In Venice, the Biennale Goes from the Heavens to the Slammer

Pavilions for Ethiopia, Australia, and the Holy See revisit the ‘outsider’ shibboleth.

O n Thursday I wrote about Foreigners Everywhere, the Venice Biennale’s mammoth, anchor international exhibition. It’s the show in the Biennale’s main pavilion that, thematically and in theory, guides the hundred or so national pavilions. Foreigners Everywhere focuses on migration, xenophobia, and art by outsiders, exiles, and immigrants. Most of the artists are — or were, since many are dead — from the so-called Global South, more or less places south of the equator.

Today, I’ll write about the national pavilions, where I saw lots of bustling predictability, some bravado but little bravery, lots of clichés and cant, though no preachiness or subversiveness. Not a lot of heart or hope, but some beauty, if not in abundance.

Before heading to Venice, I saw Madayin, an exhibition on Aboriginal Australian bark painting at the Asia Society in New York, so Archie Moore’s kith and kin in the Biennale’s Australian pavilion was a special attraction. Moore (b. 1970) is Australian and part Aboriginal and part British. His art treats the colonization of Aboriginals in the context of massacres, racism, and dispossession. Both a sculpture and a wall drawing, kith and kin occupies the entire pavilion, with 200 feet of black wall on which he wrote in chalk what he imagines is his genealogy over 65,000 years — more than 2,400 generations, each name surrounded by a chalked square. The database at Ancestry.com must have blown a circuit.

In the center of the room in a dark, reflective pool are tables on which he neatly arranged piles of coroner’s reports, names redacted — around 400 reports on bright white sheets, each detailing a suspicious Aboriginal death in prison or police custody in Australia since the early 1990s. The piles of paper are spotlit and look like white blocks of stone.

The chalked wall isn’t dazzling. It’s eerie, ghostly, and uncanny. The mass of white chalk marks on the wall grows denser and unreadable as it reaches the ceiling and covers it, so it looks like tiny stars in the sky. Medayin’s bark paintings of abstract clusters of stars taught me a little about stars’ spiritual resonance with Aboriginals. The wall also brought to mind the masses of photographs of the dead from 9/11 and the nearly 50,000 names of America’s Vietnam War dead on Maya Lin’s memorial in Washington, D.C. Some of the passages of chalk are smudged, telling us how unclear genealogy is. The contrast between the chalked wall — ephemeral and infinite — and the clinical look of the paper piles, tables, and shiny black pool is effective.

Moore is also concerned with the erasure of woe and injustice, a core theme of victim ideology. Alas, our joys, hurts, and very selves are all, sooner or later, erased. Such is life. If there’s something universal about Moore’s project, it’s the juxtaposition of the spiritual, celestial, natural world of stars and sky, birth and death, against our manmade, technocratic world of records, laws, and systems. One is forever, the other isn’t.

So much cant and so many hoaxes come with Native victimology in America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand that I’ve turned into a hardened skeptic wary of shticks. Guilty white liberals are gullible as well as vain. Aren’t they Moore’s primary market? Kith and kin is going into an Australian museum. A generation from now, will people get it? I don’t know. It will probably land in storage by then.

Moore and the Australian pavilion won the Biennale’s coveted Golden Lion, equivalent of the Best Picture Oscar, for the best national pavilion. I’m not surprised. Like every other elite award these days, the Biennale’s are political and identity-driven. Two artists won Golden Lions for lifetime achievement. Nil Yalter (b. 1938) is a French feminist artist and a childhood immigrant from Turkey. I’d never heard of her but think her big Biennale installation — Exile Is a Hard Job — is whiny. I didn’t know Anna Maria Maiolino (b. 1942), either. She’s Brazilian now but was born in Italy. Her soft-clay sculptures are beautiful. They’re lustrous, sinuous, earthy, of course, and alive. A little goes a long way. A big space packed with them seems both obsessive and gabby.

Neither Yalter nor Maiolino has exhibited at a Biennale before. I like that since, these days, I’m partial to outsiders and, to me, fresh faces. Very few of the artists in Foreigners Everywhere are Biennale veterans. “Spread the wealth,” I say.

I never succeed in picking Academy Award winners, though I tend to see nearly all the nominated movies in my flight-of-fancy stab at knowing something intelligible in another form of popular culture today. So, no surprise, I think the Ethiopian pavilion, not the Australian, is the best at the Biennale — for its nuance, the quality of the art, and its emphasis on hope and the future. Plus, it’s filled with very good painting. I visited after hours of looking at contemporary art that was everything but painting, so Tesfaye Urgessa’s work was a healing, food-for-the-soul moment. Urgessa (b. 1983) is Ethiopia-born but worked for 13 years in Germany as a translator at new immigrant-housing complexes. His dozen or so paintings, many life-size, depict groups of his subjects, part of the massive wave of refugees engineered by Angela Merkel at the end of her too many years as kaiserin.

Urgessa is a fresh, generous painter who loves paint and form. His figures are young, old, and in between, arrayed at a table, and no one looks like a victim. Some are tired, others are anxious or puzzled or curious or ready to roll. I like Urgessa’s energy, honesty, and embrace of individuals as opposed to groups.

