4 Filipino artists among 2024 Venice Biennale’s 331-artist roster
Filipino artists Pacita Abad, Anita Magsaysay-Ho, Joshua Serafin, and Maria Taniguchi join the latest iteration of the 2024 Venice Biennale | Photos from Silverlens Gallery, Joshua Serafin, and Pacita Abad Estate
Filipino artists Pacita Abad, Anita Magsaysay-Ho, Joshua Serafin, and Maria Taniguchi will be part of this year’s Venice Biennale, considered the world’s biggest art exhibition, happening from Apr. 20 to Nov. 24.
This year’s 331-artist roster surpasses 2022’s lineup of 213. The full list was announced in a press conference in Venice this week.
Organized by renowned Brazilian curator and artistic director of Museu de Arte de São Paulo Adriano Pedrosa, this year’s theme titled “Foreigners Everywhere” is a celebration of diasporas.
Poster from Venice Biennale website
The 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia said in a statement that it will focus on artists who are themselves foreigners, immigrants, expatriates, diasporic, émigrés, exiled, and refugees—especially those who have moved between the Global South and the Global North.
The biennale will feature a range of emerging, mid-career, established living, historical, and recently deceased artists.
The late Abad, a Filipino American, during her career championed the Filipino experience on foreign soil through her large-scale trapunto or quilted and painted canvases.
Photo from San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Last year, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis mounted the first retrospective of the works of Abad with over 100 works. Forty of these multifaceted works then made their way to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in October.
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Magsaysay-Ho is a prominent modernist figure in the Philippine arts movement. Trained under National Artist for Visual Arts Fernando Amorsolo, her paintings feature social realism and post-cubism. While she took a love of Filipino women in her art from her teacher, Magsaysay-Ho’s women, unlike Amorsolo’s, are not romanticized bodies of delicate abilities. Hers are drawn in the middle of doing mundane labor: harvesting fruit, catching fish, or going about the local wet market. Magsaysay-Ho passed away in 2012.
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Serafin, a Philippine-born Brussels-based multi-disciplinary artist, combines dance, performance, visual arts, film, and choreography in their oeuvre. According to their website, their works deal with questions about identity, transmigration, queer politics and representation, states of being, and ways of inhabiting the body.
Dumaguete-born artist Taniguchi is known for her multidisciplinary work that encompasses painting, sculpture, video, and installation. She is most known for her ongoing series of brick paintings, most of them reaching meters in size and all displaying seemingly endless stacks of black rectangles painstakingly painted and outlined by hand.
“Figure Study,” Taniguchi’s most recent show at Silverlens New York. Photo from Silverlens Gallery
Her works have been exhibited in and even acquired by various museums and art institutions around the world, including the M+ Museum in Hong Kong, the Kadist Art Foundation in California, and the K11 Art Foundation in China.
