Break, Learn, and Build

In 1966, the curator and critic Lawrence Alloway lost his chance to organize the exhibition for the US pavilion at that year’s Venice Biennale. Alloway, who was born in London and based at the time in New York, had taken a job at the Guggenheim Museum in 1962. There, among other things, he staged an important show of geometric abstraction, called Systemic Painting. His proposal for Venice combined paintings and sculptures by a small group of artists including Jackson Pollock, Joseph Cornell, and the self-taught surrealist Ernest Trova. That was clearly an all-too-male endeavor, but in the years that followed, Alloway made a concerted effort to write—at length and from a range of feminist perspectives—about the work of numerous women artists, something often attributed to the fact that he was married to the groundbreaking figurative painter Sylvia Sleigh.1 In the run-up to Venice, Alloway clashed with the Guggenheim’s director, Thomas Messer, who wanted to impose his own list of artists. This led the pavilion’s organizers to take the commission away from the Guggenheim and hand it over to someone else.2

An uncredentialed autodidact who had belonged, early on, to the Workers’ Educational Association, Alloway baulked at this and left the museum in protest. But then he did something interesting and arguably more consequential than assembling one more presentation in the “vivid array of national self-images” that is Venice every other year since the late nineteenth century.3 He wrote a book about the biennale as an institution. The Venice Biennale, 1895–1968: From Salon to Goldfish Bowl was published in 1968. Alloway argued that Venice was not, in fact, an exclusionary circus for the ultra-rich, hopelessly tainted by the conditions of late capitalism, but rather a project with decidedly public dimensions and democratizing agendas. Its function, Alloway wrote, was “to take art out of an elite context.”4 He described the system of ever-more enormous exhibitions like Venice as “a confrontation with historical density,” an occasion to encounter such a wild diversity of styles and iconographies that “the esthetics of elite and aristocratic art applied on this scale are irrelevant.”5 In practical terms, Alloway’s advice was to scrap the prizes and structure the biennale around “governing ideas” instead, presenting shows that were thematic and ideological rather than pulse-taking or taste-making.6

The case study at the heart of Alloway’s book is the 1968 edition. That year, a thematic exhibition had been scheduled for the Giardini, but it was cancelled at the last minute due to the perceived threat of ideological student protests. Demonstrators did indeed materialize, though, according to Alloway, they were actually demanding changes to the conservative teaching of their local art school, the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia, while remaining fully supportive of reforms to the biennale’s structure. In the five decades that have passed, shows with notional themes have become the norm in Venice. The international exhibition stands as the central event, and its governing ideas have ranged from propositions about work, time, and science to organizing principles borrowed from an ominous proverb, an architectural model, a re-reading of Karl Marx’s Capital, and a truly unnerving children’s story by the surrealist Leonora Carrington.7

Compared to the other behemoth that is Documenta, Venice remains unabashedly tethered to the art market, and so its themes have often stuck to rubrics like the perception or the experience of art, which tend to be friendly for dealers, collectors, and boards of trustees.8 Artistic directors of both Venice and Documenta have made several bold departures from what is now considered a standard exhibition model. Consider, for example, Francesco Bonami enlisting nearly a dozen other curators to break his Venice show into smaller parts, for Dreams and Conflicts: The Dictatorship of the Viewer, in 2003; or Adam Szymczyk’s decision to stage his exhibition for Documenta, titled Learning from Athens, in 2017, in both Germany and Greece; or the extreme nimbleness with which Cecilia Alemani pulled off an exhibition in Venice, in 2022, where over ninety percent of the artists were women. Only Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev evolved the large-scale exhibition format to include a physical thesis—a concentration or distillation of the show’s abiding concerns—which presented itself not only as so much text on the walls or on paper but materially and spatially in the actual show. For the thirteenth edition of Documenta, in 2012, Christov-Bakargiev offered a riddle in place of a concept. But that riddle unfolded a powerful set of ideas, positions, and questions, and all of them were gathered together on the ground floor of the Fridericianum in an elegantly arranged amalgamation of objects, which she called “The Brain.” 

