This is the subject of a new book by art historian Claire Bishop, titled Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today. Bishop posits that our phones have become a kind of “prosthesis for viewing” art, and her book is about how artists are responding to this new normal.

Today, we often treat slow contemplation of a painting as a respite from the onslaught of everyday life, the museum as a rare site of reverent attention. But in her introduction, explaining her interest in attention, Bishop shows this wasn’t always so. Citing critic and historian Jonathan Crary, she writes that the very concept of “attention” emerged in the 19th century as a means of optimizing laborers at the onset of industrial capitalism. Soon, the world witnessed new methods for displaying art meant to focus that attention. By the 1870s, single rows of paintings punctuated by blank wall space replaced crowded salon-style hangs. That same decade, theatergoers began to find their seats facing the stage head-on—no longer arranged in a horseshoe shape offering views of audience and performers alike. And whereas, historically, theatergoing had been a decidedly social experience, talking to seatmates became rude. In theater as in visual art, viewing became a disciplined cognitive experience rather than a sensorial and social one.

As Bishop makes clear in her introduction, there was a classist element to all this. Gabbing peasants, unaware of the new etiquette, were snubbed. “Distraction,” Bishop writes, became “a moral judgment.” Taking this critique into the present, she takes issue with moralizing dismissals of artworks that encourage you to whip out your phone and take a picture, or look something up. It’s elitist, she says, to classify phones and TV as objects of distraction, and set aside art and opera as worthy of reverence.

The four chapters that follow were not originally intended as a book, but are rather four essays written over the course of 10 years; only later did Bishop realize they share the theme of attention. The first chapter, on research-based art‚ is the book’s most significant contribution to the field, and I say this leaving aside my feelings about her claim therein that “the genre has never been clearly defined—or, for that matter, critiqued.” (This magazine dedicated a whole issue to the subject last year, about which Bishop and I exchanged several emails.) Bishop argues that the genre is structured around ways that digital technology organizes information, and even thought: we might not remember the name of something, but we know where to look it up. She defines research-based works as relying “on text—printed or spoken—to support an abundance of materials, distributed spatially.” Typically, such works present viewers with more information than they can meaningfully consume.

For Bishop, Renée Green’s Import/Export Funk Office (1992–93) is a formative example: with archival material on shelves and at viewing stations, visitors could research African diasporic culture, especially the reception of hip-hop in Germany. Green deliberately offered a huge quantity of information: she didn’t want her viewers to walk away feeling they had “mastered” the topic. In 1995, though, she created a CD-ROM edition, because viewers never seemed to have enough time in the museum.

Green’s decidedly post-structuralist proposition, Bishop argues, was a necessary move away from master narratives—and one that evinces digital technology’s impact on attention. But the writer is less convinced by later works of research-based art. She notes that Wolfgang Tillmans’s Truth Study Center (2005–) similarly arranges articles and photographs in vitrines, all absent a grand narrative, or even an obvious theme. By the 2000s, she says, as internet use expanded, people began to feel overwhelmed by information all the time, and stopped needing artworks to reproduce that experience.

The trend of information overload took off, and viewers grew fatigued. The 2002 edition of Documenta featured more than 600 hours of video. Technically, it was possible to watch it all, if you devoted 6 hours per day to the task for all 100 days the show ran. Viewing art came to feel onerous. (If the research-based art trend was the shot, it’s not hard to see why today’s colorful painting became the chaser.) In lieu of information overload, Bishop finds herself “yearning for selection and synthesis,” and
here considers Walid Raad exemplary. Raad offers viewers compelling narrative threads in works that often concern Lebanese history, but he always makes clear his stories are one of several perspectives. There are multiple, but not infinite truths.

IT’S NOT JUST RESEARCH ART OR VIDEO ART presenting viewers with more than we can comfortably consume. Several recent major works of performance art have also done away with the idea of comprehensive viewing, and this is the subject of chapter 2. They might offer no seating, inhumane duration, and/or a looping structure so that viewers can come and go. Two examples Bishop cites are recent Golden Lion winners at the Venice Biennale: Germany’s Faust (2017), by Anne Imhof; and Lithuania’s Sun & Sea (Marina), 2019, by Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė, and Lina Lapelytė.

Sun & Sea (Marina) was a looping nonlinear opera about climate change; viewers could come and go, or simply stay and tune in and out, much as people both attend to and ignore the anthropogenic apocalypse every day. Faust, meanwhile, was a durational performance wherein hot “health goths” strike poses on a plexiglass platform that doubles as a framing device. If you weren’t in Venice that year, you probably saw it on Instagram. Here, Bishop rebuts simplistic critiques of that work as being “too Instagrammable,” effectively calling such dismissals snobby. She says the work instead reflects “a new form of hybrid spectatorship” that smart phones have produced.

But this begs a follow-up question: does Imhof tell us anything new or interesting about this spectatorship? Does merely indexing a condition make good art? One of Bishop’s more salacious arguments is one she makes matter-of-factly, and offhand: “In the twenty-first century,” she says, “works of art tend to be symptomatic of larger conditions, rather than anticipatory fortune telling.” Due to income inequality, she quickly argues, artists are no longer canaries in the coal mine. Even if I thought that characterization of recent art were true, I’d push (beg!) artists to do more than accept and reflect status quo.

