Before the Biennale opened in April, Art in America visited the artist in his studio, a spacious workshop teeming at the time with some 20 studio assistants in a former schoolhouse near Hudson, New York. While he primed a canvas and examined other works in various stages of preparation, Gibson talked about the allure of painting, his interest in the history and intricacy of beadwork, and advice he offers to aspiring artists looking to make their mark. Watch Gibson in his studio in the video above, and read more about him in Art in America’s latest “Icons” issue.

Video Credits include: Director/Producer/Editor: Christopher Garcia Valle Director of Photography: Daniele Sarti Second Camera Op: Alan Lee Jensen Sound Engineer: Nil Tiberi Interviewer: Andy Battaglia

Never mind—I can’t get the Austria pavilion out of my head. There, in the Giardini, the Ukrainian ballet dancer Oksana Serheieva rehearses at the barre. I watched for a while, mesmerized, before my biennial brain kicked in and asked Why? and What does it mean? I turned, as one does, to the wall text, which informed me that, during times of political upheaval, the Soviet Union state television station would play Swan Lake on a loop, in lieu of regular programming. The gesture was clear: Serheieva, in collaboration with artist Anna Jermolaewa, was rehearsing—for a Russian regime change.

The piece, titled Rehearsal for Swan Lake (2024), captured the absurdity of seeing art—namely, a biennial—while waiting for war and genocide to end. It spoke as well to the ways that art can feel like a frivolous distraction from it all, while also defraying utter helplessness and despair, for those privileged enough. And it evoked, searingly, the absurd ways that grand events rub up against daily life. A number of other works in the pavilion did the same: Research for Sleeping Positions (2006) is a video of Jermolaewa in a Viennese train station, trying to find a comfortable way to sleep on a bench—the same bench she slept on every night for a week in 1989, when she first arrived in Austria before winding up in a refugee camp. Revisiting the bench years later, she struggles to get comfortable: armrests have since been installed to deter sleepers. In another room, we are confronted by The Penultimate (2017), boasting plants that were used as symbols of protest during various struggles. There’s Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution of 2010; Ukraine’s Orange Revolution of 2004; and Myanmar’s Saffron Revolution of 2007, among others. Here, poetic gestures are political, but what is most felt is the gulf between the two. If you like this one, you’ll probably like Poland too.

Walking around, wondering if we were going to war with Iran and how former President Donald Trump’s trial was going in New York (I hear he fell asleep), this Kathy Acker quote, from an essay on Goya, got stuck in my head: “The only reaction against an unbearable society is equally unbearable nonsense,” she once said. Lots of pavilions felt maximalist, chaotic, absurd—on the lesser end of the spectrum, a handful, especially France and Greece, felt unnecessarily immersive or over-produced. (So many soundtracks. Why?!) I didn’t get the hype surrounding the German pavilion in the Giardini, with its asbestos and its fog machine—but the trek to its second location, on Certosa Island, is worth it; just trust me. In the Arsenale, Lebanon and Ireland are the best, though the latter was too violent for me.

My two other favorites are consensus-approved: Japan and the Czech Republic. In the first, an installation by sculptor Yuko Mohri feels like a Rube Goldberg stop-gap for a crumbling infrastructure, as if someone had asked Rachel Harrison to fix a leak. An elaborate, tube-and-bucket apparatus is punctuated with fruits, light bulbs, and musical instruments; the whole thing channels the kinetic energy of a drip, and harnesses power from unsellable produce in order to produce light and sounds.

In the Czech pavilion, Eva Koťátková approximates the neck of Lenka, a giraffe captured in Kenya in 1954, then taken to the Prague Zoo, where she died two years later. Koťátková’s version is hollow, bisected, and supine; you can have a seat inside. It’s at once adorable and grotesque—which is often how I feel at a zoo (Hi, incarcerated giraffe; It’s awful you’re here, yet I’m so happy to meet you.) But no one could answer the question gnawing at me: is her sculpture made of real leather?

If so, that might be more nonsense than I can bear. (Update: the pavilion’s curator, Hana Janecková, told me that “both the exhibition and the artist… are vegetarian.”) This weekend, I’m off to see Croatia and Nigeria, two pavilions abuzz. Check back—maybe I’ll have something to add, and maybe someone will answer my question about the giraffe.

With this in mind, ARTnews senior editors Maximilíano Durón and Alex Greenberger started a Google Doc to begin a candid conversation on their initial thoughts about this Biennale. Their thoughts follow below. 

Alex Greenberger: Many of the artists who’ve done works for the main show and the national pavilions at this Biennale sound a similar note: can’t live with art institutions, can’t live without them. 

Glicéria Tupinambá, as part of her Hãhãwpuá Pavilion (née Brazil Pavilion), is showing her correspondence with several museums in which she seeks the return of cultural objects related to her people that are held abroad. One partly redacted email, purportedly with Brussels’s Musée royaux d’Art et d’Histoire, seems to have befuddled its recipient, who sassily snipes back, “Reading the project and the letter, it was quite unclear what do you expect.” But Glicéria, undaunted, has continued on with her project, contacting other museums with the aim of seeking justice.

Her pavilion, which features fishing nets and more from the communities of Serra do Padeiro, suggests that there is a place for members of her community in Western art spaces. It just doesn’t always look like a traditional white cube. Spain’s representative, the Peruvian-born Sandra Gamarra, expresses a related sentiment with a pavilion that’s billed as a “Migrant Art Gallery,” featuring the words of Indigenous activists. And in the main show, the Puerto Rico–born, Connecticut-based Pablo Delano is showing The Museum of the Old Colony (2024), an installation predominantly composed of others’ photographs attesting to America’s exploitation of the island.

