La Biennale di Venezia 2024: An inside view
by Thomas Gibbs
The Venice Biennale is often described as the Olympics of the art world. As the oldest international art expo, it is a place where the trends, vices, excesses, and discoveries of contemporary art can all be seen, crammed into a crumbling medieval city unlike any other. This summer I was lucky enough to work for a month at the biennale, invigilating the British Pavilion. Even in a month, I couldn’t see everything, however, I did get to see more than most. So, with a month left until the biennale shuts its doors for the winter, here is my guide to the 2024 Venice Biennale.
Installation view of Central Pavilion, Venice Biennale. Feat. Claire Fontaine, Foreigners Everywhere, 2004-Present, neon sign.
This year’s biennale is titled ‘Stranieri Ovunque - Foreigners Everywhere’, inspired by Claire Fontaine’s artwork of the same name – a series of neon signs which translate the phrase ‘Foreigners Everywhere’ into multitudinous languages. The theme is provocative and serves to highlight minority artists, however, to my mind, many national pavilions and even the Biennale curator Adriano Pedrosa interpreted ‘foreigner’ too broadly. In the national pavilions this results in astonishing diversity, addressing issues such as the war in Ukraine, economic migration, the importing of animals, and queerness as an outsider identity. In Pedrosa’s unremarkable Central Pavilion, however, diversity came at the cost of focus, and the exhibition lacked narrative force. Nonetheless, attempts to intervene in existing artistic canons are always welcome, and it was good to see renowned artists like Frida Kahlo and Barrington Watson appear at the Biennale for what is, shockingly, the first time.
The Arsenale, by contrast, is far better curated. Pedrosa is the first Biennale curator to be based in the Global South and his focus on indigenous and queer voices from Asia and South America elevated this exhibition. The Arsenale featured far more diverse artforms than the Central Pavilion, with a weight towards textiles and video art – although never to the point of exhaustion. Charmaine Poh’s video essay on queer family life in Singapore was deeply moving and provoked a very bittersweet emotion that stayed with me throughout the exhibition. Most exciting was the number of artists using folk techniques to discuss “modern” political issues. I was thrilled to see Xiyadie’s san-bian style papercuts which celebrate sexuality and cruising in a queer-hostile Chinese environment. Combining a gay orgy scene with the colourful floral motifs typical of the ancient Chinese style is a delicately political and subversive act. Likewise, Ahmed Umar’s complex queering of a Sudanese bridal ritual subtly portrayed the difficulty of connecting heritage and gender identity; excluded from his heritage in Norway, and his identity in Sudan, the artist truly is a foreigner everywhere. Violeta Quispe took a less personal but no less striking approach, using Andean folk painting to highlight gender-based and colonial violence in Peru. As with Xiyadie’s work, the contrast between subject matter and style was both striking and politically charged.
Xiyadie, Kaiyang, 2021, Papercut with waterbased dye and Chinese pigments on Xuan paper, 140 × 300 cm, Stranieri Ovunque - Foreigners Everywhere, Venice Arsenale.
The national pavilions are too numerous to list but a few highlights are worthy of mention. Some, like the British pavilion (where I spent most of my time), stuck closely to the theme. John Akomfrah’s overwhelming audio-visual display traced the history of racism, migration, colonialism, and identity throughout British history. Unlike many other artists at the biennale, Akomfrah shies away from presenting conclusions, instead he merely presents images and sounds to the viewer as evidence and invites their own interpretation. The result is a subtle, thought-provoking experience, albeit one that is ill-suited to the format of a biennale, which rewards shorter more immediately striking artworks. Most visitors spent under five minutes exploring Akomfrah’s eight ‘cantos’ (which total over four hours of video). After a month sat in the gallery all day, I felt like I was barely scratching the surface of the work’s meaning and complex symbolism. Nonetheless, the work is masterful. A leitmotif of water rippled through the exhibition, from the “submerged” basement room at the entrance to the bubbling exterior of the pavilion. The water washes over symbols of our history but it does not cleanse them, it holds onto their memory and carries it through. It was a remarkable experience to move through the immersive space and soundscape, and at no point does Akomfrah’s work feel preachy, even when it is confrontational. Of course, you will be able to form your own opinion when Listening All Night to the Rain comes to Dundee’s DCA next year.
Australia’s pavilion was more direct. Archie Moore’s kith and kin consisted of a single black box; its walls covered in a chalked family tree which traces his First Nation’s heritage back to the common ancestors of the entire human race. Moore suggests that we all share a link to the tragedy of First Nation people dying in British custody, symbolised by piles of coroner’s reports in the centre of the room. An inky black moat surrounds these papers, denying us detailed access to them and reflecting Moore’s family tree. kith and kin therefore ingeniously balances the scale of indigenous people’s suffering with the personal tragedy of each case.
