The Best Living Artists at the 2024 Venice Biennale

Mataaho Collective and MAHKU—Movimento dos Artistas Huni Kuin (Arsenale and Giardini, respectively)

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.

Frieda Toranzo Jaeger (Arsenale)

The effect of taking in Frieda Toranzo Jaeger’s mural-size canvas Rage Is a Machine in Times of Senseless (2024) is jarring. It’s a layered composition with a lot going on. At its center is a machine-like structure from which protrude several braids, at various points. On the right-hand side, the machine emits noxious-looking plumes of red smoke, onto which Toranzo Jaeger has written “Viva Palestina Viva” several times. To the left of the machine, as if a banner suspended in the sky is a tableau showing various cut watermelons, a symbol of Palestinian resistance; on one is carved the words “Viva la Vida.” The machine is set in a lush landscape and in one passage is an embroidered scene of nude women on a cloud, a reference to Sappho of Lesbos; on the canvas’s reverse the artist has scrawled the poet’s Fragment 38 “You burn me.”

Brett Graham (Arsenale)

Who determines what is a wasteland? That’s the premise of a massive, black-painted wooden sculpture, titled Wastelands (2024), by Brett Graham (Ngāti Koroki Kahukura, Tainui). The work takes the shape of a pātaka (storehouse) that he has put on wheels. Traditionally, the appearance of a pātaka holds special significance: how ornate the carvings on one’s pātaka was a sign of wealth and prestige in the community. But Graham has subverted this by carving into his pātaka the image of eels, a traditional food source of the Tainui people. During colonization of New Zealand, the Western-imposed government passed a law that deemed swamplands, a habitat of eels and important resource for the Māori generally, as “waste,” essentially deeming them “unoccupiable land, redefining them as territories of wetland to be drained and turned towards agriculture,” per the wall text. Graham then has gathered these eels to save them, honoring their importance to the well-being of Māori people.

Emmi Whitehorse (Arsenale)

There’s something enamoring about the abstract landscapes of Emmi Whitehorse, a Diné artist in her late 60s. The artist’s palette of burgundy, ochre, burnt sienna, and marigold speaks to the landscape of the Southwest, specifically Santa Fe, New Mexico, where the artist is based. To these colors, Whitehorse adds dozens of marks and shapes that seem to tell the story of the landscape. It’s not necessarily for non-Native people to decode what each mark marks or what knowledge is held here in this land. The joy of life of Indigenous peoples who are still the stewards of these lands and the pain of destruction through colonization are evident, however.  

Dana Awartani (Arsenale)

I gained a further appreciation for Whitehorse’s palette when I encountered the work of Dana Awartani, a Saudi artist of Palestinian lineage, further along in the exhibition, which also consists of hues of reds, yellows, and oranges pieces of fabrics hang, suspended from the ceiling, overlapping. If you look closely, you’ll notice that the swaths of fabric have imperfections, irregularly shaped square patches that point to a previous tear or rip. Awartani has darned these works, a technique that brings together the existing threads of a tattered cloth rather than introducing a new, or foreign, piece of fabric. Each tear, and by extension repair, represents “historical and cultural sites that have been destroyed in the Arab world during war and by acts of terror,” per the wall text; it is updated and expanded for each presentation, with this new one reflecting the destruction in Gaza amid Israel’s ongoing war that has claimed thousands of lives and leveled all its universities. The work’s title, Come, Let Me Heal Your Wounds. Let Me Mend Your Broken Bones (2024), speaks to this practice, as does the dyes Awartani has used, mixtures of herbs and spices that all carry medicinal properties. The work is quite literally a salve when we need it the most.

Disobedience Archive (Arsenale)

I have to admit, when I watched the livestream of the press conference of the artist list for the Biennale, I was skeptical of how the Disobedience Archive would manifest in the exhibition. There seemed to be too many artists included for it to be successful, I thought. I am glad to be proven wrong. There are in fact so many works in this room, all playing on small screens simultaneously. (My only complaint is the sound bleed made some more difficult to hear.) This is a polyphonic and disorienting installation that highlights how resistance manifests in various places at various points in history and today, from ACT UP to advocating for trans live and against femicide, to protesting jointly against anti-Muslim racism and antisemitism, to boycotting Israel. The cacophony presented here feels closer to the world we inhabit as opposed to neat tellings of activism long ago. It’s as much hopeful as it is discombobulating.   

Agnes Questionmark (Arsenale)

A major theme of this year’s Whitney Biennial is the emergence of a new kind of body art, as my colleague Alex Greenberger wrote in his review of that exhibition. The themes of the body certainly recur at this Venice Biennale but manifest in very different forms. One such work is Agnes Questionmark’s Cyber-Teratology Operation (2024), a sculpture of a mutant-like, pregnant humanoid, from which emerge red tendrils that are somewhere between viscera and umbilical cords. The figure reclines in a dentist’s operating chair and is connected to three screens, one featuring an eye that seems to follow you around, and the other two showing what appears to be the view of a laparoscopic camera as it makes its journey into the figure’s body. As we watch the figure undergo an operation—life-saving? gender-affirming? both?—the figure watches us back. It’s eerie, haunting, and daring. Questionmark, whose participation is produced through the Biennale College Arte 2023–24, is among the youngest artists in the exhibition. I’m excited to see where this career will go.

