VENICE INTERNATIONAL ART BIENNALE 2024 -

VENICE INTERNATIONAL ART BIENNALE 2024

FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE

“The backdrop for the work is a world rife with multifarious crises concerning the movement and existence of people across countries, nations, territories and borders, which reflect the perils and pitfalls of language, translation, nationality, expressing differences and disparities conditioned by identity, nationality, race, gender, sexuality, freedom, and wealth. In this panorama, the expression Foreigners Everywhere has several meanings. First of all, that wherever you go and wherever you are you will always encounter foreigners—they/we are everywhere. Secondly, that no matter where you find yourself, you are always truly, and deep down inside, a foreigner. “

– Adriano Pedrosa, curator of the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia

Introduction:

For the 60th Venice International Art Biennale, located in the historic Pavilions at the Giardini, the Arsenale, and in the city center of Venice, 88 national participants have come together to present their art creations based on the theme “Foreigners Everywhere“. The title was taken from the series of works of the “readymade” conceptual artist Claire Fontaine, known for questioning political powerlessness and the crisis of singularity. This year, the Venice Biennale introduced its first curator from Latin America and also the first ever openly queer curator in the history of the Biennale, Adriano Pedrosa.

As an artistic director of the Museum of Art of São Paulo (MASP) since 2014, Pedrosa has has steadily gained national and international experience as curator or artistic director of large-scale shows and biennials, including the 2nd Triennial of San Juan in Puerto Rico (2009) and the São Paulo pavilion at the 9th Shanghai Biennale (2012). Sensible to identity politics, he is known for his thought provoking exhibitions with titles such as Afro-Atlantic Histories (2018), Women’s Histories, Feminist Histories (2019); Brazilian Histories (2022), and most recently, Indigenous Histories (2023).

In this 60th, Biennale, Pedrosa has given a special place to queer, self-taught artists and those on the margins of the society, focusing on the theme of a foreigner in all it’s possible interpretations: foreigners in regards to one’s own sexual identity or given social or economic structure, migrants, oppressed and indigenous nations typically perceived as foreign or distant, colonial heritage and oppression, and female identity issues, seen as foreign within dominant masculine structures.

Keeping in mind that we live in a world that is getting more and more individualistic and defragmented, with the slow disappearance of familiar codes, the ultimate richness of the Biennale is the unity of thought, brought by artists all over the world, to leave a testament of a time, to witness change in their singular ways, and create dialogues for a brighter future.

In this personal, accidental selection, I will present 20 national participants with the short resume of the idea behind each project.

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Jeffrey Gibson: the space in which to place me

Jeffrey Gibson is a multidisciplinary artist, member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent. His visual language has its roots in merican, Indigenous, and queer histories, with references to popular subcultures, literature, and global artistic traditions. Born in 1972 in the state of Colorado, Gibson is a graduate from the Royal College of Art in London. His work is heavily influenced by the Native American heritage, particularly the craft tradition of beadwork, totem carving, embroidery, painting, and more.

The materials he uses reflect those used by Native American tribes, including raw hides, glass beads, flowers and other repurposed textiles, which he combines with contemporary influences of music, pop art and modernist abstraction. “The space in which to place me” represents a modern, inclusive vision of the future, in which indigenous culture codes go hand in hand with modern global, social trends, like his tribal statues in the colors of LGBT flag.

FRANCE

Attila cataract your source at the foot of the green peaks will end in the great blue abyss sea we drowned in the tides of the moon

This year, France was represented by Julien Creuzet, internationally recognized for combining sculpture, music, video and poetry in installations that have often been described as archipelagos. Born in 1986 in Blanc-Mesnil, Julien Creuzet spent his childhood in Martinique, and currently lives in Montreuil, where he works. He trained at ÉSAM in Caen, at ENSBA in Lyon, and at Fresnoy in Tourcoing, France.

Martinique is a starting point in his reflections: this results in another map of the world and a transnational dialogue based on Afro-diasporic policies, knowledge and beliefs. The place of memory, ancestrality and the fluid temporality of the past, present and future hold a central place in the construction of a landscape whose collective resistance efforts give rise to a fantasized and liberated community. Julien Creuzet is represented by the High Art galleries (Paris), Andrew Kreps Gallery (New York) and Document (Chicago). He is also head of the sculpture workshop at the Beaux-Arts in Paris.

