Jury Members Announced for the 60th Venice Biennial ‘Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere’

With less than two weeks until the opening of the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia the biennial press team has announced its 2024 jury. The group of five are established multi-hyphenated scholars and art professionals from Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas: Alia Swastika, Indonesian curator and writer; Chika Okeke-Agulu, Nigerian curator and art critic; Elena Crippa, Italian curator, and María Inés Rodríguez, French-Colombian curator, and the group’s president Julia Bryan-Wilson (president), American curator and professor at Columbia University. Representation reigns, necessarily, as Pedrosa marks the first queer and South American curator of the biennial.

Together the jury will nominate artists for the biennial’s prestigious recognitions. For best participant in Pedrosa’s exhibition, the Golden Lion. In 2022, Simone Leigh and Sonia Boyce, won for their participation in Cecilia Alemani’s main show and the U.S. and U.K. national pavilions. They will also award the Silver Lion for a promising young participant in the International Exhibition. Notably, Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg were awarded it during the 53rd Venice Biennial “Making Worlds.”

The Jury may also award one special mention to National Participations and two special mentions to the participants in the main exhibition. The Awards Ceremony will take place in Venice on Saturday, April 20th 2024.

More about the members of the jury:

Julia Bryan-Wilson – president – is Professor of Contemporary Art and LGBTQ+ Studies at Columbia University. Her curatorial credits include Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen (with Andrea Andersson) and Louise Nevelson: Persistence. She is the author of Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era; Fray: Art and Textile Politics (winner of the ASAP Book Prize, the Frank Jewett Mather Award, and the Robert Motherwell Book Award); and Louise Nevelson’s Sculpture: Drag, Color, Join, Face. Bryan-Wilson was a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow.

Alia Swastika is a curator and researcher/writer that expands her practices in the last 10 years on the issue and perspectives of decoloniality and feminism, where she involved with different projects of decentralization of art, rewriting art history and encouraging local activism. She works as the Director of Biennale Jogja Foundation in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. She continues her researches on Indonesian female artists during Indonesia’s New Order and how the politics of gender from the regime influenced the practices of artists from that period. She is now part of curatorial team of Sharjah Biennale 16 in 2025.

Chika Okeke-Agulu is Director of the Program in African Studies, Director of Africa World Initiative, and Robert Schirmer Professor of Art & Archaeology and African American Studies, Princeton University. Okeke-Agulu is Slade Professor of Fine Art, University of Oxford (2023), and a Fellow of The British Academy. He is editor of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art and author of El Anatsui. The Reinvention of Sculpture (2022). He is on the advisory board of the Hyundai Tate Research Centre, Tate Modern.

Elena Crippa is an Italian curator based in London. Since 2023, she has been Head of Exhibitions at London’s Whitechapel Gallery. She was previously Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Tate Britain, where her exhibitions explored transnational and transcultural intersections and engaged with art from a global perspective. Her shows at Tate included All Too Human (2018), Frank Bowling (2019) Paula Rego (2021) and the 2022 commission Hew Locke: The Procession.

María Inés Rodríguez is a Colombian French curator, currently Director of the Walter Leblanc Foundation in Brussels and Artistic Director of Tropical Papers. With a profound commitment to fostering a dialogue between artistic production and historical, political, and social contexts on both local and global levels, she has consistently championed the interconnectedness of art and its broader cultural implications. She was the Director of the CAPC Musée d’art Contemporain, Bordeaux, Curator at Large at MASP, São Paulo; Chief Curator at the MUAC in Mexico City, as well as at the MUSAC in Spain and guest curator at the Jeu de Paume in Paris.

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