that all of the narratives and romanticism that humans created for themselves led only to war and chaos. Therefore, he felt that art should abandon all such narratives, and instead express the order of nature through pure formal principles. Sympathizing with Mondrian’s radical ideas, Yoo Youngkuk said, “Abstraction was good because it had no words.”

Documentary Film image Joom Equipment Support LG Electronics

Inhye Kim

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A Journey to the Infinite: Yoo Youngkuk

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Trevor Yeung, Night Mushroom Colon (Five), 2020. Night lamp, plug adaptors, 14 × 15 × 13 cm. Courtesy the Artist and Blindspot Gallery.

Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser, A World of Many Worlds, 2018 A World of Many Worlds responds to the theme Foreigners Everywhere, to consider what it means to acknowledge the existence of multiple worlds rather than just multiple subjects, and what it might mean to put them in relation. The conversation asks us to acknowledge a multiplicity of social geographies, political positions, cosmologies, aesthetic perspectives, and temporal locations, while seeing them not as incommensurable, not as universal, but as pluriversal. By doing so, we reject false notions of universalism that centre the West and merely include other narratives, politics, and modes of expression. The flowing streams of our voices are instead multiple, connecting geographies and articulating new intra-related modes of being and knowing.

These flows issue from and through Asias. Not an Asia spectacularised for global consumption, but an introspective constellation of global Asias that looks deeply at its difficult histories of colonisation, genocide, environmental devastation, displacement, diaspora, dispossession, and war, and seeks to imagine new worlds into being through a multiplicity of positions, connections, diasporas, and solidarities. Through an engaging programme of presentations, panel conversations, activations, and screenings, A World of Many Worlds proffers a portal into different temporalities, allowing a glimpse into a hopeful transformation, surprise, and joyful encounters.

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Curators Annie Jael Kwan Michèle Ruo Yi Landolt Hammad Nasar John Tain Ming Tiampo Nick Yu Artists Isaac Chong Wai Sandra Gamarra Heshiki Lap-See Lam Subash Thebe Limbu Vidha Saumya Joshua Serafin Yao Qingmei Trevor Yeung With the Support of Asymmetry Art Foundation Bagri Foundation

Asia Forum & Asymmetry Art Foundation

Many words are walked in the world. Many worlds are made. Many worlds make us. […] In the world of the powerful there is room only for the big and their helpers. In the world we want, everybody fits. The world we want is a world in which many worlds fit. “Fourth Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle”

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A World of Many Worlds

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Wong Weng Cheong, Wandering in Wilderness #2, 2024. Print on paper, 42 × 52 cm. Courtesy the Artist.

Wong constructs a landscape of the mind that alludes to the proliferating psychic, physical and existential displacements of our time. At the same time his work is attuned to the implications of the title of the 60th Venice Biennale: “Foreigners Everywhere”. Above Zobeide locates itself amid the ubiquitous “inclusive exclusions” (in Giorgio Agamben’s phrase) faced by the subject of mass migration both within and across borders, territories and cultures. In Above Zobeide, the virtual and the actual coexist without any clear border, the native and the outsider at once demarcated and indiscernible. As such, the location “Above Zobeide” constitutes what Roland Barthes theorised as an atopia: a site that cannot be described, classified or compared — somewhere completely Other. In a journey of self-exploration and self-projection whose dimensions and scope continue to evolve, the artist has been creating this series of works since 2018. Above Zobeide carries this work further into self-analysis. Wong digs up his familiar habitat, poring over and re-framing it from an impersonal perspective. Through a process of deconstruction, the self is othered. Like everyone else, the artist himself becomes a foreigner in his fictional world.

Curator Chang Chan Artist Wong Weng Cheong

Coordinator in Venice Carlotta Scarpa, PDG Arte Communications

Macao Museum of Art

Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities relates the story of Zobeide and its founding. Men of various nations each dream an identical dream of a naked woman running through an unknown city. Pursuing but losing the woman, when they wake up they search for the city but cannot find it again. Together they resolve to re-build the city, altering their respective pursuits of the woman so that next time she will not elude them. Zobeide, like so many places established through processes of colonisation and globalisation, is a city of desire. Growing up in Macao, a city developed by waves of “foreigners” from various nations, Wong Weng Cheong constructs a kind of weird pastoral analogue to Calvino’s dream urbanism in his art. Wild and domesticated at once, the sole inhabitants of his landscapes are mutant herbivores with freakishly elongated legs that keep their bodies away from the grassland, their sole food source. Their dysfunctional bodies strive skyward like a living contradiction. Traces of human activity can be seen everywhere in the landscape, indicating the tight bond between civilisation and mutation.

Commissioner Paolo De Grandis Graphic Design Steven Wu With the Technical Support Lu Shixiao Ieong Ngai Ian Celestino Maria MG Cordova Leong Chi Ian

Chang Chan

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Above Zobeide, Exhibition from Macao, China

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Dread Scott, All African People’s Consulate, 2024, detail of passport interior. Participatory installation, dimensions variable. Courtesy the Artist and Cristin Tierney Gallery, New York.

Dread Scott, All African People’s Consulate, 2024, detail of participant with passport. Participatory installation, dimensions variable. Courtesy the Artist and Cristin Tierney Gallery, New York.

The All African People’s Consulate is a conceptual artwork by Dread Scott. It is a functioning consulate for an imaginary Pan-African, Afrofuturist union of countries, promoting cultural and diplomatic relations. In the Consulate, visitors can apply for an All African People’s Community passport or visa. They will have an interview with Consulate staff, where they will discuss their relationship to Africa, their family history of migration, and more. For those of African descent, the Consulate facilitates their citizenship in this futurist, globalist community, presenting them with a personalized passport. Others receive a visa allowing them to visit. The premise of the Consulate is the opposite of most existing immigration choke-points; while those often function to constrain admittance and movement, this Consulate facilitates ways to let you in. In a convivial setting, you are invited to stay, converse, and interact in organic, spontaneous ways.

By creating the All African People’s Consulate, Scott engages in an act of inversion. American and European media feeds are replete with images of Black people impacted by violence, in desperate migrations across hot, dry places, or in frequently disastrous situations aboard overcrowded, leaking rafts. But the Consulate offers a riposte to these views of the continent and its peoples. What if, instead of being seen as a place to escape from, there was an African community of nations which was a magnet, a refuge from colonialism and oppression, a destination for immigration and visitation? The Consulate fulfills this vision long hoped for by freedom fighters and activists: a free state for “Africans”, truly independent and democratic. Visionary Afrofuturist and musician Sun Ra famously proposed that “space is the place”—the locus for free Black people of the diaspora to reconvene. But what if we didn’t have to go that far? What if Africa was that place? What if it always has been?

Curator Paul Bright, Hanes Art Gallery, Wake Forest University Artist Dread Scott With the Support of Wake Forest University Cristin Tierney Gallery Ford Foundation Mellon Foundation

The Africa Center and Open Society Foundations

“Creating a consulate in the midst of this important art exhibition inverts the logic where African movement is controlled and restricted. This project will create community among people coming to Venice, especially if they’re Black. If they’re African or of African descent, this is going to be like a welcoming and a gathering. It will be fun, it will be cool and it will be a place to think about the present and the future.” Dread Scott

Paul Bright

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Andrzej Wróblewski, Wedding Photograph (Married Couple with a Bouquet), 1949. Oil on canvas, 119 × 69 cm. On the reverse: (Abstraction), [Geometric Abstraction], undated [1948]. Starak Collection. Courtesy Andrzej Wróblewski Foundation / www.andrzejwroblewski.pl. © Andrzej Wróblewski Foundation.

The exhibition In the First Person tells the story of art in times of captivity, of being on the leash and hobbled by orders. It is a dialogue with contemporaries on the price and consequences of one’s choices. It is a lesson of art suspended between abstraction and figuration. It is a story of an outsider, an outlaw, who aimed for unrestricted creative freedom. It is a young artist’s post-mortem cry for courage, intransigence and social responsibility. It shall be the second presentation of Andrzej Wróblewski’s work in Venice. The first was the collective exhibition Mostra di pittura polacca contemporanea in the Sale Napoleoniche (now part of Museo Correr) in 1959 curated by the eminent Polish art historian and curator Ryszard Stanisławski (1921–2000) and the Venetian art historian and critic Guido Perocco (1916–1997).

Curator Ania Muszyńska Artist Andrzej Wróblewski Team Magda MarczakCerońska Kama Kieremkampt The exhibition presents works from the collection of Anna and Jerzy Starak, other private collections and the collections of Polish national museums.

Starak Family Foundation

Andrzej Wróblewski was one of the most important Polish painters of the second half of the twentieth century; he was born in 1927 and died prematurely before he turned 30. His personal experience included the extreme hardships of war, the death of loved ones, brutality, extermination of the excluded, as well as the postwar conflagration, displacement and a sense of loss. Persistently wandering on the border of life and art, Wróblewski certainly escapes easy definitions and categories. His work, though historically complete, remains timely and, generation after generation, many young artists have become his heirs. They see in him not just a classic, but a genuine and symbolic patron. Andrzej Wróblewski represented modern painting of realistic descent, whose new formula easily carried the burden of the abstract and ambiguous content, while its form never failed to respect the achievements of the avant-garde. He left behind a courageous, revolutionary and bold legacy, including undeniable monuments of Polish contemporary art represented by series such as “Executions”, “Chauffeurs”, “Queues”, “Chairings”, “Tombstones”. Andrzej Wajda (1926–2016), the eminent Polish film director and Wróblewski’s friend considered him the most outstanding artist of their generation and frequently paid tribute to Wróblewski’s genius in his films.

Ania Muszyńska

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Andrzej Wróblewski (1927–1957). In the First Person

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Berlinde De Bruyckere, Arcangelo II (San Giorgio), 2023–24, work in progress, 2024. Wax, animal hair, silicone, iron, epoxy, 251 × 82 × 105 cm. Photo Mirjam Devriendt. Courtesy the Artist and Hauser & Wirth. © Berlinde De Bruyckere

In the Sacristy De Bruyckere displays an installation of metal welding tables with tree trunks cast in wax on and around them. The installation conveys a post-apocalyptic scenario in which fragments of dead nature undergo further congelation, while opening up a redemptive horizon of rejuvenation and rebirth, lending the situation with a potential of growth. Interfacing with the woodwork of the Sacristy, the tree installation provides an adventurous, precarious environment to the painting on the altar by Giuseppe Porta (called il Salviati) of Mary and Joseph presenting Jesus at the temple in Jerusalem. A third group of sculptures derives from the exceptional carvings of the sixteenth-century woodcarver Albert van den Brulle who decorated the Basilica’s Choir with walnut bas-reliefs portraying the life of Saint Benedict. In the hallway of the Monastery’s Gallery, De Bruyckere has mounted a sequence of wall-vitrines in which motifs from the Choir’s bas-reliefs are being processed, concurrently revived and fossilized.

Curators Carmelo A. Grasso Ory Dessau Peter Buggenhout Artist Berlinde De Bruyckere With the Support of Hauser & Wirth

Abbazia di San Giorgio Maggiore - Benedicti Claustra Onlus

City of Refuge III has been specifically conceived for the sacred spaces of the Abbey of San Giorgio Maggiore, responding to their architectural givens, function, symbolism and history. Taking its title from a Nick Cave song of the same name, City of Refuge III is the third in a series of exhibitions thematising art as a place of sanctuary and shelter, reinforced here by the venue’s spiritual intensity. Oscillating between transcendence and material immanence, the exhibition is based on three new groups of works joined by a selection of recent works in the Monastery’s gallery halls. The first group of works occupying the Basilica highlights the archetype of the archangel appearing as a veiled hybrid figure juxtaposing the human with the divine and the creatural, the earthly with the celestial, and the temporal with the eternal. It consists of four new Arcangeli, each of them emerging within a modular sculptural cluster composed of an irregular, tall pillar-like pedestal with a silver patina, a tilted mirrored screen multiplying the figure of the archangel and the surroundings, and a monumental banner deepening the ritualistic aspect of the setting and the works.

Ory Dessau

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Berlinde De Bruyckere: City of Refuge III

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Carlos Casas makes films, installations and sound environments that pay attention to places and communities that exist in symbiotic modes, portraying the relationship between beings and spaces. With Bestiari, he proposes dreaming as a form of interspecies communication, enhancing the need to attend to multiple perspectives, senses and agencies. Bestiari is a project about where to find hope today, observing the communalities of the present with the past, exploring the role of the unconscious in ecology and proposing ways to connect with other lives and ways of living. Filipa Ramos

Curator Filipa Ramos Artist Carlos Casas Image Carlos Casas

Institut Ramon Llull

Inspired by a medieval text in which speaking animals demand interspecies justice, Bestiari is a hypnagogic environment inhabited by sounds and images of creatures from natural and imagined Catalan landscapes. Making reference to early natural history compendiums, in which all sorts of animals were described, Carlos Casas’s installation Bestiari departs from the medieval text Disputa de l’ase [The Dispute of the Donkey], written in 1417 by Anselm Turmeda, one of the founders of Catalan literature. Disputa de l’ase tells the story of a man who wakes from a dream understanding what animals say. He faces a trial, led by the animals’ spokesperson, a long-tailed donkey, who questions him on humankind’s superiority over other beings. Through nineteen arguments, the donkey challenges anthropocentrism on matters such as spatial orientation, kinship and political organisation. Turmeda’s pioneering environmental consciousness places him at the forefront of the advocacy for the rights of nature. His accounts also expand the concept of the foreigner from an anthropocentric perspective to the recognition of the entanglement between humans and other beings. Bestiari pays tribute to the animals of the medieval text by featuring dreamlike sounds and images of bats, bees, dolphins, donkeys, elephants and other creatures, recorded in their natural habitats. Featuring Ambisonics 3D infrasound spatialization, Bestiari presents frequencies that are beyond the human sensory realm, inducing a sense of physical closeness with these animals and landscapes and propitiating sensorial modes of interspecies discovery. A large film installation, derived from each species’ spectrum of vision, creates hypnotic encounters with the various animals and environments, further dissolving the relationship between reality and dream.