Chapter 3 focuses on performance works that Bishop calls “interventions.” These works swap duration for disruption. Here, she makes a useful distinction between guerrilla interventions and institutional ones, Fred Wilsons’s Mining the Museum being the canonical example of the latter. In 1992 Wilson rehung rooms of the Maryland Historical Society with objects from the institution’s collection in a manner that lay bare the state’s history of slavery. It was a provocative piece—but rather than change the museum’s practices, the gesture, Bishop writes, “gave rise to a glut of compensatory invitations,” with institutions delegating critical gestures to artists rather than rethinking their own practices.

Bishop contrasts these interventions with guerrilla-style ones by the likes of Pussy Riot and Ai Weiwei, who seized public space and attention without permission. While such works offer important political warnings, they are also symptomatic of a changing mediascape: going viral and making headlines is an important part of the strategy for works looking to generate “provocation, disruption, attention, debate.” In 2004 a member of the Yes Men went on BBC posing as a Dow Chemical spokesman to apologize for a deadly disaster the company had caused—then watched Dow’s share price plummet. What’s key here is not site specificity, as is often true for institutional gestures, but what Cuban artist Tania Bruguera calls “political-timing-specificity.”

Interventions, according to Bishop, “tend to foreground a model of authorship that heroicizes the artist … as a daring rebellious outsider.” There’s a reason, she adds, why many of the artists she cites are men: “this kind of intrepid assertion of the self in public space … privileges those who feel secure enough to penetrate that zone and claim it.” Continuing in this vein, she rebuts critics of Bruguera’s #YoTambienExijo project. Her 2014 performance involved asking Cuba to open up not only to free markets, but to free press and free speech. Because the project involved social media, it necessarily linked to an individual’s profile, even though it was a collective endeavor. Yet some complained that the project centered the artist rather than the cause. Bishop writes that such criticism is “much less frequently levelled at [Bruguera’s] male contemporaries like Ai Weiwei, who are more likely to be heroicized as dissidents,” rather than seen as attention whores.

The final chapter takes an unexpected pivot to the many artists today making work about Modernist architecture, a trend that Bishop argues is the product of the internet placing history at one’s fingertips. Such artworks are a useful case study for laying bare the many problems that artistic research can engender. In researching—or simply searching—online, it’s all too easy to strip objects from their context, and to depoliticize or romanticize them in the process. These works “produce historicity in a register of simultaneity,” Bishop writes, and produce the feeling of “everything everywhere all at once.”

Certain motifs can come to take on myriad meanings, with the “universalism” of the so-called International Style lending extra malleability. So much so that in 2009, curator Adriano Pedrosa organized a whole show of non-Brazilian artists engaging with Brazilian modernism; meanwhile, Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (1919–20) has been refigured by the likes of Ai Weiwei, Michael Rakowitz, and the collective Chto Delat. Stopping just short of calling Modernist invocations cheap tricks, Bishop jabs that “mid-century modern became synonymous with grown-up good taste,” and adds that countless artists venerate modernism in “an appeal to ancestral spirits”—that its invocation automatically “lend[s] significance to the contemporary object.” Modernism already holds space in our collective attention, and artists reroute those symbols to new ends.

Somewhat unexpectedly, digital art is wholly absent from Bishop’s book: she argues that “the effects of digital technology upon spectatorship are best seen in art that, at first glance, seems to reject digital technology most forcefully.” For this reason, hers is a much more interesting and less obvious argument about the internet’s effect on art than many made by the preponderance of shows and articles in the 2010s. But the wholesale sidestepping of digital and post-internet art, as well as all the scholarship around it, still seems strange. I found myself eagerly awaiting her take on phenomena like immersive experiences—the apotheosis of blending digital viewership with traditional artworks—but it never came. Her brief mention of works by so-called post-internet artists feels cherrypicked in its focus on artists who reproduce the experience of information overload: she omits the many who warned (21st-century artists do warn!) of what was coming, for our attention span, for AI, and so on.

I suspect this omission is for one of two reasons: either Bishop didn’t consider digital art a subject worthy of attention—(would that not also be elitist, I genuinely wonder?)—or because the patched-together essays that constitute her chapters were, as Bishop acknowledges, never meant to form a master argument. Either way, ironically, I have to hand it to her: the elision proves her point.  

“It was the nullification of expression,” Accardi later said of her works from that period. Her almost calligraphic scribbles—whether arranged in neat lines or garbled into a blob—look like language. And indeed, words were on her mind. Rivolta Femminile was founded on the principle that reading and writing were valuable tools for achieving self-awareness—and in turn, for helping women disentangle their own desires from internalized expectations.

When Accardi left Rivolta Femminile in 1973, she wrote a letter to a cofounder justifying her departure—a letter she never sent. Now, an excerpt appears in the catalog for her retrospective at Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, on view through June 9. In that letter, Accardi explained why she needed to leave and devote herself more fully to making art again: “The most remarkable thing I found in feminism,” she wrote, “was the discovery that I am a human being, and as such, I have no desire to deprive myself of … imaginative, utopian passions.”

The early ’70s was not the first time Accardi interrogated the relationship between aesthetics and politics so intensely that she had to press pause. A vitrine in her retrospective displays a manifesto that the Italian-born artist signed in 1947, when she was in her 20s and had just joined both the Communist Youth Federation and Forma. The latter was an artist group aligning formalism and Marxism. They believed in making art as a way to improve one’s life in a material sense, through labor, and insisted that such a vital and deeply human act shouldn’t remain the purview of the bourgeoisie. Forma’s ideas galvanized the work she produced until around 1953, when she experienced a “deep crisis.” After a yearlong hiatus, she temporarily eliminated color from her work, as she would again decades later. In so doing, she hoped to avoid becoming “distracted towards pleasantness” and “to give her painting a moral certainty,” as an exhibition pamphlet from the time reads.

