The Venice Biennale, arguably the world’s most important recurring art exhibition, has named the 331 artists and collectives that will participate in this year’s edition, including five from Zimbabwe.
Set to run from April 20 to November 24 this year, the exhibition’s full list was revealed during a press conference in Venice yesterday afternoon.
The five Zimbabweans — Kudzanai Chiurai, Shalom Kufakwatenzi, Josiah Manzi, Taylor Nkomo and Doreen Sibanda — will have their works exhibited at the Zimbabwe Pavilion.
However, the number of artists featured in this year’s biennale far surpasses the 213 artists that were included in the 2022 edition.
As usual, there will be a range of emerging, mid-career, and established living artists as well as historical artists and recently deceased artists.
Last June, Adriano Pedrosa, the show’s curator, announced that his biennale exhibition would take the title of “Stranieri Ovunque” or Foreigners Everywhere,” which borrows its title from a series of neon works by Palermo-based French artist collective Claire Fontaine in several languages, including now extinct indigenous ones.
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Pedrosa, who is the artistic director of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, is well-known for his groundbreaking exhibition initiative Histórias, which turns over the museum’s programming for the year to under-known histories, such as those of Afro-Atlantic, indigenous, women and queer people.
He said: “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 in deep down inside of foreigner … yet, one may also think of the expression as a motto, a slogan, a call to action, a cry of excitement, joy, or fear: ‘Foreigners Everywhere’.”
Pedrosa noted that the biennale’s home, Venice, itself experiences visitors, or foreigners, daily, with tourists numbering more than 165 000 in a single day, compared with the local population of some 50 000. Similar to the 2022 edition, which included several sections dedicated to historical work, Pedrosa’s edition will be divided into two parts, “Nucleo Contemporaneo” and “Nucleo Storico”, for contemporary and historical work, respectively.
The show, Pedrosa said, is personal. “I myself feel very implicated in many of these themes, concepts, motifs, and frameworks in the exhibition. I have lived abroad and have been fortunate to travel extensively during my lifetime.
“Yet, often I have also experienced the treatment reserved to a third-world foreigner as I am, although never a refugee and, in fact, holding one of the highest-ranking passports from the Global South.” — Staff Writer.