The Venice Biennale 2022 - In Photos

Dr Nick Gordon

(authorship updated 30 October 2023)

Limelight Arts Travel’s 2022 tour to the Venice Biennale took in the best of the more than 200 exhibitions on show, including a day trip to the world-class Arte Sella sculpture park in the foothills of the Dolomites. Here’s a look at the tour in pictures, taken by our tour leader Dr Nick Gordon.

The Venice Biennale is the oldest, largest and most prestigious art fair of its kind. More than 200 exhibitions take place throughout Venice, from pavilions that represent nation states, to retrospectives in palaces on the Grand Canal and numerous smaller exhibitions showcasing cutting-edge art from around the globe. This year’s show was no exception, although the selection of artists was incredibly diverse.

At the Giardini

The Giardini is a vast green space created by Napoleon, who destroyed the shipyard workers’ houses here to modernise Venice. It’s been used since the early twentieth century as the centre of the Venice Biennale, and here you find the first part of a central exhibition organised by a Biennale-appointed curator. This year, Cecilia Alemanni, curator of The High Line in NYC, brought together an exceptionally diverse group.

Inside the Giardini are also pavilions representing nations with an established presence in the international world of contemporary art. Here are some highlights from these shows at the Giardini.

Andra Ursuta's sculptural cyborgs made from lead crystal, in the central exhibition curated by Cecilia Alemanni.

Installation and paintings by Cecilia Vicuña, who was awarded a Golden Lion for lifetime achievement.

Mrinalini Mukherjee's sculptures made from dyed macramé, in the Central Pavilion.

Simone Leigh representing the USA with her show, 'Sovereignty'. Simone Leigh was awarded a Golden Lion for best exhibitor in the Central Pavilion.

Máret Ánne Sara's sculptures, some made from preserved reindeer stomachs, in the Sámi Pavilion. (Norway, Sweden and Finland decided to have a collaborative exhibition of three Sámi artists, indigenous groups of these Nordic countries.)

One of Yunchul Kim's installations in the Korea Pavilion: magical machines programmed to find solutions to invented problems.

A view through the Giardini to the Nordic Pavilion.

AT THE ARSENALE

The Arsenale is the historic shipyard of Venice, the powerhouse of its maritime and commercial empires. In the 1980s, 40,000 square metres of the shipyards were transformed into exhibition space. Here you find the second part of Alemanni’s curated exhibition, in a long 700m x 30m space that used to be the rope-makers workshop. In surrounding buildings, there is a host of national pavilions that often belong to countries with a smaller presence on the international stage.

Ruth Agawa's sculptures, brilliantly displayed so that their shadows become part of the ensemble.

Marguerite Humeau's "Migrations" sculptures loom beautifully in a softly lit-space.

Precious Okoyomon's installation grows daily, slowly taking over the space. This plant (kudzu) was introduced to the USA from West Africa to shore up riverbanks against the erosion caused by intensive cotton farming. It has subsequently become a noxious weed.

Barbara Kruger’s installation at the Arsenale.

A DAY TrIP TO ARTE Sella

There are some wonderful places for modern and contemporary art and architecture on the mainland, near to Venice and making for fabulous day trips. We took an excursion to Arte Sella, a contemporary sculpture park in the foothills of the Dolomites. Its large-scale works have an affinity with the visual and material splendour of this narrow alpine valley. On the way, we stopped to visit Tomba Brion, the funerary monument created by Carlo Scarpa for the Brion family. It’s a fully realised Modernist masterpiece by one of Italy’s most influential architects, sitting peacefully in the cemetery of Altivole. (Scarpa requested to be buried next to it, standing up ‘like a medieval knight’ - a request that he was granted).

The Japanese influence on Carlo Scarpa is everywhere apparent in his Tomba Brion.

A view across the lake and lawn to the final resting place of entrepreneurs Giuseppe Brion and Onorina Tomasin. Their tombs lie beneath the bridge-like structure, “like Stygian gondolas” passing beneath Rialto (as one scholar puts it).

Symbolism also runs through the funeral monument: the tiles here are a reference to Venetian glass mosaics.

Impressive cliffs line the road into the Dolomites.

Kengo Kuma’s Kodama in the garden of the Villa Stroebele, the seat of the arts organisation that created Arte Sella.

Most sculpture parks are obsessed with steel, but Arte Sella is more interested in natural materials interacting with the environment.

The Tree Cathedral: after 20 years its columns have almost grown in. Now the vaulting can start to grow.

Art Around Town

Historic spaces in Venice have increasingly become the seats of arts foundations and museums, who restore and maintain the palaces and then open them to the public. The exhibitions in these sites are typically fabulous and are often by some of the world’s most successful artists - in 2022 they included Anselm Keifer, Marlene Dumas, George Baselitz, Mary Weatherford and Anish Kapoor. But in amongst the great names of contemporary art, you' find smaller exhibitions and other national pavilions, introducing you to amazing artists whose work you may not come across quite so easily.

Anselm Kiefer's monumental works installed in the Doge's Palace, filled with references to Venice's history, esoteric philosophy and even some U-boats.

The Sala dello Scrutinio, where Kiefer’s works are installed, was redecorated by Tintoretto after a fire in the 1570s. Kiefer refers to that here.

Erwin Wurm's playful exhibition of new sculptures, in the historic reading room of the Library of St Mark.

The Anish Kapoor Foundation has recently acquired and restored Palazzo Manfrin, at the entrance to the Ghetto, and use its historic spaces for exhibitions of Kapoor's work.

Kapoor's play with surfaces is spectacular, from the ultra-reflective work shown here, to his Vanta Black works.

Georg Baselitz responds to seventeenth-century Venetian painting, with these site-specific works in Palazzo Grimani.

Carlo Scarpa's architecture, Noguchi's lamps, Park Seo-bo's paintings and new installations by Danh Võ, who also curated this exhibition at the Querini Stampali Foundation.

Extraordinary sculptures made from dyed mulberry paper by Chun Kwang Young, at Palazzo Contarini Polignac in Dorsoduro.

The thousands of pieces of used paper in Kwang Young's work are folded by hand!

Collin Sekajugo's paintings in the Uganda Pavilion, a clever appropriation of stock images of Caucasians that are used frequently in Ugandan advertising.

A detail of an installation by Acaye Kerunen in the Uganda pavilion. Kerunen works with communities of weavers to turn traditional crafts into artworks about art, gender and culture in contemporary Uganda.

This year was the first time Uganda has participated in the Venice Biennale - and they were awarded a ‘special mention’ by the Committee. (A “special mention” is occasionally given to a pavilion or artist if the contest for first place was particularly close.)

And between contemporary art exhibitions, we strolled the delightful streets of Venice from our family-run hotel - and kept ourselves well sustained, of course!

Tours to the Venice Biennale are a hallmark of Limelight Arts Travel’s program. You can read more about our 2024 tour to the Biennale and Venice International Film Festival here.

Our group enjoyed the homemade pastries at breakfast and the generous cocktails during our evening debriefs, at our centrally-located boutique hotel.