The best colorful paintings in the show in Rome are from the 1960s. Accardi, who died in 2014 and liked to call her practice “anti-painting,” explained her attraction to contrasting colors: “Only through the notion of night do I know the day.” With abstraction, she wanted to dispense with the patriarchal baggage that haunted representational imagery, and to capture life’s complexities. “I simply paint a symbolic portrait of life as I see it,” she said, “with its struggles, its joys, its miseries and its defeats.” So in the ’60s, as advertisements and packaging were newly altering the visual landscape, Accardi ingested it all and responded with paintings of squiggles in dizzying hues. In Violarosso (1963), she scribbled in bright orange all over a magenta surface, nearly dissolving all distinction between foreground and background.

By 1965, Accardi was on to something totally new. She swapped canvas for Sicofoil—a clear plastic—in an effort, as she said, to “reveal the mysteries behind the art.” That material, designed for packaging, is inclined to curl, so she would sometimes let it roll into cylinders or cones, or else stretch it like a canvas on wooden bars. A room in the retrospective is dedicated to immersive pavilions she built with plexiglass and then painted on. On these clear plastics—newly introduced material at the time—bold, opaque brushstrokes appear to hover in space. There is a quiet revolution in the way Accardi’s paintings foreground the background: whether a clear substrate disappears entirely or a vibrating magenta surface refuses to recede, this supporting role is really also the protagonist. I imagine most women can relate.

Accardi cared deeply about political thought and action, but she didn’t want to fall into the trap of, well, black-and-white thinking that might cleave aesthetics from politics too neatly. For her, life encompasses both in a complex, contradictory swirl. She insisted that a rich range of experiences was her right, and in fact part of the reason she cared about Marxism and feminism in the first place: that richness made life worth living and defending.

Cattelan’s bet that art viewers are a bunch of masochists has paid off: the press release claims that he is “the most famous Italian artist since Caravaggio.” I rolled my eyes when reading this at first, before conceding that it’s also probably true. And annoy me as he does, I still eagerly await Cattelan’s next move. I just hope it’s funnier.


Image: View of Maurizio Cattelan’s 2024 exhibition “Sunday” at Gagosian, New York.

Never mind—I can’t get the Austria pavilion out of my head. There, in the Giardini, the Ukrainian ballet dancer Oksana Serheieva rehearses at the barre. I watched for a while, mesmerized, before my biennial brain kicked in and asked Why? and What does it mean? I turned, as one does, to the wall text, which informed me that, during times of political upheaval, the Soviet Union state television station would play Swan Lake on a loop, in lieu of regular programming. The gesture was clear: Serheieva, in collaboration with artist Anna Jermolaewa, was rehearsing—for a Russian regime change.

The piece, titled Rehearsal for Swan Lake (2024), captured the absurdity of seeing art—namely, a biennial—while waiting for war and genocide to end. It spoke as well to the ways that art can feel like a frivolous distraction from it all, while also defraying utter helplessness and despair, for those privileged enough. And it evoked, searingly, the absurd ways that grand events rub up against daily life. A number of other works in the pavilion did the same: Research for Sleeping Positions (2006) is a video of Jermolaewa in a Viennese train station, trying to find a comfortable way to sleep on a bench—the same bench she slept on every night for a week in 1989, when she first arrived in Austria before winding up in a refugee camp. Revisiting the bench years later, she struggles to get comfortable: armrests have since been installed to deter sleepers. In another room, we are confronted by The Penultimate (2017), boasting plants that were used as symbols of protest during various struggles. There’s Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution of 2010; Ukraine’s Orange Revolution of 2004; and Myanmar’s Saffron Revolution of 2007, among others. Here, poetic gestures are political, but what is most felt is the gulf between the two. If you like this one, you’ll probably like Poland too.

Walking around, wondering if we were going to war with Iran and how former President Donald Trump’s trial was going in New York (I hear he fell asleep), this Kathy Acker quote, from an essay on Goya, got stuck in my head: “The only reaction against an unbearable society is equally unbearable nonsense,” she once said. Lots of pavilions felt maximalist, chaotic, absurd—on the lesser end of the spectrum, a handful, especially France and Greece, felt unnecessarily immersive or over-produced. (So many soundtracks. Why?!) I didn’t get the hype surrounding the German pavilion in the Giardini, with its asbestos and its fog machine—but the trek to its second location, on Certosa Island, is worth it; just trust me. In the Arsenale, Lebanon and Ireland are the best, though the latter was too violent for me.

My two other favorites are consensus-approved: Japan and the Czech Republic. In the first, an installation by sculptor Yuko Mohri feels like a Rube Goldberg stop-gap for a crumbling infrastructure, as if someone had asked Rachel Harrison to fix a leak. An elaborate, tube-and-bucket apparatus is punctuated with fruits, light bulbs, and musical instruments; the whole thing channels the kinetic energy of a drip, and harnesses power from unsellable produce in order to produce light and sounds.

