We should start in Venice. I was making my way through Europe. The trip was a week-long luxury, the first time I could afford to pay my own way abroad. 

“You love art,” a painter friend said when I told her about the trip. “You have to go to Venice, to the Biennale.”

“I do love art,” I echoed without feeling. “Venice. The Biennale.”

Lately, the way in which I loved art was very much in question. Cut off from most openings and shows during the pandemic, I’d begun to ask myself what the purpose of art was, even my own work. I’d just sold my second novel, a lucky and incredible moment I had worked my whole life for. But after the transcendent joy, a new hollowness had entered my chest. It was a strange feeling, to want something for so long, and then the crash after you finally get it, the liminal gray of the space between projects, that specific fog. 

Maybe selling work is the same as cleaving a specific chunk of your heart out of your chest, wrapping all that red up in white wax paper, binding it with thread, then passing it over the counter, placing part of myself into the hands of whoever would pay for it.

Before Venice, at drinks with the brilliant writer Sophie Mackintosh in London, we kicked around another aspect of the same question. 

We were at The French House in Soho, drinking wine, occasionally sneaking drags off of very thin cigarettes through the wide open window. Around us, the sun shone on the city and the streets were packed with people celebrating the end of the pandemic which was still happening and something called a bank holiday.

“When I see a work of art that I love, I can never explain why, exactly, I love it,” she said. “And for a writer, isn’t that strange?”

“It’s baffling,” I said. “I can go into a museum or a gallery and not care about 95% of what I see, but when I’m standing in front of the 5% that has its hooks in me, I’m suddenly weeping and I don’t know why.”

“Shouldn’t we be able to say why?” she asked. 

The idea gnawed at me. The problem had teeth. 

But Venice. The Biennale. I went to the Biennale cold, without doing much research. I went after the big openings, after the special VIP previews, after the fancy parties, without a press pass. I fell into the Biennale anonymous, faceless, a ghost. 

But first, Venice, where we must begin: a series of small islands connected by canals and major waterways, grand palaces built on every island of the sinking city, the waters a green swelling to blue, choppy beneath the bright spring sun, the city in pale brick pinks and light rust greens, that’s how I’ll remember it, the boats whipping through the water, past the arched windows, the old Italian man arranging the bright pink peonies at his flower stand in the morning, a little black dog nipping at his heels, an old Italian grandmother throwing open the bright yellow shutters of her home to hang laundry in the sun, the movie-like scenes unfolding in unison around me that first morning. 

Everything was so beautiful that I had to look away, down at my feet, to keep the tears in my eyes. For a moment, I thought I might come alive again. 

Then the boat to the Biennale: Packed with tourists, rich strangers in expensive sensible shoes, our bodies softly colliding with the force of the slapping current. I followed the mass of people, flowing off of the boat and through the streets of Venice until we reached the entrance to Arsenale, one of the Biennale’s main exhibition halls. 

The Biennale is a mass art experience, a miles-long cattle shoot of art spread out across the city that draws half a million visitors each year. Ninety countries have a pavilion at the Biennale, and each country selects their best artist to fill the pavilion with their work, almost an Olympics of art. In addition to the pavilions, the Biennale has two main exhibition halls in the old docks at Arsenale and in the gardens at Giardini, as well as exhibits scattered throughout Venice.

The crowd swarmed into the first room, where Simone Leigh’s statue of a gigantic, eyeless girl with pigtails loomed over us. Representing the United States at the Biennale, Leigh had just won the coveted Golden Lion for her stark, powerful pavilion. 

Everyone around me began to snap pictures of Leigh’s gigantic girl, jostling a little for the best angle. And I wasn’t above it: Automatically, as if in a daze, I pulled out my phone and took a picture too.

During certain moments, like this one, I felt very much as if I were in a mall although nothing was exactly for sale. In my notes, I wrote: The Venice Biennale is the Mall of America if the Mall of America was in Venice and taken over by MOMA.

But that wasn’t exactly true. The Mall of America was hideous. Venice was beautiful. The Mall of America sold sneakers. The Biennale sold an experience. Language was failing me again. Why couldn’t I be precise? 

