The prestigious Venice Biennale will have a curator from Latin America for the first time. It will be 57-year-old Adriano Pedrosa from Brazil, who will oversee the event’s 60th anniversary in 2024. Referring to the event’s president, Robert Cecotto, the DPA announced.
More than ever, the Biennale will be about contemporary art not to show what is already there, but to search for contrasts, dialogue and kinship, Cicutto advises. “I am honored to become the first curator in Latin America of the Venice Biennale, which is clearly the most important platform in the world of visual arts,” he adds. Pedrosa.
Biennale It has been held since 1895 and always has two parts. The main one is the selection of curators for the works, and the second is the national pavilions, which each country has its own czech And Slovakia runs itself. This year under the leadership of an Italian curator Cecilia Alemaniwhich deliberately included a minimum number of men in the selection, was seen by a record number of more than 800,000 people.
The next show will run from April 20 to April 24, 2024. Its newly appointed curator, Adriano Pedrosa, studied law and art history. First, at the beginning of the millennium, he led the Pampulha Museum in the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte. Since 2014 he has been the artistic director of the most important Brazilian art museum in São Paulo, known by the Portuguese acronym MASP.
Here, Pedrosa has intentionally increased the representation of works created by women in the collections and, above all, has prepared a series of Histórias thematic exhibitions outlining Brazil’s role in the slave trade. From the 16th to the 19th centuries, 46 percent of all slaves destined for the United States from Africa ended up in this country, nearly four million people, according to estimates.
Exhibits revisited the history of Latin America, the continent’s relationship with Africa, Portuguese colonization, the condition of the African diaspora and non-whites in general, as well as neglected figures in Brazilian art and the influence that Europe, Africa, and the indigenous peoples of the United States had in that part of the world. Pedrosa also took into account the point of view of queer artists and feminists, and possibly Indigenous people or critics of colonialism.
In this way, he was able to bring into the main institution subjects that usually remained behind their walls in Brazil. sums up Artnews.com. “I am always interested in who writes histories in Brazil or who writes histories of Brazilians elsewhere, and if I can offer some juxtaposition, question or take a decisive stand on the immutable hierarchy,” he summed up his style of work last year.
for the Historias Shows series will receive Pedrosa Award from Bard College, USA, with a value of $25,000, equivalent to 570,000 crowns.
A modified version of one of these exhibits, called Afro-Atlantic History, is currently touring the US through next September. to see In Los Angeles. When Washington hosted it in the spring, Vice President Kamala Harris called it groundbreaking. “This is world history, American history, and, for many of us, our family history. Yet it is rarely taught in schools or shown in museums,” mentioned vice president
In addition, Adriano Pedrosa, as curator, has prepared separate exhibitions for now-deceased influential Brazilian artists Tarsila do Amaralová, Ione Saldanhaová, Wanda Pimentelová, or contemporaries such as Beatriz Milhazesová.
According to the DPA, he already has experience with other international art fairs. He was one of the curators of the biennials in São Paulo, Brazil and Tijuana, Mexico, or triennials in San Juan, Puerto Rico. In 2011, half of it was with Jens Hofmann, he prepared an edition for the then Istanbul Biennial.
Adriano Pedrosa will become the first Venice Biennale curator from the so-called Global South, where countries formerly called developing countries are sometimes referred to, generally low- and middle-income countries in Asia, Africa or Latin America. The late Okoye Enwezor was the first African curator of the Biennale in 2015.
The German art fair went in a similar direction this year documentswhich was prepared by an Indonesian group Ruangrupa.
