In a Biennale that puts a real emphasis on the interactive experience of art, the mist has emerged a major artistic medium across the sprawling exhibition, which extends beyond the main exhibition into 90 national pavilions and manifold collateral events.
Israeli artist Aya Ben Ron has created a field hospital to treat social ills from domestic abuse to racism to occupation, which forces hurried visitors to slow down, take and number and wait their turn.
Australian artist Angelica Mesiti uses film to examine ways citizens can assemble and communicate against the backdrop of fragile democracy.
And American Martin Puryeare explores liberty through a series of clear, declarative sculptures and installations that are a rebuke against racism and testosterone-driven power.
Beyond the Biennale, Marina Abramovic asks whether empathy created in a virtual reality experience can motivate action against climate change.
The French pavilion also emits vapour, meant to create a dreamlike environment for the journey proposed by 41-year-old artist Laure Prouvost, only the third woman to represent France at the Biennale.
Hers is an immersive experience of film, performance and installations featuring, among other details, two living white seabirds pecking along a neglected seaside where Murano glass shoes representing humanity's castoffs lie alongside colourful sea life, representing the artist's concern about climate change and ecology, according to curator Martha Kirszenbaum.
Mist is put to effective use inside the Indian Pavilion, which is a thematic tribute to Mahatma Gandhi, marking the 150th anniversary of his birth.
Artist Jitish Kallat projects a 1939 letter written by Gandhi to Adolf Hitler, appealing to him to prevent war and addressing him as "friend." The audience can not only read the letter but walk through the projection and be literally illuminated by its message.
Kallat said the "Dear friend" salutation projects Gandhi's message across time "and asks the reader to rethink what they... can do to save the world from going to a savage state."
Ghana also is making its Biennale debut, one of only six African nations participating.
The pavilion was designed by architect David Adjaye as a series of interconnected units that form a whole, recalling West African dwellings, while the late Okwui Enwezor, the 2015 Biennale curator who died in March, served as an adviser.
It features all newly commissioned works, from sculpture to film and photography, which will travel to Ghana after the Biennale for show.
"Things like this, I guess, is a form of self-politics. It is a way of representing your culture in a way other than political and economic," said curator Nana Oforiatta Ayim.
"We have so many pluralistic expressions, so many ways of being in Ghana, but often so often in the outside world, you just get one, and very often it is negative. This is very much how we represent ourselves to the world in all our plurality, in all our diversity, in all our different layers."
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