The following pics and video extracts allow a peek at some of the things that could be seen in the course of a couple of days at the 2017 Biennale at the Giardini and the Arsenale in Venice.

New Zealand offered an animated history of the invasion by the British

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Tracy Moffat’s photographic sequences encouraged creation of a personal narrative.

The moody Georgian house left a long, sad, mournful aftertaste.

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Then there was the Italian presentation, suggesting cryogenic suspension of life on a space station that somehow failed. The presentation includes the machinery for making the life sized bodies, Chambers for storing bodies in suspended animation, a machine for processing bodies and fragments of decaying bodies. The presentation was all ‘hard copy’ without sound, the video with added sound track is my fumbling attempt to create the mood of the installation. Again, the formulation of the narrative is the responsibility of the viewer.

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Death was a recurring issue. The following “band in the water” clip was part of a very long surreal flow of consciousness by a dying man. Perhaps he was contemplating hell.

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Outside the Austrian pavilion was a 5 ton truck mounted on its front bumper with the exhaust pipe pointing skywards. Visitors could climb stairs all the way up to the now horizontal back door and look out over the gardens.

Some of the exhibits were orderly arrangements of thousands of similar objects. A wall of a couple of thousand old audio cassettes. A very big wall covered with coloured balls of fabric, Wall plaques made of thousands of syringes, A wall with 365 similar maps of New York. On each of these for a year the artist had recorded his movements in time and space. A wall of thousands of overlapping embroidered blue and white rectangles. A collection of a hundred large test tubes each containing a quite different sculpture, but all confined to the dimensions of the test tube. In the Israeli pavilion billows of something like insulation foam or fairy floss.

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Upstairs in the Japanese pavilion were a series of hanging mirror image temple buildings. On the floor was an installation with a head sized hole in the middle. People downstairs were expected to climb the stairs and put their head through the hole to see what was upstairs, while those upstairs were entertained by startled heads appearing through the floor.

Another Japanese artist Kishio Suga Had stones floating on water

Got drenched trying to understand the Canadian exhibit.

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The Argentinian horse was a marvellous statement

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Elsewhere there was a simple but effective mirror maze that was difficult to understand, and a giant checkerboard with blobs of golden mercury.

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Outdoors, near a café, there was a long wall with thin stripes of many colours. Sort of interesting, but the stripes had been made by carefully pouring paint down the wall in thin lines. The good part was the interaction of different colours in the pool of paint below.

The Russian show was very, well, Russian. With thousands of little models of people collectively trying to do things in front of a backdrop of a chaotic video projected onto the surrounding walls

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Difficult to know when to stop. The Germans and the French used performing art. The Germans with a large cast of young people doing conflicting stuff in the shallow space under a glass floor on which the viewers were standing. The French had a recording studio in which musicians came and went with un-programmed performances, their creations being replayed at random. The enjoyment of these segments depended on being in the right place at the right time. But isn’t that what life is all about?