60th Venice Art Biennale 2024 – ‘Foreigners Everywhere’
We spent the May weekend of 2024 exploring Venice and, above all, viewing the 60th Venice Biennale! Of course, we did not miss the art of Ewa Juszkiewicz or the exhibition of Andrzej Wróblewski's art in the prestigious location of St. Mark's Square in Venice! The exhibition was highly acclaimed, and The Artnewspaper considered it one of the most interesting events accompanying the Biennale. This is already the fourth Polish art exhibition organised in Venice by the Starak Family Foundation.
The 60th edition of the Venice International Art Exhibition, which ran from 20 April to 24 November 2024, was held under the slogan ‘Foreigners Everywhere’. The main exhibition was curated by Adriano Pedrosa, director of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP). The exhibition addressed the themes of identity, migration, otherness and multiculturalism, making it one of the most political and emotional editions of the Biennale in recent years.
Pedrosa focused on artists who, in their biographies or work, become ‘foreigners’ – migrants, members of minorities, outsiders, people moving between countries and cultures. The Main Exhibition at the Arsenale and Giardini featured 331 artists from around 90 countries, more than 50% of whom came from the global South. A large part of the exhibition consisted of works from Latin America, Southeast Asia and Africa, which have rarely been represented at the Biennale.
The 2024 Biennale also featured 88 national pavilions, including several new participants (e.g. East Timor, the Republic of Benin and Papua New Guinea). The Golden Lion for Best National Pavilion was awarded to the Australian Pavilion for the project ‘Kith and Kin’ by artist Archie Moore, and the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement went to Marlene Dumas. Critics emphasised the emotional, social and intellectual weight of this year's edition, calling it ‘a biennale of people, not markets’.
The Polish Pavilion presented an exhibition entitled ‘Repeat After Me II’ by the Open Group collective (Yuriy Biley, Pavlo Kovach, Anton Varga) curated by Marta Czyż – an installation consisting of two films from 2022 and 2024, in which civilian refugees talk about war through the sounds of weapons and explosions, and the audience is invited to ‘repeat’ these sounds in a karaoke format. The exhibition highlighted the themes of trauma, migration and identity – directly related to the Biennale's slogan – and was an interpretation of contemporary experiences colliding with politics and history. In addition, Poland's participation was organised by Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, and funding was provided by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland.
