Can a Biennale provide a space for Indigenous resistance?

In the middle of the Venice canals last April, almost one year ago, crowds from the international art world gathered to inaugurate the 60th edition of the oldest art Biennale in the world. Between private views and exclusive parties, the show allows a temporary snapshot into the current preoccupations, debates, and contradictions of the art world.

The Venice Biennale, founded in 1895 and often hailed as the ‘Arts Olympics,’ holds a particular place in the artistic ecosystem. For the 2024 edition, Adriano Pedrosa, director of the Museum of Art of Sao Paulo, was appointed curator, making him the first Latin-American curator in its history. The theme of his Biennale was ‘Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere’, and showed a record-breaking 331 artists and collectives. These were shown across 90 ‘national pavilions’ – exhibition spaces showcasing a country’s contemporary art – that reflect each country’s cultural identity and artistic innovation. 

But this event is also charged with issues – much like its architectural counterpart, as shado Editor Zoe Rasbash covered in 2023, which will return to Venice this May. For me, the art Biennale raised many questions. Why are nation-states and their pavilions still central at the Biennale? Is it possible to reconcile private sponsors with artistic proposals that question the capitalistic and modern system of consumption? During a climate crisis, is it still relevant to fly people from all over the world to see exhibitions that decry the social and political causes of this crisis? Can this model be reinvented, or is it slowly losing its relevance?

The power of pavilions

This idea of national pavilions started in 1907, when the Biennale organisers encouraged governments to build their exhibition venues in Giardini Park. Today, 29 of these now recognisable pavilions are in the Giardini. Other countries rent their national pavilions in the Arsenale, a complex of former shipyards and the second official Biennale venue, while due to limited official space, an increasing number rent temporary spaces across the city. 

The size and location of these pavilions can already be used to demonstrate how power and status play a role at the Biennale. The oldest and biggest pavilions are mostly from former Western imperial powers, with three Latin American countries present (Brazil, Venezuela, and Uruguay), two from Asia (Japan and South Korea), and one from Africa (Egypt). And outside the bounds of what’s regarded as ‘official’ space, for some countries, any kind of representation at all is impossible, with the high costs and lack of governmental support preventing many global majority artists from making an appearance. 

The national pavilions, representing a world order based on the centrality of nation-states, as well as providing a stage for nations to push their individual agendas, remain a subject of debate. However, with the number of countries joining increasing year on year, they remain a central component of the Biennale, as much as a space for discussion by artists and their proposals of the role of nation-states, and the questioning and redefinition of what makes a nation. 

Resistance in Venice

Nevertheless, the Biennale has also historically been a site of resistance. Since the 1960s, the institution has  been the site of numerous protests and boycotts, from student protests in 1968, to the 1974 Biennale in solidarity against the dictatorship in Chile, to the 2015 protests by artists and activists on labour rights and migrant workers in artistic institutions.

In 2024, it was no different: the Biennale was awash with acts of resistance. There were protests for Palestine outside the venues and refusals to open the Israeli pavilion, and in the absence of a Ukrainian pavilion for obvious reasons, the Polish pavilion hosted the Ukrainian collective Open Group.    

Even the slogan of this year’s Biennale, Stranieri Ovunque – Strangers Everywhere, can be read as a political statement. The title is a reference to a series of artworks by the Claire Fontaine collective, inspired by a Turin collective from the 2000s that fought racism and xenophobia in Italy. In the context of the anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric of Giorgia Meloni’s far-right government, this statement shows Pedrosa’s clear positioning. 

“The Biennale Arte 2024’s primary focus is artists who are themselves foreigners, immigrants, expatriates, diasporic, émigrés, exiled, or refugees – particularly those who have moved between the Global South and the Global North. Migration and decolonisation are key themes here,” states Pedrosa. 

But can these political claims truly take place in the institutional space of the Biennale? And can the narratives represented make it out of the showrooms and have an impact in the wider world?   

Being political at the Biennale

Pedrosa is clearly committed to exhibiting artists who had not been shown at the Biennale before, or who were previously marginalised by art institutions.

As I walked in the alleys of the Giardini to encounter the facade of the Central Pavillion, I was greeted by a monumental mural of the Brazilian Makhu Collective, originating from the Huni Kuin Indigenous Territory. Seeing the entrance of the Central Pavillion filled with the images produced by the Collective was an astonishing shift from the usually traditional aesthetic of the Central Pavillion. 

As I walked into the exhibition curated by Adriano Pedrosa in the Arsenale Venue, the showing of Indigenous artists’ work powerfully continued. 

