Brazil, like Russia, has a celebrated pavilion in the Giardini and, like Russia, is presenting work by an artist who arrived on the art scene in the 1970s.
Artur Barrio was born in Portugal in 1945 and moved to Brazil in 1955 but remained outside the best-known movements of those years (Neoconcretismo, or Brazilian Modernism in architecture). The first room shows works from the 1970s when he used materials such as toilet paper, humble and readily available, a choice of materials based on the assumption that other more precious ones epitomised capitalism and would distance people from art. It also inevitably, and as professed in his 1970 manifesto, called the whole art system into question.
The curator of the Indian pavilion Ranjit Hoskote has chosen a resonant and pertinent title 'Everyone Agrees: It's About to Explode…' But what? Contemporary Indian art, the subcontinent, the economy, the contradictions or sustainable development?
You would expect more from China. Simona Bordone