As the professional preview days for the 2024 Venice Biennale draw to a close, the ARTnews team has been taking it all in, from the main exhibition, titled “Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere” and organized by curator Adriano Pedrosa; to the national pavilions, numbering to almost 90 this year; to the dozens of officially sanctioned collateral events and the smattering of unofficial shows all being staged in La Serenissima. goldenqq

With this in mind, ARTnews senior editors Maximilíano Durón and Alex Greenberger started a Google Doc to begin a candid conversation on their initial thoughts about this Biennale. Their thoughts follow below. 

Alex Greenberger: Many of the artists who’ve done works for the main show and the national pavilions at this Biennale sound a similar note: can’t live with art institutions, can’t live without them. 

Glicéria Tupinambá, as part of her Hãhãwpuá Pavilion (née Brazil Pavilion), is showing her correspondence with several museums in which she seeks the return of cultural objects related to her people that are held abroad. One partly redacted email, purportedly with Brussels’s Musée royaux d’Art et d’Histoire, seems to have befuddled its recipient, who sassily snipes back, “Reading the project and the letter, it was quite unclear what do you expect.” But Glicéria, unassailed, has continued on with her project, contacting other museums with the aim of seeking justice. goldenqq

Her pavilion, which features fishing nets and more from the communities of Serra do Padeiro, suggests that there is a place for members of her community in Western art spaces. It just doesn’t always look like a traditional white cube. Spain’s representative, the Peruvian-born Sandra Gamarra, expresses a related sentiment with a pavilion that’s billed as a “Migrant Art Gallery,” featuring the words of Indigenous activists. And in the main show, the Puerto Rico–born, Connecticut-based Pablo Delano is showing The Museum of the Old Colony (2024), an installation predominantly composed of others’ photographs attesting to America’s exploitation of the island.

The decolonial subject matter broached by all these projects typically lends itself toward bitterness and anger, and rightly so, yet all these works are quite hopeful. Admittedly, I’m dubious anyone can decolonize museums without undoing them entirely, but I’m struck by the artists’ optimism about imagining other possibilities for institutions and, by extension, biennials. So, my question to you is: How successful do you think this is as a decolonial biennial? Have the artists in it persuasively proposed alternative forms for institutions?

Maximilíano Durón: I think it’s important to broaden that a little. What even is a museum? And what are the histories of those institutions? As many in Venice this week know, museums are part of Western colonial projects. It’s a tradition that goes all the way back to the wunderkammern, or cabinets of curiosities, amassed by European aristocracy beginning in the 16th century. A wunderkammer boasted how much its owner had traveled beyond his homeland—and how much he had plundered. Museums in many ways grew out of that. And I’ll add to this lineage the world fairs and international expos that displayed the day’s latest technologies and architectural innovations, while also putting humans, often African and Indigenous people, on display.  goldenqq