For the art world this is the most exciting and important week of the year. Some 25,000 curators, artists, journalists, critics, directors and gallerists from around the world fly into Italy’s floating city to spend a week frantically running from pavilion to exhibition, exhibition to pavilion – crossing canals and palazzos – to see the work of artists legendary and new. It’s a week of meeting old friends, exchanging ideas, discovering new talent and plotting for the future.
Their reviews dictate the zig-zagged routes of the some 800,000 visitors who subsequently turn up to see the sprawling, city-wide exhibition over its seven month run; the artists who will be picked up by big galleries, the shows everyone will queue round blocks, squeeze through arched corridors and down tiny backstreets to see.
“It's a shared journey of discovery, a little bit like an Olympic marathon,” says Jenny Waldman, director of the UK’s Art Fund, the national charity for art. “It is an extraordinary international coming together of contemporary art in one of the most beautiful cities in the world.” It begins with “the vernissage, the opening” she says, and “it is a bit crazy”, with back-to-back parties and events and of course, exhibition openings: “There's a lot of rushing around,” adds Waldman, who recommends wearing sturdy shoes.
Thereafter, things calm down and art fans are invited to come and see the expansive exhibition, which lasts a whopping seven months. It’s where some of the biggest names – this year, Yinka Shonibare, Etel Adnan (celebrated in Monday’s Google Doodle) and Judith Lauand – are shown alongside unknown artists. And as ever at the 130 year-old biannual contemporary exhibition, there is a different artistic director curating its central show.
This year it’s 58-year-old Brazilian curator Adriano Pedrosa’s turn. The artistic director of the São Paulo Museum of Art, Venice’s first-ever Latin American curator, has titled his show Foreigners Everywhere, inspired by a series of works by collective Claire Fontaine but doubling up as a commentary on, as Pedrosa puts it, “a world rife with multifarious crises concerning the movement and existence of people across countries, nations, territories and borders”.
Featuring 331 artists, 55 per cent of whom are dead (an interesting choice for a contemporary art show), and only around a quarter of the group from the West (in 2022 about half the artists were European) it’s set to be a tantalising collection of works.
“What I’m trying to do is almost a speculative exercise,” Pedrosa said on Artnet’s The Art Angle podcast, “It’s a draft, it’s an essay, it’s a provocation.” Foreigners Everywhere, which took more than two years to pull together, will be divided into two main sections: Nucleo Contemporaneo and Nucleo Storico – the latter part allows the curator to look at works from 20th century history.
“One can see contemporary art has been decolonized to a certain extent,” Pedrosa said to the New York Times. “But that didn’t happen for most exhibitions during the 20th century.”
”He is particularly interested in artists who are from marginalised communities – that's from global majority communities that have had less exposure in Venice,” says Waldman. “Queer artists, artists who are from indigenous communities that have been marginalised within their own countries. And, and all of this is about an artistic exploration. So it'll be really interesting to see what what he shows us.”
But what makes Venice more than just a glitzy, though thought-provoking, art show in an exquisite location are the accompanying National Pavilions and Collateral Events, which run alongside the highly-anticipated central exhibition. And the prestigious prizes of course – the Golden and Silver Lions – which is where the Olympics nickname comes in.
A total of 88 countries are bringing a national pavilion to Venice in 2024, including the first-time inclusion of the Republic of Benin, Ethiopia (excitingly represented by the celebrated painter Tesfaye Urgessa), United Republic of Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Timor Leste.
Shows include celebrated installation artist Luciana Lamothe, who will represent Argentinia; Canada’s Kapwani Kiwanga; Chile‘s Valeria Montti Colque; Egypt’s Wael Shawky.
Artist and filmmaker John Akomfrah will represent the UK and expectation for his exploration of post-colonialism and environmental devastation, Listening All Night To The Rain, is sky-high. Over the last 24 hours, reviews have started to come in and they couldn’t be more polarising: one paper gave it five stars, describing it as “a magnificent and awful journey”; another gave it two, another described it as “a jumble of gibberish”.
