Venice Biennale Curator Adriano Pedrosa Champions Indigenous Art
Adriano Pedrosa, recipient of the Sotheby's Prize and curator of the 2024 Venice Biennale, on bringing culture and identity to the fore
A driano Pedrosa, the artistic director of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP), has his hands full presiding over not one major exhibition, but two. In addition to serving as curator of the 2024 Venice Biennale, opening in April, he has unveiled Indigenous Histories at MASP (until 25 February) exhibiting the art and culture of Indigenous people in South and North America, Oceania and Scandinavia. Pedrosa explains how the exhibition concept, awarded the Sotheby’s Prize in 2019, reflects his curatorial philosophy. The Prize champions the work of innovative institutions that strive to break new ground by exploring overlooked or under-represented areas of art history.
History has a different meaning in Portuguese than in English. What is that difference?
We have one word both for story and history. História in Portuguese, as in French and Spanish, can mean both fiction and nonfiction. It can encompass many different narratives: personal, macro, micro. In the plural – histórias – it becomes even more diverse and polyphonic.
This show is part of a series at MASP. What made you focus on Indigenous histories for this iteration?
Before I joined MASP, I co-organised Mestizo Histories in 2014 at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake. Mestizo relates to the mixing of cultures and identities. There was an understanding that the official Brazilian art history was predominantly white – in the past 10 years, there’s been an extraordinary opening up of the cultural field. In 2014, we tried to bring in the Afro-Brazilian, Indigenous and Afro-Atlantic. This is a follow up to that and to the Afro-Atlantic exhibition at MASP in 2018 – this time, we have only invited curators who have Indigenous backgrounds.
“We are interested in themes related to social, cultural and political history rather than art history.”
– Adriano Pedrosa
Has this series informed your approach to the Venice Biennale?
Definitely. The exhibition in Venice, Foreigners Everywhere, will focus on four subjects: the immigrant, the queer, the outsider and the Indigenous. Some of this goes back to my own experience: I was a foreigner living abroad in the US and UK, and as a queer man, that is important to my history. At MASP, we do one major project a year dedicated to an artista popular (outsider artist), and Indigenous people are threatened as foreigners in their own land.
Are the next chapters of the Histórias series planned out?
I have 10 in mind. The next four will be queer histories (2024), histories of ecology (2025), of Latin America (2026), and of madness and delirium (2027). We are interested in themes related to social, cultural and political history rather than art history. We wouldn’t do one on Impressionism. In a museum such as MASP, it is important to attract people with themes closer to their everyday lives.
This show won a share of the $250,000 Sotheby’s Prize. How did that impact what you could do?
It was quite a stimulus. In Brazil, we have institutions doing Indigenous exhibitions, but we don’t see them doing international exhibitions. Our shows are the first of their kind in many ways. They don’t want to be the definitive show on the theme: the histories are speculative and a provocation, which is something I’m also trying to do in the Biennale.
Exhibition Highlights
Indigenous Histories presents works by 170 artists from three continents. Here are a few to seek out.
Sandy Adsett
The influential Māori artist and teacher is credited with breathing new life into kowhaiwhai, an abstract pattern that decorates traditional wharenui (meeting houses). After British colonisation in the 19th century, the dynamic painting tradition became more uniform, adopting set shapes and a limited palette of red, white and black. Adsett led the effort to restore its experimental spirit in the 1960s. Paying special attention to the koru (unfurling fern), he moulded the pattern into new forms, rendered on canvas in expressive hues such as teal, brick red and lime green.
Huni Kuin Artists Movement (MAHKU)
Since forming in 2013, this collective from the western region of the Brazilian Amazon has commanded attention, culminating with an exhibition at MASP. The group’s dazzling all-over compositions are part of traditional ayahuasca ceremonies. The artists give form to stories told in huni meka chants, regarded as messages from the spirits channelled through the Huni Kuin people. The resulting images – intricate and colourful – often depict myths about the origins of the world and relationships between humans, animals, plants and spirits.
Joar Nango
Born in 1979 in Alta, the world’s second northernmost city, the Sámi artist and architect explores what he calls “indigenuity”: the ingenuity of Indigenous people. For the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, Nango presented a nomadic library of Indigenous activism and architecture. The sculpture Rákkas III, 2020 (above), was made with Sámi maker Katarina Spik Skum. They covered a rákkas – a small tent erected inside a larger one for privacy – with illustrations of Sámi architecture from the 1767 account of a Norwegian priest.
Indigenous Histories is at MASP, São Paulo, until 25 February
Cover image: Adriano Pedrosa in Venice, June 2023. Photo: Stefano Mazzola/Getty Images
