“Anonymous Faggots.” That's what the chunky white serif text reads on a small, royal blue oil painting hung on a concrete-and-exposed brick wall in a dimly lit room in the Arsenale. My mum gestures towards it and says, “Oh, I haven't seen that one yet.” We stand side by side in front of the painting. It's by Dean Sameshima, and the didactic informs us that his work “safeguards fragile narratives” and “excavate[s]…the complexities of identity.” In the series this canvas comes from, which repeatedly uses the word “anonymous,” the artist “creates variety by incorporating words related to queer individuals, such as homosexual, faggot, or even pleasure.” “Interesting,” I say. Mum takes a photo. I take a photo. “Shall we take a break?”
We're at the 60th Venice Biennale, the biyearly colossus of curated mega-shows, national pavilions, and opportunistic pop-up exhibitions. Art is spread across venues all over the Floating City: in a gigantic complex of repurposed medieval shipyards, in sun-dappled gardens, in slickly concreted modernist galleries hidden beneath centuries-old brick facades. This year’s Biennale is curated by Adriano Pedrosa, a silver-haired Brazilian man in his late 50s who gained acclaim working as the artistic director of the Museum of Art of São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand. He has included over 300 individual artists and collectives from around 70 countries. The theme is Stranieri Ovunque—Foreigners Everywhere, and the phrase is displayed in neon translation throughout the exhibition. Pedrosa has approached the theme expansively, to speak biennale style. “Wherever you go and wherever you are you will always encounter foreigners—they/we are everywhere.” The exhibition covers artists from the Global South, migrant artists, “outsider” or “folk” artists, queer artists, and Indigenous artists, who “are frequently treated as foreigners in their own lands.” Pedrosa has also curated a substantial historical exhibition of modernist artworks created outside of Euro-America, reflecting an increased curatorial interest in global modernism. Picasso and Braque unleashed a beast.
The national pavilions, which operate independently from Pedrosa’s theme, are mostly in the Giardini, a park on the island’s eastern side with pale grey gravel paths, abundant greenery, and canals that glisten in the late afternoon sun. Pavilions are organised by a curator or two connected to the pavilion’s respective nation-state, and mainly show one artist, though some show a few artists or collectives. This year, the Biennale’s most prestigious prize, the Golden Lion, was awarded to the Australian Pavilion for the Kamilaroi/Bigambul artist Archie Moore’s kith and kin, curated by Ellie Buttrose. Feelings of national pride are tempered by Moore's subject matter: relationship systems that endure despite the settler colonial state and its institutional violence.
It’s the first time I've been to the Biennale. I’m here with a motley crew of six: my mum, Pippa, my boyfriend, Moyshie, my friend, Naveed, and my family friends, Lisa and Phil. We're all staying together in a rental property with a terrace overlooking a canal. It’s right by the Arsenale, a location chosen to facilitate maximum art viewing. I arrive frazzled, with early-morning-flight-fatigue and all the Venice reviews I've read ricocheting through my skull. What did Verónica Tello think again? What about Nicolas Bourriaud? This trip comes at the end of an extended period away from Australia, studying in London. Biennale or not, I’m already dwelling on questions of foreignness, national identity, British colonialism, artistic centres and peripheries, and home.
An art event of this scale is a deluge; one puts their face over the fire hydrant for a couple of days and hopes to come away with some sense of the current thematic preoccupations and aesthetic tendencies of the world's best artists, curators, patrons, government officials, and luxury fashion conglomerates. Only the most punishing art freak could claim to have seen all the art on display in Venice during the period of the Biennale. They’d be lying. I do not see it all, but I do see, among other things, a row of striped gondoliers’ shirts hanging from a clothesline, a person whose face is concealed by a glowing, golden orb stride through a haze of yellow lights, and Phil purposefully spraying insect repellent in his eyes to liven up our dinner table after a long day trudging the grounds. I also see most of the national pavilions. First stop, Australia.
*
Kath & Kim is a beloved Australian television show that follows the trials and tribulations of a mother-daughter duo from the outer suburbs of Melbourne. The show is not to be confused, as one of my relatives did, with kith and kin—Archie Moore’s exhibition in Venice. Moore’s title references an English phrase now meaning friends and family, though he cites a fourteenth century definition that linked the word “kith” to the concepts of “countrymen” and “one’s native land.” In the exhibition pamphlet, he writes: “i was interested in the phrase as it aptly describes the artwork in the pavilion, but i was also interested in the old english meaning of the words, as it feels more like a first nations understanding of attachment to place, people and time.”
