A Subjective Walk in Venice

Author: János Schneller

Adriano Pedrosa, of the Sao Paulo Art Museum, is the chief curator of the Venice Biennale 2024, and has given the title Stranieri Ovunque (Foreigners Everywhere) to the international fair, which is being held now for the 60th time this year. The concept itself revolves around notions of strangeness, displacement, strangeness and otherness. Pedrosa has gathered, in a somewhat unreflective way, the social, political and gender inequalities of society and the most diverse manifestations of oppression and minority existence in art, along the lines of postcolonial discourse. The central exhibition is difficult to relate to, with few truly witty and innovative works of art. Amongst the national pavilions, the most striking is the Gold Lion-prize winning Australian pavilion, with its monumental black box, which is both minimalist in style and unassisted, and features Archie Moore’s installation kith and kin. Also enjoyable was the Polish exhibition titled Repeat after me, in which artists from the Open Group asked ordinary people who had fled from Ukraine to Poland to imitate the horrific, death-defying noises made by state-of-the-art weapons.
To my mind, the satellite exhibitions offered more excitement than the Biennale itself. The exhibition space of the Arsenale Institute for Politics of Representation provided the setting for William Kentridge’s video series titled Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot. The seventy-year-old South African artist is one of the world’s best-known visual artists today, whose work is situated in a confluence of drawing, reproduced graphics, moving images, stage set designs and movement art pieces. A similarly defining experience is the grand exhibition of French artist Pierre Huyghe’s titled liminal, held in the Pinault Collection’s Punta della Dogana. On huge projection screens and in dark interiors, the oppressive atmosphere of human and non-human or post-human fictions is blended with the atmosphere of a future archaeological museum.