Loads of them are small and can be visited in 15 minutes, like say, the national pavilions at the Guardini. But some of them are large group exhibitions. You can find Flemish artist David Claerbout’s video “The Algiers’ Section of a Happy Moment” as part of the Il monde vi appartiene show in the Palazzo Grassi. Flemish artist Hans Op de Beeck’s new installation, meanwhile, is part of One Thousand Ways to Defeat Entropy at Arsenale Novissimo.
Several exhibitions this year have a strong link with Flanders.
Antique dealer and hyperactive collector Axel Vervoordt, based in Schilde,
Antwerp province, constructed one of the most impressive exhibitions at
the previous Biennale (Infinitum), and with Tra, Edge of Becoming he’s at
it again. Tra (“art” read backwards, but also a prefix that means “beyond”)
presents works by almost 160 artists.
These are mostly contemporary (Gerhard Richter, Michaël Borremans,
Anish Kapoor) and include some big names (Paul Klee, Man Ray, Alberto
Giacometti), but also Joos Van Cleve, a Renaissance painter from Antwerp
or Pieter de Hooch, a 17th-century Dutch master are not out of place.
In the beautiful, labyrinthine Palazzo Fortuny, the works are thematically
grouped because “TRA will enhance their secret relationships, their
capacity to echo meaning, their power of reverberation.” You can try
and decipher the different metaphors and symbols the curators created
by grouping them. But you can also just enjoy the works: paintings,
sculptures, photos and video installations.
www.tra-expo.com
Angel Vergara is a francophone Belgian painter with Spanish roots,
and his exhibition was curated by Flemish colleague Luc Tuymans: The
Belgian Pavilion at the Guardini stresses national unity. To avoid linguistic
disputes, the Flemish and French-speaking communities alternately
select an artist for the Biennale. This year is the francophones’ turn, but
more than ever it’s a Belgian choice, symbolised by the flags flapping on
top the pavilion. One flagpole holds the Belgian flag, the other one both
the Flemish and Walloon flags.
But what about art? Vergara created one large new work, “Feuilleton”,
which occupies the entire pavilion and is based on the seven deadly
sins. He presents a perpetual stream of (news) images, shown on seven
screens. But he also paints on the images, and the visitor is welcomed to
the pavilion by a freshly made fresco: a combination of wild brushstrokes
and the names of the different sins. At the opening of the Biennale, it
was rumoured that the Belgian Pavilion was one of the favourites for the
Golden Lion, but it didn’t win the prize.
www.labiennale.org
In the late 1990s, Koen Vanmechelen launched his Cosmopolitan
Chicken Project (CCP), for which he crossbreeds poultry of different
species. In Nato a Venetia (Born in Venice), the 15th generation (the
Mechelse Fayoumi) sees, literally, the light of day. The CCP flourishes
on the crossroads between art and science, so it doesn’t come as a
surprise that Nato a Venetia is shown at Palazzo Loredan, which houses
the Venetian Institute for Science, Literature and Arts.
In Venice, Vanmechelen also started his Open University of Diversity, “a
biological and intellectual breeding centre”, with scholars doing research
over the next five months, but in which the visitors, also, are invited to
take part. If you’re not tempted, you can always look at the eggs in the
breeding machines.
www.koenvanmechelen.be
For the third time in a row, Jan Fabre has a Venice exhibition parallel
with the Biennale. Two years ago, he exhibited in an impersonal old
warehouse, difficult to access. This time around he has chosen a building
that reflects his magnitude much better: the stately Nuova Scuola Grande
di Santa Maria della Misericordia.
Few exhibitions have been the subject of a more fiery debate than
“PIETAS”. The central piece is a sculpture in Carrara marble – white as
the winter moon – a reinterpretation of Michelangelo’s famous “Pièta”,
held in the Saint Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City. But Fabre’s Virgin Mary
is now is a skeleton, and the dead Jesus she holds in her arms is Fabre
himself, barefooted, dressed in a suit, holding bare brains in his right
hand and covered with beetles, snails and insects.
Reinterpreting (art) history with a wink, attacking religion, images of
insects, the homo Fabre and brains – this one work reads as a crash
course in the Fabre universe. (Only sexuality is lacking.) The pieta is
surrounded by four huge marble sculptures of brains, adorned with
religious references. The ensemble rests on a floor covered with gold
leaf. It’s one of the most striking images of this Biennale.
www.janfabre.be
Flanders Today is a 
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