The decolonial subject matter broached by all these projects typically lends itself toward bitterness and anger, and rightly so, yet all these works are quite hopeful. Admittedly, I’m dubious anyone can decolonize museums without undoing them entirely, but I’m struck by the artists’ optimism about imagining other possibilities for institutions and, by extension, biennials. So, my question to you is: How successful do you think this is as a decolonial biennial? Have the artists in it persuasively proposed alternative forms for institutions?

Maximilíano Durón: I think it’s important to broaden that a little. What even is a museum? And what are the histories of those institutions? As many in Venice this week know, museums are part of Western colonial projects. It’s a tradition that goes all the way back to the wunderkammern, or cabinets of curiosities, amassed by European aristocracy beginning in the 16th century. A wunderkammer boasted how much its owner had traveled beyond his homeland—and how much he had plundered. Museums in many ways grew out of that. And I’ll add to this lineage the world fairs and international expos that displayed the day’s latest technologies and architectural innovations, while also putting humans, often African and Indigenous people, on display. 

This is all to say that encyclopedic museums, for all that they have purported to show off the diversity of world cultures, do not show off diversity as we understand it today. Typically, they have had the effect of othering people from the Global South. 

The other, the foreigner, the stranger (l’étranger, el extranjero): those are the words that recur at this Biennale’s main exhibition, titled “Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere,” which takes its name from an ongoing series by artist duo Claire Fontaine, in which those words are translated into the local languages of the places where the work is displayed as neon sculptures. Here, more than 50 of them hang over the shipyards at the Arsenale. The main exhibition is in many ways a deviation from that history, but I don’t think it’s necessarily aiming to decolonize the Biennale, which is itself rooted in histories of colonialism and nationalism. Showcasing the work of dozens of Indigenous artists and artists from the Global South itself is not necessarily a decolonial practice—the Biennale isn’t divesting itself from the current biennial model, even if some of the artists seek to do so. Rather, I think it’s an effort to expand the canon and the purview of all who attend. That in itself is a cause that shouldn’t be taken for granted or dismissed. 

But I want to go back to Delano’s The Museum of the Old Colony. I think that work really stands apart from the rest. Adriano Pedrosa, the main exhibition’s curator, has said in multiple interviews that he sees his Biennale as a provocation. I’ll take it a step further. It’s a condemnation of much of our current situation. How can you not read the Delano installation as a denunciation of the US and its exploitation of Puerto Rico, often called the world’s oldest colony? It’s a work that requires you to spend time with it, to see how all that has been collected here speaks to what the US has used to its benefit. 

I think that’s especially potent right now as discussions around self-determination and settler colonialism are being applied to Israel and Palestine. It’s worth noting that Puerto Rico has held six referendums on whether or not its populace would like to see the island become the US’s 51st state or a fully independent nation. All of these have been non-binding votes, as the ultimate decision on Puerto Rico’s future is held by Congress. 

AG: It’s interesting Pedrosa views his main show as a provocation, because to me, it didn’t seem so shocking. Much of what’s in it is really elegant and quite beautiful—the art doesn’t seem designed to trigger. I’m thinking in particular of the historical sections, the thematic parts of the show that assemble older works, many of them by dead artists from the Global South who have yet to be canonized in the West. 

Take the portraiture galleries in the Central Pavilion. Here, you can find Lim Mu Hue’s incredible Self-Expression (1957–63), featuring the Singaporean painter wearing half a pair of glasses, an abstract painting reflected in its sole lens, not far from a singular work by the Mozambican artist Malangatana Valente Ngwenya, To the Clandestine Maternity Home (1961), with its array of colorful women meant as a testament to female oppression under colonialism. The only thing that shocked me was that both of these artists, along with most of the others here, had never before appeared in the Biennale. Hats off to Pedrosa for fixing that.

One thing is abundantly clear from these sections: Pedrosa has great taste for art-historical deep cuts. But more than simply flaunting his research abilities, he’s also continuing his project of rewriting the canon, breaking down geographical and stylistic hierarchies, and even eliding a chronological structure. 

To further that project, he sprinkles dead artists throughout the main show. In the Central Pavilion, he places recent paintings by the young American Louis Fratino, who envisions nude men fornicating and dancing together, alongside canvases from several decades ago by Indian painter Bhupen Khakhar, who made no attempts to hide his work’s homosexual content. Even if Fratino didn’t know Khakhar’s art when he started out, Pedrosa suggests the former is working within a lineage seeded by the latter. That’s compelling.

I also wonder how successful it really is. The historical sections seem to suggest that all the artists held within are similar, which I don’t think is fair because it strips away a lot of nuance. In the abstraction section, for example, there’s a great canvas by the Palestinian painter Samia Halaby called Black Is Beautiful (1969). It features a dark cross that emerges from a void just barely tinted pink. The wall text mentions that the painting plays with depth and color, but it doesn’t state that the title is an allusion to a slogan voiced widely by Black Americans. Pedrosa mainly seems interested in pointing out how formal innovations took place outside the West. I just wish he paid more mind to the actual cultures from which those innovations were born.

MD: I agree to an extent. There is a certain amount of nuance that has been sanded down here, though I don’t know how that could be avoided with the sheer amount of work on view. But there is something beautiful about being able to take in all the abstract works for their formal innovations all at once. I found the three sections devoted exclusively to 20th-century artworks to be overwhelming. Each artist is represented by one work with a wall of text, and by my estimate there must be at least 150 works in those sections in total. Pedrosa has called this portion of the Biennale, which tells the story of global modernism with a focus on the Global South, “an essay, a draft, a speculative curatorial exercise that seeks to question the boundaries and definitions of modernism.”

