Eliana Willis

Heavy black curtains conceal the entrance to the Malta pavilion at the Venice Biennale, but if they open at the right moment, you’ll catch a glimpse of streaking lights falling from the ceiling like meteorites trailing through the night sky.
The piece is Arcangelo Sassolino’s Diplomazija Astuta, at once a technological marvel (the artist uses induction technology to liquify 400 pounds of steel each day) and a reference to one of Malta’s most historic Baroque paintings.
“Induction is really magic,” Sassolino told Artnet News. “Through a magnetic field, it can turn steel from [room temperature] to 1500 degrees Celsius [2732 degrees Fahrenheit], which is the point which steel melts.”
A large metal armature stands inside the pavilion, concealing a computer-programmed system that feeds steel coils into the induction machine. The installation is inspired by Caravaggio’s altarpiece, The Beheading of St. John the Baptist (1608), at St. John’s Co-Cathedral in Valletta, Malta, and reflects the artist’s famed mastery of dramatic lighting.
Arcangelo Sassolino, Diplomazija Astuta (2022), Malta pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Photo by Massimo-Penzo.
“When steel is melted, the energy is transformed into light,” Sassolino said. “There is darkness and then a moment of light, and then the return of darkness.”
The steel collects in seven pools of water, where the light extinguished as the steel hisses and sinks to the bottom of the basin, also made of steel. Workers at the pavilion collect the steel each day and send it back to the factory that produced the original coil, working with Carbonsink, a “climate solutions provider,” according to its website, to offset its CO2 production.
The basins of water are arranged to mirror the placement of the figures in the Caravaggio painting, creating a 21st-century take on the artist’s depiction of the brutal scene.
The flaming steel is set against a backdrop of a large steel plate, titled Metal and Silence, on which is etched an inscription by Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci that features text from Ezekiel 37 and Psalm 139 in a combination of Aramaic, Hebrew, Latin, and Greek. The pavilion’s third artist is Brian Schembri, who composed a soundtrack for the installation, and the curators are Keith Sciberras and Jeffrey Uslip.
Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci, Metal and Silence, part of the Malta pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Photo by Massimo-Penzo.
The over 12.5-by-16-foot piece is an exact match to the dimensions of the original Caravaggio altarpiece, which he painted during a brief stint in Malta, after he was exiled from Rome in 1606.
Caravaggio was briefly inducted as into the Knights of Malta before being cast out of the order, likely due to a physical altercation with another knight. Two years later, he was dead.
“Going to Malta was supposed to save Caravaggio’s life,” Sassolino said.
See more photos of the pavilion below.
Arcangelo Sassolino, Diplomazija Astuta (2022), Malta pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Photo by Massimo-Penzo.
Arcangelo Sassolino, Diplomazija Astuta (2022), Malta pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Photo by Massimo-Penzo.
Arcangelo Sassolino, Diplomazija Astuta (2022), Malta pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Photo by Massimo-Penzo.
Arcangelo Sassolino, Diplomazija Astuta (2022), Malta pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Photo by Massimo-Penzo.
Arcangelo Sassolino, Diplomazija Astuta (2022), Malta pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Photo by Massimo-Penzo.
Arcangelo Sassolino, Diplomazija Astuta (2022), Malta pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Photo by Massimo-Penzo.
Arcangelo Sassolino, Diplomazija Astuta (2022), Malta pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Photo by Massimo-Penzo.
Arcangelo Sassolino, Diplomazija Astuta (2022), Malta pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Photo by Massimo-Penzo.
Arcangelo Sassolino, Diplomazija Astuta (2022), Malta pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Photo by Massimo-Penzo.
Arcangelo Sassolino, Diplomazija Astuta (2022), Malta pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Photo by Massimo-Penzo.
Arcangelo Sassolino, Diplomazija Astuta (2022), Malta pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Photo by Massimo-Penzo.
Arcangelo Sassolino, Diplomazija Astuta (2022), Malta pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Photo by Massimo-Penzo.
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After the past two calamitous years, our memories of 2011 may be hazy, but the year was politically significant for several uprisings around the globe, from Occupy Wall Street to the Arab Spring. But what happened after the protests were kettled off by police and eventually dissipated? How has populist anger fomented ten years on? Stan Douglas asks these questions with his two-part pavilion for Canada in Venice. 
In a triumphant turn, Douglas looks at four distinct uprisings that were different in character but similarly driven by disenfranchisement and a sense of frustration with social systems. The acclaimed Los-Angeles and Vancouver-based artist is a key voice internationally working in image-based media, and once again, he has turned to music to peg his story, this time employing two popular genres that served as anthems for the political turbulences that rocked 2011.
Across four monumental photographs that have been painstakingly staged and stitched together, as well as a major two-channel film installation, the question we are left with at the end of viewing both halves of “1848 ≠ 2011” is: where have we arrived at since 2011, and what are we left with? The answer is, of course, deeply unsettling, as we face unprecedented and ongoing challenges with social ruptures, and race and class inequality, and police brutality.
Stan Douglas New York City, 10 October 2011, from the series “2011 ≠ 1848” (2021). © Stan Douglas. Courtesy of the artist, Victoria Miro, London and Venice, and David Zwirner, New York, London, Paris and Hong Kong.
For his project in Venice, commissioned by the National Gallery of Canada and curated by Reid Shier, Douglas has drawn a line between 2011 and 1848, a year of several revolutions across Europe known as the Springtime of Nations. This marked the beginning of the end of absolute monarchy rule in Europe and prompted a major shift toward democracy and liberalism.
