Strategies of Visibility in an Age of Exile
and visited Biennale Arte 2024 in Venice and present this review of the exhibition. The text considers Adriano Pedrosa’s curatorial concept, the structure of the central project and the national pavilions, while also paying special attention to Belarusian artistic presences shaped through parallel initiatives, diasporic networks, and distributed forms of participation.
The 2024 Venice Biennale became one of the most politically and ethically charged editions of recent decades. Curator Adriano Pedrosa proposed the theme Stranieri Ovunque, Foreigners Everywhere, addressed to the figure of the “foreigner”, the migrant, the exile, the subject outside the national norm. This framework resonated with a broader historical moment: an age of geopolitical turbulence now shapes the agenda of artistic production and institutional decision-making. The ongoing war in Ukraine, waves of forced migration, crises of representation and cultural diplomacy, as well as tense debates around the participation of particular countries, including protests and public appeals connected to the pavilions of Russia and Israel, all set an intense political background for the Biennale. In this context, the stated curatorial concept could be read as a symptom of its time and as an institutional attempt to respond to the redistribution of visibility and power within the global art field.
Adriano Pedrosa’s central project was conceived as a large-scale revision of the history of modern and contemporary art through a shift in perspective and principles of selection. The exhibition brought together two interrelated layers, Nucleo Contemporaneo and Nucleo Storico, the contemporary and the historical, and in this way linked current practices to a re-reading of modernism, portraiture, and abstraction beyond the Western centre. The focus fell on artists whose positions had long remained outside institutional attention, practitioners from the Global South, representatives of Indigenous communities, diasporas, and queer scenes, as well as practices connected with self-education, folk traditions, and extra-academic forms of knowledge. This choice produced another map of art, one in which value was defined through experiences of displaced identity, cultural translation, and historical vulnerability.
One of the key decisions was to connect contemporary material with historical sections devoted to global modernisms. Pedrosa proposed modernism as a plural phenomenon, developing in parallel across different geographies and cultural contexts. As a result, abstraction, modernist movements, and other forms of twentieth-century artistic language appeared as a field of heterogeneous and often incommensurable practices tied to local histories, colonial traumas, migrations, and processes of self-determination. This approach made it possible to shift the narrative centre and to reconstruct connections between artists previously separated by institutional and geographic boundaries.
Particular attention was given to forms of artistic labour that retain the trace of the body, time, and community. Textile, embroidery, craft techniques, archival structures, documentary video, and practices linked to everyday life and collective memory dominated the exhibition. This emphasis shifted the perception of art away from the autonomous object and toward process, in which gesture, repetition, accumulation, and the transmission of experience become central. In this context, manual labour acquired a political dimension, becoming a way to register migratory histories, traumatic experience, and forms of solidarity.
The queer line became one of the central axes of the project. It appeared not as a separate thematic section but as a pervasive logic determining the choice of artists, subjects, and artistic languages. Here the figure of the “foreigner” unfolded through multiple forms of otherness, including gender and sexual identity, the experience of exile, life in diaspora, and a state of constant displacement. As a result, the Biennale formed a space in which queer experience was treated as a key to understanding contemporary subjectivity and political reality.
The project’s strongest effect emerged at the point where the curatorial gesture met the institutional structure of the Biennale. On the one hand, the exhibition proposed a radically expanded model of the art world, in which the centre is constantly shifting and being redistributed. On the other hand, the system of national pavilions continued to impose a framework connected to state representation and geopolitics. Within this tension, the Biennale revealed itself as a space in which the canon is being reassembled even as the limits of institutional transformation become visible.
In 2024 the national pavilions functioned as an autonomous field of statements, in which the institutional framework combined with a high degree of artistic freedom and political sensitivity. Against the background of Pedrosa’s central project, oriented toward the redistribution of the canon, the pavilions often became the site of more concrete, localised, and sharply articulated gestures.
A strong cluster was formed by the neighbouring pavilions of Greece, Egypt, and Poland, in which historical perspective and contemporary wartime experience generated different yet resonant forms of collective expression. The Egyptian project unfolded through an operatic structure, bringing together sound, text, and visual imagery in a reflection on colonial history, cultural memory, and mechanisms of power embedded in the language of representation. The Polish pavilion, represented by the Ukrainian group Open Group, in turn proposed an extremely concise yet powerful gesture: participants reproduced the sounds of war from memory with their voices, the sound of a siren, a missile passing overhead, gunfire, warning signals. The karaoke format turned this process into a collective act in which viewers were drawn into an act of recollection and solidarity. In both cases, sound became the key medium through which trauma, history, and the experience of violence were articulated and translated into a form of shared experience.