Sound Chris Watson Carlos Casas Audio Engineering and Spatialization Tony Myatt Sound Mixing Armand Leseq Marc Parazon Voice and Special Guest Marina Herlop Exhibition Production Marta Millet Agustí Public Programs Curator Pol Capdevila Visual Identity Design Phantasia Collaborators àngels barcelona Barcelona Provincial Council, Department of Natural Spaces and Green Infrastructure Batalha Centro de Cinema, Porto; Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Department of Linguistics and Comparative Cultural Studies; Department of Climate Action, Food and Rural Agenda, Government of Catalonia; University of Surrey Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP); Institute Art Gender Nature – HGK FHNW, Basel IUAV Arti Visive, SSH! Sound Studies Hub, Venice; Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona The Institut Ramon Llull is a consortium formed by the Government of Catalonia, the Government of the Balearic Islands, Barcelona City Council and Palma City Council.

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Catalonia in Venice | Bestiari | Carlos Casas

204 Madhvi Parekh, Karishma Swali and Chanakya School of Craft, Devi and Asura, 2023. Organic jute, cotton, linen and raw silk thread on cotton textile, 292 × 378 cm. Photo Abner Fernandes. Courtesy Chanakya Foundation.

Manu Parekh, Karishma Swali and Chanakya School of Craft, Temple of Goddess, 2023. Organic jute, cotton, linen and raw silk thread on cotton textile, 282 × 412 cm. Photo Abner Fernandes. Courtesy Chanakya Foundation.

BIENNALE ARTE

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Just as both artists celebrate Indian ancestral traditions and myths, where the spiritual dimension serves as a potent imaginative and creative device, the interdisciplinary works created by Karishma Swali and the Chanakya School of Craft go beyond traditional boundaries, shaping a new artistic language firmly rooted in collective cultural histories. These new works are brought to life through meticulous needlework embroidery and handcrafting techniques, utilising organic materials like raw linen, jute, silk, and cotton to capture the purity of their aligned vision. The series of three-dimensional works visually embody a true artistic statement affirming a multidisciplinary approach dedicated to dismantling hierarchies between the arts, roles, and genres. By redefining the roles of both artists and artisans, a new language emerges, celebrating the vital role of communities in preserving their material culture and highlighting women’s transformative energy, giving rise to innovative forms from pre-existing foundations.

Curators Maria Alicata Paola Ugolini Artists Madhvi Parekh Manu Parekh Karishma Swali Chanakya School of Craft

Chanakya Foundation

Cosmic Garden emerges from an ongoing fertile exchange between Indian artists Madhvi Parekh and Manu Parekh, Karishma Swali and the Chanakya School of Craft — a non-profit institution committed to the preservation of global artisanal legacies and highlighting the role of craft in enabling self-expression and building communities. The exhibition honours the pluralistic beauty of India’s cultural heritage, featuring paintings and sculptures by Madhvi Parekh and Manu Parekh, and the evolution of their practice into a third interdisciplinary medium — hand-embroidery — presented across crafted works and sculptures by the Chanakya School of Craft and its creative director Karishma Swali. The project seeks to re-evaluate the mutual relationship between women and embroidery, transcending the confines of domesticity by bringing hand-embroidery into the public sphere. Madhvi Parekh’s paintings and sculptures draw inspiration from Indian female deities, emphasising power in the context of self-transformation. In contrast, Manu Parekh’s work, influenced by Indian cultural traditions, incorporates aspects of Western modernism and abstract expressionism.

Assistant Curator Giulia Mastropietro Exhibition Design Gerardo Cejas, InMovimento Design Graphics Elisa Calore Exhibition Production A Consulting Press & PR Pickles PR Technical Partner ILTI Luce (Part of Nemo Group) Special thank you to Delphine Arnault Maria Grazia Chiuri Olivier Bialobos and Rachele Regini at Dior

Maria Alicata Paola Ugolini

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Cosmic Garden

206 Dana Kavelina, It Cannot Be That Nothing That Can’t Be Returned, 2022. 3D animation, 52‘02”. Produced by PinchukArtCentre. Courtesy the Artist.

Allora & Calzadilla, Graft (Baobab), 2024. Recycled polyvinyl chloride and paint, dimensions variable. Coproduced by PinchukArtCentre. Courtesy the Artist.

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Curators Björn Geldhof Ksenia Malykh Oleksandra Pogrebnyak Artists Kateryna Aliinyk Allora & Calzadilla Alex Baczyński-Jenkins Fatma Bucak David Claerbout Shilpa Gupta Oleg Holosiy Nikita Kadan Zhanna Kadyrova, Dana Kavelina Nikolay Karabinovych Lesia Khomenko Yana Kononova Kateryna Lysovenko Otobong Nkanga Wilfredo Prieto Oleksiy Sai Anton Saenko Fedir Tetianych Anna Zvyagintseva Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk Daniil Revkovskiy and Andriy Rachinskiy

Victor Pinchuk Foundation

The world has reached an inflection point. Storms and climate change ravage lands far and wide. Political extremes are seizing their growing momentum. Russia’s war in Ukraine unveiled an ongoing global power struggle that has brought war back to Europe. We are at a crucial moment where the future is hidden while fundamental changes are on the horizon. What changes will come? Can we imagine tomorrow in a time of existential uncertainty? Do we have the courage to dream? This exhibition weaves a tapestry of stories and dreams gathered from all over. Ukraine is its point of departure and it is organised by a Ukrainian institution, but the exhibition transcends the country’s own struggle and links with others, addressing earth’s ecological disaster while imagining a new utopia. Exhausted landscapes bear witness to human violence — from extractive economies to the harsh realities of war — while carrying seeds of a new beginning. Subdued voices become songs of resistance and resilience. Can many struggles become the joint creation of a better future? After liberation, can former victims co-exist with former aggressors? Can empathy offer ways of common being in a space of conflicting memories?

Assistant Curator Oksana Chornobrova Commissioned by Victor Pinchuk Foundation With the Support of PinchukArtCentre

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Daring to Dream in a World of Constant Fear

Awilda Sterling-Duprey, Blindfolded Performance, 2022. Oil sticks on canvas, variable dimensions. 2022 Whitney Biennial. Courtesy the Artist.

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At the heart of the exhibition stands Celso González’ monumental Yola sculpture, San Juan Bautista, a powerful symbol of Puerto Rico’s enduring spirit. This site-specific installation challenges the constraints of its political status, while honouring the island’s rich maritime heritage. Desde San Juan Bautista… is not merely an exhibition, but a new testament to the enduring spirit of Puerto Rican visual artistry. Consolato invites audiences to engage with the complexities of Puerto Rican identity and the ongoing struggle for cultural sovereignty.

Curators Anabelle RodríguezGonzález Chiara Boscolo REM - Roberto Escobar Molina Artists Awilda Sterling-Duprey Celso González Chemi Rosado-Seijo Daniel Lind-Ramos

Consolato REM Brega

Desde San Juan Bautista... is a group exhibition that presents new and recent actions, artworks, documentary and archival materials, photographs, ephemera, interventions, and performances by four renowned interdisciplinary exhibitors from Puerto Rico: Awilda Sterling-Duprey, Celso González, Chemi Rosado-Seijo, and Daniel Lind-Ramos. The four have travelled extensively throughout the world, establishing themselves in a variety of artistic worlds spanning broad international trajectories. The title of the exhibition is a direct reference to the first name given to the island during more than half a millennium of colonisation characterised by diverse and continuous manifestations of violent forms of extraction. The first wave occurred with the arrival of the Spaniards, who embarked on what was to become the genocidal saga of La Conquista del Nuevo Mundo. After the Spanish-American War of 1898 the island became a colonial territory of the United States along with the Philippines and Guam. This is the first time in the history of La Biennale di Venezia that a group of Puerto Rican exhibitors and curators present a collective proposal to represent the island-nation of Puerto Rico. The collateral event allows for diverse interdisciplinary contributions by the selected exhibitors. The exhibition reflects the dissociation and exploitation of a colonial political system that has attempted to unravel the fraught complexities of contemporary Puerto Rican identities. The estrangement that is inherent to the colonial status is an extended act of violence resulting in a psychic malaise because of what Anibal Quijano has so aptly described and defined as “the coloniality of power”.

Collaborators 10 & Zero Uno Gallery The ~curARTorial LAB Fundación Cultural García (FunCuGar) REM Project Architect MilleEventi Technical Installation Arken Design + Build Event Production SIEMPRE Media and Communications Medi@ Presse Swiss Louvier Art With the Support of Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico Tristan Schukraft REM Project Latitude 18 Films, Santos Rivera Montero Armando Muñoz, MD Luis Cotto Román, Esq. Ricardo J. GarciaNegron, Esq. REM Art Advisory MASTERS Puerto Rico

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Desde San Juan Bautista...

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Elias Sime, THE EARTH (ምድር) III, 2023–24. Braided electrical wires and electronic components on panel, 185.4 × 280.7 × 26.7 cm. Courtesy the Artist and James Cohan, New York. © the Artist and James Cohan, New York.

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Elias Sime, Tightrope: It is Green 8, 2023. Electrical wires on panels, 251.5 × 318.8 × 8.9 cm. Courtesy the Artist and James Cohan, New York. © the Artist and James Cohan, New York.

And yet their source of power hidden inside includes precious metals such as copper, silver, and cobalt extracted from the earth under punishing conditions. Due to their geological scarcity and the associated geopolitics, the use of these materials raises serious ethical and ecological concerns. DICHOTOMY speaks to humanity’s desires and confusions as they relate to the tenuous lines between private and public, fast and slow, precious and plentiful.

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Curators Meskerem Assegued Felicity Korn Artist Elias Sime Production D.H. Office

Kunstpalast Düsseldorf

For Elias Sime, art is a boundless creative process where time and space blur. “I believe I was born an artist”, he says, “but I practice to be perfect. I love sharing my observations, fascinations, and fears using specific materials I collect. Like oil paint, acrylic or watercolour, my chosen materials speak to our modern condition.” Born in Addis Ababa, the diplomatic capital and one of the most rapidly developing cities in Africa, Sime was exposed to people from all over the world from an early age. A keen observer, he has been intrigued by the dichotomous nature of the human psyche. DICHOTOMY addresses humanity’s private and public dualities. Sime is deeply attuned to the complexity of private feelings and public expressions. Using materials that are the backbone of all digital communication, Sime meticulously crafts dimensional meditations that encourage sustained contemplation in a fast-paced world. Sime believes that we trust that our secrets and fragilities are protected in private, while in public we exhibit constructed identities. The elegant smartphone which Sime calls “The Machine” has become a central part of our lives. It also functions as a status symbol with which we broadcast our socio-economic success to the world around us.

With the Support of The Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation Daniel & Rosy Levy Marguerite Steed Hoffman James Cohan Gallery

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Elias Sime: Dichotomy ፊት አና jerba

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Ernest Pignon-Ernest, Pasolini assassiné – Si je reviens. Roma, 2015. Photo courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co. © Ernest Pignon-Ernest/Adagp, Paris 2024.

These portraits are accompanied in the exhibition by those of Jacques Stephen Alexis, Antonin Artaud, Gérard de Nerval, Robert Desnos, Jean Genet, Édouard Glissant, Pablo Neruda and Arthur Rimbaud. In his early career, Pignon-Ernest’s artistic approach was unique in the art world. His Paris studio remains in La Ruche, the artists’ residency founded in 1904 to welcome foreign artists from around the world, including Akhmatova herself in 1910–11. Pignon-Ernest’s creations resonate from the Western sphere to the Global South. His oeuvre has attracted the interest of artists ranging from Francis Bacon — who began compiling a file on the artist’s work in 1976, to Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Barthélémy Toguo, who has introduced his oeuvre throughout Africa through exhibitions organised by his foundation. JR, French photographer and street artist, considers Pignon-Ernest as “[his] inspiration.” In France, Pignon-Ernest is the first to have appropriated city walls as canvases, mixing drawing and photography thirty years before street art began its rise.

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Curators Suzanne Pagé Hans Ulrich Obrist Artist Ernest Pignon-Ernest

Fondation Louis Vuitton

The notion of “the foreigner” has been an important element in Ernest Pignon-Ernest’s work since the 1960s. From Naples to Rome, Soweto to Haiti, Paris to Algiers — his artistic interventions on city walls spotlight and transform the tensions and dramas of the places he selects to express his vision. Two works, specifically created for the Biennale Arte, stand at the exhibition entrance and celebrate two major figures of universal poetry driven by strongly emotional writing and unwavering commitment. The first is a portrait of the Russian Anna Akhmatova, who was born in Odessa in 1889 and died in Moscow in 1966 after a tragic life of censorship and stalking by the Soviet regime; the second is that of Forough Farrokhzad, who was born in Tehran in 1935 and died in the same city in 1967, a key figure in the rebirth of Persian poetry, whose free-spirited behaviour and depth of thought are still fully vital and resonant today. Pignon-Ernest executed new portraits of these two poets, working as “presences” in the Espace Louis Vuitton Venezia much like they would have in the street. Central to the display is the image of Pier Paolo Pasolini, created by Pignon-Ernest, carrying his own corpse like a pietà, as a stranger to himself — an image that has appeared in Rome, Matera and Naples to resonate with the work, life and death of this leading Italian figure.

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Ernest Pignon-Ernest: Je Est Un Autre

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Ewa Juszkiewicz, Untitled (after Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun), 2020. Oil on canvas, 160 × 120 cm. Collection Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso. Courtesy the Artist and Almine Rech.

In her versions of old portraits, Juszkiewicz cultivates a traditional pictorial craft, painting in layers, with many glazes, following the brushstrokes of the original work. But her technical virtuosity would be useless were it not at the service of a transgressive project. By covering the face of historical portraits, Juszkiewicz challenges the very essence of this genre: she destroys the portrait as such. Her paintings are no longer portraits of anyone in particular, but representations of the condition of women under patriarchy. And, as she points out, at the heart of the altered portrait she drives the stake of another genre: the still life, to which belong the fabrics, flowers, fruits, and other objects the artist uses as masks, subverting the traditional hierarchy of genres and the culture/nature dichotomy.

COLLATERAL EVENTS

Curator Guillermo Solana, artistic director at Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid Artist Ewa Juszkiewicz With the Support of Almine Rech

Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso

For more than a decade, Ewa Juszkiewicz has created paintings based on portraits of women by European artists, especially those from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In 2010, Juszkiewicz painted a series of masked characters in which the markedly feminine clothing contrasted with the violence suggested by the mask. The pro-faciality mask hid one face while proposing another, symbolic or fantastic, animal or supernatural. The anti-faciality mask, meanwhile, hides the first face and prevents the appearance of a second one, blocking the reproduction of faciality. By 2013–2014, the dominance of the anti-faciality mask was consolidated in Juszkiewicz’s work. Any object capable of replacing a head or any material capable of enveloping it would be used: hypertrophied mushrooms, a bouquet of flowers, a tangle of branches and leaves, a combed or braided head of hair, a bandage made of luxurious fabrics... When these objects and materials appear in the place of the face, the viewer looks for signs of an eye, nose, mouth, for signs of a facial outline; sometimes, but for an instant, they may think they have found them, but their reading is immediately frustrated. The anti-faciality mask actively resists our desire to decipher a face in it.