“1848 is exactly what I thought about when these events were going on [in 2011], except that the kind of democratic reform that 1848 brought, the kinds of nations that resulted from those revolutions—that did not happen this time,” Douglas told Artnet News.  “While 1848 allowed for some democratic reform, it was clear that this was not going to be the case with what happened in 2011.“
In his presentation at the pavilion, four monumental photographs string together four disparate occurrences. In the first, diverse groups of people sit in the twilit streets of Cairo, incubating what would become the Arab Spring; in the next photograph, we see the Vancouver 2011 riots, which spilled into the streets when a local hockey team lost the Stanley Cup—Douglas sees this moment as a catharsis that had less to do with sports than with frustrations around gentrification in the city, which had become increasingly unaffordable due to speculative real estate. Another image portrays a standoff in the Hackney riots in London; and the final scene is of police kettling Occupy Wall Street protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City.
Installation view of “Stan Douglas: 2011 ≠ 1848,” at the Canada Pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Jack Hems. Courtesy of the artist, the National Gallery of Canada, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner.
“Even though these events were not organized by a political party, there was an intuition on the part of the participants that something was wrong and that something needed to be done, even though they did not quite know what that something was,” said Douglas.
Douglas’s works often balance on a razor-sharp tipping point, depicting a moment in flux. He recreates historical events but artificially stitches together archival and staged images to produce a kind of hyperrealism. And while he usually mines niche or overlooked events in history, what is poignant about this most recent project is that it focuses on events that we all witnessed in real time on our cellphones.
These cathedral-worthy photographs find their proper setting in Venice, a city brimming with larger-than-life works that tell a story in multiple acts on a single canvas. Douglas’s images leave you similarly overwhelmed by their catharsis and clarity; from edge to edge, the photographs borrow the raw narrative power of Brueghel and the emotional electricity of Titian, but with a Kubrickian attention to detail. Each image, which uses largely actors, takes months to create.
Stan Douglas, Vancouver, 15 June 2011, from the series “2011 ≠ 1848” (2021). ©Stan Douglas. Courtesy of the artist, Victoria Miro, London and Venice, and David Zwirner, New York, London, Paris, and Hong Kong.
“It was not a revolution but an expression of political despair,” said Douglas of why he grouped these four events. “There was a lot of anger, frustration about the lack of representation of their interests by their local governments in very diverse ways. But my frame is to say that these are not just policing events, these are political representations.”
The second half of the presentation, a film called ISDN, is, somewhat inconveniently, a vaporetto ride away from the Giardini at the Magazzino del Sale, a 500-year-old salt storage house. The large cavernous room is much better suited to film than the light-filled Canada pavilion, but it feels unfortunate that the two bodies of work cannot rub up against each other.
On two separate screens, the camera hovers around a pair of grime rappers, TrueMendous and LadySanity in London, and two Mahraganat lyricists, Raptor and Youssef Joker in Egypt. Mahraganat emerged as a street music in the mid-2000s, and although it is one of the most popular genres in the country, it is controversial with the government and has even been banned from being played publicly.
Grime has a similar history in the U.K.; Lethal Bizzle’s 2011 song “Pow!” was de-platformed and banned from music venues, as authorities claimed it would incite violence. After tuition fees were raised nationally in 2010, the song became an anthem of the frustration, and anger towards the hike in costs folded into the race-based protests in Hackney. 
Stan Douglas ISDN (2022). Still from two-channel video installation. © Stan Douglas. Courtesy of the artist, Victoria Miro, London and Venice, and David Zwirner, New York, London, Paris, and Hong Kong.
As the lyricists race through fierce verses pounding at a blistering 140 beats per minute, Douglas conjures a fake call-and-response session, bringing together two music genres that emerged out of states of disenfranchisement in distinct communities in both countries. (Despite their differences, both genres’ beats are made on Fruity Loops, a low-cost and often pirated software.)
On screen, the musicians vent the frustrations of everyday life, weaving in triumphant boasts about self-determination. As LadySanity raps: “Whole city alight / searching for revolution tonight… riot vans on move tonight / angry faces on the news tonight.” The Egyptian rappers’ verses are less explicitly political, but as Douglas noted, the very act is transgressive since the genre is officially banned.
Whatever lost futures haunt the photographic images Douglas painstakingly recreated in “2011 ≠ 1848,” the music that pulsates through ISDN is evidence that creativity emerges as a way to process the unresolved problems we face as a society, offering us words to hold on to and ways to ultimately persist.
“Music is a model of how people endure time together,” said Douglas. “Is it a time of harmony, independence, collaboration? All these aspects play out in musical form.”
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Sigurður Guðjónsson likes to keep people guessing. Take the award-winning artist’s latest offering, Perpetual Motion. At first glance, the nearly 20-foot-tall multisensory sculpture at the Icelandic pavilion at the Venice Biennale presents itself as an enigmatic, immersive, abstract audio-visual piece that transports viewers from one reality to another.
But as one watches the seemingly never-ending moving image installation, on display on perpendicular screens, one can’t help but ask: What is this exactly? And where are we headed?
“This piece will take people to thousands of directions,” Guðjónsson told Artnet News. “It’s similar to music. When you listen to music, it takes you somewhere. It is a sensory experience. It’s abstract and offers layers of readings.”
