La Biennale di Venezia
20.04 - 24.11.2024
Venice is a wild lover with no mercy. Here, winter or summer, your body will know it lives. You might enter the city on a Vaporetto (water bus) with an engine growl that will vibrate in your spine and fill your chest. If you’re lucky, you might speed along the Canale Grande, 007 style. The fancy dark-wood motorboat taxi will bounce on small waves and kick up foamy splashes, leaving a wake of other motorboats and crescent moon gondolas behind. Your eyes will love the impossible scenes — domed churches standing on the water and storey-high posters hanging from noble palazzi. Images and words will tug at your hardened heartstrings. Well — that is if you are someone like me, a jittery artist hungry to get high on art, also afraid that the feeling might give me the slip.
Claire Fontaine, Foreigners Everywhere / Stranieri Ovunque, 2004-2024. Photograph by Francesca de’ Medici
The Venice Biennale invited Brazilian Adriano Pedrosa to curate the 60th edition of the world’s oldest art fair this year. He responded by importing a whopping three hundred and thirty-one artists, the largest group in the fair’s history.
Team Pedrosa borrowed this edition’s title, ‘Foreigners Everywhere’, from an artwork by Italian/British conceptual artist duo Fulvia Carnevale and James Thornhill, aka Claire Fontaine. “We have divided this theme into four different subjects: the Foreigner, the Queer, the Indigenous and the Outsider,” said Pedrosa. This delighted me. My queer feminist fears were assuaged. The last fair was an almost all-women cast; how do you top that? But this team felt like an appropriate follow-up of messengers to address the patriarchy.
Over the centuries Venice rose as a powerful centre thanks to its diplomatic connections and trade with lands near and far. Later, upon the discovery of the Americas and new routes around Africa, the city all but lost this identity and only came back into vogue by the voices of artists and poets. This historical trajectory brings the city into a symbiosis with the Biennale celebrations of 2024. I say celebrations because as “the Queer” I have never experienced such a volume of mirroring to feast on in art. But also, the response of many of the artists billowed up as joyful imaginings of a truly possible world.
The Venice Biennale sprawls across the city from three projection points. The Giardini (gardens) host wealthier countries that have their own pavilions. The Central Pavilion is curated by Pedrosa and is an impressive show of his curatorial vision. The second main venue, the Arsenale, is made up of a hangar-sized building with large annexes where centuries ago ships were built from scratch. The milling marketplace of hundreds of paintings, installations and large-scale video projections has replaced the ships since 1980. We now have a veritable art buffet that will take you a full day and more to feast on. Both places require entrance fees. Then, flecked around the city, galleries, collections and foundations deploy their spoils to sustain the tiers of the international art world economy. On occasion, wealthy blue-chip artists have been known to renovate a palazzo or two just for the fair, sideways river dancing their way into the crush on their own terms.
And so in this clamour, my political concerns already satisfied, I wanted to know where Africa was within these gigantic efforts. As it turns out, the 2024 edition sees the highest African presence ever, with thirteen countries from our continent. I had to wonder though. African migrants suffer severe violations. Colonial pillaging has us amid tense international restitution demands. Murders and political oppressions of LGBTQI+ people continue. Are we even able to get out of bed to make art? Could our perspectives speak to power and guide foreign hearts?
‘Nigerian Imaginary’ at Palazzo Canal. Photograph by Francesca de’ Medici
My first stop was Nigeria, housed outside of the pay gates of the main festival venues in an old building fashioned with captivating green poster designs: “Nigeria Imaginary”, “No condition is permanent” and “Young Artists in a New Nation”.
Inside I found Yinka Shonibare CBE RA at his installation; Monument to the Restitution of the Mind and Soul. Clay reproductions of stolen artefacts were stacked in a pyramid over a bust of the chief thief in charge of the British invasion of Benin, circa 1897. Covered in Shonibare’s trademark Dutch wax cloth, the bust is locked in a museum-style wood and glass display. I heard him explain that while the fabric might be recognised as African, it actually originates from Indonesian batik design, is produced in Europe and sold to Africans — another colonial imposition.
Yinka Shonibare CBE RA, Monument to the Restitution of the Mind and Soul, 2024. Photograph by Robert Hamblin
New York-based Nigerian Toyin Ojih Odutola posed for me in front of her/their spot-lit paintings. To my delight, she/they had a conversation with me about shared queer topics and then warmly took me by the arm. I was too close to the work. The “paintings” turned out to be pastel and charcoal drawings, much more vulnerable to proximity than paint. The people in them, who seem to be hanging out in a bathhouse of sorts are conscious of one another but quiet, and at peace. The wall text describes the work as a house which becomes a portal, where Mari’s restless spirits perform theatre productions, speaking a hybrid language of Yoruba and Igbo. They only honour stories which feature women in Nigerian history and imaginary. “My people in this (work) are free to roam, are free to play safely as themselves in their mercurial bodies. This is the Ilé Oriaku House of Abundance. Ilé being house and Oriaku is my grandmother’s name, which means ‘I am never without want’. So House of Abundance is what I called it. The idea was that everyone here is a flexible spirit, which is very difficult to control,” says Odutola. I left Nigeria with a warm heart, conversations with straight and queer artists alike, all of them conscious of pain and hopeful of healing.
