Professor Irene Small led a group of A&A modern and contemporary art history graduate students to the Venice Biennale this summer.  The trip complemented Small’s spring 2024 graduate seminar “The Global Contemporary,” while also setting the stage for her upcoming fall 2024 undergraduate seminar, “Contemporary Art: The World Picture,” which will travel to Venice over fall break.

“What a privilege to bring A&A graduate students to Venice to experience the biennale together!” said Small. “As a scholar of modern and contemporary art who has spent a lot of time researching Brazil, questions of the global south, and the larger geopolitics of such nominations, have long been present in discussions in my various fields. I was very curious to see what the Brazilian curator Adriano Pedrosa, the first Latin American curator to oversee a Venice Biennale, would do with that platform.”

“It was a special opportunity to visit the Venice Biennale this year,” echoed graduate student Sonya Merutka, who participated in both the course and the trip. “Pedrosa's curation filled the Arsenale and Giardini with art by more indigenous and queer artists than I had ever seen at previous Biennales,” she said. “Although we had some qualms about the naming of the monumental exhibition 'Foreigners Everywhere,’ questioning the translation across languages where ‘Strangers Everywhere’ or ‘Estrangement Everywhere’ might have been more suitable (in which we are not ‘all foreigners’ as Pedrosa claims, but rather a range of foreigners and natives, at times estranged from the land and history by way of colonization, extraction, and modernity), the exhibition still offered a rich reflection on these questions,” said Merutka. “We gave thought to terms such as ‘native,’ ‘indigenous,’ and ‘colonial’ in terms of artistic practice and how they become attached to notions such as static, land-based, or mobile—migration being an age-old reality on this planet.”

For fellow participant in both the course and trip Alexandra Germer, “The trip to Venice provided a wonderful opportunity to apply insights gained from the texts examined throughout the semester.  In our seminar, we had taken every opportunity to anchor our discussions in exhibitions and installations around campus, but nothing compares to the Biennale's unparalleled scope. The seminar had incorporated critical analyses of the global history of the biennial, as articulated by scholars such as Caroline Jones and Yacouba Konaté, among others, and having this context greatly enriched my experience in Venice,” she said.

Graduate student Tobias Rosen also found the trip hugely enriching. “I was able to see works by a number of artists for the first time in person,” he said. “The collateral exhibition dedicated to the Polish painter Andrzej Wróblewski was an absolute highlight for me. His socialist realist paintings from the 1950s are teeming with the psychic forces of trauma and spirituality breaking with the doctrinaire party line. The exhibition was also expertly curated with thought-provoking juxtapositions and creative techniques of presenting the front and backs of works.”

For Merutka, “It was especially exciting to visit the exhibition SOUTH WEST BANK—Landworks, Collective Action and Sound centering artists from Palestine and co-organized by Artists + Allies x Hebron and Emily Jacir's residency space Dar Jacir, as well as Dread Scott's All African People’s Consulate where you could apply for a passport or visa to a Pan-African, Afrofuturist union of countries. The docents, guides, and participants (in the case of the All African People's Consulate, who not only welcomed but interviewed visitors regarding visiting or citizenship rights to the conglomerate) at all three of these sites were incredibly welcoming, knowledgeable, and provided excellent tours of the artworks present and the curatorial concept behind their staging of these shows.”

The Egyptian and Nigerian pavilions were also especially impactful. In reference to a painting by Egyptian artist Hamed Ewais, Rosen noted, “his colors were all the more vibrant and stunning in person.”  In the Nigerian pavilion, Rosen enjoyed looking at and discussing batiks by Nigerian artists Susanne Wenger and Sàngódáre Gbádégęsin Àlàlá.  

Merutka singled out Nigeria’s pavilion as a highlight as well, complete with a tour by curator Aindrea Emelife organized by A&A graduate student Anisa Tavangar. “The exhibition, Nigeria Imaginary, also looks to the future,” said Merutka, ”through intergenerational reflection on the past and the present, incorporating sound, sculpture, and archives to activate our sensory imaginary.”

Professor Small also found the Venice Biennale to be generative and original. “I want the undergraduate students in my seminar “Contemporary Art: The World Picture” to see the exhibition with fresh eyes this fall, so I won’t preview too much about it here. But I will say I was most intrigued by how various national pavilions took up issues of queerness, indigeneity, coloniality, and networks in distinct ways. These were themes that Pedrosa foregrounded in his framing of the main exhibition. But they took on unique and focused inflections in several of the pavilions. Highlights for me were the Egyptian, Australian, Brazilian, and Nigerian pavilions,” she said. “I’m looking forward to another deep dive with undergraduates this October.”