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Ewa Juszkiewicz: Locks With Leaves And Swelling Buds

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Jim Dine, Venice Cry, the poems, 2024. Acrylic on polymer resin with copper tubing, 220 × 200 × 100 cm. Courtesy Galerie Templon. © Jim Dine Studio.

Curator Gerhard Steidl Artist Jim Dine With the Support of TEMPLON

COLLATERAL EVENTS

Kunsthaus Göttingen

Jim Dine is an exceptional artist who works across a seemingly boundless range of media—painting, printing (etching, lithography, linocuts, serigraphy and more), drawing, sculpture, photography, poetry, performance art and bookmaking. Unlike artists who focus on a single medium, Dine, since his first works made while still at high school, has – over the course of seven decades – explored and respectfully disrespected materials and processes. He takes this approach to a new intensity in his exhibition Dog on the Forge at the Palazzo Rocca. Here Dine re-invents some of his most beloved motifs, including Pinocchio, antique sculpture, hearts and tools, all in eclectic combinations of media such as painted bronze and collage on canvas. The results, vibrating with restless, sometimes frenzied energy, are a transcendent leap into the unpredictable future of Dine’s never-ceasing creativity.

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Jim Dine – Dog on the Forge

218 Josèfa Ntjam, swell of spaec(i)es, 2024. Film render, commissioned by LAS Art Foundation. Courtesy the Artist; LAS Art Foundation; Galerie Poggi, Paris; Nicoletti, London. © ADAGP, Paris, 2024.

Josèfa Ntjam, swell of spaec(i)es, 2024. Film render, commissioned by LAS Art Foundation. Courtesy the Artist; LAS Art Foundation; Galerie Poggi, Paris; Nicoletti, London. © ADAGP, Paris, 2024. BIENNALE ARTE

2024

swell of spæc(i)es unfolds a new creation myth shaped by ancient and emergent ways of conceiving the world(s). Within this imaginary, plankton is a point of convergence between the deep ocean and outer space, biological and mythical realms, possible pasts and alternative futures. Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation and housed in a purpose-built pavilion designed by UNA / UNLESS architecture studio at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia, Josèfa Ntjam’s installation takes the form of an otherworldly environment. The cosmic landscapes of a cyclical film are enriched by a soundscape composed by Fatima Al Qadiri. Suspended jellyfish sound showers made from bio-sourced materials emanate fragments of narration, while a membrane-like layer emerges from the ground, diffusing electroacoustic frequencies and offering a resting space. Shaping a poetics of alterity, the installation spans multiple cosmo-geographies and epistemologies, merging perspectives and knowledge systems.

The film fuses Dogon cosmogony and recent scientific observations into a circular narrative of creation, transformation and resurgence. It features a cast of interspecies characters synthesised using AI and digital tools from various sources including 3D models of marine life, images of West African statues held in Westerns collections, and photographs witnessing decolonial independence movements. These avatars embed histories and memories subject to hegemonic erasure within marine and cosmic landscapes, reflecting influence from Drexciya, whose mythology tells of an underwater population born from the wrecks of the Atlantic human trade, and Sun Ra, who envisioned Saturn as a host planet for Afro-diasporic people. In a satellite space at Palazzina Canonica – CNR ISMAR (Istituto di Scienze Marine), Ntjam asks audiences to join her process of multiplying avatars of these histories to expand her mythology by creating their own AI-generated hybrid species. The resulting creatures inhabit a virtual ecosystems inside the belly of the astral snake seen in the film, simulated on site on an LED screen. swell of spæc(i)es is complemented by a public programme organised with Ocean Space, CNR ISMAR and Accademia di Belle Arti.

Curators Carly Whitefield with Sophie Korschildgen and Zoe Büchtemann Artist Josèfa Ntjam

LAS Art Foundation

“swell of spæc(i)es is an alchemical process in perpetual agitation, the alloying of ancestral geneses with new image creation technologies.” —Josèfa Ntjam

Artist Advisor and Writer Mawena Yehouessi Project Management Ghost House Film Production Aquatic Invasion Film Sound Composition Fatima Al Qadiri Sculpture Construction Förma Productions Sculpture Sound Hugo Mir-Valette LAS Art Foundation Directors Jan Fischer Bettina Kames Kristina Leipold Project Management Alexis Convento, Harriet Collins Pavilion and Exhibition Design UNA / UNLESS Production D.H. office Technical Production FAXstudio Mote Studio Lighting Design Studio Barthelmes Collaborators Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia CNR ISMAR (Istituto di Scienze Marine) Ocean Space

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Josèfa Ntjam: swell of spæc(i)es

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A Zimbabwean black granite monolith titled Meok (2024) invites contemplation, complemented by Issu du Feu (2004), which transforms charcoal into mosaic canvasses. Exiting the hall, Moon (2024), an ephemeral structure, leads to the Venetian waters. The glass ceiling lets the moonlight shine through, symbolically connecting with Cheongdo. In an era of complexity and estrangement from nature, La Maison de la Lune Brûlée delivers a powerful message of reconnection with nature’s rhythms, shared humanity, and folklore knowledge, through a synthesis of art and ritual.

Curator Valentina Buzzi Artist Lee Bae Exhibition Director Jaeho Jung Head of the Wilmotte Foundation Silvia Gravili Senior Curator of Museum SAN Nayoung Cho Artist Liaison Sun Kyung Jung Project & Logistics Coordination Hyung-Jung Suh Artist Assistants Seung Soo Back Ho In Kim Jeong Hwa Min Da An Han Gi Jin Park With the Support of Johyun Gallery Italian Cultural Institute in Seoul Korean Embassy in Italy Korean Cultural Institute in Italy Perrotin Esther Schipper Gallery City of Cheongdo The exhibition is part of the special programming of the Embassy of Korea in Italy, The Embassy of Italy in Korea, the Italian Cultural Institute in Seoul and the Korean Cultural Institute in Italy

Fondation d’Entreprise Wilmotte and Hansol Foundation of Culture

The exhibition La Maison de la Lune Brûlée, a solo presentation of Korean artist Lee Bae, pays homage to the century-old ceremony of the Daljip Teugi, an annual celebration taking place in Cheongdo, a rural village in the south-east of the Korean countryside, where the artist was born. Coinciding with the first full moon of the lunar calendar, all members of the community gather together to perform the Moonhouse Burning: wishes for the new year written on hanji paper are hung on a structure in stacked wood which is then set ablaze at the rising of the full moon. Once the fire is extinguished, the charcoal produced by the combustion is collected in small recipients and conserved as a conveyor of good luck. Profoundly influenced by the Daljip Teugi, over the last thirty years Lee Bae’s entire oeuvre has been based on two elements: the use of charcoal as a material, and the idea of circularity and repetition, profoundly bound to lunar cosmologies. These same characteristics sit at the core of the exhibition presented in the spaces of the Wilmotte Foundation. Engaging the global community into a shared ritual, messages of hope collected online are transcribed onto hanji paper for the Moonhouse Burning, taking place at the end of February, 2024 in Cheongdo. The recorded ceremony becomes the video-art piece Burning (2024), projected onto the Wilmotte Foundation’s entrance corridor walls. Inside the exhibition hall, whose walls and floor are covered in paper through a technique called marouflage, three Brushstrokes (2024) installations unfold, painted with charcoal from Moonhouse combustion.

Technical Partner Fabriano

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Lee Bae — La Maison de La Lune Brûlée

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Nam June Paik, Dolmen, 1995. Mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy Gwangju Biennale Foundation.

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

Kcho (Alexis Leyva Machado), Para olvidar (To Forget), 1995. A wooden boat and beer bottles, dimensions variable, installation view at the 1st Gwangju Biennale. Courtesy the Artist; Gwangju Biennale Foundation.

Madang: Where We Become Us, a special 30th-anniversary commemorative archival exhibition, reflects on the Gwangju Biennale’s history and envisions its future. This exhibition, comprised of archival materials, artwork from the Gwangju Biennale collection, an artifact from the 5·18 Democratic Uprising Archives, and the artwork of three artists – Ayoung Kim, Sojung Jun, and Sylbee Kim – does not merely seek to chronicle the Gwangju Biennale’s history; it proposes a perspective that contemplates the spirit of Gwangju, restating the contemporary value of the Gwangju Biennale. The exhibition title includes the Korean word madang, literally translating as “yard” in English; it signifies a core space in Korean. In traditional Korean residences, the yard serves as the “face” of the house, functioning as a space for communication, where significant and minor decisions are made within the village, and festivities are held—essentially serving as a place where people constantly come and go. The exhibition aims to showcase the Gwangju Biennale’s previous exhibitions through fourteen madang, each representing previous Biennales.

Considering that the yard is an outdoor space that simultaneously provides some level of protection to the home, it can be argued that the madang of the Gwangju Biennale unfolds as a field between these centrifugal and centripetal forces. Gwangju Biennale explores themes such as the climate crisis, race, gender, and democracy as it endeavours to transcend geographical boundaries and contemplate the era from a planetary perspective. Simultaneously, the discourse of community, an integral part from its inception, has sought multifariousness in various forms, ranging from Gwangju to the global community. Presented in this exhibition are Nam June Paik’s Dolmen (1995) and Kcho’s To Forget (1995), both from the Gwangju Biennale collection. These works contemplate the meaning of community. Paik’s Dolmen was created to honour the Gwangju community and the lives sacrificed in the May 18 Gwangju Democratisation Movement, while Kcho’s To Forget delves into the lives of refugees who escaped by boat from Cuba. Gwangju Biennale once again affirms the power of art as a madang, embodying diversity and inclusion.

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Curator Dusu Choi (Head of Exhibition Department) with Jaehee Kim, Jihyoun Han, Nahyun Kim, Sujin Jung, Yeoreum Lim Artists Nam June Paik Kcho (Alexis Leiva Machado) Ayoung Kim Sojung Jun Sylbee Kim

Gwangju Biennale Foundation

“Some memories never heal. Rather than fading with the passage of time, those memories become the only things that are left behind when all else is abraded.” —Han Kang, Human Acts , Portobello Books, Edinburgh, 2016.

Programme Curator Juri Cho, Chief of Exhibition Team President of the Gwangju Biennale Foundation Yang-woo Park With the Support of Gwangju Metropolitan City May 18 Democratic Uprising Archive

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Thandiwe Muriu, Camo 16, 2021. Photography Fine Art Baryta 325g, 90 × 70 cm. @ Thandiwe Muriu.

Passengers in Transit takes its title from a storybook by Angolan writer José Eduardo Agualusa. Disconnected stories with characters travelling through indifferent settings transport us from one place to another to discover the world. This restlessness of diverse latitudes, the nostalgia of the “leaving”, and the search for who we really are reflect on the strain of being foreign within a global society, and the subjective forces that amplify this feeling. At a time of challenges – increased discrimination, global warming, wars, and a moment when the individual is often more important than the collective – the concept of the foreigner brings forward political, ideological, and religious motivations. It opens up a broad spectrum of meaningful discussions about identity and belonging. How this concept is understood depends on who is speaking and from where – who is foreign in relation to whom? Who has the power to decide? Foreigner in relation to what? Alterity is beyond the self’s grasp. It’s a form of relationship that demands respect and acknowledgement of singularities. Identity eludes analysis. It is under construction, a constant process of becoming.

Yet this difficulty in grasping the strangeness of others opens up a space for understanding otherness. Inspired by Levinas and Waldenfels, and by Edouard Glissant’s right to opacity, the project Passengers in Transit invites us to reflect on the endless journey that leads us to who we are as social beings. The five selected artists’ interdisciplinary practices explore the convergence between identity, gender, memory, and place. Navigating between history and fiction, working from and within archives, the artists reflect upon the representation of black (female) bodies within the contemporary world and speculate on possible futures. Joana Choumali, April Bey, Thandiwe Muriu, Christa David, and Euridice Zaituna Kala propose a conversation around belonging and identity construction, and about accepting the complexities of cross-cultural existence as opposed to the normalisation and assimilation of cultural differences. The project reflects different perspectives and explores diverse ways of thinking about human subjectivity, language, and politics in dialogue with this Biennale’s theme of Foreigners Everywhere.

COLLATERAL EVENTS

Curators Paula Nascimento, Oyindamola Faithful Roger Niyigena Karera Artists April Bey Joana Choumali Thandiwe Muriu Christa David Euridice Zaituna Kala With the Main Support of 193 Gallery Venice & Paris With the Support of Dominique Louis Fondation H Myriam Venneschi Benoit Manuel Kenzah Baddou

CCA Lagos, (Centre For Contemporary Art)

“On the island of Mozambique, a foreigner tries to forget who he is to better be forgotten. Will (he) be able to escape the past?” —J.E.A.

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Karine N’guyen Van Tham, Larmes de guerre, 2021-2022. Linen, silk, vegetable dye (madder), pine cone flakes, Indian ink, paper, 110 × 80 cm. Collection of the Artist. Courtesy the Artist. © Karine N’guyen Van Tham.

Parul Thacker, The Book of the TimeTravellers of the Worlds: the Forms of Time: Earth and Sky. Stitched Drawing 03, 2023. Hand sewn double sided stitched drawing, cotton, polyester, silk, 100 × 80 cm. Collection of the Artist, Mumbay. Courtesy the Artist. © Parul Thacker.

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

In the delicately poetic, intimate and frugal work of French-Vietnamese artist Karine N’guyen Van Tham, one perceives her deep connection with Nature and the importance of writing, almost a weaving of words, for an understanding of her creations. The complex and multi-material structures by Indian artist Parul Thacker are inspired by the sculptures that adorn Indian temples, by Tantra cosmology, and by quantum physics. They reveal her deep spirituality and rootedness in her own culture. Both artists have conceived and realised site-specific works inspired by the Venetian context, and by the spaces and collections of the Palazzo.

