And at the center of the BKC is the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC), opened last year by art patron Nita Mukesh Ambani, whose husband, Mukesh, sits at number 9 on the Forbes “World Billionaires List.” After a debut show dedicated to TOILETPAPER, the magazine and creative studio founded by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari, and a second show on American Pop art, the NMACC has shifted its focus closer to home, with its third exhibition “Liminal Gaps” (through June 9), focusing on four contemporary Indian artists and collectives as a way to reshape “perspectives on India’s evolving cultural identity,” according to the catalog.

In explaining the exhibition’s approach to liminality, Mafalda Millies, one of the show’s curators and a cofounder of TRIADIC, a self-described “creative house and cultural engine,” said, “we aren’t from here and wanted to understand India in today’s time and space. We noticed that art in India has always had a historical element while shedding light on the present. India seems to thrive in this liminality between the past and the future and that is how the theme came to us.”

The exhibition takes over the four floors of NMACC’s Art House venue, with each artist getting their own floor: Ayesha Singh, Raqs Media Collective, Asim Waqif, and Afrah Shafiq (from the ground floor up). With the works on view, the show insists on sensorial and cognitive participation from its audience, asking them to occupy the museum’s many lines and nooks—to touch, click, scroll, play, listen, read, think, scribble, walk, stop, chuckle, rest, and most important, take pictures.

Roya Sachs, a cofounder of TRIADIC and its artistic director, said the group wanted to approach this exhibition in an untraditional format, as it had with the TOILETPAPER show and with its editions of the Format Festival in Bentonville, Arkansas. “We come from different worlds—art, performance, production—and our ethos has been to mix mediums and people,” she told ARTnews. “The contemporary art world is a disruptive space where we increasingly witness interdisciplinarity: choreographers working with visual artists, fashion designers creating sculptures, or sound engineers collaborating with painters. We are always trying to make bridges, take risks, and find magic in the unexpected.”

“Liminal Gaps” begins with visitors physically entering Delhi-based Ayesha Singh’s Hybrid Drawings (2024), a white-box room housing a wireframe installation of a two-point perspective. As you move around the space, architectural elements from different cultures and eras—Mughal, Indo-Saracenic, Sikh, Hindu, and modern—come into view. While the lines are a technical abstraction of Delhi’s architecture, they could be representative of any ancient city in the Indian subcontinent where imprints of past civilizations continue to transcend time and space. Even so, there is a clear erasure of the complexity, chaos, disarray, and entropy that resides in Delhi, or any Indian city for that matter. Singh’s work purges and reduces the city into sanitized lines of black against the spotless white of the walls, ceiling, and floor.

Established in 1992 by three artists (Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta), Raqs Media Collective presents several works that are meditations on time. The first, titled Nerves (2018), starts in a stairwell that leads from the floor where Singh’s work is installed to the other Raqs pieces. Set against a deep cobalt blue background are line drawings of neurons as they were represented in the early 20th century; running alongside them are expressions like “hit a raw nerve,” “nerves of steel,” or “you have some nerve.”

This passageway leads to Chromacron (2023), where stripes of Pantone’s Color of the Year from 2000 to 2024 line up in chronological order, leading to the installation called Escapement (2018). As the name suggests, its liminality derives from the mechanism in clocks (escapement) that governs consistent and uninterrupted motion of its arms. The work’s 27 seemingly identical clocks are set to different time zones. However, there are two aberrations: the hours are denoted by moods and emotions—remorse, awe, fear, epiphany—instead of numbers, and three clocks, running counterclockwise, are tagged to fictional cities (Babel, Shangri La, and Macondo). Nearby, a giant 24-hour clock sits by itself toward the end of this space; its digits are replaced by words in the Devanagari script that take on literal and symbolic meanings associated with time, such as shran (second), pran (life), atithi (guest), ritu (season), and kaal (era).

The center of the room looks deceptively empty wherein sits Betaal, an augmented reality work of abstract geometric figures that can be seen using iPads. Raqs has said they see this work as an entity that moves in the liminal gap between time and consciousness. There is a comfortable rhythm to Raqs’ work, the repetition and symmetry of clocks for instance lull you into reading it as an obvious rendition of time, until you are faced with the giant clock that compels you to dwell on the immense volatility of time and how it shapes our lives, language, and consciousness.

On the third floor is Asim Waqif’s Chaal (2024), an elaborate bamboo structure that is brought to life as you walk around or into it. While the work, and the exhibition as a whole, could perhaps be interpreted as an escape from the world, Waqif sees it differently. “I am nauseated by celebration right now, especially in the arts which has become a medium of celebrating redevelopment projects, real estate, new infrastructure, or just about anything. So Chaal while being playful is intended to have a dark mood, an element of unsettlement owing to its unpredictability.”

That unsettling feeling can come in the form of sudden sounds and lights activated by stepping on the bending bamboo structure or getting lost in its crevices—like entering a maze that has no exit. The experience can often vacillate between a childlike curiosity or a melancholic sense of doom.

In thinking about Waqif’s work within this context, BKC, the real estate development where this work is now sited, itself become a negation and denial of the realities of Mumbai, especially its poor. BKC and the NMACC within it are technically open to everyone are traversed by few, and comfortably so by even fewer. The looming glass facades, luxury brands, and absence of public transport or affordably priced food all ensure that the barrier of class and caste stands inviolable. The show itself is priced at INR 299 ($3.60 USD), an amount that could buy three dinners in Mumbai; it is, however, free for art students, if previously booked online.

