Ana Segovia’s “Pos’ se acabó este cantar” features two charros (Mexican cowboys) wearing custom-made traditional suits with altered hues. Segovia’s close-up is staged almost like a screen test, revealing a certain homoeroticism amongst the actors (All photos by Bradley Wester)
The well-established field of postcolonial critique and its art-world iterations have prepared and conditioned us to be conscientiously pleased with the 60th International Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia titled Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa. The recent #MeToo and #BLM movements, Indigenous and descendant movements, the expanding LGBTQIA+ or LGBTQI2S movement, and consequent installations of diversity officers at every academy, institution, corporation, and arts funding department or foundation have primed us. Finally, the world’s current refugee-migrant emergency and all its profound implications bring context to Foreigners Everywhere. Of course, the ‘us’ of whom I speak are the mostly educated liberal-progressive participants in the global worlds of contemporary art and culture that now considers itself inclusive of “Foreigners Everywhere.”
The exhibition is ‘good’ because of its moral imperative to be inclusive. Foreigners Everywhere not only includes but centers on the Global South—the original ‘them,’ or that vast group of ethnically diverse makers explicitly left out of the Western (Global North) art historical canon. Something curator Pedrosa, Artistic Director of the São Paulo Museum, knows about. His exhibition title is from a Turin, Italy collective called Stranieri Ovunque, which fought against racism and xenophobia in the early 2000s. But calling the exhibit Foreigners Everywhere and including in his ‘foreigner diaspora’ refugee artists, immigrants, self-taught, so-called ‘naive’ and ‘outsider’ artists, with Indigenous and queer artists from all over the world, including renowned ones from the Global North, creates an unavoidable paradox. I doubt members of the Global South see themselves as foreign or strange, nor do queer people. And certainly, Indigenous populations, the ab-originals, would never see themselves as foreigners.
So, this group of named foreigners or strangers can only be seen as such if framed by a context not their own. What happens, then, to their work’s authority when forced to occupy the latter part of an ‘us and them’ binary, which Foreigners Everywhere constructs by favoring a Global North gaze? Perhaps it’s impossible to do otherwise within an institutional format as colossal as the Venice Biennale, which favors making the foreign familiar, specifically to the Global North, which defeats the purpose. Translating the marginalized or outsider perspectives to align with an insider lens is a misstep in representation. How can an exhibition of ‘foreigners’ and queers be queer and foreign while giving everyone access to that uncertain, intermediate space?
Vibración (2022) by Aycoobo. Aycoobo’s work is influenced by his father, renowned painter and plant expert Abel Rodriguez, whose broad knowledge of the Amazonian landscape served as a foundation.
One becomes aware through the exhibition of colonialism’s legacy of marginalization, a centuries-long condition that gives much of this figurative and textile-heavy work its out-of-time, retro look to the contemporary Western art-goer’s eye, reaffirmed by the familiar ‘look’ of so-called ‘outsider’ art and some Indigenous art. Take the enormous mediumistic and surreal scroll drawings of neurodivergent artist Aloïse Corbaz, who lived predominantly in a Swiss psychiatric hospital, in a similar obsessive style to the exquisite over-20-foot table drawing by London’s Madge Gill. Indigenous artist Aycoobo depicts the psychedelic experience of an elder Amazonian inside the forest sacred to the Nonuya people. Wathaurung/Wadawurrung Elder and Traditional Owner Marlene Gilson’s paintings “redress the art historical record that has rendered Aboriginal people, communities, and culture absent.”
Aycoobo and Gilson make arresting images but in an Indigenous traditional form. While it’s high time we see and discover this work, it prompts us to wonder how it would appear today if it had not been isolated from the Western contemporary art narrative. It follows that we must question what Western art would look like today if there had been parity rather than mere influence, as seen with Picasso pirating African art, for a tired example. Either way, something gets lost. What we do know is that modern-day globalization and internationalization have a way of conforming everything in its path.
Renowned Turkish dramatic soprano, painter, sculptor, actor, costume designer, and performance artist, Semiha Berksoy’s “My Mother the Painter Fatma Saime” was the key feature of her deeply biographical “Semina Berksoy Room” (1994), an inhabited installation that, in her eighties, she created inside her apartment using her paintings of beloved acquaintances and their everyday objects.
