Competition for eyeballs is intense in Venice.
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There are 88 official national pavilions, eight more than the previous edition. The international exhibition at the Central Pavilion and the Arsenale, called “Foreigners Everywhere”, curated by Brazilian Adriano Pedrosa – the first openly queer curator in the history of the Biennale Arte – features a mind-boggling 331 artists and collectives.
Most will be unfamiliar to visitors as the purpose of the selection is to redress the marginalisation of minority voices and art forms (for example, it deliberately includes many textile works).
And then there are the at least 30 collateral events across the city, which include the Hong Kong and Macau exhibitions (because the cities do not have official pavilions).
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I also managed to catch two interesting shows at commercial galleries: Sarah Sze’s pulsating, total environments at Victoria Miro, and a group show full of mutant forms at Capsule Gallery’s new space in Venice.
How did people decide what to see during opening week? Two ways: word of mouth and keeping an eye out for queues – the longer they were, the better or more controversial the shows were likely to be.
Australia’s pavilion, which would go on to win its first Golden Lion for Best National Participation in the biennale, was among the first to get a queue, and deservedly so.
The aboriginal artist Archie Moore spent months creating a sombre, dignified memorial with chalk.
A sprawling, hand-drawn, genealogical chart that goes back 65,000 years extends from the walls to the ceiling within the all-black interior, with the exception of a massive, central platform covered in stacks of white paper records registering aboriginal deaths, including many that happened in jail and in police custody.
Egypt’s pavilion, which is showing a 45-minute-long film, Wael Shawky’s Drama 1882, requires queuing for at least that long. It is one of many pavilions this year where sounds and music play a major role.
Featuring a staged musical performance, the film is a mannered, dreamlike recreation of the disastrous nationalist revolution against Anglo-French imperialism in Egypt known as the Urabi revolt.
Shawky’s genius is seen elsewhere in Venice this year: his 2015 Al Araba Al Madfuna III is featured in the ambitious moving images exhibition organised by Qatar Museums, called “Your Ghosts Are Mine” (the catchy title is seen on tote bags being carried all over town); while his I Am Hymns of the New Temples (2023) features in an exhibition of the same name with sculptural installations at the Museo di Palazzo Grimani.
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The spot-the-queues method of selection usually worked out. The prize for the longest queue during the preview must go to the German pavilion, which is certainly one of the most interesting and deliciously divisive exhibitions.
The architect and curator, Cagla Ilk, has deviated from the kind of solo presentation typically favoured by national pavilions.
The first part of the duo exhibition, titled “Threshold”, features a dramatic sound, sculpture and film installation called Light to the Nations by the Israel-born artist Yael Bartana. It shows life on an imagined spaceship built on the principles of Jewish kabbalah mysticism.
Some visitors find it too white, too utopian. But the pairing with Ersan Mondtag’s Monument to an Unknown Person – an experiential, lifelike, gritty installation that is a tribute to his own grandfather, who died from asbestos exposure – creates an undertone of scepticism that ironises the utopian, futurist, race-based vision in the former work.
Inevitably, with wars raging, politics loom large. Since 2022, there has been no Russian presentation, while Ukrainian artists have continued to have a presence in Venice.
Poland is represented by a Ukrainian collective called Open Group – a last-minute change after the previous right-wing, socially conservative government was voted out in Warsaw.
Repeat After Me II is the grimmest version of karaoke imaginable. Ukrainian refugees imitate the sounds of firearms used during the war – from automatic rifles to mortars – and ask the audience to join in.
It is an unforgettable exercise that truly brings home the horror of living in a war zone.
Signs of solidarity with the Palestinians are seen all over the biennale, from the shut and heavily guarded Israeli pavilion – the artist and curators are refusing to open the door until there is a ceasefire in Gaza – to actual messages on artworks, such as Mexican artist Frieda Toranzo Jaeger’s Rage Is a Machine in Times of Senselessness, an unmissable multi-panel mural with “Viva Viva Palestina” written on one side.
Italian domestic politics have cast a shadow, too. After Giorgia Meloni’s right-wing, anti-migrant government took office in 2022, a new president of the Venice Biennale was put in place as the ruling party vowed to shake up what it considers a left-wing fiefdom promoting progressive values and political correctness.
The title of the curated international exhibition, “Foreigners Everywhere”, is therefore quite pointed. The curator has explained that it is meant to suggest that the feeling of estrangement can happen to all of us, anywhere.
Pedrosa’s zealous attempt to challenge the art historical canon (a project begun by Okwui Enwezor in 2015 and Cecilia Alemani in 2022) by flooding the international exhibition with marginalised textile artists, queer artists and artists representing postcolonial communities in the Global South, can therefore be seen as an urgent pushback, even if the result is a patronising, identity-led jamboree.
Indeed, the politicised nature of the exhibition extended to Hong Kong, with Pedrosa’s curatorial statement naming Hong Kong, Palestine and Puerto Rico as countries. Sporting what looked like trendy Alexander McQueen sneakers, Kevin Yeung Yun-hung, Hong Kong’s secretary for culture, sports and tourism, did not comment on the statement, as he made his first official biennale visit.
Given this year’s biennale is particularly crowded and cacophonous, exhibitions have to go the extra mile to stand out.
