VENICE — Well-heeled professionals standing in line with scores of visitors — in the rain. Journalists and respected art critics swarming pavilions to collect their goodie bags. Me, speed-walking through masses of people with bags and umbrellas, down little alleyways and over bridges, trying to get from one pavilion to the next.

In short, it’s exactly the kind of Biennale chaos you would expect — but on a totally different scale. After all, we’re talking about the Olympics of the art world.

MOTHER OF ALL BIENNALES

Now in its 55th incarnation, the Venice Biennale is the largest international art event around, with 88 nations participating this year. Although regarded as an overblown phenomenon by some, it remains the mother of all biennales, sending artists, curators, directors, and everyone else in the art trade packing their bags for the City of Canals.

The National Arts Council (NAC), having recently initiated a networking and exposure programme, flew in a young contingent of artists, curators, and arts administrators. Led by Dr Charles Merewether, Director of the Institute Of Contemporary Arts Singapore and Artistic Director of the 2006 Biennale of Sydney, the delegation included curators Charmaine Toh and Khim Ong, arts administrator Annabelle Aw, as well as artists Tan Guo-Liang, Chun Kaifeng, Debbie Ding, Robert Zhao and Angie Seah (who was also set to perform with art/fashion duo Chicks On Speed). Many of us were in Venice for the first time and I was very fortunate to be part of the group.

After a decade of participation, Singapore had passed on showing any work this year, but the NAC was in full networking mode, organising a brunch event that attracted local, regional and international artists, curators, collectors and press.

Amid the popping of prosecco, the council assured everyone that Singapore will most certainly be back in 2015.

(Interestingly, the e-invite design for the event — called “Paint The Town Red” — was a pixelated paint bucket icon against a red backdrop. It recalled artist and curator Heman Chong’s own work titled Closed Until Further Notice, a pixelated “broken-image” icon against a plain yellow backdrop that was created when Singapore’s withdrawal of participation from the Biennale was announced.)

MEMORABLE ART

Four days isn’t really enough to soak up the entire Biennale (there were nearly 50 concurrent shows aside from the key pavilions) but it was enough to spot some memorable art.

Among the national pavilions, perhaps the most intriguing was Gilad Ratman’s The Workshop, a five-channel installation at the Israeli Pavilion. Audiences entered the dark space to discover a hole in the floor surrounded by debris, in front of a projection of a DJ mixing sounds that were broadcasted throughout the pavilion. We were led through a non-linear chronicle of a group of people journeying underground from Israel to the pavilion in Venice, following which they proceeded to sculpt self-portraits in clay.

There’s never a straightforward reading of Ratman’s works. It’s an absurd commentary on the Biennale’s idealistic model of nations’ connectivity. It stands out, too, for the way each aspect is intrinsically connected to the pavilion’s architectural structure. Ratman takes full advantage of the spiral non-linear architecture of the pavilion to subvert the orderly hierarchical structure and linearity in narratives akin to those of mainstream cinema, and also undermines any privileging between production and its outcome.

The work by Alfredo Jaar for the Chilean Pavilion was another highlight. Located in Venice’s historic Arsenale, viewers first encounter a lightbox photograph depicting artist Lucio Fontana when he first returned to his destroyed studio after World War II. Viewers are then led up to a structure holding a pool of murky water. Nothing happens but everybody watches it. After three minutes, a shimmering replica of the Giardini — where some national pavilions have been situated since 1895 — and its 28 national pavilions emerge from the water. It stays up for a short 30 seconds before it is submerged again.

Inside the dimly-lit room, this happens repeatedly to hypnotic effect. The cycle in which the replica is continually re-submerged is a haunting metaphor that asks viewers to consider the obliteration of the Biennale model and its nationalistic architectural structure, while at the same time pointing back to Fontana’s ruined studio, signalling renewal.

It is a spectacular sight to see the Giardini model repeatedly “dying” and subsequently being “born again”. Complex and self-reflexive, it’s also a multi-layered examination of the history of international representation, an invitation to speculate the end of an era of nationalism.

FLOATING PLATFORM

The other main pillar of the Biennale is the International Art Exhibition — The Encyclopaedic Palace, directed by Massimiliano Gioni this year. It focuses on the desire for complete knowledge and the impossibility of such an endeavor. What’s notably different in this Biennale is that it includes numerous artists from outside the standard art circuit. There are works from professional artists to obsessive hobbyists, mystics, theosophists and even the manuscripts of psychologist Carl Jung.

Following the rather utopian dreams for an encyclopaedia to be an absolute archive of the world, the exhibition’s 150 artists demonstrate that this archaeology of knowledge can come from almost anywhere. (The focus is on underrepresented visual narratives, extending artistic recognition beyond Western European art history.)

“It’s such a museum show,” I overheard someone say, complaining about the supposed blurring between “museum” and “biennale” curatorial approaches. Personally, I enjoyed the fluidity of the model and the risk taken by Gioni here. It opts for complexity and hybridity and accepts contradictions and difficulties.

On one of our treasure-seeking adventures across the circuitous cobbled roads and grand canal of the water city, the reality of Singapore’s non-participation hit me while queuing for a vaporetto (or a water bus) on a floating platform.

It was, in a sense, funny that the Singapore delegation should find ourselves temporarily stranded, neither here nor there, as speedboats zipped by. As if everyone else was in business while we stood there waiting.

Oh, well. Here’s to getting back on board again in 2015.

The Venice Biennale 2013 runs till Nov 24 at various venues around Venice.

The writer is a curatorial associate at the Institute Of Contemporary Arts Singapore.