The destination varies on each viewer’s experience—as well as on their level of curiosity. The work may lead one to see it as a sculpture, a painting, or a cinematic world, the artist noted. It could also be a landscape (the most natural, yet cliched, association with anything coming from Iceland).
“Yes, we have the landscape. It’s Iceland. It always comes up,” the artist quipped.
Sigurður Guðjónsson, Installation view: Perpetual Motion, Icelandic Pavilion, 59th International Art Exhibition -– La Biennale di Venezia, 2022, Courtesy of the artist and BERG Contemporary, Photos: Ugo Carmeni.
Challenging Perception
Landscape, in fact, was not his mind when Guðjónsson started creating Perpetual Motion for the Icelandic pavilion, curated by Monica Bello, the curator and head of arts at CERN. The work, rather, is the result of experimentation with objects and materials.
The primary object is, in fact, a small magnetic disc taken from an old loudspeaker, with metal dust sprinkled around the rim. The work depicts the metal dusted rim in extreme close up as it revolves. The outcome is a 45-minute uncut video shown on two screens connected to each other like mirror images, but their playback speeds are different. Accompanied by a visceral soundtrack developed by Guðjónsson and the famed Icelandic musician and producer Valgeir Sigurðsson, founder of the record label Bedroom Community, Perpetual Motion is a work that challenges viewers’ perceptions of materiality.
This is not the first time that Guðjónsson has played with perception by using mundane objects. For Fluorescent (2021), the artist took a peep into a fluorescent tube and presented a mesmerizing alternative view of the everyday object, exposing a hidden universe made of swirling dust. He also employed an electron microscope to scan a fragment of carbon in Enigma (2019), conjuring an otherworldly image of the material, and made the mysterious poetic space of Lightroom (2018) from an old slide projector. Tape (2016), a particularly important work for the artist, is a close-up study of a cassette tape, another medium that has been largely forgotten in the digital age.
Sigurður Guðjónsson, Still from Perpetual Motion, 2022, courtesy of the artist and BERG Contemporary
So what inspired Guðjónsson to get his hands on these materials and look at them differently?
“Curiosity,” he said. “I was definitely a curious kid, looking at hidden places. What’s happening inside the light? It’s a very interesting space to look into. The experiment with space and objects, and then transforming the apparatus into something new by creating many layers of perception, are all very important to me.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the unique landscape of Iceland shaped his vision.
“When you are standing in the snow but there’s a very hot spring right in front of you, you pick up the contrasting layers of smell and sound, and you sense the materials and nature differently.”

Space as a New Dimension
With Perpetual Motion, an extra layer of experimentation has been added: the Icelandic pavilion’s new space.
The pavilion has been nomadic since the Icelandic Art Center took over as project commissioner in 2007. Some of the presentations took place at locations far from the center of Venice, such as in a warehouse venue on the island of Giudecca in 2017 and 2019, which saw the exhibitions of Egill Sæbjörnsson, and Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir (better known as Shoplifter), respectively.
Sigurður Guðjónsson, Fluorescent (2021). Courtesy of the artist.
This time, the Icelandic pavilion is right inside the Arsenale, one of the main exhibition venues. The Icelandic Art Center estimates that the number of visitors to this year’s pavilion will be 20 times that of previous editions.
Moving to a prime location means that Guðjónsson is likely to get more exposure, as well as more pressure. “But we just have to do our best and it will work out,” he noted.
At the same time, the high-ceiling cube that allows visitors to come in and out as they move from one exhibition to another poses another dimension for his experiment.
“I was inspired by the space, the high ceiling, and the flow of the room, which influences the mood and the motion of the work,” the artist noted. “The video work is like a source to activate the space.”
Sigurður Guðjónsson, Lightroom (2018). Courtesy of the artist.
It’s Not About the Landscape—or Is It?
Despite its small population of just under 350,000, Iceland has been participating in Biennale since 1960. It also has a thriving music scene.
The country’s vibrant cultural landscape drew the attention of Barbara Kerr, a psychology professor at the University of Kansas who led a 2017 study to investigate why Iceland is so creative.
The study concluded that family structures and education in the country lay the foundation for creative processes. Interviewees quoted in the study pointed to the built environment of the city as a factor of creative productivity: besides art museums, galleries, and art spaces in the capital city of Reykjavik, the small but elegant contemporary art space LÁ Art Museum can be found in Hveragerði, a town with a population of less than 3,000 people.
The ever-changing weather and storied landscape of Iceland, however, did not play such a conscious role in influencing artists’ creations, according to Kerr’s findings.
The magnificent landscape of Iceland. Photo: Vivienne Chow.
Guðjónsson, who was born in 1975, built his career against such a backdrop. He studied at the Iceland University of the Arts between 2000 and 2003, followed by a year at the Akademie Der Bildenden Kunste in Vienna.
“It’s a very local, small art scene,” he said of Iceland. “I like being here but it’s very important for us to get a broad perspective—it’s extremely important to get away.”
Such a strong desire to leave and return is prominent among Icelandic artists, who have a strong presence internationally, said Ingibjörg Jónsdóttir, director and founder of the Berg Contemporary art gallery, which represents Guðjónsson. The landscape and nature are there, she said, but much more deeply embedded in artists’ psyche.