Within the exhibition, I encounter the work of Claudia Alarcón and the Silät Collective, a women’s collective from La Puntana community of Wichí people of the Salta region in Northern Argentina, fills the walls of the Arsenale with textile artworks. Andrei Fernandez, the collective’s representative, tells me:

“We deserve to occupy those spaces and those systems of those territories that have been taken from us and continue to be taken from us. It seems to me that occupying these spaces is crucial, as a rebound of the need to survive. We also know the history of Western art, that it has always been at the service of power. But for us, being there helps us in many ways. It can be uncomfortable or strange at times, but by choosing to be there I’m optimistic that we can generate positive things, too.”

The artwork of the Silät Collective has not been recognised within cultural institutions in Argentina until this Biennale. The Wichí community continues to struggle with the preservation of their land against eviction and lithium extraction, and are systematically ignored by the Argentinian state. The international platform of the Biennale, even with its issues, still provides a valuable platform for the work of the collective to be known internationally and to be valued in the art market.

Further into the main exhibition, I encounter the work of Violeta Quispe, a Peruvian artist from Ayacucho who revives Sarhua art traditions. She shares how her practice has evolved into contemporary art, allowing her to exhibit at the Biennale:

“The new language and characteristics I am adopting in terms of this heritage have brought me into a contemporary art environment. Contemporary art is what you call it, but I consider all kinds of art contemporary. At the Biennale, I’m proud that this history, knowledge, and reflection – using materials from my land and my practice – are being shared with the world.”

Exhibiting at the Biennale has enabled Violeta to create new works addressing migration, politics, and gender. Despite this thematic shift, she remains deeply rooted in the traditional Sarhua art she learned from her parents – what she calls “a connecting thread with traditional art and the connection it holds to land, technique and history.” 

Finally, coming to the end of the Arsenale exhibition, are the prominent artworks of father and son Santiago Yahuarcani and Rember Yahuarcani, two artists from the Uitoto Nation in the Northern Amazon. Santiago is a visual artist and Indigenous leader, creating work on Amazonian cosmologies and history, and representing the violence of the rubber exploitation in the Amazon region. Rember is also a visual artist and activist, whose work is inspired by the stories his grandmother told him. He speaks in interviews about the importance of maintaining the memory and heritage of Indigenous elders.

The works of Santiago and Rember are in the same exhibition room, facing each other. The monumentality of their artworks, and the contrast between the different techniques and aesthetic languages of their pieces, resonates and powerfully fills the space. This room, putting forward two generations of Indigenous artists, exhibiting at the Biennale for the first time, renews the guiding principle and intention of this year’s curation: to question the Western categories upheld in art history and cultural institutions. 

Economic redistribution and the art market 

Another central question to the existence of the Biennale is how it is funded. Not all funders, which are a mix of public and private, are communicated to the public. For the ambitions of the artists and curators to become reality, money from artist galleries and private foundations is also invested in the exhibitions.  

Known as the “Venice effect,” showing at the Biennale can seriously materially benefit artists. This, aside from allowing for the creation of more art, can have other run-on effects.  

Curator Andrei Fernandez, who represents artists from the Wichi community of the Salta province in Argentina, believes that the sales generated from the Biennale can contribute to an improvement in tangible community living conditions. “What we always insist on is that the art is a community project produced by a collective,” she says. “This helps other actions to be carried out in the territory, which always have to do with meeting, with collective learning, and mutual care,” she says. The Biennale, more than an international exhibition, can become a crucial space to enter the art market and, in the case of Indigenous communities or artists in vulnerable contexts, can make a real difference in accessing higher economic redistribution for their artworks.  

However, artists must still be wary of the potential of appropriation and tokenisation. Due to the relatively recent interest from cultural institutions towards integrating Indigenous art, artists such as Rember call for a consolidation of strong networks between Indigenous artists, curators and academics, with a look to encourage the long-standing  transformation of cultural institutions and ensure that when Indigenous art is incorporated, Indigenous actors are also.  

The Biennale of contradictions and ambivalences

While the artwork I saw was incredible, the questions I had before going in still remain. Ultimately, while the Biennale does offer a space for resistance, it still upholds a framework deeply entrenched within the capitalist and extractivist structure that causes these crises – and I don’t know whether that can be reconciled. 

To understand further the model of the Biennale and its intrinsic paradoxes and contradictions, it is interesting to think about it as a heteronomous site, as Julia Bethwaite analyses, with different fields interacting, such as the art field, but also the field of politics, business, media, celebrity or diplomacy. By bringing forward this multifaceted nature, it becomes easier to understand the underlying forms of power that constitute it.  

To form an understanding that goes further from the idealisation or condemnation of this space, the idea of heteronomy allows us to think of the Biennale as not one uniform site, but many coexisting ones, even with seemingly contradictory social dynamics constituting them. From the hegemonic structure of the manifestation, to the counter-hegemonic discourses taking place within it,, the paradoxical nature of the Biennale seems to be what defines it.