The Nucleo Storico section of the exhibition gathers over 100 portraits of the human figure from 1915 to 1990 by artists in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. Beautifully hung with paintings floating in the giant space, these are mostly traditional portraits meant to show the impact of Modernism on the Global South. What we see here is familiar. But more often than not, it is persons of color depicted—less familiar. There’s Brazilian-born painter Candido Portinari’s “popular” Brazilians, including “Black and Mulatto” field workers, and Turkey’s Semiha Berksoy’s intense, almost goth portrait of her mother as corpse and saint. Chang Woosoung’s gorgeous Atelier is a self-portrait that includes a female, perhaps his lover, model, or both, in a casual but intimate setting that indicates a new sense of modernism in Korean ink painting. From Egypt, there is Cairo’s Hamed Ewais depicting the working class protected by an oversized soldier holding a gun, reminiscent of Diego Rivera. The nostalgic pleasure of this section is like visiting a solid portrait exhibition in an old, traditional, oak-paneled art club.
Much of the abstract and nonobjective work leans toward textile and craft. Claudia Alarcón and the Silät collective from the La Puntana community in northern Salta (Argentina) spin and dye fibers from their native Chaguar plant. The weavings are exquisite and covetable, like the perfect wall décor for today’s mid-century furnished home. The rich textile work of Nour Jaouda is inspired by the fig trees of the artist’s grandmother in Benghazi, Libya. I could also see these sumptuously textured fabric pieces as soon-to-be fashion. Agnès Waruguru, from Nairobi, Kenya, stylishly hangs large unstretched paintings that look more like drop cloths with splatters and marks with woven beaded objects floating over them. The aesthetically pleasing and elegant installation, according to the wall text, “establishes a relationship between her research and the book Vagabonds! (2022) by the Nigerian writer Eloghosa Osunde.”
Agnès Waruguru’s works are constantly linked to painting and its relations with design, embroidery, sculpture, and installation through ideas of geographical belonging, time, and transience. For the Biennale Arte, Waruguru shows paintings in a traditional format and an installation that contains organic materials.
Videos and film installations bring us a bit up to date both in medium and subject matter. Especially noteworthy is French-Moroccan Bouchra Khalili’s The Mapping Journey Project, which collaborates with refugees and stateless citizens across the Mediterranean migration routes. We see multiple screens of map closeups as migrants draw their routes and tell their stories. A simple and affective visual way of showing us what these people risk for better lives. On a screen in a blood-red lit room, Mexican artist Ana Segovia’s film challenges dominant narratives of masculinity, featuring two charros (Mexican cowboys) helping to dress each other in their traditional costumes. London-born, Nigeria-raised Karimah Ashadu also looks at the performance of masculinity in her film Machine Boys about the working class drivers of banned Lagosian motorcycle taxis or okada. WangShui, one of the few artists in Foreigners Everywhere working with technology, installs a large LED video-light floor sculpture that is nearly as wide as the final darkened Arsenale room. It’s gorgeous to look at and a visual relief, but again, without the wall text, we would not know they explore migration between Latin America, Asia, and Europe and “integrates haptic and mechanical processes to blur the line between mind and machine.”
As it stands, this Biennale mostly makes the ‘foreign’ archive-ready through a process of discovery, categorization, and explanation. Indeed, one compelling installation is an archive: Disobedience Archive (The Zoetrope) is “a multiphase, mobile, and evolving video archive that concentrates on the relationship between artistic practices and political action.” This darkened corridor of video monitors and benches includes the films Diaspora Activism, about migration across national borders, and Gender Disobedience, “conceived as a rupture of heterosexual binaries.” This noble project counters the argument that the archive is where art disappears, yet the ‘artivist’ work it promotes is still quite literally reduced to archival footage.
WangShui presents an installation comprising three large-scale aluminum works and an LED video sculpture exploring the migration of matter and form between Latin America, Asia, and Europe.
