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Migration

Over the past few years, Pedrosa has developed a critical programming of thought-provoking exhibitions with titles such as Afro-Atlantic Histories (2018), Women’s Histories, Feminist Histories (2019); Brazilian Histories (2022), and most recently, Indigenous Histories (2023). Pedrosa is a well-known curator throughout Brazil, who gained recognition working as chief curator at the Pampulha Museum of Art in Belo Horizonte. There, he transformed the museum’s antiquated salon-style exhibition model into a residency programme that brought up-and-coming contemporary artists to the institution. Since then, he has steadily gained national and international experience as curator or artistic director of large-scale shows and biennials, including the 2nd Triennial of San Juan in Puerto Rico (2009) and the São Paulo pavilion at the 9th Shanghai Biennale (2012). He was part of the artistic team of the São Paulo Biennial twice, in 1998 and 2006.

Pedrosa follows previous artistic director Cecilia Alemani’s 2022 method of dividing the International Exhibition into a contemporary and a historical section, thereby showcasing artists that are active today as well as creating space for an art historical approach. The exhibition, which takes its title, Foreigners Everywhere, from a series of neon works by Claire Fontaine, will include several large installations by indigenous groups such as the Brazilian MAHKU collective and the New Zealand Mataaho collective. There will also be several outdoor projects, including one by the winner of the Golden Lion Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Brazilian artist Anna Maria Maiolino. While there are several more well-known names among the 332 artists, such as Teresa Margolles, Superflex and Bouchra Khalili, much of the work is by lesser known artists, most of whom have never taken part in the Venice Biennale before.

Pedrosa steers the Biennale in an outspokenly political and decolonising direction, while at the same time following the developments of the art world of the past years

Pedrosa has long foregrounded the work of LGBTQIA+ artists in his curatorial practice, perhaps most notably when he, together with Jens Hoffmann, co-curated the 12th Istanbul Biennial around the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres in 2011. In Venice, he intends to continue in this thematic direction: ‘Queer artists will appear throughout the exhibition. They are the subject of a large section of works, and there will also be a section devoted to queer abstraction, with works by artists from China, Italy, and the Philippines. There will also be an area of the exhibition dedicated to the Disobedience Archive, a project by Marco Scotini, who since 2005 has been developing a video archive focusing on the relationship between artistic practices and activism. This section includes works by 39 artists and collectives, and is divided into two main parts especially conceived for our framework: diaspora activism and gender disobedience.’

Tradition

Several of the participating artists are based in the Netherlands, such as Chinese painter Evelyn Taocheng Wang and Panamanian/Serbian artist duo Antonio Jose Guzman & Iva Jankovic. Pedrosa explains: ‘I made an effort to work with artists I never worked with before, including Taocheng Wang and Guzman and Jankovic. Taocheng Wang’s work connects with my interest in abstraction; she will present new paintings that reference Agnes Martin. I invited Guzman and Jankovic because of my interest in performance and textiles. There will be a specific part of the exhibition organised around textile work. In the case of Guzman, I was also happy to present an artist from Panama, because I very much wanted to include artists from different parts of Latin America.’

With the geographic focus almost entirely on the Global South and special attention for marginalised figures, Pedrosa steers the Biennale in an outspokenly political and decolonising direction, while at the same time following the developments of the art world of the past years. In the curatorial process, Pedrosa realised that two thematic motifs recur throughout the exhibition: ‘The first one is textiles, works that reveal an interest in craft, tradition, the handmade, and in techniques that were at times considered other or foreign, outsider or strange in the larger field of fine arts. A second is what I call “families of artists”: artists related by blood, many of them indigenous. Again, tradition plays an important role here – the transmission of knowledge and practices from father or mother to son or daughter, or among siblings and relatives.’

Many artists may have participated once in the Biennale, and might be very important, even canonical, figures in their own countries. But somehow they are not well-known at all in Europe

The historical section of the exhibition focuses on global modernisms with works by twentieth century artists from the Global South, including New Zealand painter Selwyn Wilson, Palestinian-American visual artist and activist Samia Halaby, Korean painter Qoede Lee, and the Casablanca School of painters from Morocco. Pedrosa talks about the curatorial decision to include a historical section: ‘In the last twenty or twenty-five years there has been a strong presence of artists from the Global South in the Biennale, but this only started in the 1990s. That’s why I thought it would be interesting to include artists from earlier in the twentieth century. Many artists from this period may have participated once in the Biennale, and might be very important, even canonical, figures in their own countries, such as India, Egypt and South Africa. But somehow they are not well-known at all in Europe.’

Glass easels

Pedrosa took a similar historical approach in his work for the 1998 edition of the São Paulo Biennial, which was curated by Paulo Herkenhoff. He reflects that this was a particularly formative experience for him: ‘I was a very young curator and it was such a privilege and honour to work on that biennial. It also included a historical section, though it was very different from the one I’m developing now. It was devoted to ‘antropofagia’, Oswald de Andrade’s term for Brazil’s modernist practice of cultural cannibalism, which is still an important tool for me when I look at twentieth-century productions from the Global South.’

The historical section in Venice is further divided into portraits, abstractions and artists from the Italian diaspora, including Italian artists who moved abroad and developed their careers elsewhere, such as Juan Del Prete and Simone Forti. This final section will be presented on the pioneering glass easels that architect Lina Bo Bardi, herself an Italian immigrant in Brazil, designed for the MASP building when it opened in 1968.

With the introduction of many artists from the past century in a showcase of contemporary art, Pedrosa is proposing a bold historical revision of the Biennale itself, though he is careful to formulate it tentatively as an ‘essay, a draft, a speculative curatorial exercise that seeks to question the boundaries and definitions of modernism’. He adds: ‘I’m not presenting a definitive history on a particular theme or topic, the aspect of speculation is quite important. The Biennale offers this wonderful opportunity to do something different that hasn’t really been done yet: to bring together all these artists from different parts of the world. You will never have seen a Frida Kahlo in the same room as Amrita Sher-Gil or Tarsila do Amaral, for example. I hope it will be quite a revelation.’