For Sultana’s Reality (2017), Afra Shafiq takes the liminal gaps of the exhibition’s title more literally, presenting a mini library of books written by South Asian women, which visitors can annotate using sticky notes and graphite pencils, and a black box displaying a fantastical interactive experience (it can also be accessed online). This multimedia story, which borrows part of its name from Begum Rokeya’s 1905 feminist utopian story Sultana’s Dream, explores the relationship between women and colonial education movement in India using archival imagery, humor, contemporary culture, and historical nuggets.

“Most conversation around women’s education in India has been in the lines of ‘beti bachao… beti padhao’ (translation: save the daughter by educating the daughter) devoid of women’s autonomy or even voice,” Shafiq said. “Even the early reformers—colonial and Brahmanical alike—never thought of women’s education as a way to make them equal partners, or to imagine a world where they’d be educated and hence emancipated. She sees this reform movement “as a software update” that is “full of bugs.” Indeed, a thinking, liberated woman would be disastrous to their world order, especially when taking into account that Indian women were to be taught “to read but not to write,” according to one primary source in the video, and “only literature on devotion, gardening, child rearing, perhaps poetry” but never mathematics, chemistry, philosophy, or political science.

How this exhibit will “reshape India’s cultural identity” remains an unanswered and forgotten assertion when actually visiting “Liminal Gaps.” The insistence on these artists’ Indian-ness, on the part of the curators and NMACC’s billionaire founders, fails to register.

Occupied City (2023), his four-and-a-half-hour documentary about Amsterdam during the Holocaust, seems most telling about his priorities right now. In this film, a narrator outlines the disenfranchisement of Jews across the city, but McQueen’s footage of the present-day Dutch capital never testifies to what is described. His camera drifts through apartments, down museum corridors, and across canals. More often than not, he doesn’t show us anything of much interest. At a time when images of police brutality and suffering have become pervasive, McQueen has moved away from representing violence altogether.

With his latest work, he shows us nothing at all. McQueen has parted ways with moving images entirely for Bass (2024), a new installation that fills the 30,000-square-foot basement of Dia:Beacon in the Hudson Valley with sound and light. The only objects on view are 60 boxes hung on the ceiling that slowly change their hue, turning the space a succession of vibrant colors, from the retina-burning red of a horror movie to the orange glow of a sunset.

The title of Bass is the giveaway: the focus is sound, not sight. The sounds were produced by five musicians, all belonging to the African diaspora, who performed together in Dia’s columned basement this past January. McQueen was there to act as conductor, not that these musicians really needed it—mainly, they just improvised. He has presented all 189 minutes of their music largely unedited.

This quintet—Marcus Miller, Aston Barrett Jr., Mamadou Kouyaté, Laura-Simone Martin, and Meshell Ndegeocello—appears to have played as a unified whole, not as five soloists. It is difficult, for example, to discern which sounds were produced by Kouyaté, playing a West African instrument called a ngoni, and which were produced by Miller, a bassist who’s worked with many jazz greats. Together, the musicians have created a symphony of rumbles, bowed strings, and plaintive hums, some of which McQueen has arrayed across space so that they appear to echo across this vast gallery.

The relationship between the music and the lightboxes is oblique. Sometimes, coloristic shifts and sonic digressions sync to form associations. To my mind, a transition from deep blue to that burning red seemed to induce a horror-like state. Harsh knocking noises and aggressive pizzicato started to pour out of speakers overhead. The sounds continued until red faded to orange.

That, however, is an exceptional instance in this elegant installation. Most of the time, the music is set to a low simmer, with the sounds of fingers running across frets and the roll of bass playing whether the space is lit neon green, lush fuchsia, or haunting azure.

These hues recall the ones emitted by the Dan Flavin sculptures upstairs; the squarish, factory-made look of the lightboxes owes something to pieces by Donald Judd and his ilk. There can be no doubt that McQueen is situating Bass within the history of Minimalism, the movement that has provided the backbone of Dia’s collection. Yet whereas the Minimalists of the 1960s and ’70s prized austerity and order, McQueen’s latest contains an inner warmth. In that way, it’s closer to another recent installation that showed in this basement, Carl Craig’s more maximal Party/After-Party (2020), a light-and-sound spectacle that had the feeling of a wild night’s final hours.

The randomness of the sounds runs counter to the rigorous, strict arrangement of his lightboxes and the basement’s columns. And there is no designated way to experience Bass, either, since there are just a few benches set against the darkened walls. You can methodically weave your way through the columns, as I did, or you can plop down in the center and take it all in, as I observed others doing. McQueen seems to delight in all these possibilities.

What is Bass about? The work is abstract, but McQueen seems to have had concrete ideas on his mind. He told the New York Times that he’d been thinking of the Middle Passage as a state of “limbo,” and that he views Black people as being “post-apocalyptic.” Maybe that second remark explains the vacant, semi-abandoned look of the Dia basement in this artist’s hands.

But there is no one-to-one relationship: Bass does not simulate the hull of a ship ferrying enslaved people across the Atlantic, nor does it even feature representations of anything or anyone at all. If Bass is in some way connected to the Middle Passage, McQueen has approached the carnage that happened along the way using the same method he applied to the atrocities of the Holocaust in Occupied City: by not depicting it at all.

His reasons for doing so may be similar to those of many artists in the current Whitney Biennial, a show of art that deals with racism and other forms of prejudice without representing them. Perhaps McQueen, like those artists, rightfully assumes that we know enough about the barbarities of slavery and sees no reason to re-inflict trauma by depicting them once more. (He already did that anyway in 12 Years a Slave, his 2013 Oscar-winning film adapted, with a questionable degree of historical accuracy, from Solomon Northup’s memoir.) Perhaps, too, McQueen is suggesting that painful histories live on in ways that cannot be visualized, especially when those in power have been successful in expunging them from public memory.