The abstraction section is overloaded with paintings, which is actually pretty interesting because it flattens geography and time. Modernism, as defined by MoMA and its first director, Alfred H. Barr, was a relatively linear progression of movements. Pedrosa is suggesting that we can’t think about modernism linearly—which also reflects the ways many of the Native and First Nations artists here think about time. To me, he’s rendering the European avant-gardes and manifestos that define the first half of the 20th century as inconsequential.

It’s also worth noting that abstraction wasn’t invented at the turn of the last century. It has a long history throughout the course of humanity, particularly in the Global South and among Indigenous peoples. In many ways, we are being asked to look at the work of artists who are under-recognized internationally on their own terms. To understand what is going on here, you have to broaden your point of view, to think in ways you likely haven’t thought before. That’s a fascinating challenge, and in my mind what a great exhibition of art should do. 

AG: Forgive me for invoking one biennial to discuss another here, but I wonder if the best way to describe this Biennale is by using the terminology provided by Meg Onli and Chrissie Iles for their current Whitney Biennial, which they called a “dissonant chorus.” That, to me, is how this Biennale reads as well. It’s a mixture of unlike individuals working in unlike styles, and if it all comes off a bit inharmonious, that may be intentional. I can’t say it totally works for me, but I admire the ambition.

MD: Oh, for sure. This edition is nothing if not ambitious. First, there’s the sheer number of artists selected: 331, to be exact. That’s over 100 more artists than the 2022 edition, and nearly four times as many as the 2019 edition. More than half are dead. Even in a moment in the art world that is exceedingly pushing to correct and expand the canon through “rediscoveries” of art historical import, this show is a tough sell. 

There’s a precedent for all this: the 2015 and 2022 Biennales, by Okwui Enwezor and Cecilia Alemani, respectively, both contained a lot of artists who were neither white nor male, and also a lot who weren’t straight. But here, queer artists, Indigenous artists, artists from the Global South, and artists who have migrated, whether voluntarily or by force, account for almost the entire artist list. 

AG: Before anyone had even seen the show, critic Dean Kissick called it “exceedingly stupid” that the Biennale classed queer people as foreigners. That’s a reactionary take I can’t abide. I like Pedrosa’s logic that queer people sometimes feel like aliens in their own land. Perhaps that’s too expansive a conception of the term “foreigners,” but I thought he made a solid case for it.

MD: I couldn’t agree more. Kissick’s logic is that Pedrosa is othering queer people, but Western society has othered queer people for centuries. Being queer myself, there are moments still where I feel like a foreigner in certain spaces (read: straight spaces). And in his essay, Pedrosa says he himself “feel[s] implicated in many of the themes, concepts, motifs and framework of the exhibition,” as someone who has not only lived abroad but someone who is also the first openly queer curator of the Biennale. And there’s definitely some latent homoeroticism running through a number of works, like in the pairings of Fratino and Khakhar, or even Dean Sameshima and Miguel Ángel Rojas. 

AG: For me, one of the big discoveries at this Biennale was Erica Rutherford, an Edinburgh-born painter who died in Canada in 2008. She painted spare images of faceless women as a reflection on her own transition. Without any features, these women are totally distanced from us, just as Rutherford was distanced from a world that sometimes would not accept her.

Other artists go in a different direction, evoking sci-fi and horror to disturb gender binaries. In a Biennale that’s unfortunately light on notable video art, Joshua Serafin’s VOID (2022) stands out. In this video, this Philippines-born, Belgium-based artist dances around in a pool of oil, covering themselves in the stuff as they writhe around amid two blue neon lights. Dripping with black liquid, Serafin appears creaturely, totally unbound from the rules that have traditionally guided human bodies. It feels eerie, off-kilter, and, well, a bit foreign.

MD: A standout for me was a sculpture by Agnes Questionmark of a pregnant, not-quite-human figure receiving some kind of medical procedure—perhaps gender-affirming surgery. As we look at the figure’s innards on two screens, an eye stares back at us in a third. 

Key to understanding “Foreigners Everywhere” is the political situation it’s working against: the right-wing governments around the world that seek to strip women, queer people, and immigrants of their rights. Regarding the latter, that’s particularly the case in Italy, one of the many European countries directly impacted by the refugee crisis across the Mediterranean. Given the political leanings of the Biennale foundation’s new president, I’m not sure we’ll get another Biennale quite like this anytime soon. Pedrosa has added his own response to this crisis with the historical section “Italians Everywhere,” showing how countless Italian artists have fled their country and settled elsewhere, ultimately becoming famous in their local scenes. 

AG: I wasn’t a fan of the “Italians Everywhere” section—it felt overly indulgent, to me, and kind of out of place, compared to the two other historical sections, which are more about artistic genres—but I see your point. It’s nicely installed, for sure, with works mounted on structures by the late Italian-born, Brazil-based architect Lina Bo Bardi, taking a cue from how she conceived of displaying the permanent collection of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Pedrosa’s home institution. These glass elements enable works to hang in the center of the room, instead of on the walls, and through them, you can see a bunch of other pieces all around. They essentially turn the works into prisms for each other, suggesting that all of these Italian migrants are bound to each other.

There’s an emphasis on collectivity running throughout that’s important to note. Take that gallery devoted to the Disobedience Archive, a project begun by curator Marco Scotini that here marshals videos by nearly 50 artists, from Seba Calfuqueo to Hito Steyerl. It is almost impossible to watch any one of these videos, since they’re crowded together into a circular gallery shaped like a zoetrope, and even if you wanted to try, there’s no information provided for individual works. The point, it would seem, is to view them together, delighting in the cacophony of sounds they emit.

MD: Exactly. As I wrote in my highlights about the living artists in the main exhibition, I was prepared to hate the Disobedience Archive. Something about how it was presented on the official artist list as one entry, with no biographical details for each participant, irked me. But it really does work. Archives are both imposing and incomplete. Some things come to the fore more easily than others. That’s exactly what happens here, and it’s exceptional. 

