From Gold Lion winner Archie Moore to Brazilians the Tupinambá collective, First Nations artists are making their voices heard at ‘the Olympics of art’. They talk hammocks, hunting and human connection

‘I’m not using the word ‘representing’ as I can’t represent Australia,” says the softly spoken Indigenous artist Archie Moore , recovering after the packed opening of the Australian pavilion at the Venice Biennale. “I can’t even represent all the Aboriginal people – because we’re not a homogenous group. So I choose to just say I’m presenting an exhibition for the Australian pavilion.”

Although First Nations artists have been to Venice before, with the Nordic pavilion hosting Sámi artists in 2022 , this time they seem to have broken through en masse at the biennale. The main exhibition, called Foreigners Everywhere , is packed with their work, sourced from all over the world by the Brazilian curator Adriano Pedrosa . The idea is that being colonised makes you feel like a foreigner in your own country, with the erasure of your culture, the robbery of your land, and at worst the extermination of your people.

Archie Moore’s meticulous genealogy, kith and kin, is a memorial to Indigenous lives lost – but it’s also about global common humanity

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For the past two months, in the quiet, darkened room of the Australia pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Bigambul-Kamilaroi artist Archie Moore has been drawing by hand in chalk a vast and meticulous genealogy.

But Moore’s work, kith and kin – Australia’s official entry in the 2024 Venice Biennale, which opened this week with the theme “Foreigners everywhere” – is about much more, and its grand scope reveals itself slowly.

The artist’s nightmare of colonial exile, ecology and globalisation – recurring endlessly over six interconnected video installations – leaves you unsettled, unhinged and gasping for air

Trucks pass by spewing clouds of insecticide that fumigate a poor neighbourhood. A small child, stoic and resigned, gets the treatment too. A carriage clock and an old watch drown on a riverbed, along with old master drawings and paintings distorted by the rills in the stream, and avuncular 1970s TV ecologist David Bellamy explains global warming in some old degraded footage. A container ship founders, its cargo shifting. Sound and image do all the work in John Akomfrah’s Listening All Night to the Rain , which fills the British pavilion at the Venice Biennale. I was there two hours and still feel I’ve only seen snatches, the story constantly slipping away from me and leading me on, via continual swerves and jumps and shifts, from moment to moment, screen to screen and room to room. Overwhelmed, I’m left gasping.

As soon as the eye settles on one thing, we are swept away again. A man sleeps beside pictures of boy soldiers. One of them once might have been him. Jellyfish rise through water in green light, and a white woman in pearls and gloves waves from a car at dutiful crowds of black faces. A man waits at a lonely bus stop in the Scottish highlands beside a road sign warning of otters crossing. How do we go from here to images of Patrice Lumumba, first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, before his assassination? A waving placard tells us that colonialists are doomed.

Why are there almost no tears in great works of art? Italian artist Francesco Vezzoli is rectifying this – by embroidering balloon-shaped drops on to modern mashups of Giotto and Botticelli

Since tears express intense emotion, you’d think great painters would have fallen over themselves to depict people crying. Wrong, says Francesco Vezzoli. “Just Google books about tears in art,” says the Italian artist via video call. “There aren’t any. There are some tears in Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, but that’s an extreme painting. You should find tears on the face of Christ, but that happens only once.” This is in Antonello da Messina’s Ecce Homo, from 1475. “Go to the Kunsthistorischen Museum in Vienna: no tears. In European religious paintings, there should be tears on the faces of every saint because they all died for martyrdom. But tears are very rare.”

To correct this remarkable oversight, over the past 15 years Vezzoli has embroidered tears on to reproductions of paintings by great Renaissance artists from Giotto to Botticelli and Lotto. Sewing has been long part of Vezzoli’s practice: he used to frequent a needlepoint shop called Creativity while at Central St Martin’s in London in the early 1990s (when he wasn’t clubbing, that is, or writing his dissertation on homoeroticism in Brazilian soap operas).

