Anne de Charmant, Artistic Director & Curator for Meadow Arts, embarked on an inspiring trip to Italy for the 60th Venice Biennale: Foreigners Everywhere. Find out what she had to say about her time in Venice in this blog post.

Journeying through the Biennale leads to an understanding that travel and migration, perhaps more than destination and settlement, are the true constituents of humankind.

Anne de Charmant, Artistic Director & Curator

Image: Yinka Shonibare CBE RA, Refugee Astronaut VIII (2024). Installation view, Venice Biennale 2024

Foreigners everywhere. What an inspired and magnificent title for this 60^th Venice Biennale! On a negative level it could be understood as a sentence sometimes muttered in overpopulated tourist spots – Venice for example – or a lazy populist and xenophobic truism of our times. In Venice in 2024 though, it stands as a deep and poignant statement that resonates endlessly, from a global societal plane to a profoundly intimate soul-searching one. 

The 2024 Biennale’s Brazilian curator Adriano Pedrosa recognises his theme 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 deep down inside, a foreigner.” Yes, and, as he no doubt intended, this has generated an almost monstrous number of interpretations. 

On the medieval docks of the Arsenale, with a work by the collective Claire Fontaine, this sentence is repeated and reflected in joyful coloured lights above dark waters, in what is a dizzying Babel of languages. And one suspects that these words in turn, in each language are loaded with a host of further cultural associations. 

Image: Claire Fontaine, Foreigners Everywhere, (2004-24). Installation view, Venice Biennale 2024

At the entrance of the Arsenale’s mammoth exhibition space, Yinka Shonibare’s astronaut in a Dutch batik space suit, carries a travelling kit in his backpack, intent on finding refuge in an altogether other world, his demeanour implies many failed attempts in finding refuge on our own planet. He invites us to walk in. 

It is worth noting that Shonibare CBE RA is one of very few “big name” artists of the main event. Many of the artists’ works presented here carry the phrase “this is the first time this artist has been exhibited…” on the helpful interpretation panels. The Venice Biennale was once, aeons ago, the territory of the big stars of the art world, but in recent editions, this has been reversed to embrace an impressive and very welcome throng of artistic discoveries. This particular edition, true to its mission, introduces us to hundreds of amazing works coming from what, to the mind of a traditional contemporary art user, feels like global but delicate art ecosystems we might never have been aware of. This sense of frailty and dislocation is an important constant throughout the visit.

Journeying through the Biennale leads to an understanding that travel and migration, perhaps more than destination and settlement, are the true constituents of humankind. Maps and lines are everywhere. The most recent understanding of migratory forces is powerfully represented by the work of Moroccan artist Bouchra Khalili’s ‘Mapping Journey Project,’ an installation of a dozen screens showing large paper maps where anonymous migrants’ hands draw, in felt-tips lines, their desperate journeys. They describe these itineraries with matter-of-fact comments that harrowingly expose a world of pain and arbitrariness.

Image: Bouchra Khalili, The Mapping Journey Project, (2008-2011). Installation view, Venice Biennale 2024

Self-taught artists and collectives have been a constant of the last few Biennales, again leading to amazing discoveries. Logically this edition has an even greater focus on what was once termed ‘outsider art’. Aside from historic figures such as Madge Gil and Aloyse with their mesmerising inner journeys, artists like Leopold Strobl and Anna Zemànkovà deploy near messianic intimate rituals.

Impressive research by the curatorial team led to invitations of indigenous artists the world over that allow the visitor a glimpse into the deep seams of infinitely rich cultures. Rooted in a pact with the land, artists like Aycoobo and his visual glossary of Amazonian native trees, or the Diné Navajo Emmi Whitehorse with her large sensorial abstract landscapes, underscore the genius of places we might lose.

Image: Emmi Whitehorse, Typography of Standing Ruins #3 (2024). Venice Biennale 2024

The queer experience is amply represented and often powerfully embodied. Norway-based Sudanese artist Ahmed Umar performs a spellbinding ritual bridal dance, a practice he learned before being excluded from his family upon reaching puberty for being “a third of a girl”.

Aside from the Arsenale exhibition and the Central Pavilion, curated by Perdosa, the Giardini hold the National Pavilions where each country, as they have done, for the past 59 editions, present their own countries’ choice. There are also national pavilions throughout the city and numerous collateral events, which we will refer to in another blog. I have by no means seen the proverbial “everything”, but over decades of visiting the Venice Biennale, I have learned to manage the sinking feeling that I have missed out something unmissable.

A few days ago, upon leaving behind what is to me the most beautiful city in the world, I had the familiar and recurrent feeling that I was somehow leaving home. Since I first came to Venice, many decades ago, I have always felt a bit guilty that it is somehow part of me – what right had I, a foreigner, to claim it as my own? This year, strangely, I was more comfortable in the knowledge that I, as just another ‘foreigner everywhere’, could belong there too.