Tigo Ayres at the Venice Biennale 2024: Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere

Between April and November 2024, the city of Venice once again became the central stage for the most urgent debates in contemporary art with the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Curated by Adriano Pedrosa, Director of MASP (São Paulo Museum of Art), the central exhibition carried the theme “Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere”, inviting artists and audiences to reflect on migration, diaspora, displacement, and decolonisation.

For Tigo Ayres, a Brazilian artist who has lived in London for nearly twenty years, the Biennale was more than an aesthetic experience: it was a moment of profound recognition, where his personal history as an immigrant and his artistic practice resonated directly with the curatorial proposal.

Foreigners Everywhere

The exhibition’s title — Foreigners Everywhere — functions as a slogan, a cry, and an appeal. In a global context marked by the alarming rise of forcibly displaced people, particularly across Europe and the Mediterranean, the Biennale shed light on migration as one of the defining issues of our time.

The show gathered artists who are foreigners, immigrants, exiles, refugees, expatriates, or members of diasporas, with a particular focus on those navigating between the Global South and the Global North. This movement — increasingly restricted by border policies — has become a hallmark of contemporary art and a space of symbolic and cultural resistance.

For Ayres, this narrative struck a deep chord. Living between Brazil and the United Kingdom, he feels in his own skin what it means to be a foreigner — not only as a legal identity but as a subjective experience that shapes his work with memory, identity, and spirituality.

A Dialogue with the Global South

The 2024 Biennale highlighted works exploring decolonisation, diaspora, and displacement, bringing the relationship between the Global North and the Global South to the forefront. For Ayres, this was crucial: as a Latin American artist, he recognised that his own investigations — rooted in Afro-Latin ancestry, Brazilian folk traditions, and psychoanalysis — echo within a broader movement of artists reclaiming historically marginalised narratives.

In Venice, he found himself not only as a spectator but as part of a community of artists who challenge physical and symbolic borders, building new cartographies of art through plural histories.

Personal Reflections

Walking through the pavilions and the central exhibition was, for Tigo Ayres, a rediscovery of his own condition as a “foreigner everywhere”. After nearly two decades in London, he has come to understand that being an immigrant also means carrying multiple belongings, living in transit, and transforming that experience into art.

This awareness is reflected in his practice, which combines painting, performance, and psychology, always traversed by notions of fragmented identity, collective memory, and spirituality in motion.

The Significance of the Biennale

The Venice Biennale remains the world’s most important artistic platform — a space where the pressing issues of the present are confronted and reimagined through the language of art. For Tigo Ayres, being there was a confirmation that his journey — marked by voluntary exile and the condition of foreignness — is part of a larger narrative that connects artists across continents.

More than simply visiting an exhibition, his presence was an act of witnessing and participating in a global conversation on belonging, borders, and the power of art as a tool of resistance and transformation.

Tigo Ayres’s visit to the Venice Biennale 2024 was an experience of recognition and belonging. At the heart of the world’s most influential contemporary art exhibition, he found echoes of his own life as an immigrant and foreign artist, reaffirming that we are all foreigners somewhere — and that it is precisely in this condition of movement and multiplicity that art finds its most radical strength.