COLLATERAL EVENTS

Curator Daniela Ferretti Artists Karine N’guyen Van Tham Parul Thacker General Secretary Béatrice de Reyniès Organisation Dario Dalla Lana Antonella Mazza Camilla Sironi Anna Mistrorigo

Fondazione dell’Albero d’Oro

Karine N’guyen Van Tham and Parul Thacker, two artists who differ in origin, training, sensitivity and expressive methods, confront the spaces of Palazzo Vendramin Grimani in San Polo. The main theme – but not the only one – is the notion of the thread, taken as a medium, as source of inspiration, a metaphor that alludes to the trace, to the ordering principle, to writing; and is a fundamental part of braiding, weaving, and the art of embroidery. The gaze widens from the detail to the general, and we become aware of how fabric accompanies the existence of the individual person, from ribbons to shrouds, and is able to influence the basic mechanisms of civil coexistence. As the theologian Vito Mancuso states, “thinking and operating by threads means thinking relationships and laying the grounds for relationships […], it means conceiving the world as a work in progress and acting within it in a way that increases harmony and rationality.” The two artists, who share the use of weaving as medium, along with an intense spirituality, develop visions that are apparently very different from each other but are able to establish an effective dialogue with unprecedented juxtapositions or unexpected assonances between archaic and contemporary, collective memory and private mythologies, local customs and international exchange. Cultural roots are transformed by travel, while cultures themselves are enriched by mutual exchange. This is a mechanism that seems to respond to immanent biological laws, just as it happens with the multiplicity and diversity of interactions between all living beings.

Exhibition Design Daniela Ferretti Graphic Design Sebastiano Girardi Studio With the Support of Fondation Etrillard

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

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Per non perdere il filo. Karine N’guyen Van Tham – Parul Thacker

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Peter Hujar, Self-Portrait Lying Down, 1975. Pigmented ink print, 55.8 × 40.64 cm. Courtesy The Peter Hujar Archive.

Peter Hujar, Susan Sontag, 1975. Pigmented ink print, 55.8 × 40.64 cm. Courtesy The Peter Hujar Archive.

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

This exhibition assembles all 41 of the photographs that Hujar included in the book Portraits in Life and Death, which was published in 1976. It was the only book of Hujar’s photographs that he produced during his lifetime. The exhibition combines two bodies of work. The first are portraits of famous cultural figures on the New York scene taken during the early 1970s, such as the critic Susan Sontag, the playwright Robert Wilson, the writer Fran Lebowitz, the filmmaker John Waters, and the artist Paul Thek. These images are interspersed with photographs that Hujar took of bodies inside the Capuchin catacombs of Palermo during a trip with Paul Thek in 1963. Hence, they are portraits “in life and death”.

COLLATERAL EVENTS

Curators Grace Deveney (David C. and Sarajean Ruttenberg Associate Curator, Photography and Media, Art Institute of Chicago) Artist Peter Hujar

Peter Hujar Foundation

Peter Hujar (1934–1987) is one of the most important American photographers of the twentieth century. He was a major figure in New York City’s avant-garde community during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, when he documented the artistic life of the city. His portraits depict many of the bestknown writers, artists, poets, performers and intellectuals of the era. Hujar’s work has often been compared to that of contemporaries Diane Arbus and Robert Mapplethorpe, yet it is distinguished by a poetic sensibility and an extraordinary sense of intimacy. Since his death from AIDS-related complications in 1987 at the age of 53, Hujar’s work has received widespread acclaim.

The exhibition is supported by Pace Gallery Fraenkel Gallery Mai 36 Galerie Maureen Paley

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

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Peter Hujar: Portraits in Life and Death

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

Ackroyd reflects on the site of Fondaco Marcello – originally designed to store and dry tobacco leaves – its open architecture and visceral relationship to water. She envisages an environment populated by child-like apparitions and feminine characters, engine wheels, body parts and charts. Labouring on the idea of familiarity – pursued through casting the same figures or body parts – ready-made objects and furniture are deconstructed and juxtaposed in new configurations, surrendering to the possibility of new meanings. Through reiteration, the work intertwines different temporalities, as something we have already lived, suspending our perception of the present into a soft, semi-hallucinatory experience. Creating a sensory reality that straddles the imagined real and symbolic, borrowing from the destabilising surreal visual language of dreams, viewers are invited to interpret the cues of the exhibition.

COLLATERAL EVENTS

Curator Attilia Fattori Franchini Artist Rebecca Ackroyd Production D.H. Office

Kestner Gesellschaft

Rebecca Ackroyd’s practice assembles painting and sculptural works into dreamlike fictional landscapes. Blending personal meditations with post-human fantasies, the work investigates the body, memory, femininity, sexuality and domesticity, which she interlaces together into layered references and recurring patterns and motifs. Conceived specifically for the spaces of Fondaco Marcello in Venice on the occasion of the Biennale Arte 2024, the exhibition Rebecca Ackroyd: Mirror Stage curated by Attilia Fattori Franchini is a collaboration with Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover, Germany. The exhibition unfolds as an installation comprising a series of large-scale paintings, drawings, cast sculptures and ready-made objects. Taking its title from the Lacanian notion describing a fundamental development step in the child’s distinction between the self and others, the exhibition ambiguously plays with the figure of the mirror as a reflective tool – through the mirror we insert ourselves in the surrounding world – as well as a symbol of the division between conscious and unconscious states. Rebecca Ackroyd: Mirror Stage explores iconography and representation, desire and disgust, repetition and fragmentation, using replication and casting as a way of distorting an idea of perceived reality.

Organising Institution Project Coordinator Alexander Wilmschen Exhibition Architecture Rebecca Ackroyd, Peres Projects Graphic Design Peres Projects Strategic Advisor Pia Capelli With the Main Support of Peres Projects

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Rebecca Ackroyd: Mirror Stage

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Robert Indiana, Love Is God, 1964. Oil on canvas, 172.7 × 172.7 cm, diamond. Private Collection. Courtesy The Robert Indiana Legacy Initiative. © 2024 Morgan Art Foundation LLC/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY/SIAE, Italy.

Robert Indiana, Eat/Die, 1962. Oil on canvas, Diptych, each panel: 182.9 × 152.4 cm. Private Collection. Courtesy The Robert Indiana Legacy Initiative. © 2024 Morgan Art Foundation LLC/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY/SIAE, Italy.

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

By the early 1960s Indiana was producing bold canvases arranged with pure geometries, text, and numerals in unmodulated colour, responding to the visual culture of an increasingly pervasive consumerism. Embedded with personal memories and biographical detail, his works point to universal questions about the human condition and faith in turbulent times while also processing issues of Queer identity and the self. His particular form of Pop Art extends a line of American radicalism with roots in the transcendentalists of the nineteenth century and the formal experimentation of the early modernists. Through a focused selection spanning more than fifty years of artistic output, including many early works rarely exhibited, The Sweet Mystery frames Indiana for new audiences to contemplate the metaphysical in the face of pressing concerns about life in the twenty-first century.

COLLATERAL EVENTS

Curator Matthew Lyons Artist Robert Indiana Exhibition Director Simon Salama-Caro (Founder of The Robert Indiana Legacy Initiative)

Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Robert Indiana: The Sweet Mystery marks one of the most significant presentations in Italy to date of the work of celebrated artist Robert Indiana (1928-2018). Following an itinerant childhood in the American Midwest and an art education in Chicago and in Europe, the artist arrived in New York City in 1954, still using his given name Robert Clark. Two years later, a chance encounter with Ellsworth Kelly altered the personal and professional trajectory of his young life. He soon found himself living in a loft on Coenties Slip, a forgotten pocket of lower Manhattan where the remains of a bustling maritime past rubbed up against the burgeoning financial sector. With little funds for art materials, Indiana created assemblages using the detritus of the seaport activity around him, while also developing his two-dimensional pictorial language in dialogue with his close-knit community of neighbours including vanguards such as Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, and Jack Youngerman. In an act of reinvention during this fervent time, he renamed himself after his home state of Indiana.

Production D.H. office The Museum Box Curatorial Advisor Suzanne Geiss Exhibition Architecture Philipp Krummel Graphic Design A.M. With the Main Support of The Robert Indiana Legacy Initiative

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Robert Indiana: The Sweet Mystery

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Seundja Rhee, A Pearl of Sap, 1959. Oil on canvas, 81 × 65 cm. Courtesy Seundja Rhee Foundation.

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

Seundja Rhee, A World Without Obstacle, 1968. Oil on canvas, 116 × 89 cm. Courtesy Seundja Rhee Foundation.

Rhee’s work is divided into thematic and aesthetic periods that revolve around the feminine condition and its relationship to Earth. Classified by the artist herself, Rhee’s work is here introduced as a synthesis including the best moments of her production, featuring paintings from iconic periods titled Woman and Earth, Superimposition, City, Nature, and Road to the Antipodes. Rhee’s work can be viewed today as the expression of an alternative and paradoxical modernism, in which the languages of progress promised by the tabula rasa of the industrial revolution are confronted with non-depredatory attitudes towards the universe. The exhibition highlights how Rhee both belonged to her time and defied any association to a single historical period. Her work has become a timeless document of the future, rather than of a time that was.

COLLATERAL EVENTS

Curator Bartomeu Marí Artist Seundja Rhee Supported by Seundja Rhee Foundation Gallery Hyundai

KoRICA (Korean Research Institute of Contemporary Art)

A pioneer of modern art in Asia, with her work Seundja Rhee (1918–2009) established a trifold aesthetic and intellectual edifice bridging multiple worlds: East and West, Asia and Europe, France and Korea. The consolidation of abstraction as an emblem of modern art in the aftermath of World War II; the cultivation of Korean identity in her geographical and cultural displacement in Europe; and the solid affirmation of her self in a patriarchal order across all aspects of society—these construct the underpinnings of how Rhee built her oeuvre and lived her life. She was a mother and an artist who refused to align herself with credos or aesthetic obeisance to the dominant fashions of the time. Rhee was one of the first Korean women artists to establish, with her visual autonomy, a unique and unrepeatable artistic paradigm of her own, from the second half of the twentieth century to the beginning of the twenty-first. Separated from her family, she emigrated to France in 1951 at the outbreak of the Korean War. Having acquired in Paris her artistic training amidst the milieu of the then predominant modern art, Rhee began traveling back to Korea from 1965 and explored the confection of images that speak to both worlds. The work of Rhee expresses, in an evidently early concern for such matters, the consciousness of humankind’s dependence on earth and nature. A lone woman starting life anew as an artist on foreign land, she identified art as her vital motivation. In her own words: “I am a woman, a woman is a mother, and a mother is Earth.”

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

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Seundja Rhee: Towards the Antipodes

236 Shahzia Sikander, A Slight and Pleasing Dislocation, 1993. Gouache and gesso on board. Cincinnati Art Museum, Alice Bimel Endowment for Asian Art, 2019. © Shahzia Sikander.

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior reveals the evolution of Sikander’s practice since The Scroll, including new site-specific works. Rather than proceeding chronologically, this exhibition follows Sikander’s primary ideas and inquiries as they have taken form throughout her work. Three thematic sections explore Sikander’s engagement with South Asian and Persian historic manuscript illustrations, highlight her dynamic treatment of gender, and show her response to the complex histories of colonialism and their legacies in contemporary language, trade, and migration patterns. This exhibition positions Sikander as an American artist, a Pakistani artist, a Muslim artist, a feminist artist, and most significantly, as a global citizen who mines the past to make visible new possibilities for the future. After Venice, iterations of Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior will travel to the Cincinnati Art Museum and the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2025.

COLLATERAL EVENTS

Curators Ainsley M. Cameron Emily Liebert Artist Shahzia Sikander Production D.H. office Exhibition Architecture Philipp Krummel Graphic Design Sebastiano Girardi Studio With the Main Support from Terra Foundation for American Art The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Kenneth J. Birdwell Rebecca and Irad Carmi Lauren Rich Fine With the Additional Support from Sean Kelly Gallery The CMA Fund for Exhibitions

The Cincinnati Art Museum and The Cleveland Museum of Art

For more than three decades, Shahzia Sikander, born in Pakistan in 1969, has been animating South Asian visual histories through a contemporary perspective. Her work reimagines the past for our present moment, proposing new narratives that cross time and place. Working in a variety of mediums – paintings, drawings, prints, digital animations, mosaics, sculpture, and glassworks – Sikander considers western relations with the Global South and the wider Islamic world, often through the lens of gender and body politics. Her work is rooted in a lexicon of recurring motifs that makes marginalised subjects visible. At times turning the lens inward, Sikander reflects on her own experience as an immigrant and diasporic artist working in the United States. Sikander’s artistic training began in Lahore, Pakistan where she studied at the National College of Arts (NCA). Following her acclaimed undergraduate thesis project, The Scroll (1989–1990), she became the first woman to teach in the NCA’s prestigious miniature painting department. In 1993, Sikander moved from Lahore to Providence, Rhode Island to pursue graduate studies at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). After completing her MFA, Sikander moved to Houston, Texas to participate in the Core Residency Program at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston’s Glassell School of Art from 1995 to 1997. She then moved to New York City, which has remained her base to date.

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

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Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior

238 BIENNALE ARTE

2024

Adam Broomberg with Rafael González, Anchor in the Landscape, 2022. Photograph of the Al-Badawi olive tree, Palestine, 190 × 152 cm. Courtesy the Artists © Adam Broomberg and Rafael González.

The exhibition highlights sound narratives manifesting the symbiosis between vegetation and nature. It includes photographs, sculptures, archival images and videos from several land projects initiated by artists; the works from a seed conservation initiative; a permaculture designer and educator; documentation of rural life and practices; the cultivation, neglect and destruction of traditional olive groves; and discussions of biodiversity and heirloom varieties. It also focuses on literary writing and documentation, dance as a form of collective making inspired by elements directly connected with agriculture and working the land, and other works that place a strong emphasis on sound-making. Central to the work of the artists presented by Dar Jacir for Art and Research are dance, planting, music and rhythm as a form of poetry, resistance and sustenance. Meanwhile, Artists + Allies x Hebron aims to draw the attention of the international community to the situation in Hebron H2, where Israel exercises military control to monitor every aspect of Palestinians’ life throughout the West Bank and focuses on engagement to gain a genuine and firsthand understanding of the situation on the ground. The works within the exhibition express an Anthropocene rooted in forced dispossession and occupation.