Journeys to the rest of the three hundred artists at the Giardini, Arsenale and some collateral exhibitions left me inspired by unapologetic anti-colonial tones. The Arsenale housed a maze of videos in ‘The Disobedience Archive’, a timeline of forty films curated by Marco Scotini that critique capitalism and show the rise of international LGBTQi+ movements. Standing in the year 2010 is Zanele Muholi’s seminal Difficult Love, a documentary of interviews with the artist, family and friends, providing insights into how Muholi works in a highly charged political environment. Two halls down I found a selection of works by Sabelo Mlangeni from three of his series – ‘Black Men in Dress’, ‘Country Girls’ and ‘Royal House of Allure’. As is his usual practice, the South African artist refuses to centralise violence, preferring to photograph African queers in states of rest or revelry.
At the Giardini, Jeffrey Gibson, of Cherokee and Choctaw origin, combines American, Indigenous and Queer histories for the USA with a house alight with bright beaded busts and sculptures and walls covered in designs that could remind one of South Africa’s Ndebele abstracts. Entranced visitors could not help but sway and bounce in front of the nine-screen video projection. The work shows artist and dancer Sarah Ortegon HighWalking performing the Jingle Dress Dance, She Never Dances Alone, calling upon ancestors for strength, protection, and healing.
France offered Julien Creuzet’s oceanic voyages in rooms buoyant with light. Labyrinths of mythical beasts sit in woven webs and an aquatic blue atmosphere emanates from large video screens that cover the width and height of the walls.
Eva Koťátková, The heart of a giraffe in captivity is twelve kilos lighter, 2024. Photograph by Robert Hamblin
In the Czech Republic visitors are encouraged to sit inside of Eva Koťátková’s giant giraffe Lenka and listen to children and other collaborators tell the story of a real giraffe. The installation is surrounded by drawings, collages costumes and text from workshops with people who tell the sad stories of Lenka who was captured in Kenya in 1954 and transported to the Prague Zoo, where she became the first Czechoslovakian giraffe. She survived only two years in captivity. After her death, her body was donated to the National Museum where terrible blunders in the preservation process were made. The taxidermied giraffe was displayed on Prague’s main square but retrieved soon after as it started releasing dangerously toxic gases.
I find a spirit of hopefulness at the opening of the Zimbabwe pavilion and their installation ‘Undone’. Fadzai V. Muchemwa’s curatorial media statement includes these words: “As we stand on the cusp of centuries-old impact of human action this exhibition is our space for reflection, building what does not exist yet and looking towards a new horizon.”
I meet Sekai Machache, a Zimbabwean artist living in Scotland, one of six artists representing Zimbabwe this year. She points me to a video room where we have to shout amidst the gleeful noises of the vernissage erupting around us. “Inside you will find my video called ‘Svikiro’, meaning someone who acts as a conduit to [the] spirit in Shona context,” she explains. The film uses song and gestural performances from high-femme costumed characters who play in visually rich dreamscapes. When we talk again I predictably ask about gender to which she responds; “I never understood gender since I was a small child and so I really like the idea of having the pronouns of she and they. My work has an intense exploration and even a queer-like magnification of the feminine.”
MADEYOULOOK, Dinokana, 2024. Courtesy MADEYOULOOK. Photo by Bubblegum Club.
With blistered feet, I only arrived at the South African pavilion after days of filling myself to the brim, noise-cancelling headphones hugging my head to keep me sane from sensory overload. There was a niggling fear in me that I might be dulled by now. No such thing happened.
What I found was a risk taken by curator Portia Malatjie and her team. A sanctuary, aptly named ‘Quiet Ground’ enveloped me as I stepped into the warm room. Seating shaped as smooth stacks of wooden terraces ran along the walls, reminiscent of the wavy contour lines found in cross-section geological mapping. Artist Molemo Moiloa of MADEYOULOOK collective (with Nare Mokgotho) commented that “Especially in the quieter times like early mornings, we would see people pause and dwell in the space and sound. And that is always rewarding. It says people are having a qualitative experience of the work.” The set was lit from the high rafters. Pools of light infused the wooden floors and the rushes of Resurrection Bush curtains which hung from the high roof beams. On the highest tiers of the wavy seating, lay large piles of the woody shrub. Its tough branches appeared dead. What I already knew about the plant was that its befitting name was in sync with the healing intent the artists had for the work. In nature, it also presents in this dry way. For most of the year, it sits on rocky crags looking like bundles of dead sticks. But come the seasonal rain it morphs into foliage and transforms the rock into plumed hills. Resurrection Bush indeed.
A twenty-minute sound work immerses the set with singing and spoken words. Traditional songs about harvesting, rain, and divine water come from the communities that earn life from the land. For me, the sound functioned as the rain and when I closed my eyes the room exploded into a green lush. How that happened inside of me was satisfaction enough to whisper a thank you to Moiloa and Mokgotho, the Institute for Creative Repair and the production team for this respite from the Venice vortex outside.
Attending the Venice Biennale preview days found me surrounded by professional opinions around dinner tables and openings with dignitaries. My phone immersed me in unceasing, conflicted opinions by media and influencers alike. I listened to heated debates about the curatorial approaches of this season. In the end, one has to accept that the experience of art can be informed but is always subjective. For me, this year’s Venice Biennale abounds in messages of warning, beauty and hope. I am planning another visit later this year.
