The Venice Biennale has released their in-figures report for this year’s exhibition, with an overall decrease in visitors but an uptick in visitors from underrepresented groups.
The total comes to 699,304 visitors in attendance, with an average of 3,321 enjoying the mega-exhibition each day during the seven-month run, which closed on November 24. These figures are down from the previous edition in 2022, when over 800,000 tickets were sold and 4,062 visitors attended “The Milk of Dreams”—curated by Italian curator Cecilia Alemani—on average per day.
Of the nearly 700,000 tickets sold this year, 30 percent were used by young people (under the age of 26) and students (35 percent of whom travelled from abroad to attend the Biennale). Another 18 percent of the visitors came as part of a group, and while these were mostly student and university groups , there was a 20 percent increase in the number of elementary school visitors. The Biennale also reported a 150 percent increase in visitors taking part in educational activities and guided tours.
An installation by artist Alioune Diagne during the pre-opening of the Venice Biennale, on April 16, 2024 in Venice. Photo: Gabriel Bouys/AFP via Getty Images
What organizers are surely most proud of, though, is a 67 percent increase in visitors from underrepresented groups, defined as those with “mental health disabilities, homeless people, individuals with addictions, and migrants”.
There were 171 groups, made up of 2,689 participants, involved in the Biennale’s Fragile Categories Project which gives access to the exhibition to more than 1,200 people each year as part of the Accessible Biennale, the exhibition’s initiatives for accessibility. This was an almost 70 percent increase in comparison to 2022.
On the Biennale’s official website, it explained how “the last few decades have seen the emergence, internationally, of an increasing attention to issues related to the accessibility of cultural heritage for people with physical or mental disabilities”. The increase was said to confirm “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 marginalization.”
Adriano Pedrosa, curator of the 2024 Venice Biennale, poses for a portrait on the terrace of Ca’ Giustinian, Venice, Italy. Photo: Stefano Mazzola/Getty Images.
The statement also explained that “a greater sensitivity” was being paid to remove “linguistic and cognitive barriers” to visitors accessing art. In order to make the exhibition more accessible, the Biennale’s programming included a sensory map “indicating the environments in which sensory stimuli are present and services are provided”, a social guide “written in easy-to-read language” which was “aimed at people with cognitive disabilities, presenting the history of the institution, the spaces and information about the current exhibition”, and special routes through the Biennale designed for members of the “visually impaired or blind public”.
This year’s exhibition, titled “Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere”, was curated by Brazilian curator and artistic director of the São Paulo Museum of Art, Adriano Pedrosa. Pedrosa referenced the emphasis on inclusivity at this year’s Biennale in a press statement following the closing of the exhibition, saying that he looked forward to an “afterlife” for the “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”.
Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, a rightwing Italian journalist and the Biennale’s president this year, said: “In these challenging times for the world, art reminds us that everything is polemos [sic] 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.”
So far no details have been announced about the curatorial team or plans for the 61st edition of the Biennale, which was inaugurated in 1895.