This article reviews a selection of works by Black diaspora artists who were included in the 2024 Venice Biennale. The article focuses on artists included in the pavilions of Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, and Benin, along with artists included in the Arsenale and the collateral exhibition Passengers in Transit. Drawing on the biennale’s theme of Foreigners Everywhere, the author explores how these artists engaged with its expanded meanings, drawing on the experiences of mobility, impermanence, diaspora, and nation building. The article details the different registers these terms hold for Black diaspora artists, as they address concerns about climate change, social injustice, migrant labor, cultural memory, and understandings of the nation. In beginning with these questions, these artists also assert new starting points in which Africa’s global significance historically and toward the future was reiterated, defamiliarizing the terrain of art-historical production. Artists also explored these questions using methods that often enfolded the personal with the diverse experiences of a collective, returned viewers to local and indigenous knowledge systems, foregrounded human and non-human relations, and looked toward difficult and unacknowledged histories to imagine what might be possible, collectively, now and in times to come.
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