Adriano Pedrosa’s exhibition Foreigners Everywhere for the current edition of the Venice Biennale, which opened in April and runs through November 24, does something similar but subtler, and, as such, one might argue that he has nudged Venice closer to Documenta at a time when Documenta has driven itself off a cliff. Pedrosa’s show is split in two. One part, the nucleo contemporaneo, or contemporary core, offers the expected survey of contemporary art, revolving around ideas of the queer artist, the outsider artist, and the indigenous artist. The other part, the nucleo storico, or historical core, consists of three standalone sections devoted to modern art in the Global South, specifically Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. These three sections explore abstraction and portraiture in two of the most prominent galleries in the Central Pavilion and then, about mid-way though the Arsenale, the diasporic or exilic condition. This third section is expressed by an exuberant and wondrously uneven show-within-a-show titled Italians Everywhere—presented on local reproductions of the architect Lina Bo Bardi’s celebrated glass-and-concrete display system.

In the first nucleo storico, on abstraction, a flurry of paintings, tapestries, and three-dimensional objects hang somewhat haphazardly on the walls surrounding a majestic installation of the Brazilian artist Ione Saldanha’s painted wooden slats called Bambus, from the 1960s and 70s. Thirty-five of them, all brightly colored and patterned, stand on a low platform like trees in an imagined forest. They represent one among several experiments that Saldanha carried out using everyday quasi-industrial materials such as electrical cable spools and wooden blocks to question the relationship between nature as natural and art as artifice.

The paintings, meanwhile, are often huddled together, or they are arranged high on the walls, as if to mimic the salon-style hangings of so many national and parochial museums around the world. Because this particular nucleo storico focuses, for the most part, on geometric abstraction, there are echoes bouncing everywhere: between Saldanha’s circles and stripes and those of, say, Mohamed Melehi, Mohammed Chebaa, and Mohamed Hamidi, three artists associated with the legendary Casablanca School. In the aftermath of Moroccan independence from France, they committed themselves to building a new national culture, fighting off neocolonialist forces, and bringing modern art into the streets and among the people.9 

To know the work of even just a few of the artists in this room is to be jolted again and again by the thrill of recognition and the joy of seeing them included here. Etel Adnan, for example, is present with an early untitled painting from 1965. Near the center of her canvas is a classic red square, the mark Adnan so often used as a starting point. To that initial red square, she would add other shapes and colors, building abstract compositions that always doubled as landscapes, showing places she had loved or worlds that had vanished. Here, too, is Saloua Raouda Choucair, with an energizing painting of a Sphinx hidden among geometric forms that repeat, like paper cutouts, in variations and rotations. The work casts new light on the importance of her travels to Egypt in the 1940s, early in her career. Choucair was known to have studied Islamic architecture, but she clearly spent time among Pharaonic monuments, too. Adnan was the doyenne of Christov-Bakargiev’s Documenta, but she had never been included in the Venice Biennale before. Besides a survey at Tate Modern more than a decade ago and a smattering of paintings and sculptures here and there, Choucair’s work is rarely seen on such international circuits.

Rarer still is the chance to see, in this setting, a 1974 canvas by Saliba Douaihy, with wide bands of mint and turquoise green languorous between zingers of pink and orange, combined to suggest the moment of sunset over the Mediterranean Sea. Douaihy is considered a national treasure in Lebanon, though he is not at all uncontroversial. He was effectively a religious painter and despite the similarities he refused to accept that his work had anything to do with hard edge painting. He remains little known outside of his own country, despite traveling widely from India to Mexico and living for decades in New York, Paris, and London. Even more woefully understudied is Samia Osseiran Junblatt, who is here with another red sun, looming over what appears to be an ominously open but claustrophobically constructed wooden tunnel.

