From an alligator ride across Asia to an escape to outer space, the Venice Biennale’s ‘foreigners everywhere’ theme leaves our critic beguiled, tantalised – and frequently appalled
enice. Terrible. Foreigners everywhere, and it is even worse during the biennale, where the exhibition opened to the public on Saturday. Marked by unrest and protests, theleaves us uncertain of art’s ability to draw us together in a world in crisis. It is filled with the clamour of conflicting voices and doubtful purpose.
On posters and on the sides of the water buses, written in neon and hung in the entrances to the central pavilion in the Giardini and to the Arsenale, the phrase Foreigners Everywhere, written in languages living, endangered and dead, is ubiquitous. Dangling in a roofed-over section of the medieval dock, the words multiply, reflecting brightly in the sullen waters below with a cheer that belies a general unease.
There are menacing soldiers impaled on a skewer, wearing uniforms that open up to reveal lacy underwear). Claire Fontaine have queered the phrase, lending its pungency and ambiguity to a biennale that I wish were nearly so succinct. There are longueurs. There are detours and incomprehensible delays. Interrupted by strange encounters and chance meetings, occasionally we are astonished and beguiled, led astray, tantalised and sometimes shocked.
Maybe we shouldn’t expect too much coherence. It is all about the journey through an exhibition that is frequently transcultural, transdisciplinary, transtemporal, transsexual and even at times post-human.’s 2021 Prêt à Patria, live, menacing soldiers, whose uniforms open up to reveal lacy underwear, goose-step around a flagpole on which more soldiers are impaled like kebabs, the pole skewering them from arse to mouth, as they climb towards the roof of the Arsenale.
But instead of the global south, a deferred elsewhere, we should probably talk more plainly about the global majority, whose pressing needs and voices cannot be kept on hold. A rain of bullets, arrested in mid-flight, is suspended from filaments in the Brazil pavilion in the Giardini, confronting a similarly suspended clutch of painted gourd rattles, belonging to the indigenous Tupinambá community. Time has stopped.
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