‘Foreigners Everywhere’ highlights overlooked artists, many from Southeast Asia
By Wang Zineng

The pre-opening of the 60th Venice Biennale from 16 to 19 April 2024 was marked by a palpable combine of excitement and displacement, in part due to the combustible theme of ‘Stranieri Ovunque’ or ‘Foreigners Everywhere’, presented against a backdrop of unstable global geopolitics. By curatorial design, this Biennale is meant to shake up conventionality, establishment and hierarchy. The main exhibition is curated by Brazilian Adriano Pedrosa, artistic director of the São Paulo Museum of Art. It is a sprawling gathering of 331 artists largely from the Global South, many of them featured for the first time in the Biennale. Their works are spread across two large groupings–‘Nucleo contemporaneo’ (Contemporary nucleus) and ‘Nucleo storico’ (Historical nucleus)–at the Biennale’s two main sites, Giardini and Arsenale.

Never has there been as many outsider artists seen as in this edition of the Biennale; never has there been greater prominence of twentieth-century artists from Latin America, Africa, South and Southeast Asia, all working tangentially to historically dominant American and European art nodes. ‘Foreigners Everywhere’ signals an inversion; an invasion challenging dominant order in the artworld, somewhat analogous to resistances in global geopolitics.

“‘Foreigners Everywhere’ signals an inversion; an invasion challenging dominant order in the artworld, somewhat analogous to resistances in global geopolitics. ”

The Venice Biennale is popularly equated to the Olympics of the artworld. Featured artists do not only represent themselves through their works, but become representatives of their nations through the national pavilions that run parallel to the main exhibition. The mythic brilliance of individual artists often takes a backseat in Venice as the art crowd switches to speaking in common nouns: Egypt was amazing– have you seen it? Germany and Spain are also worth queuing up for.

Pre-opening scene outside of the Central Pavilion at Venice Biennale 2024. Mural over its façade by the Brazilian collective MAHKU (Movimento dos Artistas Huni Kuin). Photo by the writer.

Now if the 60th Venice Biennale is a gladiatorial arena of Olympic proportions for the global art world, Adriano Pedrosa’s particular curation of the main exhibition has brought the Global South into a sweeping upset over their historically dominant northern counterparts, with many firsts for disenfranchised and historically overlooked constituencies in the global artworld:

Adriano Pedrosa is the first artistic director ever appointed by Venice Biennale who hails from and presently works in the Global South.
Archie Moore, an artist of mixed Aboriginal and Anglo-Celtic ancestry representing Australia winning the Golden Lion for best national pavilion with his powerful genealogical installation ‘Kith and Kin’. He is the first Australian and first indigenous artist to take home the Golden Lion.
Women artists making a clean sweep of Biennale awards and special mentions: self-taught Egyptian Nil Yalter and Brazilian Anna Maria Maiolino taking home the 2024 Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement; Maori women artists collective Mataaho Collective awarded Golden Lion for best participation in the main exhibition; Jerusalem-born abstract painter Samia Halaby, Argentine La Chola Poblete and Nigerian Karimah Ashadu, each representing a different façade of the disparate Global South, awarded and mentioned for their participation as well.

For far too long, art history has located the quintessential focal points of 20th century modernist art in European and American art nodes. The truth is that modernism is an attitude of global inflection more than a set of concentrated historical occurrences, in a particular part of the world. And yet because of art history’s geographical biases, almost all modern artists of mettle working anywhere else outside of Euroamerican centres have had to wrestle with the derivative label.

Pre-opening scene at the ‘Nucleo Storico - Abstraction’ section of Venice Biennale 2024. Photo by the writer.

‘Foreigners Everywhere’ poses a powerful challenge to such a label. Pedrosa’s ‘Nucleo Storico–Abstraction’ section tries to articulate what he states in his curatorial statement as a “certain type of abstraction that detaches itself from the European tradition” with works by 39 artists of the Global South. For the majority of them, their presence in the Venice Biennale would have been unimaginable otherwise. Seen collectively, their works represent how abstraction as a visual language of the global artworld is particularly enriched when they bring distinct religious, cultural and indigenous contexts to bear upon formal considerations.

A pre-opening attendee taking a photo of Fadjar Sidik’s ‘Dinamika Keruangan IX’ (1974). Photo by the writer. — A pre-opening attendee taking a photo of Fadjar Sidik’s ‘Dinamika Keruangan IX’, 1974. Photo by the writer.

Achievements in figural art in the 20th century have long been associated with the West’s veneration of its heroes in Picasso, Giacometti et al., undergirded by the belief in artistic genius and a misplaced colonial sense of superiority. And for far too long, previous editions of Venice Biennale have done little to shake up such a worldview. And so, it is all the more pertinent in this edition of Venice Biennale that Pedrosa has managed to create a revisionist framework. In a pioneering move, he has assembled 109 portraits by the same number of artists with origins in the Global South across two halls at the Central Pavillion in the ‘Nucleo Storico- Portraits’ section. Like the Abstraction section, rendering the overlooked visible is the curatorial tactic undertaken here, and a masterful retort to the myopia of western art history as it has largely been written.

Amongst these portraits, the ones from Southeast Asian artists stand out, with many on loan from the collection of National Gallery Singapore. The self-portraits of Lim Mu Hue and Georgette Chen exude an unmistakable contemporaneity in spite of their modest sizes. Small is not only beautiful but often bears outsized potency.

And on loan from Galerie Nasional, Indonesia is a work by Dullah. Many see him as a merely excellent realist artist, but the luminous portrait of his wife painted in 1953, sends a reminder that great art transcends without affectation and hype. Hendra Gunawan’s ‘Family’, depicting his family’s visit during his incarceration, is singularly powerful with its unflinching portrayal of Indonesian social norm and familial ties. And Affandi’s ‘Self-Portrait’ from 1975 - a leitmotif in his oeuvre – delves into psychological depths rarely surpassed by others in his generation, globally.

Other outstanding portraits include painter Lee Qoede’s sizzling self-portrait as a modern Korean artist par excellence. There is also a stark pair of archetypal priestly figures depicted by Indian artist Francis Newton Souza in 1956.

What is worth pointing out is that only a small number of attendees at the biennale this year are actually able to identify more than a handful of featured artists without the assistance of artwork labels. The portraits Pedrosa has gathered are, by design, intended to appear thoroughly foreign and rather inchoate to most. This begs the question: how inclusive is this edition of Venice Biennale when it tries to subvert the established and the dominant? What does inclusivity mean in the present world that seems to be besieged by ideological, political and social divides?

Pedrosa’s curatorial hand is deceptively simple in its orientation beyond the West towards the Global South. Its simplicity belies the fact that it encourages self-reflexivity at every turn: noticing the foreigner means to notice difference, and noticing difference means to be aware of oneself. If differences are not taken up and bridged, what is foreign remains, and foreigners everywhere can cause discomfort. On the other hand, if there is sympathy and identification with others, foreigners can become compatriots.

Where do we go from here? Venice in 2024 is a celebration-in-progress, but it cannot be the crowning achievement of the Global South. It would be sad if it were. Pedrosa has demonstrated a modus operandi to raise awareness and create dialogue. Though not many of us will be presented a similar privileged opportunity to influence and shape discourse in the art world as he has been presented, we all have agency in respective other ways to address imbalance and find compatriots across geographies in the way Pedrosa has.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of A&M.

About the Writer

Wang Zineng is an art dealer, curator and writer. He founded Art Agenda, an art advisory and gallery in Singapore and Jakarta, specialising in 20th-century Asian art.