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 the Venice Art Biennale was ‘a celebration of the foreign, the distant, the outsider, the queer, as well as the indigenous. [It] focuses 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 first instalment, see Foreigners Everywhere International Art Exhibition – Top Picks 1
Foreigners Everywhere, 2004 (France & Italy)
Foreigners Everywhere is a series of neon signs in several different languages, from which the Venice Biennale 2024 took its title.
The Mapping Journey Project, 2008-11 (France-Morocco)
“Bouchra Khalili is a French-Moroccan artist and scholar whose multidisciplinary practice develops collaborative strategies of storytelling with members of communities excluded from citizen membership. The Mapping Journey Project was developed over three years across the Mediterranean migration routes, collaborating with refugees and stateless citizens from North and Eastern Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. Her practice involves neither casting nor interviews; instead, she engages for long periods in listening to her collaborators so that they can devise and perform their narration. Each of the eight videos is made of one long static shot without cuts, focusing on a map, a hand holding a permanent marker, and the drawing in real-time of often years-long tortuous and perilous journeys.”
Tracy Fenix
Das Grosse Fest des Ajagemo, 1958 (Austria-Nigeria)
Mythos Oduduwa Schöpfungsgeschichte, 1963
“During her initiation into Yoruba cults in the 1950s and 1960s, Wenger began an immersive study of the various aesthetic repertoires associated with Yoruba rituals: batik, mural painting and shrine sculpting. [These pieces are also] representative of her search for Jungian primordial archetypes.”
Merve Fejzula
Uknown title 1, (Nigeria)
Unknown title 2
“Àjàlá was a batik painter whose practice conveyed, in his words, ‘the rich complexity of his heritage and spirituality’. His extensive knowledge of Yoruba herbology … enabled him to develop plant dyes that facilitated the extraordinary colouring of his work, with single compositions like these including up to thrity-five colours.”
Merve Fejzula
Aqui esta caliente, 2024 (Peru)
El mundo del agua, 2024
“Yahuarcani is a self-taught painter and sculptor who belongs to the Aimeni clan (the White Heron clan) of the Uitoto Nation of northern Amazonia. [His work is a response to] memories told by his ancestors, the sacred knowledge of medicinal plants, the sounds of the jungle, and and Uitoto myths. …. By reclaiming the presence and force of the spirits (guardians) of the plants, trees and animals who are largely ignored in the modern era, Yahuarcani stresses how climate catastrophe is not a recent event, but part of a long hisotry of colonial dispossession that begins with the eradication of spiritual worlds …..”
Miguel López
Orbital Mechanics, from the series Electric Dub Station, 2024 (Netherlands & Panama)
“In their ongoing collaboration, Guzman and Jankovic incorporate indigo textiles, soundscapes and performances to address how our world has been shaped by colonialism and migration. They reinterpret the history of sacred indigo textiles which are deeply connected with colonial histories and feature an abstract pattern of intercultural DNA sequences that embody a global connection between the Black Atlantic. The accompanying soundscape alludes to ideas of belonging and exclusion through an exploration of diasporic sounds that combine electronic music, dub, punk, and Senegalese drums.”
Amanda Pinatih & Britte Sloothaak
Heritage Reimagined, 2024 (China)
Cui Li Xin Zhi, 2024\
Shifting Sands: A Battle Song, 2024 (Saudi Arabia)
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