In the Czech pavilion, Eva Koťátková approximates the neck of Lenka, a giraffe captured in Kenya in 1954, then taken to the Prague Zoo, where she died two years later. Koťátková’s version is hollow, bisected, and supine; you can have a seat inside. It’s at once adorable and grotesque—which is often how I feel at a zoo (Hi, incarcerated giraffe; It’s awful you’re here, yet I’m so happy to meet you.) But no one could answer the question gnawing at me: is her sculpture made of real leather?

If so, that might be more nonsense than I can bear. (Update: the pavilion’s curator, Hana Janecková, told me that “both the exhibition and the artist… are vegetarian.”) This weekend, I’m off to see Croatia and Nigeria, two pavilions abuzz. Check back—maybe I’ll have something to add, and maybe someone will answer my question about the giraffe.

The Golden Lions for Lifetime Achievement were announced last November, ahead of the artist list being released in January. Those went to Italian-born Brazilian artist Anna Maria Maiolino and the Paris-based Turkish artist Nil Yalter, who are the only two artists to be included in both sections of the exhibition, the “Nucleo Contemporeano” and the “Nucleo Storico.” 

The remaining prizes to be awarded are the Golden Lion for Best National Participation, the Golden Lion for Best Participant in the International Exhibition, and the Silver Lion for a Promising Young Participant in the International Exhibition, which this year carries the title of  “Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere” and is curated by Adriano Pedrosa. (Additionally, the jury can name a limited number of special mentions, one for a national pavilion and two for participants in the main exhibition, if they so choose.) 

This year’s five-person jury, selected by the board of the Biennale’s foundation but recommended by Pedrosa, is chaired Julia Bryan-Wilson, an art historian and professor at Columbia University who has collaborated with Pedrosa on several exhibitions as an adjunct curator at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, where he is artistic director. The other four members are curators Alia Swastika, Chika Okeke-Agulu, Elena Crippa, and María Inés Rodríguez.

While it may be the jury who ultimately decides the winners, ARTnews senior editors Maximilíano Durón and Alex Greenberger and Art in America senior editor Emily Watlington are weighing in as to which artists they feel should win—though with the sheer amount of artists in the main exhibition (331) and the number of national pavilions (88), it’s like trying to get a bullseye on a dart board, blindfolded and using your non-dominant hand. 

Golden Lion for Best National Participation 

Alex Greenberger: The German Pavilion floored me, as it seems to have done for many others. Spreading half the offerings to the island of La Certosa risks becoming a gimmick, but in this case, I do think it successfully undoes the very model of the national pavilion itself. Whether the jury members will agree with me will depend on whether they trekked beyond the Giardini portion, which was mobbed on all the preview days. Let’s hope they did.

Maximilíano Durón: The buzz around Venice for the German Pavilion is inescapable this year that’s for sure. I, however, found the Australian Pavilion by Archie Moore to be the most affecting. Not only does it perfectly tie in with the themes of Pedrosa’s exhibition (never a requirement), it would stand on its own in any given year. Moore has transformed the pavilion, painting the walls chalkboard black and scrawling 65,000 thousand years of First Nations Australian history onto the walls, adding in smudged sections that honor those whose names have been forgotten but whose life force still runs through Moore’s being. 

Emily Watlington: In Anna Jermolaewa’s Austrian pavilion, a live ballet dancer is rehearsing Swan Lake—which I watched, mesmerized, before reading on the wall that on Soviet TV, during times of political upheaval, Swan Lake would play on a loop for days in lieu of regular programming. In Jermolaewa’s Rehearsal for Swan Lake, a Ukrainian ballerina named Oksana Serheieva researses—for Swan Lake, for another regime change in Russia. Viewing the Biennale this year, I often felt the absurdity and frivolity of looking at art while waiting for war and genocide to end—and also, at times, distracted or even motivated by real moments of beauty. In Rehearsal for Swan Lake, Jermolaewa beautifully captured that swirl of feelings—and the totally bizarre ways grand narratives intersect with daily life.

Golden Lion for Best Participant in the International Exhibition

MD: Given that “Foreigners Everywhere” is split into two sections, I think one of the few living artists in the “Nucleo Storico” has a very good shot at getting, at the very least, a special mention form the jury, though I wouldn’t rule out a Golden Lion either. I spent last night flipping through the catalogue to tally up the numbers. There are five living artists in the portraiture section, ten in abstraction, and five in “Italians Everywhere.” (It’s worth noting that the youngest of this cohort was born in 1954.) I think many of them have a very good shot at taking home the prize. Simone Forti (b. 1935) might have been the most obvious, but since she won the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement for the Dance Biennale that seems unlikely. Zilia Sánchez (b. 1926) is one of the few artists who has participated in a previous edition of the Biennale; she was included in the 2017 iteration, which brought renewed attention to her decades-long career. Could this be her shot at the win? I could see it honestly. Her shaped canvases that protrude into our space are divine. 

Personally, I would love to see Fanny Sanín (b. 1938), a Bogotá-born, New York–based abstract artist who regrettably is new to me. I was almost immediately drawn to the deep yet muted four colors in her Oil No. 7 (1969): black, violet, magenta, and cerulean. The off-kilter tilt of the magenta rectangle that extends from the top to the bottom of the canvas is quite everything. And not for nothing, I personally think a win for her is the deserved boost and recognition her career not only needs but deserves. Her CV lists her inclusion in several recent exhibitions that are reevaluating abstraction but with an exhibition history that dates back to 1964, according to her CV, the fact that she hasn’t had a major retrospective in the US is a damn shame. 

