Rooms with views

The most picturesque festival of them all, the Venice Biennale, begins again this month. Here are four pavilions you shouldn’t miss.

Listening All Night to the Rain British Pavilion, Giardini della Biennale

The artist and film-maker

John Akomfrah was a founding member of the Black Audio Film Collective, a group which made documentaries such as Handsworth Songs (1986) about the 1985 riots in Birmingham. Akomfrah is gracing Venice with an installation featuring eight interlocking multi-screen works that encourage viewers to meditate on the idea of listening as activism.

Ka’a Puera: we are walking birds Hahawpua Pavilion, Giardini della Biennale

Brazil’s pavilion has been renamed the Hahawpua Pavilion, in tribute to the name given to the country by the Pataxó people, a tribe based mostly in the state of Bahia. For the first time, Brazil will be represented by an Indigenous artist, Glicéria Tupinamba, who uses traditional craft techniques in her work and promotes the preservation of Pataxó culture.

kith and kin Australia Pavilion, Giardini della Biennale

The word ‘kith’, says Archie Moore, in Old English meant not just friends but, more specifically, countrymen. The artist has taken this idea as a starting point for his Venice exhibition, which is guided by the sense of kinship First Nations people have with the land and explores the decline of Indigenous tongues. He has researched the Gamilaraay and Bigambul languages and woven their vocabulary into his art.

Everything Precious is Fragile Benin Pavilion, Arsenale

African representation at Venice has been steadily growing in recent years; the Republic of Benin and Morocco are the latest African countries to make their debuts this year. Benin’s pavilion features four artists whose work touches on their home country’s colonial history and explores the themes of ecology, national identity and ‘rematriation’, a feminist spin on restitution.