Venice 2024 part 2 of Wednesday

Hi,

This is the Second part of Wednesday at the 60th Biennale in Venice called Foreigners Everywhere curated by Adriano Pedrosa (Brazil). All the work is from the Global South. I should have talked more about this earlier. It would have helped you understand what you are seeing and why you are seeing it but I didn't. So sorry.

Now I want to talk about my overall impressions so far. This year the Biennale is emphasizing the artists, where they are from, and whether they are self-taught or trained. They also emphasize where the artist is from versus where they live now and most of them seem to live someplace other than where they were born. They are almost all completely unknown to me. I couldn't pronounce their names if you held a gun to my head. They are from the Global South and countries I barely know exist sometimes like Benin. Where is that? So it has been a heady experience. Trying to learn all of this in a day is exhausting which is partly why I divided Wednesday into two parts. It must be exhausting for you too.

I love a lot of the work and the materials used to make it. The folk art and the traditions it comes from though obscure to me feel authentic and real and the family relationships between parent and child seem important as well. There are quite a few places where the parent and child's artwork is presented together. But there is a scattered quality to it all for me. As the Diaspora of immigrants is scattered and hard to track so are my thoughts about this show. As my thoughts evolve I will share them with you.

So we are in the middle of Wednesday. This was a day we spent with Valentina at the Arsenale. Here is a shot of the lunch area.

After lunch, we saw this show. Gülsün Karamustafa Hollow and Broken The State of the World. She is from Turkey. The columns are made in China of plastic. This means something but I can't explain it. Perhaps you can.

We went to the Ukrainian Pavilion where they were presenting videos of people acting out certain roles as if applying for a job.

At the South African pavilion, there were dried seeds that with just a drop of water would spring to life.

From Benin we get Everything Precious is Fragile. The pavilion envisions a compassionate future and challenges perceptions of fragility and strength. The Arsenale’s pavilion includes a library on colonial legacy, Indigenous knowledge, African representation, and biodiversity loss. I can't tell you the names but there are four artist's work in this exhibition.

The warrior queen - army of women armed with weapons.

This is what is inside - gas cans or faces?

Alioune Diagne. Born and trained in Senegal. He has been using a complex sign process to create dynamic paintings depicting daily life scenes in Senegal as well as the major world challenges, from ecology to gender equality, racism, and the notions of transmission and heritage.

This is a close-up of one of the paintings including a headline. They appear in numerous places. This technique is a kind of pointillism.

Next.
Artist Abdullah Al Saadi is a wanderer, chronicler, cartographer, poet, decipherer, alchemist, memory carrier, and storyteller. His show was called Sites of Memory, Sites of Amnesia.

This is an Actor telling stories about the artist.

In 2019, Erick Meyenberg, a Mexican artist of German and Lebanese descent, gathered the Doda family around a table in the Italian countryside. At the center of the Mexican Pavilion, we find a table, framed by pairs of corner screens showing the family gathered around that other table. The setting poetically evokes the displacement of the migrant and, at the same time, the rootedness that a shared lunch can represent.

This chair filled with burned candles is for the missing person at the table.

Matthew Attard's work is called I Will Follow the Ship. The idea started with the engravings of a ship on a church wall, then using an eye tracker he made drawings of the ships.

Aziza Kadyri explores the experiences of Central Asian women and how they reimagine their identities in the process of migration. The performative part of Don't Miss The Cue is by the Qizlar Collective. See below.

We got inside this and Valentina asked us if we were comfortable or not. We said we were and she said that meant that we were flexible and could move to other places. Like a migrant.

This was the stage backdrop.

This area acted like a stage setting. While in the space, the viewer is invited to embody both the observer and the observed, shifting between states of exposure—changes perceptible only to the onlookers beyond this space of accidental performance.

Manal AlDowayan’s installation, Shifting Sands A Battle Ground, is inspired by the evolving role of women in Saudi Arabia’s public sphere and their ongoing journey to assert their place and reshape the narratives that have historically defined them. The healing stone called a Rose Stone is the basis for the central shape. It has been used to help nurture emotional wounds back into health and foster self-love.