I’ve a favourite pavilion—should you’ll allow me a superlative, regardless of not having seen each single one. For 5 days, I ran round Venice pounding cappuccinos, my step depend uptick fueled by FOMO. Nonetheless, this was not sufficient time to see all the pieces I wished. (Is it simply me, or are there extra good collateral reveals than ever earlier than?)
By no means thoughts—I can’t get the Austria pavilion out of my head. There, within the Giardini, the Ukrainian ballet dancer Oksana Serheieva rehearses on the barre. I watched for some time, mesmerized, earlier than my biennial mind kicked in and requested “Why?” and “What does it imply?” I turned, as one does, to the wall textual content, which knowledgeable me that, throughout occasions of political upheaval, the Soviet Union state tv station would play Swan Lake on a loop, in lieu of normal programming. The gesture was clear: Serheieva, in collaboration with artist Anna Jermolaewa, was rehearsing—for a Russian regime change.
The piece, titled Rehearsal for Swan Lake (2024), captured the absurdity of seeing artwork—specifically, a biennial—whereas ready for warfare and genocide to finish. It spoke as nicely to the ways in which methods artwork can really feel like a frivolous distraction from all of it, whereas additionally defraying utter helplessness and despair, for these privileged sufficient. It additionally evoked, searingly, the absurd methods grand occasions rub up towards day by day life. A lot of different works within the pavilion did the identical: Analysis for Sleeping Positions (2006) is a video of Jermolaewa in a Viennese practice station, looking for a snug method to sleep on a bench—the identical bench she slept on each evening for per week in 1989, when she first arrived in Austria earlier than winding up in a refugee camp. Revisiting the bench years later, she struggles to get snug: armrests have since been put in to stop relaxation. In one other room, we’re confronted by The Penultimate (2017), boasting crops that had been used as symbols of protest throughout numerous struggles. There’s Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution of 2010; Ukraine’s Orange Revolution of 2004; and Myanmar’s Saffron Revolution of 2007, amongst others. Right here, poetic gestures are political, however what’s most felt is the gulf between the 2. When you like this one, you’ll most likely like Poland, too.
Strolling round, questioning if we had been going to warfare with Iran and the way former President Donald Trump’s trial was entering into New York (I hear he fell asleep), this Kathy Acker quote, from an essay on Goya, bought caught in my head. “The one response towards an insufferable society is equally insufferable nonsense,” she as soon as mentioned. Plenty of pavilions felt maximalist, chaotic, absurd—on the lesser finish of the spectrum, a handful, particularly France and Greece, felt unnecessarily immersive or over-produced. (So many soundtracks; why?!) I didn’t get the hype surrounding the German pavilion within the Giardini, with its asbestos and its fog machine—however the trek to its second location, on Certosa Island, is price it; simply belief me. Within the Arsenale, Lebanon and Eire are one of the best, although the latter was too violent for me.
My two different favorites are consensus-approved: Japan and the Czech Republic. Within the first, an set up by sculptor Yuko Mohri looks like a Rube Goldberg stop-gap for a crumbling infrastructure, as if somebody requested Rachel Harrison to repair a leak. An elaborate, tube-and-bucket equipment is punctuated with fruits, mild, bulbs, and devices; the entire thing channels the kinetic vitality of a drip and harnesses energy from unsellable produce to be able to produce mild and sounds.
Within the Czech pavilion, Eva Koťátková approxomates the neck of Lenka, a giraffe captured in Kenya in 1954, then taken to the Prague Zoo, the place she died two years later. Koťátková’s model is hole, bisected, and supine; you may have a seat inside. It’s without delay lovable and grotesque—which is usually how I really feel at a zoo (Hello incarcerated giraffe; It’s terrible you’re right here, but I’m so joyful to satisfy you.) However nobody may reply the query gnawing at me: is her sculpture fabricated from actual leather-based?
In that case, that is likely to be extra nonsense than I can bear. This weekend, I’m off to see Croatia and Nigeria, two pavilions abuzz. Examine again—possibly I’ll have one thing so as to add, and possibly somebody will reply my query in regards to the giraffe.