The Australian pavilion, designed by the Melbourne firm Denton Corker Marshall, is a stark black box that juts over a canal with a view to the ocean. Most of the other national pavilions have a slightly battered, mid-century feel—I didn't expect that they would look so dingy. But the Australian one is like an alien cube that’s been dropped in the centre of the Giardini: a statement about a new, modern nation with slick ambitions for the international stage. It also sort of looks like a giant black coffin.
To enter the pavilion, you walk up a gentle, tree-lined ramp. At the door, you are greeted by a polite invigilator, who gives a short introduction to Moore’s work and asks that you do not touch the water component of the installation. (Who would be that stupid? I think. Later, a French man who has evaded the introductory speech enters the pavilion and immediately drenches his sneaker.) A darkened antechamber frames the main exhibition space. The room inside the pavilion mirrors the exterior. It has black walls, pale grey concrete floors and a ceiling lined with two thin, white rectangular light panels. These dimly illuminate the two major, diametrically opposed components installed in the space.
On the black walls, starting at around eye level, is a monumental family tree hand-drawn in white chalk. It begins with discretely separated names, outlined by boxes with rounded edges, which are linked by neat lines. “Me” links to “Stanley Moore” and “Jennifer Joan Cleven,” who link to a number of empty boxes—members of Moore's family he has de-identified to protect their privacy. Up a little higher, “Elma May Carolyn McGregor” links to “Ethal Bird” who links to “Charles William Bird” who links to “William ‘Little Breeches’ Ku-ti-run Bird” who links to “Full Blood Aborigine.” Above eye level, the words in the family tree start to change from Anglicised names to derogatory race-based categories of Aboriginal identity, gender, and blood: “Half Caste”; “Abo. Female.” Tilting my eyes up further, the words change again: “Meetjak”; “Kunnlara”; “Jini”; “Yimmi”; “Oobina.” These are singular Kamilaroi names. At certain points in the network, there are voids or rubbed out sections—gaps in the archives; ruptures in connections caused by massacres or forced displacement. The higher we look, the further back we move through Moore's ancestral history, to a time before colonisation. Here, the linear connections between the individuals begin to disintegrate. Up the top, names are packed together in dense constellations. The chalky names stretch all the way up to the crease at the top of the wall and travel onto the roof, where the web continues above our heads.
In the centre of the room, a white table covered with neat stacks of white paper sits above a shallow pool of black, reflective water. The papers—coroner's reports into the deaths of Aboriginal people in custody and archival documents about Moore's family members—are piled to different heights. The white paper blocks speak the sombre visual language of recent memorials. Tello, writing for Memo, makes reference to The Aboriginal Memorial (1987–88), created by Yolgnu artists working in collaboration with Dijon Mundine, and now in the National Gallery of Australia. From afar, the display is also reminiscent of the uneven topography of the stelae of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (2005), in Berlin. Moving closer, the print on top of some of the sheets of cold white paper becomes legible. A few pages have the grey patina of a photocopy. Many are legal texts, topped with intricate royal insignias of the colonial courts. The names of the men who died in custody have been redacted with neat black rectangles—an echo of the occlusions in the chalk family tree. Leaning across the moat of the water, the documents placed in the centre of the table are impossible to read. One experiences bureaucratic vertigo.
Taken in its totality, kith and kin is a kind of symbolic diorama of the interlocking structures that shape the lives of people living on the continent now known as Australia. The colonial legal system and government surveillance systems appear via the official papers. The colonial education system appears in the classroom-like chalkboard. Different systems of familial connections, which move from seemingly straightforward Western genealogy to an interwoven Indigenous kinship system, are etched out in the names, phrases, and lines between them. Moore is the gravitational centre in this ancestral cosmos. It is a quiet, subtle, and reflective work, conceptually and technically accomplished. But the first time I visit, I can't focus. My eyes won't adjust to the light. There’s been so much build-up to this moment, so many pictures of the installation, so much hype with the Golden Lion. I feel self-conscious in the presence of everyone else in the room—like I should be having an appropriately Venice-scale emotive reaction, communing in a poignant and meaningful art experience. I wander around the space aimlessly, reading name after name after name, waiting for something to cohere.
