60th Venice Biennale : 4 artists from Seychelles to showcase talent

Three among the four artists who will be representing Seychelles at the Venice Biennale in 2024. From left Juliette Zelime, Ryan Chetty and Jude Ally. (Seychelles Nation) 

Four Seychellois artists will participate in the 60th Venice Biennale, which will be held under the theme "Foreigners Everywhere," from April 20 to November 24, in Venice, Italy.

Three of the four artists, Juliette Zelime, Jude Ally and Ryan Chetty, received their airfares in a short ceremony held at the Creative Seychelles Agency (CSA) on Monday. The fourth participant is Danielle Freakley, who is living in Australia.

The artists will spend 11 days in Venice and the initial days will be spent setting up the installations in the Arsenale, the official pavilion.

This is the first time that artists from Seychelles have been offered an exhibition space in the prestigious 'Arsenale zone' of the official biennale. Two of the four will exhibit at the Arsenale Zone and the other in the nearby 'Palazzo Mora.' This was the location for the Seychelles National Pavilion in 2015 and 2019.

The Seychelles' pavilion curator, Martin Kennedy, said, "They are very strict about who can put work up. We can't even hang our own paintings, we have to have accredited unionised Italian workers, so we have been arranging that by remote control from here."

The first preview day for the Biennale will be on April 16, following which Kennedy said there will be an inauguration ceremony for the Seychelles pavilion. The secretary general of the Seychelles National Institute for Culture, Heritage and the Arts (SNICHA), David Andre, will be present and is expected to make an address.

Kennedy said one of the benefits of Seychelles' participation in the Biennale is  the works of the artists "depict the Seychelles and encourage people to visit Seychelles."

The four artists taking part will also have the chance to visit other national pavilions at the event presenting "an incredible networking opportunity for our artists and administrators to meet people from other nations, small and large," he added.

They will also attend a forum for African art at the Biennale.

Chetty, one of the artists whose installation will be on show at the Biennale,  told reporters that his piece is a "conceptual one that shows the different aspects of Seychelles, how it all began and I have globes showing the different nations that joined together to make the Seychelles people.".

Once the Biennale closes in Venice on November 24, the exhibition will travel to Seychelles and will be on display at the National Gallery of Seychelles 

"Everybody in Seychelles will have the chance to see it, exactly how it was presented in Venice," said Kennedy.