2024 Venice Biennale pavilions: your go-to list

Fonte: https://artreview.com/2024-venice-biennale-pavilions-your-go-to-list/

ARTREVIEW

Publicado em: 08 de Agosto de 2023

The 60th Venice Biennale, set to run from 20 April – 24 November 2024, will be curated by Adriano Pedrosa – and some countries have already announced the artists who will exhibit in their national pavilions. ArtReview will keep a running tally as they come.

Queensland-based, First Nation artist Archie Moore has been selected to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale. Born in 1970, three years after the 1967 Australian Aboriginals Referendum – which gave constitutional citizenship rights to Indigenous people – Moore is known for his large-scale installations that reveal the tensions between personal and official histories of Australia’s colonial past as well as issues of identities, intercultural understanding and racism.

Austria has named Vienna-based artist Anna Jermolaewa for its pavilion. Born in Russia, Jermolaewa fled the Soviet Union in 1989 after being accused of anti-Soviet agitation. Jermolaewa’s oeuvre straddles photography, video, and installation, in works that probe the social and political structures of everyday situations. At the biennale, Jermolaewa will present new works that reflect on different expressions of non-violent resistance. The exhibition is to be curated by art historian Gabriele Spindler.

The Republic of Benin has announced its debut national Pavilion in Venice. The exhibition will be curated by Nigerian curator Azu Nwagbogu, who is known for his advocacy for contemporary African art and photography, founding Lago’s African Artists’ Foundation in 2007 and directing the LagosPhoto Festival since 2010. ‘We are delighted to have Azu Nwagbogu as the curator of the Bénin National Pavilion. His unique background, vision and expertise in the field of art curation makes him the perfect candidate to showcase Bénin’s cultural heritage and contemporary art to the world.’ Patrice Talon, president of Benin, said in a statement. Yassine Lassissi, curator of La Galerie Nationale du Bénin, and architect Franck Houndégla will also join the curatorial team.

Glicéria Tupinambá, also known as Célia Tupinambá, will represent Brazil in alongside her community as a representative of the Tupinambá Indigenous people, and other guests to be announced. The exhibition, titled Ka’a Pûera: nós somos pássaros que andam [Ka’a Pûera: we are walking birds], will share the wealth of the Tupinambá culture and its journey of resistance and resurgence. Tupinambá adds another view to the theme defined by Adriano Pedrosa forthe Biennale, Foreigners Everywhere, adding a perspective reflecting on the longstanding marginalisation of Brazil’s indigenous communities within their own lands. The exhibition, which will be curated by Arissana Pataxó, Denilson Baniwa and Gustavo Caboco Wapichana, will also see the Brazil Pavilion renamed the Hãhãwpuá Pavilion. Hãhãwpuá is the name used by the Pataxó people to refer to the territory that was Brazil before colonisation, which has also had many other names.

Canada has named Kapwani Kipwanga to represent the country’s pavilion in Venice. With a background in anthropology, Kipwanga’s practice often emerges from extensive archival research. Through performance, video, sound, photo, sculpture and installation, her minimalistic works reveal neglected memories and the inner workings of asymmetrical power. Kipwanga is ‘interested in the role of art as a catalyst for revealing and addressing alternative and often silenced, marginalized socio-political narratives that are part of our shared histories’, said Canada Pavilion Curator Gaëtane Verna. She believes that Kipwanga’s project will ‘undoubtedly transcend the materials that she will choose to use to transform our own understandings of the world’. Kapwani Kipwanga was chosen by The National Gallery of Canada.

Vlatka Horvat will be representing Croatia, responding to the theme set by curator Adriano Pedrosa ‘Foreigners Everywhere’ with a project titled By the Means at Hand. It refers to the improvised transport systems common in Croatia and around the world where informal networks of friends and family are asked to carry packages, letters, money and other things from people in their home countries to their loved ones wherever they are travelling to. Curated by art historian Antonia Majača, the pavilion will display the work of ‘foreign’ artists delivered to Venice by such improvised means.

Estonia has named Edith Karlson to represent the country. Dogs, bears, lions, birds, dinosaurs and other animals appear allegorically or symbolically in the artist’s sculptures. She told Echo Gone Wrong last year, ‘I have always, as far as I can remember, been a huge fan of animals, and I have never stopped loving and admiring them. I probably started to use them in my art because I did not want to use the human body or the human figure, or anything too human. Whatever problem or feeling I try to show with my art is already very human anyway.’ Karlson was chosen by the Estonian Centre for Contemporary Art.

Finland has named artists Pia Lindman, Vidha Saumya and Jenni-Juulia Wallinheimo-Heimonen to exhibit at its Pavilion, commissioned and produced by Frame Contemporary Art Finland. Curators Yvonne Billimore and Jussi Koitela anticipate a ‘multifaceted collaboration that reimagines the pavilion as well as the kind of art, bodies and experiences which the pavilion can support. In the early phases, we are taking time to explore the relationalities of our individual practices and share how our lived experiences impact our work. These exchanges will be the building blocks for the exhibition’.

