Identity crisis

Laura Gascoigne on how the Venice Biennale is searching for its place in art history

This year, the national pavilions steal the show. Among the strongest contributions are the Swiss Thomas Hirschhorn’s ‘Crystal of Resistance’, a glittering maze of tacky consumerism held together with sticky-backed tape; the Japanese Tabaimo’s ‘Teleco-soup’, an elegantly inverted animation of water and clouds; and the Israeli Yael Bartana’s moving trio of films in the Polish Pavilion promoting her doomed utopian vision of returning Jews to Poland.

In the Arsenale, Adrián Villar Rojas deserves notice for filling the Argentine Pavilion with a concrete jungle of surreal columns, and Ayse Erkmen for taking over the Turkish Pavilion with her wonderfully mad construction ‘Plan B’, a water purification unit with extended coloured piping resembling a 3D Tube map designed by Heath Robinson. In these chastened times there is mercifully little sensationalism, although American artists Allora & Calzadilla have come to the Giardini armed with a tank.

As ever, the rare finds are on the fringes. The Iraq Pavilion off Via Garibaldi gets my vote for the most eloquently simple installation on the recurring theme of water: Azad Nanakeli’s three giant taps set into a wall above a cascade of empty plastic water bottles. Iraq also scoops my video award for Adel Abidin’s ‘Consumption of War’, in which two sharp young executives in business suits fight over contracts with strip-light sabres torn from the office ceiling. My runner-up video prize goes to Berry Bickle for her painterly film Ze, and my prize for painterly painting to Misheck Masamvu, both in the Zimbabwean Pavilion in Santa Maria della Pietà.

Yes, even Zimbabwe made it to the ball. The bananas piled against a wall at the preview were not an installation, I was courteously informed, but ‘for refreshment’. How refreshing.