The Venice Biennale is the oldest of its kind, starting in 1895 and only breaking for six years

during World War two. Despite my interest in international contemporary art and that fact it happens every other year, I am embarrassed to say this was my first time. Oddly I had been to Venice twice before, once aged fourteen on a school choir tour and the second time with Prof John Onians and the School of World Art Studies. Both these previous trips had offered unique, in depth but very experiences of the art and architecture of this famous city. Yet this autumn once again the city surprised me and revealed a whole new side to its complexity with a vast array of exhibitions in disused buildings, grand palaces and unexpected places. The international art festival is really remarkable in the sheer volume of art exhibitions that are open during the five month run. The core exhibition, this year called ILLUMInations, was spread over two sites, the historic shipbuilding quarter of the Arsenale and the purpose built biennale site at the Giardini. The exhibition themed on the idea of light, brought a commendable breath of media and work loosely based around the concept of light and nations. Although I felt the theme a little under explored in parts, as was not impressed with focus largely on Western Artists (80%), the exhibition was constructed with some careful thought, with my personal highlights including a James Turrell, Within these two sites, and around the city, different national pavilions also presented exhibitions, often one, or a few, key artists from that country. The British pavilion focused on presenting the work of Mike Neilson, transforming the historical purpose built neoclassical building into a set of rooms and parts of buildings imported from disused places in eastern Europe. Similarly the nearby French and Japanese buildings transformed their architecture through large installations by the artists Christian Boltinski and xxx respectively. Although these large, and probably hugely expensive, works were interesting, the best works I saw during my all to brief trip were two humble video pieces. The Desire Machine Collective showed xxxx as part of the India Pavillion, a poetic video piece shot in a disused hydropower plant in India, overlaying images of disused machines, overgrowing nature, and forgotten places with sound recordings of industrial plants and the deep chats of Tibetan monks. Simple and effective the piece made me pause and contemplate the materiality of power production, the persistence of nature, and a melancholic beauty of the disused dystopia of the place. The second video piece I found, eventually, tucked away in the small but assertive Zimbabwe pavilion. Again a simple but beautifully conceived concept has me memorized, this time through careful overlays of video footage of a woman washing herself in a bathroom and footage of street scenes in Harare, accompanied by music of a woman singing. In my hurry around the many sites, navigating vast quantities of spectacles to see, these two ten minute videos made me stop, sit down, listen, carefully look and consider, in the way only really good art really can amongst such a plethora. I learnt that next time I needed to sit more, see less, and go for longer.