*
Venice is beautiful, obviously. The sky is wide and blue and the canals all lead to the edges of the island, which is surrounded by algae-lined paths looking out onto the ocean. Every afternoon, when school finishes, Via Giuseppe Garibaldi is suddenly filled with little kids running around spurting water at each other out of plastic guns and shouting in Italian.
But once you’re in a darkened room filled with multi-channel video art about the poetics of eviction, you could be anywhere else on earth (maybe you'd rather be). We spend an afternoon and two days walking through rooms like this. A theme emerges: European power and the legacies of colonialism are under scrutiny. Pieces of indigo fabric are critiquing European colonialism. Ethically-made chocolate sculptures are critiquing European colonialism. Appropriated nineteenth century Spanish landscape paintings are critiquing European colonialism. Groaning, rumbling ambient soundscapes, which seem to feature in every third exhibit, are critiquing European colonialism. An immersive sauna installation is critiquing European colonialism.
Naturally, the Ministry of Cultures, Decolonisation, and Depatriarchalisation of Bolivia is critiquing European colonialism. Russia has not participated in the Biennale since the invasion of Ukraine. In 2022, the Russian artists and curators withdrew in protest, but this year, the nation-state shared its prime-location pavilion in the Giardini with Bolivia. This coincided with the signing of a lithium mining contract between the two countries worth $450 million USD. The pavilion is mouldy green and emblazoned with white serif lettering that says, “RUSSIA.” A temporary banner saying “BOLIVIA” hangs between two grimy columns attached to the facade. I wander inside. There are laboriously hand-made textiles. There are folkish paintings of and by Indigenous peoples living in the forest in a “traditional” manner, seemingly unaffected by modernity. There are statements that challenge the nature of chronological time: “Looking to the futurepast, we are treading forward.” The concept of “foreigners everywhere” gets a mention. Also: “Many thanks to the Russian Federation for welcoming Bolivia into its Pavilion and giving us the opportunity to bring our project into the heart of the Biennale. Our presence in the Giardini subverts for once those hierarchies that seemed immutable and our voice is now audible…” Israel's pavilion is closed.
The main Foreigners Everywhere exhibitions are in the cavernous spaces of the Arsenale. The first room is filled with a massive, intricate weaving that stretches over our heads, made from iridescent industrial fabric straps by the Mataaho Collective, four Māori women from Aotearoa/New Zealand. It’s incredibly striking and skilful. Further on, some work Pedrosa has included is supremely average. Didactics emphasise the biographies and cultural heritage of participating artists, and sometimes this feels significantly more exciting than the actual art on display. One work is a larger-than-human-sized wooden box, painted a thin orange, with a concealed speaker broadcasting meditative phrases like: “Energy vibrates. Atoms vibrate. And vibration is naturally linked with sound…” My family friend Lisa and I stand in front of the artwork for a couple of minutes, acclimating. It’s reminiscent of the artwork Marnie gets locked inside by the repellent artist “Booth Jonathan” in Lena Dunham’s Girls, but New Age rather than ageing New York fuckboy. This is not the correct reference point. The didactic explains: “Delving into altered states of consciousness through the experiences of sound, silence, and listening, the artist draws on the wisdom of both Yorùbá traditions and practices, always with the elevation of Black and queer consciousness to the front.” A crescent moon and blobby orange sun, suspended mid-air, rotate extremely slowly around the box.
What do I think of this box? Do I think it is good? In this Biennale, these may be the wrong questions. Pedrosa has rejected any pretence of maintaining a singular, universal, objective notion of connoisseurial taste. Nor is there any form of linear art history. His curatorial approach is an almighty global dredging of over a century’s worth of lesser-known artists and art historical narratives. This has a kind of forcefully admirable, if not slightly exhausting, logic. Yet it doesn’t extinguish my belief that concepts of quality and taste are not totally arbitrary. I’m no Kantian, but some works in this exhibition are much better—visually, conceptually, thematically—than others. The box is not one of them.
In general, I am predisposed to like art that depicts elaborate scenes populated with tiny figures engaging in a carnival of social interaction, a genre that covers artists from Pieter Breugel the Elder to Florine Stettheimer to Kaylene Whiskey. Pedrosa’s curation of “folk” and “outsider” artists into the show appeals to me. But how can one tell when an artist's works are a) representations of significant historical events or marginalised subjectivities executed in a technically naive yet symbolically powerful style that occludes dominant modern Euro-American aesthetic criteria, or b) really quite amateur? I consider this question many times in Venice.
