Venice Biennale 2024 is a rapturous celebration of unfamiliar global artists

“I promise you a lot of beauty,” Brazilian curator Adriano Pedrosa announced as he launched his Venice Biennale, Stranieri Ovunque (Foreigners Everywhere).

He has not disappointed. His title, blazing in red and green neons by the Claire Fontaine collective at the Giardini entrance, reiterated in multiple colours and languages dangling reflectively over the Arsenale’s final pool, originates in a work made to criticise Italian xenophobia against migrants, but this is no harangue. Pedrosa’s thoughtful, serious approach showcases the joys and opportunities, as well as the trauma, of displacement and marvellously balances aesthetic pleasure and politics.

Not this century has a main Biennale exhibition boasted such an array of unabashedly rapturous paintings and harmonious, formally satisfying sculptures: from Pakistani-American emerging star Salman Toor’s limpid queer figures bathed in otherworldly green luminosity, flirting and frolicking among the fronds in “Night Grove” as if in a Watteau painting, to fragmented geometric-organic wooden assemblages, hacked with a chainsaw, by 88-year-old Korean-Argentine Kim Yun Shin, who gained gallery representation only this year.

Pedrosa’s show is so traditional that it is radical. There are scant installations, few films, almost no digital media or AI. Instead painting spanning a hundred years by artists of the “Global South” — the “foreigners” — rings out across this oldest, most Eurocentric biennale as Pedrosa claims for Latin American, Middle Eastern, Asian and African names a historic as well as contemporary place in the canon. More than half his artists are dead; among the living, few are widely known.

In “La del Abanico Verde” (1919), Argentine Cubist Emilio Pettoruti’s fractured, sensuous figure in pink holds a green fan whose dynamic folds animate the entire composition. Iraqi pioneer Jewad Selim’s play on crescent and full-moon shapes in “Woman and a Jug” (1957) draws on Islamic, Mesopotamian and western styles. In Dalton Paula’s intricately layered life-size portraits of unsung Black Brazilian heroes — “Pacifico Licutan”, “Ganga Zumba” (both 2024), gold-leaf heads shimmer like halos, crumpled white impasto disturbs the smooth sheens of elegant couture, the ripples and gaps a metaphor for turbulence and vacuums in colonial narratives.

Nuancing the 20th-century canon geographically is hardly original — artists here such as Lebanese abstractionist Huguette Caland, Turkey’s Fahrelnissa Zeid and the Casablanca school, for example, have each had recent Tate retrospectives. And such historical works are largely imitative, though inflected by local colour.

Nevertheless, Pedrosa’s historical section in the Giardini is enjoyable, accessible, cohesive and asserts the vitality of the human touch in making and affirms art as a human project. Emblematic is Osmond Watson’s expressive portrait of a Jamaican boy with piercing eyes and languid air, “Johnny Cool” (1967). “My aim is to glorify Black people through my work,” Watson said, “with the hope that it will uplift the masses of the region, giving dignity and self-respect . . . and to make people more aware of their own beauty.”

So powerfully does Pedrosa establish Modernist optimism and belief in art’s force for change that it spills over to the contemporary works, of protest or even of mourning, in the Arsenale. Imitating ancient mosaics, Omar Mismar reimagines the Syrian war in “Fantastical Scene”, where a lion, assad in Arabic, is overwhelmed by a bull, thawr — the Arabic word for revolution is thawra.

In Bárbara Sánchez-Kane’s “Prêt-à Patria”, goose-stepping Mexican soldiers mounted one above the other wear uniforms open at the back to expose lacy lingerie, a sardonic, salacious take on nationalism and masculine power. At intervals the absurd sculptures are “performed” by actors marching across the Giardini and Arsenale. Puppies Puppies’ “Electric Dress”, a disco figure adorned in changing coloured lights, looks like a comedy but isn’t; their belt reads “Pulse” — the Florida gay nightclub where 49 people were shot dead in 2016.