AG: There’s also a lot of collaboration on display. Isaac Chong Wai, in one of my favorite works on view, has a performance in which a group of dancers, all from the Asian diaspora, pretend to protect each other when they fall. When one collapses, the others join in to ensure that the fallen dancer does not get hurt. Solidarity is thus a protective mechanism.

Meanwhile, Claudia Alarcón, a young Wichí artist from the La Putana community in Salta, Argentina, produced some of the most impressive works in this show: a series of fiber pieces done with the 13-person Silät collective. Executed in traditional Wichí techniques, these pieces look more like modernist abstractions. They deliberately hang loose, offering a full view of all the disparate threads that combine to create these pictures, and seem like a metaphor for what the show is all about.

MD: The threads that connect us is certainly an apt metaphor for this show and for the times we live in. A good chunk of the work on view at the Arsenale is fiber- or textile-based. I can’t stop thinking about Dana Awartani’s Come, Let Me Heal Your Wounds. Let Me Mend Your Broken Bones (2024), composed of several lengths of silk dyed in hues of red, yellow, and orange via herbs and spices that have medicinal properties. 

AG: Likewise. Awartani’s work is one of several in this show that refers to the current war in Gaza, where more than 34,000 people have been killed since October 7. But this artist, who was born in Saudi Arabia and is of Palestinian descent, has chosen not to represent all that carnage and cultural destruction, instead depicting it metaphorically, via hanging silk sheets that she has torn, then darned back together. Though not visible from a distance, these darned parts look like scars—welts, even—up close. It’s striking that the work, with its rows of yellow and orange fabric, is so beautiful, despite its horrifying subject matter.

MD: That approach to handling violence—alluding to it without replicating it—also recurs in some of the national pavilions. In Australia’s, Archie Moore (Kamilaroi/Bigambul) has created an extremely elegant installation in two parts. The walls of the building have been painted a chalkboard black onto which Moore has scrawled his family tree, going back 65,000 years, 2,400 generations, and encompassing an extensive notion of kinship. There are elisions here, represented by rubbed-out voids. The names may be lost to time but their lives and their importance to their people are not forgotten. Moore gets at violence more directly, but rather obliquely, in a display of dozens of stacks of paper related to First Nations people who have died in police custody. The names are redacted out of respect but the amount here illustrates just how endemic this is to Australian society, a constant threat faced by First Nations peoples.

A similar formal approach occurs in a video and sound installation by Onyeka Igwe that’s in the Nigerian Pavilion, the country’s second one ever at the Biennale. If you hit it at the right time, you might at first you think the projector isn’t running, since all you get is sound from a film without an image. The work, titled No Archive Can Restore This Chorus of (Diasporic) Shame, reinterprets films that were censored in Nigeria by British colonial rule via Igwe’s own archive of personal sounds. The destruction of an archive is the destruction of a people’s history—itself a violent act. What happens when people try to fill in those gaps, recovering and reimagining those histories anew? Contrast that with a more explicit installation, also in the Nigerian Pavilion, by Ndidi Dike featuring 736 black wooden police batons that have been used by the state to beat Black bodies. 

AG: Yes, it’s not as though the artists are retreating from the harsh realities of the past and the present—they just want to supply alternate visions of it that aren’t as harmful. In the main show, Marlene Gilson, a Watharung/Wadawurrung Elder based in Gordon, Australia, is showing paintings that contend with British colonialism, minus any representations of the violence that accompany it. In one called Culture Learning (2023), Aboriginal people mill about on a beach while a ship with a British flag looms nearby. It’s easy to miss that vessel because the focus is the placid existence of Gilson’s community, not the invaders who approached it by force.

But I wonder, Max, if you think the main show feels a bit polite? It occurred to me quite often that the exhibition seemed calculated not to offend, which I found pretty odd, considering its politics. 

It’s not like 2022’s Documenta 15, the last big European art festival devoted to the Global South, to which this Biennale feels like a response. The former show featured works that were explicit in addressing the Israel-Palestine conflict and its impact on countries as far-flung as Algeria and Indonesia. No surprise it got the artists—and the showrunners—in a good deal of trouble. 

But I don’t think anyone is going to protest one of the biggest Palestine-related works in this show, a vast Frieda Toranzo Jaeger mural that has the phrase “VIVA PALESTINE” scrawled on it. Generally, the painting, which depicts a vast machine emitting toxic red smoke, deals more with utopian visions of the future than it does our ugly current moment. To be clear, I’m not saying Toranzo Jaeger’s work is bad—it’s one of the best pieces on view, actually, in my opinion—but it seems to me that there are too many objects here that function similarly.

MD: To answer your question, I find the situation to be a catch-22 for artists: damned if you do, damned if you don’t. I wouldn’t call it polite. I’d call it sly. It’s a form of subversion of putting the politics in their subtly. You see that happen in a lot of art scenes under repressive governments, particularly in Latin America, where artists have historically had to obliquely insert their politics to avoid government censorship or worse. Sure, you have to read between the lines here, but that can be the fun of it—you need to spend time with the work to figure out what exactly is going on. 

Perhaps what we’re seeing here is artists responding to a different kind of repressive ruling class: the international art world and the market. Of course, the Biennale is not a market-oriented event; the wall labels are essentially forbidden from listing the names of artists’ galleries in their credit lines. But the market has a chokehold on the art world right now, and it’s affecting what we’re seeing throughout the world. For artists to live on their work, it has to sell. Who’s buying it? The ultra-rich, whose politics might not align with the artist’s. So, if a very wealthy collector somehow does manage to later purchase a work that was on view here, they may be getting more than they bargained for. So, who gets the last laugh? I can’t wait to find out.

