As the international art world has descended on La Serenissima this week, the 2024 Venice Biennale began the first of its preview days on Tuesday morning, with visitors heading to either (or both) of its main venues: the Arsenale and the Giardini. Curated this year by Adriano Pedrosa, the closely watched artistic director of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, the exhibition, titled “Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere,” focuses on Indigenous artists and artist from the Global South, highlighting the vastness of art that is out in the world today and, with the historical section, throughout the 20th century. mejahoki

The first several rooms of the Arsenale are the strongest section of this exhibition—triumphant and elegant in their presentations of monumental works that have presence and touch on the legacies of colonialism and its aftereffects and current realties today, queerness in an expanded form, the cacophony of modernity, and much more. While the Giardini is not as near pitch-perfect, there are standout works there too.

More than half of this Biennale’s participant list consists of deceased artists, the majority of whom are represented by a single work in the historical section (“Nucleo Storico”). The “Nucleo Contemporaneo,” on the other hand, focuses on contemporary art (though a few deceased artists appear here, too). Here, I’ll focus on living artists included in the “Nucleo Contemporaneo”; below a look at the highlights. mejahoki

Each section of the Biennale’s two parts opens with an installation by an Indigenous art collective—and both are knockouts. Where the Mataaho Collective’s Takapau (2022) is a meditative, dimly lit space in which gray polyester tie-downs are suspended above and latticed together, MAHKU’s mural on the Biennale’s Central Pavilion in the Giardini is popping with color and has transformed the façade. More importantly, both works relay information on their people’s mythology. A takapau is both a woven mat used during childbirth in Māori culture, and it is the word that marks the moment of birth, “signifying the transition between light and dark, Te Ao Marama (the realm of light) and Te Ao Atua (the realm of the gods),” according to wall text. The façade mural tells the Huni Kuin (an Indigenous people of the Brazilian Amazon and parts of Peru) story of kapewë pukeni (or the alligator bridge), a myth about the crossing of the Bering Strait that once connected Asia and North America by land. Each work is about a passage, between one space to another, with the contents of the exhibition, in my reading, serving as the liminal space you go through before passing on to the next phase. It’s an incredibly thoughtful way to open both sections of the main exhibition. mejahoki