The pavilion of Greece made a particularly strong impression on us. It unfolded as a complex interdisciplinary structure combining elements of rural life, performance, and musical theatre. The space functioned as a kind of stage in which agricultural machinery, everyday objects, water, sparks, and video became equal participants in the action. The project created the sensation of a strange ritual spectacle, in which contemporaneity, archaic elements, and technological reality were joined in a single choreographic gesture about the decline and crisis of the Greek provinces.
The German pavilion, which drew a long queue, was represented by the project of Yael Bartana and Ersan Mondtag and worked with the image of the stage as a space of historical projection and collective imagination. Mondtag’s contribution took the form of an almost total installation, at the centre of which stood a two-storey house placed inside the pavilion and surrounded by a layer of earth that blocked the familiar entrance. Inside unfolded a fragmentary story linked to the biography of his grandfather, a Turkish worker who died from the consequences of labour involving asbestos, turning the entire project into a kind of memorial architecture of migration and invisible labour. In contrast, Bartana proposed a speculative, almost science-fictional line built around the aesthetics of Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia and connected to imagined scenarios of the future and possibilities of survival, intensifying the tension between historical trauma and the projection of the future.
The Ukrainian pavilion was conceived as a compact, specially built circular architecture that established an intimate and concentrated mode of viewing. The exhibition brought together different registers of expression, from collective works created with the participation of children and educational practices to the ironic project by Andrii and Lia Dostlieva, which explored stereotyped perceptions of Ukrainian migrants in Europe. The pavilion proposed a more complex and mediated conversation about the current situation, shifting the focus away from direct representations of war and toward an analysis of roles and modes of communication.
OOne of the strongest and most celebrated projects was the Australian pavilion, which received the Golden Lion, with Archie Moore’s work kith and kin. The artist created a total installation in which the pavilion space was filled with archival documents concerning the persecution and discrimination of Indigenous peoples in Australia, arranged into a dense, almost landscape-like structure. Above this mass unfolded an enormous genealogical drawing, executed in white chalk across the black surfaces of the walls and ceiling, including thousands of names of the artist’s relatives and ancestors. The work joined personal and collective history, turning the pavilion into a space of memory in which colonial violence, institutional control, and kinship ties became part of a single, almost endless structure.
In a broader view, the national pavilions demonstrated a wide spectrum of approaches, from large immersive installations to камерных, research-based projects. The French pavilion, represented by Julien Creuzet, constructed a complex visual and sonic environment oriented toward Caribbean experience, migration, and cultural mixing. The US pavilion, with Jeffrey Gibson’s project, combined decorative and textile forms with political slogans, addressing the identity of Indigenous peoples and the language of contemporary activism.
General attention was drawn to the situation around pavilions connected to current political conflicts. The Israeli pavilion remained closed throughout the Biennale, accompanied by public discussions, actions, and demands for a reconsideration of participation in connection with the war in Gaza. The Russian pavilion this time functioned outside national representation: the building was handed over to a project from Bolivia.
Belarus once again remained absent from the official structure of the Biennale in 2024. Since 2020, the country’s participation at the level of a national pavilion has remained suspended, and this rupture is now perceived as an enduring situation. In this case, the Venetian model of representation based on state participation proves inapplicable, yet this absence does not mean the disappearance of artistic presence. On the contrary, Belarusian practices continue to appear in dispersed, short-term, and often informal formats that correspond more precisely to the current position of artists and cultural initiatives.
A notable episode was the participation of in the Other Session project, organised during the Biennale’s opening days within a broader European cultural agenda. This format combined discussion, performative presence, and exhibitionary statement, in which Pcholka’s work occupied a central place. Her project addressed the experience of forced migration and the condition of losing one’s home, unfolding the figure of the refugee as a living, unstable monument deprived of any fixed identity. Through the visual image of a blank sheet of paper covering the face, the work articulated a conversation about trauma connected with rupture from place and language, as well as the fragility of any form of belonging.
Another important gesture was realised by the Portuguese initiative Architectural Thinking School, whose co-organisers include Belarusians, which formed a temporary street pavilion in immediate proximity to the Biennale’s main flows. The project was built around the participation of children, including those from migrant and diasporic communities, and unfolded as a series of game-based practices developed by the participants themselves. Over the course of several days, urban space was transformed into a field of collective action in which play functioned as a universal language of communication capable of overcoming cultural and social differences. This “children’s pavilion” proposed an unexpected shift in perspective. In the context of a Biennale saturated with institutional statements and complex theoretical constructions, it introduced the figure of the child as a subject possessing its own form of agency. In this way, it expanded the very understanding of the theme of the “foreigner”, translating it into the plane of immediate experience and everyday interaction.
Overall, the Belarusian presence in Venice in 2024 can be described as decentralised and short-lived, yet conceptually precise. It did not seek to imitate a national pavilion but acted through situational forms that coincided with the logic of the Biennale itself, oriented toward multiplicity and the displacement of the centre.