The 10 Best National Pavilions at the Venice Biennale 2022

Metamorphosis of both the body and the land are running themes across contemporary art—and were certainly reflected in the main exhibition of the 59th Venice Biennale, “The Milk of Dreams,” curated by Cecilia Alemani. The national pavilions this year echo some of the same wonderful concepts and histories, delving into the possibilities of our world and ourselves following the global pandemic and in the midst of mounting climate catastrophes.

Many of the artists exhibiting in national pavilions this year—whether or not they were responding to the pandemic—sought to create distinctively corporeal experiences for audiences that prioritized feeling over sight. Several artists aimed to reinvent our relationship with the screen, while others created robust presentations of ceramics and textiles, pushing sculpture and installation art to the fore.

Here are 10 of the more engaging and mesmerizing pavilions across the Arsenale, the Giardini, and off-site locations at the Biennale this year.

Singapore

Shubigi Rao, “Pulp III: A Short Biography of the Banished Book”

Curated by Ute Meta Bauer

Arsenale

Shubigi Rao knew that it would be impossible to translate her 10-year history of research into an exhibition space for the Venice Biennale. Rather than think about the breadth of the work and how much could not be encountered or experienced, Rao approached the site by keeping in mind the needs of the body. The exhibition space, which was designed by architect Laura Miotto, is specifically designed for audience members to move through Rao’s practice across artmaking and writing, without feeling overwhelmed.

There are large-scale curtains that drape across and surround the exhibition space; through the towers of fabric is a hub where audiences can sit and engage with the publication of Pulp III (2022). Around the corner, visitors can experience the corresponding film, Talking Leaves (2022). The attention to the layout is part of the installation as Rao wanted audiences to physically feel the research before they intellectually engaged with it.

The publication Pulp III is part of a decade-long project on the history of book and library destruction, its impact on humanity, and its futures. The project uses storytelling as the medium to unravel these histories while also ensuring, as Rao explained, that the individuals who are contributing to this ongoing body of research maintain agency. The film features existing research material about the project alongside new material shot in Venice. Although it’s 90 minutes long, Rao’s film is intentionally edited in such a way that audiences walk away with a clear grasp of the project’s intersecting and interweaving histories after five minutes. Yet the exhibition layout is designed in such a way that we’re inclined to stay for so much longer.

Hungary

Zsófia Keresztes, “After Dreams: I Dare to Defy the Damage”

Curated by Mónika Zsikla

Giardini

Zsófia Keresztes’s pastel-colored glass mosaics captivate the audience’s eyes with their sheen and bulbous forms. Keresztes’s scuptulures resonate with the physicality of the works included in the Biennale this year. The whimsical color palette and undulating forms disarm audiences, while masking the severe psychological pain that inspires the work: our collective growing dread of becoming our virtual selves.

This fear of losing our bodies manifests as powerful physical work that confronts our bodies. Keresztes finds inspiration through this ever-growing virtual crisis in identity—what she describes as “our identities becoming imprisoned by the virtual world of social media.” She counteracts this loss of the self by envisioning a new sense of physicality of the body—that is literally sharpened at the edges in her work.

The sculptures in “After Dreams” are connected with multiple chains so that no one piece is ever physically isolated from the others. The tangible connection is also metaphorical: It suggests that the sculptures themselves are ever-evolving beings that shed their previous form to become something else. Like the work, Keresztes is modeling that behavior to evolve and resist becoming a fixed, single identity.

The presentation is notable for the Hungarian pavilion as it is only the the third time a woman has represented the country and the first time both the curator and artist are women. Femininity, though, is only implied in the exhibition, while the themes of transformation and evolution are impactful, universal, and timely.

United States

Simone Leigh, “Sovereignty”

Curated by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, ICA Boston

Giardini

Simone Leigh’s staggeringly monumental sculptures reinvent the lives and lost histories of Black women across the diaspora. Leigh was the recipient of the Golden Lion for best participation in the Biennale’s central exhibition, “The Milk of Dreams,” which included her 16-foot-tall bronze sculpture Brick House (2019).

The U.S. pavilion, which was organized by the ICA Boston, arrived with much fanfare due to Leigh being the first Black woman to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale. That history shapes the pavilion’s themes as Leigh interrogates the historical absence and erasure of Black women from prominent white institutions in the sculptures, as well as a symposium that will take place at the pavilion in October entitled “A Loophole of Retreat.” The symposium, which is part of the pavilion commission, will host prominent Black women scholars and artists engaging with what curator Rashida Bumbray described as “the fugitive pursuit of sovereignty by Black women.”

