In 1922, the Venice Biennale presented a special exhibition of thirty-three African sculptures, drawn from the Luigi Pigorini National Museum (now part of the Museum of Civilizations) in Rome and the Ethnographic Museum in Florence. The surviving archive, including Carlo Anti’s introductory text and a single black-and-white photograph of a sculpture by a Luba artist set against a stark white backdrop, presents a familiar colonial narrative that reinforces the racial hierarchies underpinning the imperial world order. While acknowledging the artistic merits of these works as evidence of the “absolute ingenuity” of African art, the text simultaneously casts them in derogatory terms as “primitive.”

1922 Revisited, a live arts program staged during the opening week of the 61st Biennale, is conceived as an invitation to mine this fragmented archive—to poetically confront the imperial logic of the Biennale, to amplify long-silenced voices, and to propose new frameworks grounded in African epistemologies. Featuring artists including Jelili Atiku, Tsedaye Makonnen, Jermay Michael Gabriel, Va-Bene Fiatsi, Zora Snake, Wura-Natasha Ogunji, ruby onyinyechi amanze, Wilfried Nakeu, Bernard Akoi-Jackson, and Victoria-Idongesit Udondian, the program unfolds across Venice as a series of live performances, a screening, and a panel discussion staged at Hotel Monaco, the European Cultural Centre’s Marinaressa Gardens, and other sites throughout the city.

The program reanimates this history in the present, positioning performance as a critical method for engaging the 1922 exhibition and the wider imperial histories within which it is situated, while opening new narrative pathways. Through embodied, time-based practices, artists move between archive and action, drawing out the tensions at work within the 1922 exhibition while insisting on alternative modes of knowing and remembering. In dialogue with Artistic Director Koyo Kouoh’s vision, it becomes not only a site of reflection, but a space for “repairing wounds and worlds.”

Third Space Art Foundation supports artistic exchange and collective engagement through the cultivation of third spaces, or dynamic zones of encounter, negotiation, and creative transformation. Drawing from the widely embraced concept of third space as a site for dialogue, as well as Homi K. Bhabha’s decolonial formulation of the “third space” as a liminal ground that challenges fixed hierarchies and dominant narratives, the foundation advances practices that expand cultural understanding and foster new frameworks for connection. Through colloquia, performances, exhibitions, residencies, and other collaborative initiatives, it brings together artists, curators, and scholars across geographic and cultural divides, working to catalyze critical inquiry, mutual understanding, and new structures of solidarity.