Florentina Holzinger\u2019s skinny dippers<\/p>\n
She\u2019s famous for her extreme performances and Florentina Holzinger upped the ante yet again in Venice with a postapocalyptic pavilion that opened with her suspended upside down from the clappers of a large bell. Inside, there was a woman riding a speedboat in circles, two others suspended at the top of a pole and another sitting entirely submerged in a tank. Oh, and no one was wearing any clothes. Viewers were invited to use two toilets so that their urine could be purified and pumped into the tank \u2013 but what looked like a sewage disaster in another section of the pavilion suggested that this project threatened to go dangerously awry. The whole thing was so transgressive that four cops turned up when I was watching to ask what the hell was going on. It was immediately the talk of the town. AN
Austrian pavilion, Giardini della Biennale<\/p>\n
Sanya Kantarovsky\u2019s eerie seances<\/p>\n
One of the great things about the Venice Biennale is that it allows you to see contemporary art in incredible historical spaces. Kantarovsky, 44, is a brilliant painter who was born in Moscow and whose family emigrated to the US when he was 10. His paintings are like stills from very intense films \u2013 just what is going on in the one where a naked man is crouching in seeming despair at the foot of a bed while a dog cheerfully sits on the pillow? They\u2019re displayed in book-lined rooms with incredible Murano glass chandeliers, and the show culminates with an incredibly detailed sculpture of the head of a boy, also in Murano glass. The atmosphere is like a weird seance between the centuries. AN
Basic Failure, Palazzo Loredan<\/p>\n
Gabrielle Goliath\u2019s hypnotic mourners<\/p>\n
Goliath was one of several artists who were caught up in controversy leading up to the biennale. The South African government banned her from appearing at the event because her piece \u2013 called Elegy \u2013 was a \u201chighly divisive\u201d tribute to a Palestinian poet. Goliath has staged the work anyway<\/a> in partnership with London arts centre Ibraaz, at the Chiesa di Sant\u2019Antonin, which is a short walk from the Giardini and Arsenale. It\u2019s well worth the trip and is arguably the exact kind of visceral hit the main show was missing this year. The performance itself is hypnotic, as screens show operatically trained female performers holding a single high note. Then, as their voice fades, they step down from a platform and are replaced by another singer. Made as a ritual of mourning for women killed in acts of sexualised or racialised violence, it was first conceived in 2015. LB Carrie Schneider\u2019s photographic curlsGrabs hold \u2026\u00a0Smell by Carrie Schneider at Arsenale. Photograph: David Levene\/The Guardian<\/p>\n The main In Minor Keys show might have turned off some, but there were several standouts: Akinbode Akinbiyi\u2019s street scenes, which are suspended from the roof and are taken all over Francophone Africa; the Chicano archive of Guadalupe Rosales; the devastating directory of lost businesses and lives in Gaza by Avi Mograbi. Perhaps chief among them though is Carrie Schneider\u2019s 1.5km-long photographic curls, which repeat over and over a still from Chris Marker\u2019s 1962 film La Jet\u00e9e. Some work fails in the vast caverns of the Arsenale, but Schneider\u2019s grabs hold. LB Lydia Ourahmane\u2019s coin-slot art<\/p>\n The British-Algerian artist Lydia Ourahmane<\/a> has created a delicate sculptural show, quiet and formally poised, whose components are drawn entirely from the city of Venice, and will be reabsorbed into its world when it ends. A beautiful new wooden pier will be handed over to a local cooperative; a bead curtain of Murano glass was threaded by inmates of the Giudecca women\u2019s prison; a contraption once used in a church to illuminate a Bellini now switches on the show\u2019s lights when you put a euro coin in the slot. It\u2019s a touching, thoughtful piece that works with, rather than against, the grain of the world. Next time, put her in the British pavilion. CH Lawrence Abu Hamdan\u2019s audio detective work<\/p>\n Canicula, an exhibition of eight new film works commissioned by Fondazione In Between Art Film, features a new installation by Lawrence Abu Hamdan<\/a> in his guise as a \u201cprivate ear\u201d, whereby he investigates human rights abuses using sound as evidence. In 450XL: the Story of a Fugitive Sound, he gathers testimony from demonstrators in Serbia who appear to have been dispersed from their peaceful, silent anti-government protest by a form of sonic weapon. It\u2019s beautifully installed in the hospital\u2019s old music room, surrounded by frescoes of musicians, its 15 screens resembling protest placards. CH Zhanna Kadyrova\u2019s origami deerMoving \u2026 Deer by Zhanna Kadyrova at the Ukrainian pavilion. Photograph: David Levene\/The Guardian<\/p>\n The huge concrete deer dangling irresolutely from a crane on a flatbed truck just beyond the entrance to the Giardini has come all the way across eastern and central Europe from the city of Pokrovsk in the Donetsk region of Ukraine. It was originally made for a park by artist Zhanna Kadyrova in 2018 \u2013 then, in 2024, on the fourth attempt and with difficulty, evacuated. In the Ukrainian pavilion in the Arsenale, watch touching footage of the origami deer\u2019s journey as it travels by road, pauses in different European cities, and is greeted by refugees from Pokrovsk, which is now under Russian military control. CH Zhang Zhoujie\u2019s digital chairs<\/p>\n There\u2019s a hell of a lot in the main exhibition to make you despair about the state of the world \u2013 it really lives up to its title, In Minor Keys. But if you make it right to the end of the Arsenale, you\u2019ll find that some Chinese artists have a very different take. In a cavernous, darkened space with a column of light in the centre, 10 of them have presented 10 off-the-wall proposals for how art might bring together human and artificial intelligence. There are sculptured model landscapes by Jiang Suxuan, a robot doing traditional calligraphy thanks to Nie Shichang and Chinese myth turned into a video game by the collective Game Science. Best of all, it ends in a lawn of \u201cdigital chairs\u201d by Zhang Zhoujie \u2013 and after all that, you really will need a sit down. AN The gull<\/p>\n The Austrian pavilion might have been the biggest draw this year, but in its shadow was another part of the biennale that also drew a crowd and didn\u2019t need nudity or someone hanging upside down in a bell to grab attention. Outside the Polish pavilion, surrounded by a neat white fence was a nesting gull<\/a>, which caused confusion during the press preview. Was it an art work? Or some form of ornithological provocation? No, it was just a bird that had decided the Giardini was a good a place as any to set up shop. A selfie with the artist is essential. 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Elegy, Chiesa di Sant\u2019Antonin<\/p>\n
In Minor Keys, Arsenale<\/p>\n
5 Works, Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation<\/p>\n
Canicula, Complesso dell\u2019Ospedaletto<\/p>\n
Ukrainian pavilion, Giardini della Biennale<\/p>\n
Chinese pavilion, Arsenale<\/p>\n