Venice Biennale 2024: our pick of collateral shows

Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behaviour

Palazzo Van Axel, Cannaregio

Perhaps the most beautiful combination of works and setting at this year’s Biennale is Shahzia Sikander’s mini retrospective. The Palazzo Van Axel is a fairytale gothic palace, like something out of Romeo and Juliet. You are greeted in the courtyard by one of Sikander’s bronze sculptures of a woman with tentacles for legs and arms: a figure that reoccurs throughout her work.

Displayed through the rooms of the palazzo are works from her over 30-year career, from her first major work, The Scroll (1989-90), which shows Sikander herself as a child growing up under military dictatorship in Pakistan. There are video works, collages, watercolours and works made from glass, right up to new works inspired by Venice.

A version of this show will travel to the Cincinnati Art Museum and the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2025—but you should see it now in this magical setting.

Andrzej Wróblewski (1927-57): In the First Person

Procuratie Vecchie, Piazza San Marco 139-153/A

When the renowned Polish director Andrzej Wajda saw the painting Executed Man, Execution with a Gestapo Man (1949) by his friend Andrzej Wróblewski (1927-57), it changed the trajectory of his life. The two leading cultural figures were at art school together, trying in their art to give a voice to the countless victims of the Second World War. In that painting, Wróblewski "said everything there was to say", the late director said, so he switched to film-making—the rest is cinema history. War, fascism, loss and displacement loom heavy over the Biennale this year, and Wróblewski's poetic evocations of Nazi atrocities couldn't come at a more pertinent time.

Martha Jungwirth, Herz der Finsternis (until 29 September)

Palazzo Cini Gallery, Campo San Vio 864

The Austrian artist Marth Jungwirth's show at the Palazzo Cini Gallery manages to inject some colour into the bleak history of colonial rule and its enduring legacy. Taking its title from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the show features new paintings completed mere months before the opening of this show. Painted in vivid hues, in her signature abstract style, they reflect the tones of the Central African rainforest described so memorably in the famous book. The 84-year-old artist's fame has grown exponentially since she joined Thaddaeus Ropac in 2021 (Jungwirth will have a solo show at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in June), and the world is all the richer for it.

Julie Mehretu: Ensemble

Palazzo Grassi, until 6 January 2025

This overview of works by Julie Mehretu spanning 25 years shows that the established US artist can count on her friends. In amongst a plethora of Mehretu’s paintings and engravings can be found other pieces by seven artists including Nairy Baghramian, Huma Bhabha and Tacita Dean. “An idea emerged [with the curator Caroline Bourgeois] from our many discussions—to include the work of a community of close friends that I have either been in conversation with over many years or have collaborated with more recently,” Mehretu said in a statement. The result is a collegial collage of concepts and cross-currents that grab and intrigue the viewer.

Nebula

Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, until 24 November

This group show of video installations, comprising eight new site-specific works, winds and weaves around the inspiring architecture of the Complesso dell'Ospedaletto, moving from the church of Santa Maria dei Derelitti to the wing of a former care home. The theme of nebula (the Latin word for fog) underpins the pieces which question how we navigate a path through these disorienting times. Look out for Giorgio Andreotta Calò’s work, also called Nebula (2024), which follows a sheep around the aforementioned church—the disconcerting animal glares into viewers’ souls—and Diego Marcon’s single-channel video installation with CGI animation, entitled Fritz (2024), that depicts a Pinocchio-esque figure in the most ghoulish and absurd situations.

Breasts

Palazzo Franchetti, until 24 November

There’s no shortage of breasts in art history and this deftly curated survey spans painting, sculpture, photography and film to explore how this most scrutinised part of the female anatomy has been represented and understood in art across cultures and traditions. From a 14th-century Madonna del Latte through to Laure Prouvost feeding her newborn child, via the fetishised imaginings of Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp and Allen Jones, the critiques of Cindy Sherman and Louise Bourgeois, as well as the photographic images of Oliviero Toscani, Lakin Ogunbanwo, more than 30 works offer a playful, provocative and frequently problematic portal into our shifting views on sexuality, identity and health.

Peter Hujar: Portraits in Life and Death

Chiesa di Santa Maria della Pietá, Riva degli Schiavoni, until 24 November

A concise show of the posthumously canonised Peter Hujar brings together two bodies of his work. The larger one, taken from his book Life and Death, includes intimately captured portraits of his close friends, including John Waters and a young Fran Lebowitz. The show’s highlight, however, is the anterior room of eight works from his Catacombs series, taken during a 1963 trip to Palermo, of corpses in a crypt dressed in finery for their families to visit. Curious, chilling and undeniably camp they are persuasive counterpoints to the vivid portraits, emphasising the often unacknowledged porosity between our mortal planes. Just as those passed are kept alive through human rituals, death is buried within the living, like a seed waiting for the first day of spring.

From Ukraine: Dare to Dream

Pinchuk Art Centre at Palazzo Contarini Polignac, Dorsoduro, until 1 August

The curators of From Ukraine: Dare to Dream have adopted a theme of hope among the “shadows of global conflicts” for this group show of 22 artists. The beautiful pairing of Kateryna Lysovenko’s wall murals—that look like remnants of a lost pagan-Christian culture on the palazzo walls—and Allora & Calzadilla’s hand-painted rubber flowers strewn across the floor, make a striking contrast with Shilpa Gupta’s dark sound installation Listening Air (2023) nearby. Elsewhere, for her installation Damascus Rose (2016-ongoing), Fatma Bucak sourced the famed roses from locals still growing them in war-torn Syria and brought them to the show—via Lebanon and Saudi Arabia—to be planted in a huge pile of earth. While some shoots have withered after the arduous journey, others are already beginning to bloom.

Best of the rest

• Zeng Fanzhi combines influences from Chinese and Western landscape painting with almost pointillist style. The exhibition design is by star architect Tadeo Ando, who carves up the massive spaces of the Scuola Grande della Misericordia to create an exhilarating journey.

• Rounded stones reminiscent of ancient buttocks, vitrines of stacked sea sponges and gold tasselled curtains are just some of the sculptures in the beautifully hung show of works by James Lee Byars and Seung-taek Lee in the library setting of Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti in Palazzo Loredan.