Wonders and marvels, the beautiful and the terrible, the celebratory and the morbid all fill the 59th Venice Biennale. Business as usual, you might say, but there are no trillionaire oligarch yachts moored by the Giardini and there is less razzmatazz all round. As well as being the first biennale since the pandemic, this is the first time the main exhibition has been predominantly devoted to women, trans and non-binary artists. It is also the first time that a black British artist, Sonia Boyce, has won the Golden Lion for best national pavilion.
We wander about, wearing masks and carrying tote bags. The Russian pavilion is closed (the curators resigned) and Ukraine has a large presence both off-site and in the dusty spaces between the national pavilions. In the wake of Black Lives Matter, Covid and escalating existential dread, this biennale was bound to be different. You are asked to remain silent as you traipse through the Italian pavilion, which seems like a parody of a Mike Nelson installation. I heard the sound of frantic drilling emanating from behind the doors of the Chinese pavilion. You can’t read the white texts painted on to the white walls of the empty and partially excavated German pavilion. And if you don’t use the torch on your phone, you won’t see a thing in the Swiss pavilion, which presents itself as a concert for which there is currently no music. (The darkened space, populated by shadowy wooden heads, hands and other body parts, smells of charred wood – make of that what you will.)