AG: Should a dead artist be able to win a Golden Lion? My gut says no, but given that the main exhibition has more dead artists than living ones, hell, why not. My vote for that deceased winner would be Ṣàngódáre Gbádégẹsin Àjàlá, a batik painter I couldn’t believe I’d never heard of before. This Nigerian artist, who died in 2021, produced visually dazzling images of pressed-together throngs of multicolored humans. His work speaks well to this Biennale’s emphasis on people whose identities contain multitudes.

EW: One pet peeve I had with the show is that the Arsenale made a great argument for the formal innovations found in works made in fiber and that respond to lineages other than European Modernism, and yet, in the section in the central pavilion on abstractions from the Global South, so little fiber was included. I wondered, why separate the two?

But there were a couple works in fiber—hung salon-style rather than given room to be the monumental painting-sculpture-hybrids they are—and the best was the knotty, weighted tapestry by an overlooked Columbian nonagenarian named Olga De Amaral. The artist has so clearly thought about how to thread the needle, if you’ll pardon the pun, between marginalized lineages and the white cube context at the same time. And she was doing it before the term “fiber art” had even been invented. Her North American contemporaries—Anni Albers, Leonore Tawney, and Sheila Hicks—have recently gotten their dues; now, it’s Amaral’s turn.

Silver Lion for a Promising Young Participant in the International Exhibition

EW: One of the first things you see upon entering the arsenale is a giant polytich by Frieda Toranzo Jaeger—the work is shown on the heels of her MoMA PS1 survey, and I’m often saying she’s one of the smartest artists working today. I wrote in my diary about how her work really tied the show together for me: after she paints altarpiece-like constructions, Toranzo Jaeger hires her relatives, who are trained in traditional Mexican embroidery, to stitch scenes right on top of her canvases. When I interviewed her in 2021, she told me she does this because she wants to insert an Indigenous tradition into a Western one, and to fuck with the preciousness of painting. She also told me then that, while often and for good reason, Indigenous artists are concerned with preserving cultural heritage against all that has tried to kill it off, she thinks it’s important to imagine decolonial futures, and to carve a space to dream.

AG: The Silver Lion ought to be awarded to Dana Awartani, one of the select few artists who addressed the war in Gaza here. A Saudi artist who’s of Palestinian descent, she’s showing a jaw-dropping piece composed of hanging silks that she split in places and then darned back together. They evoke the carnage faced by Gazans daily without representing it, and double as a stoic form of protest and a powerful representation of healing. 

MD: Awartani is definitely at the top of my list for the Silver Lion win. I can’t get over how poetic, delicate, and beautiful her installation is. I’ve thought about it everyday since I’ve seen it and it’s already among the best things I’ve seen this year. And Toranzo Jaeger’s sculpture is something to behold, I must say. Before I say who my other pick is I want to give a quick shout out to the uncanny alien-humanoid sculpture by Agnes Questionmark that really defines the spirit of a promising career; however, because Questionmark’s inclusion is through the Biennale College Arte, she is technically out of competition. My other pick is Gabrielle Goliath who presents a room-size video installation that shows the moments before, after, and between her interviewees share their traumas. It’s a completely different way to present a lot of the themes that undergird this exhibition.

After I showed up for my appointed time slot—which I booked a week in advance, so that they could run a background check—I had to hand over my phone and my passport before stepping inside. A blue-chip dealer interrupted my security check, explaining his importance to the Italian prison guard, and trying to cut the line; naturally, he was indifferent. Then, an esteemed Italian curator chimed in to remind him that this is a real prison, and those are real police.

The artist-prankster Maurizio Cattelan, of taped-banana fame, is the headliner of this group show. On the boat ride over, I started to wonder if us viewers were going to be the butt of the joke. In a way, we were: I was making fun of myself after thinking absurd thoughts in earnest, like “what do I wear to prison?”—after all, I haven’t visited one since I was a kid. The buildup was so ridiculous that I felt like I was living in an episode of The Curse. Then again, maybe The Curse wouldn’t even go this far.

If you’re familiar with Cattelan’s work, you might be wondering: why did the Vatican pavilion tap the guy who made a sculpture of an asteroid hitting the Pope? It’s a good question, but as far as I can tell, Cattelan isn’t pulling one over on the papacy. Instead, he painted giant feet—à la Mantegna’s Lamentation (c. 1480)—over the prison’s exterior in black-and-white, J.R.-style, for visitors and not inmates to see. This year marks the first that any pope will ever visit the Biennale; Pope Francis arrives next week.

Once we got inside, the ridiculousness faded away as two inmates gave us a moving, sincere tour of the group show installed inside. They introduced works by the likes of Corita Kent, Simone Fattal, Claire Fontaine, and Sonia Gomes, then shared personal stories, too. Of the 80 women incarcerated in this facility—a former convent, built in the 13th century—20 volunteered to become tour guides.

From the cantina, filled with prints by Corita Kent, we walked through an alleyway lined with stone slabs onto which Simone Fattal painted poems, in Italian, written by inmates. Next to the prison’s only window that does not have bars, Fattal laid out postcard versions for visitors to take home with them—we were not allowed to take photos or notes.

From there, we entered the courtyard, where we were instructed not to ask questions or interact with inmates. Some women were chatting as others worked to install a new bench. On the wall, Claire Fontaine installed a blue sign that reads SIAMO CON VOI NELLA NOTE (translation: “at night we are with you”). The phrase is taken from murals that appeared in Italian cities in the 1970s as a statement of solidarity with political prisoners. One of the guides, sharing her own experience of the work—which blasts blue light into their windows—told us that at night, she often lies awake replaying her mistakes.

