Venice biennale

In a recent interview Oleksandr Syrskyi, the new commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian army, said that he spends his time off reading books on the country’s ‘difficult history’. If even he finds it difficult, where do us non-Ukrainians start? In the introduction to its new exhibition, the Royal Academy makes a brave attempt at explaining the political background to Ukrainian modernism, developed in a brief window of creative opportunity before it was slammed shut by Soviet repression. To western eyes, though, it’s not immediately clear what distinguishes the 70 works on show – the majority on loan from Ukraine’s National Art Museum and Museum of Theatre, Music and Cinema – from

Last week’s opening of the 60th edition of the Venice Biennale marks a watershed for the art world. In much of the festival’s gigantic central exhibition, curated by the Brazilian museum director Adriano Pedrosa, as well as in many of the dozens of independently organised national pavilions and countless collateral events, it more obviously than ever before didn’t so much matter what was on show, but why. The politics of visibility and representation has been eating away at the arts for at least a decade, most recently under the banner of ‘decolonisation’. The now nearly complete abdication of aesthetic criteria in favour of a decolonial organising principle is here finally

Should you visit Malta this spring, you may notice something decidedly weird is afoot. Across the public squares of its capital, Valletta, performance artists are blocking busy thoroughfares and causing havoc on packed café terraces. The Hospitaller and British military forts that dominate the capital’s famous harbour, meanwhile, are full of dysfunctional installation work, while the curio-filled vitrines of local museums are forced to compete with video art. Even the Grandmaster’s Palace – for centuries the country’s seat of power – has accommodated several dozen mini-exhibitions on the theme of ‘the Matri-archive of the Mediterranean’. As more than one artist showing work in these places told me, the venues were

Describing the Venice Biennale, like pinning down the city itself, is a practical impossibility. There is just too much of it, tucked away, scattered throughout the maze of alleyways and canals. And the art is no longer confined to the Biennale’s national pavilions in the gardens. It has spread, via dozens of tagalong shows cashing in on the presence of the global art world, to a motley array of disused palaces, warehouses, churches, at least one shop and a hidden garden loggia. A good way to sample it is just to follow your fancy: step through an ancient doorway and find out what is on the other side. That’s how