At the Venice Biennale, “Foreigners Everywhere” Carves Out Space for Queer and Indigenous Artists

At the docks of Venice’s Arsenale, multicolored neons spell out the title of the 60th Venice Biennale: “Foreigners Everywhere.” No matter whether you speak Croatian, Irish, or Japanese, your tongue is likely represented here among the diverse Western, non-Western, Indigenous, and even extinct languages on view.

The titular work, by Italy-based collective Claire Fontaine, was originally created in 2004 and conjures ambiguous meanings—a statement of marginalized groups’ right to exist, or a comment on our own fundamental strangeness, depending on the context. For Adriano Pedrosa, artistic director of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, who has curated this year’s International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale, the phrase creates a framework for inclusivity of a kind that is not just about belonging to a national or ethnic group. Here, “foreign” comes to mean any form of otherness that can create boundaries and friction between groups of people. Gender, sexuality, and culture can all act as walls of exclusion, and to be a foreigner is to struggle with this alienation. We are all foreign to someone, and, sometimes, the foreigner can be within.

Accordingly, the show—as usual, held across the two venues of Venice’s Giardini and Arsenale—includes a large proportion of artists from the Global South and Asia (in fact, there are a huge number of artists altogether, at 331). Also included are several artists who worked outside the traditional art world system (such as Aloise Corbaz, who spent most of her life in a psychiatric hospital). And perhaps most notably, for a show that is the world’s most significant showcase of contemporary art, many of them are dead. Pedrosa has used this influential exhibition to give a serious platform to artists outside the mainstream, mostly those documenting underrepresented symbols, traditions, and heritage, rather than the specific interiority of the individual.

A large chunk of the show’s artists are represented by a single artwork each, mostly painting, in a series of sections entitled “Nucleo Storico” (“historical nucleus”). One nucleus focuses on mid- to late-20th-century abstraction from outside the U.S. and Europe, noting the non-Western emphasis on fluid forms and palettes over primary-colored, purist geometry. Another showcases portraiture from a similar time period from Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, with stunning examples, such as semi-abstract Cubism from Argentine artist Emilio Pettorutti, or a vibrant, fantastical half-length portrait by Mexican muralist Roberto Montenegro.

These salon-style historical showcases present an alternative art history, expanding the canon and acknowledging the influence of a whole range of traditions outside the mainstream, many of which have not been afforded the attention they deserve. The viewer can spot clusters of themes within this nucleus—for example, a fantastic group of self-portraits of artists at work, including Argentine Surrealist Raquel Forner with Filipino modernist painter Anita Magsaysay-Ho.

But these “Nucleo Storico” sections also create a historical lineage for the contemporary artists and establish the exhibition’s expansive understanding of foreigners—not just those who seem different, but those who live and love in ways rejected by the mainstream. And while the Arsenale contains the majority of the largest, site-specific work, the nearby Giardini presents the strongest case for Pedrosa’s argument for linking historically and contemporary marginalized artists.

Most of one room in the Giardini is devoted to the paintings of Louis Fratino. The rising American artist’s portraits of gay male intimacy and domesticity are shown next to a work by the late Indian artist Bhupen Khakhar, who is also known for his canvases that explore homosexual life. In the show, Khakhar’s depiction of three men fishing in a sailboat, Fishermen in Goa (1985), shows a strikingly similar approach to color and shapes as Fratino, despite it being produced decades earlier. Elsewhere in the Giardini, Dean Sameshima’s recent black-and-white photographs of Berlin’s gay porn theaters sit opposite monochrome shots secretly taken by Miguel Ángel Rojas of a Bogotá cinema that functioned as a gay cruising spot in the 1970s.

From these historical threads, contemporary artists build their own vision of the world, acknowledging the complex burden of representation. In her series “Do Not Agree with Agnes Martin All the Time” (2022–23), Dutch artist Evelyn Taocheng Wang appropriates work by Agnes Martin along with Ming Dynasty painting, transcribing elements of her identity into her canvases. Elsewhere, Peruvian artist Violeta Quispe uses traditional wood painting to reimagine rituals from the Andean Quechua culture she grew up in, placing women, instead of men, in the central role.

