The curator and artistic director of the 60th Venice Biennale, Adriano Pedrosa, has announced the guiding theme for next year’s exhibition. It will explore the notion of the outsider and focus on those on the margins, namely exiles, migrants and foreigners.
The title and theme, “Foreigners Everywhere”, was announced today, June 22, in Venice by Pedrosa. THE artistic director of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo hails from Brazil and is not only the biennial’s first Latin American curator, but, more remarkably, the first to come from the southern hemisphere. The gigantic artistic event in Italy will take place from April 20 to November 24, 2024.
The concept of the 2024 show has a double meaning for Pedrosa. The planned theme not only suggests that wherever we go in the world we will meet those we perceive as strangers, but also that “no matter where you are, you are always truly and deeply inside a stranger yourself,” according to the curator. He added that artists are no strangers to this sentiment.
The title is borrowed from a series of works by conceptual “artist collective” Claire Fontaine, founded in Paris in 2004 by Italian artist Fulvia Carnevale and British artist James Thornhill, currently based in Palermo, Italy.
their series Strangers everywhere consists of simple neon signs with the slogan written in different languages. In each case, the term carries a strange ambiguity as to whether we should read the statement as a fact or a threat, although it was taken from the name of Stranieri Ovunque (as the phrase translates into Italian), a collective Turin-based anarchist known for his anti-racist activism in the early 2000s.
Tourists and locals enter the central pavilion of the Biennale during the 59th International Art Exhibition on April 20, 2022 in Venice, Italy. Photo: Stefano Mazzola/Getty Images
Pedrosa told the press that “the backdrop of Claire Fontaine’s work is a world full of multiple crises concerning the movement and existence of people across countries, nations, territories and borders, which reflect the perils and pitfalls of language, translation, ethnicity [in] expressing differences and disparities conditioned by identity, nationality, race, gender, sexuality, wealth and freedom.
For his curated exhibition, Pedrosa promises to focus on immigrant, expatriate, diasporic, exiled and refugee artists, especially those who have moved between South and North. However, as the Italian translation of “foreigner” as “straniero” shows, the word also conjures up the idea of a foreigner more generally. To that end, the exhibition will also include all kinds of marginalized artists, including those who are queer, referred to as “outsiders” or indigenous and therefore “often treated as outsiders in their own country”.
For many artists, this “foreign” status dictates the themes or narratives of their work, but Pedrosa was keen to note that other artists “delve into more formal matters with their own foreign accent.” Works that reflect this mode of innovation will appear throughout the exhibition, as will historic 20th-century works from underrepresented modernist movements that flourished in the Global South. Finally, the spotlight will also be placed on the Italian artistic diaspora, which emigrated to Latin America, Asia, Africa and the Arab world, among other places, where it contributed to the development of modernism on an international scale.
The Venice Biennale is the biggest international event in the art world – there were 80 national pavilions in 2022 – and it always welcomes new exhibitors. The Republic of Benin will participate for the first time at the 60th edition next year.
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