Exploring Venice’s neighborhoods through art exhibitions
The Venice Biennale runs through November 22. Here’s how to use it as your excuse to explore Venice, its six sestieri and everything in between.
Forget the label “the Olympics of art”. The Venice Biennale is anything but that. It’s not a short term competition that crowns winners (we’ll get to that in a moment), it’s more like an endurance race of art lasting six months. Originally created to take you through the world of art in the Biennale-designated Gardens and now Arsenale, the Biennale has expanded across the city’s sestieri and more with contemporaneous exhibitions in the numerous palazzi and exhibit spaces. We’ve created a guide to our favorite collateral events.
Over the past few decades, more and more international foundations have taken over and renovated La Serenissima’s rundown palazzi, transforming them into engaging art spaces. During the Biennale, they are dialled up. Mix that in with the galleries, pop up exhibitions and national pavilions who don’t have an address in the Arsenale and Giardini, and you have contemporary art in residence in all of Venice’s six sestieri (check our sestieri guide here).
While it’s true that Venice is a place that has you falling in love at first and why not? It’s a magically impossible floating city with canals and crenellations and peaked-arch windows decorating its early Renaissance palaces. It is a backdrop to a fairytale, but what makes you stay in love are exploring the neighbourhoods and stumbling across the quieter vibes. So if you’ve need an excuse to explore La Serenissima outside of Piazza San Marco, this year’s Biennale is just that.
Exploring the Collateral Exhibitions By Geography
Santa Croce –S. Stae
Helter Skelter at Fondazione Prada. Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince excavating aesthetics and the American psyche with fifty-plus works appropriating, inverting, and referencing pop cultural ephemera from movies to social media posts. The most important show in Venice right now and worth the trip alone.
San Polo- S. Tomà
Finally, Fondazione Dries Van Noten has opened its doors. If getting inside the incredible rococo Palazzo Pisani Moretta isn’t on your playlist, it should be. The Only True Protest is Beauty brings together more than 200 works of fashion, contemporary art, collectible design, and photography, essentially fanning the flames of the Belgian designer’s obsession with beauty and craftsmanship.
San Marco –S. Samuel
The apex predator of art palaces is Palazzo Grassi on the Grand Canal – beautifully restored, three levels of exhibition space overlooking the water. And if that weren’t enough, it’s hosting Kenyan-British painter Michael Armitage: the Promise of Change, forty-five paintings and more than 100 studies. Get close enough to see the texture of the lubugo bark cloth he paints on, because with Armitage the material is almost as much the point as the image.
In Piazza San Marco? Pop into the Palazzo delle Prigioni, around the corner from the Doge’s Palace, where Taiwain artist Li Yi-Fan takes a surreal and mesmerizing AI trip im Screen Melancholy.
Dorsoduro –Accademia
At the base of the Accademia bridge is one of Venice’s cultural jewels, the Galleria dell’Accademia, where Tintoretto and Titian take a temporary back seat to Marina Abramović: Transforming Energy. Crystals, swinging horsehair, marble, and viewer interaction- being present is not optional; it is the work. At 80, Abramović becomes the first living female artist to receive a major show in the institution’s history.
On my list for my visit is Nalini Malini: Of Woman Born. Taking over the Magazzini del Sale – a centuries-old salt warehouse and one of the best locations for large scale site specific art,, Malani draws you into her world through an animation chamber, projecting hand-painted and digitally rendered animations directly onto its brick walls.
Canareggio – Ferrovia
Part of the official Biennale program, The Holy See Pavilion: The Ear is The Eye of the Soul wins the prize for most meditative antidote to Biennale sensory overload. Tucked into the secret garden of Santa Maria dei Carmini, it is a sound installation anchored by the story of St. Hildegard of Bingen (a 12th century Benedictine abbess and one of the earliest composers in Western history) with original commissions from FKA Twigs, Patti Smith, Brian Eno, and Jim Jarmusch.
Canareggio – Ca’ d’Oro
Palazzo Manfrin is Anish Kapoor’s studio and occasional exhibition space. The opposite of most of Venice’s lavish palaces, this is a bare-boned workshop. Alongside architectural models and classic Kapoor works like the cement Ga Gu Ma pilings and the void Descent into Limbo is the vertiginous At the Edge of the World: a massive 8-meter diameter bell hanging from the ceiling that completely disorients when you stand in its center and look up.
Totally gutted for the Berggruen Arts & Culture Institute, Palazzo Diedo has its three floors filled with Strange Rules, a group show curated by Mat Dryhurst, Holly Herndon, and Hans Ulrich Obrist with Protocol art. Think: ai models and algorithms through sound art, video and installations. Keep an eye oout for the Carsten Holler piece.
Canareggio – Rialto
Where Canareggio and San Marco overlap by the Rialto bridge is one of the prettiest Gothic palaces: Palazzo Sorano Van Axel and thankfully, you can enter to see Su Xiaobai’s Alchemical Universe where the Chinese artist’s intensely lacquered paintings take over the piano nobile.
Giudecca – Redentore
A great reason to step on to the Giudecca is Joseph Kosuth: Chain of Resemblance, The Berggruen Institute’s Venice program at Casa dei Tre Oci. It’s all about conceptual process and together with Palazzo Diedo, the conceptual dialogue continues.
San Giorgio Maggiore Island
Palladio’s masterpiece church and Barry X Ball: The Shape of Time almost don’t seem to fit, but the trippy marble sculptures, directly inspired by Michelangelo and Medardo Rosso, with a subtle side of humor, are in perfect tone with this temple of geometry. Also with the two recently restore Tintoretto canvases.
Castello – Giardini
The Giardini and The Arsenale make up the bulk of the Biennale: 150 acres, more than 100 national pavilions, over 100 artists and collectives. There is performance and rage, humor and babies, bell ringing and escape rooms. Take your pick and take your time. Which pavilion is best? That’s entirely up to you, and this year, officially so. Following the jury’s resignation, the traditional Golden Lions have been replaced by the Visitor Lions, putting the awards in the hands of the public for the first time in history.
The Biennale gives you a map. All you have to do is buy a multi-day pass for Venice’s water transport and go.