As one myself, it is the inclusion of queer artists in this taxonomy that strikes me as out of place and forced. Especially considering the inclusion of queer painters Louis Fratino and Salman Toor, whose work I am very familiar with because it is very much a part of my world of contemporary art. Despite the New York-based Toor being from Pakistan, both artists are not foreign or strange to anyone following painting in the last ten years in the Global North, the primary location of their success. They are part of a contingent of queer figurative painters on the rise, including Doron Langberg, Kyle Dunn, Anthony Cudahy, Jenna Gribbon, Devan Shimoyama, and Hernan Bas, all seen in high-profile gallery shows in major Western cities. Both Fratino and Toor paintings are in the current Day for Night: New American Realism at Rome’s Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica, in collaboration with Beirut’s Aïshti Foundation, and Toor had a recent solo at the Whitney Museum. Indeed, my generation and the generation before me helped open doors through which this younger queer generation has been ushered, not undercover, but in broad daylight. There is nothing foreign or strange here. Sexual explicitness does not count, even if only queer artists can get away with it nowadays.
I believe Pedrosa, the first out queer biennale curator, intends to show us the universal agency of queer desire and its radical and utopic impulse. But foreigners? I thought we Western queers had accomplished equal rights, marriage, having “A Place at the Table,” and that we were “Virtually Normal,” two mid-90s controversial book titles by conservative gay writers Bruce Bawer and Andrew Sullivan, respectively. Doesn’t including queer artists in an exhibition of foreigners imply that that agenda has failed?
Louis Fratino is an artist whose paintings and drawings of the male body and domestic spaces capture the intimacy and tenderness found within everyday queer life.
If only it were true! At least in part. Alas, many of us queers, the ones who have a choice, have all but volunteered to be hetero-normalized, as per the book titles above. But no doubt, this contributes to the current extreme backlash against our fringes, many of whom do not have a choice. Those and others never wanted a place at their table. Why not our table? Why a table at all? Why not a demonstration, a bed, a back room?
Rather than create an actually strange or foreign exhibition, in a backroom or border control center, for example, Pedrosa merely gives us yet another instance of making our marginalized/outsider status comprehensible to the persecutor/colonizer. Foreigners Everywhere is far too little too late; it reaffirms rather than changes the age-old colonial point of view about art in the Global South—so much of the colorful handmade here. Though some of its appeal, even timeliness, may have something to do with our anxiety around AI. Ultimately there isn’t much formally or conceptually foreign here, by queers or otherwise, just the unfamiliar. What the exhibition does not accomplish is to show us the mystery of our foreignness, our queerness, our otherness, our strangeness, and celebrate it. It’s not the foreigner but the foreignness we should countenance.
German Pavilion’s Yael Bartana envisions a dramatically lit ‘generation ship.’
I’m left feeling like our ‘multiculturally sensitive’ aspirations, as demonstrated by Foreigners Everywhere, are almost quaint in the face of a leveling force far more immediate than colonialism—the Anthropocene epoch. However, one could argue this force is colonialism’s ultimate and fast-approaching consequence.
Some contemporary artists are already off-planet, conceptually, anyway. At the German Pavilion, separate from the main exhibition and across the Giardini, artist Yael Bartana envisions a dramatically lit ‘generation ship,’ a kind of human Noah’s Ark to transport a select number of humankind to other galaxies after we destroy our home planet Earth. She includes two films, one of a human departure ritual and the other of life aboard the ship. But this installation comes off as modish window dressing when compared to the far more compelling and opaque collateral exhibition of Pierre Huyghe at the Pinault Collection’s Punta della Dogana Museum, a Vaporetto ride away. Huyghe darkens this vast maritime complex with mysteriously lit installations, sculptures, films, and performances. It’s bleak work about the terror and magnificence of a dead planet, machine mutation, artificial intelligence, extraterrestrial life, and the post-human—human-machine and human-animal hybridization. Barely visible, black dirt covers the large floor of the last installation. When you exit the darkness and stop in the bright white minimalist bathroom, you see lifeless filth tracked everywhere. You are obliged to take the future with you.
Bradley Wester is a visual artist, writer, critic, and cultural activist. His artwork has been exhibited internationally. His recently published essay, “Shiny Object,” has been nominated for both a Pushcart Prize and Best American Essays. That essay and parts of the Filthy Dreams piece, “Is Mary Boone a Bloodsucker?” are taken from his agented creative nonfiction manuscript about his southern gothic New Orleans upbringing and the New York art scene of the 1980s.