Earlier this year, in October, some OCA students visited the Venice Biennale.
Venice Biennale is one of the longest-running cultural festivals in the world. It attracts up to 600,000 international visitors each year. The Venice Biennale is renowned for setting new global trends and launching the international careers of many pioneer artists, the exhibitions are often considered to be highly political, provocative, or ground-breaking. (Britishcouncil.org, 2012)
Known to be divisive, here are some of the thoughts of attending OCA students.
Shirry Insole
This is my first visit to Venice Biennale. I will write about my experience while I journeyed through the rich tapestry of art forms, from a diverse cultural and national background.
This year Venice Biennale’s theme is Foreigners Everywhere, the exhibition is curated by Adriano Pedrasa. It features 87 National Participations, 30 collateral events, 331 artists and collectives at the main stage at the Central Pavilion (Giardini) and at the Arsenale, and around the city of Venice. The theme ‘Foreigner Everywhere’ focuses primarily on artists who are themselves foreigners, immigrants, expatriates, diasporic, émigrés, exiled, or refugees – particularly those who have moved between the Global South and the Global North. Migration and decolonization are key themes here. (La Biennale di Venezia, 2023)
I come from a background of being migrant and have been brought up in a colonial setting. During my visit to the Biennale, I found some works resonate with me and bring me closer to my own personal experience. I am also stunned by the imagination, ideas, intellectual worldviews, the hope, and healing, and also the vision for new futures. This exhibition gives me a sense of inclusion as well as reconciliation; works that represent different traditions, race, nationalities, and identity play a major role in the Biennale, so as the reconciliation found in the works which represent our history, heritage, the colonial past, and the injustice to the humankind also shaped the exhibition.
The Venice Biennale is an overwhelming experience based on the sheer number of artworks displayed. It was an ambitious trip and an exhausting one, there is much to learn here. I observe the artistic trends along with the global concerns being portrayed in creative works, and the narratives that bring along with it. It expanded my horizon in many aspects, my approach to art and my position as an artist. It led to some introspection and meditation on my own creative practice, on how to be more competent and how to take risks, what is my core value and what mattered to me? Indeed, the Biennale has been such an important experience to me, if there is one thing I would remember of this year’s Biennale by, I would like to relate it to the famous message by McLuhan, “The Medium is the Message”. As McLuhan described, it was the medium itself that shaped and controlled “the scale and form of human association and action”.
Steve Meyfroidt
It was an amazing experience; my first time in Venice and we're definitely returning for the next one in 2026, hopefully showing work again in the collaborative group I've found myself involved in. I’ve included some pictures from my visit including a lady inspecting my piece in Palazzo Bembo.
Venice is overwhelming, particularly if you're interested in art in any way. We saw all sorts, from pre-Renaissance paintings to utterly contemporary installations. We went in open-minded and enjoyed several hundred years of making, in all sorts of media, very sad that it came to an end (in torrential rain!).
Annalisa Mercuri
After a first quick visit to the Giardini at the end of April 2024, I returned to visit 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2024 at the end of October 2024. I went to the Arsenale, again to the Giardini and also managed to see some of the Pavilions scattered around the city, along with some collateral exhibitions.
I have found that the effort of this year curator Adriano Pedrosa to show the artworks of minorities was at the end far-fetched, especially compared to the that of the previous Biennale curated by Cecilia Alemani (which I have found extremely beautiful and terrifying at the same time). I have found in many cases that the artworks displayed at Arsenale and Giardini had more on the amateur level, and failed to meet the qualities one would expect from an Art Biennale. On a positive side I have found a strong presence of textiles (my textiles colleagues were in heaven!), and that the national Pavilions this year were on a different level, with some of the artworks and Pavilions being thoroughly breathtaking and others wanting to be so progressive and openminded that I have found them at the opposite spectrum of what they probably wanted to communicate, as they became just kitsch and stereotyped. The danger of continuously screaming progression is to become propaganda, and one extreme is not better than its opposite.
Read a full review from Annalisa's two visits; the first here and the second here.
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