Strikingly, many of the largest works in this Biennale are produced by collectives that center Indigenous perspectives. The front of the Giardini building has been painted by the Indigenous Brazilian Huni Kuin artist collective MAKHU (Movimento dos Artistas Huni Kuin) with a luminescent narrative mural depicting their myth of the Earth forming from an alligator. At the very end of the Arsenale, another brightly imposing mural created by Aravini Art Project, an Indian collective of cis and trans women, is a bright call for unity, depicting femininity in all its technicolor diversity.

These projects, like many in the show, focus on artists who will be little-known to even the most seasoned visitors to the Biennale. Miniature paintings by Maya Kaqchikel artist Rosa Elena Curruchic, made throughout the Guatemalan civil war, meticulously document women’s role in her people’s customs and festivities, rendered in tiny format due to their historical context (during this period they were made and transported in secret). Haitian brothers Sénèque and Philomé Obin share a room in the Giardini that showcases their painted visions of the local commerce, politics, and economy of the mid–20th century. Australian Indigenous painter Marlene Gilson meticulously details the Australian Wathaurung/Wadawurrung people’s involvement in historical events, insisting upon their significance in panoramic paintings.

Alongside these references to heritage, custom, and social experience, a single room of landscape paintings in the Giardini is a welcome change of pace. Here, Kay WalkingStick’s flattened portrayals of American geographical features are adorned with geometric designs referencing the specific Indigenous groups who originally lived on the land. They are shown next to a series of drawings by Leopold Strobl, whose obsessively produced miniatures take photographs from local media as his starting point, which he then scribbles over, erasing all evidence of humanity. How much, we start to think, of human wrongdoing might the natural world be hiding?

While much of the work evokes the daily life and symbols of the life, traditions, and culture of those who are designated foreigners, the viewer rarely comes into contact with the voices and faces of those who straddle this boundary today. In one of the largest rooms at the Giardini, French Egyptian feminist artist Nil Yalter (who will be awarded the Golden Lion Award for Lifetime Achievement, along with Ana Maria Maiolino, at this year’s Biennale) has installed a round, tent-like installation, with an open roof that references the living structures used by the Central Anatolian Bektik community, which the artist spent time living with. The title of the work, Exile is the Hardest Job, is printed atop monochrome photographs and testimonial videos of migrants, whose voices through the speakers form a buzzing background hum. And in the Arsenale, Bouchra Khalil’s “The Mapping Journey Project” (2008–11)—a series of eight projected videos closely cropped on immigrants drawing their often-perilous migration routes onto paper maps, as their anonymous voices explain its challenges—lends some specificity to the experience of being other.

South African video artist Gabrielle Goliath takes a similar approach to telling the foreigner’s experience in Personal Accounts (2024). Across multiple screens against the same blue-screen background, Black, Brown, Indigenous, and trans people are filmed documenting testimonies of the violence and trauma they’ve experienced, with all the words edited out of the video, leaving tics, gestures, and coughs to tell their stories.

But if there is a gap in Pedrosa’s exhibition, it is in how the entire show is focused on people and their social interactions in a broad sense. Interior lives are often just outside the frame to be filled in by the viewer, creating a kind of faceless blur of subjects. The pain and vulnerability of existing as a foreigner, amid the contemporary crises of today’s world, are kept at arm’s length. The issues of Indigenous land rights, for example, simmer in the background of work centering the Yanomami people of the Amazon: both Claudia Andujar’s photographs of the community, as well as Joseca Mokahesi Yanomami’s drawings, which document the practices and shamanistic rituals of his people. Confronting the systems that perpetrate the issues faced by these communities is left for the viewer to figure out.

And so, a question remains: If everyone, everywhere (and in particular, every viewer of this Biennale) can be a foreigner to someone, who are the ones perpetuating the old mainstream ideals of exclusion? With this inclusive and celebratory appeal, the Biennale’s provocation is thin on the ground.