The 60th International Art Exhibition will take place in Venice from Saturday 20 April to Sunday 24 November 2024 (pre-opening on 17, 18 and 19 April), curated by Adriano Pedrosa.
Adriano Pedrosa (Brazil) is currently artistic director of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand – MASP, where he has curated numerous exhibitions, including “Stories of Dance” (2020) and “Stories of Brazil” (2022). He has recently been named the 2023 winner of the Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence, presented by the Center for Curatorial Studies at BardCollege in New York.
THE VENICE ART BIENNALE 2024 THEME: Stranieri Ovunque – Strangers Everywhere, is inspired by a series of works initiated in 2004 by the Paris-born Claire Fontaine collective, based in Palermo, Italy. The works consist of neon sculptures in different colours that reproduce in an increasing number of languages the words “Foreigners Everywhere”. The phrase in turn comes from the name of a Turin-based collective that fought against racism and xenophobia in Italy in the early 2000s: Stranieri Ovunque.
“I am honoured and humbled by this prestigious appointment, especially for being the first Latin American to curate the International Art Exhibition, and indeed the first based in the southern hemisphere,” commented Pedrosa.
The phrase Foreigners everywhere has a double meaning. Firstly, that wherever you go and wherever you are, you will always find foreigners: they/we are everywhere. Secondly, that no matter where you are, you are always, really and truly, a foreigner.
Art Biennale 2024 will focus on artists who are foreigners, immigrants, expatriates, diasporic, emigrants, exiles and refugees, especially those who have moved between the South and the North.
The figure of the foreigner is associated with the stranger, the straniero, the estranho, the étranger, and so the exhibition unfolds and focuses on the production of other related subjects: the queer artist, who has moved between different sexualities and genders, often persecuted or outlawed; the outsider artist, who is situated on the margins of the art world, as well as the self-taught and the so-called folk artist; as well as the indigenous artist, often treated as a foreigner in his own land. The production of these artists is the main focus of this Biennial, and constitutes the Contemporary Core of the International Exhibition.
The International Exhibition will also feature a Historical Nucleus that will bring together works from Latin America, Africa, the Arab world and Asia from the XXth century. In addition, the Historical Nucleus will dedicate a special section to the Italian artistic diaspora of the 20th century around the world: Italian artists who travelled and moved abroad developing their careers in Africa, Asia, Latin America, as well as the rest of Europe, integrating into local cultures, and who often played significant roles in the development of modernist narratives beyond Italy.