CANADA

Trinket

By the use of trinkets, or small seed beads, the Canadian multidisciplinary artist Kapwani Kiwanga addresses the often-destructive history of commerce and how the trade of these beads shaped the world. Conterie (seed beads) was historically employed as both currency and items of exchange. Conterie were dispersed globally from the Venetian island of Murano and incorporated into various material cultures. Kiwanga uses these tiny glass units to construct the monumental out of the minute, each bead acting as a witness to past transactions that changed the socioeconomic landscape of the sixteenth century and beyond.

Kiwanga studied anthropology and comparative religion at McGill University in Montreal and followed an art course at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In 2022, she won the Zurich Art Prize (CH). She is the winner of the Marcel Duchamp Prize (FR) in 2020, the Frieze Artist Award (USA) and the Sobey Prize for the Arts (CA) in 2018. Kiwanga is represented by Galerie Poggi, Paris; Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, Cape Town and London and the Tanja Wagner Gallery, Berlin.

KOREA (REPUBLIC OF)

Koo Jeong A- Odorama Cities

The Koreean artist Koo Jeong A proposes an interesting visual study on how we perceive spaces and the connection between scent and space. The motivation for Odorama Cities is actually an idea of an expanded and inclusive concept of a nation. For that purpose, they have collected scent stories through an open call, starting with a question about scent memories from Korea from people all around the world, not just citizens of Korea. 600 submissions were received from June to September last year, making it possible to create a project of collective thinking and remote imagination, something that is very abstract and at the same time becomes a wider story about creating a kind of new knowledge or meaning.

With the pavilion itself, Koo Jeong A explores an expanded tactility. Some of the prominent interests in Koo Jeong A’s art, such as immaterialism, weightlessness, endlessness, and levitation, are keywords throughout the Korean Pavilion. Born in Seoul in 1967, Koo’s works include paintings, magnet sculptures, augmented reality animations, and site-specific works that aim to transform space. Perhaps her most iconic works are her glow-in-the-dark skate parks, the first of which was installed at Vassivière Island, France, in 2012.

KOSOVO (REPUBLIC OF)

The Echoing Silences of Metal and Skin

The sculptural installation The Echoing Silences of Metal and Skin addresses female physical labor and workplace inequality. Investigating the joint deindustrialization of the economy and deregulation of the labor market, Doruntina Kastrati encounters the (im)material forms of precarious employment in light industries in the aftermath of the 1999 Kosovo War. The gendered labor in industries like food production has rendered women economically vulnerable and pushed them to the political margins. Kastrati’s project engages with the experience of female workers of a Turkish delight factory in Prizren, Kosovo. In part because the factory’s employées perform their work from a standing position, nearly one third of them undergo knee replacement surgery.

The metal objects implanted in their knees are material traces of their long working hours yielding little pay. The longer the shift, the larger the accumulation of unpaid labor. Activated by sound, the sculptures build a distinctive rhythm in the exhibition space. Made from aluminum, they simultaneously allude to surgical implants and industrial manufacturing. Doruntina Kastrati (b. 1991, Kosovo) lives and works in Prishtina, Kosovo. She was awarded the Young Visual Artist Award from the National Gallery of Kosovo in 2014, and the Hajde x 6 Award from the Hajde Foundation in 2017. She was a resident at the International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York in 2015, a resident at Art House in Shkodër in 2018 and at Initiators in Athens in 2018.

TURKEY

Hollow and Broken: A State of the World

The installation A Broken State of the World, from Gülsün Karamustafa invites viewers to consider the tragic and tumultuous realities of a world affected by wars, earthquakes, migrations and nuclear danger. Consisting of an interconnection of sculptural works, film, and a sound installation, these works reflect the artist’s perception of a broken and empty world. Space plays a central role in the exhibition, with Karamustafa taking inspiration from the rectangular shape of the Halls of Arms, whose dimensions recall those of the historic Constantinople Hippodrome in Istanbul, and from the building’s earlier history, thus strengthening its connection with its environment.

Upon entering the pavilion, visitors discover three extraordinary hanging chandeliers in Venetian glass, each representing a monotheistic faith: Christianity, Judaism and Islam. These luminous symbolic objects are wrapped in a web of barbed wire, evoking the historical tensions and feuds between each religion and serving as a lens through which to explore the state of our world today. Gülsün Karamustafa is considered one of the most important artists of the second half of the 20th century in Turkey. She trained in the studio of the painter Bedri Rahmi Eyüboglu (1911-1975) at the National Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul (today the Mimar-Sinan University of Fine Arts) from 1964 to 1969. Her work is structured around themes of nation, social class and cultural constructions in modern Turkey, as well as notions of citizenship and human agency, colonial narratives, avenues of resistance and conflict-related migrations .

