The

Venice

Biennale’s

'Foreigners

Everywhere'

Has

Global

Aims,

featuring

Kiluanji

Kia

Henda

Kiluanji Kia Henda’s work, ‘The Geometric Ballad of Fear’, 2015, presented at the 60th Venice Biennale, captures images of homes in Luanda, Angola, refracted through metal railings, creating a prism of fragmented views that reflect the social and political anxieties embedded in the urban landscape. Those actual railings are then used to assemble a large sculpture, A Espiral do Medo, 2022.

Just behind it hang silk fabrics by Dana Awartani in ‘Come, Let me Heal Your Wounds. Let Me Mend Your Broken Bones,’ 2024, where every piece of silk is a requiem for a historic site in the Arab world destroyed by war. Awartani’s installation is tragically designed to accommodate new examples, and the Biennale’s version includes testimonies to places destroyed in Gaza in the past months. Kia Henda and Awartani both make abstractions of built environments to create a haunting image of reality, only from disparate contexts and discussing different issues.