Foreigners Everywhere is the stirring slogan of the Venice Art Biennale’s 60th International Art Exhibition. At the helm this year is the first curator to be born and based in the Global South, the Brazilian Adriano Pedrosa, who says his concept follows in the “rich tradition” of “foreigners from all over the world” coming together at the Venice Biennale. Dating back to 1895, it is the first large-scale exhibition of its kind, the namesake of all subsequent global art biennales.

But while Pedrosa promises a radically inclusive 2024 exhibition that celebrates migrants, outsiders, queer artists and Indigenous artists, the Biennale has long been—and remains—a hotbed of fraught geopolitics. The former president of the Venice Biennale Foundation, Roberto Cicutto, diplomatically described the event at a recent press conference as “a privileged vantage point from which to observe the state of the world” and “a unique meeting ground between the arts and the changes in society”. A chief reason for that, he noted, is the Biennale’s century-old system of national pavilions, through which different countries stage their own independent shows.

Starting with Belgium in 1907, the Biennale organisers encouraged governments to build their own permanent exhibition venues in the Giardini Park (Giardini della Biennale) on the eastern edge of Venice. Today 29 of these embassies of art reside in the Giardini, from the Monticello-style neoclassical architecture of the United States (the only one backed by private sponsors) to Finland’s modest wooden prefab designed by Alvar Aalto. Other countries rent pavilions in the Arsenale shipyards, the second official Biennale venue, while increasing numbers vie for temporary spaces across the city.

Culture is a bridge between people and nations, not a dividing wall. – Gennaro Sangiuliano, Minister of Culture, Italy

Global conflicts have redrawn the map of pavilions during the Biennale’s history and this year is no exception. In 2022 the art curator and artists representing Russia cancelled their participation days after the invasion of Ukraine. Russia’s pavilion is now on loan to Bolivia, with which it recently struck a lithium deal.

Ruth Patir, the artist chosen to represent Israel in 2024, shut down her state-subsidised exhibition days before the Biennale opening in an act of protest over the war in Gaza. The conflict began last October when the Palestinian group Hamas killed 1,200 people in southern Israel and took around 250 hostages. Israel’s military strikes in Gaza have since killed more than 33,000 people, according to the Hamas-run health ministry. A sign posted on the Israeli pavilion entrance says it will open to the public “when a ceasefire and hostage release agreement is reached”.

Over recent months, thousands of art-world figures had signed a pro-Palestinian petition calling for Israel to be excluded from the Biennale. The Art Not Genocide Alliance cited the precedent of apartheid South Africa, which was banned from 1968 until 1993. The Italian Culture Minister Gennaro Sangiuliano rejected the boycott in February, stating: “The Venice Biennale will always be a space of freedom, meeting and dialogue and not a space of censorship and intolerance. Culture is a bridge between people and nations, not a dividing wall.”

Yet the Biennale’s world order has never been free from political influence or bias. The Giardini is unavoidably Eurocentric, housing the former Western imperial powers along with three Latin American countries (Brazil, Venezuela and Uruguay), two from Asia (Japan and South Korea) and just one from Africa (Egypt). It was the Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini that amplified the Biennale’s soft power credentials in the 1930s, extending its reach into music, theatre and film and accelerating the construction of the national pavilions to make Venice a “Geneva of the arts”.

The political interests of Fascist Italy determined which countries could participate and influenced the art on show, as documented in a 2020 exhibition by the Biennale’s Historical Archives of Contemporary Arts (ASAC), The Disquieted Muses: When La Biennale di Venezia Meets History. Two wartime editions went ahead in 1940 and 1942 as part of Mussolini’s cultural propaganda machine, reflecting traditional themes such as motherhood and work. At that point, “the absence of international participation was more visible than its presence”, according to the ASAC exhibition text. The Italian Ministry of War chose artworks to fill the enemy British, French and American pavilions, while Belgium’s was given to the pro-regime Futurists.