Why do I like some of the works in the show, and not others? It's partly basic and to do with colour (I am drawn more to works with pale or monochromatic colour schemes, and less so to works that use highly saturated palettes) and partly to do with geographical affinity (I am, provincially, more interested in work by Australian artists). I'm also more inclined to enjoy work with some kind of weirdo levity or horniness. Maybe it’s not that deep. Maybe good folk art is like pornography: you just know it when you see it. Or maybe my attachment to categories of good and bad are outmoded, elitist, or evidence of fundamental colonial-brain.
Some folky works in the Biennale, such as Aydeé Rodríguez López's ominous paintings of Afro-Mexican life on colonial plantations, I find ugly. Others I am drawn to. For example, the unidentified Chilean artists’ arpilleras, made under the Pinochet regime, which are intricately detailed applique fabric collages on burlap sacks that show mini people holding packages of rice. And Wathaurung/Waudurang Elder Marlene Gilson’s minutely detailed historical paintings, which reconstruct interactions between First Nations people and settlers in the nineteenth century, on familiar dry, yellow-green land. Maybe if I’d grown up in Mexico I might be drawn to López’s paintings and walk straight past Gilson’s.
As I walk through the Arsenale with my mum, another art mother and daughter are peering at Gilson’s paintings. One scene shows a woman weaving baskets by a fire. Another shows the hubbub of the Eureka Stockade. The mother moves up close to one painting and points out a detail to her daughter. The girl, who is about twelve, looks mortified, and yanks her mother’s hand away from the painting. Too close! She abruptly walks away, towards nowhere particular in the middle of the room. Then she relents and walks back up to another one of the paintings, holding her hand out, asking her mum to come closer so they can look together again.
*
Taking a lunch break, I walk over the canals and through the back streets, which alternately smell like spaghetti vongole and sewage. On the top of one bridge, a desperate-looking guy has set up a neat display of fake Louis Vuitton handbags—Foreigners Everywhere praxis merch, though few Biennale attendees seem to be buying.
What do the punters at this strange international trade fair/meditation retreat on a sinking island want from the experience? Much of the contemporary art world is currently animated by a discourse defined by self-conscious criticality. Institutional critique is the dominant mode. This is often framed as a move towards democratic anti-elitism, yet it arguably coincides with the declining influence of museums and visual art in popular culture. Theorist Benjamin Bratton’s analysis of the situation is scathing: “Given how much time, energy and money is spent by the art world denouncing itself… in the future, it will be difficult to convince people that the core function of a Biennale was once to gather and celebrate new and relevant works and not as a regularly scheduled megaforum for competitive repudiation, renunciation and withdrawal.”
Bratton also thinks that twentieth-century geopolitical formations have been fundamentally altered by the advent of “planetary-scale computing.” One common criticism of the Venice Biennale has it that the nation-state framework is near-redundant. Art people often hope this analysis will orient us towards a future wherein art transcends the brutality of borders, fostering globe-spanning networks of collective collaboration. Maybe capitalism will be overthrown along the way! At the Biennale, there is already a truly post-national and popular exchange of visual culture happening, but it’s led by luxury fashion houses, not well-meaning curators. These entities long-ago superseded nation-states and museums. Fashion is the realest global contemporary, transcending class and geography to provide clout to all. The evidence is everywhere in Venice, from Karimah Ashadah’s Machine Boys (2024), a video work which shows outlawed motorcyclists in Lagos revving in Gucci drip, to Pierre Huyghe’s astonishing, technofuturist Tarkovsky installation in the Punta della Dogana. The latter gallery is funded by the Pinault Collection. François Pinault is the French businessman who built Kering, the entity that currently owns, among other maisons, Balenciaga, Bottega Veneta, and Gucci. Humanity is connected by green and red stripes and swag. Brand loyalty is the highest form of global solidarity. Viva la rivoluzione?
