Venice best

The Nine Best National Pavilions at the Venice Biennale

http://www.artinfo.com/news/category/199/venice-biennale-2011/

© British Council

An installation view of Mike Nelson's "I, IMPOSTOR" at the British Pavilion

Over the weekend, the organizers of the 54th Venice Biennaleannounced the winner of the highly anticipated Golden Lionaward for best national pavilion at the international art summit, with that coveted honor going to Germany for its moving display of work by the late performance artist and inveterate experimentalist Christoph Schlingensief. (German art starGerhard Richter had criticized the choice of Schlingensief, calling it a "scandal" and an indication of the "decline of painting" — so the prize comes as a serious vindication).

But of course, the German show is just one of many dozens of national displays on view in the Giardini and throughout the City of Bridges. Below, ARTINFO offers our humble picks of nine pavilions that are worth at least an honorable mention:

BRITISH PAVILION

Mike Nelson's multi-chambered immersive environment re-imagines the artist's contribution to the 2003 Istanbul Biennial, the idea being to point out the link between these two historically great mercantile centers. The visitor rambles through a series of spaces on different levels of the building: a darkroom, a ramshackle bedroom, a workshop, two nearly identical arched rooms with ruined looms in them, and, of course, a bathroom replete with Turkish toilet. Although the narrative thread is obscure, it is also quite compelling.

SCOTTISH PAVILION

Turner Prize nominee Karla Black has created an impressive installation harmonizing abstract forms with ravishing colors that echo those of the 15th-century Palazzo Pisani in which it's housed. Black here works in such materials as Vaseline mixed with Venetian marble dust, sugar paper and eye shadow, top soil and mulch, cellophane, soap, and sand — all to ravishing effect.

HUNGARIAN PAVILION

"Crash-Passive Interview" by Hajnal Németh consists of a multimedia installation combining, among other things, a video of opera singers singing about a car crash as well as a smashed car. But it is the galleries bathed in a blue and then magenta light, causing a sense of optical dislocation, that make this pavilion unique in the Biennale.

U.S. PAVILION

From the runner atop an actual tank treadmill to the alternating performances by male and female gymnasts, this extraordinary pavilion by Allora & Calzadilla takes physicality to an extreme degree. The gymnasts perform routines on wooden sculptures representing economy and business-class airplane seats, suggesting the American obsession with fitness and the rigors one must go through to fly these days. In another room, a functional ATM operates inside a working pipe organ — because of course Mammon is our god and, as the tank outside reminds us, we will go to almost any length to protect our financial interests.

EGYPTIAN PAVILION

The videos projected onto four spare panels in "Thirty Days of Running in the Space" show the Tahir Square protests in late February elegantly juxtaposed with video of a performance by Ahmed Basiony, who was killed during the early stages of the uprising.

AUSTRIAN PAVILION

Markus Schinwald's surreal paintings — most of individuals trussed by vaguely medical-seeming devices, rendered in a 19th-century style — and elegant sculptural pieces in wood are set off and presented to great effect by the labyrinthine walls erected for the installation. One is led into nooks, out through a small piazza, and into two screening rooms where an intriguing video is projected.

An installation by Austrian Markus Schinvald inside Austria's pavilion

Courtesy AFP/Getty Images

GREEK PAVILION

Although the interior contains serviceable work by the artist known as Diohandi, it is the high blond-wood façade encasing the pavilion, suggesting at once a rural outpost and modernist severity, that stands out here. Too often the pavilion façades are left untouched by the participating artists. (Britain's Mike Nelson would disagree: he had considered altering the façade of the English pavilion but, because doing so would only emphasize the fun-park aspect of the Giardini, decided against it.)

SWISS PAVILION 

Even if you don't always love art-star Thomas Hirschorn's elaborate installations, it's difficult not to admire this one, called "Crystal of Resistance." Silver foil and duct tape wrap the entire interior of the pavilion, and as one snakes one's way through it, one encounters crystals, photographs of war atrocities, books of post-colonial theory, recent magazines, webs, mouths with teeth made of Q-tips, and short walls spiked with broken glass, among many other intriguing items. The formal coherence — a sophisticated approach to sculpture-making — and thematic resonance make it one of the strongest efforts to be seen in the Giardini.

Inside the Swiss pavilion at the Venice Biennale

Courtesy AFP/Getty Images

ISRAELI PAVILION 

Artist Sigalit Landau's title, "One man's floor is another Man's feelings" for this powerful installation is echoed in a video, projected onto the floor, of men seen from directly above symbolically dividing territory by throwing knives and scratching lines in the sand. It suggests that Israel's land-grab policies constitute a deadly game. Elsewhere laptops play a video of the feet of sitters presumably beneath the very table on which the computers are arranged, while upstairs in another video, nude women emerge from the sea to drag their long hair and bodies across the littoral space, the boundary between ocean and land.