Anna Maria Maiolino (Arsenale)

One of the two winners of this Biennale’s Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, Anna Maria Maiolino presents (just outside the main Arsenale hall) a new, site-specific installation, INDO & VINDO (2024), consisting of a sculpture of unfired earthen clay that appears like tendrils or intestines and is draped over a bench-like structure and placed along the shelving and affixed to chicken-wire armature of this storeroom on the Arsenale grounds. Because this clay is not fired, it will eventually dry out and likely disintegrate. The ephemeral quality of the material, which can survive thousands of years when heated, points to the fleetingness of life, of our time here, there, everywhere.

Gabrielle Goliath (Giardini)

This is an affecting video that purposefully doesn’t reveal itself to the viewer. Comprising more than a dozen of screens, we see people sitting before a light-blue backdrop as they are being interviewed to discuss the violence—“patriarchal, racializing, and colonial,” per the wall text—that they have experienced first-hand. But we never actually hear their story. Instead, what Gabrielle Goliath presents is what comes before, after, and between their recountings: the clearing of one’s throat, the ‘ums’, the pauses in speech, the cracks in one’s voice. We don’t need to hear their trauma to believe it, Goliath seems to say.

Teresa Margolles (Giardini)

Teresa Margolles has long commemorated those who have died in her work. For Manifesta 11 in 2016, she was to present a collaboration with Karla, a trans sex worker from Cuidad Juárez; Karla was murdered just months before the exhibition opened. And instead Margolles presented a moving installation that featured an eight-foot-tall photo of Karla and audio of a friend recounting Karla’s murder. In Venice, Margolles presents her version of the Shroud of Turin, which features the outline of a Venezuelan man who was killed as he crossed into Colombia. Margolles placed this shroud over his body during his autopsy. While migration is a central theme of this Biennale, this is one of the few works that explicitly deals with the perils and violence that happen during forced migrations—the sacrifices and hardships human beings are willing to endure for the chance to live a better life, to live out their life. Margolles, however, reminds us that not everyone accomplishes that goal.

Pablo Delano (Giardini)

This room-size installation might be one of the most talked-about installations in the main exhibition. Titled The Museum of the Old Colony (2024), it is a condemnation against the imperial, colonial project that the United States has imposed on Puerto Rico, which has been a colony for more than 500 years. Gathered here are found photographs of life under colonization and the remnants of the colonizer’s society: a classroom desk where indoctrination takes place, a light-skinned Puerto Rican Barbie (marked down from $24.99 to $12.99), the soft drink Old Colony, M&Ms, the anthropologist’s camera, a jar labeled “Little White Lies,” piggy banks and domino sets from US banks, a volume titled United States Colonies and Dependencies: Illustrated, and much more. A video, installed toward the back of the room, pieces together various clips from the news and social media that gather a range of opinions on Puerto Rico from a white man saying all crime on the island is drug-related and does not involve white people like himself, to Trump during Hurricane Maria and much more.

Dean Sameshima and Miguel Ángel Rojas (Giardini)

A recurring theme in this Biennale is how artists from different generations and working in different contexts have, across time, taken up similar themes in their work—a reminder that what was resonant yesterday is still potent today. Nowhere is that more evocative than the black-and-white photographs of movie theaters by Miguel Ángel Rojas, in 1970s Bogotá, and Dean Sameshima, in 2020s Berlin. There’s a tension between the two bodies of work, which are hung in the same room. Sameshima’s images document adult movie theaters, whereas Rojas’s theater was not explicitly for X-rated films though it was a known space for sex acts between men, which was not decriminalized in Colombia until 1981. Sameshima photographs men who are shown alone, staring at blank screens. Rojas’s images are shot through a pinhole, though not the traditional kind—an aperture in a bathroom stall that perhaps could also serve as a glory hole. The stolen, illicit moments of Rojas’s era give way to the sleek, Grindr-accessible times of Sameshima.

Honorable Mentions

I must say there is a lot of great art on view in this Biennale, and I’d be remiss to not mention other standouts. Two of the most mesmerizing video installations come from Ahmed Umar and Joshua Serafin, both showing in black boxes at the Arsenale. Umar’s Talitin, The Third (2023) shows the artist performing a traditional Sudanese bridal dance as the bride, while Serafin douses himself in a black liquid resembling oil. Afro-Mexican artist Aydée Rodriguez Lopez and Indigenous Australian artist Marlene Gilson are among the artists in the exhibition showing paintings depicting the daily lives of their people, asserting their place in society despite efforts at erasure and marginalization.

There’s something titillating about the amount of homoerotic art in this very queer Biennale. Standouts for me include the mosaics of Omar Mismar, including two nude men whose faces are pixelated about to lock lips; a Louis Fratino painting showing a man giving birth to another man from his hole and titled I Keep My Treasure in My Ass (2019); and a Xiyadie papercut in which a man sews up his penis.