The Biennale Arte 2024 closes with 700,000 tickets sold

Today, Sunday 24 November 2024, following seven days of performances at the Arsenale, the 60^th International Art Exhibition Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa, closed after registering one of the highest levels of visitor attendance in its history.
With an 18% increase over the pre-Covid edition in 2019 and second only to the previous 2022 edition – The Milk of Dreams, curated by Cecilia Alemani, which registered a record 800,000 visitors, Biennale Arte 2024 announced the superlative sale of 700,000 tickets (an average of approximately 3,300 visitors per day), in addition to the 27,966 visitors who attended the preview.

THE PUBLIC
A share of 59% of the public came from abroad, and 41% from Italy.
There was strong attendance by young people and students under the age of 26, totalling over 190,000, or 30% of all visitors. There was also a significant 20% increase in primary school visits; while 35% of the schools came from abroad.
A record result was also the participation of fragile categories at the Exhibition, with an increase this year of +67%. This figure confirms La Biennale’s constant and growing attention to activities relating to the accessibility of the cultural heritage and of contemporary arts in particular to persons with disabilities or situations of social disadvantage or marginalisation.

PRESS and MEDIA
There were 4,289 accredited journalists in the days of preview alone, from the Italian and international press, in addition to the reporters from agencies, television, radio, daily newspapers, periodicals and online news sites who received accreditation throughout the months of the exhibition.
The press review highlights extensive coverage across all geographic areas, with over 2,500 articles, in addition to numerous reports and specials on TVs, radios, specialized magazines, and international online platforms.

President Pietrangelo Buttafuoco commented on the results in these words:

“We  wistfully take our leave of Adriano Pedrosa’s Biennale Arte, its rousing success and its important lesson: we are all Foreigners Everywhere. The works and the artists in the exhibition he curated have reached beyond the confines of the Giardini and the Arsenale to pervade our daily lives and our mental horizon. In these challenging times for the world, art reminds us that everything is polemos between cultures, viewpoints, past and future. But it also teaches us that life’s path leads us to encounter the you, the us, beyond the desperate solitude of the I. We are all Foreigners Everywhere in the crossing of worlds, in the experience of existence, and hence in the evolution of beauty and our very freedom, there where we are united by our common appreciation of art.”

The Curator Adriano Pedrosa, on his part, stated:

“As the Biennale Arte 2024 closes after a week of extraordinary performances, I am grateful above all to the artists who participated in the exhibition, to the biennale staff, to my own team, to all the lenders, galleries, sponsors and donors who supported the exhibition so generously, as well as to the more than 700.000 visitors who came to see our show.  I am also grateful to former president Roberto Cicutto, for having appointed me, and for president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, for his support. 
It is always melancholic to see an exhibition of this magnitude come to an end, yet in some ways the journey continues, and I am now looking forward to the afterlife of Stranieiri Ovunque - Foreigners Everywhere, especially regarding the understanding, reception and visibility of artists from the Global South, as well as indigenous artists, queer artists, self taught artists and 20th century figures from Africa, Asia and Latin America.”

331 Artists in the International Exhibition

2 Curator’s Special Projects
Pavilion of Applied Arts in collaboration with the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, with the exhibition by Beatriz Milhazes
Forte Marghera, Austrian Armoury, exhibition by Nedda Guidi

4 Meetings on Art

86 National Participations
30 National Participations in the historical Pavilions of the Giardini
23 National Participations in the Arsenale, including Italy
33 National Participations around the city of Venice
4  National Participations exhibiting for the first time:  Republic of Benin, Ethiopia, United Republic of Tanzania, Democratic Republic of Timor Leste
Participating for the first time with their own Pavilion: The Republic of Panama (previously with the IILA), Senegal (previously with the African countries)

30 Collateral Events

The Golden Lions for Lifetime Achievement, upon recommendation of the Curator, were awarded to Anna Maria Maiolino, a Brazilian artist (Italian by birth) and to Nil Yalter, a Turkish artist (based in Paris).

