There are many ways to experience Venice during La Biennale. You can follow the crowds through the Giardini, wander between the national pavilions, get lost in the calli, or stop for an espresso and watch the city move around you.
This year, however, there is another journey to take: one that leads from Venice to Sierra Leone, and from Sierra Leone into a much wider African and international conversation.
For its historic first participation in the International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, the Republic of Sierra Leone presents “Worlds of Today”, hosted at the ancient Liceo Artistico Guggenheim. More than a conventional national pavilion, the exhibition offers visitors an opportunity to discover a contemporary Sierra Leone through art—and, at the same time, to see Venice from a different perspective.
Curated by Sandro Orlandi Stagl and Willy Montini, the project brings together artists from Sierra Leone, West Africa, Italy, and Mexico. The result is a cultural journey across continents, where paintings, sculptures, drawings, videos, and installations become points of connection.
A Journey Without Leaving Venice
Travel is often about crossing borders. Art can do the same thing without requiring a passport.
In “Worlds of Today,” visitors move between different worlds through the work of Hawa-Jane Bangura, Ayesha Feisal, Hickmatu Bintu Leigh, and Abu Bakarr Mansaray, the four Sierra Leonean artists featured in the pavilion.
Mansaray’s extraordinary imaginary machines, for example, transform memories of Sierra Leone’s turbulent past into visions of invention and possibility. Bangura looks further back, drawing on ancient African civilizations to explore questions of identity and cultural memory.
Feisal’s organic sculptures connect the human body with the resilience of nature, while Leigh turns her attention to one of the defining challenges of contemporary life: the way information—and misinformation—travels through the digital world.
Together, their works offer an introduction to a country that many international visitors may know little about, but whose artistic scene is deeply engaged with some of the questions shaping the world today.
West Africa Meets the World
The journey does not stop at Sierra Leone’s borders.
The pavilion also includes artists from Senegal, Togo, Benin, and Nigeria, among them Seini Awa Camara, Abdoul Ganiou Dermani, Eloy Lokossou, and Mòyọ̀sórẹ́ Martins.
For a traveller visiting Venice, this creates an unusual opportunity: within a single exhibition, different corners of West Africa can be encountered through distinct artistic voices and cultural perspectives.
And then the journey continues across the Mediterranean.