And when that happens, invisible histories are spun into sound—stories get told and retold, songs record events that books do not, abstract musical tones recall clear memories. Bass is a sonic work about that which cannot be seen. Hear its hushed cacophony, feel its sounds vibrate in your chest, and find what exists out of sight.

Last May, the Cannes Film Festival debuted the newly restored 4K versions of the films to honor the centennial of Man Ray’s entry into filmmaking. Following the North American premiere at the New York Film Festival last fall, a wider release by distributor Janus Films begins this month, just as Surrealism celebrates its 100th anniversary.

Le Retour à la Raison (1923), Emak-Bakia (1926), L’Étoile de Mer (1928), and Les Mystères du Château du Dé (1929) comprise these wondrous 70 minutes that are now accompanied by a hypnotic avant-garde score, replete with guitar riffs, percussion, and droning synthesizers, by filmmaker Jim Jarmusch and Carter Logan of SQÜRL.

Created two years after his move to Paris, Le Retour à la Raison (Return to Reason) was produced with the encouragement of poet Tristan Tzara for a Dada evening of performance. Man Ray, adapting his process for creating cameraless photographs (photograms he eponymously dubbed “rayographs”), placed objects directly onto celluloid strips and briefly exposed them to light. He fudged the editing by gluing strips together. In his 1963 autobiography, Self Portrait, Man Ray wrote of his early films, “My curiosity was aroused by the idea of putting into motion some of the results I had obtained in still photography.”

For Le Retour’s opening image, he sprinkled salt and pepper on film “like a cook preparing a roast,” as he once put it. Seasonings, dress pins, and thumbtacks pulsate on screen, sometimes reversed as film negatives. These compositions are interspersed with footage such as a revolving carousel’s lights and a woman’s nude torso turning in front of a window. Despite his attempt to adhere to a credo of randomness, Man Ray’s unrelated shots belie his aesthetic attention to line, pattern, and movement.

At its 1923 premiere, his inexpertly mounted film broke twice, causing an uproar. By the principles of Dada: a success.

Emak-Bakia (Leave Me Alone) similarly is the result of playful experimentation with professional camera equipment, a turntable, crystals, lighting, and distorting mirrors. According to Man Ray’s remarks at the screening, the film was “purely optical, made to appeal only to the eyes.”

A vibrating pattern of white on black is followed by a shot of daisies, alternating between the real and the abstract. The legs of model and artist Kiki de Montparnasse, Man Ray’s lover and muse who posed for many of his iconic works such as Le Violon d’Ingres (1924) and Noire et Blanche (1926), appear in t-strap shoes dancing the Charleston while a Black man’s hand strums a banjo. A crossdresser finishes grooming and looks out at the ocean’s lapping waves. Soon, the camera rotates to invert sea and sky, an unusual move for Ray, who more often used a static camera to capture motion, akin to enlivening still pictures. A bit of trickery ends the film as Kiki awakens to reveal that her closed lids had been painted to look like eyes, echoing the film’s opening of Man Ray’s eye looking through a camera lens.

The most cohesive film, L’Etoile de Mer (The Star of the Sea), features a starfish with undulating appendages, providing an erotic motif amid dream-like sequences. An interpretation of Surrealist writings by Robert Desnos, it also stars Kiki.

Early on, through what appears to be smeared glass, a man and a woman climb a staircase to a bedroom. The woman undresses seductively and lies down. Surprisingly, the man departs. In his autobiography, Ray described his process of obscuring the scene to avoid censorship by using soaked gelatin sheets as a filter, “obtaining a mottled or cathedral-glass effect through which the photography would look like sketchy drawing or painting.”

What follows is typical Surrealist delight: scenes of trains and steamships in motion, newspapers flying in the wind, a woman holding a dagger—later a double exposure with a starfish in a jar, and a second man who leads the woman away from the first, to his dismay.

And finally, there is Man Ray’s most elaborate short, Les Mystères du Chateâu du Dé (The Mysteries of the Castle of the Dice), commissioned by Charles de Noailles, one of the day’s leading patrons of avant-garde film, to record his mansion in the South of France and his patrician guests. With the payment, Ray bought the fastest film and newest lenses available to realize his vision for the project. The blocky exterior of the château informed the theme of the film, which drew inspiration from Symbolist Stéphane Mallarmé’s 1897 poem, “A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance.”

The film opens with two men in a Parisian café rolling a pair of dice to determine their actions. Over a bumpy road, they drive to a gray cement estate. Using a dolly, Man Ray provides sweeping shots that examine the various angles of the building, the garden’s outdoor sculptures by Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró, and the rest of de Noailles’s extensive art collection.

Back inside the château, guests arrive and cast the die to determine their recreational activities in and around the well-equipped pool and gymnasium. Everyone wears face obscuring silk-stocking masks “for mystery and anonymity,” according to Man Ray. In striped swimsuits, the guests dive, juggle underwater, and flip into headstands as sunlight casts pleasing shadows around the pool. When night falls, a couple tussle in the garden and then freeze into place, posed like statues in a tableau, as the suspenseful soundtrack builds. A wooden hand holds a large pair of dice in the final closeup shot.

What connects these four films, other than their maker? Serendipity and the interdisciplinary art world of Paris in the 1920s. Through mesmerizing images and unexpected drama, Ray created magic in his filmmaking—another successful medium for the prolific and influential artist.

When Holzer exhibited similar dictums via a screen mounted to the Guggenheim’s spiraling ramp into 1989, critics praised her for bringing new modes of communication into the walls of museums. Thirty-five years on, she has returned to the project, this time with the help of AI technology to create new digital effects.