COLLATERAL EVENTS

Curator Jonathan Turner Artists Samer Barbari Adam Broomberg Duncan Campbell Rafael González Isabella Hammad Shayma Hammad Chris Harding Baha Hilo Emily Jacir Sebastián Jatz Rawicz Benjamin Lind Jumana Manna Sari Khoury Jasbir Puar Michael Rakowitz Adam Rouhana Mohammad Saleh Vivien Sansour Andrea de Siena Dima Srouji

Artists + Allies x Hebron

South West Bank – Landworks, Collective Action and Sound focuses on works produced by artists, collectives and allies from the southern West Bank in Palestine. The participating artists look at aspects of land, agriculture and heritage in an ever-rapidly shifting topography. The artists share a voice centred on the historical transmission of memory and collectivity. The works embody the idea that “home” is strongly rooted in many traditional practices, a reinforcement of Biennale Arte 2024’s Foreigners Everywhere theme. The works further strengthen the connection of expressions and cultural identities within changing urban and agricultural landscapes. They communicate farming practices, indigenous growing and gathering methods, and the practices of human and non-human rhythms as a sensory resistance. A significance is placed on dance, music and rhythm as a form of poetry, resistance and sustenance.

The exhibition is a collaboration between Artists + Allies x Hebron & Dar Jacir for Art and Research

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

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South West Bank Landworks, Collective Action and Sound

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Betsabeé Romero, The Endless Spiral, Rolling Totem, 2024. Installation of 45 hand-engraved and gold-leaf-painted GoKart wheels set to the ground with impressions of the tire engraving on 18 gold silk-screen printed black laces. Variable dimensions. Courtesy the Artist. © Betsabeé Romero.

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

Betsabeé Romero, The Endless Spiral, Identities, 2024. 45 polycarbonate security mirrors, intervened with vinyl and cut with the borderline, with MDF frames, to give 20 cm of separation to the wall and lighting with LED strips, variable dimensions. Courtesy the Artist. © Betsabeé Romero.

The Endless Spiral includes a wide variety of works spanning Romero’s long career and creates dialogues with new works that touch upon contemporary questions. All are linked with historical comments and traditions from Mexico, ranging from pre-colonial to present times, which has always been a nexus of culture and international thought. The exhibition presents a diverse approach to this crucial topic, with opening ideas and concepts and making visible the dualities, tensions, conflicts, and fractures in our culture and history.

COLLATERAL EVENTS

Curator Gabriela Urtiaga Artist Betsabeé Romero MOLAA Board of Directors and MOLAA Staff Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa Art Studio Betsabeé Romero Collaborator Massimo Scaringella With the Support of William S. & Michelle Ciccarelli Lerach Santiago García Galván ITACA Films

Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA)

The Endless Spiral is a research project and a solo show of the Mexican artist Betsabeé Romero, curated by Museum of Latin American Art Chief Curator, the Argentinian art historian and researcher Gabriela Urtiaga, at the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa. This presentation explores Romero’s artistic practices through the commissioned artworks and new installations, and results from the long-term relationship between the artist and the MOLAA, the only U.S. museum fully dedicated to modern and contemporary Latin American and Latinx art. Her work is part of the MOLAA Permanent Collection and, at the end of its run as a Collateral Event of the Biennale Arte 2024, MOLAA will present this show in 2025, in Long Beach, California. Betsabeé Romero is an artist who has had the opportunity to live and produce her work in different countries, cultures, and contexts. In the curatorial statement, Gabriela Urtiaga writes: “Betsabeé is a nomadic spirit always looking for new experiences and perspectives with a focus on examining different essential and urgent topics for international audiences. She works with a strong consciousness of issues such as migration, gender roles, cultural traditions, religiosity, miscegenation, and individual and collective memory. Her method of transgressing the limits of different established categories and making visible the injustice around the world as a point of examination and a call for action is redefined as a community commitment through a dialogue between art, social justice, and heritage interacting for the common good. The artist developed a strong starting narrative that focuses on the experience of being a foreigner in the world and from the perspective of many who lack territory to seek refuge and survive.”

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

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The Endless Spiral: Betsabeé Romero

242 The Spirits of Maritime Crossing, 2022. Single screening, performed by Marina Abramović and Pichet Klunchun, directed by Apinan Poshyananda, stereo, 34:27 min. Still from video. Commissioned by Bangkok Art Biennale Foundation. Courtesy the Artists. © Bangkok Art Biennale Foundation. Jompet Kuswidananto, Terang Boelan (Moonshine), 2022. Broken glasses, glass chandeliers, iron, wood, upright piano components, electronics, 200 × 150 × 200 cm. Photo Bangkok Art Biennale. Collection of Bangkok Art Biennale Foundation. Courtesy the Artist; Bangkok Art Biennale. © Jompet Kuswidananto.

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

Mythological dancers by Khvay Samnang inspired by the Ramayana relate to hegemony and deforestation. Rain dance is intertwined with local worship to nourish harvest and dispel foreign threat from fire dragon. Yee I-Lann and sea-based communities explore maritime histories to revive ancestral knowledge. Mats stitched with rubbish washed ashore by tidal currents connect Venice and Borneo. Gourds by Truong Cong Tung are analogous to spirits from Vietnam. Drips of water and bubbles symbolise time and decay shared by humanity. Embroideries by Jakkai Siributr evoke the plight of stateless people. Art collaboration with asylum seekers reflects on ethnic cleansing. Moe Satt’s video performance, inspired by dance and tribal hunting, suggests survival of sectarian violence in his homeland. Priyageetha Dia’s video of deep sea is about ancestral migratory movements from India to Malay Peninsula. Maritime currents enmesh subaltern culture with diasporic histories. Kawita Vatanajyankur performs in foamy blue dye from the textile industry. Female labour, feminism and abuse are part of being foreign.

COLLATERAL EVENTS

Curator Apinan Poshyananda Artists Marina Abramović Priyageetha Dia Chitti Kasemkitvatana Khvay Samnang Pichet Klunchun Jompet Kuswidananto Nakrob Moonmanas Bounpaul Phothyzan Alwin Reamillo Moe Satt Jakkai Siributr Truong Cong Tung Natee Utarit Kawita Vatanajyankur Yee I-Lann

Bangkok Art Biennale Foundation

A journey from Southeast Asia to Venice with glimpses of allurement and diasporic experiences. Foreigners dispersed from their homeland physically and spiritually. Marina Abramović, an icon of diaspora, travels from Venice to Bangkok. Her spirit encounters Monkey King, played by Pichet Klunchun with priests and talismans. In parallel worlds of Italy and Siam, Chitti Kasemkitvatana and Nakrob Moonmanas create phantasmagorical montages of foreigners and commoners whispering in different tongues. Colonisers and missionaries brought a new faith and left behind painful memories. Jompet Kuswidananto’s twinkling shards evoke broken vessels and shattered dreams in a vast ocean. Across the archipelago, Christianity became enmeshed with locality. Alwin Reamillo’s 14 Stations of the Cross peel layers of colonialism and Christian iconography through subjects on migration, New World Disorder and globalisation. Paintings by Natee Utarit infuse Buddhist philosophy with Western art history that convey contradiction and absurdity. East-West encounters depict foreigners everywhere in temples and piazzas. For Bounpaul Phothyzan, the remnants during American occupation in Southeast Asia left scars and trauma. Bombshells discarded in rice fields are carved to record victims crippled and killed by mighty foreigners.

With the Support of Thai Beverage Public Company Limited One Bangkok C asean

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The Spirits of Maritime Crossing

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Trevor Yeung, Cave of Avoidance (Not Yours) (detail), 2024. Fish tanks, aquarium equipment, ceramics, plastic containers, lamps, metal racks, fish waste, and water, dimensions variable. Commissioned by M+, 2024. Photo South Ho. © Trevor Yeung.

Trevor Yeung, Night Mushroom in shade (Teak Cabinet) (detail), 2024. Night lamps, artificial plants, and plug adaptors, dimensions variable. Commissioned by M+, 2024. Photo South Ho. © Trevor Yeung.

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

In his landscapes of fishless aquariums, Yeung articulates his fascination with artificiality in nature and urban space. He highlights the nuanced relationship between the fish, their caretaker, and a meticulously controlled aquarium. Whether we find ourselves in the position of the fish, the caretaker, or an inanimate part of the landscape, an attachment always arises. At its heart, this is a yearning to be an irreplaceable, distinctly defined part of something larger than us, an ache to love and be loved.

COLLATERAL EVENTS

Curator Olivia Chow Artist Trevor Yeung Commissioners Bernard Charnwut Chan Kenneth Fok Kai-kong Co-Presented by M+, West Kowloon Cultural District Authority and Hong Kong Arts Development Council Coordination in Venice PDG Arte Communications

M+, West Kowloon Cultural District Authority and Hong Kong Arts Development Council

In this exhibition, Trevor Yeung invites us to reflect on the expectations and social codes that condition the way we relate to one another. Social conventions are a natural product of our desire for order, efficiency, and control. However, our feelings make attempts at precise, rational calculation impossible. For Yeung, this emotional complexity not only encompasses human relationships, but also extends to the plants and animals that are part of our ecology in the widest sense. With his profound understanding of botany, horticulture, and aquatic ecosystems, Yeung weaves together deeply personal encounters and astute social observations in intricate sculptures, photographs, and installations. Hong Kong is an enduring reference and source of material for Yeung, but the emotional resonance of his work and his concern with power dynamics are universal in their ambition. Yeung explores sentimentality, desire, and relationships of power through the concept of attachment. Attachments manifest as feelings of connection with objects as well as a longing for someone special. The exhibition articulates Yeung’s intimate experiences and keen observations of the relationships between humans and aquatic systems, drawing from references that include his father’s seafood restaurant, pet shops, feng shui arrangements, and the fish he kept as a child. The presentation is organised into four installations. Each features fully operational aquariums, complete with filters and accessories, yet devoid of living fish. The palpable sense of absence that saturates the exhibition conjures the cyclical nature of life and the delicate equilibrium of social ecology, which is always susceptible to disorder.

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

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Trevor Yeung: Courtyard of Attachments, Hong Kong in Venice

246 Ydessa Hendeles, Grand Hotel (detail), 2022. Family-album photograph, “Sommer 1946”, gelatin silver print, with hand-written annotation in ink on recto, original print: 5.9 × 8.9 cm. Collection Ydessa Hendeles. Courtesy the Artist. © Ydessa Hendeles.

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

Ydessa Hendeles, Grand Hotel (detail), 2022. “Grand Hotel” (architectural model), wood, pressed paper, glass, iron, 19th century, 147.6 × 147.6 × 108.0 cm. Photo Robert Keziere. Courtesy the Artist. © Ydessa Hendeles.

Viewers start from a seemingly benign past: a post-war photo from Hendeles’ family album; an archival film clip from Eastern Europe; a painting of Jewish merchants in a village in Ukraine; portraits of bejewelled Russian royalty; and a car designed to empower “everyman” Germans. These objects are starting points for a story of rejection, displacement and aspiration. Tomb-like travel trunks, relics of the dawn of modern-day luxury travel, take on a darker significance in the context of the installation’s ambiguous opening. The location, architectural design and scale of Spazio Berlendis bring the various elements of the work to vivid life. The metaphor of “journey” is central to Hendeles’ work. She invites viewers to respond to the disparate parts in a sequence, culminating in a cul-de-sac, and then to retrace their steps. The full art experience comes from review, re-examination and reflection on the return passage.

Curator Wayne Baerwaldt Artist Ydessa Hendeles Executive Director Barbara Fischer (Art Museum at the University of Toronto) Project Producer Barbara Edwards With the Support of Canada Council for the Arts The Flanagan Foundation Campbell Family Holdings Ronald and Bunnie Appleby Cowley Abbott Hart Lambur Contemporary Calgary Rosamond Ivey Mats Nordstrom and Susanne Niwong Anonymous The Phyllis Lambert Foundation The Schulich Foundation Jay Smith and Laura Rapp Hartel Holding Company Ltd. Vincent Tangredi and Siu Lan Ko Hill & Schumacher Denis Walz MNP LLP – Chris Joakim, Partner Scott Shields Architects Inc. Zachari Logan David Candler Daniel Friedman and Rob Dalgliesh Danny Shapiro and Marie Lannoo Margaret Swaine and William Siegel Mary Montanari Marlene Stern and Peter Rae Rahmi Emin Stephen Smart and Juan Pablo Francisconi With Special Acknowledgement to Wolodymyr George Danyliw Foundation

COLLATERAL EVENTS

Art Museum at the University of Toronto

Ydessa Hendeles’ practice has always sought to give artistic expression to the multigenerational effects of traumatic displacement and the ensuing psychological and physical barriers to rebuilding community and a sense of belonging. Her history as the only child of Auschwitz survivors who crossed frontiers and an ocean to rebuild their lives inevitably informs her works. Though born in Germany, she is a Polish-Canadian dual national with deep family roots in Poland as the descendant of a line of rabbis and Talmudic scholars. The Nazis’ program to eradicate Jews made hers the generation without grandparents. After World War II, there was no going “home” anymore. Hendeles’ works are post-Holocaust documents that not only seek to forge creative links between past and present but also use evocative and at times provocative visual metaphors to portray the tone and tenor of our times. Grand Hotel stages collectibles, machine- and hand-made items, vernacular objects and found film footage in a narrative assembled to trigger responses from a viewer’s own life experience. Grand Hotel is set in a country emerging from the wreckage of war. The scenario envisages a family or group of close friends who are on the road like tourists. But what are the circumstances? Does the carefree transience of leisure travel mask a fraught odyssey to safety and emotional security? And is the journey’s end built on dreams of new beginnings or nightmares of past traumas?

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

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Ydessa Hendeles: Grand Hotel

BIENNALE ARTE

2024

Yuan Goang-Ming, The 561st Hour of Occupation, 2014. Single-channel video, 5’56”. Courtesy the Artist. © Yuan Goang-Ming.

The effortless access to visual information of a place makes it a nonplace. A sense of sameness is the dominant feature of a flattened globe with no distinction between inside and outside. The once-romanticised leaving and returning are now trapped in the absence of curiosity, enlightenment, and exploration. Movement between origin and destination is meaningless without body orientation between the observer and the observed. The collapse of time reduces any location that could shelter belongings to mere dots on a map. Like many Taiwanese born after World War II, Yuan’s upbringing was haunted by his father’s traumatic memories of war and displacement. The imagined violent encroachment of private space, which foregrounds the generational trepidation, is not only about Yuan’s personal struggle, but also resonates as a shared sense of impending doom among Taiwanese society.