In other moments, I felt completely transported by the work, immersed and overwhelmed by the sheer force of the artists.

This year’s theme: Surrealism, the Biennale titled The Milk of Dreams, a nod to Leonora Carrington. The work largely focused on women and people of color, mixing younger contemporary artists with big names like Barbara Kruger alongside those who have been long dead. 

After decades of Surrealism being presented as a mode of art largely for and by white men -- exhibit after exhibit full of Max Ernst and Salvador Dali and if we’re lucky, a few pieces by their “muses” — it was refreshing to walk through new work with new ideas. This was meant to be a year for the overlooked, the spotlight finally finding the marginalized.

But it wasn’t so simple: A few major male artists — Anish Kapoor, Anselm Kiefer, Bruce Naumann — had exhibitions in the grand palaces scattered around Venice. They weren’t in the building, but they were hovering outside, looming, gigantic paintings rising up to the high ceilings of grand ballrooms gilded in gold. It suggested a deeper problem: Perhaps center stage had only been lent to these voices, just for a year, with the same structures still in place, waiting in the wings.

As I made my way through the pavilions, the crowd eventually thinned. Finally alone, I could breathe and absorb everything that was happening around me — gigantic amorphous sculptures towered above me, flanked by video installations and paintings. Some artists showed individually in the main exhibitions, while others presented pavilions for their countries. The pavilions also spoke to the current political climate: Russia’s pavilion was empty after its entire team resigned in protest of the invasion of Ukraine, while this year marked Ghana’s second showing as the Biennale begins to more accurately reflect the diversity of the world.

Much of the work examined the body, technology, birth, death, and even murder. Everywhere I looked, something new tugged at my vision — strange paintings, day-glow flowers and bird cages in a black room, the severed tail of a rat sneaking out from beneath a red velvet curtain waiting for me to step inside. 

I only had one day in Venice, so I saw as much as I could of the Biennale, my mind cataloging the work as I went. Whenever the art put a hook into my heart, I wrote it down. I was trying to answer the question with teeth.

Aletta Jacobs, Netherlands (1854 – 1929)

Scattered throughout the show were smaller pieces that called to me. In one display featuring an old, old book, I discovered the work of Aletta Jacobs, who was for many years in the 1800s the only female doctor in the Netherlands. She published “The Woman: Her Structure and Her Internal Organs,” which aimed to explain reproductive organs to women who wanted to understand their own bodies. 

Alongside the book, Jacobs created paper mache womb models in order to study the stages of pregnancy. Stumbling upon the small, delicate wombs the same day my phone alerted me that the draft decision to overturn Roe v. Wade had been leaked in the United States sent a tremor through me. 

Maria Bartuszova, Czech Republic & Slovakia (1936 - 1996)

Simplicity can be powerfully surreal, as evidenced by Maria Bartuszova’s series of egg-like sculptures. The artist frequently created forms that recall hollow eggs, nests, and organic materials. The pure white and organic sculptures take on a new dimension with cracks, small holes, and an almost impossibly delicate nesting of shells. The shapes were created by coating balloons in hardening plaster — and Bartuszova often referred to them as “living organisms.” I couldn’t help but hold my breath, waiting for one of them to finally hatch.

Aneta Grzeszykowska, Poland (1974—)

Mama, Aneta Grzeszykowska’s series of photographs, managed to stand out even in the busy and electric Giardini exhibition hall. I caught the first scene from the corner of my eye: The torso of a woman perched on a bed being embraced from behind. Looking closer, I could see it was a child hugging the woman. Grzeszykowska’s series is based on a stirring premise: She created a silicon doll of herself and gave it to her daughter. The series of photos captures their exploits together. Her daughter tends to the doll-mother, washing its hands, putting on its makeup, helping it smoke. In one of the most compelling images, her daughter stands in a lush idyllic setting with a black wagon holding the doll-mother’s torso. Each photograph could be a surreal short story.

Mire Lee, South Korea (born 1988)

Strung up on the metal framework, ceramics attached to pumps gurgled and oozed shimmering viscera, the unsettling sound making me feel as if I were standing inside of someone’s stomach, listening to the inner workings of the wet clock of their body. Lee’s most recent work, including the Biennale sculpture, takes its inspiration from vorarephilia — the fetish of being swallowed or swallowing another alive. In that context, the sculpture suddenly sounded as if it were chewing on itself, lips smacking. How horrific, how compelling.