France has named sculptor Julien Creuzet for its pavilion in Venice. Deploying plastics and rope in his work, the artist often explores his own French-Caribbean identity. ‘His singular work and his gift for oral literature feed on creolization by bringing together a diversity of materials, stories, shapes and gestures. The questions raised by his works will find, at the French Pavilion in Venice, a particularly important resonance with those of our time,’ pavilion organisers said in a statement. ‘Julien Creuzet was also chosen for the horizons he draws, going beyond the opposition between identity and universality, demonstrating that in the folding of art, the poetic and artistic echoes always trace responses that are as beautiful, joyful and restorative as they are unexpected.’

John Akomfrah, known for his ambitious film installations, will represent Great Britain at Venice. The artist, who first came to prominence in the early 1980s as part of the Black Audio Film Collective, is no stranger to the biennial, first exhibiting in 2015. Vertigo Sea, commissioned by curator Okwui Enwezor, was a vast three-screen installation which took whaling, the environment and our relationship with the sea, as its subject. Four years later, Akomfrah – who was born in Accra, before moving to the UK as a child – returned to Venice with his work Four Nocturnes (2019), included in a group exhibition for the inaugural Ghana Pavilion. Akomfrah commented: ‘I’m grateful to be given a moment to explore the complex history and significance of this institution and the nation it represents, as well as its architectural home in Venice – with all the stories it has told and will continue to.’

Hong Kong-born and based artist Trevor Yeung will represent Hong Kong at Venice. The selection was made by M+, Asia’s first visual culture museum, and the Hong Kong Arts Development Council (HKADC). Yeung’s work examines the systems and conditions that contain and create emotional and behavioural responses. With a fascination for botanic ecology and horticulture, he juxtaposes natural objects in his installations to reflect on their artificiality. ‘As the world adjusts to the reopening of borders and new ways of interaction after the pandemic, it is particularly meaningful for me to present new work influenced by cross cultures and my immediate surroundings—to bring my vision abroad and connect with the international art community’, the artist said in a statement. Olivia Chow from M+ will curate.

Hungary’s national pavilion will be represented by Budapest-born, London-based artist Marton Nemes. The colourful, abstract canvases characteristic of Nemes’s works often represent urban architecture and subculture music scenes. For the Biennale, Nemes will present a piece of large, multimedia work that utilises the spatial features of the Hungarian pavilion. The pavilion is commissioned by Julia Fabenyi, Hungarian art historian and the director of Cologne’s Ludwig Museum. Rona Kopeczky will curate.

Reykjavik based artist Hildigunnur Birgisdóttir will represent Iceland. Birgisdóttir’s works explore the inconsistent alignments between beauty, utility and value. Her inspirations often come from everyday objects that reflect globalised systems of production, distribution and commerce. Distorted paper clips, sticky notes, computer buttons, and plastic packaging form a playful visual language that subverts and unnerves the mundane. ‘The Venice Biennale is the perfect forum for Birgisdóttir’s aesthetically subversive and slyly political work.While still in its early stages, I’m excited by the way she is approaching the exhibition space, and the unexpected relationships she is creating between seemingly disparate sources and materials. I don’t think this pavilion will look or feel like any other’, Dan Byers, curator of the Iceland Pavilion said in a statement.

Eimear Walshe will represent Ireland. Currently based in Longford, Walshe works with video, sculpture, publishing and performance to negotiate issues of nineteenth-century Irish land laws and their impacts on ideas of private property and sexual conservatism. Their pavilion for Venice will present a reconsideration of housing activism and history of land in relation to sexuality and community agency. ‘My work emerges from the context of a nation in escalating crisis; this is the subject of my work. With Sara Greavu as curator, we aim to make a pavilion in tribute to those who persist, against the odds, in being shelter for each other.’

Italy has selected Massimo Bartolini for its pavilion. Bartolini, born in Cecina in 1962, works in a variety of mediums, including performance, sound, sculpture, photography, video and large-scale public installations. Bartolini’s work draws on theatre and performance: his early works featured music and dancers, and reflected a complex relationship between the performers, the public and architecture. This then also developed to the recognisable room-size immersive installations he has been making more recently. Luca Cerizza will be the curator.

Japan has selected Tokyo-based artist Yuko Mohri to represent its Venice Pavilion. Born in 1980 in Kanagawa, Mohri is interested in various forms of interconnections. In her often large-scale installations, such as Moré Moré (Leaky): Variations (2017–) and I/O (2011–), water or electricity flow through connected pipes and circuits, in and out of various everyday objects. Her works recently appeared in this year’s 14th Gwangju Biennale, whose artistic director Sook-Kyung Lee will curate the exhibition. ‘I have admired Yuko’s work for some time, finding her choice of everyday, mundane materials and spatial configuration very interesting. Sound and music seem almost integral or embedded to their given spaces, rather than taking a central stage or overly exposed,’ Lee said in a statement.