One way to do that has been to arrange live performances that can transform the experience of seeing flat videos or still installations. Hong Kong-born artist Isaac Chong Wai’s Falling Reversely (2021–2024), a powerful evocation of solidarity in the face of racial discrimination, drew a large crowd when Chong and fellow performers produced an engrossing, multisensory display of complex choreography.
The Filipino artist Joshua Serafin, a graduate of the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, gave a performance of their groundbreaking work Void, which they also brought to Hong Kong’s Tai Kwun in 2023 during the queer art extravaganza Myth Makers-Spectrosynthesis III.Hong Kong was also invoked in the Nordic Pavilion (shared by Finland, Norway and Sweden). “Altersea Opera”, initiated by third-generation Hong Kong-Swedish artist Lap-see Lam, is an opera about Lo Ting, the mythical half-fish, half-man indigenous symbol of Hong Kong’s muddled identity. Lam made it together with Finnish textile artist Kholod Hawash and the Norwegian composer Tze-yeung Ho, who is also of Cantonese descent.
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In a story that befits the biennale theme of liminal identities, Lo Ting is aboard a dragon ship searching for the Fragrant Harbour (Hong Kong’s literal English translation), a home it has never been to. The opera was performed live during opening week surrounded by scaffolding built by a Hong Kong master (now based in the UK), and guarded by a giant dragon head and tail that used to belong to a floating Chinese restaurant in Sweden.
It is a deeply personal project for Lam and Ho that delves into the idea of generational loss. The finale, which features Lam’s own father singing a line from Hong Kong singer Anita Mui’s The Years Flow like Water, drips with pathos. It is also a celebration of the third-culture freedom to pick and choose.
Looking impossibly cool in a beautifully embroidered kimono, actor Ivan Cheng, accompanied by the soaring voices of countertenor Steve Katona and alt-rock singer Bruno Hibombo, declares: “Lo Ting is back, baby, but it’s profoundly different.”
Although only one Asian venue saw long queues form outside during opening week – the Japanese pavilion, which houses Yuko Mohri’s delightful, fruit-powered sound and kinetic installation – there are plenty of other major, noteworthy Asian shows.
I have already written about Trevor Yeung’s Hong Kong exhibition, a defiant project in many ways that treads the line between saying too much and too little. Its tackling of post-human sensibilities and other ideas is ambitious and typically nuanced.Macau’s open-call approach to its Venice collateral event continues to yield positive surprises. This time, Wong Weng-cheong presents a striking, dystopian allegory for his home city, which is founded on desires.
At the Taiwan presentation, Abby Chen, an American curator born in mainland China, has sharpened the geopolitical immediacy of Yuan Goang-ming’s new Everyday War with several of the artist’s classic works. Personally, I would have preferred a more nuanced introduction than Yuan’s The 561st Hour of Occupation, which was shot during the 2014 student occupation of Taiwan’s parliament, but the exhibition has proven popular.
The Bangkok pavilion, with the support of private sponsors, helps compensate for the near total absence of Southeast Asian pavilions at Venice this year, apart from Singapore and the Philippines.
Its sprawling exhibition, “The Spirits of Maritime Crossing”, in an opulent palace overlooking the Grand Canal, contains some familiar works, but the new setting alters one’s encounter with them.
For example, Jakkai Siributr’s There’s No Place (2023), which was first unveiled at his retrospective at Hong Kong’s Chat, has a new immediacy because of the way the embroidered pieces by displaced Shan refugees are hung.Young founder of new Seoul art fair on championing emerging artists
Another queue-free but stunning exhibition is Pakistani-American artist Shahzia Sikander’s mid-career survey organised by the Cincinnati Art Museum and the Cleveland Museum of Art.
There are plenty of other major Asian artists present in a biennale that focuses on art made outside Euro-American culture and experiences (there was even a full-day Asian contemporary art symposium co-presented by the Asia Forum and the Asymmetry Art Foundation). Zeng Fanzhi, Yu Hong, Xu Bing and Chu Teh-chun are all big Chinese names that have solo shows in the city.
There are also seven Korean exhibitions outside the biennale, including a 30th-anniversary show by the Gwangju Biennale.
The Venice Biennale’s attempt to open itself up to diverse voices is hampered by money concerns. The significant cost of presenting an artist’s work – especially if it is a complex, multimedia presentation – is often borne by their gallery, and therefore involves a complex series of financial arrangements.
And when the shows happen, they face an uphill battle to compete with long-established local institutions that put on well-funded projects that have had more time to gestate.
The Pinault Collection presentations, the Gallerie dell’Accademia, the Fondazione Prada, the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo and the local Benedictine community have produced most of the best-regarded shows at Venice this year – the latter, at the Benedictine church San Giorgio Maggiore, is hosting Belgian artist Berlinde De Bruyckere’s profound “City of Refuge III” exhibition.
This may be why Enrico Polato, the Italian owner of Shanghai’s Capsule Gallery, recently opened a Venice outpost to promote young artists such as Leelee Chan, Catalina Ouyang and Young-jun Tak. Outside biennale madness, a real community emerges, he says.
Not being fortunate enough to have a Venice base, I am seriously thinking of a return visit. I do have time – all the major shows last until November 24.
Check out @enidtsui on Instagram for a glimpse of my favourite exhibitions in Venice, so far.
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