Walls of glass beads, each colored strand hugging the next as they hang from the ceiling.
A pile of rotting fruit on a wooden desk, connected by long wires to speakers emanating a low and melodic hum.
In a room that’s all chalkboard, names link in a never-ending tree stretching from floor to ceiling.
A fountain with a Greek-looking bust in the middle, red lasers and water spurting from her eyes.
These are just four examples of the incredible displays of art from the 2024 iteration of the biannual Biennale di Venezia (or in English, the Venice Biennale). Visiting the Biennale was a highlight of my semester abroad, a faint dream turned reality during the two-hour ride from Florence into The Floating City’s central train station.
The Venice Biennale is one of the most prestigious contemporary art exhibitions in the world. The Biennale oscillates between art and architecture, switching between them each year. Typically running from April through mid-November, the Biennale features artists from all over the world in pavilions that are spread throughout the grounds like amusement park rides. Each pavilion is its own freestanding building and exhibition space, most consisting of one or two rooms with flexible layouts. Most countries who participate each year retain their own pavilion or share with a neighboring country, making the exhibition akin to the Olympics of the contemporary art world. The pavilions culminate in the Central Pavilion, which—in 2024 at least—resembled a more traditional art exhibition.
Each year the Venice Biennale is something to write home about, and the 60th iteration, entitled “Foreigners Everywhere” or “Stranieri Ovunque” and curated by Adriano Pedrosa, the Biennale’s first openly queer curator, was no exception. The 2024 exhibition aimed to send the message that, in Pedrosa’s words, “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.”
Each artist and each pavilion interpreted this theme in their own way: below I have highlighted three of my personal favorites from the 2024 Venice Biennale: Foreigners Everywhere.
Australia
Winner of the Golden Lion Award for Best National Participation, Archie Moore’s work “kith and kin” spoke volumes. My favorite of the pavilions I experienced, Moore’s work demonstrates the common ground between his personal experience and Australia’s political climate. Upon entrance, the work encased the visitor in a large, somber, square room. Chalkboard walls lined the room with over 2,400 generations of Moore’s family lineage, organized into a large-scale family tree. The work was meant to represent the deep-seated and strong history of the First Nations people of Australia, while also exposing how these peoples have been colonized, murdered, and repressed by the British and eventually the Australian government.
The center of the room was filled with a pool of dark ink. Floating in the pool was a ‘city’ of stacks of paper, the top of each stack including copies of coroner reports from the deaths of Aboriginal Australian people. The island of floating paper represents the island of Australia itself and the delicacy of Aboriginal history. One wrong step, one wrong sweep of a hand, and the documents would cascade into the black ink, their information lost forever. The installation spoke volumes and seemed to demand whispers and lowered voices to let the work’s voice fill the room instead.
Japan
Artist Yuko Mohri exhibited two works in the marble-floored and airy Japanese pavilion, entitled “Moré Moré (Leaky)” and “Decomposition.” The former, inspired by Tokyo subway workers who resourcefully used whatever objects they had on hand to patch up subway leaks, was a series of kinetic sculptures with water flowing through them. Using only local materials and objects from Venice itself, Mohri sought to explore the intersection of movement, water, and the everyday object in a different context.
The second work, my favorite from this pavilion, explored the organic roots of sound and noise. “Decomposition” was a series of live sculptures, consisting of groups of fruit allowed to decompose and rot. These pieces of fruit were connected via cables to hanging lights or speakers, resulting in either a flickering light display or a melodic hum that changes in pitch alongside the changing levels of moisture in the fruits. The fruits were replaced every few weeks and therefore the lights and sounds changed completely depending on how long the fruit had sat out. Mohri is interested in how the world will continue to respond to global crises such as natural disasters and climate change, and so her works embody these responses in a smaller-scale form.
The United States
The first Indigenous artist to represent the United States in the Biennale solo, Jeffery Gibson’s pavilion “the space in which to place me” was a colorful and involved exploration of how culture survives and thrives under “impossible conditions.” A highlight of the show was the large looming figures with intricate beadwork. Each torso held a different caption, including “WE WANT TO BE FREE,” the title of the work.
Another work in the show used two found punching bags covered in heavy and rainbow beadwork, reading the phrase “WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT.” Admirers of Gibson may remember his work “RED POWER” in the Harvard Art Museums’ collection, which was displayed last spring as part of the show “Future Minded: New Works in the Collection.” His pavilion at the Biennale was simultaneously a representation of his oeuvre and a sign of where the artist plans to move next with his work. Gibson continues to inspire and inform contemporary studies of how Indigenous material and non-material culture has and continues to persist and evolve.
The 2024 Venice Biennale was a show of coming together. A show of recognizing that though we all may be foreigners, there exists unity despite our differences. Although this iteration of the Biennale has been uninstalled, there is always next year to see a new curator’s vision for the Biennale. And for the architecture-minded, the 19th International Architecture Exhibition opens on May 10, 2025.
Sachi Laumas ’26 (slaumas@college.harvard.edu) can’t stop reminiscing about her semester abroad and is also the Associate Arts Editor of the Independent.