If you take a look at a given artist list for a recurring exhibition over the past hundred years, you’ll most certainly find yourself recognizing quite a few names (several if it was a consequential show), while also wondering to yourself who are some of these artists you’ve never heard of and what about their work drew the curators to them, only for them to become a footnote in art history. idncash

In many ways, resurrecting artists like those is the central concern of one half of the 2024 Venice Biennale. Titled “Nucleo Storico,” this portion is split into three parts: “Portraits,” “Abstractions,” and “Italians Everywhere.” They are each given their own space and inserted into the main exhibition as a pause or an intervention into the steady follow of contemporary art.

For anyone who has been following the tenure of the Biennale’s curator Adriano Pedrosa at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, where he is artistic director, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Pedrosa would fill part of his exhibition with artists, particularly from the Global South or who migrated from Italy to the Global South, who have yet to be canonized in the Global North. That’s the premise of the exhibition initiative he’s most famous for, “Histórias,” which over the years has focused on various histories (Afro-Atlantic Brazilian, Indigenous, women, queer) and aimed to trouble and disrupt them as he aims to expand them. Those contributions have certainly been groundbreaking and in many ways done what they’ve set out to do. idncash

Part of his curatorial thesis is to use the Portuguese word histórias (and its translations in other Romance languages) as a jumping off point. Unlike in English, história can mean, depending on the context, the official history of something or the story of something else—fact and fiction wrapped into one. It was a way for Pedrosa to think of exhibition making as “more open, plural, speculative, and perhaps in a way more marginal,” as he told ARTnews in 2019.

A main purpose of doing this historical-focused section is to bring the selected artists to wider attention, especially as the overwhelming majority of them have never show at the Biennale previously. The “Nucleo Storico” accounts for around half the artist list, though each artist here is represented by only one work. The sheer scale of each of these rooms is formidable, and I often found myself spending more time here than expected. It wasn’t so much because I was taking it all in, however, but because I was stopping to read the paragraph-long labels for many of the artists.

Starting with the least successful of these sections, the “Italians Everywhere” section felt the most out of place, a way to shoehorn Italian artists into a show focused on the Global South. There’s a sound logic to Pedrosa wanting to include this, other than just wanting to preempt any criticisms from the Italian press about the lack of Italian artists. First, Brazil has the largest Italian diaspora in the world and several Italians there have made significant contributions to the Brazilian art. Second, it’s a way to slyly turn contemporary anti-migrant sentiments, especially dominant in Italy, on its head by pointing out that there really are foreigners everywhere, even in the Global South. Even still, I don’t know how additive it was to the exhibition, especially when placed in context of the Arsenale, where some of the exhibition’s larger-scale works are on view.

For this display, Pedrosa has brought Italian-born architect Lina Bo Bardi’s iconic installation design from MASP for the museum’s permanent collection, which he revived at the museum after taking over. The works are affixed to glass easels that rest on concrete blocks; they float in the center of the room and the wall labels are on their back. It’s a way to abolish the hierarchy of museums by putting everything on the same label. But, it’s much more successful at MASP. Works dating back to the 17th century are paired with ones made just a few years ago. And the display is imposing at the institution, coming off as a maze that requires you to really dig deep and allow yourself to get lost. At the Arsenale it’s a bit too open. idncash