As we head into the final months of the 2024 Venice Biennale—which closes with a fortnight of alta acqua parties around the third week of November—and with many folks finally making their way now that the festival-heavy summer tourist season has passed, here are five exquisite off-site collaterals enriching the discourse. Between them you will find all the emotion, beauty, opulent craft, theatrical drama, spiritual uplift, and deep engagement with the peerless context of the city itself that is rather lacking in the main exhibition (the national pavilions are the real stars of this edition). So whatever else you have planned, make a point to add these memorable, moving, eccentric, intimate, and message-forward presentations to your art-map itinerary. 

1. Wallace Chan: Transcendence at Chiesa di Santa Maria della Pietà.

Sculptor Wallace Chan has been to Venice before. In fact we spoke at length for Flaunt two years ago, when his ancestral futurist technical tour de force TOTEM was on view during the 2022 Biennale. In many ways, Chan’s return amid the era of Foreigners Everywhere is emblematic of what 2024’s best off-site installations have to offer—specifically the permission to experience wonderment, joy, beauty, and mystery that goes beyond the confines of geopolitical discourse. Chan’s aptly named Transcendence proceeds in the most explicit manner with a manifesto of radical love, and the artist himself is among the most eager to discuss the role of spirituality in his work. 

Radiating from within a cozy chapel opening onto the main promenade, halfway between San Marco and the Arsenale, Chan’s installation deploys a bespoke armature suspending monumental sculptures throughout the low-lit space, transforming it architecturally, but preserving with great care its status as a hallowed place in which to contemplate the mystery of it all. Walking between and among suspended, slowly rotating enormous heads—faces rendered with beguiling distortion from the front, which spin and reverse to reveal the inside-of-the-mask spaces as containers for consciousness, the inner self, and the truth. His utterly, refreshingly, cynicism-free ode to craftsmanship encourages everyone to find their own path through the work—so of course, when it was time for our interview, I asked about his path. With overt spirituality and a deliberate fusion of Eastern and Western religious symbols in the mix, I could see what he wanted to say with the work—but now I wanted to know why.

“When I was 8 or 9,” Mr. Chan explained through a translator, “I started going to church. But actually this was because I was from a humble family, and I went there for free bread and milk. And when I returned home, my grandmother would ask me to burn the incense for the ancestral blessings at the family altar. So it's very comforting for me, because these two very different religions coexisted in my upbringing. A decade later, two missionaries knocked on my door. At that time, I was very poor and was surprised to have guests at my door, aware I had nothing to offer them.” They preached a sort of prosperity gospel to him, and asked what his English name was. Mr. Chan didn't have one. And they said, you know, you look like our friend Wallace. So let's call you Wallace. And that's how Mr. Chan got his name. 

“Much later, I was helping to build a Buddhist reliquary,” Chan continues. “And during the scripture research process, I discovered that one of the names of the Buddha was Siam—my real, Chinese name. I felt a very deep connection to him, though I hold no religious beliefs. To me, the best of all the world’s religions are united in me, as they are in every person, in the form of greater love and achieving our own transcendence.”

Stubbornly insisting despite all evidence to the contrary that the world is full of kindness and compassion, if only we learn to accept it, both Wallace Chan in both his art practice and his humanity, felt called to express this higher path. Releasing the opulent perfection of his iconic jewelry designs and previous sculptural projects, in these works he instead enacts a more raw, honest, fearless, and eternal vision of the turbulent, poetic inner life. With the soul amplified to nearly monumental scale, the suspended heads remain in constant gentle motion; pirouetting, their forms seem to alternate between solid and molten states, resisting instagrammability but capturing the imagination. wallace-chan.com.

2. Con i miei occhi at the Giudecca Women’s Prison

Speaking of radical love, history, empathy, and collective action, the politically engaged artist nun Sister Corita Kent (1918-1986) stars in the Vatican (Holy See)’s first official national pavilion presence at the Biennale—Con i miei occhi/With my eyes. A selection of Kent’s faith-fueled activist visual art is installed as part of a thoughtfully curated group exhibition commissioned for the campus of the functioning women’s prison on the island of Giudecca, carrying messages of peace and freedom. The site can be a challenge to reach and is devoid of creature comforts or much deference to art folks, but that’s part of the deal. You surrender your passport and phone (the horror!) to the guard; you prepare to wait outside even if it is biblically raining. So with some forms to fill out online and timed free tickets, the public is allowed inside the prison walls, and given a tour (mostly in Italian, and accompanied by guards)—but the art isn’t for the public, not really. It is for the women, the inmates, on the very on-brand papal theory that the prisoners could benefit from a reminder of their transcendent humanity, and some proof that their stories are worth telling. 

Besides the Corita Kent in the sort of interior lobby canteen area, the exterior facade of the imposing but still Italianate building has been covered in a monumental, site-specific mural by Maurizio Cattelan. Its depiction of careworn, shoeless soles evokes at grand scale one of the Pope’s favorite professions of his faith—washing the feet of prison inmates. In various rooms throughout the compound, less massive but no less moving activations include Claire Fontaine’s comforting/alarming neon sign in the wide outdoor courtyard reading “We are with you in the night,” and Sonia Gomes’ colorful, hand-wrought hanging mixed fabric ropes dangling from the upper reaches of the opulently decorative chapel space; as well as artists like Claire Tabouret installing smaller-scale pieces in transitional spaces like hallways and waiting rooms. 