“[Iceland] is not stagnant like other places. A small society has a need to connect with others. It is far from the continent, but it is right between Europe and America. There’s a connection with the mainstream, international environment of art. Over the years, artists have the opportunity to study abroad, and when they return, they bring something back,” said Jónsdóttir, whose gallery recently presented Guðjónsson’s work in London ahead of the Venice presentation.
Sigurður Guðjónsson, Installation view: Perpetual Motion, Icelandic Pavilion, 59th International Art Exhibition -– La Biennale di Venezia, 2022, Courtesy of the artist and BERG Contemporary, Photos: Ugo Carmeni.
As for Guðjónsson, he has big plans upon his return to Iceland, where he will release a book chronicling his journey over the past decade. He will also be teaming up with composer Anna Þorvaldsdóttir and multi-Grammy-nominated artists the Spektral Quartet for a performance of his work Enigma at the Reykjavík Arts Festival in June, followed by a major solo show at the Reykjavík Art Museum in October, coinciding with a presentation of Perpetual Motion at Berg Contemporary for a home audience.
He may have plans to experiment with a prolonged period of time away from home, but he has no plans to permanently relocate.
“My anchor point is here,” he said.
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A humble gouache of a colorful anthropomorphic creature by Ukrainian artist Maria Prymachenko, whose vivid and fantastical visions have become an international symbol of peace amid the devastating war in Ukraine, was hastily added to the main exhibition at the Venice Biennale, the show’s curator, Ceclia Alemani, told Artnet News.
The last-minute addition expains why Prymachenko’s name is not included in the exhibition catalogue, which lists more than 1,500 works by more 213 artists.
“I didn’t know her before,” Alemani said, adding that the artist would otherwise have had a more central place in the show. 
Born in 1909, Prymachenko began making art in the 1930s and was widely exhibited in her day. Influenced by Ukrainian folk traditions, including the intricate art of pysanka, the Ukrainian style of decorating Easter eggs, Prymachenko became a known inspiration for artists including Pablo Picasso and Marc Chagall. Her work appeared on Ukrainian stamps in the 1970s, and her face also appeared on Ukrainian currency.
But until recently, she was relatively little known to the international art world.
Alemani became aware of the artist’s work in February, when the Ivankiv Historical and Local History Museum in Kyiv, home to dozens of Prymachenko’s artworks, was burned down by Russian forces.
Early reports suggested that 25 of her works were burned in the assault, although it later emerged that a local man was able to evacuate at least some pictures.
Since the attack, her work, particularly Dove Has Spread Her Wings and Asks for Peace, has become a fixture at anti-war protests around the world.
Maria Prymachenko, A Dove Has Spread Her Wings and Asks for Peace (1982).
“The most interesting part of the work is in the titles she gives,” Alemani said, adding that the childlike names of her works are cruel reminders of the pressures of war and other societal ills.
The work included in the biennale, Scarecrow (1967), was made after Prymachenko took a 20-year hiatus from art-making following a series of scarring experiences, including the deaths of her partner and brother during the Second World War.
Her subsequent works, including Our Army, Our Protectors (1978) and May That Nuclear War Be Cursed! (1978), are phantasmagoric dreamscapes with a message of global peace.
The wall text at the Venice Biennale contrasts her fairytale style with the much more sober Soviet artistic language of the mid-20th century.
“As the title suggests, the work is a symbolic deterrent to the aggressors of every conflict,” according to the text. 
At the Biennale’s introductory press conference, Alemani said it felt “miraculous” to finally see the show open after “more than two years of fear and terrible losses,” which underscored her sense of “necessity and responsibility” as the show’s curator.
Alemani added that she hoped the eleventh-hour inclusion of Prymachenko’s work would be understood as “a sign of solidarity [with] Ukrainian culture.”
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Never mind the packing materials still stacked up on the side of the hastily erected Piazza Ucraina, the latest addition to the Giardini in Venice. Nor the few small typos on the posters that have been hung, or that the work was only half-installed on the first morning of the biennale preview: Incredibly, this piazza has come together in less than a week, with its artists and curators working overtime and ad-hoc as they struggle to forge ahead amid a ravaging war at home.
The eleventh-hour installation was organized by the curators of the Ukrainian pavilion—Borys Filonenko, Lizaveta German, and Maria Lanko—at the invitation of the Venice Biennale and its main curator, Cecilia Alemani, as a way to address the dire conditions in Ukraine. Set among the nation-state pavilions that have stood in the Giardini for decades, it is a powerful statement in the face of the ongoing invasion by the Russian army.
The piazza itself is stark: populated with benches for rest, in its very center stands a tower of sandbags, reminiscent of those images that have circulated on the internet in recent weeks, showing ordinary Ukrainian citizens sandbagging their art, historic memorials, and public sculptures in hopes they survive the Russian bombings. There are pillars of wood, burnt black, on which hang A1 posters displaying artworks made by artists during the past months, since the invasion began in February. The posters, which are incredible testimonials and diaries of life during war, will remain on view throughout the biennale, the images changing monthly.
“Some document personal experience and others are trying to give a voice to those who do not have one right now,” Filonenko told Artnet News. “Many of these artworks have been made in shelters.” The contribution of Daniel Nemyrovski, who is based in the besieged city of Mariupol, is one such case—the curator said that they had lost contact with him for weeks. But Filonenko added that there have been “miraculous” moments of internet connection, during which high-res images could be sent and information about people’s well-being exchanged.
Daniel Nemyrovski, Sketches from the Shelter on Semashka Street in Mariupol – The Young Family. Made between March 12 and 20, 2022. Photo: Artnet News.