The Venice Biennale was essentially an art fair when it opened in 1895, an exhibition built specifically to establish a market for what was then considered contemporary art. From 1942 until 1968, there was even an official office, run by Italian art dealer Ettore Gian Ferrari, that helped find buyers for works that showed in the exhibition. That is, as long as artists (and their galleries) didn’t mind that Ferrari pocketed 15 percent of the sale price for the Biennale and 2 percent for himself.

As the art world’s commercial and institutional structures solidified, open sales were banned in ’68, though it was understood that the works would, at some point, become available, especially to a buyer with a dedicated interest. And if the buyer represented a major institution, all the better. Even up until 2019, exhibition labels noted a given artist’s dealer, so interested parties could initiate a transaction, or at the very least, a conversation.

Such vulgarities are no longer permitted but that doesn’t mean the Biennale is not transactional in nature. It is, even if the benefits are generally distributed these days in a slightly more egalitarian, trickle-down fashion befitting the birthplace of modern capitalism.

“One of the most important aspects of appearing in the Biennale is that an artist suddenly appears on the radar of collectors from all over the world,” Simon de Pury, the celebrated curator, columnist, and auctioneer, told me outside the Giardini.

Obviously, that can and often does generate commerce, de Pury added. In the same way that a museum exhibition organized by a notable curator brings credibility and desirability to an artist’s oeuvre, participation in the Biennale is a gold-leaf star on an artist’s curriculum vitae. Before we parted ways, de Pury told me that the 2022 Biennale was especially fascinating for him.

“It put a spotlight on female artists. Today, when you look at auctions, the majority of contemporary artists who sell very, very well are women. Can you ascribe that specifically to the Biennale? No, not really. But it’s one element, of course,” he said.

The institutional halo effect of the Biennale is real. Over lunch at the café at the Arsenale, Maria Montero, of the newly formed São Paulo– and Brussels-based gallery Martins&Montero, told me that Venice is the ideal setting to “internationalize and institutionalize” an artist. While deals may not be closed at the Biennale, many can be closed through the Biennale.

“Galleries are always looking to offer more visibility to their artists. I don’t think there’s a better way. It has a big impact,” Montero said. “Perhaps, let’s say a conversation between a gallery and an institution started a while ago. Then, of course, when the work is here, the conversation goes to another level. Especially with serious institutions.”

Martins&Montero has three artists in the Biennale’s main pavilion, which was organized by Adriano Pedrosa, artistic director of the São Paulo Museum of Art in Brazil: Jota Mombaça, Manauara Clandestina, and Dalton Paula. In addition to his works’ appearing in the main exhibition, Paula received the 2024 Chanel Next Prize, an unconditional €100,000 purse that comes with two years of mentorship from the brand’s global partners.

Apart from the institutional cachet, artists typically experience a financial restructuring of their market. “There’s prestige to any biennial in terms of garnering interest and the critical positioning of an artist,” art dealer Stuart Morrison of New York’s Hales Gallery told me.

“Obviously, the Venice Biennale is arguably the peak of that kind of attention. It’s very much a natural series of events,” Morrison said. “The curators … brought in to organize these shows are some of the most important working today. That adds a particular significance to the artists and their work.”

Morrison added that, while every dealer is different, inclusion in the Biennale does usually affect how most think about pricing an artist’s work, particularly when they see an increase in demand.

“We work with estates like [those of] Anwar Jalal Shemza and Elda Cerrato, both of whom are in the Biennale, and Kay WalkingStick, who has five works here,” he went on. “With both estates and living artists who can only produce so much, scarcity becomes a very real thing. which again kind of plays into it.”

In the Centrale Bar in the Giardini, a brightly lit café just behind the main pavilion decorated with visually intense black-and-white graphics (which also happens to be the quickest and cheapest place to eat anywhere near the Biennale), Nick Olney, president of Kasmin, told me that “what really matters is that during a Biennale, people are able to get a broader and deeper knowledge of an artist’s work. For a lot of artists that maybe haven’t been exposed to or had an international platform like this before, it provides an opportunity for countless very bright, very curious, and very influential audiences, be they writers, curators, or collectors, to actually engage with the work in a direct way.”

When the work is great, he said, that drives conversations, and those conversations have real world effects, such as institutional shows and acquisitions, which of course lead to an increase in demand and in an artist’s influence and durability.

“Those are natural things,” he said. “It’s not a machination of manipulation of the market, which is very inorganic, but rather a natural, organic way that leads to more interest, dialogue, exposure, and of course, demand for an artist’s work.”

Call it the Biennale bump.

“Something the capital ‘A’ art world doesn’t recognize is the power of the collective, it sometimes leans into the cult of the individual,” Ryan Zurrer told ARTnews during a preview of the opening. “But this show is supported by the entire community around Sam.” 

Spratt’s Venice exhibition was put on by 1OF1 Collection, a “collecting club” set up by Zurrer to nurture digital artists working in the NFT space. Since its launch in 2021, 1OF1 has been uniquely successful in bridging the gap between the art world and the Web3 community. Last year, 1OF1 and the RFC Art Collection gifted Anadol’s Unsupervised – Machine Hallucinations – MoMA to the museum, after nearly a year on view in the Gund Lobby. Zurrer also arranged the first museum presentations of Beeple’s HUMAN ONE, a seven-foot-tall kinetic sculpture based on video works, showing it first at Castello di Rivoli in Italy and the M+ Museum in Hong Kong, before sending it to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas. 

With “The Monument Game,” Zurrer is once again placing digitally native art at the center of the art world. While Anadol and Beeple had large cultural footprints prior to Zurrer’s patronage, Spratt is far earlier in his career. But, what attracted Zurrer, he said, was the artist’s shrewd approach to building a dedicated, participatory audience for his work. He did so by making his art a game. 