The best here is exuberant, daring to be humorous; the worst is an overload of samey textile works, arguing for regional craft-as-art, and names that bring diversity but not much more; the show’s largest pieces are “Diaspora”, a dull mural by Indian cis- and transgender women’s collective Aravani Art Project, and Frieda Toranzo Jaeger’s puerile fabric/oil painting celebrating lesbian sex, “Rage is a Machine in Times of Senselessness”.

The Arsenale’s most memorable moment is, atypically, historic — a restaging of exhibition designs by Italian Modernist architect Lina Bo Bardi, who worked in São Paulo, excavating Italian diaspora artists: Constantino Nivola’s plaster-sand relief figure “Study for the Olivetti showroom in New York” (1953), inspired by Sardinian masks and Native American totems; Edoardo Villa’s “Mother and Child” (1963-2010), a column of stacked shapes criss-crossing into a majestic female figure with a baby on her back, influenced by classicism and African sculpture.

So strong, desperately timely and fertile is Pedrosa’s theme that it characterises nearly every national offering. Most major western countries selected Indigenous artists or those with immigrant backgrounds. A handful — Britain’s John Akomfrah, France’s Julien Creuzet — produced the most impressive pavilions of 2024, as did, on tight budgets, several “Global South” countries (see my top five choices below). But many other western pavilions are lacklustre and one-dimensional, notably the US’s Jeffrey Gibson with The Space in Which to Place Me, gaudy bead-encrusted sculptures alluding to Native American traditions and stories.

As ever, countries in or close to tragedy demand to be heard — this is what makes Venice unique. Heart-rendingly, Poland devotes its pavilion to Ukraine collective Open Group’s “Repeat After Me II”, about the war’s everyday cacophony. Ukraine itself shows Daniil Revkovskyi and Andrii Rachynskyi’s filmic encyclopedia of violence, “Civilans. Invasion”.

Russia offered its shuttered pavilion to Bolivia, which failed to open in time for press day. Israel’s pavilion, guarded by carabinieri, will open, says a note pinned to the empty building, “when a ceasefire and hostage release agreement is reached”.

Germany, its Nazi-era facade covered with the now habitual mound of rubble, is represented in Thresholds by two projects: Israeli Yael Bartana’s strident but forgettable films, and an unforgettable participatory performance from theatre director Ersan Mondtag, who has Turkish ancestry. His piece, with actors writhing around us on a dust-coated iron spiral staircase within a concrete bunker of dilapidated domestic rooms, recounts his grandfather’s death after working in an asbestos factory. It draws long queues and, in the claustrophobic misty interior, breathless gasps.

Off-site, there is a quintet of exceptional collateral shows, led by the Accademia’s Willem de Kooning and Italy about the European stowaway to the US (review follows next week). William Kentridge: Self-portrait as a Coffee Pot at the Arsenale Institute for Politics of Representation recreates the polymath South African’s studio: inky tree wall drawings, doppleganger props, musings on dada, utopianism, Shostakovich, in the film “Oh to Believe in Another World”.

At Chiesa di San Samuele, Bruce Bailey’s Beati Pacifici is an “anti-heroic” war-art history including Goya’s and Dix’s prints and, fascinatingly, their predecessors Jacques Callot and Romeyn de Hooghe, visual chroniclers of 17th-century conflict. Berlinde de Bruyckere’s City of Refuge III, textural sculptures of fallen angels, tragic yet redemptive, perfectly suits its setting, San Giorgio Maggiore’s chapel and monastery — a refuge of peace.

Back in venal St Mark’s at Espace Louis Vuitton, in Je est un autre, 82-year-old French street artist/existentialist provocateur Ernest Pignon-Ernest, precursor of Banksy, displays exquisitely drawn torn murals depicting dispossessed or exiled poets — Rimbaud, Genet, Mayakovsky, new representations of Anna Akhmatova and Iranian Forugh Farrokhzad. The show especially explores images, once pasted across Rome, Matera, Naples, of murdered poet-filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, carrying, like a pietà, his own corpse as a stranger to himself. So Pignon-Ernst brings us face to face with “the other” on the street, the foreigner everywhere, while asking if, like his alienated poets, we are all also strangers to ourselves.

