The Ghosts in the Machine: Drowning in Data at the Venice Biennale

VENICE — Look, let's get this out of the way. Venice is sinking, and after a week slogging through the 2025 Biennale, I think most of the art here is already underwater. I'm talking about a deep, beautiful, high-production-value drowning. It's the most exquisitely crafted, intellectually polished, and emotionally vacant Biennale I have ever seen. A gorgeous, billion-dollar corpse laid out in the Giardini.

I've seen enough art that looks like a collaboration between a Swiss design firm, a McKinsey consultant, and a sad AI. This Biennale, curated by Adriano Pedrosa under the theme Stranieri Ovunque — Strangers Everywhere, is full of it. The theme is supposed to be about the outsider, the foreigner, the queer gaze. A great idea. Necessary. But in pavilion after pavilion, it's been interpreted with a kind of bloodless, academic perfection that feels like the ultimate insider trading. The artists aren't strangers; they're just estranged from their own work.

The art world of 2025 is suffering from a bad case of Post-AI Malaise. Remember three years ago when every gallery was showing "boundary-pushing" AI-generated video installations? We're living in the hangover. Now, the machines are so good, the rendering so seamless, that artists are using them to create art that is friction-free. It glides past your eyeballs without leaving a scratch. It's visual Ambien.

Walk into the American Pavilion. It's a jaw-dropper, I'll give it that. A 360-degree immersive video room showing a shifting cast of deep-faked historical figures—Lincoln, Cleopatra, Frida Kahlo—reciting poetry generated by a language model fed on the entire Library of Congress. The tech is flawless. The avatars look at you with pleading, photorealistic eyes. And I felt... nothing. It's a ten-million-dollar screensaver. A ghost story told by a calculator. It's all signal, no noise. And art without noise, without the mess and the hand and the oops, is just decoration for oligarchs.

This is the big lie of 2025. The lie of clean data.

Then there's the German Pavilion, a masterclass in tasteful emptiness. Huge, polished chrome sculptures that vaguely resemble discarded server racks, humming with a low, algorithmically-determined frequency. The wall text talks about "post-human bodies" and "digital entropy." I call it what it is: Zombie Minimalism. It's afraid to be ugly, afraid to be emotional, afraid to be wrong. It's art made for the press release.

I was about to give up, to go get a 20-euro bellini and complain about how I'm an old dinosaur yelling at clouds of data.

And then, I found the ghosts. The real ones.

Tucked away in the Arsenale, the Albanian Pavilion stopped me dead. No screens. No polish. Just one room filled with hundreds of small, misshapen figures molded from unfired local clay and what looked like fishing-net twine. They were made by an artist I'd never heard of, a woman in her 70s from Durrës. The figures were huddled together, some crumbling, leaving dust on the floor. It smelled of earth and salt. You could see the artist's fingerprints all over them. They were awkward, fragile, and more human than anything in the American Pavilion's digital zoo. They were alive with the terror and grace of being a stranger. It had nerve.

I almost wept. This is it. This is the stuff.

The same jolt hit me in the Japanese Pavilion. After years of slick media art, they went completely analog. The entire space is a forest of a thousand handmade, hand-cranked music boxes, each playing a single, dissonant note. Visitors are invited to wind them. The result is a cacophony that is sometimes beautiful, sometimes maddening, but always present. It's a collective, imperfect song made by a room full of strangers. It's about the vulnerability of the body, the effort of the hand. It has scars.

So what's the takeaway from this tale of two Biennales? The digital and the dirt?

It's this: The art world is in a battle for its soul, and the soul is in the smudge. It's in the fingerprint on the clay. It's in the painter (yes, I saw one! A brilliant young Colombian in the main show) who dares to make a weird, lumpy portrait that doesn't look like it was color-corrected in post. It's in the work that admits it doesn't have all the answers, that it's fragile, that it might even fail.