SAUDI ARABIA

Shifting Sands: A Battle Song

A subject very close to my heart, the one of women’s empowerment, is presented in Manal AlDowayan’s installation Shifting Sands: A Battle Song. In her installation, AlDowayan brings together the sonic and geological features of the desert with the voices of women, in a collective expression that defies misconceptions about their lives. Large-scale petal-like sculptures take their forms from the desert rose, a crystal commonly found in the desert sands near the artist’s hometown of Dhahran. The surface of these sculptures is silk screened with texts about Saudi women from local and international media. A cacophony of prejudiced opinions, these words and archives have distorted self-representation and limited women’s voices, hemming them into the straitjacket of outsider perspectives.

Through participatory workshops held in three major cities across Saudi Arabia-Al Khobar, Jeddah, and Riyadh-, AlDowayan has offered women and girls a platform to assert their own voices, both individually and collectively. Their self-expression is channeled through the distinctive “singing sands” of the Rub’ al-Khali (Empty Quarter)- a vast desert where the towering dunes hum and drone as they shift. AlDowayan has recorded the deep vibrations of the earth to enact the shift at the center of the work. Following the structure of battle ceremonies traditionally performed by men, the installation is shaped around a central motivating element. Here, it is the voices of Saudi women boldly proclaiming themselves, through song, speech and drawings.

Manal AlDowayan is a Saudi Arabian contemporary artist, best known for her installation piece Suspended Together from the Home Ground Exhibition at the Barjeel Art Foundation in 2011.he has shown work in a number of shows including the 2012 Soft Power show at Alan Art Center in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, the 2013 Journey of Belonging, a solo show at Athr Gallery in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, the 2017 100 Masterpieces of Modern and Contemporary Arab Art in Paris, France, as well as having her work exhibited in the 2014 USA Biennial in Houston, the 2015 P.3: Prospect New Orleans USA Biennial Notes For Now, and the Venice Biennale in the Future of a Promise Exhibition.

UZBEKISTAN (REPUBLIC OF)

Don’t miss the cue

Aziza Kadyri, the exhibitor at the Uzbekistan pavilion, is a London-based multidisciplinary artist with a focus on extended reality (AR/VR), live/digital performance, experimental costume, and textiles. Originally from Uzbekistan, she graduated with a degree in Fashion Design from Tsinghua University, Beijing in 2017 and was awarded an MA in Performance Practice and Design with Distinction from Central Saint Martins in 2020. Aziza is the co-founder and coordinator of Qizlar, a grassroots feminist collective based in Tashkent, Uzbekistan.

As an diaspora artist, in her installation Don’t miss the cue, Aziza Kadryri questions how do we embody the character of a “foreigner”In a deconstructed theater backstage, costumes become sculptures alongside audiovisual work co-created with Tashkent-based Qizlar Collective, rooted in women’s narratives, exploring embodied memories and the relationship between the body and its environment. The accent is put on women, and the way they redesign their identities in the process of migrations.

LATVIA

O day and night, but this is wondrous strange… and therefore as a stranger give it welcome

Amanda Ziemele (b.1990), representing Latvia, is a Riga-based artist who uses site-specific settings that trigger situational associations. She graduated from the Visual Arts Department of the Art Academy of Latvia, with a Bachelor’s degree in Painting. She completed diploma studies in the study programme of Interdisciplinary and Experimental Painting at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts and was awarded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) with a Post-Graduate Scholarship. Since 2016, she has held several solo exhibitions and has been engaged in various collaborative projects as well as actively participated in exhibitions in Latvia and abroad. Amanda Ziemele received the 2021 Purvītis Prize for her exhibition Quantum Hair Implants. In early 2023, her solo exhibition The Sun has Teeth was on view in the Dome Hall of the Latvian National Museum of Art in Riga.

With her installation Amanda Ziemele transforms the Pavillon’s interior into a living organism, taming space, animating dimensions, letting us, the viewers, develop a romance of polyphonic space, This is a space of desired welcome, a child’s playground, a habitat of hospitality. Following the Shakespearian thread: “O day and night, but this is wondrous strange…and therefore as a stranger give it welcome”, from Edwin A. Abbott’s 1884 novella Flatland, Ziemele unfolds the mysteries of three dimensions, creating a space for healing.