To November 24, labiennale.org

Jackie Wullschläger’s pick of the pavilions

Britain: John Akomfrah, ‘Listening All Night To The Rain’, Giardini

Akomfrah’s eight-part film is this year’s most ambitious, extensive, allusive, complex national presentation. The title comes from 11th-century poet Su Dong-po, mourning exile; the arrangement in “Cantos” imitates Ezra Pound’s journey through history.

The imagery is the lexicon that Akomfrah has made his own: water in all its beauty and threat, floods, drownings, migrations, climate disaster, reservoirs of collective memory, archival footage of colonial catastrophe — the British suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, the murder of Congolese politician Patrice Lumumba — accompanied by dazzling soundscapes: chants, jazz, Nelson Mandela’s speeches and, always returning, the waves’ rhythmic cadences.

It’s politically charged, horrifying, a postcolonial epic, hours-long, challenging the imperial monument of the British pavilion itself. But you can also come and go, catching each time countless small, lyrical touches — haplessly ticking metronomes washed away by water; flowers opening like Monet’s lilies then dissolving; coils of pearls conjuring sea changes, ‘Tempest’-like — which are Akomfrah’s meditation on mortality.

Benin: ‘Everything Precious is Fragile’, Arsenale

Benin’s first-ever pavilion, a group show curated by Azu Mwagbogu, is a knockout — especially contrasts between Romuald Hazoumè’s dark walk-in dome built from petrol cans, leering mask-like into the interior, the gap at the top suggesting starry skies, and Chloe Quenum’s ethereal glass models cast from Beninois musical instruments languishing unplayed in the Musée du Quai Branly’s storeroom.

Suspended around an exact replica — made in the cloudy, antique-looking, ironically named colonial glass — of the pavilion’s big arched window, these phantom drums, trumpets, castanets reflect light at myriad angles, acquiring fresh beauty, suggesting ghostly memories and also future ensembles and collaboration.

Egypt: Wael Shawky, ‘Drama 1882’, Giardini

Shawky’s fantastical musical comedy film about the 1882 Urabi revolution, crushed by the British who occupied Eygpt until 1956, is refreshing, subtle and seductive. The film, like the uprising, begins with a row over a donkey — an animal named in Shawky’s credits; shot on a vintage Alexandria stage, the story unfolds like an Egyptian ‘Hamilton’. Stunning too is Shawky’s large molten glass relief depicting Cairo, its people, mosques, the British army at the gates. Foreigners are not always immigrants; they can be colonisers.

Nigeria: ‘Nigeria Imaginary’, Palazzo Canal

Nigeria’s optimistic, youthful show, curated by Aindrea Emelife, occupies a decaying palazzo. From its glamorous ruins rises a grand many-faced wooden Igbo figure, suggesting multiple possibilities. Upstairs, among many multimedia presentations, painting wins out: Toyin Ojih Odutola’s flamboyant, elegantly striated female portraits, denoting agency and freedom; Tunji Adeniyi-Jones’s vibrant “Celestial Gathering”, a ceiling painting of figures immersed in foliage, evoking swirling Tiepolos; Yinka Shonibare’s batik-painted bust of General Rawson, leader of the Benin Expedition, caged beneath ceramic versions of Benin’s now restituted bronzes.

France: Julien Creuzet, ‘Attila cataract’, Giardini

Creuzet’s full title, “Attila cataract your source at the feet of the green peaks will end up in the great sea blue abyss we drowned in the tidal tears of the moon”, declares this Martinique-raised young artist’s extravagance and melodic impetus. He immerses the senses: music; bright feathery wiry multimedia abstract sculptures, perhaps hybrid plants/personages; captivating, surreal films of marine life and mythical figures — an underworld evoking myth, ecological fears, the hope of imagination. As French as rococo, fun, light of touch.