In April a small group from Epekwitk (PEI) made the pilgrimage to Preview Week of the 60th Venice Biennale, honouring the inclusion of Erica Rutherford (1923-2008) in the main exhibition.

Largely overlooked until the 1990s, Rutherford was a trans artist who recounted her experience of identity in her 1970s paintings, as she was beginning her transition. Rutherford moved to PEI in 1985, where she found a home with her partner, Gail, and daughter, Susana. There, she became a mentor to many, and a retrospective of her life’s work is on display this summer at Confederation Centre Art Gallery. PEI has been home to numerous Olympians and dozens of NHL players, but Rutherford is the first ‘Islander’ to be included in the Venice Biennale. She is an exemplary artist for Biennale curator Adriano Pedrosa’s exhibition and it was exhilarating to witness a local hero on the global art stage.

I traversed the Biennale for four days, a foreigner casting my tourist gaze over the main exhibitions, forty-five of the national pavilions, and dozens of collateral events and exhibitions throughout the city. I left with an unfamiliar feeling: that, beyond the hype, art is valued, important and carries geopolitical weight.

The main exhibition, Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa, includes a record 332 artists and collectives. There are also eighty-eight national pavilions, and thirty collateral events throughout the city of Venice and many more associated venues, ranging from palazzi to churches, and swimming pools to former prisons. Arguably the world’s most anticipated event in contemporary art, the Biennale lays itself open to the multitude of criticism expected of any platform built upon nationalism at the intersections of hope, performativity and hypocrisy.

Pedrosa’s central exhibition is divided into two main sections: The Nucleo Storico, featuring twentieth century art, and The Nucleo Contemporaneo, a collection of contemporary works, both of which consider the foreigner, paying homage to the many ‘outsider’ voices that have been excluded from, dismissed or undermined by, the art historical canon. In an introductory text, Pedrosa identifies himself as “the first openly queer curator” in the sixty-year history of the Venice Biennale; he is also the first curator based in the global south and, likewise, has included the largest rosters of queer and Indigenous artists in the event’s history.

Throughout my experience of the Biennale, polemics are seething below the surface. It is a context that Pedrosa is familiar with, as an organizer of exhibitions that amplify institutionally underserviced perspectives during Jair Bolsonaro’s populist reign in Brazil. Rebelling against the borders of national identities, Pedrosa proposes that we are all foreigners surrounded by more foreigners. In other words, the binary of exile vs. belonging is insufficient and the concept of otherness is superficial.

Brazilian Cultural Critic Oswald de Andrade’s 1928 Antropofagia Manifesto is a foundational text for Pedrosa. In it, Oswald de Andrade proposes that excluded artists and intellectuals could assert themselves against European colonial cultural domination by “cannibalizing” modernist references and reinventing them with Indigenous references. The Antropofagia Theory imagines a form of cultural contract grounded upon the creative incorporation of ‘otherness’ into one’s own identity in an endless process of reinvention. Antropofagia characterized my first impression of the Biennale, with a mural painted on the main entrance of the Central Pavilion by the Huni Kuin Artists Movement (MAHKU), a group of Indigenous Amazonian artists. MAHKU’s work depicts the myth of the alligator bridge, in which humans betray their relationship with multi-species ecosystems and separate into distinct human cultures.

This year most of the original national pavilions turned their facilities over to Indigenous artists to engage in a resistance to the project of colonialism.

The Giardini, a park designed by Napoleon and built on drained marshland, contains thirty national pavilions, as well as the central pavilion. Here, I encountered creative responses to Foreigners Everywhere by curators and artists who often juxtaposed the architecture’s heavy aesthetics of permanence with gentle, sometimes fragile, materials and forms–the stark contrast echoing overarching themes of otherness.

The Arsenale is a historic shipyard with cavernous armories, transformed into a gallery space for the main exhibition and temporary national pavilions, including, for the first time, the Republic of Benin, Ethiopia, Democratic Republic of Timor Leste, and United Republic of Tanzania.

Geopolitical forces are always on display at the Venice Biennale and often result in overt political controversy and struggle. In 1948, ten years after Germany’s pavilion was built in celebration of the Third Reich, the first Jewish Israeli artists participated in the Venice Biennale, archived under the title Pavilion of Palestinian Artists.

This year Israel’s pavilion was locked and the artist surprised organizers by refusing to open the exhibition until a ceasefire was declared. Viewers glimpsed the artwork through glass walls, behind a sign with a protest message from the artist, as three Italian soldiers patrolled continuously outside. While protests materialized, during this year’s previews they were relatively subdued and harmonious despite the demands of the Art Not Genocide website.

Among several rogue anti-genocide activations were a man handwashing with blood at the front gates, marches for Palestine, satirical posters about the nearest bomb shelter, and earnest manifestos posted throughout the city.

