Collective Memory and Coded Histories at the
60th Venice Biennale

Joyce Joumaa, Memory Contours (installation view) (2024). Foreigners Everywhere, 60th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist and Galerie Eli Kerr. Photo: Valentina Mori.

The etymological history of the word “shibboleth,” understood today as an expression or pronunciation that “distinguishes people of one group or class from those of another,” traces back nearly 3,000 years.¹ In the Hebrew Bible, the word shibbōleth refers, alternately, to currents of water and ears of grain.² But in its most enduring usage, the original meaning of the word is inconsequential: In the story of the Ephraimites and the Gileadites, the word was employed in a pronunciation test for suspected members of an enemy tribe, whereby failure to utter the “sh” phoneme resulted in execution.³ “Shibboleth” therefore came to signify “a test in which a hard-to-falsify sign winnows identities and establishes and confirms borders.”⁴

Arguably the best-known work of contemporary art associated with the term is Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth (2007), a 548-foot crack installed in the concrete floor of the Tate Modern in London. In some places, the crack was as thin as a hair, and elsewhere it widened into a gap of several inches. Salcedo’s Y-shaped crevice was meant to be read as a metaphor for exclusion. According to an artist statement published in the journal Signs, “the crack represents a history of racism, running parallel to the history of modernity; a standoff between rich and poor, northern and southern hemispheres.”⁵ For some, though, the artwork’s metaphorical operations were notoriously vague and obscure,⁶ and the installation in turn became a test in its own right, separating those who pored over the exhibition materials in order to participate in the work’s discourse and those who, for various legitimate reasons, did not. Although Salcedo’s installation was diffuse in its meaning, the concepts of memory and power are vital and continue to complicate our understanding of belonging and erasure each time they rear their head in contemporary art.

In the 2024 Venice Biennale’s provocatively titled central exhibition, Foreigners Everywhere, a group of works stand out as present-day inheritors of—and apt rejoinders to— some of the conceptual questions raised by Salcedo’s influential installation. Themes of memory and exclusion echo across the massive, 332-person exhibition: namely, in the work of Joyce Joumaa, Sim Chi Yin, Beatriz Cortez, and Kang Seung Lee. While Salcedo’s Shibboleth linked a concrete entity (a crack) to an abstract phenomenon (exclusion), these artists link specific, tangible images and objects to equally concrete events involving people who have been othered within dominant historical narratives. Their resulting works pinpoint the crucial role that recollection plays in the enforcement—and blurring—of cultural boundaries. Such memory, if preserved, provides a wellspring of intergenerational wisdom to be wielded in the face of ongoing oppression and injustice.

Joumaa’s multimedia installation Memory Contours (2024) depicts reenactments of an obscure test administered at the historic immigration processing center in New York’s Ellis Island in the early 1900s: Before entering the country, new arrivals were tasked with memorizing and reproducing a series of geometric shapes by hand. The work, installed in the Giardini’s Central Pavilion, consists of a four-channel video; still images displayed in lightboxes; and a soundscape of ocean waves, birdsong, and human voices. In the videos, Joumaaa shows her hand and those of three collaborators drawing various shapes —rhombuses, hourglasses, concave pentagons. The shapes are recreations of four drawing tests featured as case studies in the 1915 U.S. Public Health Service report. These looping gestures play out on large vertical screens, filmed reenactments of the so-called “intelligence testing” that detailed immigrants’ intellectual “inferiority” and, by extension, their unsuitability for entry.⁷ In this case, the faculty of memory—specifically, that of rote visual recollection—was used to determine a person’s right to cross a geopolitical threshold.⁸ In the context of migration and assimilation, memory often functions as a delineator of cultural difference: What one remembers about a particular time and place marks them as an insider or a foreigner. Memory, however, is a slippery and problematic faculty. It can be co-opted, as Joumaa’s installation shows, to assess aptitude and justify exclusion.

Sim’s single-channel video Requiem (Internationale, Goodbye Malaya) (2017) from One Day We’ll Understand (2015–present), installed in the Arsenale’s Nucleo Contemporaneo as part of the roving group exhibition Disobedience Archive,⁹ similarly homed in on how memory can be weaponized. In the video, elderly British Malayan veterans of the Anti-British National Liberation War were tasked with singing their movement’s anthem, the “Internationale.” The video’s subjects —a wide-eyed old woman with cropped hair, a liver-spotted old man in a rumpled suit, and others—struggle to recall the words to the socialist movement’s anthem, even though in their youth 70 years ago, they’d sung it daily. In total, 30,000 Malayan leftists, including Sim’s paternal grandfather, were deported by the British to China, their histories erased.¹⁰

Requiem is concerned not only with the fading memories of the elderly but with historical memory on a larger scale. “Malaya is a largely forgotten war despite its outsized importance in the history of warfare,” Sim told The Guardian. “It is where Agent Orange and strategies of ring-fencing rural populations were piloted, then applied to other wars including Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.”¹¹ In Sim’s work, fading memory seems to unwittingly aid in the kind of historicizing that erases the participants and victims of such a war, evidencing the urgent need for intergenerational dialogue and care as a means of preserving not only the knowledge of ‘minor histories’ but also the continuity between organized struggles against oppression.

Sim Chi Yin, Requiem (Internationale, Goodbye Malaya) from One Day We’ll Understand (video still) (2015–present). Video installation with sound, 6 minutes and 56 seconds. Disobedience Archive, 60th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy, 2024. Images courtesy of the artist, New Academy of Fine Arts, and Zilberman Gallery.