Elsewhere in the abstraction gallery, one finds a kaleidoscopic vision by Fahrelnissa Zeid, a groovy ellipse by the great Carmen Herrera, and a late abstract composition by Zubeida Agha, one of the few women protagonists of a calligraphic modernism whose art historical narratives are still very much actively in formation. If this room had sound, if these artworks emitted their own tones or made their own rhythms, one would certainly hear strange, clamorous, but undeniably interesting music. Over in the other nucleo storico, in an elevated gallery at the back of the Central Pavilion—devoted to all manner of portraiture, good, bad, and uproariously ugly—one would hear murmurs and shouts and so very many stories.

Inji Efflatoun’s portrait of a woman prisoner, from 1963, is far from her best work, but in this setting, a surprising dialogue becomes possible with, for example, Uzo Egonu’s Guinean Girl, from 1962, or Emma Reyes’s untitled painting of a woman with enormously sad-defiant eyes, from 1955, stemming from a time when the Colombian artist was living in Rome and hanging around with Pier Paolo Pasolini, among others. The voices here are varied and multiple, and they represent the motherlode of scholarship that has been done in the field of global modernism: Ahmed Morsi, Semiha Berksoy, Wifredo Lam, Effat Naghi, Ibrahim El-Salahi, Frida Kahlo, Uche Okeke, Tahia Halim, Dia al-Azzawi, Saloua Raouda Choucair again with a self-portrait from the 1940s, Syed Sadequain, Tarsila do Amaral, Bahman Mohasses, Lorna and Jewad Selim, Amrita Sher-Gil, Diego Rivera, the inimitable Baya, Jamini Roy, Gazbia Sirry, and Mahmoud Saïd. It is a boisterous experiment with what a crowded, inclusive, chaotic, non-hierarchical but crucially thought-provoking art history could be—an art history open-ended and regenerative rather than condescending and restricted.10

Like many of the artists in Italians Everywhere—the third and final nucleo storico—Lina Bo Bardi left the country where she was born to make a life for herself elsewhere. She had been a communist during World War II, and when that made Italy impossible in the immediate postwar period, she emigrated to Brazil. She stayed there for the rest of her life, working as a writer, curator, magazine editor, graphic designer, furniture maker, and more. She not only designed the main building of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP). She also created its famous display system, known as the cavaletes de vidro, which was presented to the public for the first time in 1968, and used to structure this nucleo storico. The cavaletes de vidro are freestanding “glass easels” with thick panes of glass slotted vertically into concrete cubes and held in place by wooden blocks, allowing viewers to regard two-dimensional artworks from both the front and the back—to approach them as objects first, and to discover their stories and contextualizing details second. Adriano Pedrosa has been the artistic director of MASP since 2014. Within a year of his arrival, he reinstalled Bo Bardi’s display system as part of a reassessment of the museum’s permanent collection. It makes sense that he would bring this singular curatorial achievement to Venice, not only to honor her work but also to illustrate how patterns of migration like hers have so often produced modernism, modernity, and modern art.

In the room devoted to Italians Everywhere, Bo Bardi’s display system amplifies the sense of old hierarchies being overturned and access being leveled. As with Ione Saldanha’s Bambus, the glass easels compel viewers to wander around and through a thicket of artworks arranged in the space of a room. Some of the art here is incredible and much of it is absolutely awful. Among the former, who could profess indifference to Tina Modotti’s revolutionary Falce, Pannocchia e Cartucciera (1928), a highly formalist black and white photograph of a sickle tucked over an ammunition belt and then looped under a slightly dimpled ear of corn? Could it really be the case that Modotti’s work has never been shown in the biennale before? Among the latter, the bad paintings, there are several orientalist portraits by mercenary Italian artists who traveled to places like Ethiopia, Thailand, and the Philippines in the wake of “friendship treaties” and brute colonization.