The future of art isn't going to be about who has the best processor. It's going to be about who has the most courage. The courage to be imperfect. The courage to leave a ghost in the machine—a messy, unpredictable, glorious human ghost. The rest is just expensive static.

Go to Venice. Suffer through the slick stuff. It's the price of admission. But look for the smudges. Look for the cracks. That's where the real strangers live. That's where the art is.

Architecture of Power: How National Pavilions Shape Global Art Politics

To understand the Venice Biennale is to understand the geography of power inscribed in its very landscape. Walk through the Giardini, and you're not just navigating an exhibition space—you're traversing a century-old map of global influence, where architecture becomes diplomacy and real estate reflects realpolitik.

The pavilion system, unique among major art exhibitions, began in 1907 when Belgium constructed the first national pavilion. What followed was a decades-long land grab that perfectly mirrors the geopolitical dynamics of the 20th century. The prime real estate near the entrance belongs to the early adopters: Britain (1909), Germany (1909), France (1912). The United States, a latecomer in 1930, compensated for its tardiness with sheer architectural ambition, building a neoclassical temple that dominates its corner of the gardens.

This frozen choreography of national power becomes even more fascinating when you consider what's missing. Where is China's pavilion? India's? These nations, representing nearly 40% of the world's population, must rent space in the Arsenale or scattered venues throughout Venice. The architecture of inclusion and exclusion speaks volumes about whose culture was deemed worthy of permanent representation in the early 20th century.

The pavilion system creates a unique curatorial challenge. Unlike other biennales where a single artistic director shapes the entire exhibition, Venice operates as a confederation of mini-exhibitions, each reflecting national artistic policies and politics. This has produced some of the Biennale's most memorable moments: Hans Haacke's 1993 destruction of the German Pavilion's floor to expose its Nazi-era renovations; the French Pavilion's 2007 transformation into a hotel by Sophie Calle; Sarah Lucas's yellow-painted British Pavilion in 2015 that seemed to glow with irreverent energy.

But the pavilion system also perpetuates inequalities. Wealthy nations can afford star architects and elaborate installations, while others struggle with basic exhibition costs. The Nordic Pavilion, shared by Sweden, Norway, and Finland, offers one model of collaboration, while the Central Pavilion's "Aperto" section provides space for countries without permanent venues. Yet these solutions only partially address the fundamental asymmetry built into the Biennale's structure.

Recent years have seen creative rebellions against this architectural determinism. Countries have abandoned their pavilions for other venues (Germany in 2015), transformed them into sites of critique (many Eastern European pavilions addressing their Soviet past), or used them to question the very notion of national representation. The 2019 Lithuanian Pavilion's beach scene—complete with sunbathers and vacation soundtrack—brilliantly satirized both climate crisis and cultural tourism.

As we move deeper into the 21st century, the pavilion system increasingly seems like an anachronism in our globalized, post-national art world. Yet perhaps that's precisely what makes it valuable. In an era of international art fairs and global gallery empires, the pavilions offer a different model: art as cultural diplomacy, aesthetic expression tied to national identity, creativity shaped by—and sometimes struggling against—political frameworks.

The real genius of Venice's pavilion system may be how it makes visible what other exhibitions hide: that all art is political, all exhibitions are exercises in power, and all cultural spaces encode hierarchies. By literalizing these dynamics in brick and mortar, the Biennale forces us to confront questions other exhibitions can avoid. Who gets permanent space in the global cultural conversation? Whose art represents a nation? What does it mean to make national art in a transnational world?

These aren't just theoretical questions. They play out in real time every two years, as artists and curators navigate the possibilities and limitations of their architectural inheritance. The pavilions are both stages and cages, platforms and prisons. How artists work within, against, or beyond these constraints often produces the Biennale's most compelling art.

The Venice Biennale's pavilion system is a relic of a world that no longer exists—a world of clear national boundaries, stable cultural identities, and unquestioned hierarchies. Yet like Venice itself, this anachronism endures, not despite its obsolescence but because of it. In showing us how culture was organized in the past, the pavilions challenge us to imagine how it might be organized in the future. They are museums of power, but also laboratories for its reimagining.