*
Some kind of revolution is underway, but it’s probably not one most Biennale visitors want. All over Italy, outside the charmed circle of the Giardini, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's face is everywhere—on billboards, on buses, on trains. Meloni is bottle-blonde, tanned, and flinty-eyed. As a youth, she was connected to a Mussolini-affiliated political group. Currently, she is leader of the Fratelli d’Italia (“Brothers of Italy”) party, which she co-founded with some other bros who hate migrants, LGBTQs, Brussels bureaucrats, and EU environmental policies that mean San Pellegrino bottles can no longer have detachable plastic lids (too litterable—marone!). Meloni is not just a brother. “I am Giorgia! I am a mother! I am a Christian! I am an Italian! And you can't take that away from me!” she famously shouted at a rally in 2019. The day after I leave the Biennale, her party receives the Venetian winged lion’s share of Italy’s vote in the European Elections. She is now more powerful than ever.
Only one pavilion successfully addresses the economic rot and general decaying neo-Classical theme park vibe of Europe that underpins Meloni’s populist appeal: Guerreiro do Divino Amor’s Super Superior Civilisations, in Switzerland. It’s gonzo. It’s camp. It opens with a rotating marble female bust with red laser eyes, illuminated by purple light in a haze of dry ice, and gets more cracked from there. Broken columns are strewn throughout the courtyard. This ironic destruction is a respite and a relief; you would not believe how many works in the Biennale, by artists from Lebanon to Los Angeles, are still sincerely rehashing tropes from antiquity. Divino Amor is the sole exhibiting artist who shows how kitsch these forms are now. Only the local Moreland Hotel does it better.
Deeper into the pavilion, the drama continues. Divino Amor’s multi-character, soap-operatic video work is broadcast onto a faux-marble dome structure, satirising narratives of Swiss national supremacy. A woman shreds sensitive financial documents through her arse while cheeses and watches spin round the night sky. What do conservative Swiss visitors think of their pavilion? “They do not expect it to be this way,” the invigilator says diplomatically. The last section addresses Italian mythologies of racialised imperial supremacy, going all the way back to Romulus and Remus’ mother. In a hologram, an imperious woman with six bare breasts warbles operatically: “I am a she-wolf! I am a mother! I am a Christian! I am an Italian!”
*
For better or for worse, I am an Australian. On my final evening in Venice, in the last hour the Giardini is open, I visit the nation-state's pavilion once more, alone. This time, my eyes adjust to the light. I step into one corner of the room housing Moore’s work and look again at the water, the stacks of documents, and the tree of names. The vast majority of the random crap I’ve seen in the last two days suddenly seems like a distraction. On this visit, the dark chamber of Moore's pavilion invites focus and seriousness.
The art historian Tara Heffernan recently wrote about Moore in relation to the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgård. Both artists disclose intimate biographical information and attempt, with acknowledgement of the ultimate futility of the process, to painstakingly share their subjective experiences with the wider world. Considering his experience of encountering art, Knausgård writes:
What is a work of art if not the gaze of another person? Not directed above us, nor beneath us, but at the same height as our own gaze. Art cannot be experienced collectively, nothing can, art is something you are alone with. You meet its gaze alone.
For a second, it’s just “me” staring at Moore’s “me,” etched in white chalk on the black wall.
Then, I turn to look at the stacks of documents again. On one side of the table, the edges of the paper are a pale, ephemeral green. A narrow window is letting in light from the outside world. The colours of the plants lining the canal are bouncing off the surface of the water and into the gallery. An invigilator tells a visitor that normally the window is blocked off, but that Moore wanted it to be open. It connects the gallery to the water outside—water that leads to the Adriatic Sea, which eventually leads back to the ocean surrounding Australia.
I don’t feel like a foreigner everywhere. I feel like a foreigner outside this room, in Europe, and in the places where my ancestors came from (England and Scotland, like Moore’s father’s side of the family). I have an Australian passport. I don't exactly feel like a foreigner in Australia. But nor do I not feel like a foreigner in Australia. In this room, a nation-state in miniature, placed in a European diorama of the world, I feel like a participant. Not in a blood-and-soil, carn 'Straya way. It’s more like I have a sense of connection and obligation to the place where I had the random chance of growing up. My family histories and relationships imbricate me in the systems presented here by Moore.
kith and kin doesn’t propose a clear pathway to political action, though the weight of the death notices stacked in the centre of the room make political action appear necessary. In Venice, kith and kin seems to function more as a sombre memorial: This is what has happened—what's still happening. This is who is involved. This is our inheritance. Look at what we live with.