COLLATERAL EVENTS

Curator Abby Chen Artist Yuan Goang-Ming With the Official Support of The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Culture, Republic of China (Taiwan), Taipei City Government, and the Department of Cultural Affairs of Taipei City Government

Taipei Fine Arts Museum of Taiwan

Everyday War is an incisive introduction to living with the constant threat of apocalypse in the midst of a radical societal transition. The show synthesises the artist’s anxiety and hope, evoking the notion of home and the search for “poetic dwelling”, the Heideggerian place of peace, safety and freedom. The audience can gain insight into Yuan Goang-Ming’s little-known daily life narratives: how fear is individually experienced as a nightmarish re-enactment and collectively processed through public assembly. Everyday War features five videos and one kinetic installation. The eponymous piece depicts a military attack destroying a studio flat home, employing the artist’s well-known cinematography technique. Two 2014 pieces, Dwelling and Prophecy, also explore Yuan’s unresolvable domestic anxiety. Everyday Maneuver (2018) filmed during Taiwan’s annual Wanan Air Raid Drill, sets the tone for the entire exhibition. The artist describes living in Taiwan as “uncanny”, a state of eerie suspense due to escalating tension across the strait. Imagining a way out in such unpredictable times, Yuan also debuts his latest film Flat World (2023). Edited exclusively with footage from Google Street View, it marks Yuan’s first foray into the virtual world. He envisions it as a new kind of road movie, generated by algorithms. Contrary to classical road movies – leaving home as escape, discovery and rebellion – Flat World shows that information is not experience.

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Yuan Goang-Ming: Everyday War

List of Participants

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Albania Iva Lulashi Tirana, Albania, 1988. Lives and works in Milan, Italy

Argentina Luciana Lamothe Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1975. Lives and works in Buenos Aires

Republic of Armenia Nina Khemchyan Yerevan, Armenia, 1964. Lives and works in Paris, France

Australia

LIST OF PARTICIPANTS

Archie Moore Toowoomba, Australia, 1970. Lives and works in Redlands, Australia

Austria Anna Jermolaewa Leningrad, USSR, 1970. Lives and works in Vienna, Austria

Republic of Azerbaijan

DoJoong Jo Jeonju, Republic of Korea, 1948. Lives and works in Jeonju Claudia De Leonardis Mosciano Sant’Angelo, Italy, 1955. Lives and works in San Benedetto del Tronto, Italy Franco Marrocco Rocca d’Evandro, Caserta, Italy, 1956. Lives and works between Saronno and Milan Anna Carla De Leonardis Mosciano Sant’Angelo, Italy, 1960. Lives and works in San Benedetto del Tronto, Italy Jiyoon Oh Boryeong, Republic of Korea, 1962. Lives and works in Seoul, Republic of Korea

Irina Eldarova Moscow, Russia, 1955. Lives and works in Baku, Republic of Azerbaijan Rashad Alakbarov Baku, Republic of Azerbaijan, 1979. Lives and works in Baku

Patrizia Casagranda Stuttgart, Germany, 1979. Lives and works in Krefeld, Germany

Vusala Agharaziyeva Baku, Republic of Azerbaijan, 1990. Lives and works in Baku

Natalia Revoniuk Lviv, Ukraine, 1980. Lives and works in Ilkley, UK

Shahid Kabir Barishal, People’s Republic of Bangladesh, 1947. Lives and works in Dhaka, People’s Republic of Bangladesh Syeda Mahbuba Karim Dhaka, People’s Republic of Bangladesh, 1962. Lives and works in Dhaka

2024

Shahjahan Ahmed Bikash Jamalpur, People’s Republic of Bangladesh, 1972. Lives and works in Dhaka, People’s Republic of Bangladesh

Roberto Saglietto Loano, Italy, 1967. Lives and works between Rome and Finale Ligure, Italy

People’s Republic of Bangladesh

BIENNALE ARTE

Abdur Rab Dhaka, People’s Republic of Bangladesh, 1966. Lives and works in Dhaka

Marco Nereo Rotelli Venice, Italy, 1955. Lives and works in Venice Mirko Demattè Trento, Italy, 1975. Lives and works in Zivignano di Pergine, Italy

Belgium Sophie Boiron Oullins, France. 1987. Lives and works in Brussels, Belgium Valentin Bollaert Saint Lo, France, 1986. Lives and works in Brussels, Belgium

Simona Denicolai Milan, Italy, 1972. Lives and works in Brussels, Belgium Pauline Fockedey Mouscron, Belgium, 1988. Lives and works in Brussels, Belgium Pierre Huyghebaert Leuven, Belgium, 1969. Lives and works in Brussels, Belgium Antoinette Jattiot Nancy, France, 1989. Lives and works in Brussels, Belgium Ivo Provoost Diksmuide, Belgium, 1974. Lives and works in Brussels, Belgium

Republic of Benin Moufouli Bello Porto Novo, Republic of Benin, 1987. Lives and works in Cotonou, Republic of Benin Chloé Quenum Paris, France in 1983. Lives and works in Paris Ishola Akpo Yopougon, Ivory Coast, 1983. Lives and works in Abomey-Calavi, Republic of Benin, and Paris, France Romuald Hazoumè Porto Novo, 1962. Lives and works in Porto Novo and Cotonou, Republic of Benin

Plurinational State of Bolivia Maria Alexandra Bravo Cladera Oruro, Plurinational State of Bolivia, 1950. Lives and works in La Paz, Plurinational State of Bolivia Lorgio Vaca Duran Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Plurinational State of Bolivia, 1930. Lives and works in Santa Cruz de la Sierra Ines Fontenla Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1950. Lives and works between Rome, Italy, and Buenos Aires Ronald Moran Chalchuapa City, El Salvador, 1972. Lives and works in San Salvador, El Salvador

Humberto Vélez Panama City, Republic of Panama, 1965. Lives and works between Panama and Manchester, UK

BosniaHerzegovina Stjepan Skoko Ljubuški, BosniaHerzegovina, 1959. Lives and works in Ljubuški, Bosnia-Herzegovina

Brazil Glicéria Tupinambá Serra do Padeiro village, Tupinambá de Olivença Indigenous Land, Bahia, Brazil, 1982 Olinda Tupinambá Bahia, Brazil, 1989. Lives and works in Pau Brasil, Bahia, Brazil Ziel Karapotó Terra Nova village, Alagoas, Brazil, 1994. Lives and works in Recife, Brazil

Bulgaria Krasimira Butseva Asenovgrad, Bulgaria, 1994. Lives and works between Sofia, Bulgaria, and London, United Kingdom Julian Chehirian Brooklyn, New York, USA,1991. Lives and works between Sofia, Bulgaria, and Philadelphia, USA Lilia Topouzova Plovdiv, Bulgaria, 1979. Lives and works in Toronto, Canada

Republic of Cameroon Jean Michel Dissake Douala, Republic of Cameroon, 1983. Lives and work in Yaoundé, Republic of Cameroon Hako Hankson Bafang, Republic of Cameroon, 1968. Lives and works in Douala, Republic of Cameroon Kendji & Ollo Arts A group of three artists: Yaoundé, Republic of Cameroon, 1982, 1986 and 1990. Lives and works in Yaoundé, Republic of Cameroon

Patrick-Joël Tatcheda Yonkeu Douala, Republic of Cameroon, 1985. Lives and work in Bologna, Italy Guy Wouete Douala, Republic of Cameroon, 1980. Lives and works in Antwerp and Brussels, Belgium, Douala and Penja, Republic of Cameroon Angelo Accardi Sapri, Italy, 1964. Lives and works in Sapri Julia Bornefeld Kiel, Germany, 1963. Brunico, Italy, and Berlin, Germany Cesare Catania Milan, Italy, 1979. Lives and works in Milan Adélaïde LaurentBellue Paris, France, 1989. Lives and works in Paris Franco Mazzucchelli Milan, Italy, 1939. Lives and works in Milan Rex Volcan Eindhoven, The Netherlands, 1973. Lives and works in The Netherlands and London, UK Edna Volcan Colombia, 1990. Lives and works in The Netherlands and London, UK Giorgio Tentolini Casalmaggiore, Italy, 1978. Lives and works in Casalmaggiore Liu Youju Jiexi, Guangdong, People’s Republic of China, 1955. Lives and works in Guangzhou, Guangdong, People’s Republic of China

Canada Kapwani Kiwanga Hamilton, Canada, 1978. Lives and works in Paris, France

Chile Valeria Montti Colque Stockholm, Sweden, 1978. Lives and works in Stockholm

Zhu Jinshi Beijing, People’s Republic of China, 1954. Lives and works in Beijing Che Jianquan Tianjin, People’s Republic of China, 1967. Lives and works in Guangzhou, People’s Republic of China Jiao Xingtao Chengdu, People’s Republic of China, 1970. Lives and works in Chongqing, People’s Republic of China Wang Shaoqiang Born in 1969 in Shantou, Guangdong, People’s Republic of China. Lives and works in Guangzhou, People’s Republic of China Shi Hui Shanghai, People’s Republic of China, 1955. Lives and works in Hangzhou, People’s Republic of China Qiu Zhenzhong Nanchang, Jiangxi, People’s Republic of China, 1947. Lives and works in Beijing, People’s Republic of China Wang Zhenghong Shanghai, People’s Republic of China, 1973. Lives and works in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, People’s Republic of China

Democratic Republic of Congo Aimé Mpane Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo,1968. Lives and works in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Brussels, Belgium

Eddy Ekete Mombesa Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, 1978. Lives and works in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo Jean Katambayi Mukendi Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of Congo, 1974. Lives and works in Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of Congo Cédric Sungo Mome Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, 1992. Lives and works in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo Steve Bandoma Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, 1981. Lives and works in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo Eléonore Hellio Paris, France, 1966. Lives and works in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo Michel Ekeba Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, 1984. Lives and works in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo

Marina Ashioti Nicosia, Republic of Cyprus, 1997. Lives and works in Nicosia, Republic of Cyprus, and London, United Kingdom Niki Charalambous Nicosia, Republic of Cyprus, 1997. Lives and works in Nicosia Doris Mari Demetriadou Nicosia, Republic of Cyprus, 1997. Lives and works in Nicosia, Republic of Cyprus, and Amsterdam, The Netherlands Peter Eramian Nicosia, Republic of Cyprus, 1984. Lives and works in Nicosia Irini Khenkin Nicosia, Republic of Cyprus, 1997. Lives and works in Nicosia Rafailia Tsiridou Nicosia, Republic of Cyprus, 1998. Lives and works in Nicosia Emiddio Vasquez Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, 1986. Lives and works in Limassol, Republic of Cyprus, and Phoenix, USA

Croatia

Alexandros Xenophontos Nicosia, Republic of Cyprus, 1996. Lives and works in Nicosia, Republic of Cyprus, and London, United Kingdom

Vlatka Horvat Čakovec, Croatia, 1974. Lives and works in London, UK

Czech Republic

Cuba Wilfredo Prieto Sancti Spiritus, Cuba, 1978. Lives and works in Havana, Cuba

Republic of Cyprus Haig Aivazian Beirut, Lebanon, 1980. Lives and works in Beirut Andreas Andronikou Nicosia, Republic of Cyprus, 1998. Lives and works in Nicosia, Republic of Cyprus, and London, United Kingdom

Eva Kot’átková Prague, Czech Republic, 1982. Lives and works in Prague Himali Singh Soin India, 1987. Lives and works in New Delhi, India, and London, United Kingdom David Soin Tapesser Germany, 1985. Lives and works in New Delhi, India, and London, United Kingdom

Denmark Inuuteq Storch Sisimiut, Greenland, 1989. Lives and works in Sisimiut

Egypt Wael Shawky Alexandria, Egypt, 1971. Lives and works in Alexandria, Egypt, and Philadelphia, USA

Estonia Edith Karlson Tallinn, Estonia, 1983. Lives and works in Tallinn

Ethiopia Tesfaye Urgessa Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 1983. Lives and works in Addis Ababa

Finland Pia Lindman Espoo, Finland, 1965. Lives and works in Inkoo, Finland Vidha Saumya Patna, India, 1984. Lives and works in Helsinki, Finland Jenni-Juulia Wallinheimo-Heimonen Helsinki, Finland, 1974. Lives and works in Nurmijärvi, Finland

Yael Bartana Kfar Yehezkel, Israel, 1970. Lives and works in Rome, Italy, Berlin, Germany, and Amsterdam, The Netherlands Robert Lippok Berlin, Germany, 1966. Lives and works in Berlin Nicole L’Huillier Santiago de Chile, Chile, 1985. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany Jan St. Werner Nuremberg, Germany, 1969. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany Michael Akstaller Regensburg, Germany, 1992. Lives and works in Nuremberg, Germany, and Berlin, Germany

Great Britain John Akomfrah Accra, Ghana, 1957. Lives and works in London, United Kingdom

Greece

France

Thanasis Deligiannis Larissa, Greece, 1983. Lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Julien Creuzet Blanc-Mesnil, France, 1986. Lives and works in Montreuil, France

Yannis Michalopoulos Athens, Greece, 1982. Lives and works in Paris, France

Georgia Juliette George Paris, France, 1992. Lives and works in Arles, France Rodrigue De Ferluc Talence, France, 1987. Lives and works in Arles, France Nikoloz Koplatadze Tbilisi, Georgia, 1997. Lives and works in Tbilisi, Georgia Grigol Nodia Tbilisi, Georgia, 1994. Lives and works in Tbilisi, Georgia

Germany Ersan Mondtag Berlin, Germany, 1987. Lives and works in Berlin

STRANIERI OVUNQUE

Project team of A Comprehensive Collection of Ancient Chinese Paintings Founded in 2005 in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, People’s Republic of China

Eddy Kamuanga Ilunga Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, 1991. Lives and works in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo

Elia Kalogianni Athens, Greece, 1995. Lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and Athens, Greece Yorgos Kyvernitis Athens, Greece, 1988. Lives and works in Athens, Greece Kostas Chaikalis Athens, Greece, 1980. Lives and works in Athens, Greece Fotis Sagonas Thermo, Greece, 1983. Lives and works in Thessaloniki, Greece FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

253

People’s Republic of China

254

Grenada Frederika Adam New York, USA, 1970. Lives and works in Grenada, New York, USA, London, United Kingdom, West Indies, Northern California Breakfast Connecticut, USA, 1980. Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, USA

LIST OF PARTICIPANTS

Corita Kent Iowa, USA, 1918 – Boston, USA, 1986 Marco Perego Salò, Italy, 1979. Lives and works in Los Angeles, USA

ADGART (Antonello Diodato Guardigli) Salerno, Italy, 1962. Lives and works in Bergamo, Italy