Black Star: The Museum as Freedom — Ghana Pavilion

Ghana’s second year at the Biennale stood out for its centerpiece. Artists Na Chainkua Reindorf, Afroscope, and Diego Araúja all created installations for the show. I was most taken with Na Chainkua Reindorf’s paintings, which traced a mythological secret society of seven women who are at one with all of the elements around them. Arranged around a glittering blue vortex of strings which surrounds and partially obscures the torso of a woman, Reindorf’s work examines and subverts the male gaze — and the installation in the center of the room creates a veil the viewer must pierce through to find the meaning beneath. 

History of the Night and the Fate of Comets — Italy Pavilion

Another immersive pavilion was presented by Gian Maria Tosatti. Italy’s pavilion offered up a story in two parts. The first part replicated an entire factory in exquisite detail -- the first room of the pavilion held a time clock where it was hard to resist punching in. Moving through factory floors, then up the stairs to an office complete with linoleum floors, an old telephone, and windows that overlooked the factory floor, I felt like I should get back to work before my boss started yelling at me. The effect of the factory, empty of human presence, was eerie and I moved through the rooms quickly because the sensation was so uncomfortable.

The second part of the installation was meant to juxtapose the first: A black sea beats against a long metal dock. The sudden inclusion of nature in the sterile factory set into stark relief the tension between labor and humanity. The sea was beautiful as it was — but then a few moments in, fireflies began to flicker in the distance above the water, small hopeful lights that created an incandescent scene — and after the tour through the sterile factory, it was all the more beautiful.

We Walked The Earth — Danish Pavilion

Uffe Isolotto’s We Walked The Earth turned the Danish pavilion into a hyperreal farmhouse which set the stage for a series of tragedies that befell a family of centaurs. The farmhouse was filled with piles of manure, stones, and grass. But that was where the similarities with reality ended. Strange tools, meats, crops, and an unearthly blue ooze dotted the space, The two main rooms contained two related scenes. In one room, a male centaur had hung himself, while in the next room, a female centaur birthed a baby centaur with mutated human hands. Isolotto’s pavilion was so immersive, so fully realized, that I was left to piece together a surreal and harrowing story. A relentless confrontation of tragedy and death, We Walked the Earth haunted me long after I left. 

Diplomazija Astuta — Malta Pavilion

One of the more underrated exhibitions this year, for my money, was the Malta pavilion. Diplomazija Astuta, the kinetic installation created by Arcangelo Sassolino, Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci, Brian Schembri, is a re-imagining of Carivaggio’s masterpiece The Beheading of St. John the Baptist (1608). 

For a moment, stepping into the Malta pavilion, I thought it was a let down. There was a metal fence and seven black wells of water meant to represent the seven figures in Carivaggo’s painting. There was a score playing. But nothing was happening. Then, suddenly, a strange clicking began above my head — which turned out to be a sophisticated induction process. Then molten bits of electric-orange steel dropped from the ceiling in timed succession. The fragments of bright burning metal hissed and sizzled when they landed in the water, then disappeared into nothingness. The effect was like watching stars fall to earth, over and over and over again. It was a commentary on time, it was celestial, it was beautiful and brutal — it is a piece I haven’t stopped thinking about since the moment I experienced it.

After a day of consuming art non-stop, I felt as if I had been on a psychedelic trip, each new piece adding to the dizzying, kaleidoscopic feeling that I would never be able to take it all in. Certain works made me uncomfortable, certain works made me rethink the world, other works made me want to weep. 

On the boat leaving Venice, cutting through the green-blue waters, the sunken city receding from me, my heart clawing at my chest already to go back, to stay, I returned to the conversation I had with my friend in London. 

Maybe the wordless pull we feel toward certain works of art is really a deep recognition of a shared emotion. Each work of art that we love underscores a mutual exploration of beauty, tragedy, trauma. And in that mirroring, that recognition, we discover our own humanity again.