ARGENTINA

Hope the Doors Collapse

Born in Buenos Aires in 1975, Luciana Lamothe is a visual artist who works in sculpture, performance, activation, drawing, photography and video. The concept of her work focuses on investigating the softness of materials conceived as hard. She explores the dialectical relations between its hardness and softness in relation to its resistance, as well as between the concepts of construction and destruction. She has been exhibited in numerous shows worldwide including Art Basel Miami Beach Meridians; Kunstraum Kreuzberg/ Bethanien, Berlin; CGAC, Santiago de Compostela; La Maison Rouge-Fondation Antoine de Galbert, Paris; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Da Maré Museum, Rio de Janeiro; Museo del Barrio, New York; MAMBA, Buenos Aires; Fundación PROA, Buenos Aires; MNBA, Buenos Aires. Lamothe is the recipient of The Pollock-Krasner Grant for Artists by the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, New York (2019).

For the Argentinian pavilion, she designed a participatory work in which each element interacts with the bodies of visitors. In a labyrinthine journey where we find the brutalist aesthetic dear to the artist, the materials reveal their vulnerability. Ojalá se derrumben las doors explores the transmateriality of objects and reveals their fragility.

MEXICO

As we marched away, we were always coming back…

Without looking back. That’s how a migrant person travels when leaving home to avoid being anchored to the past, as was the case of Edith, who turned into salt. According to a biblical passage she was warned but couldn’t help turning back. The person who migrates is a perpetual stranger who yearns to return to something that no longer exists, while never fully finding a place to completely belong.

In 2019, Erick Meyenberg, a Mexican artist of German and Lebanese descent, convened a family at a table in the countryside of northern Italy to celebrate a ritual of communal gathering between festivity and mourning. The Doda family had migrated over thirty years ago from Tirana, the capital of Albania, to Italy where they integrated without losing their cultural ties and traditions. They became immersed in the culture while retaining their bonds with their place of origin. The artist translates the peculiarities of that family’s evolution and traditions into this video installation, using an aesthetic and conceptual approach that communicates what is unique and connects us in our singularities as human beings. Thus, the installation As we marched away, we are always coming back, evokes poetically both the migrant’s journey and the possibility of fleetingly establishing roots around a table.

Erick Meyenberg (CDMX, 1980) is an interdisciplinary visual artist who sees painting as a fundamental element of expression, although he also explores other media such as sound installation, drawing, collage, video and performance. Meyenberg is a graduate of the National School of Plastic Arts. He has a Master’s degree in Visual Arts from the University of the Arts, Berlin, Germany (UdK, Berlin) where he studied under the mentorship of German artist Rebecca Horn. His work is part of some public collections such as the MUAC of the UNAM, the Amparo Museum, the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (INBA), the Telefónica Foundation, (Mexico) and the Benetton Foundation, (Italy).

SENEGAL

Bokk – Bounds

For its first ever participation at Biennale Arte, Senegal has selected the work of Alioune Diagne, a Senegalese-French painter born in 1985 in Kaffrine. He is the creator of the figuro-abstro artistic movement, which aims to create a figurative form by integrating abstract signs within it. The artist then frees himself from detail and highlights shapes and colors in order to represent the expression of an unconscious and therefore abstract feeling. Trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Dakar,

Diagne has been developing a unique technique where small modules, which he calls “unconscious signs”, cluster together to form a coherent figurative image. In his puzzle-like displayed paintings, Diagne portrays some hard realities of a migrant’s life. These scenes stand in contrast to the joyful life scenes of traditional african daily life, celebrating community and shared traditions. At the center of the piece, a traditional canoe wrapped in a Senegalese-made textile painted by the artist echoes humankind’s history marked by major migration waves, foreshadowing climate change’s future migratory phenomena.

BENIN (REPUBLIC OF)

Everything Precious Is Fragile

Everything Precious Is Fragile is a group project of several artists: Chloé Quenum, Moufouli Bello, Ishola Akpo, and Romuald Hazoumè presenting the country of Benin. To showcase the vibrant nature of Benin’s traditions, they have dived into a deep exploration of Yoruba Gė lė dė traditions. Gè lè dé is considered one of the oldest cultural practices in the country, organized by women, in honor of the primordial mother, in order to protect the community and ensure the fertility of the land. This tradition has become almost a philosophy of life for the Beninese, who recognize through this ceremony the role of women within their patriarchal society. This tradition arose during the transition from matriarchal to patriarchal society. In Benin, patriarchy has long been an obstacle to women’s participation in public and private spheres. Women have been subjected to many forms of discrimination, including violence, economic exploitation and political marginalization.