Nemyrovski’s pair of drawings in red ink were made in a bomb shelter between March 12 and 20. The poignant sketches depict several people who had been sheltering there for the three weeks. They stare blankly, wrapped in thick jackets and blankets. In another, a group is depicted in a discussion under a dangling lightbulb.
One another pillar, a watercolor by Lviv-based artist Kinder Album shows a naked woman tied up in the snow, encircled by Russian soldiers.
Though artworks are typically dated by year, these posters are dated by the day. The situation in Ukraine is changing so rapidly, each week denotes a different phase of the war. Only one work was made before the full-scale war began on February 24: an acrylic on paper by Kateryna Lysovenko, shows a mother and child lifting their middle fingers in triumph. It was made two days before the latest onslaught began, and Filonenko said it is a reminder that this conflict is not new—Russia first invaded Ukraine back in 2014, and violence has not stopped since that time. 
“We are trying to show as much as we can in the time that we have,” Filonenko said. He and his team have been working a double shift, while also organizing the national pavilion, with works by Pavlo Makov. For the group, the decision to come to Venice and leave their embattled country behind was not a simple one, “but it is our duty to defend the cultural front, so to speak,” Filonenko said. “This piazza is our attempt to show how many fantastic artists we have in Ukraine who should be better known, and who are very important to us.”
Kateryna Lysovenko, Untitled. Made February 22, 2022. Photo: Artnet News.
A few steps away, the Russian pavilion is hushed and quiet, the doors locked. The organizers canceled their participation in the early days of the invasion. In those first weeks, it seemed unlikely that the Ukrainian pavilion would even make it to Venice, but the artist Makov and the curators managed the complicated journey. In the last days, Makov’s neighborhood in Kharkiv has faced heavy shelling. It is not clear as of writing whether his home is still standing. 
Another collateral event was added to the bill at the last minute, organized by the PinchukArtCenter and the Victor Pinchuk Foundation at the Scuola Grade della Misericordia, replacing what was planned to be a display of the nominees for the Pinchuk Foundation’s Future Generation Art Prize. Ukrainian artists Nikita Kadan, Yevgenia Belorusets, and Lesia Khomenko have created new pieces, which are presented alongside historical works by Stefan Medytsky and Maria Priymachenko; the latter is also featured the main exhibition, “The Milk of Dreams,“ curated by Alemani. A museum of her celebrated early 20th-century folk art was destroyed in early March. 
Somewhat confusingly, a second chapter of the group show includes works by famous artists responding to the war, including Olafur Eliasson, Damien Hirst, and Marina Abramović, among others. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky also submitted an image for the show.
Another collateral event, at the Spiazzi cultural center in the Castello district, features a solo presentation by the Ukrainian artist Zinaida, who came to Venice for a site visit in early April and has not been able to return home. It was unclear until last week whether the work would even arrive to Venice in time.
The Ukrainian pavilion and piazza co-curator Filoneko said responses from Europeans in Venice have so far not been always easy or empathetic. “Many here are not involved in this war,” he said. “We have been getting questions full of Russian propaganda. Someone asked me recently if I was a nationalist.”
He hopes that the Piazza Ucraina will help to bring about more meaningful responses from the art world and the public. Meanwhile, he continues to check his phone hourly to make sure friends, family, and fellow artists are okay. Filoneko adds that the cost of war is something felt by the whole country: “There is not work-life balance for us Ukrainian artists. It is just a work-war balance.”
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Art lovers making a pilgrimage to Venice for the delayed opening of the 59th Venice Biennial will have packed dance cards, with art shows staged across the city in conjunction with the centerpiece International exhibition and pavilions from countries around the world, including 30 official collateral events. Here are a few shows to put on your to-see list.

“Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity” at the Peggy Guggenheim CollectionThrough September 26, 2022
Max Ernst, Attirement of the Bride (1940). Courtesy of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice.
The Peggy Guggenheim Collection has teamed up with the Museum Barberini in Potsdam, Germany, on this celebration of magic and the occult in Surrealist art. (It dovetails nicely with curator Cecilia Alemani’s theme for the biennial’s international exhibition, “The Milk of Dreams.”) Works by Max Ernst, Leonora Carrington, and Remedios Varo are among the 60 pieces on loan for the occasion from 40 international museums and private collections.
The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, Dorsoduro, 701-704, 30123 Venice

“Sabine Weiss: The Poetry of the Instant” at the Casa dei Tre OciThrough October 23, 2022
Sabine Weiss, Enfants porte de Saint-Cloud Paris (1950). © Sabine Weiss.
For one of its final photography exhibitions before turning over the space to the Berggruen Institute, Casa dei Tre Oci is staging the biggest retrospective yet for French artist Sabine Weiss, who died in December at 97. It features over 200 photos, ranging from portraits of children and new images to fashion shoots and street photography, selected in conversation with Weiss before her death.
Casa dei Tre Oci, Fondamenta Zitelle, 43, 30133 Venice

“Anselm Kiefer: Questi scritti, quando verranno bruciati, daranno finalmente un po’ di luce (Andrea Emo)” at the Palazzo DucaleThrough October 29, 2022
Installation view of “Anselm Kiefer: Questi scritti, quando verranno bruciati, daranno finalmente un po’ di luce (Andrea Emo),” at the Palazzo Ducale, Venice. Photo: Andrea Avezzù, © Anselm Kiefer.
