‘Foreigners Everywhere’ International Art Exhibition – Top Picks 1

Venice Art Biennale 2024 – Arts Lab’s top picks from the Arsenale. All Artists and Curators are listed below

Foreigners Everywhere is the title given by curator Adriano Pedrosa to the 60th International Art Exhibition held between April 20th and November 24th 2024 in Venice. Pedrosa stated that 2024’s Venice Art Biennale was ‘a celebration of the foreign, the distant, the outsider, the queer, as well as the indigenous. [It] focused on artists who are themselves foreigners, immigrants, expatriates, diasporic, émigrés, exiled, and refugees — especially those who have moved between the Global South and the Global North.’

For the next instalment, see Foreigners Everywhere International Art Exhibition – Top Picks 2

YINKA SHONIBARE 

Refugee Astronaut III, 2024 (Nigeria-UK)

“This life-sized nomadic astronaut adorned with ‘African’ fabric, is equipped to navigate ecological and humanitarian crises. Carrying a mesh sack filled with worldly posessions, the figure symbolises the challenges of displacement. [For British-Nigerian Shonibare], the artwork serves as a warning, urging contemplation of the potential consequences of inaction regarding rising water levels and the resulting desplacement of people. The overarching question of humanity [for him] is incredibly diverse, emphasising the recognition that there is no singular way to be human.” 

Sofía Shaula Reeser-del Rio

MATAAHO COLLECTIVE

Takapau, 2022 (New Zealand)

“The Mataaho Collective has collaboratively worked for a decade on large-scale fibre-based installations delving into the intricacies of Māori lives and knowledge systems. The term takapau denotes a finely woven mat, traditionally employed in ceremonies, particularly during childbirth.”

Amanda Carneiro

BORDADORAS DE ISLA NEGRA

Untitled, 1972  (Chile)

“Bordadoras de Isla Negra was a group of self-taught women who, between 1967 and 1980, embroidered brightly-coloured textiles that vividly tell the story of daily life in this coastal village in Chile. The characters are real and recognisable inhabitants of Isla Negra, including Pablo Neruda hunting butterflies. This enormous textile was embroidered from individual cloths, all of which were joined together to form a cross section of Chile, from the sea to the Andes.”

Carolina Arévalo Karl 

NAMINAPU MAYMURU-WHITE

Stars Reflected in the River, 2023 (Australia)

“Maymuru-White’s iconic miny’tji [bark paintings] reflect the Yolŋu concept of the Milŋiyawuy, which simultaneously represents the Milŋiyawuy River that snakes across Maŋgalili Country and the celestial Milky Way. [The artist] depicts Milŋiyawuy from above and below, from the sky and the earth, to reflect the convergence of the physical and ancestral realms. …… each star represents Maŋgalili souls past, present, and future.” 

Jessica Clark

DANA AWARTANI

Come, Let Me Heal Your Wounds. Let Me Mend Your Broken Bones, 2024 (Palestine & Saudi Arabia)

“Awartani is a Palestine-Saudi artist who has saught kinship in the knowledge of indigenous communities acorss the Arab world, India, and other countries where she developed her work in conversation with craftspeople. The installation is a requiem for the historical and cultural sites that have been destroyed in the Arab world during wars and by acts of terror. … It expands with each iteration to make room for newer documentation. This edition adds testimony to the devastation in Gaza and sites that have been flattened indiscriminately through bombings and bulldozers. Awartani tears holes across yards of silk, each rip marking a site. Then she darns each gash tenderly as a gesture for healing; the resulting scars symbolise the physical and emotional ones left behind in the real world. The fabric is dipped in herb and spice-based natural dyes that carry medicinal value, using the sacred healing properties embedded in the traditional textile practices of Kerala … .”

Saira Ansari

KILUANJI KIA HENDA

The Geometric Ballad of Fear, 2015 (Angola)

A Espiral do Medo, 2022

“Kiluanji Kia Henda was born in Luanda in 1979, four years after Angola gained independence from Portugal and the country’s civil war began. The Geometric Ballad of Fear documents white-painted protective metal railings found in buildings and houses in Angola, which are prevalent in big cities in the Global South with significant disparities amongst their populations. A Espiral do Medo uses actual metal railings taken from the buildings that once offered robust protection to those inside.”

Andriano Pedrosa

PACITA ABAD

Haitians Waiting at Guatanamo Bay, 1994 (Filipino-America)

You Have to Blend in Before You Stand Out, 1995

“[Pacita Bad’s] interest in the immigrant experience inspired a series using her trapunto painting technique. Haitians Waiting at Guatanamo Bay depicts the hopeful wait behind barbed wire, leaving behind empty skiffs and a town with sunlit skies and palm trees. You Have to Blend in Before You Stand Out illustrates the internal struggle that immigrants and their families experience when integrating into a new society.” 

Joselina Cruz

EMMI WHITEHORSE

Typography of Standing Ruins #3, 2024 (Native America)

“Emmi Whitehorse, a Diné indigenous artist, primarily works in abstracted large-scale poetic landscapes of the US Southwest. Her sensorial landscape mark-making techniques, presented through mystifying compositions, illuminate alternative strategies for preserving  indigeneity and resisiting colonial violence and extraction.”

Tracy Fenix

MARLENE GILSON

Market Day, 2022 (Australia)

Culture Learning, 2023

“Gilson is a Wathaurung/Wadawurrung Elder and Traditional Owner whose contemporary painting practice is marked by a meticulous attention to detail. [Her] paintings redress that art historical record that has rendered Aboriginal people, communities, and culture absent. Gilson explains: ‘Each brushstroke contributes to placing my family history on the world map and back into the history books.’”

Jessica Clark 

DALTON PAULA

Chico Rei, 2024 (Brazil)

Nā Agotimé, 2024

“In these works, historical figures of African descent who led, or were involved in, anti-slavery resistance movements in Brazil, are represented in large-scale bipartite canvases – a stylistic trait that evokes the gap as metaphor for uniting memories and histories. … Objects – including glasses, chairs, flags, columns, stairs, and sceptres – are inserted symbolically, making evident the possible relationships between images, memory and power.”

Glaucea Helena de Britto

AYDEÉ RODRÍGUEZ LÓPEZ

Ex Hacienda de Guadalupe Collantes, 2014 (Mexico)

Migración, 2018

“Aydeé Rodríguez López is a self-taught Afro-Mexican artist commited to making visible the history and voices of Black communities in Mexico. Ex Hacienda de Guadalupe Collantes depicts the plantation system and the various stages of the cotton industry, symbolising the colonial system of enslavement in Mexico. Migración focuses on the Mexico-US border, contrasting human movement restrictions with the unhindered migration of birds and monarch butterflies across the continent.” 

Eva Posas