“When I first started looking at NFTs, I spent a long time just figuring out who the players were,” Spratt told ARTnews. “The auctions were like stories in themselves, I could see people’s friends bidding, almost ceremonially, to give the auction some energy, and then other people would come in, and it would get competitive, emotional.”

Spratt released his first three NFTs on the platform SuperRare in October 2021. The sale of those works, the first from his series LUCI, was accompanied by a giveaway of a free NFT to every person who put in a bid. Zurrer had been one of those underbidders (for the work Birth of Luci). While Spratt said the derivative NFTs were basically worthless, he wanted to give something back to each bidder. Zurrer, and others it seems, appreciated the gesture and Spratt quickly gained a following in the Web3 space. The offerings he gave, called Skulls of Luci, became Sam’s dedicated collectors that now go by The Council of Luci. 47 editions were given out and Spratt held back three.

All the works from LUCI are on view at the Docks Cantiere Cucchini, a short walk from the Arsenale, past a rocking boat that doubles as a fruit and vegetable market and over a wooden bridge. Though NFTs typically bring to mind glitching screens and monkey cartoons (ala Bored Ape Yacht Club), the ten works on view depict apes in a detailed, painterly style and emit a soft glow. Taking cues from photography installations, 1OF1 ditched screens in favor of prints mounted on lightboxes. 

 “We don’t want it to look like a Best Buy in here,” said Zurrer.

Each work represents a chapter in a fantasy world that Spratt dreamed up. Though there’s no book of lore to refer to, there seems to be some Planet of the Apes story at play in which an intelligent ape lives alongside humans, babies, and ape-human hybrids. Spratt received an education in oil painting at Savannah College of Art and Design and he credits that technical training with his ability to bring warmth and detail to the digital works. He and the team often say that his art historical references harken to Renaissance and Baroque art, though the aesthetics—to my eye—seem to pull from commercial illustration and concept art. That isn’t too surprising given that this was the environment that Spratt started off in after graduating SCAD in 2010. 

“After school I was confronted with the reality that for a digital artist the only path was commercial,” Spratt said. 

He did quite well on that path, producing album covers for Childish Gambino, Janelle Monae, and Kid Cudi and bagging clients like Marvel, StreetEasy, and Netflix. Spratt also enjoys a huge audience of fans who have followed him as he’s migrated from Facebook to Tumblr to Twitter and Instagram, posting his hyper-realistic fan-art on each platform. Despite the apparent success, Spratt spoke of the work with bitterness. 

“I was a gun for hire. A mimic, hired to be 30% me and 70% someone else,” he said.

Spratt’s personal life blew up when he turned 30 and he traced some of the mistakes he made in his relationships with the fact that he had spent so much of his career “telling other people’s stories.” NFTs seemed like a way out of commercial illustration and a way into an original art practice. 

For his latest piece in the LUCI series, Spratt digitally painted a massive landscape set in this ape-human world titled The Monument Game. For the piece, Spratt initially sold NFTs that would turn 209 collectors into “players” (since another edition of 256 NFTs was given to the Council to “curate” new champions”). Each player would then be allowed to make an observation about the painting. The Council of Luci would vote on which three observations were best, and those three Players would receive one of the Skulls of Luci NFTs that Spratt held back. By creating these tiers of engagement, with his Council and player structure, Spratt pushes digital collectors to give the kind of care to his work that more traditional collectors do.

“Jeff Koons said that the average person looks at a work of art for twenty seconds,” Lukas Amacher, 1OF1’s Artistic Director and the curator of the show, told ARTnews. “Sam has found a way to get people to engage in his work for much longer.” 

The game Spratt has designed for the Venice exhibition might seem too gamified to fit the art world’s notion of art, but as Amacher and Zurrer suggest, in the Web3 environment, value is built by finding alternative ways to create investment and attention in what are typically immaterial digital artifacts. And it’s working. Thus far, the LUCI series has generated $2 million in primary sales and about $4 million in additional secondary volume. The challenge now, as it has been for the past three years, is to see if art’s gatekeepers will take this work seriously. 

At the presentation of The Monument Game in Venice, an observation deck, built by platform Nifty Gateway, sits in front of the mounted work. Participants can click on the painting on the screen and write down their observations of the work in front of them, no NFT required. The first observation came from star curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the former director of Castello di Rivoli and curator of Documenta 15: a tribute to art dealer Marian Goodman. The second was from Zurrer. Who’s next?

“Sam Spratt: The Monument Game” is on view until June 21 at the Docks Cantiere Pietro Cucchini in Venice.

In “Foreigners Everywhere,” some culturally specific references get lost in translation to be sure, but being represented, and being seen, is framed as a good thing. Some curators might have hesitated to include works made by an artist confined to psychiatric institutions (Aloïse Corbaz), or drawings by a Yanomami shaman done in collaboration with a French anthropologist (André Taniki). Both are interesting works to be sure, but those artists’ inclusion begs questions about the ethics involved in putting their work on display. Who benefits the most from their subsumption into the art world: the maker, their heirs, their community; or art dealers, and/or liberals looking to learn about diverse experiences?

It’s a difficult question—case-by-case, catch-22—and the Biennale’s artistic director, Adriana Pedrosa, didn’t shy away from taking a stance. The show includes lots of works by artists who, in the 20th century, worked in contexts other than the art world—“outsider artists,” the intro text admits in scare quotes. Many of them are Indigenous or self-taught: standouts include Santiago Yahuarcani, and Claudia Alarcón, who worked in collaboration with Silät, a collective of hundreds of women weavers artists from the Wichí communities in Argentina. Their works are shown alongside young, even trendy artists decidedly working for the white cube, like Salman Toor and Evelyn Taocheng Wang.