Black womanhood is varied across Leigh’s works in the pavilion. Large-scale sculptures that intentionally evoke both architectural sites and body parts specific to Black womanhood flank the pavilion. Viewers navigate sculptures that place prominent emphasis on the bust, the hips, and the rear. Leigh abstracts these bodies to not represent a specific Black woman, but to create a hybrid form that cuts through history. She calls her process and resulting sculptures “a critical fabulation,” after the scholar Saidya Hartman, which defines the ability to invent new truths about the past.

In the pavilion, the moving 20-minute film by Black experimental director Madeleine Hunt Ehrlich focuses on Leigh’s physical process of modeling clay. The film concludes with one of these figures intentionally set ablaze by Leigh on the shores of the Venice waters. What Leigh cements through her film, hybrid creations of Black women’s bodies and architectural shapes, and the forthcoming symposium is a restitution of Black women’s roles in white institutions across body, labor, and intellect.

Serbia

Vladimir Nikolić, “Walking with Water”

Curated by Biljana Ćirić

Giardini

After two years of pandemic-filled screen engagement, video art had much to prove at the Biennale. In “Walking with Water,” Vladimir Nikolić impactfully mounts two large screens to examine our relationship with vantage point and water. Curator Biljana Ćirić listed scholar Donna Haraway’s 2016 book Staying With the Trouble, a book about climate collapse, as one of the inspirations behind the exhibition and the title. “Walking with Water” grapples ever so subtly with feminist and indigenous knowlege around creating a more entangled way of living with the world that preserves its future and ours.

The installation has two simple, yet compelling screen installations. The first is a 14-foot-tall vertical screen of an 800-meter swimming pool with the artist swimming laps. The composition exaggerates our relationship with the infinite vertical scroll we perform with our phones. This spectacular viewpoint emphasizes our need to develop new ways of looking at our environment through media.

The other screen in the pavilion is several meters wide and features an ocean horizon. This footage of water was filmed using three cameras and features no digital manipulation. As Ćirić described, “The horizon speaks to Nikolić’s growing anxiety around the loss of water and ecological locations due to climate collapse.” These large-scale screen installations of water document these seemingly innocuous views for a future generation.

Korea

Yunchul Kim, “Gyre”

Curated by Young-chul Lee

Giardini

Yunchul Kim’s wondrous machine installation places the body in the pathways between the cosmos, biology, and technology. “Gyre” presents five large-scale kinetic sculptures and a site-specific wall drawing of the same name. Kim desired to harness the power of the cosmos into tangible artifacts that we can actually interact with, as none of us can touch or move through the sun, for example. The work takes monumental wonders like the sun and the universe and channels them into an intricticate wall drawing, poetic texts, and dynamic sculptures for our consumption.

The kinetic sculptures vary in their medium. Of course, the centerpiece of “Gyre” is Kim’s Chroma V (2022), a pulsating 50-meter-widewide piece composed of various screens and glasses that are triggered by signals received by its sibling sculpture, Argos-The Swollen Suns (2022). Argos contains several hundred glass tubes that flash light when the muon—a subatomic particle that is invisible to the naked eye—is detected.

The interplay between Argos and Chroma V is alien. Kim’s work accomplishes the challenge of giving the machine characteristics of being an organic material, without relying on flesh to achieve that. What grounds the visual delight of Chroma V is its magnitude, which allows for audiences to fully engage with what appears to be a thinking, reacting device that responds to our presence and the other objects in the room.

Latvia

Skuja Braden (Ingūna Skuja and Melissa Braden), “Selling Water by the River”

Curated by Andra Silapētere and Solvita Krese

Arsenale

Artistic duo Ingūna Skuja and Melissa Braden, who operate under the name Skuja Braden, create a ceramic funhouse representing an artist’s home. Riffing off of “Womanhouse” (1972), curated by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, the makeshift home at the Latvian pavilion features a bed, a vanity, a kitchen, and more. The installation contains extensive “autobiographical and geographical pieces that use the politics of the home to wrestle with larger themes of oppression in Eastern Europe through a feminist lens,” as curator Solvita Krese described to Artsy.

The first clear indication of this exists with a vase that features Vladimir Putin’s face on it. The face is appropriately on the floor, on its side, separate from the other intricately cast ceramics on the table that take on the shape of traditional Latvian folk art. The piece precedes the February 24th invasion of Ukraine by Russia and comments on Russia’s imperial history against smaller Eastern European countries, during and after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

For Krese, having a feminist and queer perspective as the face of Latvia in the Biennale is profound. Krese recounted that while Latvians negotiate their former Soviet past, they are coming to terms with the conservative cultural environment that marks their present, where feminist ideas and queerness are not so readily expressed. By tackling the theme of the domestic, Skuja Braden literally turns the political personal.