The Japanese pavilion — here’s a snapshot report — is filled by Yuko Mohri’s Compose. Its theme is human ingenuity, which is good. I like hope and positive thinking. A gallery mimicking improvised fixes in Tokyo’s prone-to-leaking subway system — hoses, faucets, tubes, buckets, and umbrellas — is fun, kinetic sculpture but inane. And someone didn’t get the memo that pavilions were to be about migration, outsiders, and exiles. Maybe the buckets weren’t made in Japan. In another space, electrodes plugged into moist, decomposing fruit create electrical signals. Hooked to a speaker, the signals create moans and groans. It’s unseemly without being lascivious and, as a consequence, it seems trite.

The Egyptian pavilion presents Drama 1882, a 45-minute operetta dramatizing an 1882 peasant uprising that led to British military intervention. Viziers sing and muse and puzzle, and there’s a donkey that reminds me of Francis from the old Donald O’Connor movies, though, Francis, I know, was a mule. It’s a riff on Gilbert and Sullivan, colorful and jokey, but, in Arabic, inscrutable to Vermonters like me. It’s a critique of imperialism, in which foreigners imprison the locals in their own country. So cute, it has no bite. And jabs at the British Empire? Trodden in the extreme.

The Holy See’s pavilion is on the other side of Venice, on the island of Giudecca, opposite the Dorsoduro district. Il Redentore, a perfect Palladio church façade, is on Giudecca. So is a women’s prison, which hosts the Vatican’s pavilion and also constitutes, with many other features, a total work of art. Prisoners give visitors guided tours through makeshift galleries, including the staff café, on the walls of which are not-very-compelling Corita Kent posters opposing war and violence. Kent is an American nun turned social-justice artist who died in 1986. Covering the façade of the prison chapel is a mural by Maurizio Cattelan (b. 1960) depicting the soles of his dirty, wrinkled feet. It evokes Caravaggio’s religious scenes of peasants with dirty feet, as well as Jesus’s feet-washing as a form of supplication of the powerful to the poor. It’s effective.

Yes, that Cattelan. His wall installation of a banana duct-taped to a wall — winner of my “Work of Fart” award — just sold at Sotheby’s for $6.2 million. He needs to do lots of penance for aesthetic flimflam. The Chinese-born Justin Sun, a cryptocurrency billionaire, bought the thing. The ladies behind bars on Giudecca should give him some tough love about how that money could have transformed lives.

The exhibition, or experience, titled With My Own Eyes, proposes that visitors are witnesses to the humanity of prisoners, whose status is the lowest in society. The experience is supposed to be revelatory, but I’ve been in prisons before. I was in Connecticut politics for years and, of course, had a crony or two or three who spent time in the slammer. A prison in Venice, though, is new, and incongruous. There’s so much beauty there, and the sea suggests infinity, but the prison is a prison, and in the middle of Giudecca on a drab little canal.

There are lovely large and small paintings of the children of inmates by the contemporary Italian-British artist collective, begun in 2004, that goes by the name Claire Fontaine. Hanging from the chapel ceiling are colorful, elegant textile sculptures made by the Brazilian artist Sonia Gomes (b. 1948).

The inmates — the insiders — are among the ultimate outsiders as convicts, prisoners, and exiles from general society, so their experiences and performances make sense. Incarceration is only one side of the coin, though. We never learn what crimes put them there. That’s the other side, so I don’t see them as victims. I believe in redemption so, overall, the Holy See’s pavilion was a positive experience

The most moving work of art — part of the architecture — is a big window opening to the prison’s interior garden. It’s the only window in the prison that has no bars. The garden’s not a pretty space, but it’s open and green.

With My Own Eyes is certainly different, and for the inmates the buzz of artists and the public must ease the monotony and loneliness of their everyday lives. The inmate tours are in Italian, but I was able to understand pieces here and there, including that the Peronist Pope Francis visited when the Biennale opened. It was the first papal visit ever to the Venice Biennale. He’s not one to miss a photo op, and no bit of elite, Champagne-socialist chic escapes his embrace. I hear he rushed afterward by speedboat, Hawaii Five-O–style, to a Gaza pity party. Holy Hezbollah, that boat moved so fast that his bespoke papal keffiyeh nearly blew off! He belongs at this Biennale because he’s tired, old, and ready to hang up his mitre, aligning him with so many of the Biennale’s themes and approaches.

Nothing at the Venice Biennale offended me much, and there’s more new art there during its run than anywhere else. What I saw this round is certainly better than almost all the biennials I’ve seen at the Whitney. It might be wishful thinking on my part, but its themes of migration, xenophobia, colonialism, diversity, and inclusion seem not empty but tinny and stale, or a parody of themselves, or more ritualistic than anything else. When it comes to woke ideology, we’ve been there, done that, it hasn’t been pretty, and it’s time to move to the next chapter.

Let’s hope the 2026 Venice Biennale offers new thinking. Since that’s America’s 250th birthday, and we have indeed changed the world, the theme of democracy wouldn’t be a bad one.