The presence of far-right politics, anti-immigration policies and nationalist agendas are the elephants in the rooms of the art world. In response to the overly simplistic rhetoric of polarization, Pedrosa prioritized history as an explanation for the contemporary and gave more space to art historical works than ever before. Much of the main exhibition is populated with artists from the global south who are considered canonical in their context, but who are accessing the unique energy of being center stage at the Venice Biennale for the first time.

With the arrogant swagger of disinformation, this year Russia positioned itself as a benefactor of Indigenous people by lending its pavilion (built 1914) to Bolivia, evidence of their ongoing relationship built upon lithium extraction. A celebratory group exhibition of artists from South America was curated by Bolivia’s Ministry of Cultures, Decolonisation and Depatriarchalizing.      As thin as bureaucracy and lacking in substance or critical content, the exhibition appeared to be Russia’s desired press release; as such, an obvious instrumentalization of the artists involved and evidence of further extraction.

On the first day of previews, at the Giardini, we took shelter from downpours and dashed into the Canadian pavilion, where workers urgently swept wet leaves and seeds and repaired springing leaks down one of the glass walls. Built in 1955 by Italian architects, the Canadian pavilion is full of diagonal lines and feels like a seasonal shelter in one of Canada’s national parks. This year it housed a nuanced and subdued installation called Trinket, by Kapwani Kiwanga, curated by Gaëtane Verner. Trinket pulls meaning from research into materials, like the tiny glass Venetian beads that curtain the walls inside and outside the building, fluttering gently in the breeze. Abstract sculptures made of wood and layered in gold leaf ground the installation space. Venetian beads were a measurable unit of value exchanged throughout the world and symbolize our connectivity, whether through ancient allyships or kinship ties.

For the first time ever, the American pavilion housed a solo presentation by an Indigenous artist. Jeffrey Gibson’s, The Space in Which to Place Me, is an exuberant, playful and emotionally complex display of legal phrases that allude to the roots of colonization and inequality of Native American identity through virtuoso beadwork sculptures, videos and paintings.

A particular highlight was the Swiss pavilion, featuring the work of Swiss-Brazilian artist Guillermo do Divino Amor, who, in an ecstatic installation, parodies the logic of national self-representation embedded in the Biennale’s history.

The Australian pavilion (winner of the prestigious Golden Lion Award) is an understated immersive chalk drawing of thousands of names of the artist’s family tree, Archie Moore’s kith and kin, traces the artist’s Kamilaroi and Bigambul, English and Scottish relations back 65,000 years and 2400 generations. Moore arrived in Venice two months early to draw the immersive family tree. On a large table in the center of the room are stacks of papers, inquiries into the deaths of 557 Aboriginal people who died in police custody since 1991. Audience numbers are limited to small groups and asked to remain silent out of respect for the trauma endured by those represented in the installation. The timeline reflects the scope of interconnectedness and shared ancestry across time and space, along with our responsibility to each other.

The nuanced integrity and historically informed approach of the Canadian, American and Australian pavilions was echoed throughout most of the Biennale, outweighing more superficial displays of national identity found in pavilions where curation was given over to government bureaucrats.

The 2023 election in Poland saw the right wing, nationalist party defeated. With a new political order, Poland invited the Ukrainian collective, Open Group, to use their pavilion. Open Group includes Yuriy Biley, Anton Varga and Paulo Kovach, a member of the Ukrainian armed forces. Their work, Repeat after Me, is a moving exhibition of video recordings wherein Ukrainian refugees perform the sounds of Russian weaponry. Inspired by an informational pamphlet of emergency procedures that was distributed throughout Ukraine prior to Russian invasion, the subjects would vocalize the weapon sounds twice and then say, “repeat after me,” and the audience would share the experience, karaoke style.

Meanwhile, in the first ever Panama pavilion, Brooke Alfaro’s oil paintings, depicting motifs of lifeboats and shipwrecks, with allusions to the biblical Ark, and Plato’s ship of fools, are displayed alongside Cisco Merel’s relief sculpture, “Mirages of the Gap.” Molded on the wall with layers of mud from the Darien Gap, Merel’s work references a 23,000 km jungle passage traversed by 500,000 migrants in 2023 alone.

Under Pedrosa’s direction the Biennale becomes a celebration of the survivors of migration, and the difficult—sometimes deadly—experience of displacement and cultural dispossession. Vast populations are illuminated with personal stories of people persevering and moving through oppressive geographical and political forces. Foreigners Everywhere mingles within the longer history of nation-states in the Biennale to offer layered readings and a nuanced alternative to the tradition of nationalism.

All images were taken on a Samsung S20 while traversing the Venice Biennale on foot, an attendee at one of the busiest Art events in the world.