This work, titled Installation for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1989/2024), initially appeared as stock ticker–like flow of commands and phrases in green, red, and yellow. Today, Holzer’s words linger behind blue fog, disintegrate into pixels, and leave behind menacing flares. The technology has been updated, but the maxims remain largely unchanged. Unfortunately, the sentiments feel more dated than ever.

Many of Holzer’s axioms function like bizarre advice or insidious directives: “STARVATION IS NATURE’S WAY,” “THE BEGINNING OF THE WAR WILL BE SECRET,” or the famed “PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT” from Holzer’s “Truisms” series. They exude ennui: desires are boring, war is a constant, and no one can be trusted.

Five decades ago, Holzer began pushing these made-up idioms, printed in the sans-serif typeface associated with advertising, into public spaces via posters and T-shirts. She embraced the language of power, as seen on screens and in the media, and aspired to expose the evil that existed beneath its platitudes. The challenging thing about her work was its attractiveness: pictures of a flinty woman wearing Holzer’s “ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE” tank top continue to go viral for a reason.

But now, the coolness of Holzer’s art—its icy interior, its beautiful exterior—feels inappropriately glib. Words like Holzer’s appear daily on social media feeds. No one needs her art to understand how power works anymore—all one must do to figure that out is simply log on to X or TikTok. Her museum-filling Guggenheim exhibition, a survey of sorts, shows how this once-great artist went astray, failing to evolve her cold text for another era.

Holzer does, at least, seem keenly aware of what the internet has done to language. With Cursed (2022), one of the many recent works in this show, she exhibits a row of distressed, unevenly edged metal plates that run along a wall before collapsing in a pile on the floor. Each plate is printed with a different Donald Trump tweet, from ones addressing Russia’s involvement in his election to ones that preceded the January 6 insurrection he fomented into being. Their cruddy look runs counter to Twitter’s sleek aesthetic, as if to suggest the relics of a ruined civilization.

Holzer’s point, it would seem, is to imply a continuity between her “Truisms” and Trump’s all-caps histrionics. Then again, so what? Anyone who lived through the 2016 and 2020 Presidential elections need hardly be reminded of the thinly veiled cruelties of Trump’s tirades.

His sexist, racist, xenophobic words harmed many, and even got him banned from Twitter during the same year that Cursed was made. The irony is that Holzer exhibited this work at Hauser & Wirth in 2022, at a time when Trump’s Twitter account was offline, essentially ensuring that you could continue to experience this man’s textual hysterics, even when the platform’s moderators thought them too dangerous for mass consumption. Here again, Holzer limply re-presents Trump on his own terms, forgetting to perform critique along the way. (Mercifully, Holzer’s Guggenheim show, which opens to the public tomorrow, comes down on September 29, well before Election Day.)

This is not the only work in the Guggenheim show referring to the Trump administration. There is stake in the heart (2024), a series of giant gold-leafed paintings, each containing a fragment of communications to and from Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, on January 6. There’s also READY FOR YOU (2023), another golden canvas resembling a White House memo with a similar phrase to its title scrawled on it. That note was given to Trump by an aide ahead of the attempted coup d’état.

These are dark, unsettling works because of the mismatch between their gold-leafed surfaces—a style most closely associated with religious icons—and their abject texts. They are engrossing in that way, and also deeply problematic, since Holzer allows these fraught words to float free of context.

This is, to some degree, a shortcoming on the Guggenheim’s part, not Holzer’s. Curator Lauren Hinkson has installed this show without much wall text at all. Labels are placed in areas where they seem deliberately hard to find, and there is no explanation for any of the art on view. If viewers seek to learn more, they must scan a QR code and head to the Bloomberg Connects app—which is virtually impossible to download, anyway, in a museum whose heavy concrete walls limit cell service.

When I returned to my desk and finally went through that app, I found myself angered by some of Holzer’s choices. I spent time lingering over the descriptions for a new work called the beginning (2024), which Holzer did in collaboration with Lee Quiñones. The piece consists of quotations painted atop Inflammatory Wall (1979–82), a floor-to-ceiling grid of posters containing Holzer’s short writings. Within the Guggenheim galleries, a label notes that the beginning contains “testimony” from one Iranian, two Ukrainians, three Palestinians, one Israeli, and one American. (Testimony to what, you wonder? Don’t expect an answer on that from the museum.)

The sources of all that testimony, it turns out, vary widely. They are outlined in detail on the Bloomberg app, where one can discover that Israeli writer Yehuda Amichai’s quotation—“MY CHILD WAFTS PEACE / WHEN I LEAN OVER HIM”—is from a poem by him printed in a 1994 book. Meanwhile, a quotation from the Palestinian Abu Shaker—“I JUST STOOD THERE FOR AN HOUR SCREAMING MY CHILDREN’S NAMES”—was borrowed from a 2023 report on disabled Gazans that was published by Human Rights Watch.

And a quote from the Ukrainian writer Andrey Kurkov—“NOW THE CITY IS IN RUINS / ON THE STREETS LIE THE CORPSES OF RESIDENTS”—comes from a 2022 text written following his country’s invasion by Russia. (Holzer obtained permission from the respective publishers to use these clipped phrases, according to the Guggenheim.)

Holzer’s troubling equivalency between wars in Gaza, Ukraine, and elsewhere seems to elide nuance about how each conflict arose. Her appropriations are indelicate—they are all from different years, but this is not readily apparent anywhere other than the app, itself the creation of a philanthropic organization founded by a former New York City mayor who couldn’t always be trusted. She also seems uninterested in each speaker’s individual circumstances.

