Venice Biennale 2024 review: from the good to the bad to the downright ‘bizarre’

The Venice Biennale is “the artwork world’s nice beano”, mentioned Laura Freeman in The Instances. Each different 12 months, artists, collectors, curators and diverse hangers-on from throughout fly into the Italian metropolis to see what’s extensively thought of to be the planet’s most prestigious exhibition of up to date artwork. 

This newest iteration of the biennale – its sixtieth – is very “huge”. As ever, the occasion includes a “huge” central exhibition: this time entitled “Foreigners In all places”, it options the work of some 330 totally different artists – a report, even by biennale requirements. 

Exterior the primary occasion, there aren’t any fewer than 90 nationwide pavilions scattered throughout city, by which international locations compete for the coveted Golden Lion award; this 12 months, the prize was received by the indigenous Australian artist Archie Moore. 

As well as, there are numerous satellite tv for pc occasions and shows unfold city-wide – from a Willem de Kooning retrospective to an AI-assisted immersive expertise by which “jellyfish pulse throughout an asteroid belt”. Displays vary from the great to the unhealthy to the downright “weird” – however no matter you are , you may assure that “there’s all the time one thing higher, barmier and extra stunning not far away”.

The temper of this biennale is “solemn, involved, sometimes didactic”, mentioned Laura Cumming in The Observer. The preoccupations of the artists – “colonialism, migration, queer and indigenous rights, local weather disaster” – will shock no one, and geopolitics are inescapable: Russia is absent and Ruth Patir, Israel’s artist, has chosen to maintain her exhibition closed till “a ceasefire and hostage launch settlement is reached”. 

The nationwide pavilions are a blended bag. John Akomfrah, representing Britain, has produced an epic present consisting of eight movies enjoying out on a number of screens. Referring to every little thing from the English panorama to immigration to Chinese language poetry and African historical past, it’s “splendidly absorbing” in elements – however with a complete operating time of 5 hours, it is just too a lot to absorb. 

Spare your self and head to Poland’s pavilion, the place a bunch of Ukrainian artists have created a movie set up that sees survivors of Russian missile strikes try to duplicate the noise of approaching projectiles. Higher nonetheless is Bulgaria’s providing, by which “profoundly shifting revelations in regards to the nation’s Communist-era historical past” are recounted over audio system hidden inside gadgets of on a regular basis furnishings.

Lots of the Western world’s pavilions are “lacklustre and one dimensional”, mentioned Jackie Wullschläger within the Monetary Instances. The US’s Jeffrey Gibson, as an example, fields a disappointing set of “gaudy bead-encrusted sculptures alluding to Native American traditions”. 

The actual revelation at this 12 months’s biennale, nonetheless, is the primary exhibition – a present “so conventional that it’s radical”. The standard installations, movies and digital shows are nowhere to be seen: as a substitute, it affords an array of “unabashedly rapturous work and harmonious, formally satisfying sculptures”. There are works spanning 100 years by artists from Africa, Asia, the Center East and South America. 

It quantities to a historical past of modernism within the World South, with works by Argentine cubists, Iraqi modernists and Lebanese summary artists. Highlights embrace the Pakistani-American artist Salman Toor’s stunning “Night time Grove”, with figures “bathed in otherworldly inexperienced luminosity”; and Bárbara Sánchez-Kane’s “Prêt-à Patria”, an absurdist sculpture of goose-stepping Mexican troopers. The exhibition is a superb centrepiece to a largely spectacular biennale.

Numerous places, Venice, Italy (labiennale.org). Till 24 November