In the 1970s, the Biennale underwent an organisational reform by the Italian parliament, aimed at revising its Fascist-era statute. The process was triggered by the 1968 student protest movement that erupted in Italy, among other countries. Riot police were deployed to the Giardini to guard against disruption, a gesture that backfired when some exhibiting artists rebelled in solidarity with the protesters. Gastone Novelli turned his paintings to face the wall and daubed on the back: “The Biennale is fascist!”

A 1973 law aimed at democratising the Biennale led to the appointment of 18 board members from across Italy’s political spectrum. Led by a president who was a leading Socialist Party politician, Carlo Ripa di Meana, the Biennale mounted a series of politically engaged anti-Fascist events, dedicated in 1974 to freedom for Chile after the Pinochet coup, in 1975 to Spain after the death of General Franco and in 1977 to dissent in the USSR.

“One should not delude oneself that those ‘democratic and anti-fascist’ editions were done under the simple banner of anti-fascist militancy,” cautions the independent art historian Vittoria Martini, pointing to the Socialist Party’s rise to power during this period of violent unrest in Italy. “Even in the post-reform editions, the International Art Exhibition was under the direct control of the Italian government’s parties.”

...the Biennale’s association with establishment politics has proved fertile ground for exhibiting artists to work with, and against.

As demonstrated in 1968, however, the Biennale’s association with establishment politics has proved fertile ground for exhibiting artists to work with, and against. Hans Haacke famously used his award-winning 1993 installation, Germania, in the German pavilion to contest the building’s Nazi past, literally smashing up the marble floor once ordered by Hitler. Visitors were invited to pick their way across the rubble, which also alluded to the construction site of a newly reunified Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Engaging with national identity can be “meaningful and a positive standpoint” in the context of the Venice Biennale, argues the artist Maria Madeira, who represents Timor-Leste this year in its first-ever pavilion. The newest country in Asia gained independence in 2002 following military occupation by Indonesia and colonial rule by Portugal.

“We are able to show that Timor-Leste did not lose its sense of self-identity,” says Madeira, who was evacuated as a child after the Indonesian invasion and resettled in Australia. “Contemporary visual art is an important vehicle to create awareness and divulge who we are to the world.” She describes her installation, which combines the traditional cloth ‘tais’ with betel nut and red ochre earth from her village, as a “voice for the voiceless” women in Timorese society. 

Giving voice to the marginalised was a core concern of the Sámi Pavilion, which invited three Indigenous artists to represent the Nordic countries at the 2022 Biennale. Their show was billed as a celebration of the “art and sovereignty” of the traditionally nomadic Sámi people, whose Arctic homeland crosses the borders of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. Indigenous communities understand sovereignty differently from the Western concept of nation-states controlling territory, says the co-curator Katya García-Antón. She says that at the “beating heart” of all the artists’ works was the idea of Sámi life being inseparable from the land. “You don’t own the land, you are a part of it.”

Platforming Indigenous artists at one of the world’s most prominent exhibitions was not a one-off political statement but “a tool” to broaden Nordic cultural policy into the future, according to García-Antón. The pavilion project bolstered the case for more investment in Sámi culture in Norway, shifting a pattern of institutional neglect. “Sometimes you need to make it internationally to be able to change things at home.”

Alongside the emphasis on migration and decolonisation in Pedrosa’s Foreigners Everywhere exhibition, Indigenous artists will be present at this year’s Biennale in the pavilions of Brazil, the United States, Australia and Denmark. García-Antón credits a rising generation who “are using every arena they can” to advocate for their communities and “push forward structural changes”.

“These platforms are important because hundreds of thousands of people go through the Giardini and take these ideas away with them,” she observes. “That can create, over time, a very important transformation.”

The 60th Venice Art Biennale: Foreigners Everywhere runs in multiple venues in Venice from April 20 - November 24, 2024

The mandate of the 60th Venice Biennale, which aims to highlight under-represented artists and art histories, aligns with the STIR philosophy of challenging the status quo and presenting powerful perspectives. Explore our series on the Biennale, STIRring 'Everywhere' in Venice, which brings you a curated selection of the burgeoning creative activity in the historic city of Venice, in a range of textual and audiovisual formats.