It seems odd, for example, to place Abu Shaker’s testimonial alongside Amichai’s poetry, given that Amichai, though critical of Israel, has sometimes been criticized by intellectuals. (One was Palestinian writer Refaat Alareer, who taught his students Amichai’s poetry, which he variously described as “beautiful” and “dangerous,” according to the New York Times; Alareer was killed in December during an airstrike in Gaza.) Holzer mentions none of this, nor does the Guggenheim. Both she and the museum seem to hope we’ll read these sentences, acknowledge them as proof that war is bad, and move on.

There’s a lot of other historical material enlisted by Holzer: the artist Alice Neel’s partially redacted FBI file, US government documents about AI, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger’s dialogues on wartime strategy in Vietnam. Most of these forms did not become public until well after all this surveillance occurred. Holzer has repainted these papers, mocking them up at a scale just larger than standard paper size to ensure that their words remain visible to the general populace.

Those works are a bit more successful—even without Holzer there to speak for them, these paintings’ backstories are self-evident enough. the beginning and other pieces at the Guggenheim remain more opaque. Ironically, this is a show about words that’s in need of more of them.

Holzer has done the opposite of citing her sources: she’s concealed a lot of information, viewing political proclamations as nouns, verbs, and adjectives to be played with as needed. That approach worked in the ’80s, at a time when she needed to lay bare the slipperiness of language, but it does not work now, when the use of a single expression is enough to get someone fired or killed.

How might Holzer respond to that allegation? A shrug, maybe, or a giggle. “LAUGH HARD AT THE ABSURDLY EVIL,” reads one 1984 plaque shown here. Rather than being hung in the bays where paintings are usually presented, this piece is exhibited above a trashcan, next to a machine that dispenses hand sanitizer—which feels like a malevolent gag unto itself. Therein lies the problem: Holzer wants us to chuckle at her words, which demand greater scrutiny now than they once did. If only she took things a bit more seriously.

Percentage-wise, figurative painting ruled the fair, but the best works in that style bypassed camp and irony—the modes most commonly associated with it these days—for unaffected explorations of the self and our culture. Sculpture had a good showing, too, in particular the works by John Newman presented at Europa, the ceramic menagerie of Dorian Reid at Kapp Kapp, or the abstract design of Gérald Lajoie-Restrepo at Pangée.

The fair is on view through Sunday. Here are the booths you shouldn’t miss.

Together, the two form quite the duo. But depending on where you stand, they may both melt away into the skyline behind them, rendering them just another bizarre footnote in the vast New York ecosystem. Amid a downpour, the grinning spider may not be visible at all.

Petrit Halilaj, a 38-year-old phenom from Kosovo, is the maker of these sculpted animals, which are part of his rooftop commission for the Met. The museum has now done nearly a dozen of these commissions, each created by a different artist every summer. Most have been big, extravagant, and tacky. Halilaj’s, by contrast, is pared-down and minimal, and is the best of the bunch because of it.

The artist is no stranger to grand sculptures, having made a name for himself at the 2010 Berlin Biennale by showing a to-scale facsimile of the armature for his family’s Prishtina home. He’s even made another house-like structure for the Met’s roof, peopling it with a stick figure and a golden star. You can walk under the structure and peer up at a Picassoid eye that stares back down.

That’s the closest that Halilaj’s latest, an installation called Abetare (2024), gets to Instagram fodder. Setting aside the house and the spider, much of the steel components are spare, modestly scaled, and semiabstract.

Many feature words welded together that provide insight into Halilaj’s reference points. Some of the words are telling. The name Runik, Halilaj’s hometown, appears in one work. The acronym KFOR, short for the Kosovo Force, shows up in another. These act as reminders that Abetare, which refers to books used to teach Kosovar children the alphabet, is embedded within Halilaj’s own experience as a Kosovar whose life was disrupted by the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s.

Amid war in Kosovo, Halilaj was displaced to a refugee camp in Albania as a teenager. There, he was encouraged to draw by a group of Italian psychologists who visited the site. For Halilaj, art became both a creative outlet and a means of self-preservation: drawing mountainous landscapes and soldiers holding guns was a way to process his tumultuous situation. He’s consistently returned to those sketches as an adult, at times enlarging them to form new artworks.

But Halilaj’s drawings aren’t the only ones that feature in his beguiling sculptures, which have more recently tended to feature ones he found in Kosovo schoolrooms. Here, he’s expanded his inquiry beyond his home country, focusing on other Balkan nations as well.

The spider, for instance, was sourced from a banged-up desk in Skopje, North Macedonia, where it was initially accompanied by references to Pokémon that are now absent. Another sculpture pairs a heart-shaped form beside a phallus and the word “tiddies.” Rather than simply repeating the found imagery, however, he mixes them, implying a form of solidarity among teens—innocent and horny alike—separated by national borders.

By appropriating kids’ marks, Halilaj warmly suggests that these doodles are artistic endeavors worth noting. It’s not possible to retrieve any information about who these budding artists were, however; their names have been lost. Abetare is infused with the sense that nothing lasts forever, hence the frail look of these steel creations.

But that apparent fragility may be misleading. Halilaj said that the Met required that his work be able to withstand a hurricane. In addition to fulfilling a contract, Halilaj has rendered these children’s drawings monumental, and ensured that they resist the test of time—and, apparently, climate change.

Even if Abetare presents a weighty commentary on the tenuousness of national histories, Halilaj has wisely offered moments of levity. Be sure to spot the cat person dangling from a flower-strewn pergola on your way out, and don’t forget the toothy kitty leaned against the area next to a bench.