Anselm Kiefer’s site-specific installation in the Palazzo Ducale’s Sala dello Scrutinio is named after the writings of Venetian philosopher Andrea Emo. The title loosely translates to “These writings, when burned, will finally cast a little light.“
Palazzo Ducale, Piazza San Marco, 1, 30124 Venice

“Bruce Nauman: Contrapposto Studies” at the Punta della DoganaThrough November 27, 2022
Bruce Nauman, Contrapposto Studies, I through VII (2015–16). Jointly owned by Pinault Collection and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Photo: Marco Cappelletti, courtesy of Palazzo Grassi, © Bruce Nauman by SIAE 2021.
Bruce Nauman presents a series of recent video installations that return to the themes of his 1968 piece Walk with Contrapposto, a video of the artist attempting to maintain the contrapposto pose while walking along a narrow wooden corridor.
Punta della Dogana, Dorsoduro, 2, 30123 Venice

“Georg Baselitz: Archinto” at the Museo di Palazzo GrimaniThrough November 27, 2022
Georg Baselitz, Jorn (2020). © Georg Baselitz 2021. Photo: Jochen Littkemann, Berlin, courtesy of Gagosian.
In an homage to Renaissance portraiture, German painter Georg Baselitz created 12 new paintings to hang where the Grimani family portraits were on display in stucco-framed panels until the end of the 19th century. The title is a reference to Titian’s 1558 portrait of Cardinal Filippo Archinto.
Museo di Palazzo Grimani, Rugagiuffa, 4858, 30122 Venice

“Marlene Dumas: Open-End” at the Palazzo Grassi Through January 8, 2023
Installation view of “Marlene Dumas: Open-End,” at Palazzo Grassi, 2022. From left to right: Alien (2017), Pinault Collection; Spring (2017), private collection, courtesy of David Zwirner; and Amazon (2016), private collection, Switzerland. Photo: Marco Cappelletti with Filippo Rossi, © Palazzo Grassi, © Marlene Dumas.
This show marks the Pinault Collection’s first exhibition—in either of its two Venice locations—to be dedicated to a woman artist, the great figurative painter Marlene Dumas, with drawings and paintings dating from 1984 to the present day, including new unseen works.
Palazzo Grassi, Campo San Samuele, 3231, 30124 Venice

“Hermann Nitsch’s 20th Painting Action” at Oficine 800April 19–July 20, 2022 More

A whopping 213 artists will participate in the main exhibition of the Venice Biennale, which opens April 23 across the Arsenale and the Giardini.
As is tradition, exactly what we can expect from curator Cecilia Alemani’s show, “The Milk of Dreams”—which takes its title from a book by the Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington—will be kept under wraps until the preview next week. But what we do know is that it will draw on themes of Surrealism, otherworldliness, and transformation beyond human forms.
According to Alemani, a few fundamental questions underpin the exhibition: “How is the definition of the human changing? What constitutes life, and what differentiates plant and animal, human and non-human?” 
In looking forward, the curator will also look backward to mine history and explore overlooked moments, figures, and perspectives for new answers. In seeking to center women and non-gender-conforming artists, the show will look back to patriarchal narratives surrounding occultism and the history of the witch. Looking to the future, the show will also consider posthuman possibilities, such as cyborgs, as modes of survival for the human spirit.
We teased out some of the main themes to expect from this historic biennale, which includes artists from 58 countries and will span more than 100 years of art history.

The Pioneering Women of Tech Art
The landing page for Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Agent Ruby (2010). Courtesy the artist.
Digital art may be all the rage right now, but Alemani has hit the rewind button to remind digital natives to respect their mamas by highlighting the work of female generative and computer art pioneers.
There will be a gallery devoted to Vera Molnár, the 98-year-old Hungarian artist who makes minimalist geometric compositions composed with algorithms written in the (now positively primeval) programming language of Fortran. Molnár began programming with punch cards as early as 1968—before computers had screens—and is still working today from her nursing home in Paris—and is about to drop a series of NFTs.
Then, there is Lillian Schwartz, an early experimenter with computer-mediated art. Born in 1927, the U.S. artist grew up during the Great Depression, and she created groundbreaking work in the 1960s and ’70s as part of the Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) group, working with light boxes and kinetic sculpture. Schwartz went on to make a series of groundbreaking computer-animated films built from visual generative algorithms written by fellow artist-collaborator and software engineer Ken Knowlton. 
Another one to look out for is the legendary new media art pioneer Lynn Hershman Leeson, who made what is regarded by some as the first ever media work in 1966, by incorporating sound into her work.
“Nobody had ever done that, and consequently, I was told for years it wasn’t art and nobody would show it,” the 81-year-old artist told Artnet News. Leeson also began building an artificial intelligence, Agent Ruby, in 1998 as part of her practice of expanded cinema. The A.I. was a stand-in for a cyborg character who had a lonely hearts column on the internet in her film Technolust.
In Venice, Leeson is showing a film called Logic Paralyzes the Heart, about a 61-year-old cyborg played by the Chinese-American actress Joan Chen, who goes on a retreat to find ways to become more human. It will be installed in a room wallpapered with AI-generated faces of people who don’t exist.
“It is all about the two sides of existence of the future: the cyborgian side, and what that can accomplish without actually having human qualities, and humans who lack the capacity that A.I. can function with,” Leeson said. “It’s kind of like The Wizard of Oz, where you have these characters, and one doesn’t have a heart and one doesn’t have a brain, and they both feel inadequate. And it’s a matter that we need both, and one can’t be the master of the other. We need to collaborate with all systems that are alive on the planet in order to have a future.”

