Someone needs to say it: this hasn’t been a vintage year for the Venice Biennale. Foreigners Everywhere, the 60th edition of its international exhibition, arranged across the Central Pavilion in the Giardini and the cavernous Arsenale, may have a witty title, in the context of a city that profits so relentlessly from tourism. Yet it proves a disappointment, with far too many dead artists (isn’t the biennale supposed to be about contemporary art?), and not enough panache.
Its Brazilian curator, Adriano Pedrosa, celebrates artists from the Global South, along with other “foreigners” or outsiders including queer and indigenous artists as well as the self-taught. Tellingly, though, he came up with that title years ago, and his vision now feels stale. Western museums have been recalibrating themselves along these lines for at least a decade; several of Pedrosa’s “discoveries” – Saloua Raouda Choucair, Wifredo Lam, Fahrelnissa Zeid – have had solo exhibitions at the Tate.
Massimiliano Gioni’s brilliant 2013 biennale, The Encyclopedic Palace, also took “outsider” art as its theme, and articulated a lot of Pedrosa’s concerns with greater eloquence and flair; textiles are a “motif”, says Pedrosa, but they’ve been done to death in shows elsewhere. Where are the new ideas?
Moreover, Pedrosa champions too much pedestrian historical work for reasons of inclusivity rather than aesthetic merit: a salon-hung room of mediocre portraits is particularly feeble. The result is tired, not inspired, and unintentionally patronising – even awkwardly anthropological – in tone.
The presentations inside the national pavilions fare better. Drama 1882, by Egypt’s Wael Shawky, is a powerful eight-part operatic film about the nationalist Urabi revolution that precipitated the British bombardment of Alexandria; it is, in a sense, a kind of keening, minor-keyed counterpart to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hit musical Hamilton, performed in classical Arabic, with a sorrowful score and insidious atmosphere, and mesmerising, perpetually undulating choreography, suggesting the shadowy give-and-take of diplomacy and treacherous intrigue. Tackling today’s de-rigueur topic of colonial history (see also: this year’s on-point Nigerian and Beninese pavilions), but with stylised, plangent grace, it left me in bits, and, by the second preview day, was deservedly attracting long queues.