Take a second, too, to muse before a louvered screen set within a low wall. Next to it, Halilaj has placed an evocative word: HERE. It could refer to a city (New York), a museum (the Met), or a particular part of an institution (its ventilation system). Technically, this HERE is from elsewhere (the Balkans), but it looks quite at home in its funky new locale.

They were apart nearly every moment of their lives, too. The Wisconsin-born O’Keeffe graduated from art school and moved to New York, where a career whirlwind awaited; Moore, a Brit and eleven years her junior, had his studies interrupted by a draft into the first World War. O’Keeffe eventually left the city for the desert; Moore made his studio in the dewy English countryside. 

The artists approached abstraction from different dimensions and geometries. Painting, O’Keeffe flattened and magnified the crags, petals, and bones of the American Southwest, pursuing the edge of recognition. Sculpting, Moore transmuted people and places into empty-chested objects woven with string, variably round and flat-edged; his stone breathes, just unlike us. Even their sole meeting is near apocrypha, given its a secondhand account. (Some say they shared words at an exhibition opening in New York.)

The talented curators at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) are among those “some”, and they say even more: that art history has done itself a disservice by studying O’Keeffe and Moore in isolation, as their parallels—their ambitions and obsessions—close the distance by every relevant measure. Those curators, headed by Iris Amizlev, make a convincing case in a landmark two-hander currently on view at the MMFA until June 2. 

Titled “O’Keeffe and Moore: Giants of Modern Art”, it includes a wealth of drawings, paintings, and sculptures borrowed from the San Diego Museum of Art, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, and the Henry Moore Foundation. There is photography, like a stunning portrait of O’Keeffe taken in her Santa Fe home, and a recreation of their final studios, meticulous to the historically accurate paint palettes and curiosity collection of animal skulls, pebbles, seashells, and artifacts. The exhibition is curated by Anita Feldman, deputy director for curatorial affairs and education at San Diego and Iris Amizlev, the MMFA’s curator of community engagement and projects. The epic subtitle, Amizlev explained, is for Moore, who’s not as well known in Canada.

Any comparative exhibition—and there’ve been a few lately—carries extra curatorial demands. Neither co-star should outshine the other and each artwork must argue for the show’s existence beyond putting two buzzy names on the same bill, especially when the artists barely shared air. No one wants two serviceable surveys stitched together; give us revelations visible only via proximity. 

Throughout the sprawling display, the paired artists are newly contextualized by their material fascinations (scavengers and hoarders, both), associations with contemporaneous art movements (surrealism, mostly), relationship with femininity (fraught and frustrated), and national identity, among more. The curators in particular revel in unraveling the critical mis-takes that have dogged both since their debuts.

One of the best pairings is among the first that visitors will encounter, two small sculptures of the female form, O’Keeffe’s Abstraction (1916) and Moore’s Composition (1931). Moore purportedly had mommy issues, while O’Keeffe labored to escape a sound bite from her husband, Alfred Stieglitz (“At last, a woman on paper!”) Her papers, populated with blown-up blooming flowers, still get mistaken for sexual innuendo. 

Moore sculpted and sketched over his lifetime voluptuous women reclining, Olympia-light, or working at industrious pursuits like winding wool and tending children; around 1930, he sculpted about a dozen iterations of the last scenario, including Composition. Now what was the truth? He hailed from a big, happy family, and once remarked that he “could see the mother” in everything— “I suppose I’ve got a mother complex” — and said that his first sculptural experience was smoothing oil onto his mother’s back. This is the sort of sticky sentiment no journalist could ignore.

He explained himself better too late, calling the motif an extension of his rejection of European art tradition and its fuss about perfection; “a universal theme from the beginning of time and some of the earliest sculptures we’ve found from the Neolithic Age are of a mother and child,” he said. Moore, after all, practiced what he called “truth to materials”, meaning material shouldn’t imitate flesh; wood is wood, stone is stone.

That Freudian hullabaloo fades away in the presence of O’Keeffe’s sculpture of her dead mother, interpreted here as a white-robed apparition, faceless, bent at the waist, and wasted away. 

In this show, neither artist comes off as particularly autobiographical. Odd anthropologists, they memorialized remembered emotion, like how love and sorrow contort the body. They did so with some differences, as O’Keeffe was more obviously curious about the world as she singularly experienced it.

Take the two artists’ studies of “tunnels”: Moore is represented in a series of quick sketches of people sheltering underground during the Blitz, the bombing of London in World War II. Faced with a terrifying fate (but very boring present), the silhouettes can only huddle in place, doze, or hold one another. He had a sculptural way of drawing, layering figures in pencil, then white wax crayon, and finally colored crayon, to create a three-dimensional effect. These are effectively juxtaposed with O’Keeffe’s painting of spiraling wood grain, devoid of people, pure perspective.

The show takes pains to differentiate between abstraction and surrealism, which have a sort of frog and toad dynamic. The former is a choice of interpretation; the latter is a way of life. O’Keeffe and Moore were tangential to the movement—Moore even served on the selection committee for the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London and showed seven works in it—but neither ascribed to its ideology. And how could they? Surrealists surface from dreams with incoherent souvenirs. 

O’Keeffe and Moore were ascetics in comparison. To them, everything interesting already exists and can be whittled to its essence. O’Keeffe’s bones and horizons always get their due, but I remembered best her interpretations of seashells, which both artists collected according to some enigmatic criteria. Maybe their greatest strengths, illustrated here powerfully, was an unerring notice of nature’s parallels, like how the inner coils of a shell resemble entrenched canyon rivers. The shell’s aperture opens shyly on the canvas, if only you could peer inside like O’Keeffe, holding a pelvis bone to her eye, and catch the vision within.