Mónica de Miranda, Sónia Vaz Borges, and Vânia Gala, Greenhouse, plants and mixed media, Portuguese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
Around the corner, Sandra Gamarra Heshiki’s Migrant Art Gallery transformed the Spanish pavilion into a colonial-style museum, filled with new artworks based on objects in the Spanish national collection. Heshiki’s works subtly critique the ideologies and power structures underlying national museums and the similarity between her imagined neo-classical architecture and that of the British and French pavilions was uncomfortable. However, the Migrant Art Gallery was let down by vision of a new museology that offered little more than the white cube under a different name. A more developed concept could have produced something like the Portugese pavilion, Greenhouse, which built a a physical ‘creole garden’ in a Venetian library to exemplify Édouard Glissant’s writing.
The Czech pavilion stood out for its bizarre concept, a decolonial interpretation of a giraffe’s life and death in captivity, expressed through children’s stories and explorable soft-play-esque replicas of dismembered giraffe body parts. Despite mixed reviews, I think the innovative subject and collaborative approach make this one of the standout pavilions worth visiting. By contrast, the adjacent French and American pavilions were dull, commercial, and uninspired.
However, I was pleasantly surprised by Aleksandar Denić’s Serbian pavilion. He created an ‘Exposition Coloniale’ which rather than celebrating the profits of colonialism, showcased its consequences. The entire diorama sits in the shadow of Europe – a giant billboard illuminating only a distant wall and leaving the exhibition in darkness. What Denić’s work lacks in subtlety it makes up for in detail, and exploring his intricately constructed spaces was a joy.
Aleksandar Denić, Exposition Coloniale (detail), 2024, installation at Serbian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
Trevor Yeung, installation shot Courtyard of Attachments, 2024, Hong Kong Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
Trevor Yeung’s Courtyard of Attachments, the Hong Kong pavilion, generated a remarkable sense of loss and absence through an array of empty fish tanks. Exactly how this sense of longing and absence was so affecting I cannot fathom, but it impressed me a great deal. Zimbabwe’s pavilion was a low budget affair, hidden on the top floor of an office block and advertised with a single printed A4 sheet, yet it contained some of the most materially inventive work at the biennale. Kombo Chapfrika used augmented reality Instagram filters to animate his paintings, something which I had seen before, but thought was well executed here. Moffat Takadiwa’s three-dimensional collages were the highlight, however, using zippers, buttons, toothpaste tubes and other junk to form beautiful rippling surfaces and structures. His work Land Redistribution also stood out as one of the few interactive artworks at this year’s biennale, inviting visitors to ‘own a bit of Zimbabwe’ by taking away buttons from his artwork.
Moffat Takadiwa, Dudu Muduri, 2024, toothpaste tubes, clothing tags, toothbrushes, and computer keys, various dimensions, Zimbabwean Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
My favourite work, however, has to be Eimear Walshe’s Romantic Ireland. The Irish pavilion distilled all the complexity, nuance, and conflicting narratives of John Akomfrah’s work into a single room. Walshe’s focus is on Irish land, its ownership and contestation. Her film is dense with symbolism and dances across Irish history drawing comparisons between seemingly incongruous events. Beneath the scenes of stock characters fighting and dancing, Amanda Feery’s operetta tells the story of an old man being evicted in his dying days by a gang of men who tear down his house. Walshe links this individual case to institutional issues, land contestation from the 19th to the 21st century is linked to the emergence of the Irish state, while lines from Éamon De Valera’s famously romantic speech juxtapose the dream of socially progressive revolutionaries with the stark reality of an Ireland in which fundamental economic issues remain unsolved. Conflict is expressed through song and dance, within the frame of a meitheal (collaborative labour group) dancing to compress mud to build a traditional dwelling. Except it gradually becomes apparent that the characters are instead ‘building a ruin’. The pointless irony of this endeavour flows over every action in Walshe’s film as it devolves into a bizarre pantomime. A complex and delicate work, Romantic Ireland will tour Ireland next year and I can’t recommend going to see it enough.
Eimear Walshe, Production still from Romantic Ireland, 2024, film, operetta, and mud structure, Irish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Image courtesy of the artist.
The Venice biennale continues until November 24th If you cannot make it to Venice, John Akomfrah’s Listening All Night to the Rain is coming to Cardiff and Dundee in 2025/6, Eimear Walshe’s Romantic Ireland will tour Ireland next year.