Mounira Al Solh will represent the Lebanon Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Born in Beirut, Al Solh left the country during the Lebanese Civil Wars (1975–90). Her works – straddling painting, performance, textile, video and installation – often address issues of displacement and conditions of women through untold microhistories. In her recent work A day is as long as a year (2022), mounted in her solo show last year at Gateshead’s BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Al Solh collaborated with 31 women from Afghanistan, Iran, Lebanon, Turkey, the Netherlands and South Africa to create an Iranian Qajar-era tent, inside of which hung representations and evocations of the women’s migrant experience. The work ‘speaks to a solidarity of suffering as much as it does to a solidarity of women,’ Mark Rappolt wrote. ‘And, at times, of how that suffering can be overcome.’ Nada Ghandour, the curator of the Lebanon Pavilion in 2022, will curate.

Artist duo Pakui Hardware will represent Lithuania. Neringa Cerniauskaite and Ugnius Gelguda will create a kinetic, immersive installation featuring works by the modernist Lithuanian painter Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė. The Lithuanian National Museum of Art (commissioner Arūnas Gelūnas) will organise the exhibition; Valentinas Klimašauskas and João Laia will curate the show which promises to speak to the ‘inflammations’ concerning ‘human and planetary bodies’; Ona Lozuraitytė and Petras Išora will be responsible for the architecture. Pakui Hardware’s art ‘presents an aesthetics of entanglement in which positives of scientific progress – life extension, say – are indivisible from the negatives of neoliberal biopower and the lure of scientism’, Martin Herbert wrote in a profile of the duo last year.

(CATPC) will represent the Netherlands. The collective grew out of the Dutch artist’s collaboration with Congolese plantation workers, in Lusanga (once known as Leverville, the colonial-era headquarters of the Lever plantation operations), with whom he set up a sculpture workshop; and in 2017, in the DRC countryside at the White Cube exhibition space. Martens came to prominence with his 2008 film Episode III: Enjoy Poverty, in which, travelling around the DRC, the artist attempts to engage local photographers in discussions about the nature of the international media economy and the Western market for images of suffering in other parts of the world, encouraging them to exploit their own poverty and instability for profit. It was a work, J.J. Charlesworth wrote, that ‘forces us to face the uncomfortable question of the balance of economic power that continues to condemn many Africans to a life of subsistence labour and grinding poverty, somehow regardless of the countless millions in aid, and the thousands of aid workers and NGOs that have come to Africa to do “good work”’. The Dutch artist and his Congolese colleagues will open an exhibition at White Cube in Lusanga simultaneously to the Dutch pavilion.

The Nigerian Pavilion will be represented by eight artists: Yinka Shonibare, Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Ndidi Dike, Onyeka Igwe, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Abraham Oghobase, Precious Okoyomon and Fatimah Tuggar. This, the nation’s second presentation at Venice Biennale, will be curated by Aindrea Emelife, curator of Modern and Contemporary at the Museum of West African Art, Benin City. Under the title Nigeria Imaginary, the pavilion will ‘explore different perspectives and constructed ideas, memories of and nostalgia for Nigeria, with a scope that is cross-generational and inter-geographic’.

The Nordic Countries Pavilion has commissioned a Joint Nordic Gesamtkunstwerk project for the Venice Biennale. Swedish artist Lap-See Lam, Finnish artist Kholod Hawash and Norwegian composer Tze Yeung Ho will collaboratively present an experimental musical installation and performance inspired by Cantonese Opera. ‘Our three invited participants are all phenomenal storytellers, who use sound and images to amalgamate conflicting feelings of national identity, involving parallel experiences of alienation and cultural affinity,’ said Asrin Haidari, who will curate the exhibition.

The Philippines will be represented by artist Mark Salvatus, whose works create direct or indirect engagements with the audience to reinterpret everyday urban politics and narratives of national history – a practice which he refers to as ‘Salvage Projects’. The selection was made after a national open call for proposals. Under the title Kabilang-tabing ng panahong ito (Behind the curtain of this age) – which comes from the words of Filipino religious leader Hermano Pule, who led resistance movement against the Spanish Catholic church during the Spanish rule – the exhibition will centre around the ethno-ecologies of Mount Banahaw, which is located on the border of the artist’s hometown in Lucban. The show will explore the topics of mysticism, modernity and the deep past. Carlos Quijon Jr. will curate.