 “It is surprising to me to see how many people separate the objective from the abstract,” O’Keeffe said, “Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense…” This was around 1930, after the sensational New York debut of her charcoal drawings, and just as the Earth had clarified itself as a smattering of line and color.

She added: “Abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can only clarify in paint.”

In many ways, resurrecting artists like those is the central concern of one half of the 2024 Venice Biennale. Titled “Nucleo Storico,” this portion is split into three parts: “Portraits,” “Abstractions,” and “Italians Everywhere.” They are each given their own space and inserted into the main exhibition as a pause or an intervention into the steady flow of contemporary art.

For anyone who has been following the tenure of the Biennale’s curator Adriano Pedrosa at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, where he is artistic director, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Pedrosa would fill part of his exhibition with artists, particularly from the Global South or who migrated from Italy to the Global South, who have yet to be canonized in the Global North. That’s the premise of the exhibition initiative he’s most famous for, “Histórias,” which over the years has focused on various histories (Afro-Atlantic Brazilian, Indigenous, women, queer) and aimed to trouble and disrupt them as he aims to expand them. Those contributions have certainly been groundbreaking and in many ways done what they’ve set out to do.

Part of his curatorial thesis is to use the Portuguese word histórias (and its translations in other Romance languages) as a jumping off point. Unlike in English, história can mean, depending on the context, the official history of something or the story of something else—fact and fiction wrapped into one. It was a way for Pedrosa to think of exhibition making as “more open, plural, speculative, and perhaps in a way more marginal,” as he told ARTnews in 2019.

A main purpose of doing this historical-focused section is to bring the selected artists to wider attention, especially as the overwhelming majority of them have never show at the Biennale previously. The “Nucleo Storico” accounts for around half the artist list, though each artist here is represented by only one work. The sheer scale of each of these rooms is formidable, and I often found myself spending more time here than expected. It wasn’t so much because I was taking it all in, however, but because I was stopping to read the paragraph-long labels for many of the artists.

Starting with the least successful of these sections, “Italians Everywhere” felt the most out of place, a way to shoehorn Italian artists into a show focused on the Global South. There’s a sound logic to Pedrosa wanting to include this, other than just wanting to preempt any criticisms from the Italian press about the lack of Italian artists. First, Brazil has the largest Italian diaspora in the world and several Italians there have made significant contributions to the Brazilian art. Second, it’s a way to slyly turn contemporary anti-migrant sentiments, especially dominant in Italy, on its head by pointing out that there really are foreigners everywhere, even in the Global South. Even still, I don’t know how additive it was to the exhibition, especially when placed in context of the Arsenale, where some of the exhibition’s larger-scale works are on view.

For this display, Pedrosa has brought Italian-born architect Lina Bo Bardi’s iconic installation design from MASP for the museum’s permanent collection, which he revived at the museum after taking over. The works are affixed to glass easels that rest on concrete blocks; they float in the center of the room and the wall labels are on their back. It’s a way to abolish the hierarchy of museums by putting everything on the same level. But, it’s much more successful at MASP. Works dating back to the 17th century are paired with ones made just a few years ago. And the display is imposing at the institution, coming off as a maze that requires you to really dig deep and allow yourself to get lost. At the Arsenale it’s a bit too open.

There were some highlights to this section like Libero Badíi’s Autroretrato Siniestro (1978), a blocky anthropomorphic sculpture make from scrap wood and metal; a scorched piece of paper in the shape of Italy by Anna Maria Maiolino; Domenico Gnoli’s 1967 painting Sous la Chaussure of the close up of the heel of a black shoe, caught mid-step; and a Cubist-inflected painting of a ship against a twilight sky by Horacio Torres, the son of Joaquín Torres-Garcia.

But certain colonial tropes reappear in “Italians Everywhere” and even “Portraits.” Take Nenne Sanguineti Poggi’s Tekkà (1948), a portrait of the namesake Beni-Amer woman who is shown topless with seated at a table with her head resting in her hand. Similar works by non-Indigenous, Latin American–born artists of Indigenous people—Juana Elena Diz’s Lavandera (n.d.), Julia Codesido’s Vendedora ayacuchana (1927), or Miguel Alandia Pantoja’s Imilia (1960), for example—equally present an othering gaze, even if their work aims to celebrate Indigenous peoples and were part of a larger artistic and political movement. Their presentation needs to be properly contextualized; placing them in a massive salon-style hang isn’t the best way to explain what’s going on here.

These works also pale in comparison to pieces in the contemporary part of the show by Afro-Mexican artist Aydée Rodriguez Lopez, Indigenous Australian artist Marlene Gilson, and Haitian brothers Sénèque Obin and Philomé Obin, which show tableaux of each artist’s community on their own terms. Similarly, artists in the “Portraits” section are at their best when shown via self-portraits by the likes of Georgette Chen, Saloua Raouda Choucair, Olga Costa, María Izquierdo, Ahmed Morsi, Gerard Sekoto, and Yêdamaria. Here they are assured, showing us how they see themselves and why it’s essential the world see them that way, too.

The “Abstraction” section is equally a lot to take in at once. That, however, is its beauty. Time and place collapse here. Form and aesthetics reign supreme. It’s a feast for the eyes. The Casablanca Art School—represented in the Biennale by Mohammed Chabâa, Mohamed Hamidi, Mohammed Kacimi, and Mohamed Melehi—is an important touchpoint here, whose importance to abstraction writ large has been steadily rising over the past years, culminating in a major survey at Tate St. Ives last year. Pedrosa isn’t so much introducing them to the art world, but helping to cement their rightful place.

