VENICE.- Fondazione Berengo presents Welcome! A Palazzo for Immigrants, a site-specific solo exhibition by inter-disciplinary artist Osman Yousefzada in partnership with the Victoria & Albert Museum. Curated by Nadja Romain and Amin Jaffer, the intervention at the Palazzo Franchetti is a continuation of a body of work that explores themes of unity, movement and migration in modern society. The exhibition, running from 17 April to 7 October 2024, is in conjunction with the 60th edition of La Biennale di Venezia and responds to its central language of exclusion and immigrant displacement.

Yousefzada creates a moving meditation on modernity and migration using handcrafted textile works, printworks, moving images and sculptures in the historical Palazzo, converting classical grandeur into a surreal landscape where traditions meet, and the table is set. A central installation of textile fibre sculptures combined with handblown Murano glass features two large-scale plaits that descend from the Palazzo ceiling into claw-like roots that stretch out across its marble floor, while a table rich with an abundance of handblown glass objects each tell their own intricate stories, querying the domestic as symbolic talismans and tokens to create a vital dialogue between the artist’s heritage and the artisanal traditions of the Venetian lagoon.

“I'm thrilled to welcome you into A Palazzo for Immigrants,” says Yousefzada, “a series of works rooted in the domestic - anticipating more hopeful futures of us coming together, healing and crossing borders, in order to reclaim hostile languages associated with exclusion and other immigrant bodies.”

Through this new exhibition Yousefzada continues his artistic investigations into displacement, migration, class and climate change, interweaving these themes with new mediums and techniques that re-contextualize his artworks within the floating city, most notably through the series of handblown Murano glass sculptures which were made in collaboration with the glass masters of Berengo Studio. 

Co-Curator Nadja Romain says, “The exhibition pays tribute to both Venetian glass and textiles, in a dialogue with Osman’s Pakistani heritage. Osman’s interest in the history of glass - which started in the Middle East - and the history of Venice in general nourish his reflections about the migration of cultures, commercial power and trade.”    

“Yousefzada’s practice casts light on displacement and dispossession, fundamental aspects of the immigrant experience,” notes Co-Curator Amin Jaffer. “In Venice, a place renowned for its production of glass and textiles, his works take on a different dimension given the city’s traditional role as a gateway to the East and an entrepôt of exotic goods and people. The significance of the exhibition is underlined by the ongoing immigrant crisis in Europe today.”

The work presents the natural evolution of ideas Yousefzada first explored within his 2022 exhibition What Is Seen and What Is Not, a solo show originally commissioned by the British Council in partnership with the V&A and the Pakistan High Commission as part of the British Council’s festival season Pakistan/UK: New Perspectives - The 75th anniversary of Pakistan’s independence.

Osman Yousefzada is a British-Pakistani artist and writer, born in Birmingham UK, whose work engages with the representation, rupture, and reimagining of the immigrant experience. His work incorporates textiles, print-making, installations, sculpture and performance. Yousefzada has shown at international institutions including: Whitechapel Gallery, London; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio; Ringling Museum, Florida; Lahore Museum, Pakistan; and Design Museum, London. Lahore Biennale, Pakistan and Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh. 

Recent solo shows include; Queer Feet (2024) at Charleston House, Embodiments of Memory (2023) at the Ceramics Biennale, Potteries Museum in Stoke on Trent and More Immigrants Please (2023) a nationwide series of billboards with Artichoke. His large-scale series of solo interventions What Is Seen and What Is Not at London’s V&A in 2022, was commissioned by the British Council in partnership with the V&A. In May 2024 he opens the prelude to Bradford City of Culture 2025 with a solo show at Cartwright Hall. 

He is a visiting Professor of Interdisciplinary Practice at the Birmingham School of Art, BCU, a visiting Fellow at the Jesus College, Cambridge University and a Research Practitioner at the Royal College of Art. Yousefzada is also the author of The Go-Between: A Memoir of Growing Up Between Different Worlds (2022), a coming-of-age story described by Stephen Fry as ‘one of the greatest childhood memoirs of our time’.