From there, we were ushered through the playground where children visit their mothers for monitored, contained visits, and I maintained my best poker face among the fancy colleagues on my tour, whom I imagined had no clue what that experience is like. Then, we entered a room with a projection of a video that Margo Perego & Zoe Saldana made with the inmates as the cast and the crew. With dramatic music and in black-and-white, it showed us parts of the prison, like rooms with half a dozen beds, we were otherwise not going to see. Guards stood at the door; there was no coming and going at your own pace. Everyone watched the whole video.

Before entering the final room, a church, we saw a display of works by Claire Tabouret: portraits she made of inmates’ family members, who are on the other side. And in the church, spindly quilted sculptures by Sonia Gomes dangled gently—our guide said she liked them, because they remind her to look up.

These are just first impressions, which I wanted to share because it’s unlikely you’ll get in. As for my interpretations, I suspect I’ll be chewing on those for quite a while.

Today, Sime is now known worldwide for gargantuan abstractions—a new series debuts today at Tanarte Castello in Venice—comprising intricately arranged e-waste that he buys, often by the truckload, in Addis Ababa’s Mercato market—the largest open-air market in Africa. When I visited in the market in March, I saw mountains of keyboards and motherboards, and spools of coated wires sorted by color.

The sheer volume of the e-waste in Sime’s work can be a shock to Western viewers, who are used to sending off trash never to be seen again. For this reason, his work is often described as a kind of commentary on recycling. But Sime was making these for 25 years before he started showing in the Western world. For him, the work is really about our addiction to technology: he wants to make you think about all the ways connectivity has changed, to question our addiction to constant upgrades.

Resourceful reclamation is not novel for Sime, but part of his everyday ethos. Sime’s approach, of tending to his surroundings, pervades everything he does. In Addis Ababa, I visited Zoma—Sime’s compound replete with a museum, a school, a restaurant, and a farm. He funds it all with sales from his artworks. The school is critical to Sime’s mission: workers at Zoma repeatedly mentioned the corruption involved in the national curriculum, and the necessity of interventions.

The seed for the complex was planted in 2002, when Sime and his collaborator Meskerem Assegued, an anthropologist and curator, bought a dilapidated house, thinking they’d convert it into a studio. Sime began adding to the structure with mud and straw, a vernacular technique, and from there, his project evolved organically. Now, it features a half-dozen mud buildings, each sculptured with their own intricate patterns. Assegued was put off by the rampant introduction of toxic building materials into Ethiopia, when vernacular architectural forms had proven perfectly durable. Driving around the city, you’ll find countless dwellings made of mud and corrugated steel, behind which uninhabited skeletons of luxury condo buildings ominously loom. Addis Ababa is developing fast—and in ways that leave locals skeptical. A Zoma worker named Teddy put it like this: “Where there is corruption, there is construction.”

And so, Sime and Asseguedare charting alternatives. Zoma employs130 people, often training skilled workers whom other people hire right away. And they educate 160 students: the school too is in high demand, and specializes in educating autistic children. When I visited, a few were playing in the grass and tinkering with computers; Zoma does home visits to train and support their families, too.

My visit to Zoma came just days after the actress Lupita Nyong’o had stopped by. And she’s far from the only high-profile person to have taken note: the current prime minister has been tapping the duo to build on such sites as a gorgeous cave called Sof Omar, where they have just started to undertake preservation efforts, make the cave accessible, and carve artworks into the rock; or Mount Entoto, a National Park they have outfitted with a waterfall, an amphitheater, a greenhouse, a workout area, and a culinary school led by James Beard award-winner Chef Yohanis. Situated at an altitude of two miles and covered in Eucalyptus trees, the community site is terraced with ramps that make it wheelchair accessible.

At Entoto, muchof the construction is cantilevered so that it floats rather than paves over the plants and animals who lived there first. As I walked on the mosaic-lined path Sime was in the process of building, I watched him pick up a small piece of trash someone had left behind. Assegued’s design features holes cut in concrete to let light shine down and trees grow through. “I hate cutting trees. I hate killing anything,” Assegued told me, as we gazed down at a Juniper tree growing through holes in not one but two stories. She shared the same sentiment when we visited an elderly, disabled milk cow in her care, who is bonded closely with one of her daughters, also living at Zoma.

Assegued is an anthropologist by training; she and Sime craft designs together, then consult an architect and then a structural engineer. The totalizing approach prompted curator Hans Ulrich Obrist to liken Sime’s practice to the Gesamkunstwerk, German for “total work of art,” and the duo’s practice begs comparison to land art and to social practice, too. But their project reminds me most of the Austrian architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser, whose built works, made of reclaimed materials, share an ethos with everything he does: from his paintings (bright colors, organic shapes, fantastical landscapes), to his diet (mostly nettle salads). In ecology as in society, everything is interconnected; every decision has a ripple effect.

You can see this ecosystemic thinking—which really often looks like common sense care—in their intervention in Unity Park. All visitors to this major attraction, first built by Ethiopian Emperor Menelik II in the 19th century, now enter through their garden of native plants—rosemary, succulents, wild olive trees. Whereas in other artist gardens, plants are enlisted as symbols or metonyms—more often than not, for histories of colonialism their global migration betrays—here, they aren’t so much “conceptual” as the right thing to do. Native plants are always more friendly to local ecosystems. The turtle-shaped ice cream hut Sime intricately crafted of used metal spoons is friendly, too. As we shared a meal in one of the houses the duo designed together—enjoying tiramisu, a remnant of Italian colonialism, enhanced by fresh Ethiopian coffee beans—Assegued described how the buildings were like an ecosystem, too, pointing up to an intricately woven conical ceiling that both funnels heat and keeps out rain.

