With more than 300 artists and 90 national pavilions, the Venice Art Biennale opened on April 20. On the program, a political positioning with the mission of reversing the poles of influence
At the 60th edition of the Venice Art Biennale, we will not have seen an explosion like Rauschenberg whose Golden Lion, won in 1964, shook the art world by overturning the two polarities that were Europe and the United States, giving the latter a first look. However, it was in some way also a question of reversed polarities in order to highlight the “Global South” mirroring the hegemonic Eurocentrism of knowledge, from the perspective of decolonial studies, here embodied by the Brazilian Adriano Pedrosa, first curator in the history of the manifestation from the southern hemisphere. Artistic director of the Sao Paulo Art Museum, he is particularly renowned for his exhibitions addressing themes long excluded from the field of traditional contemporary art but which have widely spread in recent years within institutions, namely questions of gender or recognition of minorities. Claiming to be queer and coming from a very militant Latin America with regard to reflections on the notion of decoloniality, Pedrosa must deal with the new director of the Biennale, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, a colorful character, labeled with the Italian extreme right by Giorgia Meloni and converted to Shiite Islam. A barely imaginable alliance, and yet it seems today that the notion of inclusiveness can embrace everything, which can sometimes be worrying. La Documenta de Cassel in 2022 – another flagship international contemporary art event – had already declined the idea of under-represented peripheral geographies by inviting a collective of Indonesian artists to organize its curation – unfortunately marred by a fresco of anti-Semite who discredited the event. In Venice, world city, gateway to the Orient where the diffusion of knowledge and the arts has for centuries followed the lively eddies of the Grand Canal under the brilliant gaze of Titian and Tintoretto, the main exhibition, made up of more of 300 artists, affirms a clear position under the title “Foreigners Everywhere”: that of showing the invisible, minorities, migration phenomena and geographies on the margins through artistic productions mostly non-European and advocating ethnic and indigenous stories, the cartels constantly declining the names of unknown artists specifying their very first exhibition at the Biennale. This great crossing nevertheless shows figures celebrated by powerful Western institutions (which the cartels, although very detailed, fail to mention), such as the artist from the Philippines who emigrated to the United States Pacita Abad (died in 2004), currently exhibited at MoMA PS1 in New York, the Brazilian Dalton Paula whose vibrant portraits have already entered the collections of several American museums or the Pakistani based in the United States Salman Tour whose paintings bathed in green can be admired at the Pinault Foundation in Paris at the moment. Alongside them, more unexpected or unknown people like the Lebanese based in London Nour Jaouda and her impressive textile strippings or Santiago Yahuarcani, revealing the mythologies of the Peruvian Amazon. Here, origin and identity take precedence, which questions the foundations of the choice of works with regard to social and political considerations. “There are so many things about forgotten minorities and colonization that the issues of today’s world have completely fallen by the wayside: ecology, threats of war and war in Ukraine, fragility of democracies…”, a gallery owner told me at the Giardini . Could talking about war, the rise of extremism, the end of democracy hinder the identity discourse put forward? Moreover, the world of contemporary art walked on the first day on a carpet of red leaflets “No Death in Venice – No to the Genocide Pavilion” scattered on the ground by pro-Palestinian activists who had come to demonstrate in the morning to cries of “Viva Palestine! » without this hindering the holding of the event, whose countless colorful works or works linked to intimate and queer stories then seemed disconnected from the burning news. For its part, the Israeli Pavilion, which had already been attacked by a petition calling for its boycott, preferred to remain closed, under heavy police guard, as long as “an agreement on a ceasefire and the release of hostages would not be concluded,” read a sign on his door. A curator deplores, in turn, “the overflow of compositions by ethnic minorities and screeds on the revision of colonial history” leading to a mass of “things that are too similar”. Overall, the abundant tour, despite some nice surprises – such as the room on Moroccan, Lebanese, Iranian or Brazilian modernities in the central Pavilion of the Giardini – offers an uneven panorama. A little lost, Picabia and De Pisis seem just there to justify a historicity which is not the point of the exhibition. The decolonial and identity theme continues in the national pavilions, that of the United States, ultra-colorful, presenting the queer artist Jeffrey Gibson, member of the Chocaw community and of Cherokee origin, that of the United Kingdom highlighting the videos of Ghanaian John Akomfrah who explore the stories of decolonization between fiction and collective memory or that of France with Julien Creuzet, first representative of the Caribbean, with a proposal intended to be an aquatic immersion in the vestiges of slavery. Sculptures with simple curves, against a background of videos with a style close to lively animation, evoking the fragile suspensions of Annette Messager. We appreciated the entry into the running of the pavilions of Ethiopia, Tanzania, East Timor and Benin and we liked the post-industrial pictorial nostalgia of the Romanian pavilion, the chilling cries of Russian bombs from the Polish Pavilion, the aqueous pointillism of the Senegalese Pavilion and the filmed opera of the Egyptian Pavilion with masterful choreography designed to revisit the historical episode of the Urabi revolution which sought to put an end to the colonial influence of the English and the French. However, as New York Times critic Jason Farago points out about the rhetoric of the “Global South”: “An essentially emancipatory, anticolonial movement against unipolar hegemony is taking shape in the most diverse countries and societies” — is Did someone at the 2024 Venice Biennale say that? No, it was Vladimir Putin.” This leaves you wondering… Conclusion: if the choice guided by origin, ethnicity or identity serves political and militant causes in the service of a discourse of revalorization of identity, it does not necessarily constitute art. And in the setting of the Serenissima, while the world is splitting and collapsing, it is even more blatant.