On the back of nearly every piece in Italians Everywhere, a story unfolds. We learn about the parallel painting practice of the modernist choreographer Simone Forti; about Waldemar Cordeiro’s drafting of the 1952 manifesto of the Grupo Ruptura, a key document of Brazilian concrete art, and his subsequent turn to applied mathematics and computer art; about the language of geometric abstraction developed by Elda Cerrato as she oscillated between Marxism and mysticism and between the politics of Peronist Argentina and the sighting of UFOs. Every story is a revelation about how imperialism, colonialization, and the fear or threat of fascism drove people from their homes in one relatively small, unevenly developed European country and then scattered them all over the world, where a condition of being modern was to become naturalized somewhere else—indeed to become someone else.

What all of this material does together is provincialize the biennale, Venice, Italy, and, by extension, the entire European project, in more or less the same manner called for by Dipesh Chakrabarty is his book Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference.11 Pedrosa jumbles misfits and geniuses, standards and curios. His exhibition mirrors the historical density that Alloway wrote about, and renders obsolete a whole tradition of discernment, stylistic development, and taste. Foreigners Everywhere reminds viewers that for all its international ambitions, Venice remains an intensely local event in a city flooded by outside influences for a thousand years. For decades, the biennale has drawn a completely artificial map of the world in miniature through its system of national pavilions. More recently, the international exhibition has, with far greater accuracy, charted the rise in power of a handful of galleries functioning as multinational conglomerates. In previous editions, one could organize the artists on view according to their gallery affiliation, with Marian Goodman, Hauser & Wirth, and David Zwirner accumulating particularly large clusters. The last two editions seem to have pulled away from that, or at least they appear to have found different funding models. In doing so, they have opened a space in the structure of the biennale for something—if not outright public, per Alloway, then at least vaguely pedagogical, something like learning, like discovery, like the flashes of insight that could lead to a rewriting of art history.

To be sure, there are still economic interests at play. A significant number of artworks in the nucleo storico come from private collections (Taimur Hassan, the Barjeel Foundation, the Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Foundation), which have come together only recently, and often though acquisitions made at auction. But market performance no longer seems to be the most obvious criteria for inclusion. The more important factors in Foreigners Everywhere are complicating modernism and rectifying neglect. Venice is one of the oldest events of its kind in the world, and it has spawned generations of imitators and detractors. If it were to adopt a pedagogical function, it would be following the examples of its putative offspring, notably the Istanbul Biennial, often described as an art school that educated several generations of artists, curators, and critics, and the Home Works Forum in Beirut, which has always defined itself against the biennial model—it happens when it can—and spun off a tuition-free, non-degree-granting art school in 2011.

To his credit, Pedrosa has upended expectations in Venice by featuring more dead artists than living and focusing on work that is allegedly unknown. In place of market performance or major museum approval, he offers no alternative sets of standards or judgements. He leaves us marvelously unmoored as viewers. He insists, through this show as in previous efforts, on the importance of finding “different tools, models, and concepts to assess other narratives beyond Eurocentric criticism and history.”12 This means not only jamming in loads of unknown work but also, crucially, questioning what viewers expect to see here, what they expect to be told about it, and why. And this is exactly what rankled early critics of the show and particularly early critics of the nucleo storico. Adrian Searle, writing in the Guardian, dismissed the biennale’s romp through modern art in the Global South as “belated,” “derivative,” “kitschy,” and “unadventurous.” “These works add very little,” he wrote. “There’s not much to make one pause.”13 Jason Farago, for the New York Times, lamented the lack of context. Better shows, he explained, had “used critical juxtaposition and historical documentation to show how and why an Asian modernism, or an African modernism, looked the way it did.”14 Jackson Arn, reviewing the biennale for the New Yorker, complained that rushing so many unknown abstract paintings into a single gallery did a disservice to them all. “A Rothko couldn’t thrive in a place like this,” he said.15