Singapore Art Museum (SAM) has announced that Robert Zhao Renhui will represent the Singapore Pavilion. With curator Haeju Kim, Zhao will examine the complex relationships between nature and culture through photography, video and sculpture. Recent exhibitions include The Forest Institute (2022), a largescale architectural installation at Gillman Barracks, Singapore; and Untimely Meditations (2022), a series of works taking alternative views at history and nature through cabinetlike installations containing videoworks, photography and artefacts of the past and present. Kim is senior curator at SAM and most recently was artistic director for Busan Biennale 2022.

The Pavilion of South Korea will be represented by Koo Jeong-a. Known for her immersive, multi-sensory environments, Koo’s work ‘Odorama City’ at the Pavilion will conjure national memories through invisible elements such as scent, sound and temperature. Jacob Fabricius, director at Art Hub Copenhagen and previously exhibition director at Busan Biennale, and Seolhui Lee, curator of Kunsthal Aarhus in Denmark, will jointly curate the exhibition. ‘Artist Koo Jeong-a’s unique sensibility will be expressed through the exhibition, and the Korean Pavilion will serve as a place for sensory experience and function as a community of memory,’ said an official of Arts Council Korea.

Sandra Gamarra Heshiki, in collaboration with the curator Agustin Pérez Rubio, has been selected to represent the Spanish Pavilion by unanimous decision of an independent judging panel. Born in Lima in 1972, Gamarra Heshiki challenges representation, commercialism and appropriation through predominantly figurative painting, and has previously featured in the 53rd Venice Biennale, the 29th São Paulo Biennale, and the 11th Berlin Biennale – which was cocurated by Pérez Rubio. Under the proposed title of ‘Migrant Art Gallery’, the Spanish Pavilion marks its first selection of an artist born overseas, ‘a Peruvian mixed-race woman of Peruvian-Japanese descent, who will represent the country where she lives and works, playing an active role in the artistic world since the beginning of the 21st century’, the panel said in a statement.

Swiss-Brazilian artist Guerreiro do Divino Amor will represent Switzerland, with his project Super Superior Civilizations examining the motifs and visual strategies of ‘political mythologies’. The work for the Swiss Pavilion, organisers say, ‘poses a critical view of the visual language presented in national political myths, and explores their cultural charge, their hierarchization, and their use’. Andrea Bellini will curate.

Video artist Yuan Goang-Ming will represent Taiwan. Yuan’s artistic language often explores conditions of lived experience and our globalising urban environments. For the Venice Biennale, Yuan will focus on the politics of mapping, as well as the relationship between war and everyday life. The exhibition will be curated by Abby Chen, head of contemporary art and senior curator at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum. ‘Human beings understand history not just based on chronological records, but in a way as real as the smell in the air – we are all living in history,’ Chen said in a statement. ‘In an era full of uncertainty and disagreement, we will work together to explore time as a fluid habitat and constancy as a form of resistance.’

Gülsün Karamustafa will represent the Turkey Pavilion in the Arsenale. Curated by Esra Sarıgedik Öktem, a previous collaborator with Karamustafa’s, the exhibition will look to continue the artist’s focus on contemporary Turkey and historical injustice – often through multidisciplinary works that encompass installation, assemblage, sculpture, painting and videowork. ‘Karamustafa is one of the leading figures of the contemporary art scene in Turkey and her work has travelled and found its significance in many different parts of the world,’ said Bige Örer, Director of Istanbul Biennial. ‘Her layered artistic practice engages with the most pressing issues of our time such as displacement and migration, exile and ethnicity, sexuality and gender.’

The UAE pavilion will present Emirati artist Abdullah Al Saadi, who has previously participated in the Biennale in 2017 as part of its main exhibition. Al Saadi’s practice ranges from painting and drawing to collecting and cataloguing found objects. In My Mother’s Letters (1998-2013), he collected objects left behind by his mother during visits to his studio and codified them in an alternative alphabetical system. In Stone Slippers (2013), slippers made of boulders were displayed on the floor, all facing a single direction, speaking to a sisyphean experience of his personal quests. ‘My art is the result of interactions with places, people, ideas, and aesthetics that I encounter every day where I live and in my journeys,’ Al Saadi said in a statement. ‘I find myself driven to document these experiences visually or in written diaries and contemplations, seeking to transfigure the ordinary with the passage of time.’ Tarek Abou El Fetouh will curate.

Jeffrey Gibson will represent the United States at the 60th Venice Biennale. Gibson, as explored by Chris Fite-Wassilak in an ArtReview October 2022 feature, uses painting, craft and collage as means to unpick and repattern what is understood as contemporary Native American culture. In a brace of landmarks, Gibson will be the first Indigenous artist to represent the US in the Biennale’s 129-year history – he is a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent – and the exhibition’s cocurator, Kathleen Ash-Milby – coming from Portland Art Museum and a member of the Navajo Nation – is the US Pavilion’s first Native American to take the reigns. Ash-Milby will curate alongside independent curator Abigail Winograd.