Special Section: 61st Venice Biennale
If art and its exhibition are a kind of gnomon to guide us to the right time of reckoning, quite a few pavilions showed us the length of the shadows and the nuanced complexities (sometimes as amusing as they were alarming) that illuminate the world at this moment.
By Steven Henry Madoff
Still Joy?
In the face of the ongoing, catastrophic war, the Ukrainian exhibition proposes that joy, despite everything, is a sign of strength and resistance.
By Justin Apice
Collective Respiration: Embodied Knowledge in Minor Keys
Despite little evidence to support the harboring of hope, these works allow us to imagine that through collective care and action, renewal and repair are possible.
By Romy Cohen
Paradise Must Not Last Forever
The Latvian Pavilion does a far better job of embodying intimate and convivial universes created by artists compared to the Biennale’s overstuffed and incohesive main exhibitions in the Giardini and Arsenale.
By Colleen Dalusong
Liquid Tongues: Expanding Language, Limiting Experience
There is a difference between making deaf people the topic of an exhibition and actually being inclusive of them in making the exhibition.
By Chaieun Lee
Our New Teacher
Our agency is parodied and mourned by this chattering, oneiric devil as we cruise at ballistic speed not only toward the conjugation of democracy's collapse but toward the collapse, too, of the division between human and machine.
By Steven Henry Madoff
Whose Wet Dream Is This?
The body becomes its own archive of the exhibition’s demands in the Austrian Pavilion, and this visibility raises the very question it might intend to foreground: Who is this visibility for?
By Kiera McIntosh
Rehearsals for Possible Futures
Through smirks, dry delivery, and the revelation of constructed stagecraft, the Danish Pavilion places small cracks in the fantasies and realities of performance and desire.
By Naomi Moser
A Shift in the Air
Venice was unexpectedly hopeful, not because it offered solutions, but because it reminded me that there are other stories, other histories, other ways to understand the world.
By Diana Sardaryan
The Interstitial Stitch: Goen Choi’s Meridian in Venice
These arced movements spark the imagination, raising questions about how borders shift across national lines, and how such artistic activity can expose and unsettle the invisible infrastructures underpinning a nation's governance.
By Hyun Sung
Minor Life in the Embrace
Through the clever use of weighted dolls, the exhibition proposes that tenderness also holds a sense of burden, both symbolic and actual.
By Hongjin Zhou
The Sovereign Fox Persuades Law to Dissolve into Politics
The juridical ambitions of Zasha Colah for her edition of the biennale were laudable, but elusive as her symbolic fox.
By Sophie Barfod
Not Foreign Enough: Revisiting the 2024 Venice Biennale
A year after the Biennale’s latest edition, the philosophical and curatorial questions of Otherness and difference implicit in Artistic Director Adriano Pedrosa’s title, Foreigners Everywhere, feel all the more pressing to address.
By Abbas A Malakar
Of Snakes and Mirrors
What if nature, transfigured by a mirror, redirected its gaze at us, human beasts?
By Bernardo José de Souza
At the Edge of Ailey
While the exhibition offers a dizzying spectacle and aims to transcend disciplinary borders, it remains rooted in largely static visual art forms—ironic for a show dedicated to a master of movement.
By Tom Koren