The 60th Venice Biennale: Aswarm with Foreigners' Artwork

The Guggenheim Museum in New York first featured the Italian artist Alberto Burri in their The Trauma of Painting exhibition in 2015. The posthumous exhibition of Burri’s work, a lynchpin of the Arte Povera movement in the late 1960s, transported visitors to a radical sect of art, a veritable precursor of contemporary art. The group unorthodoxly used materials such as burlap sacks, a surplus fabric in postwar Italy, along with other unsettling textiles, testing the values of established government, industry and culture, particularly in the context of fine art exhibitions. 

Born in Rome in 1910, Palma Bucarelli began her inimitable museum career at the Galleria Borghese, the exalted home to artwork by the Italian Renaissance masters, including Titian, the most important member of the 16th-century Venetian school. Bucarelli left for Naples, but as a young, passionate and sociable art historian, embracing an eloquent gregarious streak, she returned to Rome and, in 1940, became director of the first contemporary art museum in Italy, the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea. In 1943, the Nazis occupied Rome, intent on looting precious masterpieces. However, along with other selfless figures, Bucarelli was a key protagonist in safeguarding Italy’s artistic and cultural heritage; even a decade after the fall of the Fascist regime in Italy in that year, distinguished art museums continued to maintain a cultural heritage policy, preserving a strong level of conventional art practices that still had their roots firmly in the 1500s. 

Even before Bucarelli’s directorship at La Galleria, she formed a steadfast love for Venice. In between sunbathing on the beach at Venice Lido, during a Biennale year she would befriend prominent figures in politics, academia, media and art, thereby influencing and aiding her belief in enriching the museum's collections with foreign artists. This approach would allow for the inclusion of increasingly avant-garde artists, particularly those who disrupt and challenge fine art practices. Burri, prior to the emergence of the Arte Povera movement, was a leading catalyst of the Art Informale affinity, first coined in 1950, but the Italian art establishment met his work with such disdain that they deemed him a foreigner. 

Consequently, during Burri's inaugural Venice Biennale exhibition in 1952, the sacks bearing the titles Lo Strappo (The Rip) and Rattoppo (Patch) faced unsurprisingly harsh rejection. In the following years, Bucarelli instigated the acquisition of non-figurative art by the likes of Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock and Wassily Kandinsky and, alongside opening barriers to allowing a society of all classes to visit museums, she single-handedly expanded inclusion in the Italian art ecosystem. It was a liberation that was not only evident in art; in fact, her fearlessness and attractive determination, carried with panache, made her a standard-bearer for the emancipation of women in the Italian jet set. 

Still true today, museums outside of the Biennale festival exhibited less subversive artwork but, in 1959, Bucarelli arranged to exhibit Burri's Sacchi (sacks) series at La Galleria, deeply infuriating a Communist senator. This prompted him to launch a parliamentary inquiry, which perversely not only exposed existing rigid rules but also broadened people's understanding of the meaning behind art, and Burri received the Critics' Prize for his solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale the following year. Could we, in part, attribute this accolade to Bucarelli, for altering centuries-old, stringent attitudes toward maintaining traditional art processes in order to protect the identity of Italian art heritage? 

On Sunday, November 24th, the 60th Venice Biennale, Stranieri Ovunque - Foreigners Everywhere, will draw to a close. Adriano Pedrosa, the artistic director of Brazil’s Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), is the first-ever Latin American curator to lead the Venice Biennale, and he disclosed that he is the first out queer artistic director of the prestigious cultural event since its foundation in 1895. Pedrosa, soon after his appointment, indicated that the aforementioned identification details had a massive influence on his thematic approach. 

The concept, in fact, derives from a series of works made by Claire Fontaine since 2004. Claire Fontaine is not a human — Fulvia Carnevale and James Thornhill established this Paris-born and Palermo-based collective, and the appellation refers to Marcel Duchamp's seminal Fontaine piece. The series of neon signs, since Claire Fontaine’s inception, has been created in various iterations and numerous languages, but never English. At the Biennale, a first, the works explore the fields of semiology and are suspended over the water under the arches of the historic Arsenale, looking out to the Canal — a simmering installation that creates optical effects with the reflections of the water. 