There are a few threads to  Pedrosa’s argument, and the strongest one is in the Arsenale, which is filled with works that blur the line between fiber and painting—pictorial ideas worked out with dye and thread. There, artists draw from contexts, traditions, and techniques outside the West; several didn’t show in, or make work for, museums at all during their lifetime. As the art world grows more geographically diverse, the very idea of “fine art” is expanding too, since after all, it’s a Western construct. While fiber has had a seat at the table for a while now, Pedrosa has introduced dozens of underappreciated examples. Some are better than others—aesthetically, the show is highly varied, with works united by theme and not aesthetic approach. Pacita Abad, Olga De Amaral, Anna Zemánková, and Susannne Wegner all stand out.

This infusion of the vernacular into the realms of fine art and the museum is not without uneven power dynamics. Two artists approach this thoughtfully and self-consciously—confronting inclusion with skepticism, and asking questions about whether the art museum, being a Western construct weighed down by colonial and imperialist baggage, is inherently a good place to be. For me, they steal the show. (They tie it all together, and they bookend it, too.)

One of the very first pieces you see upon entering the Arsenale is a gigantic polyptych by Frida Toranzo Jaeger. After she paints, Toranzo Jaeger hires her relatives, who are trained in traditional Mexican embroidery, to stitch scenes right on top of her canvases. Here, in one scene, a lesbian orgy overlays an idyllic landscape, and this is flanked by paintings of futuristic machinery woven with bondage-like ribbons and grommets. When I interviewed the artist in 2021, she told me she does this because she wants to insert an Indigenous tradition into a Western one, and to fuck with the preciousness of painting, which was reified by Europeans and then contorted to justify white supremacy—as if other cultures without painting-filled museums were inherently lesser. She calls this act “semiological vandalism,” and told me then that, while often and for good reason, Indigenous artists are concerned with preserving cultural heritage against all that has tried to kill it off, she thinks it’s important to imagine decolonial futures, and to carve a space to dream. Embroidery means her canvases have a backside; there, she wrote a message next to an embroidered heart: HEARTS THAT UNITE AGAINST GENOCIDE!

One of the last works you see, meanwhile, are Lauren Halsey’s towering stone-like concrete columns outside the Arsenale. Halsey borrows from the vernacular funk of her neighborhood in Los Angeles—handmade signs from local businesses in South Central, vivacious and full of character—to render these Egyptian-style columns, insisting both deserve pride of place in a continuum of Black culture. The column’s capitals are portraits of local friends, made monumental. Halsey has long expressed skepticism toward the ways the art world can extract from marginalized cultures and communities. So when the Met commissioned a major rooftop installation from her last year, she didn’t let them buy it; instead, she sent it back to her community, to the people it was meant to serve. Similarly, she uses proceeds from work she does sell to fund food justice initiatives in her community, utilizing her proximity to the ultrarich via the art world to redistribute wealth.

Halsey didn’t want the Met to own that piece of her culture like some trophy of conquest—even though of course, that’s precisely what encyclopedic museums were originally designed to do.

Below, are the answers to some frequently asked questions.

What is the Venice Biennale?

Dubbed “the Olympics of the art world,” the Venice Biennale is an international art festival that is now comprises three parts: 1) a central exhibition organized by an artistic director in the Central pavilion in the public gardens (aka the Giardini) and former dockyards (aka the Arsenale); 2) a series of national pavilions organized by dozens of countries offering a show of one or more artists; and 3) independently organized, but officially approved exhibitions known as Collateral Events.

Additionally, there are other exhibitions and events planned to coincide with the Biennale that are not, in fact, officially affiliated. This can include shows put on by artists themselves, the city’s museums and foundations, or commercial galleries. There are also performances, panels, screenings, dinners, and parties that bring the city’s art to life.

Who’s in charge?

The Biennale organization, which manages activities across art, architecture, film, dance, music, and theater, is overseen by current president and right-wing journalist Pietrangelo Buttafuoco. Each Biennale, a new artistic director is selected to curate the central show. This practice began in 1980 with legendary Swiss curator Harald Szeemann, who repeated the role in 1999 and 2001. Only three Biennales have been organized by women and only one African-born curator thus far.

The curator of this year’s edition is Adriano Pedrosa, artistic director of the São Paulo Museum of Art in Brazil, presents “Foreigners Everywhere.” The first Latin American curator in the Biennale’s 130–year history, the title is a provocation aimed at a wave of anti-immigrant agendas across Italy, Hungary, the United States, and other countries over the last few years.

What are the origins of the Biennale?

On April 21, 1868, King Umberto I of Italy married Margherita of Savoy. Nearly 25 years later, Venice’s city government honored the couple’s silver anniversary by establishing a national biennial exhibition of art and an orphanage on April 19, 1893. This era of grand international art expositions and commerce in Europe can be traced back earlier, however, to the large-scale art exhibitions of the 18th century. The inspiration for the Biennale’s organizers, though, was a national art exhibition held in Venice in 1887.

The inaugural Biennale took place with King Umberto and Queen Margherita in attendance on April 30, 1895. The first iteration boasted 516 works, with 188 by Italians and the rest by foreigners. In addition to artists from Italy, there were artists from 14 other nations, along with a selection of works submitted in advance and approved by a jury. With approximately 225,000 attendees, the Biennale quickly established itself as a vital source of tourism and commerce.

Why is this year’s Biennale identified as the 60th edition when it started in 1895?

While the Biennale typically occurs every two years, there have been changes made to the schedule over the years due to extraordinary circumstances. In 1916 and 1918, World War I nixed the show. World War II also prevented editions in 1944 and 1946. In 1974 there were related activities, but the show was dedicated in solidarity with Chile, in which a coup put General Augusto Pinochet in power the year prior. As such, it was not assigned an official number. (It should be noted that the Chile show was supported by the Italian Communist party, which had sway on the Biennale committee.)