Zoe Saldana Passaic, USA, 1978. Lives and works in Los Angeles, USA

Suelin Low Chew Tung Port of Spain, Trinidad, 1965. Lives and works in St. George’s, Grenada Gabriele Maquignaz Aosta, Italy, 1972. Lives and works in Valtournenche, Italy Lorenzo Marini Monselice, Italy, 1956. Lives and works in Milan, Italy Benaiah Matheson United Kingdom, 1985. Lives and works in United Kingdom The Perceptive Group, international collective Founded in Italy. Based in Grenada and Italy Nello Petrucci Castellammare di Stabia, Italy, 1981. Lives and works in Pompei, Italy

Holy See Maurizio Cattelan Padova, Italy, 1960. Lives and works in New York, USA, and Milan, Italy Bintou Dembélé Brétigny-sur-Orge, France, 1975. Lives and works in Île de France, France Simone Fattal Damascus, Syria, 1942. Lives and works in Paris, France, and Beirut, Lebanon 2024

Sonia Gomes Caetanópolis, Brazil, 1948. Lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil

Jason deCaires Taylor United Kingdom, 1974. Lives and works in United Kingdom

Alma Fakhre Grenada, 1961. Lives and works in Grenada

BIENNALE ARTE

Claire Fontaine Collective founded by Fulvia Carnevale and James Thornhill, Paris, France, 2004. Based in Palermo, Italy

Ireland Eimear Walshe Longford, Ireland, 1992. Lives and works in Ireland

Israel Ruth Patir New York, USA, 1984. Lives and works in Tel Aviv, Israel

Italy Massimo Bartolini Cecina, Italy, 1962. Lives and works in Cecina, Italy

Ivory Coast

Claire Tabouret Pertuis, France, 1981. Lives and works in Los Angeles, USA

Jems Robert Koko Bi Sinfra, Ivory Coast, 1966. Lives and work in Ivory Coast

Hungary

Sadikou Oukpedjo Ketao, Togo, 1975. Lives and work in Ivory Coast

Márton Nemes Székesfehérvár, Hungary, 1986. Lives and works in New York, USA, and Budapest, Hungary

Iceland Hildigunnur Birgisdóttir Reykjavík, Iceland, 1980. Lives and works in Reykjavík

Islamic Republic of Iran Abdolhamid Ghadirian Tehran, Islamic Republic of Iran, 1960. Lives and works in Tehran Gholamali Taheri Tehran, Islamic Republic of Iran in 1957. Lives and works in Tehran Kazem Chalipa Tehran, Islamic Republic of Iran in 1958. Lives and works in Tehran Morteza Asadi Tehran, Islamic Republic of Iran in 1957. Lives and works in Tehran Mostafa Goudarzi Tehran, Islamic Republic of Iran in 1960. Lives and works in Tehran

François-Xavier Gbré Lille, France, 1978. Lives and works between La Rochelle, France, and Abidjan, Ivory Coast Franck Abd-Bakar Fanny Abidjan, Ivory Coast, 1970–2021 Marie Claire Messouma Malambien Paris, France, 1990.

Japan Yuko Mohri Kanagawa, Japan, 1980. Lives and works in Tokyo, Japan

Republic of Kazakhstan Eldar Tagi Almaty, Republic of Kazakhstan, 1987. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany Lena Pozdnyakova Almaty, Republic of Kazakhstan, 1985. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany Yerbolat Tolepbay Southern Kazakhstan, 1955. Lives and works in Almaty, Republic of Kazakhstan

Kamil Mullashev Ürümqi, People’s Republic of China, 1944. Lives and works in Astana, Republic of Kazakhstan Anvar Musrepov Almaty, Republic of Kazakhstan, 1994. Lives and works in Astana, Republic of Kazakhstan Saken Narynov Issyk, Republic of Kazakhstan, 1946 – 2023 Lived and worked in Almaty, Republic of Kazakhstan Sergey Maslov Samara, Russia, 19522002 Lived and worked in Almaty, Republic of Kazakhstan

Kenya

Latvia Amanda Ziemele Riga, Latvia, 1990. Lives and works in Riga

Lebanon Mounira Al Solh Beirut, Lebanon, 1978. Lives and works between Beirut, Lebanon and Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Lithuania Pakui Hardware (Neringa Černiauskaitė and Ugnius Gelguda) Klaipėda, Lithuania 1984 and Vilnius, Lithuania 1977. Lives and works in Vilnius, Lithuania

Peter Kenyanya Oendo Tabaka, Kisii, Kenya, 1977. Lives and works in Kisii County, Kenya

Teresė Marija Rožanskaitė Linkuva, Lithuania, 1933. Died in Vilnius, Lithuania, 2007

Mzee Elkana Ong’esa Tabaka, Kisii, Kenya, 1944. Lives and Works in Tabaka

Grand Duchy of Luxembourg

Gerald Oroo Motondi Tabaka, Kisii, Kenya, 1965. Lives and works in West Pokot County, Kenya Robin Okeyo Mbera Tabaka, Kisii, Kenya, 1982. Lives and works in Kajiado County, Kenya Charles Duke Kombo Tabaka, Kisii, Kenya, 1955. Lives and works in Nairobi, Kenya John Tabule Ogao Abuya 1963. Lives and works in Tabaka, Kisii, Kenya

Republic of Korea Koo Jeong A Seoul, Republic of Korea, 1967. Lives and works everywhere

Republic of Kosovo Doruntina Kastrati Prizren, Republic of Kosovo, 1991. Lives and works in Prishtina, Republic of Kosovo

Andrea Mancini Luxembourg, 1989. Lives and works in Brussels, Belgium Every Island (Alessandro Cugola, Caterina Malavolti, Damir Draganic, Juliane Seehawer, Martina Genovesi) Live and work in Brussels, Belgium

Malta Matthew Attard Rabat, Malta, 1987. Lives and works in Malta

Mexico Erick Meyenberg Mexico City, Mexico, 1980. Lives and works in Mexico City

Mongolia Ochirbold Ayurzana Sukhbaatar, Mongolia, 1976. Lives and works in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia

Montenegro Darja Bajagić Podgorica, Montenegro, 1990. Lives and works in Luštica, Montenegro and Chicago, USA

Alphonse Bukumba Lubami-Manga, Democratic Republic of Congo, 1994. Lives and works in Lusanga, Democratic Republic of Congo Irène Kanga Kwenge Democratic Republic of Congo, 1994. Lives and works in Lusanga, Democratic Republic of Congo Muyaka Kapasa Lwayi, Democratic Republic of Congo, 1963. Lives and works in Lusanga, Democratic Republic of Congo Matthieu Kasiama Lusanga, Democratic Republic of Congo, 1987. Lives and works in Lusanga, Democratic Republic of Congo Jean Kawata Lusanga, Democratic Republic of Congo, 1980. Lives and works in Lusanga, Democratic Republic of Congo Huguette Kilembi Kwenge, Democratic Republic of Congo, 1993. Lives and works in Lusanga, Democratic Republic of Congo Mbuku Kimpala Yasa Bonga, Democratic Republic of Congo, 1986. Lives and works in Lusanga, Democratic Republic of Congo Athanas Kindendi Soa, Democratic Republic of Congo, 1970. Lives and works in Lusanga, Democratic Republic of Congo Felicien Kisiata Lusanga, Democratic Republic of Congo, 1945. Lives and works in Lusanga, Democratic Republic of Congo Charles Leba Lusanga, Democratic Republic of Congo, 1992. Lives and works in Lusanga, Democratic Republic of Congo

Richard Leta Nioka, Democratic Republic of Congo, 1964. Lives and works in Lusanga, Democratic Republic of Congo Jérémie Mabiala Kiyenge Nkiama, Democratic Republic of Congo, 1950. Lives and works in Lusanga, Democratic Republic of Congo Plamedi Makongote Idiofa, Democratic Republic of Congo, 2001. Lives and works in Lusanga, Democratic Republic of Congo Blaise Mandefu Kikwit, Democratic Republic of Congo, 1968. Lives and works in Lusanga, Democratic Republic of Congo Daniel Manenga Lusanga, Democratic Republic of Congo, 1974. Lives and works in Lusanga, Democratic Republic of Congo Mira Meya Kikwit, Democratic Republic of Congo, 1983. Lives and works in Lusanga, Democratic Republic of Congo Emery Muhamba Kikwit, Democratic Republic of Congo, 1970. Lives and works in Lusanga, Democratic Republic of Congo Tantine Mukundu Lusanga, Democratic Republic of Congo, 1985. Lives and works in Lusanga, Democratic Republic of Congo Olele Mulela Malundu, Democratic Republic of Congo, 1952. Lives and works in Lusanga, Democratic Republic of Congo Daniel Muvunzi Lusanga, Democratic Republic of Congo, 1981. Lives and works in Lusanga, Democratic Republic of Congo

René Ngongo Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo, 1961. Lives and works in Kinshasa and Lusanga, Democratic Republic of Congo Alvers Tamasala Likasi, Democratic Republic of Congo, 1990. Lives and works in Lusanga, Democratic Republic of Congo Ced’art Tamasala Likasi, Democratic Republic of Congo, 1983. Lives and works in Lusanga, Democratic Republic of Congo

Nigeria Tunji Adeniyi-Jones London, UK, 1992. Lives and works in New York, USA Ndidi Dike London, UK. Lives and works in Lagos, Nigeria Onyeka Igwe London, UK, 1986. Lives and works in London Toyin Ojih Odutola Ile-Ife, Nigeria, 1985. Lives and works in New York, USA Abraham O. Oghobase Lagos, Nigeria, 1979. Lives and works in Toronto, Canada Precious Okoyomon London, UK, 1993. Lives and works in New York, USA Yinka Shonibare CBE RA London, UK, 1962. Lives and works London Fatimah Tuggar Kaduna, Nigeria, 1967. Lives and works in Gainesville, USA

Republic of North Macedonia Slavica Janešlieva Skopje, SFR Yugoslavia, 1973. Lives and works in Skopje, Republic of North Macedonia

Sultanate of Oman Ali al Jabri Sohar, Sultanate of Oman, 1980. Lives in Sohar and works in Muscat, Sultanate of Oman Alia al Farsi Muttrah, Sultanate of Oman, 1972. Lives and works in Muscat. Sarah al Olaqi London, UK, 1984. Lives and works in Muscat, Sultanate of Oman Essa al Mufarji Bahla, Sultanate of Oman, 1981. Lives and works in Muscat, Sultanate of Oman Adham al Farsi Muscat, Sultanate of Oman, 1983. Lives and works in Muscat

Republic of Panama Brooke Alfaro Panama, 1949. Lives and works in Panama City Isabel De Obaldía Washington D.C., USA, 1957. Lives and works in Panama City Cisco Merel Panama, 1981. Lives and works in Panama City Giana De Dier Panama, 1980. Lives and works in Panama City

Peru Roberto Huarcaya Lima, Peru, 1959. Lives and works in Lima, Peru

Philippines Mark Salvatus Lucban, Philippines, 1980. Lives and works in Quezon City, Philippines

Poland Open Group Founded in Lviv, Ukraine, 2012 Yuriy Biley Uzhhorod, Ukraine, 1988

Anton Varga Uzhhorod, Ukraine, 1989 Lives and works in Wrocław (Poland), Berlin (Germany), Lviv (Ukraine) and New York City (USA) Pavlo Kovach Uzhhorod, Ukraine, 1987 Lives and works in Wrocław (Poland), Berlin (Germany), Lviv (Ukraine) and New York City (USA)

STRANIERI OVUNQUE

Djonga Bismar Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, 1978. Lives and works in Lusanga, Democratic Republic of Congo.

Philomène Lembusa Lusanga, Democratic Republic of Congo, 1989. Lives and works in Lusanga, Democratic Republic of Congo

Portugal Mónica de Miranda Porto, Portugal, 1976. Lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal Sónia Vaz Borges Lisbon, Portugal, 1980. Lives and works in Philadelphia, USA Vânia Gala Coimbra, Portugal, 1972. Lives and works in London, UK

Romania Șerban Savu Sighișoara, Romania, 1978. Lives and works in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Atelier Brenda Bruxelles, Belgium

Republic of San Marino Eddie Martinez Groton Naval Base, CT, USA, 1977. Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, USA

Saudi Arabia Manal AlDowayan Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, 1973. Lives and works between London, UK and Dhahran, Saudi Arabia

Senegal Alioune Diagne Kaffrine, Senegal, 1985. Lives and works in Dakar, Senegal

Serbia Aleksandar Denić Belgrade, Serbia, 1963. Lives and works in Belgrade

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

255

The Netherlands

256

Republic of Seychelles Jude Ally Republic of Seychelles, 1979. Lives and works in Republic of Seychelles Ryan Chetty Republic of Seychelles, 1989. Lives and works in Republic of Seychelles Danielle Freakley Australia, 1982. Lives and works in Australia Juliette Zelime (aka Jadez) Republic of Seychelles, 1984. Lives and works in Republic of Seychelles

Singapore Robert Zhao Renhui Singapore, 1983. Lives and works in Singapore

LIST OF PARTICIPANTS

Slovak Republic Oto Hudec Košice, Slovak Republic, 1981. Lives and works in Košice, Slovak Republic

Republic of Slovenia Nika Špan Ljubljana, Republic of Slovenia, 1967. Lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany and Ljubljana

Republic of South Africa Molemo Moiloa Lives and works in Johannesburg, Republic of South Africa Nare Mokgotho Lives and works in Johannesburg, Republic of South Africa

Spain Sandra Gamarra Heshiki Lima, Peru, 1972. Lives and works in Lima and Madrid, Spain

Switzerland

BIENNALE ARTE

Guerreiro do Divino Amor Geneva, Switzerland, 1983. Lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 2024

United Republic of Tanzania Lutengano Mwakisopile Dar es Salaam, United Republic of Tanzania, 1976. Lives and works in Dar es Salaam Haji Mussa Chilonga Masasi, United Republic of Tanzania, 1969. Lives and works in Dar es Salaam, United Republic of Tanzania Naby Bologna, Italy, 1968. Lives and works in Bologna Happy Robert Songea, United Republic of Tanzania. Lives and works in Dar es Salaam, United Republic of Tanzania

Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste Maria Madeira Geno, Democratic Republic of TimorLeste, 1966. Lives and works in Dili, Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste and Perth, Australia

Türkiye Gülsün Karamustafa Ankara, Türkiye, 1946. Lives and works in Istanbul, Türkiye and Berlin, Germany

