Deep down inside of us, we are all foreigners. Even if you belong to the elitist art world and have been attending the Venice Art Biennale for years, few things in the edition designed by Brazilian Adriano Pedrosa will make you feel at home. As transcendental as the one in 2022, which will be remembered as the Women’s Biennial (for the first time they outnumbered male artists), the one that will open its doors on Saturday marks a new paradigm in which previously unheard voices emerge – more than Half of the artists in the central exhibition are dead and 50 of the 332 represented were born in the 19th century – artists from the Global South in the diaspora or indigenous people who had been waiting in the wings all their lives and are now taking the stage.
Is the time of the Western white man over? Seductive and challenging, the 60th Art Biennial explores from multiple perspectives the social scars left in the world by conflicts and divisions, especially centuries of colonialism, while offering more hopeful visions of the future. “It is not so much about showing wounds as about using the past, which we can no longer change, to talk about the present and leave something for the future. The colonial past is in many of the current emergencies, from social issues to the climate crisis,” says Agustín Pérez Rubio, curator of the Spanish pavilion, which for the first time in a long time has long lines at the entrance. Inside, the P inacoteca migrante by the Peruvian-Spanish artist Sandra Gamarra, an imaginary museum that leads to a garden where, painted on methacrylate, the figures of unknown heroes and heroines of the former Hispanic colonies emerge. Which, of course, don’t appear in the books.
“There are many ways of telling history and there are many stories,” says Gamarra, who hacks and repaints works by Murillo, Velázquez and Zurbarán present in Spanish collections to reveal how current colonial thought is and relate it to issues such as racism. , sexism or even climate change (“it did not only involve exploitation of human beings, but also the earth’s resources”). In one corner, he creates a Cabinet of Illustrated Racism where, we are talking about two days ago, we find the Domund piggy banks in the shape of a Chinese man with a braid, a black boy with curly hair and an Indian with feathers, or the Three Mulatos of Esmeraldas which the Prado used to promote its Tornaviaje exhibition by wrapping chocolate bars with the percentage of cocoa depending on the intensity of the blackness of each of them.
The past that becomes present, like that inscription that Gamarra introduces in an alpine landscape, “Lithium for today, hunger for tomorrow”, which finds its echo in the Russian pavilion, which in 2022 the artists closed after the invasion of Ukraine and that this year they have given way to Bolivia thanks to the agreement between both countries to create a large lithium industry. The name of the Brazilian pavilion has also been changed, which has been renamed the Hãhãwpuá pavilion, the name that the Pataxó people use for the land now known as Brazil, a country that recently apologized to indigenous groups for persecution during the dictatorship. .
The United Kingdom has also filled its pavilion with a multimedia installation by Ghanaian-born artist and filmmaker John Akomfrah, which examines the colonial experience in exile. And the US, in a surprising turn, has invited a queer and Cherokee artist, Jeffrey Gibso, to theirs, who has filled it with majestic sculptures made of colored beads with references to indigenous stories.
The indigenous people are also the heart of the central exhibition designed by curator Adriano Pedrosa, Foreigners Everywhere, perhaps because as he himself recalled “no one like them knows what it is to feel strange in their own land.” History is written again.
