Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere (60th Venice Biennale)

Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere

In 2024, Dr Esther Mahlangu was selected to participate in the 60th International Art Exhibition — La Biennale di Venezia, titled Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere and curated by Adriano Pedrosa, artistic director of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP). Pedrosa was the first South American curator to lead the Biennale Arte in its 129-year history.

The exhibition — the largest in the Biennale's history — presented 331 artists and collectives across the Giardini and the Arsenale, with a curatorial focus on those who are foreigners, immigrants, expatriates, diasporans, exiles or refugees, particularly moving between the Global South and Global North. Its title is drawn from a series of neon works by the collective Claire Fontaine, itself borrowed from a Turin collective that fought racism and xenophobia in Italy.

"Wherever you go and wherever you are you will always encounter foreigners — they/we are everywhere. Secondly, that no matter where you find yourself, you are always truly, and deep down inside, a foreigner." — Adriano Pedrosa

Dr Mahlangu at the Biennale

Dr Mahlangu's 1990 painting Untitled — an acrylic on canvas measuring 123 × 190 cm, on loan from the Jean Pigozzi African Art Collection — was presented in the Nucleo Storico: Abstractions within the Central Pavilion at the Giardini. The Nucleo Storico gathered works of 20th-century modernism from Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia, a curatorial essay seeking to question the boundaries and definitions of modernism and to acknowledge a historical debt to artists of the Global South.

Her inclusion placed Dr Mahlangu among a constellation of Indigenous, outsider, queer, and diasporic artists whose practices Pedrosa gathered under the Biennale's four guiding subjects — the foreigner, the queer artist, the outsider artist, and the indigenous artist — forming the Nucleo Contemporaneo.

A landmark moment

Participation in the Venice Biennale is widely regarded as among the highest honours in the international art world. For Dr Mahlangu, the invitation arrived in the same year as her landmark retrospective Then I Knew I Was Good at Painting at the Iziko South African National Gallery — together marking 2024 as a defining year in her eight-decade career, and a moment of global recognition for Ndebele painting on the world's oldest and most prestigious biennial stage.

Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere was open to the public from 20 April to 24 November 2024 at the Giardini and the Arsenale, Venice.