Sim Chi Yin, Requiem (Internationale, Goodbye Malaya) from One Day We’ll Understand (installation view) (2015–present). Video installation with sound, 6 minutes and 56 seconds. Disobedience Archive, 60th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy, 2024. Images courtesy of the artist, New Academy of Fine Arts, and Zilberman Gallery.

⁂

While Joumaa and Sim explore memory as it relates to specific historical moments, Cortez and Lee center cultural artifacts and shared codes to commemorate marginalized histories. Cortez’s steel sculpture Stela XX (Absence) (2024) shows how traces of cultural memory and political power embedded in material artifacts transform over time as these artifacts are altered, transported, and institutionalized. The sculpture’s title references premodern Maya stelae, Classic period (250–900 CE) ritual objects erected by Maya kings to mark time and affirm the religious and political authority of their rule.¹² It is theorized that when the Classic period ended, many monoliths were intentionally destroyed —broken into fragments, with depictions of the kings defaced, and so on—in order to neutralize their agency as physical extensions of the former sovereigns’ divinity.¹³ This practice furthermore signaled and reinforced the rupturing of a collective historical memory.

Kang Seung Lee, Untitled (Constellation) (detail) (2023). Image courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth and Council. Photo: Gi Ahn.

Stela XX (Absence) is an imagined monument composed of several metal shapes welded together with thick sutures, highlighting the fragmented histories, and existence, of many Maya monoliths.¹⁴ Its back is dotted with 15 raised glyphs whose shapes correspond to fragments of Maya monoliths, deliberately broken in order to extract them from their original sites, that are either now housed in major museum collections or have been lost.¹⁵ On the right edge, for example, is a triangle protruding in low-relief that represents Tortuguero Monument 6 (600–900 CE), which was extracted from El Tortuguero, an archeological site in Southern Mexico, and now exists as a similarly shaped fragment in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.¹⁶ Lopsided and top-heavy, Stela XX (Absence) stands as an imperfect monument in the grass outside the Arsenale, its fractured form a comment on the illegibility of symbols whose histories have been lost over time. At the same time, it serves as a testament to the ways that cultural memory can be re-collected from far corners of the world and sutured back together—if one cares to search.

Reassembled on the verso of Stela XX (Absence), Cortez’s miniature monolith fragments constitute a kind of coded wisdom, an arsenal of cultural heritage from which to draw inspiration and empowerment in the struggle against contemporary forms of disenfranchisement. Cortez’s encryption resonates with Lee’s installation Untitled (Constellation) (2024), a memorial in the Giardini’s Central Pavilion dedicated to Asian diasporic artists who have died of AIDS-related illness, including Goh Choo San, Tseng Kwong Chi, Martin Wong, José Leonilson, and Joon-soo Oh. The installation consists of an array of eclectic materials related to the lives of each artist; Korean hemp fiber, Japanese gold leaf, smooth stones, and bird feathers are displayed on dark wooden panels next to small drawings, embroidery works, image transfers, and poetic text inscriptions. The work is far from simply an artist-curated selection of historical artifacts—it is a study of encoded memory and a space for collective mourning.

Among Lee’s eclectic sampling of votives are dried seeds and plants collected from cruising sites in Los Angeles and Singapore where undercover police were known to patrol, bait, and arrest gay men.¹⁷ In Singapore, gay men were criminalized under residual British colonial law until 2022.¹⁸ Despite the evidence and threat of being learned and punished by reactionary forces, Lee does not disown the use of codes; instead, he doubles down by inscribing them on Untitled (Constellation). Text written in an American Sign Language (ASL) font shaped like geometric hands that Lee adapted from the paintings of the late artist Martin Wong is incised in the wooden panels that line the walls, framing the collected objects. Just as the stelae fragments in Cortez’s sculpture are visible but unlabeled, Wong is represented in Lee’s memorial without being explicitly identified, his font illegible to those who do not read ASL. The obliqueness of Lee’s work, here and in other coded references, functions as a form of protection, carving out a semi-private space for the trans-geographic, transgenerational queer community whose collective memories he preserves and celebrates.

Together, Joumaa, Sim, Cortez, and Lee’s works argue for the need to preserve collective memory at a time when the historical narratives of marginalized groups—citizens of the Global South and postcolonial states, as well as those who have been othered due to their sexual or political status—are not only at risk of eroding or vanishing but also constitute elements of a vital repository of cultural knowledge. This knowledge can be used to destabilize the pernicious holdovers of imperialism and virulent new forms of exclusion present in our world today. To that end, these four Biennale presentations call upon viewers to scour archives, cultivate intergenerational dialogue, investigate visual traces, and seek the historical causes for the cultural stories that have faded (or are at risk of fading) from collective memory. Together, they make the case for embracing uncertainty, curiosity, and care—practices that are essential to the active maintenance of collective memory.

This essay was originally published in Carla issue 38.

Beatriz Cortez, Stela XX (Absence) (installation view) (2024). Steel, approximately 96 × 40 × 23.5 inches. Foreigners Everywhere, 60th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy, 2024. Images courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth and Council. Photos: Gi Ahn.

Beatriz Cortez, Stela XX (Absence) (detail) (2024). Steel, approximately 96 × 40 × 23.5 inches. Foreigners Everywhere, 60th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy, 2024. Images courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth and Council. Photos: Gi Ahn.

Jenny Wu is a critic, essayist, and the New York-based associate editor of ArtReview. Her work also appears in The New York Times, The Washington Post, e-flux, BOMB, and elsewhere. She teaches art writing in the visual arts program at Brooklyn College CUNY.

More by Jenny Wu