Frida debuted at the Biennale

Frida debuted at the Biennale, and they ask her to return to her country?
The artistic director, Brazilian Adriano Pedrosa, included for the first time numerous artists from the Global South, including Mexican artists, in the central exhibition.
The reactions were mixed.
With spring declared, the 60th Venice International Art Biennale opened to the public. The most anticipated event on the international circuit brings together a large audience largely because many countries exhibit there and express through their national pavilions their interest in the art that is produced today. But the central exhibition that every two years has a designated curator and usually a poetic title that encompasses almost everything under its umbrella, this opportunity goes to Adriano Pedrosa, the director of the Museum of Art of São Paulo (MASP), who He chose a descriptive title, although no less complex and eager for multiple readings. Stranieri Ovunque–Foreigners Everywhere (in Spanish, Foreigners everywhere), which visitors can find until November in different areas of the property in neon letters, even in the language of an indigenous community. Thus, an unusual plurality was displayed before the audience at the Biennale that, according to the criticism published in international media, provoked diverse reactions.

As the Brazilian Pedrosa explained in his press conference and in interviews, his mission in this biennial is to show a polyphony of artists from the Global South who have never come to the meeting, and can present other narratives, other panoramas. He himself is the first Latin American named artistic director of this section in a biennial that has been held since 1895. The second from the Global South (the Nigerian Okwui Enwezor was before) but the only one who lives and works in this part of the world. Doing the math, the world's oldest art gathering had two other curators Ralph Rugoff and Robert Storr, both Americans, at this location. The rest of the story was all European. From there some of the reactions are explained.
More interested in social history than in art history, Pedrosa explained in detail the breadth of the concept of foreigner, which includes the Global South, migrations, but also queer (stranho or strange is one of the meanings of queer). , self-taught or popular artists, outsiders and indigenous people, who are often treated as a foreigner in their own land. Of course, academic fashions, from original worldviews to decolonization, relativist approaches are present with their risks of appropriation and simplifications. Pedrosa warns: “We are not trying to write the definitive and global history, these are speculations.”