Biennale Arte 2024

The 60th International Art Exhibition is held from Saturday 20 April to Sunday 24 November (pre-opening on 18 and 19 April), curated by Brazilian Adriano Pedrosa who is currently the artistic director of Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand – MASP.

The Biennale Arte will be titled “Stranieri Ovunque” / “Foreigners Everywhere”. The title is taken from a series of works created since 2004 by the Paris-born, Palermo-based collective Claire Fontaine. The works consist of neon sculptures of various colors bearing the words “Foreigners Everywhere” in different languages. The expression was in turn taken from the name of a collective of the same name from Turin that was fighting racism and xenophobia in Italy in the early 2000s.
Adriano Pedrosa explains his choice as follows: “The context in which the work is set is a world full of multifaceted crises that affect the movement and existence of people within countries, nations, territories and borders and that reflect the risks and pitfalls within language, its possible translations and nationality, expressing differences and disparities conditioned by identity, citizenship, race, gender, sexuality, freedom and wealth. In this landscape, the expression Strangers Everywhere has (at least) a twofold meaning. First, it is meant to imply that wherever one goes and wherever one is, one will always encounter foreigners: they are/we are everywhere. Second, that regardless of one’s location, deep down one is always truly a foreigner.”
“(…) At the Art Biennale 2024, we will talk about artists who are themselves foreigners, immigrants, expatriates, diasporics, émigrés, exiles and refugees, particularly those who have moved between the South and the North of the world.”