The largest building of the Giardini is reserved for the biennale’s founders – Italy. The historic pavilion renamed this year Palazzo delle Esposizioni Della Biennale and enlarged to house a permanent library hosts a bundle of works curated by Beatrice Buscaroli and Luca Beatrice. After the solo shows of the pavilion – though not the joint Nordic and Danish – it’s refreshing to see works in juxtaposition. Highlights include cartoon maps by the late Swedish artist Oyvind Fahlstrom critiquing the international weapons trade and Western neo-imperialism, Toba Khedoori’s meticulous photorealist pencil drawings of crumpled paper and bed sheets and Georges Adeago’s installations made from newspaper and magazine clippings, collated around notions of “post-colonial benevolence.” The pavilion’s expansion to more than double its previous size does nothing to enhance the viewing experience however with art works filling every nook and cranny of the pavilion. Nevertheless, it’s an experience that inspires me to finally check out Daniel Birnbaum’s Making Worlds exhibition at the Arsenale.

Walking into the cavernous halls that housed the factories that built the ships of the Venetian empire, you’re greeting by Lydia Pape’s stunning installation Treia 1, C of criss-crossing gold threads descending from the ceiling to the floor. Subtly lit so only sections of the threads are exposed, the geometric structure reveals new visions of performance and leaves me dying to pluck its strings. Following this enchanting installation your chi is reconfigured stepping into Michelangelo Pistoletto’s brightly lit hallway of broken mirrors and eternally reflecting bad energy.

In keeping with now urgent ideas of urbanism and the environment is a room that juxtaposes Yona Friedman’s ongoing 1960s Ville Spatiale project of cardboard, mobile, temporary houses dangling on a bed of rope above a collection of Aleksandra Mir’s postcards of places that are not Venice but are sold as such. Also dealing with notions of geography, displacement and the cityscape is a wall of cartoonish illustrations by the Slovenian artist Martetica Potrc. Seemingly in dialogue with the Ville Spatiale above, Potrc’s paintings elucidate on the relationship between the natural world and architecture, notions of patterns providing identity and ideas for improving the urban environment like the Palafina, a house with no walls. It all chimes well with Roman Ondak’s Czech pavilion in which the artist removed the barriers between the outside and the inside of the pavilion, allowing the interior to become overgrown with the Giardini’s flora.

Unavoidable is Pascale Marthine Tayou’s huge Human Being installation. Part of his ongoing engagement with taudisme – a self-coined expression that describes artwork made with and about the African slum – the Cameroonian artist takes over an entire hallway with a reinterpretation of a shanty town in cardboard, wood and metal. Video projections over metal workers and market traders provide a glimpse of the town’s inhabitants, while sacks of flower labeled cocaine, and a rejigged biennale VIP card (“your card for cutting cocaine with”) with a photo of a bloated corpse remind the audience of their choices and consequences in today’s globalised world.

Nearby, Paul Chan’s animation Sade for Sade’s Sake depicts depraved orgiastic scenes in silhouette stuttering along while random squares float by – the jerky rhythm of the animation reflecting Sade’s writing style – making a link between modernism and sexual degeneracy. In its entirety, and after 2007’s disjointed incarnation, Making Worlds doesn’t disappoint. It’s an exhibition that builds upon ideas of the Altermodern formulated by Nicolas Bourriaud in its colossal, global scope, which reflects on ideas of over-population, the environment and imagination without overwhelming the audience with its size.

One last word then before I call it a day. Countries whose contemporary art scene have recently got the tongues of the intelligentsia wagging - make an effort at the Venice Biennale. Yes Iran that means you. And India, you too! While Iran, with young artists that have been the subject of large scale survey shows at the Saatchi gallery in London, fielded a presentation of sculptures and paintings by three gentlemen of a certain age that draw on nothing more than reappropriations of antiquarian iconography, India – whose galleries have been the toast of recent Frieze and Dubai art fairs, didn’t even show up.

In a way, India can be forgiven for its lack of institutions and infrastructure, but artist/curator Bose Krishnamachar doesn’t accept that as an excuse. Outside the British pavilion, Krishnamachar revealed his intentions to bring India to the next biennale, budgets be damned. Whether the hot shot artists of Iran – from the established (Shirin Neshat, Khosrow Hassanzadeh) to the emerging (Nazgol Ansarinia or Shirin Aliabadi for example) didn’t want to be associated with the current regime, or the Iranian establishment didn’t want them for one reason for another, we may never know. It does explain the truly dreadful graphic design of the Iranian’s invite though. Two missed opportunities have passed. One election awaits.

Hangover: 3/10
Hours of Sleep: 20
Blisters: 3