Zimbabwe

“I Did Not Leave a Sign”

Curated by Fadzai Veronica Muchemwa

Santa Maria della Pieta

This group exhibition of emerging artists makes a huge impact on the realm of textile-based arts. “I Did Not Leave a Sign” is incredibly tactile, featuring works by Wallen Mapondera, Ronald Muchatuta, Kresiah Mukwazhi, and Terrence Musekiwa. Mapondera—who was featured in The Artsy Vanguard 2021—uses available everyday materials like cardboard, cartons, and paper to create compelling abstract sculptures that evoke rather than represent everyday life in Zimbabwe. In a series of meticulously drafted prints by Muchatuta, hands and other eviscerated body parts are drawn and displaced to create a mosaic of the Black body, rather than a singular representation of it.

The turn to abstraction is especially effective in Muchemwa’s curatorial statement on spiritual and institutional faith practiced in Zimbabwe. “I Did Not Leave a Sign” points audiences to alternative forms of knowing (both spiritually and intellectually) that leaves no material trace beyond a feeling.

The exhibition uses materials that are readily identifiable to audiences, like bras as featured in Mukwazhi’s sculptures, to draw out women’s varied experiences in the world. Muchemwa’s curatorial eye is expansive and focused on showcasing the heterogenous ways Zimbabwean artists mount political and institutional commentary by evoking the tools of everyday life in their work.

Germany

Maria Eichhorn, “Places of Remembrance and Resistance”

Curated by Yilmaz Dziewior

Giardini

Maria Eichhorn delivers a bold, minimalist installation that is built around heavy research. The German pavilion appears empty upon first glance, with much of its architectural bones exposed and ripped out for the viewer. It is an installation about destruction of the site.

This is a pavilion that benefits from close inspection, specifically at the architecture and nearly invisible wall text. The wall text reveals the proposal of giving the pavilion away or unearthing a darker history about the construction and expansion of the German pavilion. The exposure of the bones of the pavilion are not random but in fact are the artist exposing the additions and expansions made to the pavilion during the Nazi regime, an unnerving revelation once discovered.

Eichhorn’s piece speaks to the way that architecture can transform and carry legacies to audiences as installation art, which still can be tricky for artists or curators to install or engage with. With “Places of Remembrance and Resistance,” Eichhorn demonstrates the difficulty of such a practice as she literally destroys much of the building to create her work.

The extensive catalogue operates as a companion to the piece, featuring years of research, architectural planning, and government documents. These texts relay the complex legacies of oppressive funding and the architectural space that is still reflective of those histories even if the culture is not. While the catalogue is beneficial, the experience of discovery through literal excavation of the space itself and the wall text creates a physical opportunity for audiences to feel history and politics rather than read about them via the traditional method of research.

Greece

Loukia Alavanou, “Oedipus in Search of Colonus”

Curated by Heinz Peter Schwerfel

Giardini

In perhaps what is the most intimate pavilion, Loukia Alavanou delivers a stimulating virtual-reality (VR) short film Oedipus in Search of Colonus (2022). The film is a loose adaptation of the classical Greek antiquity play Antigone and features participants from a Roma community as the actors. Curator Heinz Peter Schwerfel outlined to Artsy their interest in wanting “to engage with political commentary around capitalism, migration, and displacement without having to engage with contemporary news.” Alavanou convincingly examines these political narratives through the evergreen sociocultural allegories in classical Greek texts.

The film is shot like a classical farce, where the director and the participants make no attempt to mask their inexperience with acting. Moreover, the use of VR is extremely effective at allowing audiences to immerse themselves into this world without feeling like an intruder as the traditional 1:1 screen experience conveys.

What stands out about the VR installation here are the architecturally complex chairs that allow for a surprisingly comfortable sitting experience, enabling you to move yourself through the world via the hand rails. The other benefit of the pavilion’s layout is the time crutch it creates. The need to wait in line to enter the pavilion almost all but guarantees that audiences complete the 16-minute short film. To complete any film at the Biennale is a challenge, but here, through the installation of intimacy, viewers can fully immerse themselves into the world of others and experience a more physical relationship with the screen, if only for a few minutes.

Great Britain

Sonia Boyce, “Feeling Her Way”

Curated by Emma Ridgway

Giardini

Does the voice have an identity? Sonia Boyce’s eye-popping and sonically rich Golden Lion award-winning pavilion works through layers of vocality to map out Black women’s impact in British music production. Working with four vocalists, Poppy Ajudha, Jacqui Dankworth, Sofia Jernberg, Tanita Tikaram, alongside composer Errollyn Wallen, Boyce presents an installation that expands on her work Devotional Collection (1999–present), which contains over 20 years of research across three centuries that honors Black British female musicians. Devotional Collection and the layered installation uses the ephemera-like vinyl records, CDs, posters, images, ticket stubs, and more, placed against an engrossing gold wallpaper and plinths to create devotions altars.