Other highlights include the sensational abstractions of Latinx artists like Freddy Rodríguez, who died just last year after six decades in New York; Kazuya Sakai, born in Buenos Aires in 1927 and died in Dallas in 2001; and Fanny Sanín, now in her late 80s and has lived in New York since the ’70s. These three are woefully underrepresented in museums and desperately need major retrospectives of their singular careers.

One of the few fiber artists represented here is Eduardo Terrazas, whose vibrant, color-blocked shapes pulse upon close inspection. New to me is Indonesian artist Fadjar Sidik, whose soft edges bring sfumato into the 20th century and into abstraction, as is Brazilian Ione Saldanha, whose installation of hanging painted wooden poles hold court in the center of the room. So are Rafa Al-Nasiri and Margarita Azurdia. I mostly certainly will fall into a few rabbit holes when I get back, researching them.

The selection at times is a bit uneven; I’m befuddled by the works Pedrosa chose by Carmen Herrera and Olga de Amaral. The muted palettes of both these works lack the presence of their best pieces. Here they get lost in the mix.

Flipping through the catalogue, I noticed something about the historical-section works, printed on its own page with the wall text now serving as the artist’s biographical entries. They have room to breathe. The nuance of their distinctive practices comes into focus. All of this history—fact and fiction, plural yet marginal—begins to make sense. 

In 2015, for the Icelandic Pavilion, the Swiss artist opened a functioning mosque, billing it as the first religious site of its kind in the city. It was shut down after two weeks, apparently for safety concerns, but by that time, the pavilion had gotten a good deal of negative press. (There were also a few defenders in the wake of the decision to shutter the pavilion.)

His contribution to the main show of the 2019 Venice Biennale lasted a lot longer. Titled Barca Nostra, his piece re-presented the very ship that had sailed 1,000 or so migrants leaving Libya to their death in the Mediterranean. Allegations of exploitation quickly followed. Still, the piece weathered the controversy, remaining in the show for its whole run—and even lingering on once the Biennale ended, creating yet another fracas.

None of that makes Büchel an obvious candidate for yet another Venice outing, but that’s what we got this week in the form of a big, sprawling solo show beyond the Biennale, at the Fondazione Prada.

Just how polarizing will Büchel’s latest endeavor be? Very. How much scandal will it generate? That depends on how many people end up seeing it. Without explanation, the show’s preview was abruptly delayed by two days right before it was set to occur, meaning that many in town for the Biennale will either have left before seeing this exhibition or otherwise be too tired to get there. Too bad: this is, for better and for worse, the craziest show on view in Venice right now.

The postponement, it would seem, owes something to the nature of Büchel’s latest project, “Monte di Pietà,” which takes its name from the centuries-old institution that offered loans to poor Italians without them having to rely on the wealthy elite. The Fondazione Prada’s outpost in the city once hosted an outpost of that service, and Büchel’s installation marks an attempt to reanimate it, in a way. But his project, which fills the entire museum, does not so much resemble a bank as it does an apocalyptic tour through financial corruption across time.

There is, for example, an allusion to the greed of the Catholic Church in Italy in the form of a darkened, cruddy apse. Viewers can sit there in pews, where they can admire an altar and the candles before it—or they can gaze upward and see a mass of wheelchairs that Büchel has affixed to the ceiling. All those wheelchairs were clearly made more recently than the Renaissance, implying that the Church continues to disable the poor, even today.

He invokes a lot of local culture throughout. One room features appropriated videos from a TikToker named Regina of Venice, an elderly woman who guides viewers through the city. Another includes arrays of purses arrayed around blankets, referencing the goods sold by vendors to tourists unaware of these objects’ cheap quality. And outside the Fondazione Prada, Büchel has covered up all the museum’s signage, replacing it with fake ads for a Venetian diamond exchange. Büchel is questioning who does the scamming and who gets scammed, and seems to find it awfully weird that there is a system that allows for any of this.

All of this material has been in Büchel’s wheelhouse for quite a while: he’s long been fascinated by material evidence of the masses being bled dry by those in power. What’s more surprising is that Büchel has expanded his inquiry more broadly than ever, looking to locales far beyond Europe to prove his point.

The Biennale this time around largely steered clear of openly discussing Israel’s war in Gaza, but surprisingly, Büchel of all people has waded into the fray, offering in one gallery what appears to be live feeds of Jerusalem, Gaza, and the border between Israel and Lebanon. In another, he is showing CCTV footage that purports to be coming in from Kyiv, Dnipro, and other Ukrainian cities. Büchel doesn’t take a stance on these conflicts, which makes the presentation of these images both ambiguous and uncomfortable, but it is obvious he thinks these wars imbricate in the quest for disenfranchisement of the unempowered. You certainly cannot accuse this show of being disinteresting.

As one might expect, Büchel’s show edges into problematic terrain. Addressing the NFT boom and its subsequent implosion feels acceptable for Büchel to do, but creating a room devoted to sex work, with a stripper’s pole and a box of Durex condoms, does not. Re-presenting archival materials dedicated to the Monte di Pietà of Venice here feels like salient institutional critique, but a poster that calls for an end to the Venice Biennale, seemingly in parody of the protests agitating for the ejection of the Israeli Pavilion, does not.

The problem, as usual with Büchel, is that it’s ultimately difficult to make definitive pronouncements about what his political values are. Were his art not so grand, so spectacular, and so bizarre, it would be easy to write it off entirely. To his credit, he makes doing so pretty tough. To that end, see this show, then debate it. It cannot be ignored altogether.

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.