Massimiliano Gioni

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The penultimate installment of our five part series: the frieze editors select the most significant shows from the past 25 years

The 55th Venice Biennale

BY Dan Fox |

The Biennale exhibition, curated by Massimiliano Gioni, has turned out to be something of a coup. He has compellingly followed through his basic idea of submerging him and us – via surrealism, spiritualist abstraction, ‘outsider art’, popular culture – into the phantasmagorical unconscious and the primordial of 20th century art (and its digital counterpart of the 21st).

BY Jörg Heiser |

I left the damp and maddeningly labyrinthine beauty of Venice a few days ago. Here is an assortment of observations still nagging at me:

BY Dan Fox |

The title for Massimiliano Gioni’s Venice Biennale – an exhibition which is mostly wonderful, often magisterial and elegantly provocative – comes from a work by Marino Auriti, Enciclopedico Palazzo del Mondo (c.1950s). A model of this skyscraper is installed in the first room of the Arsenale. The Italian-American artist’s quixotic aim was for the building to house all the knowledge in the world; he estimated that it would cost about $2.5 billion to realize. Unsurprisingly, Auriti never found a backer, though he wrote plenty of letters, and even patented his design. For decades it languished in his garage. In 2003, 23 years after Auriti died, his granddaughters donated the model to the American Folk Art Museum in New York.

BY Sam Thorne |

Massimiliano Gioni discusses his plans for the 55th Venice Biennale, ‘The Encyclopaedic Palace’

BY Barbara Casavecchia |

‘10,000 Lives’ was a fascinating examination of the role of photography in contemporary culture

BY Christy Lange |

18 critics and curators choose what they felt to be the most significant biennials and survey shows of 2008

Various venues, Berlin, Germany

BY Jörg Heiser |