Last year, Feeling Her Way by Sonia Boyce at the British Pavilion, won the Golden Lion for best national participation (those who can’t make it to Venice can see Akomfrah’s exhibition when it tours to Cardiff’s National Museum, to Dundee Contemporary Arts and other UK galleries in 2025).
But the National Pavilions have been criticised in some quarters for promoting nationalism; after all, there are many other ways of interchanging ideas globally. In 1974, the pavilions were abandoned completely, before being quickly reintroduced, their merits outweighing their drawbacks.
For most, allowing each pavilion to tell its own story creates a truly unique dialogue, a stunning portfolio of the world’s cultures and preoccupations – as artists make work on varied topics such as biodiversity, history, climate emergency and peace. And, artists can be shown at different pavilions: Akomfrah, for example, was part of Ghana’s pavilion in 2019.
That isn’t to say there aren’t any issues. There is always a palpable tension between events, playing out in real time, and the work of the artists whose pavilion presentations are two years in the making, and this year will undoubtedly be another extreme example of this (in 2022 the war in Ukraine had started two months earlier).
The Israel-Gaza war looms large over Venice in 2024; in March, the Biennale rejected a petition, signed by thousands of artists, curators and creative professionals, to ban Israel from the festival. Then on Tuesday, Ruth Patir, the artist representing Israel, announced that the show would not open until a cease-fire and hostage release deal had been agreed upon. “I hate it, but I think it’s important,” said Patir.
Russia, meanwhile will have no pavilion for a second year in a row; Ukraine’s show, a collaboration with refugees, is a haunting series of portraits of women who have been displaced.
As a non-sales event, Venice has been increasingly reliant on big brand-backing as state funding for the pavilions declines. The British Pavilion, for example, is sponsored by Burberry for a second year (with art fair Frieze co-sponsoring) and some dislike the creeping (or even, brazen) commercialisation.
The appointment of right-wing journalist and intellectual Pietrangelo Buttafuoco as director in November 2023 (he stepped into his role in March 2024) has also caused upset, shocking parts of the art world, but the impact of his leading the festival is yet to be fully understood.
Nevertheless, Waldman says, after more than a century the Venice Biennale “still is really important. It’s an absolute learning rollercoaster. It’s brilliant. You will see some things that you've never seen before, artists that you've not heard of before, that are phenomenal.”
The Collateral Events are part of this: 30 events, approved by Pedrosa, that take place around the city. This year these shows have been curated by institutions and collectives from around the world, including CCA Lagos, (Centre For Contemporary Art), the Yorkshire Sculpture Park and Taipei Fine Arts Museum of Taiwan.
It’s an opportunity for more voices to be included in the festival: Artists + Allies x Hebron, for example, represents the perspectives of activists focusing on the Palestinian city of Hebron (there is no Palestinian pavilion).
“The joy of the Biennale in Venice is the combination of the contemporary work that is on all over the city,” says Waldman. “Everything is open, everything is on display. And there is art everywhere.”
Only some of this year’s prizes have so far been announced. The Golden Lions for Lifetime Achievement will be awarded to Turkish artist Nil Yalter and Brazilian artist Anna Maria Maiolino on Saturday at the inauguration ceremony, alongside this year’s other winners, which currently remain a secret.
This year’s jury is made up of four women – Julia Bryan-Wilson, the jury’s president, Alia Swastika, Elena Crippa, María Inés Rodríguez – and one man Chika Okeke-Agulu, and there is no shortlist.
If it all seems like a lot, remember there are no rules of play at the Biennale: those sick of seeing contemporary art can take a couple of hours (days?) out to see a Titan or a Tintoretto, whose paintings also hang in the ancient city.
And the thousands of reporters, collectors, writers and directors who are set to descend on the city this week, will do a lot of the hard work for future attendees, scouring out which exhibitions are worth the time of art fans.
Waldman, for that reason, actually recommends showing up to Venice later in the year: “Getting the benefit of all the press and all the advice is a really good thing. It’s quieter and it’s huge huge fun.”