In a decade rife with conflict, only exacerbating struggle, the focus is bestowed on people who have migrated between the Global South and the Global North. The inclusion of African countries has increased from nine in 2022 to thirteen this year. At the festival’s onset organisers, critics and an early wave of visitors marked the Nigerian pavilion as one of the most ambitious presentations in its history. Eyes were widened, and it soon became evident that the project captivated the attention of the audience and media alike, resulting in enthusiastic reviews, which only boosted numbers by a significant amount. 

A special mention should also go to Nigeria’s African neighbour, Benin, and their inaugural Pavilion. It should come as no surprise that their theme includes Nigeria. Along with exploring topics such as slavery, decolonisation, and even vodou, the well-known artist Romuald Hazoumè from the Republic of Benin occupies the centrepiece of the Pavilion. He has created his signature mask using petrol containers, both inside and out, presumably as a nod to Benin's reliance on a vast illegal network that smuggles petrol from Nigeria! 

In this Biennale edition, the prominence of embroidery and textiles has increased to inform and express social and political issues. Indigenous art, in a wider context, is an increasingly pressing conversation, not least in leading London cultural institutions such as the British Museum and Tate Britain, which enter an exciting yet uncertain future under new directors. Karin Hindsbo, the director of the Tate Modern, recently announced a major initiative to acquire and display Indigenous art. This initiative coincides with a shift in foreign visitor preferences towards Britain. 

Returning to the Arsenale, Claudia Alarcón is an indigenous textile artist from the La Puntana community of Wichi people in Argentina. Her collective Silät, an organisation of one hundred women weavers of different generations from the communities, have beautifully presented their reflections on being treated as foreigners in their own country, through their method and finished artwork. This, along with their South American heritage, embodies, perhaps more than most, the theme that Pedrosa conceived. 

Woven on site by the Maori collective Mataaho, their canopy Takapau (2022) is highly admired — so much so that before the festival the four Māori women were awarded the coveted Best Participant Golden Lion. The pre-eminent contemporary artist living today, Anna Maria Maiolino, who was born in Italy in 1942, raised in Venezuela, and is now based in Rio de Janeiro, has presented at the Biennale to great approval, and she was presented with the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement. 

Pedrosa has chosen to include a majority of self-taught artists who have never before exhibited at the Venice Art Biennale, in keeping with the concept of foreigners in the art world. Respected as one of the world's most fascinating self-taught artists, an English outsider and visionary, Madge Gill, distinguished herself for many reasons, notably working under the guidance of Myrninerist, her spirit guide. Although Gill would have been 142 years old if she were still alive, this is her debut appearance, and Crucifixion of Soul (1936) is her most famous work. 

Also located in the Central Pavilion of the Biennale Giardini (the city public gardens left by Napoleon Bonaparte) Italy’s only Italian artist participating out of 332 artists is the alluring Giula Andreani, who has beautifully paid homage to Gill with a painting, pour elles toutes (Myrninerest), portraying her pouring signs and colours into a rolled-up piece of paper. If you’re a follower of The Rake, Andreani’s style may pique your interest; she’s feted for interpreting one of the most important photographic collections in the world, that of Condé Nast, with her work. Another young artist to look out for is the American-born artist Louise Fratino, whose drawings of the male body and domestic spaces emanate a seductive yet stylish atmosphere. 

At the Biennale, Satoshi Kuwata of Setchu, the 2023 LVMH Prize winner, collaborated with Savile Row's oldest operating tailor atelier, Davies & Son, and the esteemed family-run bespoke shoemaker George Cleverley. The exhibition took place at Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, the former residence of expatriate American millionaire Peggy Gugganheim, the Queen of Modern Art. Movie stars, European counts and greats of modernist painting all held court at the palace for thirty years, making it a prescient choice, especially considering its unmatched taste. 

"I’d like everyone to feel like they’re visiting a friend’s house", Kuwata said. However, "Savile Row tailoring is not just fashion; it's an art. [So] we wanted to deploy it to everyone in a dream location." The partnership between Setchu and Davies & Son was a masterstroke. The collaboration would unearth a couture-like collection that transcends your sartorial senses to a space where you could marvel at a gender-neutral double-breasted coat in white cashmere with a long statement train, while the elongated silhouette of the black wool jacket allowed adjustments through a hidden button to also flatter the feminine form, thus signing off a collection embodying the Biennale theme in ways you would have never pondered before.