There are dozens of pavilions at the Venice Biennale – some housed within the Arsenale and Giardini, the two main spaces, and many not. It's virtually impossible to see them all, no matter how tempted you are. This poses a challenge: how to choose the most important ones? To help, we put together a list of the 10 best pavilions at this year's Bienal.
10.Australia
Marco Fusinato almost bursts the walls of the Australian Pavilion with his sound installation DISASTERS , in which the artist performs live playing an electric guitar at deafening volume. (Earplugs are not provided.) As Fusinato plays his music, a complex technological loop transmits images generated after entering undisclosed terms into search engines. These images, which appear on huge LED screens, run almost the entire length of the pavilion and constitute what Fusinato called the score.
9.Romania
When it won the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival in 2018, Touch Me Not by Adina Pintilie, polarized critics with its clinical portrayals of forms of unsimulated sex rarely depicted on screen. For the Romania Pavilion, Pintilie returned to this resource by reconfiguring some images of Touch Me Not, in two new video installations as part of an ongoing research project. By paying so much attention to disabled and largely non-heterosexual individuals, Pintilie aims to promote a broader definition of intimacy and greater empathy between her interviewees and the viewer, a device emphasized by getting subjects to look back at themselves. While most visitors only frequent the Giardini pavilion, the best part of this exhibition is located across the city in the New Gallery of the Romanian Institute of Culture and Humanistic Research. The must-see work is a virtual reality piece where the viewer can look, touch and even see through the eyes of Pintilie's subjects.
8.Brazil
The Brazilian Pavilion stood out from the crowd for its dry humour. In this pavilion, the spectator enters through a gigantic sculpture of an ear. Everywhere are other “oddities”: a sculpture of a severed tongue oozing blood, a suspended head that bobs up and down (and threatens to strike onlookers who aren't careful), and more. The fun and games end when he finds a video with rhythmically cut zooms on people's hands and feet, which are interspersed with scenes of revolt in Brazil. In the hands of Jonathas de Andrade, his native country, Brazil, is a sick body in need of healing.
7. Portugal
Vampires inhabiting a drifting spaceship are the subject of Pedro Neves Marques. In the unusual Pavilhão de Portugal, there is a show that functions as an intelligent play with horror and science fiction trappings and a tender meditation on bodily transformation. While there are several elegant poems printed on long sheets of paper, three films are the main attraction here, each focusing on five people traveling among the stars with the goal of reaching some unknown destination. In one film, one of the passengers mysteriously removes a retainer equipped with a set of fangs and places it on a table; in another, the protagonists read X-Men comics (mutant superheroes). While there's nothing overtly weird about these movies, vampires have been used as metaphors for people going through a world where just about everything works differently. Neves Marques' creatures function in a similar way - they look like us, but they've been marginalized to the point where they no longer live on the same planet. Despite everything, they find means of survival.
6. latvia
The big surprise at the Biennial was the Latvia Pavilion, a beautiful collection of ceramics by the duo Skuja Braden. None of the sculptures here are of the dramatic scale normally seen in the Bienal pavilions, but all are striking in their strangeness. Some appear to be misshapen plates that hang over the side of tables, and others may function as vases; one is even a functional fountain, and another takes the form of a tiled wall. Fish, snails, snakes, dalmatians and plump women appear throughout, as do Buddha images, a nod to the artists' Zen faith.
5.Mexico
Pavilion group shows are rarely, if ever, a good idea, but Mexico has tried the format for its entry this time, an exhilarating four-person exhibition that evokes the country's indigenous cultures through conceptual art. The best work in this pavilion is the Tetzahuitl (2019–22), from Fernando Palma Rodríguez, a group of 43 dresses that are arranged to move in a pattern similar to what a Nahuatl shaman might do using machines. The movement of the dresses, each representing a female student who disappeared in 2014 in a mass kidnapping that sparked national protests, is unpredictable and a little frightening. Meanwhile, Mariana Castillo Deball designed a wooden floor engraved with patterns reminiscent of colonialist mapping. Naomi Rincón Gallardo has a video with performers disguised as well-known Oaxacan deities. Finally, Santiago Borja has 23 fabrics made in collaboration with weavers from Tsotsil, who translated a human DNA sequence into hanging abstractions.
4.England
This exuberant pavilion Sonia Boyce features a range of photography, sound and video, and focuses on the under-recognized contributions of black British musicians to their country's culture. In the central work of this pavilion, a video installation called Feeling Her Way(2022), five singers - Errollyn Wallen, Jacqui Dankworth, Poppy Ajudha, Sofia Jernberg and Tanita Tikaram - meet for the first time at the famous Abbey Road Studios to record together for the first time. The group spans generations and musical genres, and varied sounds that ironically produce an unusual harmony. In the other galleries, Boyce, who is the first black woman to represent England at the Venice Biennale, features videos of each singer separately, along with memorabilia related to black British musicians she has collected. Visually striking and concise, this pavilion suggests a form of unity in a community that has long been invisible in the British mainstream.
3. U.S
Perhaps one of the most anticipated pavilions at the Bienal, Simone Leighshow, was the first woman of African descent to have an American flag designed. This pavilion's elegant, calm sculptures unfold intertwined stories of anti-Black racism and misogyny, referencing photographs that promoted pernicious stereotypes and colonialist displays that cemented harmful attitudes among white Europeans. As usual, Leigh's focus is specifically on black women, whose bodies augment the pitcher-like shapes. It's a lot to take in, but Leigh works her magic, and the pavilion never feels overly academic.
2.Sami
Typically, this structure is labeled the Nordic Pavilion; this year, however, it was renamed in honor of the Sámi, the only indigenous people native to Europe. The art on display by Pauliina Feodoroff, Máret Ánne Sara and Anders Sunna lived up to the pavilion's ambitions. Works are available that allude to the carnage wrought by Norse colonialism against the Sámi, but any violence on display is balanced by a deeply rooted belief in the power of resistance. Two-part sculpture of Sara Du-ššan-ahttanu-ššanit is composed of the tendons of reindeer, key animals in the Sámi culture, which are added with various aromas; one must smell of fear, the other of hope. Not far from this is Sunna's positively epic painting, Illegal Spirits of Sápmi (2022), which traces 50 years of activism since the passage of a law in Sweden that protects the rights of indigenous peoples. The installation literally contains history – it contains shelves that house archival materials documenting court cases brought by the Sámi.
1.France
Zineb Sedira stole the show early on with its pavilion focused on the movement to achieve Algerian independence, as manifested in films of the 1960s. The subject is heady material, though Sedira has tackled it in a way that feels broadly accessible. This pavilion features sets inspired by films such as The Stranger (1967), by Luchino Visconti, and F for Fake , by Orson Welles.(1973), along with a film by Sedira and art related to the research he compiled while making this exhibition. At once information-dense and lucid in a way unusual for Biennale pavilions, its exhibition explores a legacy of anti-colonial activism that has historically been a bitter pill for the French to swallow, and it does so in a hopeful and moving way.
