VENICE BIENNALE: WHOSE REFLECTION DO YOU SEE?

… “There are exceptions in the Giardini, the park that hosts some 30 national pavilions. One, a witty video by the young Russian artist Taus Makhacheva, shows an acrobat transferring a museum’s worth of Socialist Realist paintings, by tightrope, from one Caucasus peak to another. Also of interest is a 2009 video, by Agnieszka Polska, documenting the career of the underknown Polish Conceptualist Wlodzimierz Borowski (1930-2008). Two veteran African-American artists look strong: Senga Nengudi, with her stretched-fabric sculptures, and McArthur Binion, with his autobiographical abstraction. (He paints on copies of his 1946 Mississippi birth certificate.) And, in an essential inclusion, there’s what amounts to a precious career survey of the Damascus-born painter Marwan, who died last year…”