Uganda Artisan Weavers Collective is a coalition of 25 leading, intergenerational artisan weavers Odur Ronald Uganda, 1992. Lives and works in Kampala Sanaa Gateja Kisoro, Uganda, 1950. Lives in Kampala, Uganda Jose Hendo Kagango, Uganda, 1966. Lives and works in the UK and Uganda Xenson Ssenkaaba Wakiso, Uganda, 1976. Lives and works in Kampala, Uganda

Taga Nuwagaba Kitante, Uganda, 1968. Lives and works in Kampala, Uganda

Ukraine Katya Buchatska Kyiv, Ukraine, 1987. Lives and works in Kyiv Oleksandr Burlaka Kyiv, Ukraine, 1982. Lives and works in Kyiv Andrii Dostliev Brianka, Ukraine, 1984. Lives and works in Poznań, Poland Lia Dostlieva Donetsk, Ukraine, 1984. Lives and works in Poznań, Poland Andrii Rachynskyi Kharkiv, Ukraine, 1990. Lives and works in Kharkiv and Lviv, Ukraine Daniil Revkovskyi Kharkiv, Ukraine, 1993. Lives and works in Kyiv, Ukraine

United Arab Emirates Abdullah Al Saadi Khor Fakkan, United Arab Emirates, 1967. Lives and works in Khor Fakkan

Uruguay

Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela Juvenal Ravelo Caripito, Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, 1932. Lives and works in Caracas and Caripito, Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela

Republic of Zimbabwe Gillian Rosselli Masvingo, Republic of Zimbabwe, 1962. Lives and works between Harare and Masvingo, Republic of Zimbabwe Viktor Nyakauru Harare, Republic of Zimbabwe, 1977. Lives and works in Harare, Republic of Zimbabwe Kombo Chapfika Harare, Republic of Zimbabwe, 1981. Lives and works in Harare, Republic of Zimbabwe Troy Makaza Harare, Republic of Zimbabwe, 1995. Lives and works between Harare and Marondera, Republic of Zimbabwe Moffat Takadiwa Karoi, Republic of Zimbabwe, 1983. Lives and works in Harare, Republic of Zimbabwe

Eduardo Cardozo Montevideo, Uruguay, 1965. Lives and works in Montevideo, Urugua

Sekai Machache Harare, Republic of Zimbabwe, 1989. Lives and works in Glasgow, UK

USA

Venice Pavilion

Jeffrey Gibson Colorado Springs, USA, 1972. Lives and works in Hudson, USA

Franco Arminio Bisaccia, Italy, 1960. Lives and works in Bisaccia

Republic of Uzbekistan Aziza Kadyri Moscow, Russia, 1994. Lives and works between Tashkent, Republic of Uzbekistan and London, UK

Vittorio Marella Venice, Italy, 1997. Lives and works in Venice Pietro Ruffo Rome, Italy, 1978. Lives and works in Rome Safet Zec Rogatica, BosniaHerzegovina, 1943. Lives and works between Venice, Italy, Sarajevo and Počitelj, Bosnia-Herzegovina

Yoo Youngkuk Uljin, Republic of Korea, 1916–2002

Dread Scott Chicago, USA, 1965. Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, USA

A World of Many Worlds Isaac Chong Wai Guangdong, People’s Republic of China, 1990. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany Sandra Gamarra Heshiki Lima, Peru, 1972. Lives and works in Lima, Peru and Madrid, Spain Lap-See Lam Stockholm, Sweden, 1990. Lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden Subash Thebe Limbu Yakthung Nation (known as Eastern Nepal), 1981. Lives and works in Newa Nation (Kathmandu, Nepal), and London, United Kingdom Vidha Saumya Patna, India, 1984. Lives and works in Helsinki, Finland Joshua Serafin Philippines, 1995. Lives and works in Brussels, Belgium Qingmei Yao Zhejiang, People’s Republic of China, 1984. Lives and works in Wenzhou, People’s Republic of China, and Paris, France Trevor Yeung Guangdong, People’s Republic of China, 1988. Lives and works in Hong Kong

Above Zobeide, Exhibition from Macao, China Wong Weng Cheong Macau, Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China. Lives and works in Macau

Andrzej Wróblewski (1927–1957). In the First Person Andrzej Wróblewski Wilno, Poland, 1927 – Tatra Mountains, Slovakia/Poland, 1957

Berlinde De Bruyckere: City of Refuge III Berlinde De Bruyckere Ghent, Belgium, 1964. Lives and works in Ghent, Belgium

Catalonia in Venice | Bestiari | Carlos Casas Carlos Casas 1974, Barcelona, Spain. Lives and works in London, UK and Basel, Switzerland

Cosmic Garden Madhvi Parekh Gujarat, India, 1942. Lives and works in New Delhi, India Manu Parekh Gujarat, India, 1939. Lives and works in New Delhi, India Karishma Swali Mumbai, India, 1977. Lives and works in Mumbai, India

Daring to Dream in a World of Constant Fear Kateryna Aliinyk Luhansk, Ukraine, 1998. Lives and works in Kyiv, Ukraine

Jennifer Allora Philadelphia, USA, 1974. Lives and works in San Juan, Puerto Rico Guillermo Calzadilla Havana, Cuba, 1971. Lives and works in San Juan, Puerto Rico Alex Baczyński-Jenkins London, United Kingdom, 1987. Lives and works in Warsaw, Poland, and London, United Kingdom Fatma Bucak Iskenderun, Türkiye, 1984. Lives and works in London, United Kingdom, and Istanbul, Türkiye David Claerbout Kortrijk, Belgium, 1969. Lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium Shilpa Gupta Mumbai, India, 1976. Lives and works in Mumbai, India Oleg Holosiy Dnipro, Ukraine, 1965 – Kyiv, Ukraine, 1993 Nikita Kadan Kyiv, Ukraine, 1982. Lives and works in Kyiv, Ukraine Zhanna Kadyrova Brovary, Ukraine, 1981. Lives and works in Kyiv, Ukraine Dana Kavelina Melitopol, Ukraine, 1995. Lives and works in Lviv, Ukraine, and Berlin, Germany Nikolay Karabinovych Odesa, Ukraine, 1988. Lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and Antwerp, Belgium Lesia Khomenko Kyiv, Ukraine, 1980. Lives and works in New York, USA Yana Kononova Pirallahi Island, Azerbaijan, 1977. Lives and works in Kyiv oblast and Cherkasy oblast, Ukraine Kateryna Lysovenko Odesa, Ukraine, 1989. Lives and works in Vienna, Austria Otobong Nkanga Kano, Nigeria, 1974. Lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium

Wilfredo Prieto García Province of Sancti Spíritus, Cuba, 1978. Lives and works in Barcelona, Spain Oleksiy Sai Kyiv, Ukraine, 1975. Lives and works in Kyiv, Ukraine

Elias Sime: Dichotomy ፊት አና jerba Elias Sime Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 1968. Lives and works in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Anton Saenko Sumy, Ukraine, 1989. Lives and works in Kyiv, Ukraine

Ernest PignonErnest: Je Est Un Autre

Fedir Tetianych Kniazhychi, Ukraine, 1942 – Kyiv, Ukraine, 2007

Ernest Pignon-Ernest Nice, France, 1942. Lives and works in Paris, France

Anna Zvyagintseva Dnipro, Ukraine, 1986. Lives and works in Kyiv, Ukraine Roman Khimei Kolomyya, Ukraine, 1992. Lives and works in Kyiv, Ukraine Yarema Malashchuk Kolomyya, Ukraine, 1993. Lives and works in Kyiv, Ukraine Daniil Revkovskiy Kharkiv, Ukraine, 1993. Lives and works in Kyiv, Ukraine Andriy Rachinskiy Kharkiv, Ukraine, 1990. Lives and works in Lviv, Ukraine

Desde San Juan Bautista... Awilda Sterling-Duprey San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1947. Lives and works in San Juan, Puerto Rico Celso González San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1973. Lives and works in San Juan, Puerto Rico Chemi Rosado-Seijo Vega Alta, Puerto Rico, 1973. Lives and works between Naranjito and San Juan, Puerto Rico Daniel Lind-Ramos Loíza, Puerto Rico, 1953. Lives and works between Loíza and San Juan, Puerto Rico

STRANIERI OVUNQUE

All African People’s Consulate

Ewa Juszkiewicz: Locks With Leaves And Swelling Buds Ewa Juszkiewicz Gdansk, Poland, 1984. Lives and works in Warsaw, Poland

Jim Dine – Dog on the Forge Jim Dine Cincinnati, Ohio, 1935. Lives and works in the United States and Europe

Josèfa Ntjam: swell of spæc(i)es Josèfa Ntjam Metz, France, 1992. Lives and works in Saint-Étienne, France

Lee Bae — La Maison de La Lune Brûlée Lee Bae Cheongdo, Republic of Korea, 1956. Lives and works in Cheongdo, Republic of Korea and Paris, France

Madang: Where We Become Us Nam June Paik Seoul, Republic of Korea, 1932. Died in Miami, USA, in 2006

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

257

A Journey to the Infinite: Yoo Youngkuk

258

Kcho (Alexis Leiva Machado) Isla de la Juventud, Cuba, 1970. Lives and works in Havana, Cuba Ayoung Kim Seoul, Republic of Korea, 1979. Lives and works in Seoul

Rebecca Ackroyd Cheltenham, UK, 1987. Lives and works between London, UK, and Berlin, Germany

Sojung Jun Busan, Republic of Korea, 1982. Lives and works in Seoul, Republic of Korea

Robert Indiana: The Sweet Mystery

Sylbee Kim Seoul, Republic of Korea, 1981. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany and Seoul

Passengers In Transit

LIST OF PARTICIPANTS

Joana Choumali Abidjan, Ivory Coast, 1974. Lives and works in Abidjan April Bey New Province, The Bahamas, 1987. Lives and works in Los Angeles, USA Thandiwe Muriu Nairobi, Kenya, 1991. Lives and works in Nairobi Christa David New York City, USA, 1979. Lives and works in Atlanta, USA Euridice Zaituna Kala Maputo, Mozambique, 1987. Lives and works Paris, France

Per non perdere il filo. Karine N’guyen Van Tham – Parul Thacker Karine N’guyen Van Tham Marseille, France, 1988. Lives and works in Brittany, France Parul Thacker Mumbai, India, 1973. Lives and works in Mumbai

Peter Hujar: Portraits in Life and Death BIENNALE ARTE

Peter Hujar Trenton, USA, 1934. Died in New York, USA, 1987. 2024

Rebecca Ackroyd: Mirror Stage

Robert Indiana New Castle, USA, 1928. Died in Vinalhaven, USA, 2018

Isabella Hammad United Kingdom, 1991. Lives and works in Greece Shayma Hammad Palestine, 1997. Lives and works in Ramallah, West Bank, Palestine Chris Harding United Kingdom, 1996. Lives and works in New York City, USA

The Endless Spiral: Betsabeé Romero

Seundja Rhee: Towards the Antipodes

Betsabeé Romero Mexico City, Mexico, 1963. Lives and works in Mexico City

Seundja Rhee Jinju, Republic of Korea, 1918. Lived and worked between Paris and Tourettes, France. Died in Paris in 2009

The Spirits of Maritime Crossing

Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior Shahzia Sikander Lahore, Pakistan, 1969. Lives and works in New York City, USA

South West Bank Landworks, Collective Action and Sound Samer Barbari Palestine, 1983. Lives and works in Beit Jibreen Camp/Al-Azza Camp Bethlehem, Palestine Adam Broomberg Lithuania, 1970. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany Duncan Campbell Ireland, 1972. Lives and works in Glasgow, UK Rafael Gonzáles Germany, 1997. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany and New York City, USA

Marina Abramović Belgrade, Serbia, 1946. Lives and works in New York, USA Priyageetha Dia Singapore, 1992. Lives and works in Singapore Chitti Kasemkitvatana Bangkok, Thailand, 1969. Lives and works in Bangkok Khvay Samnang Svay Rieng, Cambodia, 1982. Lives and works in Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Alwin Reamillo Manila, Philippines, 1964-2023. Lived and worked in Manila and in Perth, Australia Moe Satt Yangon, Myanmar, 1983. Lives and works in Amsterdam, the Netherlands Jakkai Siributr Bangkok, Thailand, 1969. Lives and works in Bangkok Truong Cong Tung Dak Lak, Vietnam, 1986. Lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam Natee Utarit Bangkok, Thailand. 1970. Lives and works in Bangkok Kawita Vatanajyankur Bangkok, Thailand, 1987. Lives and works in Bangkok Yee I-Lann Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia, 1971. Lives and works in Kota Kinabalu

Trevor Yeung: Courtyard of Attachments, Hong Kong in Venice Trevor Yeung Dongguan, People’s Republic of China, 1988. Lives and works in Hong Kong

Pichet Klunchun Bangkok, Thailand, 1971. Lives and works in Bangkok

Ydessa Hendeles: Grand Hotel

Jompet Kuswidananto Yogyakarta, Indonesia, 1976. Lives and works in Yogyakarta and Bali, Indonesia

Ydessa Hendeles Marburg, Germany, 1948. Lives and works in Toronto, Canada and New York, USA

Nakrob Moonmanas Bangkok, Thailand, 1990. Lives and works in Bangkok Bounpaul Phothyzan Champasak Province, Laos, 1979. Lives and works in Vientiane, Laos

Yuan GoangMing: Everyday War Yuan Goang-Ming Taipei, Taiwan, 1965. Lives and works in Taipei

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE – STRANIERI OVUNQUE LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA Editorial Activities and Web Head Flavia Fossa Margutti Vol. 2 Editorial Coordination Maddalena Pietragnoli Text editing and supervision Anna Amanda Albano Federico Sanna In collaboration with Caterina Moro

Graphic Design and Layout Estudio Campo Paula Tinoco Roderico Souza Carolina Aboarrage Translations and Layout Liberink srls, Padova Stefano Turon Coordinator Livio Cassese Layout Copyediting Rosanna Alberti Caterina Vettore Translations Salvatore Mele and Giuliana Schiavi for Alphaville Roberta Prandin Ismar Tirelli Neto Photolith and Print Grafiche Antiga Spa via delle Industrie 1, Crocetta del Montello (Treviso)

© La Biennale di Venezia 2024 The captions and credits of the images in this publication have been compiled with the outmost care. Any errors or omissions are unintentional, and we will be glad to include the appropriate credits and solve any copyright issues in future editions if new information comes to the attention of La Biennale di Venezia. All Rights Reserved under international copyright conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. ISBN 9788898727889 La Biennale di Venezia First Edition April 2024

La Biennale di Venezia

60th International Art Exhibition