60th International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale
Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere
Apr 20–Nov 24

The artistic director of the São Paulo Museum of Art, Adriano Pedrosa was the first curator of the Venice Biennale to hail from South America. He titled the 60th edition bilingually after the Palermo-based collective Claire Fontaine’s neon sculptures of the phrase “foreigners everywhere” written in different languages. At a time when there are more than 100 million refugees worldwide, the Biennale featured 331 artists and groups who themselves are migrants, exiles, or who live in the diaspora or as marginalized figures—whether queer, Indigenous, folk or outsider artists. As such, many of Pedrosa’s selections were shown in the Biennale for the first time, including works by Mexican self-portraitist Frida Kahlo, Cuban Chinese surrealist Wifredo Lam, and Brazilian modernist Tarsila do Amaral.

These artists were among the 188 modernists represented in Pedrosa’s three large thematic presentations called the “Nucleo Storico” (“historical nucleus”) that anchored the exhibition. One was devoted to abstraction, another to portraiture, and a third to artists of Italian descent who emigrated to other parts of the world. These broad themes found resonances in the practices of contemporary artists. In one gallery, for instance, Evelyn Taocheng Wang’s washy, watercolor renderings of Agnes Martin’s blocky minimalist paintings and Maria Taniguchi’s understated black-brick canvases were shown together with tile-like ceramic abstractions by the late feminist Nedda Guidi. Kang Seung Lee’s multipart, archive-like installation Untitled (Constellation) (2023) connects the lives and works of queer artists, from photographer Tseng Kwong Chi to painter Martin Wong and choreographer Goh Choo San, as a memorial to lives lost, unseen, or almost forgotten.