Not all art is equal. Not all art is created equally. This aphorism, which settled in my brain as I glimpsed the Grand Canal, framed my experience of the 2024 edition of the Venice Biennale titled Foreigners Everywhere. Hours later, standing in the aura of Jenni-Juulia Wallinheimo-Heimonen’s multimedia installation How Great is Your Darkness at the Finnish Pavilion, my truism got entangled with those her work suggested. Leaning on her walking stick on a makeshift podium at the official press opening, she wondered, alluding to genocide in Gaza, if we would be witnessing this scale of violence and mutilation if the world had historically considered and respected the bodies of people with disabilities. Her statement referenced the racism and ableism that continue to enable the ethnic cleansing of populations by denying them their humanity.

Titled The pleasures We choose and curated by Yvonne Billimore and Jussi Koitela, the joyously messy Finnish Pavilion is framed from floor to ceiling by queer politics and aesthetics. It centres artistic practices that are slow, empowered by forms of feminist collage—‘crafts’ conventionally practised and proliferated by women, such as stitching and embroidery—and celebrates the plurality of human and microbial bodies. Works by the three artists—Pia Lindman, Vidha Saumya, Jenni-Juulia Wallinheimo-Heimonen—porously converse with each other. I expected the finesse of Saumya’s work because it was the subject of my contribution to the publication, which formed the ground for my invitation to the Biennale’s pre-opening. However, Wallinheimo-Heimonen’s How Great is Your Darkness grabbed me by the teats. The suspended sculptural assemblage visibilises the language used to dehumanise crip bodies, exposing the Western medical complex and its inherent racism. The textile nature of the material insinuates softness and squishiness with decorative elements like beads and repetitive stitches, contrasting directly with the political heft of her content. The work is audaciously confident of its aesthetic universe while revelling in the jouissance particular to crip bodies.

Wandering through Giardini on a day when I should, ideally, have gone to Arsenale to escape the crowds, I felt a sense of panic at the serpentine queues. I sought comfort in the fact that I was an immigrant living in Italy and that Venice is, for me, a three-hour train ride away. Though I had to leave the next day because of my teaching commitments, I had the privilege of returning. I decided to optimise on time and let my body be led. I followed the quaint music played by members of the Orquesta Experimental de Instrumentos Nativos (OEIN) and found myself in the Russian Pavilion that had been leased to the Plurinational State of Bolivia. Titled Qhip Nayr Uñtasis Sarnaqapxañani, which translates to ‘Looking at the future-past, we are treading forward,’ it centred indigenous epistemologies. I was utterly moved by Yanaki Herrera’s sculptures on the first floor in which painted maternal bodies are enshrined within Ayacucho altarpieces. It reminded me of someone’s Tiktok rant about how the male-saviour body of Jesus Christ is glorified for its suffering while child-birthing female or queer bodies are marginalised the world over, the intensity of their labour overlooked and normalised. What could our future past look like if we centred what Rosi Braidotti called “Placenta Politics”, a term she coined to indicate the materialist feminist biopolitics of the relation between the material maternal body, the placenta and the foetus?

The theme Foreigners Everywhere also extended to the material aesthetics of outsider artists which formed the basis of their historical exclusion from Western art historical canons.

Glimpsing Elvira Espejo Ayca’s meditations on the spinning wheel and the loom, something Yvonne Billimore said about repetition as the basis of embodiment suddenly hit home. One of the hallmarks of matrilineally inherited artistic practices is this tendency towards repetition and the way the body’s movements get aligned with one’s breath. Billimore had hit the nail on the head. It suddenly made sense why this Biennale felt different because the works that were being showcased felt invested in feminised artmaking forms, from collages to altar decorations to cushiony sculptures to embroidered textiles. Acts of rebellious caring or caregiving felt like recurring motifs. The theme Foreigners Everywhere also extended to the material aesthetics of outsider artists which formed the basis of their historical exclusion from Western art historical canons.

The notion of a being uprooted from its lived environment for the entertainment of Western audiences finds reflection in Eva Kot’átková’s The Heart of a Giraffe in Captivity is Twelve Kilograms Lighter at the Czech Pavilion, curated by Hana Janečková, which is built around the tragic story of a giraffe named Lenka, who was captured in Kenya in 1954 and transported to the Prague Zoo. The foreigner died within two years of captivity and its corpse became an exhibit at the National Museum. This impressive and generous artwork that unfolds within the life-size soft sculpture representing the Giraffe’s entrails, is the consequence of numerous collaborations and combines pedagogy, musical composition and artistic practice. The giraffe’s disembodied body becomes a host for a soundtrack by Hylozoic/Desires that fuses fiction, fantasy and reality through stories narrated by children. The pavilion’s exterior is dedicated to Oto Hudec’s Floating Arboretum which comprised the Slovak Pavilion; a deeply political artwork about ecological preservation and cross-species activism.

Surveying Yuko Mohri’s Compose at the Japan Pavilion, curated by Sook-Kyung Lee, one sensed that the symphonic piece that harnesses the entrails of locally sourced fruit to evoke kinetic reactions in the form of light and sound was the consequence of deep and active listening. Mohri drew from the creative resilience that manifests through Tokyo’s residents’ ingenious strategies to fix subway leaks. Mohri’s compositions are fluid and unstable, the tenor of the drone regulated by the fruits’ internal state while the continuous leaking portends ecological crises.

In the cave-like Australia Pavilion curated by Ellie Buttrose, one sensed, everywhere, the residues of the artist’s intensive physical and emotional labour in the meticulous way in which he, Archie Moore, physically circumscribed the names of his aboriginal relations from the Kamilaroi and Bigambul nations over 65,000+ years up alongside racist slurs. A reflective rectangular pool of water serves as a barricade to the surface upon which lie documents testifying to the institutional murders of Indigenous Australians. Titled kith and kin, the work centres the relational systems at the crux of Indigenous cultures and renders visible the ongoing oppressiveness of settler colonial nation-states as world ordering systems that exclude and delegitimise First Nations people’s claim to land.

Artists no longer have the privilege of divorcing themselves from political activism if they want their art to be relevant and to endure.

Not all art is equal. Not all art is created equally. Venice Biennale 2024 tried to equalise the playing field by showcasing artists whose practices are intricately bound to activism or collectivity. It felt like the axis of power was already shifting as historically marginalised artists and art forms occupied centre stage. The cult of the artist as an individual performing solitary labour in a studio and accessing his (white male) genius has lost its currency. Artists no longer have the privilege of divorcing themselves from political activism if they want their art to be relevant and to endure. I read these developments as welcome shifts towards radical collectivity and daring inclusivity; an embrace of art that has been fortified because of its existence outside the realm of institutionalised pedagogy. As I boarded my train back to South Tyrol the next evening after tackling the Arsenale, I felt energised by the promise of what art can accomplish in the future past if we heed the lure of ancestral discourses and matrilineal artistic legacies centred on care, community, pleasure, and above all else, love. 

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.

(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position of STIR or its Editors.)