But isn’t that precisely the point here? Arn, like so many others—including Farago, Searle, and me—have learned how to look at a Rothko. That’s what the master narrative or unifying theory of art history does. That’s what the canon does. And that’s what Pedrosa is consciously and deliberately trying to undo. The vast majority of the artists featured in the nucleo storico had never been included in Venice before. But that doesn’t mean that no visitors to the biennale were aware of them. Can critics like Arn simply not imagine a world or worlds where, for example, everyone knows that Bibi Zogbé paints crazy flowers but finds it incredibly exciting to come face to face with one of her rarely seen portraits, and moreover discovers that she had something in common with artists elsewhere, that those commonalities might turn out to be clumsy, totally false, or unforgivably ahistorical, but thinking through them engenders a nonetheless valuable breakthrough? That is, to be sure, the same fanciful world where the next edition of Art Since 1900 is renamed to acknowledge how narrow it is, where one critic’s understanding of how to read a Rothko does not set the bar for everyone, everywhere, a world that listens generously to other voices, including those that it does not necessarily like, recognize, or understand.

That said, several critics including Farago and Ben Eastham, writing for e-flux, did grapple in extremely good faith with the mismatch they experienced between what they had hoped for and what actually materialized in Pedrosa’s biennale. They each noted a tendency to tokenize, exoticize, compartmentalize, and other the exhibition’s artists, to focus too much on the categories they could be made to fit into, whether formally or biographically, which came at the expense of their art.16 I tend to believe in the underlying sincerity of Pedrosa’s project, and to support the idea, the beau geste, that this biennale is paying a historical debt to those artists, and that such gestures matter—for scholarship, for future learning, and for posterity.17 But I do agree that the actual storytelling involved, the texts on all of those walls and floors and plinths, was often, as it tends to be everywhere in the art world, underwhelming and insufficient for the complexities attached to each work and person that appeared here as a placeholder for something bigger.

In the same year that Alloway published his book on Venice, he also joined the art department faculty at SUNY Stony Brook. There, which is to say here, he would go on to create the journal Art Criticism, with Donald Kuspit, in 1979, which is a crucial source of inspiration and motivation for the journal you are reading now. Before working in museums, Alloway was a correspondent for serval art magazines and wrote weekly criticism for the Nation for years. He was a curator-critic, one among several endangered species of public intellectual, much like the poet-critic and the painter-critic before him. Pedrosa, too, is a curator-critic. He started out as a correspondent for Flash Art. He still has the habit of testing out ideas in print. And he has described the nucleo storico specifically as “an essay, a draft, a speculative curatorial exercise that seeks to question the boundaries and definitions of modernism.”18

Can you break something open, learn from it, and rebuild it differently? Or will you be left with a hopeless pile of broken pieces? Or worse, will you end up rebuilding the same thing all over again, only this time monstrously reconstructed? Can institutions like Venice or the museum or academia be changed from within? Is questioning boundaries and definitions enough? Did Venice ever really pull art out of an elite context and into a public realm? Of course, Pedrosa is at once promising to destroy art history—to devour it, to cannibalize and disgorge its contents—while at the same time conceding to play by its rules. He willingly names himself the first artistic director of the biennale from Latin America, the first to be truly living and working in the Global South, and the first to be openly queer. These are all important but their firstness, perhaps less so. What matters more, going forward, is Pedrosa’s attempt to overhaul the discipline of art history and reconfigure the study of modernism, to pack so much historical density into the nucleo storico that it can last for years. We can return to it anytime, anywhere, to map out a wider world, to draw a web of possible connections, and to realize a more satisfying future for our field.

1 Sleigh painted Alloway more than forty times, as a bride posed as if in a Mughal miniature in 1949, and as a reclining nude in the style of Olympia or an odalisque in the 1973 oil on canvas Turkish Bath. 

2 The task of organizing the US pavilion in 1966 swerved over to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the curator Henry Geldzahler assembled an exhibition of paintings by Helen Frankenthaler, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, and Jules Olitski. Geldzahler described their works as difficult, not popular, but ultimately beautiful. Henry Geldzahler, “A Preview of the 1966 Venice Biennale,” Artforum 4, no. 10 (Summer 1966): 32–38.

