William Wegman: Conceptual Art Since 1970s

Anish Kapoor Turns Palazzo Manfrin Into a Psychological Void

At Palazzo Manfrin, Anish Kapoor presented a sweeping exhibition spanning five decades of architectural models, monumental sculptures, and immersive reflective works. Set within the stripped-back interiors of the Venetian palazzo, the exhibition transformed space itself into something unstable where mirrored surfaces became portals, steel forms collapsed into voids, and architecture dissolved into optical illusion.

Moving through the exhibition, Pilar Zeta described the show as the strongest presentation at the Biennale almost immediately. Less a sculpture exhibition than an exercise in psychological distortion, Kapoor’s work blurred the line between object, perception, and environment, turning Venice itself into an extension of the artist’s endless fascination with reflection, absence, and scale.

Antonio Canova’s Tomb Offers a Different Kind of Transcendence

Hidden inside the Frari Basilica, Antonio Canova’s monumental tomb emerged as an unexpected counterpoint to the excesses of the Biennale itself. Defined by its towering pyramid structure, marble figures, and severe symmetry, the monument carries a kind of theatrical stillness transforming death into something sculptural, ceremonial, and strangely cinematic.

For Pilar Zeta, the work’s directness became part of its power. Removed from the language of institutional framing and contemporary art rhetoric, the monument offered a quieter form of transcendence rooted purely in atmosphere, scale, and mortality.

Marina Abramović Collapses Ritual, Performance, and Devotion at the Accademia

At the Gallerie dell’Accademia, Marina Abramović presented Transforming Energy, becoming the first living female artist to receive a major exhibition at the institution. Installed among Renaissance masterpieces, the exhibition explored ritual, bodily presence, and spiritual endurance through participatory works that encouraged viewers to slow down, disconnect, and engage with the space almost meditatively.

Positioned alongside religious paintings by Titian and other historical works, Abramović’s practice took on an almost devotional quality, collapsing distinctions between contemporary performance and sacred ritual. For Pilar Zeta, the exhibition felt less like traditional art viewing and more like “spiritual wellness for emotionally damaged intellectuals” a strange but fitting description for one of the Biennale’s most emotionally charged presentations.

Jan Fabre Brings Baroque Excess to Scuola Grande di San Rocco

Inside the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Jan Fabre staged an exhibition that blurred the line between religious spectacle and personal mythology. Set beneath Tintoretto’s towering ceilings, Fabre’s gold sculptures, self-portraits, and martyr-like imagery amplified the intensity already embedded within the historic space, pushing it toward something theatrical, excessive, and almost hallucinatory.

For Pilar Zeta, the exhibition felt perfectly aligned with Venice itself, a city suspended between decadence and transcendence. Rather than competing with the architecture, Fabre’s work seemed to absorb and infect it, embracing vanity, mortality, beauty, and psychosexual tension without restraint. In a Biennale dominated by institutional seriousness, the exhibition stood out for its unapologetic embrace of spectacle and desire.

A Dadaist Performance Blurs the Line Between Breakdown and Spectacle

Without signage, explanation, or institutional framing, an unnamed performance unfolding somewhere between the Biennale crowds and the streets of Venice became one of the week’s most compelling moments. As spectators gathered instinctively, the scene dissolved into a familiar Biennale ambiguity, impossible to distinguish from performance art, emotional collapse, or some unannounced MFA intervention.

One performer carried a ladder endlessly through the crowd while another screamed the word “consumption” at pigeons, transforming the city itself into an accidental stage. For Pilar Zeta, the work registered as “pure Dada,” embracing absurdity, confusion, and spectacle in a way that felt strangely more immediate than many of the Biennale’s heavily theorized exhibitions.

Natasha Tontey Imagines Resistance Through Myth and Mutation

At Ateneo Veneto, Natasha Tontey presented The Phantom Combatants and the Metabolism of Disobedient Organs, a multimedia installation blending speculative fiction, mythology, military imagery, and body horror. Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation and Amos Rex, the exhibition reimagined the story of Indonesian resistance fighter Len Karamoy through surreal cinematic environments that moved between political resistance and fever-dream fantasy.

For Pilar Zeta, the work’s power emerged through its collision of the sacred and synthetic where hyper-masculine military aesthetics dissolved into mutation, ecology, and feminine transformation. Suspended somewhere between folklore, anime, and corrupted digital worlds, the exhibition felt less like historical retelling and more like prophecy rendered through contemporary technology.

Peggy Guggenheim Remains the Blueprint for Art World Mythology

Amid the chaos of Biennale openings and institutional spectacle, the figure of Peggy Guggenheim lingered as a reminder of a different art world altogether, one built as much on obsession, seduction, and personality as on theory or strategy. Long before contemporary art became filtered through branding language and endless curatorial frameworks, Guggenheim transformed collecting into a form of cultural mythology.

For Pilar Zeta, Guggenheim represented the ultimate architect of aesthetic selfhood: patron, muse, socialite, and manipulator all at once. Her presence still hovers over Venice, where ambition, performance, and image-making continue to blur together beneath the surface of the Biennale itself.

Sanya Kantarovsky Paints the Quiet Collapse of Contemporary Life

At Palazzo Loredan, Sanya Kantarovsky’s Basic Failure transformed the historic space into a psychological landscape filled with emotional paralysis, distorted intimacy, and quiet discomfort. Populated by exhausted, awkward figures suspended somewhere between collapse and composure, the paintings carried the artist’s signature tension between dark humor and existential unease.

For Pilar Zeta, the exhibition’s strength came from its refusal to explain or resolve anything. Rather than projecting visions of the future, Kantarovsky lingered in fragility, failure, and the strange absurdity of being human, turning emotional discomfort itself into the central subject.