The Weight of Water: Simone Leigh's Sovereign Journey from Venice to the World

When Simone Leigh's towering bronze figure crowned the U.S. Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale, something fundamental shifted in the gravitational field of contemporary art. The 16-foot sculpture, "Satellite," with its convergence of architectural dome and Black female form, didn't just occupy space—it claimed sovereignty. For those who witnessed it, the pavilion's neoclassical facade suddenly seemed to have been waiting a century for this moment, for this artist, for this reckoning.

Leigh, who became the first Black woman to represent the United States at Venice, didn't arrive at this moment through conventional channels. Born in Chicago in 1967, she came to art obliquely, studying philosophy at Earlham College and later receiving a BA in fine arts from the Art Institute of Chicago. This interdisciplinary foundation—philosophy meeting form, theory embracing material—would become central to her practice. She doesn't just make objects; she builds cosmologies.

"I'm interested in the historical erasure of Black women's intellectual traditions," Leigh told me when we spoke in her Brooklyn studio, a vast space filled with works in various stages of completion. Massive ceramic vessels lined one wall, their surfaces bearing the marks of fire and transformation. "My work is about making that erasure visible by creating new forms that assert presence."

This assertion of presence has taken many forms throughout Leigh's career, but clay—that most ancient and democratic of materials—remains her primary language. Her ceramic practice draws on traditions from across the African diaspora: Cameroonian architecture, Zulu pottery, Haitian vodou vessels. Yet these aren't exercises in anthropological recovery. Leigh transforms these references into something entirely new, creating what she calls "critical fabulations"—speculative futures built from suppressed pasts.

The road to Venice began in earnest with her 2016 project "The Waiting Room" at the New Museum, where she transformed the gallery into a holistic healing center offering free services by Black healers and herbalists. It was art as social practice, but also something more: a temporary autonomous zone where Black women's knowledge traditions could flourish outside institutional frameworks. The project revealed Leigh's ability to think beyond objects, to conceive of art as a total environment for reimagining social relations.

Her 2018 Hugo Boss Prize came with a Guggenheim exhibition that saw her transform the museum's rotunda with a massive installation centered on a 16-foot bronze bust combining features of African masks, architectural elements, and Black beauty shop culture. The work, "Cupboard VIII," dominated the space with a quiet authority that made Frank Lloyd Wright's spiral seem like it had been designed as its pedestal.

But it was Venice that provided the ultimate platform. Working with curator Eva Respini, Leigh conceived "Sovereignty" as more than an exhibition—it was a declaration. The pavilion's galleries became a journey through interconnected chambers, each containing works that grew progressively more monumental. The traditional Western progression from small to large was reversed; visitors encountered intimate works only after passing through spaces dominated by massive forms.

"I wanted to create an experience of abundance," Leigh explained. "So much of how Black women are represented in museums is through absence—what's missing from collections, what's been excluded from history. I wanted overwhelming presence."

The exhibition's centerpiece, "Last Garment," stood 24 feet tall in the pavilion's courtyard—a figure that combined elements of a Hadza skeleton dress, a Dogon house post, and the United States Pavilion's own architecture. Made of bronze and raffia, it created a dialogue between permanence and impermanence, monument and memory. Viewers found themselves looking up, always up, reversing the typical power dynamics of the gaze.

The critical response was immediate and overwhelming. Leigh won the Golden Lion for best national participation—only the second time the U.S. Pavilion had received this honor. But more importantly, the exhibition seemed to crack open possibilities for how we think about representation, monumentality, and cultural sovereignty in contemporary art.

Post-Venice, Leigh's influence has rippled outward in ways both visible and subtle. Major museums rushed to acquire her work, with pieces entering collections at the Metropolitan Museum, MoMA, and the Smithsonian. Her market has exploded—a 2019 work that sold for $390,000 now commands millions. But the real impact goes deeper than institutional recognition or market validation.