CHINA (PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF)

Atlas: Harmony in Diversity

The China Pavilion embraces “Atlas: Harmony In Diversity” as its theme, with a focus on the concepts of gathering, exchanging, and integrating, aiming to convey the values of embracing inclusivity, coexistence in unity, and shared beauty with diversity from traditional Chinese culture. In particular, “atlas” symbolizes the convergence of diverse identities, races, beliefs, ideas, purposes, backgrounds, and cultures worldwide, fostering opportunities for dialogue, communication, and mutual understanding.

The China Pavilion is curated by Wang Xiaosong and Jiang Jun. It is structured into two sections: “集 (Collect),” showcasing imagery archives sourced from “A Comprehensive Collection of Ancient Chinese Paintings,” and “传 (Translate),” spotlighting works by seven Chinese contemporary artists: Che Jianquan, Jiao Xingtao, Qiu Zhenzhong, Shi Hui, Wang Shaoqiang, Wang Zhenghong, and Zhu Jinshi.

JAPAN

Compose

Known for her installations and sculptures centered on “events” that change with conditions such as their environment, the exhibition by Yuko Mohri and curated by Sook-Kyung Lee fills the pavilion with sound, light, movement, and smell. Inspired by ad hoc efforts seen in Tokyo subway stations to stop water leaks, Moré Moré (Leaky) will artificially create leaks and then attempt to fix them, improvising with a variety of household goods available in Venice to construct kinetic sculpture. In a world where floods affect the environment, and especially in Venice, a city hit by a flood once every fifty years, the last one in 2019, Moré Moré will resonate with a wide range of issues.

Decomposition generates sounds and light by inserting electrodes into fruits and converting their moisture into electric signals. The fruits’ internal state shifts constantly, modulating the pitch of the drone and the intensity of the light while they start emitting a sweet smell of decay, dissolving or withering. With a title that etymologically signifies “to place together (com+pose)”, the exhibition asks what it means for people to be and work together in a world facing multiple global crises.

Born in 1980 in Kanagawa, living and working in Tokyo, Yuko Mohri is an artist who creates installation and sculpture not to compose (or construct) but to focus on “events” that constantly shift according to various conditions such as their environment. In recent years, she has also explored this idea through video and photography.

In 2015, Mohri received a grant from the Asian Cultural Council for a 6-month residency in New York. In the same year, she received the Grand Prix, Nissan Art Award. In 2016, Mohri took a residency at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and was in residence at Camden Arts Centre, London. 2018 saw her as East Asian Cultural Exchange Envoy, visiting 4 cities in China. In 2019, she received a grant from the Institut français for a 3-month residency in Paris.

AUSTRIA

Anna Jermolaewa

The Austrian exhibitor Anna Jermolaewa with her installation The Penultimate, shows how delicacy and cruelty can go hand in hand, with flowers representing the oppression of non-democratic regimes. Anna Jermolaewa’s artistic practice is inseparable from her political commitment. From the 1980s, she joined the demonstrations organized by dissidents of the Soviet regime. Then an art school student in Leningrad, she was only 17 when she participated in the creation of the first opposition party in the USSR, the Democratic Union. The Penultimate consists of a series of plants: carnations, roses, tulips, cornflowers, lotuses, saffron crocuses, jasmine, a cedar and an orange tree. Each plant represents a “color revolution”: a popular uprising referred to or symbolized by a color or floral term. Presented as a still life, these flowers and plants are a reminder of what undemocratic regimes fear most: an overthrow originating with the people.

Anna Jermolaewa (b. 1970, Saint Petersburg) lives and works in Vienna and Upper Austria. Since 2019 she has been professor for experimental design at the University of Arts Linz. Jeramolaewa has shown her work in solo exhibitions, including at the Schlossmuseum Linz in 2022–23 and at the MAK Wien in 2022. In 2022 the City of Vienna awarded the artist the Dr. Karl Renner Prize for her social commitment as a member of the association “Ariadne: Wir Flüchtlinge für Österreich” (“Ariadne: We Refugees for Austria”).

