Seven Shows at Venice Biennale, One Dispatch

The Venice Biennale opened its 61st edition this weekend. AnOther filed a list of seven shows worth the boat ride.

The structure is familiar: national pavilions, curator picks, a few artist retrospectives tucked into palazzos. The list avoids the headline acts. No mention of the main pavilion's central thesis show, no U.S. or U.K. pavilion callouts. Instead: Estonia (Kristina Norman's video work on Soviet monuments), Belgium (a solo by Marthe Ramm Fortun), the Central Pavilion's quieter corners (a room of Agnes Denes drawings), and Guyana's first-ever pavilion, showing work by Stanley Greaves, a painter who spent decades in Barbados before returning to Georgetown.

The Greaves inclusion is the only one that reads like discovery rather than curatorial checklist. His work hasn't been seen much outside the Caribbean. The piece AnOther flags is a large canvas from the 1980s, figurative but not literal, color work that suggests landscape without committing to it. The pavilion is small, three rooms in the Arsenale's outer hall.

The rest of the list leans process-heavy: Norman's video runs 40 minutes, Ramm Fortun's installation requires a second lap to parse the layering. The Denes drawings are from the 1970s, part of a larger archive show that spans her land-art phase and her later diagrammatic work. Not new, but positioned as underread.

The tone of the piece is patient observer, no hype, no "don't miss." Just: these seven, if you're going. The Biennale runs through November. The secondary question, unasked in the piece but hanging over every Venice edition: does anyone outside the art circuit care about the Biennale anymore, or is it a trade event with a tourism backdrop? AnOther doesn't try to answer. The list stands on its own.