3 Lawrence Alloway, The Venice Biennale, 1895–1968: from Salon to Goldfish Bowl (Faber & Faber, 1968), 17.

4 Ibid, 25.

5 Ibid, 89.

6 Ibid, 22.

7 These organizing principles correspond, in order, to Ralph Rugoff’s May You Live in Interesting Times in 2019; Massimiliano Gioni’s The Encyclopedic Palace in 2013; Okwui Enwezor’s All the World’s Futures in 2015; and Cecilia Alemani’s The Milk of Dreams in 2022.

8 Examples include Robert Storr’s Think with the Senses, Feel with the Mind: Art in the Present Tense in 2007; Bice Curiger’s Illuminations in 2011, with its revival of Tintoretto as modern or even contemporary; and Christine Macel’s Viva Arte Viva in 2017.

9 Named for L’École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Casablanca where many of its members were teaching in the 1960s under the directorship of Farid Belkahia, the Casablanca School was renowned for organizing events in public places that were busy, popular, and charged with symbolic meaning. Melehi, Chebaa, and Hamidi all participated in Présence Plastique, an outdoor exhibition staged with the force of a manifesto on Marrakech’s bustling Jemaa el-Fna in 1969.

10 Many of the scholars who have created and developed the field of global modernism are present (or excerpted) in the Foreigners Everywhere catalogue, including Kobena Mercer, Partha Mitter, and Nada Shabout. Others who have produced serious scholarship on artists presented in the nucleo storico include Salah Hassan, Iftikhar Dadi, Anneka Lenssen, Morad Montazami, Kirsten Scheid, Hala Halim, and Saloni Mathur, among many others.

11 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton University Press, 2000).

12 Adriano Pedrosa, “History, Histórias,” in Afro-Atlantic Histories (DelMonico Books and Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, 2022), 23.

13 Adrian Searle, “Venice Biennale 2024 – everything everywhere all at once,” the Guardian, April 22, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2024/apr/22/venice-biennale-2024-review-everything-everywhere-all-at-once.

14 Jason Farago, “The Venice Biennale and the Art of Turning Backward,” the New York Times, April 24, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/24/arts/design/venice-biennale-review-art-israel.html.

15 Jackson Arn, “The Dead Rise at the Venice Biennale,” the New Yorker, May 2, 2024, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/05/13/venice-biennale-art-review.

16 Ben Eastham, “The 60th Venice Biennale, ‘Foreigners Everywhere,’” e-flux Criticism, April 19, 2024, https://www.e-flux.com/criticism/603719/60th-venice-biennale-foreigners-everywhere. 

17 One example of the nucleo storico being a success already—in terms of provoking more detailed, comprehensive exhibitions and research projects about the artists featured in the abstraction, portraiture, and Italian diaspora sections—is Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism, which is on view at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, through January 5, 2025, and travels to the Royal Academy of Arts in London, from January 28 through April 21, 2025. Brasil! Brasil! is divided into ten monographic sections, with each section devoted to an individual artist’s work. Six out of the ten artists, including Tarsila do Amaral, Anita Malfatti, and Djanira da Motta e Silva, are featured in Foreigners Everywhere. The organizers of the exhibition in Bern note that this was a fortunate coincidence, and they welcomed its contribution to the work of global modernism as a means of rewriting art history and expanding its scope beyond Europe.

18 Adriano Pedrosa, “Foreigners Everywhere – Stranieri Ovunque,” in Foreigners Everywhere (Biennale Arte 2024) (La Biennale di Venezia, 2024), 50.

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie is a journalist, critic, and art historian. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary art in the Middle East and North Africa, with an emphasis on the work of groundbreaking but understudied women artists and the importance of cities such as Beirut, Cairo, and Algiers as major centers of art, culture, and political thought.

All images: photo: Andrea Avezzú, courtesy La Biennale di Venezia 

This text was supported by a Public Humanities Grant from Humanities NY.