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The 60th edition of the Art Biennale (La Biennale d’Arte di Venezia) is underway in Venice, Italy until November 24, 2024.
This renowned international cultural exhibition offers a multi-faceted experience, featuring a central exhibition and national pavilions showcasing art from participating countries.
Stranieri Ovunque — Foreigners Everywhere” is this year’s Venice Biennale theme, curated by Brazilian art expert and the 2023 recipient of the Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence, Adriano Pedrosa.
This year marks a historic moment for African art on the world stage. The 2024 Biennale boasts the largest-ever number of African countries represented, with Benin, Tanzania, Senegal, and Ethiopia making their debut appearances in their national pavilions.
They join a long standing artistic presence from Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana, Gabon, Zimbabwe, Ghana, Namibia, Ivory Coast, Seychelles, Uganda, Egypt, Madagascar, Cameroon, and Kenya, all of whom have showcased their work at previous Venice Biennales.
South Africa — Quiet Ground
Commissioner: Nosipho Nausca-Jean Jezile, Ambassador of South Africa
Curator: Portia Malatjie
Exhibitors: MADEYOULOOK (Molemo Moiloa & Nare Mokgotho)
Venue: Arsenale
MADEYOULOOK’s newly commissioned sound installation Dinokana (2024) explores themes of land and water displacement, sovereignty, and rehabilitation. Focusing on perennial strategies of repairing severed relationships to the land, the artists consider the symbolism of the resurrection plant, which, in apparent death, reanimates upon receiving water to draw attention to how two communities in the north of South Africa have approached cycles of loss and repair.
Tanzania — A Flight in Reverse Mirrors
Commissioner: Leah Elias Kihimbi, Deputy Director Ministry of Culture, Arts and Sports
Curator: Enrico Bittoto
Exhibitors: Haji Chilonga, Naby, Happy Robert, Lutengano Mwakisopile (Lute)
Venue: La fabbrica del vedere, Calle del Forno, Cannaregio 3857
“A Flight in Reverse Mirrors” consists of four imaginary rooms, each representative of an era in the history of Tanzania: from the late 19th to the first two decades of the 21st century, and on to a decontextualised future/present.
The rooms, in specular dialogue, culminating in the transformation of the last one into an invisible spirit, symbolised by a moth, in metaphorical flight through the other three, concluding its journey in a cyclical process of death and rebirth.
The exhibited works — paintings, woodcuts, and site-specific installations — explore themes of travel, migration, nomadism, and the transformations imposed by environmental changes.
Uganda — Wan Acel Tuli Bamu Turibamwe We Are One
Commissioner: Juliana Naumo Akoryo
Curator: Elizabeth Acaye Kerunen
Exhibitors: Artisan Weavers’ Collective, Sana Gateja, Taga Nuwagaba, Xenson Ssenkaba, Jose Hendo, Odur Ronald
Venue: Bragora Gallery, Castello 3496
Wan Acel invites you to de-classify art through the work of a diverse group of thirty-one intergenerational artists. Working both individually and in a collective, they examine their contexts of art production, interrogating prevailing narratives that serve to construct and maintain hierarchies of art creation.
The titles, Wan Acel Tuli Bamu Turibamwe, from languages spoken in wider Africa, are representative of the borderless origins of the exhibiting artists. Through explorations of collective memory, Wan Acel reveals and offers an intimate, multi-sensory kaleidoscope of materiality and artisanship.
Zimbabwe — Undone
Commissioner: Raphael Chikukwa, National Gallery of Zimbabwe
Curator: Fadzai Veronica Muchemwa
Exhibitors: Gillian Rosselli, Kombo Chapfika, Moffat Takadiwa, Sekai Machache, Troy Makaza, Victor Nyakauru
Venue: Santa Maria della Pietà, Castello 3701
The Zimbabwe Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition harnesses the concept of kududunuka. Kududunuka becomes an exploration of ideas of the unravelling of the world. The exhibition can be read as thinking about reimagining a potential future.
It hearkens to being unfaithful to imposed ideas of time, geography, space, identity, nationhood, humanity, migration, and the suppleness of the ever-changing landscape of what we call home.
We stand on the cusp of centuries-old impact of human action.
This exhibition provides a space for reflection, building what does not exist yet and looking towards a new horizon. — BellaNaija.com
Bongani Ndlovu
Online Reporter