Sime’s newest works, debuting this week in Venice, at Spazio Tana, concern mineral extraction, with intricately woven, colored wires forming crystalline shapes, reminding viewers from whence certain materials derive—a nod to the Earth, and to the inhumane labor practices that incessant updates rely on. In his works, many nearing ten feet wide, you’re forced to contend with the sheer volume of materials once mined at great cost to the earth and to workers, only to soon become waste. Yet with their sheer magnitude and unmistakable beauty, they devastate delicately. The works are made of electronics, but they are hardly futuristic or shiny. They evoke, instead, what we lose as we “develop.”

And the craftsmanship is exquisite—so well made that you start to wonder where the machinic ends and the handmade begins. Instead of mixing paints, he twirls and braids together different colors of coated wires. You’ll likely find yourself taking it all in from afar, then coming up close to see how it’s made, then repeat. In one of the new works, green swaths of wire punctuated with nails echo metallic components on green motherboards. These moments of irregularity remind warmly of humanity. Showing me the works at Zoma, Sime said proudly yet humbly, “What else can do this but love?”

Sime’s big abstractions are made up of small panels, allowing him to add continually; similarly, his process of building with mud and straw allows him to keep adding to buildings as needs change. And change they do:there’s not much flat space at Zoma—he keeps saying he wants to build that dream studio, but time and again, he winds up building for his community instead. And so, he’s often laying out his arrangements in classrooms when the kids have gone home, sometimes working until he falls asleep there.

E-waste is one of countless things being tended to and given a second chance at Zoma—alongside animals, gardens, children, and community. Here, burners in the culinary school are fueled by biogas from cow manure while their slur fertilizes the plants, basically eradicating the notion of “waste.” Here, an incredibly sweet local kid in need found a home with Sime andAssegued,who adopted him as their own. Here, in many ways, modernity is the thing that feels like trash—something that alienated us from nature, and in its ways, from real community, too.

In “Foreigners Everywhere,” some culturally specific references get lost in translation to be sure, but being represented, and being seen, is framed as a good thing. Some curators might have hesitated to include works made by an artist confined to psychiatric institutions (Aloïse Corbaz), or drawings by a Yanomami shaman done in collaboration with a French anthropologist (André Taniki). Both are interesting works to be sure, but those artists’ inclusion begs questions about the ethics involved in putting their work on display. Who benefits the most from their subsumption into the art world: the maker, their heirs, their community; or art dealers, and/or liberals looking to learn about diverse experiences?

It’s a difficult question—case-by-case, catch-22—and the Biennale’s artistic director, Adriana Pedrosa, didn’t shy away from taking a stance. The show includes lots of works by artists who, in the 20th century, worked in contexts other than the art world—“outsider artists,” the intro text admits in scare quotes. Many of them are Indigenous or self-taught: standouts include Santiago Yahuarcani, and Claudia Alarcón, who worked in collaboration with Silät, a collective of hundreds of women weavers artists from the Wichí communities in Argentina. Their works are shown alongside young, even trendy artists decidedly working for the white cube, like Salman Toor and Evelyn Taocheng Wang.

There are a few threads to  Pedrosa’s argument, and the strongest one is in the Arsenale, which is filled with works that blur the line between fiber and painting—pictorial ideas worked out with dye and thread. There, artists draw from contexts, traditions, and techniques outside the West; several didn’t show in, or make work for, museums at all during their lifetime. As the art world grows more geographically diverse, the very idea of “fine art” is expanding too, since after all, it’s a Western construct. While fiber has had a seat at the table for a while now, Pedrosa has introduced dozens of underappreciated examples. Some are better than others—aesthetically, the show is highly varied, with works united by theme and not aesthetic approach. Pacita Abad, Olga De Amaral, Anna Zemánková, and Susannne Wegner all stand out.

This infusion of the vernacular into the realms of fine art and the museum is not without uneven power dynamics. Two artists approach this thoughtfully and self-consciously—confronting inclusion with skepticism, and asking questions about whether the art museum, being a Western construct weighed down by colonial and imperialist baggage, is inherently a good place to be. For me, they steal the show. (They tie it all together, and they bookend it, too.)

One of the very first pieces you see upon entering the Arsenale is a gigantic polyptych by Frida Toranzo Jaeger. After she paints, Toranzo Jaeger hires her relatives, who are trained in traditional Mexican embroidery, to stitch scenes right on top of her canvases. Here, in one scene, a lesbian orgy overlays an idyllic landscape, and this is flanked by paintings of futuristic machinery woven with bondage-like ribbons and grommets. When I interviewed the artist in 2021, she told me she does this because she wants to insert an Indigenous tradition into a Western one, and to fuck with the preciousness of painting, which was reified by Europeans and then contorted to justify white supremacy—as if other cultures without painting-filled museums were inherently lesser. She calls this act “semiological vandalism,” and told me then that, while often and for good reason, Indigenous artists are concerned with preserving cultural heritage against all that has tried to kill it off, she thinks it’s important to imagine decolonial futures, and to carve a space to dream. Embroidery means her canvases have a backside; there, she wrote a message next to an embroidered heart: HEARTS THAT UNITE AGAINST GENOCIDE!

