20 Standout Works From the 55th Venice Biennale

Jeremy Deller’s widely heralded British Pavilion, English Magic, includes images of harrier hens stealing Range Rovers from the mega-wealthy, Ice Age axes found in the Thames, on-site woodblock printing in the style of William Morris, and censored references to Prince Harry’s alleged 2007 killing of two members of an endangered avian species.

Ai Wei Wei’s SACRED, installed in Venice’s Sant’Antonin, features six iron boxes containing sobering dioramas, viewable through small windows, of the Chinese dissident artist’s 81 days spent in a Chinese prison.

Milla Jovovich and Tara Subkoff trod the line between fashion, art, and advertising on May 28 with their collaborative work Future/Perfect, for the clothing line Marella. Jovovich performed in a transparent glass dressing room in the Barnabo garden, trying on various items from the new collection and communicating with the surrounding throngs via an iPad.

Jacob Hashimoto’s Gas Giant at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia, composed of 7,500 kitelike, translucent disks and patterned shapes suspended from the ceiling, transforms the upper level of the building into an airy, dreamlike environment.

In Room With Broken Sentence, Mark Manders’s installation of sculptures at the Dutch Pavilion, human figures are sandwiched within stacks of timber or fused with items of furniture.

For the Vatican’s first-ever pavilion at the Venice Biennale, its curators chose artists to represent eleven chapters of the book of Genesis.

On May 28, Chinese artist Li Wei performed above the water in front of St. Mark’s, apparently propelled by jets of green smoke.

In the Russian Pavilion, Vadim Zakharov restages the myth of Zeus’s seduction of Danae, but in the form of a shower of gold coins; access to the lower floor is restricted to women, who are given transparent umbrellas as they enter and are invited to pick up the coins and place them in a bucket that is periodically hoisted up to replenish the supply of falling currency.

Trafaria Praia is a decommissioned passenger ferry boat transformed by the artist Joana Vasconcelos and her team of 30 painters, seamstresses, carpenters, metalworkers, and electricians. Representing the Portuguese Pavilion, it sailed from Lisbon to Venice and takes visitors to the Biennale on excursions around St. Mark’s Basin.

On May 28, Tino Sehgal, who won the Golden Lion for Best Artist at the 55th Venice Bienalle, had a trio of performers, including a young boy, chant and sing while making bizarre gestures and movements.

In the Chilean pavilion, Alfredo Jaar’s miniature model of the Guardini in Venice (where many of the national pavilions are housed) was mechanically submerged and then raised out of a green pool of water.

Marc Quinn presents yet another version of his Alison Lapper Pregnant sculpture, this time a giant, mauve, inflatable one, which is located on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore.

Although it was organized separately from the fair, Rudolf Stingel’s much-talked-about solo exhibition at the Palazzo Grassi has not been overlooked by the Biennale crowd. Open through the end of 2013, it includes a site-specific installation in which Stingel extends the patterned carpet to cover the surface of the building’s entire walls and floors.

In the U.S. pavilion, Sarah Sze’s complex site-specific environments, which extend to the façade of the building and the courtyard outside, are constructed with everyday objects foraged locally, including aluminum rods, branches, espresso cups, screwdrivers, napkins, bags of sand, and a sleeping bag.

For the first time, the Iraq pavilion (in its second-ever incarnation at the Biennale) presents artists based in Iraq, rather than those living in exile; Jamal Penjweny's series of photographs, "Saddam Is Here," shows ordinary Iraqis holding images of Saddam over their faces like masks.

Bolivian artist Sonia Falcone’s Campo de Color (Color Field), in the Latin American Pavilion, comprises a landscape of hundreds of clay pots filled with cocoa, cayenne, chili, achiote, pepper, cinnamon, turmeric, thyme, mustard, curry, paprika, and more — all of which give off an intense fragrance.

In the Irish Pavilion, Richard Mosse presents The Enclave, a multimedia installation that includes astonishing images of war-torn Congo taken with a discontinued military surveillance technology — a type of film named Kodak Aerochrome that registers an invisible spectrum of infrared light, rendering the landscape in hot pinks and crimsons.