Foreigners Everywhere: The 2024 Venice Biennale Centres the Outsider

The 60th Venice Biennale, which opened in April 2024, took its theme from a deceptively simple phrase: 'Foreigners Everywhere'. Curated by Adriano Pedrosa — the first Latin American to lead the exhibition — it placed migrants, exiles, Indigenous artists, the self-taught and the long-overlooked at its core.

It was a Biennale that deliberately looked away from the usual centres of power, surfacing artists from the Global South and from the margins of established art history. For many visitors it reframed what the 'international' in international art could mean.

Sprawling across the Giardini, the Arsenale and the whole floating city, it reaffirmed Venice's role as the place where the art world takes the temperature of its own conscience.

Image: “Giardini biennale Brazilian pavilion 2011” — Cyril S, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.