One of the last works you see, meanwhile, are Lauren Halsey’s towering stone-like concrete columns outside the Arsenale. Halsey borrows from the vernacular funk of her neighborhood in Los Angeles—handmade signs from local businesses in South Central, vivacious and full of character—to render these Egyptian-style columns, insisting both deserve pride of place in a continuum of Black culture. The column’s capitals are portraits of local friends, made monumental. Halsey has long expressed skepticism toward the ways the art world can extract from marginalized cultures and communities. So when the Met commissioned a major rooftop installation from her last year, she didn’t let them buy it; instead, she sent it back to her community, to the people it was meant to serve. Similarly, she uses proceeds from work she does sell to fund food justice initiatives in her community, utilizing her proximity to the ultrarich via the art world to redistribute wealth.

Halsey didn’t want the Met to own that piece of her culture like some trophy of conquest—even though of course, that’s precisely what encyclopedic museums were originally designed to do.

Meanwhile, in the United States, the art market has basically become a figurative-painting-industrial-complex, and museums, strapped for cash, are resorting to pandering to board members and luxury fashion brands. In institutions, art that is genuinely envelope-pushing, political, and experimental has become hard to find.

Daring artists will continue to persist, of course, but what does the future of showing and supporting their work look like? There’s a growing sense of unease.

Amid it all, the nation of Malta has started its own biennial—and proven itself a promising platform. Organized in just six months, the show opened in March and runs through May 31, with works by emerging and iconic artists scattered about the Mediterranean island. The show was initially billed as a home for the Palestine pavilion not included in the Venice Biennale, since Italy does not recognize Palestine as a sovereign nation. Unfortunately (and understandably), that pavilion did not come together—as the artistic director told me, “with an ongoing genocide, organizing aspects of logistics at a distance was more difficult than expected.” Still, a willingness to take strong stances pervades the show.

As with any new arts initiative, one should wonder: where did the money—and the motive—come from? The answer, in addition to government and arts council funding, is largely the tourism board—by today’s standards, certainly one of the more innocuous options. Though, of course, no biennial would be complete without work addressing the subject of gentrification, a phenomenon every biennial is likely to exacerbate. In Malta, the Angolan artist Edson Chagas is showing an impressive series of photographs, “Common Walls (2022­-23),” of architectural fragments that, printed to scale and displayed in deep frames in a room full of frescoes, are easily mistaken for paintings, or architectural chunks he excised and then put on display. Instead, the artist says he captured moments that betray the effects of gentrification found in various urban locales—like peeling paint that gives clues about what a certain building used to be.

The biennial commissioned a number of new artworks, and also installed existing ones in some of Malta’s most gorgeous locales, framing them meaningfully anew. Rosa Baba’s film Inside the Outset: Evoking a Space of Passage (2021), shot in Cyprus and featuring underwater and archaeological sites, is installed in tunnels that Medieval knights dug beneath Saint John’s Co-Cathedral in Valletta—where skulls are inlaid in marble floors below Caravaggio paintings. A sculpture by Guadalupe Maravilla is on view in another church, where the setting resonates beautifully with the artists’ work concerning migration and healing, and borrowing Catholic imagery. For Suez Canal Republic’s performance Embassy (2023), a performer danced with a disused exploration rover that followed her around a rocky, grassy, seaside terrain, making the environment—Gozo island—feel all the more alien.

Malta proves itself as fitting a setting as any for a global affair like a biennial. Culturally, linguistically, and geographically, it is a meeting point of influences from North Africa, Europe, and the Arab world. The Jamaican artist Simon Benjamin made this nexus visible in his installation Pillars (2023), wherein viewers peer into shipping barrels, only to find the peepholes are more like portals. Videos viewed through thick lenses make you feel like you’re looking into a telescope and across the ocean, viewing vignettes from Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and North America. Tania Bruguera’s contribution lays bare some Maltese politics, too: she installed a giant EU flag and then, for a performance, hired a local graffiti artist to turn its yellow stars into a ring of barbed wire, emblazoned with a warning: THE POOR TREATMENT OF THE MIGRANTS TODAY WILL BE OUR DISHONOR TOMORROW. It served as a reminder to the Maltese of their responsibility as residents in a port for those crossing the Mediterranean—and to the European countries to the north who too often abdicate their responsibility to such hubs.

Bruguera’s was one of a smattering of political performances that took place at the opening—the genre was, until recently, a mainstay of major art events. For another, in the main square of the capital city, the Maltese duo Keit Bonnici and Niels Plotard wrapped a red telephone booth—a remnant of British colonial occupation—in bubble wrap, as if preparing it to be shipped away. The artists were protesting the Malta Planning Authority’s designation of such booths as protected elements of Maltese heritage—saying, in effect, this isn’t ours.

The Malta Biennale is not a show with a grand curatorial theme making a big statement about what art is or could or should be. But it is a platform that clearly believes in artists and their visions—something badly needed in a world increasingly asking artists to play roles in relation to shows of soft power and money laundering. Refreshingly, the organizers seem to believe in more than artists, too: at the televised opening at the Grandmaster’s Palace, the artistic director, Sofia Baldi Pighi, dressed in a ballgown, called for a ceasefire—a firm, simple statement of a kind seldom spoken so directly in so many realms of the art world.