As Somalia’s first-ever national pavilion debuts at the 61st Venice Biennale, a coalition of local cultural organizations says that artists based in the country “were not meaningfully consulted, included, or recognised in a process that should have belonged to the nation more broadly.”
Last month, the Somalia Arts Foundation (SAF), the country’s self-coined first contemporary art institution, issued a statement denouncing the absence of Somalia-based artists from the pavilion’s artist lineup, which included only artists living in diaspora. In a separate missive, the Somali queer collective Warbixinta Cidda decried the appointment of Italian graphic designer Fabio Scrivanti as the pavilion’s co-curator, citing Italy’s colonization of the region beginning in the 19th century.
“That [curatorial] dynamic is particularly difficult to separate from the historical relationship between Somalia and Italy, given Italy’s role as a former colonial power in Somalia,” SAF Founder and Executive Director Sagal Ali told Hyperallergic in an email. “For many Somalis, questions of representation, authorship, and who gets to speak for Somali culture are therefore not neutral questions; They carry historical weight.”
Marketing materials for the inaugural pavilion, titled SADDEXLEEY, contain only the names of three Somali artists who do not live in the country — Somali-Swedish painter Ayan Farfah, Somali-Danish poet and filmmaker Asmaa Jama, and Somali-British poet Warsan Shire.
Named after a Somali triadic poetry form, the national exhibition contends with oral tradition, displacement, and memory, according to promotional materials.
“Our concern is that artists and arts organizations based in Somalia, those who have spent years rebuilding the cultural sector from within, were not meaningfully consulted, included, or recognized in a process that should have belonged to the nation more broadly,” SAF’s April statement said.
Scrivanti, a project manager at the consulting firm Venice Art Factory, co-curated the pavilion with Mohamed Mire, an exhibition producer at Fotografiska in Stockholm. Abdirahman Yusuf Mohamud, a cultural advisor to the office of Somalia’s prime minister, serves as the pavilion’s commissioner.
Other groups in Somalia signed on to the letter, including Arlo Art Space, the heritage preservation group Biciid, and the magazine Shineemo Banaadir, as well as a handful of local artists.
Responding to the public criticism, a spokesperson for the pavilion organizers told Hyperallergic that the exhibition “includes and collaborates with Somalia-based artists,” including the Mogadishu-based painter 4C (Abdinasir Abdikadir).
The spokesperson said events spotlighting Somalia-based artists would accompany the primary exhibition throughout the Biennale, both in Venice and locally, but did not respond to Hyperallergic’s requests for additional programming details.
In another April public statement, SAF accused pavilion organizers of “using intimidation, coercive pressure, and scare tactics” against the organizations that first publicly denounced the pavilion. Hyperallergic has reached out to pavilion organizers for comment on those allegations.
In light of the public criticisms, Somali-American poet and filmmaker Ladan Osman said she decided not to visit the pavilion in a letter addressed to pavilion co-curator Mohamed Mire and posted on Instagram.
Osman told Hyperallergic that her decision was partly informed by allegations that the exhibition’s commissioners circumvented a pre-approved governmental process for selecting artists, bypassing a review of local artists. (Pavilion organizers and the Somalia Ministry of Information, Culture, and Tourism have not responded to Hyperallergic’s requests for comment.)
“The Somalia national pavilion is anti-indigenous, and the Venice Biennale as a whole is too, given its flagrant erasure of Palestine,” Osman told Hyperallergic, noting that she hopes her criticism will lead to a productive dialogue.
Criticism against the Somalia pavilion’s organizers comes during a historic year of protests at the Venice Biennale, including a first-ever cultural labor strike in opposition to the Biennale’s inclusion of Israel amid the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Another missive circulating among Somali cultural groups last week called for a boycott of the pavilion unless pavilion organizers met demands, including the removal of Scrivanti as co-curator and a public response from the participating artists. It is unclear who authored the letter; however, Warbixinta Cidda confirmed signing it.
The pavilion’s artists and curators have yet to make a public statement responding to the criticism, and have not yet replied to Hyperallergic’s requests for comment.
Ali, SAF’s founder, told Hyperallergic that the organization recognized the importance of Somali diaspora artists in the broader regional art scene and did not wish to alienate them in the criticism.
“Contemporary art is inherently transnational; The issue is about power, process, and whose voices are centered in the construction of a so-called national representation,” Ali continued. “At present, the pavilion feels disconnected from the realities and wider ecosystem of Somali cultural life.”