MACAU (SPECIAL ADMINISTRATIVE REGION)

Above Zobeide

Wong Weng Cheong’s installation for the Venice Biennale is titled “Above Zobeide”. ‘Zobeide’ is a reference to a fictional city in a novel by the Italian writer Italo Calvino, who wrote Invisible Cities in the early ’70s. The book is framed around a conversation between Marco Polo and the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan, where the former tells the latter about his experiences exploring the world.

According to Calvino’s Marco Polo, Zobeide is a chaotic, maze-like city full of men yearning for connection – yet amplifying their sense of isolation through an insistence on constructing their own, private spaces. The novel is a reflection on humanity’s search for meaningful relationships in a world where individualism reigns, a subject completely in tune with Pedrosa’s theme for this Biennale. Wong Weng Cheong was the youngest artist selected to exhibit his work at the first Macau Printmaking Triennial in 2013, after which he received a scholarship from Macau’s Cultural Affairs Bureau to study Fine Art at the prestigious Goldsmiths, University of London. His recent exhibitions in Macau include “Above the Descending” held at Post-Ox Warehouse Experiment Site in 2020, followed by “Somewhere Still Wild” taking place at the Casa Garden Gallery in 2021.

VENEZUELA (BOLIVARIAN REPUBLIC OF)

Participatory Experience. Juvenal Ravelo.

Fragmentation and color, and the viewer’s participation are two major artistic occupations of the Venezela’s born exhibitor Juvenal Ravelo. Juvenal Ravelo is one of the most prestigious Latin American artists of his time, a master of kinetic art, a pioneer in thinking about the social impact of art in the community, and one of the references of participatory art in the region. Juvenal Ravelo belongs to the movement of kinetic art. He was born in Caripito, Monagas state, on December 23, 1934. He studied at the School of Plastic and Applied Arts in Caracas, as well as the Martín Tovar y Tovar School of Plastic Arts in Barquisimeto. He was a professor at the Cristóbal Rojas School of Plastic Arts.

In 1964 he traveled to France to learn about abstract art and constructivism. During his stay, he attended seminars on the sociology of art given by Pierre Francastel and Jean Cassou at the Sorbonne. After his return to Venezuela, he began to develop proposals aimed at community integration into the artistic act, which from his perspective would promote a change in the human being by creating works of art in the middle of the street, with which he would seek to develop the aesthetic sensitivity of ordinary citizens. Ravelo calls his concept Street Participation Art.

For this Biennale, Venezuela has given a tribute to probably one of its most prominent artists of all times, with an installation that demonstrates some of Ravelo’s principal artistic preoccupations: light, color, and form in a dimension of optical illusions.

BRAZIL

Ka’a Pûera: we are walking birds

This year’s Brazilian pavilion honors the indigenous peoples of Tupinamba, who as a group present an exhibition entitled “Ka’a Pûera: we are walking birds”. This title refers to a bird known for its ability to camouflage itself in the precious forests of Tupinamba. Unfortunately, these same forests are threatened by commercial interests who seek to repurpose them for agricultural purposes. In a statement, the curators stressed that the theme of the pavilion revolves around the idea “that we remember those who are on the margins, deterritorialized, made invisible, imprisoned and whose territorial rights have been violated, but who call us to resistance, believing that we are human-birds-memory-nature because there is always a possibility of resurgence and resistance.”

SWITZERLAND

Super Superior Civilizations

Born in Geneva and raised between Paris, Grenoble, Brussels and Rio de Janeiro, Guerreiro do Divino Amor is known for his audiovisual and graphic installations. In them, all kings, queens and subjects always appear naked. The artist creates parallel worlds, linked by bridges of attraction and repulsion, using utopian and dystopian images. With a sharp, cynical sense of humor, Guerreiro do Divino Amor shocks the viewer by presenting the absurdity and chauvinism of the superpowers of our society: major media outlets, religious and political institutions, big corporations. He passionately explores super-fictions which he considers to be occult forces which influence the construction of the territory and the collective imagination.

Guerreiro do Divino Amor’s work has notably been presented at the Contemporary Art Center in Vilnius (Lithuania), at the Iberê Camargo Foundation in Porto Alegre (BR). His works are part of the collections of MAR (Rio Art Museum), MAB-FAAP São Paulo (Brazilian Art Museum) and the Pampulha Art Museum (Belo Horizonte). He is a finalist for the PIPA prize for Brazilian Contemporary Art 2019 and holds a master’s degree in Architecture awarded by the Grenoble School of Architecture and La Cambre Architecture (Brussels).

Source:

Biennale Arte 2024, https://www.labiennale.org/en/art/2024