The International Jury, chaired by Julia Bryan-Wilson, an American curator and professor at Columbia University, with Alia Swastika, Indonesian curator and writer; Chika Okeke-Agulu, Nigerian curator and art critic; Elena Crippa, Italian curator; Maria Inés Rodriguez, French-Colombian curator, decided to award the official prizes as follows:

• Golden Lion for Best National Participation to Australia
• A Special Mention for National Pavilion to the Republic of Kosovo
• Golden Lion for Best Participant to the Mataaho Collective
• Silver Lion for a Promising Young Participant to Karimah Ashadu
• 2 special mentions to the participants Samia Halaby and La Chola Poblete

Biennale College Arte 2023/24 took place for the second time with young emerging artists under the age of 30, selected by the Curator from the over 150 applications submitted from 37 countries around the world. The finalists in this edition – Agnes Questionmark, Joyce Joumaa, Sandra Poulson, Nazira Karimi – enjoyed a grant of 25,000 euro for the realization of the final work they presented, out of competition, at the 60^th International Art Exhibition.

The Biennale Sessions project – dedicated to Universities, Fine Arts Academies, research and educational institutions in the visual arts and similar fields – for the twelfth consecutive year has drawn groups of students and teachers to visit the Exhibition, registering the extraordinary participation of foreign universities.

76 universities were involved, including 31 Italian universities and 45 foreign universities, from every continent. With 6 Universities, Germany and France follow Italy in terms of the number of participants, followed by the United States (with 5 participants).
3000 university students participated in the project.

A total of 80,613 participants (4704 groups) took part in the educational activities and guided tour services.

Educational Activities
39,844 young people and students who participated in the educational activities
1,827   groups
5,941   teachers involved in the educational activities in the exhibition venue
2,199   teachers who participated in the dedicated previews
1,096   participating schools, of which:
50         preschools
187      primary schools
72        Lower-level secondary schools
787      Upper-level secondary schools

Guided Tours
40,769  adults and public who participated in the guided tours
24,519 public organised in groups
16,250 the participants in the guided tours on a fixed schedule or family friendly (+15% compared to 2022)
2,877 groups  

58% of the young participants in the educational activities were from the Veneto region.

Active Catalogues
An important contribution was given by the 30 active catalogues:
young college graduates standing along the Exhibition route, according to a dedicated editorial project, with the purpose of providing information, met with the appreciation and gratitude of the visitors.

Official website: www.labiennale.org
20 April > 13 November 2024
1.6 million active users
7.5 million page views
19.7 million events generated (page views, session openings, first visits, page scrolls, clicks, file downloads, etc.)

Social Media
The content published during Biennale Arte 2024 on La Biennale di Venezia’s social media platforms – Facebook, X, Instagram and YouTube – obtained around 101 million views overall, generating about 1.7 million interactions.

The official catalogue and guide of the Biennale Arte 2024 are published by La Biennale di Venezia.
As of 13 November 2024, the Exhibition Bookshops and the de-commerce website store.labiennale.org, sold:
938 catalogues in Italian, 3,538 catalogues in English,
6,941 short guides in Italian, 20,470 short guides in English.

Since 2021 La Biennale has begun a process to review all of its activities in the light of consolidated and recognized principles of environmental sustainability. For the year 2024, the goal once again was to achieve “carbon neutral” certification, which it achieved in 2023 for all of La Biennale’s programmed activities: the 80^th Venice International Film Festival, the Theatre, Music and Dance Festivals and, in particular, the 18^th International Architecture Exhibition, which was the first major Exhibition in this discipline to test, in the field, a tangible process to achieve carbon neutrality, while furthermore reflecting upon the themes of decolonisation and decarbonisation.

La Biennale is working concretely towards the crucial goal of fighting climate change by adopting a more sustainable model for the design, installation and operation of all its activities,  by accurately collecting the data on the causes of the CO2 emissions generated by the events themselves, and adopting consequent measures. For all the events, the most important component of the overall carbon footprint involves the mobility of the visitors. The entire process for achieving carbon neutrality, conducted in compliance with the international standard PAS2060, was certified by RINA.

We would like to thank the Ministry of Culture, the regional Institutions that  each in their own way support La Biennale di Venezia, the City of Venice, the Regione Veneto, the Office for the Protection of the Archaeological, Artistic and Natural Heritages for the City of Venice and its Lagoon, the Italian Navy.
Our thanks go to the Donors, the International Councils and Organizations, which are essential to the creation of the 60^th Exhibition.

The 60^th International Art Exhibition has also been made possible by the support of Swatch, Partner of the event.
The Main Sponsor is illycaffè.
Sponsors: American Express, Bloomberg Philanthropies with Bloomberg Connects, Vela-Venezia Unica
Media Partner: Rai
We would also like to thank Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP.

And we would particularly like to thank the Curator, Adriano Pedrosa, and his entire team.

The videos of all the initiatives of the Exhibition may be seen on Biennale Channel.