Founder of Black Audio Film Collective says he would have laughed if someone had said he’d someday be in the UK pavilion

Britain’s national pavilion at the Venice Biennale, the world’s largest and most prominent art event, begins with video of delicate Holbein drawings from the Tudor court being washed over by the eddies of a stream and ends with the death of a British-Nigerian man, David Oluwale, who drowned in a Yorkshire river after being beaten by local police in 1969.

Along the way, in filmmaker Sir John Akomfrah’s exhibition, comes a sumptuously told visual and auditory story of migration and colonialism, held together by the image of flowing water. It culminates in images of the arrival in Britain of the Windrush generation – those who migrated from the Caribbean to the UK in the years after the second world war, often to work in British public services.

Curators protesting against Gaza conflict say ‘art can wait but women, children and people living though hell cannot’

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The artists and curators of the Israeli national pavilion at the Venice Biennale have announced their decision not to open until “a ceasefire and hostage release agreement is reached” in the conflict in Gaza, on the opening preview day of the largest and most prominent global gathering in the art world.

A sign on the front of the Israel pavilion in the Giardini, or public gardens, in Venice, one of the main venues for the Biennale, conveyed the team’s decision – while the pavilion itself is guarded by three armed Italian military personnel.

He only published one book – and it was hardly noticed. Now his portraits of drag queens, poets and artists are seen as vital documents of a vanished world. As they go on show, the photographer’s favourite subjects recall his genius

‘He made me wear white,” says Fran Lebowitz , down the phone from New York. The writer is talking about the day her close friend, the photographer Peter Hujar, shot her for Portraits in Life and Death, the only book he ever made. “Peter was very specific. It was in my apartment which was the size of, I don’t know, a book. And the light was a big thing – as it was with all photographers, back when they were actually photographers.”

This week, the picture of a 24-year-old Lebowitz smoking a cigarette, slightly slumped, in a white shirt and tight white trousers on the arm of a settee, goes on show at the Venice biennale, alongside the 40 other pictures from Portraits in Life and Death. Twenty-nine of them depict artists, writers and performers Hujar knew and admired from the downtown scene of 1970s New York – many of them reclining in a state of reverie that seems completely un-posed. There’s the writer Susan Sontag , supine on a bed with a pensive expression; the drag artist and underground film star Divine off duty and resting on some cushions; nightclub dancer TC, topless and drowsily seductive; poet and dance critic Edwin Denby with his eyes meditatively closed, his wrinkles mirroring the rumpled duvet behind him.

For Ukraine’s entry in this year’s Venice Biennale, two artists asked refugees to help them create an ‘acceptable’ portrait of a woman ravaged by war. We meet the team behind an astonishing project

In a room inside a Liverpool gallery, Saskia Pay, a young British actor dressed in studiedly ordinary jeans and top, is sitting on a chair in front of a camera. The guy with the camera, Ukrainian artist Andrii Dostliev, briefs a trio of other women, all of them refugees from Ukraine, on the type of image he is trying to create. He indicates the props they can use – a foil blanket, an arm sling, a dirty teddy bear, some makeup. The women nod. They don’t need much in the way of explanation. Everyone knows this kind of picture.

Unhesitatingly they move in, wrapping the foil blanket around Pay’s shoulders. “It would be more natural if she had marks on her face,” one of them points out, and another gets to work with the makeup. Next, hair. One of the women says that when she was living under occupation – in the town of Makariv, west of Kyiv, near Bucha, which fell under Russian control at the start of the full-scale invasion – she just pulled hers into a ponytail and it went unwashed for days on end. Another observes that it would be better if the model had some blood on her face. They give her the teddy bear to clutch to her body; they give her the arm sling.

Canadian author’s work, shared exclusively with the Observer, is to be shown alongside art by Goya

Margaret Atwood has written a new protest poem about the impact of war that will be unveiled at the Venice Biennale on Monday.

The poem, shared this weekend exclusively with the Observer , was written to be shown alongside more than 200 works, including the art of painters Francisco de Goya and Otto Dix , in an exhibition designed to emphasise the futility of human conflict.

Many have travelled far
to the place of fire and blackout,
the time without words.
Some have survived,
though not intact.
No one comes back.

Damaged people damage people,
and so on.