Spooks on Spooks
Medium Eusapia Palladino (woman in the background) during mandolin levitatation during a seance at the house of Baron von Schrenck Notzing in Germany march 13, 1903. Photo by Apic/Getty Images.
Superstitious visitors to the biennale might want to carry a smudge of sage with them, as Alemani’s artist list suggests that we should expect no dearth of witchery.
We counted at least six artists who have spent time communing beyond the veil. These figures include the obscure Italian psychic and artist Milly Canavero, who made automatic writings and drawings she believed were messages from extraterrestrials; Hélène Smith, a Swiss Surrealist and psychic medium who claimed to communicate with Martians; and Josefa Tolrà, a self-taught Spanish medium and artist whose sacred and cosmic visions fused traditional beliefs with vivid imagination.
These are by no means the only artists who claimed to be physical and spiritual mediums on the list. There is also Linda Gazzera, a spiritualist medium who captured her spectral materializations in photographs, Italian spiritualist Eusapia Palladino, and Georgiana Houghton, a British spiritualist medium and painter whose abstract works referred to as “spirit drawings” were produced during seances in the 19th century.

Indigenous Perspectives 
Gabriel Chaile Indudablemente estos músicos están rayados (II), (2019) Installation view at ChertLüdde, Berlin. Photo Andrea Rossetti
When it comes to negotiating a new relationship with animals and Earth, especially in the face of a climate emergency, the pains of late capitalism, and emergent technology, Indigenous voices will be among those most pertinent to listen to. In the Giardini this year, for example, Indigenous perspectives will have a landmark place among many pavilions, including at the Nordic pavilion, which has been renamed the Sámi Pavilion for a presentation of three Indigenous artists from the Sápmi region, which stretches across all three of the nation-states of Sweden, Finland, and Norway.
Inside the Arsenale, as a part of Alemani’s exhibition, work by another Sámi artist will be on view—70-year-old Britta Marakatt-Labba, who grew up in a reindeer-herding family in Sápmi/Northern Sweden. The artist’s hand-embroidered textile works tell stories about Sámi history and life in the communities.
Important perspectives from the Global south, including that of Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe, an Indigenous Yanomami artist from Sheroana in the Upper Orinoco River of the Venezuelan Amazon, makes delicate drawings pulling from ancestral knowledge and symbols of Yanomami culture. His work appears in the Sydney Biennale, which on view until June 13, and was included in the Berlin Biennale in 2020.
Also from South America is Gabriel Chaile, from Tucumán in Northwest Argentina, who creates sculptures drawing on Pre-Columbian traditions. Jaider Esbell, an artist and curator who is of the Macuxi people in Brazil, made incredibly vivid drawings will also have work present. (The artist was found dead at age 41 last fall in his home in São Paulo.) 
From farther north in Canada, artist Shuvinai Ashoona, who is Inuk, will present intricate pen and pencil drawings that depict Inuit life in the far North of Canada. Cree and Métis rising star artist Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, who was subject of a solo project show at MoMA last year, works with found materials to consider issues around land, property, and economy.
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Participating in the Venice Biennale has never been an easy feat. To take part in the prestigious event, countries need to secure funding, ship art across the world to Venice, mount an exhibition in a rented structure—most of which are hundreds of years old—and, finally, staff their pavilion for the biennale’s six-month duration.
The usual hurdles were exponentially harder to surmount this year due the dire state of world affairs and the effects of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. For artists and curators from countries that have been hit hardest by Covid-19 or those that have struggled most to foot the bill—presentations require around $100,000 to $300,000, according to several commissioners we spoke to—it’s been a race against both time and resources.
“We are the marginalized of the marginalized—even in the Global South—and we want to change that,” artists Hit Man Gurung and Sheelesha Rajbhandari told Artnet News from Kathmandu, Nepal. The curators of the first ever Nepal Pavilion at the Venice Biennale said it has long been a dream to participate in the celebrated international event, but that financial difficulty and a lack of government support had made it impossible until now.
“The global art scene is always dominated by the powerful countries; the same geopolitics that governs the world governs the art scene,” Gurung said.
Nepal Pavilion curators Hit Man Gurung and Sheelesha Rajbhandari with artist Tsherin Sherpa.
In early January 2021, a group of individuals and private arts organizations decided to change that narrative by making the Nepal pavilion a reality—despite the pandemic, and even though they hadn’t yet secured the funding to do so. “We knew we were going to make it happen and put Nepal on the world stage,” Sangeeta Thapa, one of the commissioners, told Artnet News.
Nepal’s featured artist is Tsherin Sherpa, whose work aims to change what he deems “an international understanding of Nepali art plagued by Western conceptualization of the Himalayan region.” The total cost for the pavilion, including shipping, leasing of the space, travel expenses, and mounting of the artwork will be in excess of $200,000, funding for which was still being raised in the penultimate weeks before the event.
Nepal’s Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Civil Aviation has promised to chip in for shipping costs, but a couple of weeks out from the unveiling, Thapa said the exact contribution had yet to be settled. So far, materializing the pavilion has been helped with support from the Siddhartha Arts Foundation, the Nepal Academy of Fine Arts, Rossi and Rossi gallery—which represents Sherpa—and the Rubin Museum of Art from New York, which has funded 50 percent of costs.