Though the Biennale has not seen that kind of solidarity since, subsequent iterations of the festival adopted this concept of selecting a unifying theme. Numbering resumed with the 37th edition in 1976, which considered “environment, participation, cultural structures.”

Were there Biennales held during World War II?

Though some nations dropped out in the years leading up to the war—the United States, the Soviet Union, and Britain boycotted in 1936, for instance, over the political situation in Italy—the Biennale continued through the 1942 edition.

If the Biennale began in the odd-numbered year 1895, why have there been some even-numbered editions in the past?

Beginning with the ninth edition in 1910, the Biennale shifted to even-numbered years, though a show was still staged in 1909. This move was intended to avoid a grand art exhibition planned in Rome in 1911 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Italy’s unification, with the goal of avoiding a major overlap between the two events. There was a three-year pause following the 1990 Biennale, after which the show went back to debuting in odd-numbered years so that the centennial edition could be celebrated in 1995. With the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, the 2021 edition was postponed to 2022.

How many nations will present work at this year’s Biennale?

This year’s edition saw a substantial increase, with works by 331 artists, including Kay WalkingStick, Lauren Halsey, and Samia Halaby, from the 2022 edition’s 213 artists.

The Central pavilion will focus on “the queer artist,” “the outsider artist,” “the folk artist,” and “the Indigenous artist.” On the hall’s facade, Brazil’s Indigenous Movimento dos Artistas Huni Kuin (MAHKU) collective will paint a mural, while New Zealand’s four-woman Māori Mataaho collective will stage an installation in the building’s first room. A large section of the pavilion is dedicated to LGBTQ+ artists, with a special display of queer abstraction.

What are national pavilions?

Biennale organizers encouraged countries to participate with their own pavilions to create shows. Each individual nation is responsible for the costs of construction, upkeep, and programming of their respective pavilion.

Belgium was the first to participate with an inaugural pavilion in 1907. Germany, Britain, and Hungary joined the ranks in 1909. The United States joined in 1930 for the ninth national pavilion. Since the Giardini is filled with only 30 pavilions, other countries began showing at the Arsenale and other venues across the city. In 1995 South Korea was the last country to build a pavilion in the Giardini.

How did the US pavilion come together?

The US Pavilion is distinct because it was not actually started by the government. Instead, the effort was undertaken by the Grand Central Art Galleries in New York. The three-room Palladian-style structure opened in 1930. In 1954 the Museum of Modern Art purchased the pavilion, and sold it to the Guggenheim Foundation in 1986.

How are artists selected?

The artistic director selects artists for the central show. For the pavilions, each country makes its own choices, ideally in line with the Biennale theme.

In the United States, for instance, the Advisory Committee on International Exhibitions, a group of experts assembled by the National Endowment for the Arts in an agreement with the US Department of State, makes the choice from proposals submitted by various institutions. Jeffrey Gibson will represent the United States at the 2024 Venice Biennale, marking the first time in more than 90 years that an Indigenous artist has had a solo presentation with the US Pavilion.

What prizes does the Biennale give out?

Three main awards—a Golden Lion for the best national participation, a Golden Lion for the best individual participant in the main show, and a Silver Lion for the most promising young participant in the main show—are presented by an international jury of curators following the opening festivities. Two special mentions can also be given to artists in the main show. One special mention can be awarded to a participating nation. Additionally, the artistic director proposes a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement that is confirmed with the Biennale’s board ahead of the show’s opening. The latter award went to Anna Maria Maiolino and Nil Yalter this year.

The history of the prizes is somewhat muddied. Between 1968 and 1986, there were no awards. At certain points, the awards were medium-specific, with prizes for the best examples of painting and sculpture, for example. During the height of Fascism, there was even a prize for best maternity subject. In the early days, the awards came with cash prizes to incentivize the participation of major artists. Today, however, the award comes with a lion statue and a sense of pride. The current prize structure began in 1986, based on a prior system from 1938.

Is the art in the Biennale for sale?

Until 1970, the art was available for purchase, and the sales office tracked the deals: there were 186 sales in the first edition and a high of 1,209 sales in 1909. Political shifts in the late 1960s and changes around art commerce influenced the decision to stop selling at the fair. The art, however, can still be purchased through dealers from the galleries representing the artists on view. Often, works on view by the most in-demand artists will sell ahead of the exhibition’s opening.

Editor’s Note: This article was originally reported and written by Andrew Russeth in 2019, on the occasion of the 58th Venice Biennale. It has been updated with information about the 60th Venice Biennale by Francesca Aton.

Many are coming with the top priority of seeing the main exhibition, which, in 2024, will be curated by Adriano Pedrosa, the first Latin American to have received the honor. But just as many are there for the national pavilions, which are not officially related to the main show but coincide with it.

As usual, there will be firsts, with Benin among those making its Venice Biennale debut this year. Yet other countries who typically participate won’t be there this time for a variety of reasons.

Russia, which is still embroiled in its war with Ukraine, won’t show at the Biennale for the second edition in a row. New Zealand and Scotland scuttled their plans to mount pavilions, citing problems associated with financing their exhibitions. Morocco, which was set to exhibit at the Venice Biennale for the first time ever, bowed out at the last minute; the reasons for the decision remain opaque.

Meanwhile, a storm of controversy has centered around the pavilion for Israel, which will go forward with its show. Amid military action in Gaza that has killed more than 30,000 people sparked by the October 7 Hamas attack, thousands of artists, including some showing in the main exhibition, called on the Biennale to ban Israel from participating. The Biennale declined to do so, but just before the show opened, the representatives for the country said they wouldn’t open their show until a ceasefire in Gaza and a hostage release agreement were accomplished.

Below is a look at every pavilion that has been announced for the 2024 Venice Biennale.