Young artists, particularly Black women working in ceramics and sculpture, speak of Leigh's Venice presentation as a before-and-after moment. "She showed us we could work at that scale, with that ambition," says emerging artist Tiffany Smith. "Not just physically, but conceptually—that our histories and bodies could occupy monumental space without apology or explanation."

Leigh's practice has also evolved post-Venice. Her recent works push even further into architectural scale, with commissions for public sculptures that will permanently alter city skylines. A 30-foot bronze figure is planned for the High Line in New York; another will anchor a new plaza in Chicago. These aren't just sculptures in public spaces—they're interventions in the civic imagination.

When I ask about the pressure of following Venice, Leigh laughs. "People expect you to have this hangover, this 'what now?' moment. But Venice was never an ending for me. It was a door opening. Now I'm interested in what happens when these forms I've been developing exist in the world permanently, when they become part of daily life rather than exhibition experiences."

Her current studio practice reflects this expansion. Multiple assistants work on various projects simultaneously—a ceramic vessel the size of a small building, bronze elements for future monuments, experimental works in materials she's never used before. The studio has become almost a small factory, but Leigh maintains direct involvement with every piece, her hands shaping critical details.

"Scale isn't just about size," she reflects, working on the surface of a massive ceramic form. "It's about impact, about how a work changes the space around it, changes the people who encounter it. I'm interested in that transformation—how an object can restructure reality."

This restructuring extends beyond individual works to Leigh's broader influence on institutional practices. Museums presenting her work have had to reconsider their approaches to display, lighting, even wall text. Her insistence on contextualizing her work within Black intellectual traditions has pushed institutions to expand their frames of reference, to acknowledge knowledge systems they've historically excluded.

The Venice effect also manifests in how Leigh's earlier works are now understood. Pieces from a decade ago, when she was largely unknown outside specific art circles, now seem prescient, as if they were always pointing toward that moment in Venice when "Satellite" would rise above the U.S. Pavilion like a new kind of monument—one that doesn't commemorate the past but inaugurates a different future.

As our conversation winds down, I ask Leigh about sovereignty—the title of her Venice exhibition and a concept that runs throughout her work. "Sovereignty isn't just political autonomy," she says, wiping clay from her hands. "It's the right to define yourself, to create your own systems of meaning. For Black women, that's always been a radical act. My work tries to make that radicality visible, tangible, undeniable."

Looking at the works filling her studio—future monuments waiting to claim their spaces in the world—it's clear that Leigh's sovereignty extends beyond any single exhibition or accolade. Venice wasn't a peak but a platform, a moment when the art world's oldest and most prestigious stage became a launching pad for forms and ideas that will reshape how we understand monumentality, history, and power in contemporary art.

The weight of water that surrounds Venice, that threatens its foundations even as it preserves its impossible existence, seems an apt metaphor for Leigh's practice. Her works carry the weight of history—personal, cultural, political—yet they float, impossibly, transforming that weight into a kind of buoyancy. They sink deep roots while reaching toward sky. They claim space not through force but through an authority that seems to have always existed, waiting for someone with the vision to make it manifest.

Simone Leigh's journey from Venice to the world isn't just about one artist's rise to international prominence. It's about how art can restructure reality, how monuments can be medicines, how sovereignty can be claimed through clay and bronze and raffia. Most importantly, it's about how one artist's vision can open spaces—physical, conceptual, spiritual—where none existed before, creating room for others to follow, to build, to claim their own forms of sovereignty.

As I leave her studio, I pass "Satellite"—the sculpture has returned from Venice and awaits its next installation. In the Brooklyn light, it seems both more grounded and more celestial than it did crowning the pavilion. It's a reminder that some artworks don't just occupy space; they create new worlds. And in those worlds, different futures become possible.