The Venice Biennale opened this week. As the global art world converges around the Giardini and Arsenale, two artists who have worked with our galleries since the 1990’s, Edouard Duval-Carrie and Juan Roberto Diago, are currently representing Haiti and Cuba (respectively) at the world’s most prestigious contemporary art stage.
La Nostra Biennale is an exhibition born from that simultaneity. Pan American Art Projects presents works from its collection by sixteen artists who have been invited to the Biennale throughout the years, from González Palma’s participation in 2001 to Diago and Duval-Carrié in 2026. It is a show about what it means to bring the Americas into that conversation, across oceans and generations.
While Diago and Duval-Carrié speak to Venice from the inside, this collection holds the longer arc, twenty-five years of Latin American and Caribbean voices at the Biennale.
The exhibition unfolds in three registers. The first is based on the live present: Juan Roberto Diago’s Hombres Libres / Free Men, an installation of scarred sculptural heads built from salvaged materials, at the Cuban Pavilion; and Édouard Duval-Carrié’s work in the main international hall, where twenty artists carry the histories of Haiti and the African diaspora into one of the world’s most visible platforms.
The second register honors artists from our collection who have defined the Biennale’s Latin American presence across generations: René Portocarrero, one of the great figures of Cuban modernism, who presented his “Flora” portrait series in 1966; León Ferrari, who was the recipient of the Golden Lion award, the event’s highest distinction, at the 2007 edition. For Luis González Palma and Ronald Morán, from Guatemala and El Salvador, respectively, we show pieces that were part of the original presentations at the Latin American Center on the Grand Canal.
The third register unfolds as a generational portrait: from the Cuban Pavilion in 2011 with Eduardo Ponjuán to the gathering of Mabel Poblet, Reynier Leyva Novo, Roberto Fabelo, José Manuel Fors, René Peña, Abel Barroso, and José Ángel Toirac at the Palazzo Loredan in 2017. Kcho (Alexis Leiva Machado), who had already represented Cuba at the Arsenale, completes this lineage.
La Nostra Biennale is not a survey. It is a live document, an argument that the artists of the Americas have long held a central place in the Biennale’s history, and that this collection is a witness to that claim.
