Venice Biennial 2024    Foreigners Everywhere 

The motto of the 2024 edition of the Venice Biennale was “Foreigners Everywhere”. How was this seemingly controversial statement implemented in the exhibition? We spoke to Dieter Roelstraete, curator at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society.

Dieter, you have been working in the curatorial field for more than two decades now. What do you think about how the theme or title of this year’s Venice biennial – “Foreigners Everywhere” – was translated into the exhibition?

Funnily enough it is the very notion of translating, for me, that cast a bit of a shadow over my experience of the major curated exhibition: I think Adriano Pedrosa’s showpiece (which was titled after a Claire Fontaine’s installation from 2006 called Stranieri Ovunque) should have been translated as “Strangers Everywhere” rather than “Foreigners Everywhere“, as I think it is more productive to think of art as something strange rather than something foreign. That said, all in all I did not find much in said exhibition to be either that foreign or that strange: a lot of artists I had never heard of, to be sure, and a lot of artists “representing” historically marginalized communities (though in some cases that marginalization may now be considered fully historical indeed), but most of the work on view hardly struck me as “alien” (a third possible translation for stranieri).

I mean, how “foreign” can painting really ever be??

Indeed, to be quite honest my visit to the Arsenale and the International Pavilion felt haunted by that nagging “same old, same old” sensation of a now overly familiar curatorial framework and art-historical argument that did little to individuate the quality of the work on view, much of which was of course very rewarding in its own right (and which may be one reason why I found the individual national pavilions to be the bigger draw this time around). Seeing, or presuming to see, “foreignness” everywhere appears to breed its own sense or sameness, and this was nowhere more apparent, if you ask me, than in the facile reduction of the art of various and sundry “others” (indigenous artists, outsider artists, queer artists) to displays of authenticity and craftsmanship. There is very little truly unsettling, these days, about seeing an endless parade of weavings and faux-naïf, folkish figurative painting in the hallowed spaces of the global north’s art establishment.

I mean, how “foreign” can painting really ever be?? (On this note: the question of “strangeness” and painting was addressed quite compellingly in a review I read just recently of the unsettling Christina Ramberg survey show organized by the Art Institute of Chicago earlier this year – Ramberg is surely the kind of artist whose work would have positively radiated in a Venice biennial such as this – and it is worth quoting Susan Tallman’s opening paragraph of said review at some length here: “Strangeness is overused as a selling point in contemporary art. There’s no real reason that “strange” should equate with “good”, and anyway most of what gets called strange trades on century-old surrealist tricks (jarring juxtapositions, biomorphic distortions, sexual kink) that are no longer strange at all. Every once in a while, though, something comes along for which no other word really suffices – something whose strangeness is not a strategy or a goal but a by-product of following a certain line of thought. Something whose strangeness creeps up on you, as it must have done on the artist as she worked, and changes the way you look at things.”) Anyway… I presume you’ve guessed, by now, that I did not really care for this slightly patronizing throwback to the ethnologizing days of Magiciens-de-la-terre-style “othering” – but there is of course a whole lot of really great art on view in Pedrosa’s show that makes the trip more than amply worth your while.

a lot of really great art

The curated exhibition in the Arsenale presents more indigenous artists than any other Biennale edition so far. Isn’t there an internal paradox, that now in Venice indigenous artists feature prominently under the label “foreigners”, while in most instances indigenous people would consider them as “the people”, who during the course of history got colonized by “foreigners”? And now get presented in the heart of the continent, the colonizing foreigners had come from?

Yes, there is something about the equation of indigeneity and foreignness at the heart of Pedrosa’s curatorial construct that feels a little… retrograde? Just like there is something about the equation of indigeneity with “craft” and a certain naïve conception of authenticity that feels like it sets us back in time quite a bit. That said, there is of course a lot of really great art to be enjoyed in this year’s biennial, and a lot of it was indeed made by indigenous artists – though the best indigenous art in Venice can be viewed in some of the national pavilions: Brazil (Ka’a Pûera: we are walking birds), Australia (a rightful winner of the Golden Lion in the person of Archie Moore, an artist of partially Aboriginal descent), the United States (Jeffrey Gibson, Mississipi Choctaw and Cherokee), Denmark – which was temporarily renamed Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland in its native Inuit tongue) by the Greenlandic artist Inuuteq Storch.

I felt the latter was particularly memorable for being so resolutely anti-nostalgic and unsentimental in its use of photography plain and simple – of a diaristic, quasi-journalistic variety that reminds us of the fact that the vast majority of today’s indigenous artists make most of their work using iPhones and laptops and online tools just like the “rest” of “us” (whatever that “us” may mean). And I can’t possibly be objective about Jeffrey Gibson’s masterful The Space In Which to Place Me, of course, but suffice it to say that I found its maximalist technicolor extravaganza a welcome antidote to the somewhat didactic tone of the generalized infatuation with the indigenous artist as a purveyor of primarily historical or archaic forms. I like Gibson’s forward-looking impulse – and his investment in a slightly more hybrid understanding of identity. Indeed, the single most moving event of the entire opening week, as far as I’m concerned, happened when a special guest of the US pavilion, the artist G. Peter Jemison of the Seneca Nation’s Heron Clan, gave his blessing (in his native language) to the proceedings, reflecting upon the serendipity of his standing there, just a couple hundred kilometers away from the birthplace of one Christopher Columbus (or that of one Amerigo Vespucci). That, to me, is what the black magic of history is about, so to speak: complexity – of the kind that frustrates the essentializing drive of so much identity politics.