At the Venice Biennale’s Contemporary Showcase… – Repeating Islands

The full title of this article by Maximilíano Durón (ARTnews) is “At the Venice Biennale’s Contemporary Showcase, Living Artists Examine Queer and Indigenous Legacies.” Here are excerpts, including a section featuring Puerto Rican-born artist Pablo Delano. We highly recommend reading the full article at ARTnews.

As the international art world has descended on La Serenissima this week, the 2024 Venice Biennale began the first of its preview days on Tuesday morning, with visitors heading to either (or both) of its main venues: the Arsenale and the Giardini. Curated this year by Adriano Pedrosa, the closely watched artistic director of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, the exhibition, titled “Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere,” focuses on Indigenous artists and artist from the Global South, highlighting the vastness of art that is out in the world today and, with the historical section, throughout the 20th century.

The first several rooms of the Arsenale are the strongest section of this exhibition—triumphant and elegant in their presentations of monumental works that have presence and touch on the legacies of colonialism and its aftereffects and current realties today, queerness in an expanded form, the cacophony of modernity, and much more. While the Giardini is not as near pitch-perfect, there are standout works there too.

More than half of this Biennale’s participant list consists of deceased artists, the majority of whom are represented by a single work in the historical section (“Nucleo Storico”). The “Nucleo Contemporaneo,” on the other hand, focuses on contemporary art (though a few deceased artists appear here, too). Here, I’ll focus on living artists included in the “Nucleo Contemporaneo;” below a look at the highlights. [. . .]

11 Pablo Delano (Giardini)

This room-size installation might be one of the most talked-about installations in the main exhibition. Titled The Museum of the Old Colony (2024), it is a condemnation against the imperial, colonial project that the United States has imposed on Puerto Rico, which has been a colony for more than 500 years. Gathered here are found photographs of life under colonization and the remnants of the colonizer’s society: a classroom desk where indoctrination takes place, a light-skinned Puerto Rican Barbie (marked down from $24.99 to $12.99), the soft drink Old Colony, M&Ms, the anthropologist’s camera, a jar labeled “Little White Lies,” piggy banks and domino sets from US banks, a volume titled United States Colonies and Dependencies: Illustrated, and much more. A video, installed toward the back of the room, pieces together various clips from the news and social media that gather a range of opinions on Puerto Rico from a white man saying all crime on the island is drug-related and does not involve white people like himself, to Trump during Hurricane Maria and much more. [. . .]

For full article, see https://www.artnews.com/list/artnews/news/at-the-venice-biennales-contemporary-showcase-living-artists-examine-queer-and-indigenous-legacies-1234703559/