Angela Su: working in progress. Courtesy of the artist.
Overcoming Coronavirus Restrictions
In Asia, where tough coronavirus restrictions have severely limited travel, effectively imposing geographic isolation on an otherwise well-connected region, artists and curators have had to work extra hard to make it to Venice.
Hong Kong only lifted its flight bans on nine countries and changed the 14-day supervised quarantine period to seven for returning residents a month ahead of the opening. But this hasn’t deterred the team of the Hong Kong Pavilion from coming to Venice.
“There is a full exhibition team in Venice,” a spokesperson from M+, a new museum for visual culture in Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District, which is co-presenting the pavilion with Hong Kong Arts Development Council (HKADC), told Artnet News. The pavilion’s featured artist Angela Su was already on site working with her exhibition team and guest curator Freya Chou. “We are glad that Covid restrictions have not affected the quality or the nature of the work going on show,” the spokesperson said.
While daily life and travel in much of Asia is returning to normal, mainland China continues to roll out lockdowns and adhere to strict border controls. The China Pavilion is a state-run affair organized by the ministry of culture and presented by China Arts and Entertainment Group Ltd. (a state-owned cultural enterprise). The pavilion’s group show will feature the work of four artists—Liu Jiayu, Wang Yuyang, Xu Lei, and the art collective AT art group. But two weeks out from the vernissage of the event Yuyang, who is showing in Venice for the first time, was still unsure of his ability to attend. “I hope my work and myself make it to the opening,” he said.
Some countries, like New Zealand, which had selected its artist—Yuki Kihara, a New Zealander of Japanese and Samoa descent—in 2019, well before country’s severe coronavirus restrictions limited its access to the world, have had to take into consideration the unexpected risk of further restrictions and expensive hotel quarantine when returning home.
“We only confirmed two weeks ago to travel to Venice as a delegation,” Jude Chambers, the pavilion’s project director told Artnet News. “Being able to safely support our delegation to be in Venice was looking near impossible at one point.” While New Zealand has reopened its borders for now, as a contingency, the team is prepared and budgeted to secure rooms in quarantine facilities on their return home in case regulations change quickly.
The financial difficulties caused by the pandemic have also made sourcing funding more difficult than ever, and a few weeks out, the New Zealand cohort was still raising money to cover costs in Venice.
“Fundraising has been the biggest challenge,” Chambers said. “Normally, there are events with the artist and curator to raise funds from potential patrons, but we only managed to offer a limited number due to Covid restrictions. It’s been tough.”
Two Faʻafafine (After Gauguin) (2020). Detail from “Paradise Camp” 2020 series by Yuki Kihara. Image courtesy of the artist and Milford Galleries, Aotearoa New Zealand.
Bootstrapping the Way to Venice
Other artists have taken the challenge of funding into their own hands. Iranian-born French national Firouz Farmanfarmaian, who is representing Kyrgyzstan for the Central Asian country’s first-ever national pavilion in Venice—the artist shares tribal heritage with the Turanian nomads of Kyrgyz—had to procure his own funding for the presentation.
The total cost needed is more than $200,000, and funds were still being sought when we spoke, through the artist’s We Are the Nomads platform, a production company that produces all his creative endeavors, including exhibitions. While Kyrgyzstan’s ministry of culture signed off on the project, financial resources were diminished by a lawsuit against the government over the health and safety of the Kumtor Gold Mine, one of the largest gold mines in Central Asia, which is responsible for 12.5 percent of the impoverished country’s GDP.
“Our mission is to assist the government to kickstart their cultural tourism industry by assisting them with fundraising from private companies,” Farmanfarmaian told Artnet News. Funding has come from SJ Global Investments, Flora Family Foundation and individual patrons and collections such as Amir FarmanFarmaian, the artist’s and main business partner.
Ayman Baalbaki, who is representing Lebanon during the Venice Biennale, at work on the pavilion. Image courtesy the artist.
Meanwhile for Lebanon, a small Mediterranean country faced with an ongoing economic and political crisis, lack of fuel and electricity and an ever-growing brain drain, not to mention recovering from a devastating explosion to its capital city in August 2020, participating in the Venice Biennale is not high on the list of government priorities. But a group of private donors, artists and a curator, with blessing from the ministry of culture, were determined to gather resources to make it happen.
“This is an entirely private endeavor; the government hasn’t spent a single penny,” Basel Dalloul, one of the main donors, told Artnet News, adding that due to Lebanon’s collapsed banking system, funders had to send money to bank accounts in Paris. “All of us in the private sector have a duty to make sure that Lebanon and its culture stays on the map in spite of all the problems we face,” Dalloul said.
Tanzanian-born London-based writer and curator Shaheen Merali, who is organizing Uganda’s first official pavilion, challenged the idea that for certain countries its more difficult to show in Venice: “It’s a big deal for all nations to present at Venice nowadays—even France or Britain, because our cultures have become recessively more right-wing and funding for anything has become part of the hierarchy of values,” he said.
Merali’s statement echoed others in speaking about their various winding roads to Venice. Despite the unique logistical barriers posed by the pandemic, the biggest problem most have faced has been a perennial difficulty when it comes to staging large-scale art events: securing funding at a time when culture is being deprioritized amid alternative political prerogatives. But as these artists, curators and patrons demonstrate, determination to showcase a nation’s cultural glories, goes a long way.
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