One surprise was Marco Perego & Zoe Saldana’s powerful short film showing in a makeshift screening room. Following Saldana in a kind of one-shot, pov style on the morning of her release, whether or not it was shot in this particular prison, it’s still speaking directly to what’s going on inside those walls, right there, the ones you can see from your seat as you watch. Almost entirely without spoken dialog, the emotional journey and interweaving character arcs of the people she’s leaving behind (most played by actual prisoners), plus those who are newly arriving, and her decompression once she’s back outside is more expressive than any script. I would have liked to have met some of the women living there, so I could ask them what they made of it all, and if they knew the literal Pope would be visiting a few days later. Still, if the message of this Biennale was to elevate the marginalized, redeem the sinner, and include their voices in the conversation, it’s weird that the Vatican succeeded where the art world sort of failed, but here we are. Free with timed reservations: labiennale.org.

3. Re-Stor(y)ing Oceania at Ocean Space 

When empathy instead of accusatory panic is the tone, you can have real conversations—in the case of the unexpectedly moving exhibition at the Ocean Space science center, that’s both literal and figurative, global and intimate. The presentation features two site-specific commissions by Indigenous practitioners from the Pacific, Latai Taumoepeau and Elisapeta Hinemoa Heta, curated by Bougainville-born artist Taloi Havini. While the narrative and mythological threads of each of the installations weave together in important ways, the overall installation makes excellent use of the half-ruined, vaulted, bifurcated interior to present two very different kinds of experiences. Yet one thing they both share is making room for communal cooperation and meaningful testimonies within the forms of the works themselves. 

The front space is a sort of great hall containing an armature of audio/visual and audience viewing scaffolds. At the center of the space is a staggered array of paddle boards which look like exercise equipment and function in much the same way—activated by the viewers, who step onto them and pull at their bone-shaped paddles. These are tethered to resistance cords that release music with each rhythmic exertion, and the more people do it together the more there's an operatic swell of ceremonial songs echoing throughout the space. 

The other room is flooded with daylight, and within this warm and unexpectedly quiet space, the artists have constructed both a tented story circle and an altar based on their own traditions with regard to different sacred materials like salt—but executed with local materials found in Venice rather than shipped at great expense and carbon footprint halfway around the world. That gesture expresses something at the very heart of the show’s ultimate message—a branch of friendship and empathy from another deeply oceanically engaged, and therefore threatened, coastal culture to another. In fact, that is what the story tent and low arc of benches is for—sharing stories in that context, of personal or cosmological mythology. I've experienced a lot of exhibitions about the dangers of climate change with regard to sea level rise, but never one that left me feeling this comforted, and truly not alone. ocean-space.org.

4. Francesco Vezzoli: Musei delle Lacrime at Museo Correr.

Vezzoli is an artist who knows how to make a splash. Known for fusing hagiographic culture and religious figures and iconic imagery with a luxuriously flashy and commercial pop aesthetic, Vezzoli is equally at home in cinema and sewing. But his turbo-charged humor and social critique rises from a foundation of advanced craftsmanship and art historical studiousness. These dynamics have often met over the years in different forms. But this time he somehow talked one of the most venerable, stately institutions in Venice into letting him do his thing throughout their permanent collection—his thing being to do embroidered and bedazzled versions of specific Renaissance masterpieces from the museum’s collection, starring supermodels, and install them face to face with the originals. These glow-ups for the Holy Virgin and other Sainted Ladies, played in this pageant by Claudia Schiffer, or Naomi Campbell, are, among other things, incredibly beautiful, aggressively photogenic, proud of their inventiveness, and somehow, inexplicably, earnest. They do nothing to diminish the impact of the historical works; if anything it makes you look at those more closely. 

Maybe he’s making a comment on the hypocritical chastity of religious dogma, maybe he’s taking a pass at the evolution of the ideal woman; maybe he’s pointing out that what we worship has become more venal, maybe he's just a cheeky bastard. But the museum installed a series of about 20 or 25 pieces throughout their classical galleries, in each case paired with the priceless treasure that inspired the re-do. I was ready to dismiss it as a gimmick, but his exceptional craftsmanship is far too elevated for a simple punchline (except for the annunciation photo op with a Heidi Klum cutout, that was a little cringe). But I was caught up in the energy of the installation, and by the time we left I was earnestly questioning whether when we killed the old gods, did we ever replace them with anything? correr.visitmuve.it.

5. Shane Guffogg: At the still point of the turning world–strangers of time at Bovolo San Marco. Architectural lore and protozoic abstractionism meet in an inspired site-responsive curation that even manages to drag Tintoretto into it. Los Angeles painter Shane Guffogg has the honor of being one of the first contemporary artists to exhibit in the post-renovation galleries of one of the most famous architectural attractions—and that’s saying something in a city like Venice. Its spiral staircase is one of the most famous in all of Italy and possibly the world, you see, and this is very much its own reward. However when you finally reach the top, it's beyond lovely to encounter the large-scale abstract symphonies of Guffogg's work. Organic, interrupted, cosmic-style abstraction seen inside such a story-rich context creates the most delightful cognitive dissonance. I think it's because Guffogg’s particular relationship to geometry is actually quite classical itself, in an archetypal proportions, golden ratio, search for balance, sacred geometry, do the math sort of way. And as though to prove his point they left what seems to be a Tintoretto in the room. And because of their resonance I understood the degree to which Tintoretto and his school reached for a new language beyond what they had been taught. This is just the sort of unlikely juxtapositional art adventure (and the sort of stairs!) that a contemporary viewer expects from Venice. vcprojects.art.

‍