Regular Time Out Budapest readers might feel a sense of déjà vu on entering the Hungarian Pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennial, since the same smashed up BMW that we featured in a review last year is the centre piece of the show. The decision to play safe in Venice by opting for an existing work, Hajnál Németh’s operatic car crash installation, can probably be put down to the risk-adverse system of having a committee of experts choose the actual project for the pavilion, rather than giving the creative freedom to an individual artist or curator. Overall, the slick professionalism and quasi-corporate tendencies at work in Venice mean nothing is left to chance, with fewer genuine surprises, but plenty of spectacular entertainment at this edition of the original global art extravaganza.

Many of the most prominent works in the main exhibition at this edition of the biennial, such as Roman Ondak’s grainy film of a gallery stampede that was conceived as homage to the Chilean miners, or Christian Marclay’s twenty-four hour film odyssey that keeps real time with clips of ticking clocks in Hollywood films, were picked up straight from recent shows elsewhere - as a result, much of the Arsenale feels a little over familiar. The revamped Italian Pavilion, which hosts the other half of the main exhibition, also looks more and more like a permanent museum than a temporary pavilion. A newly-installed system of metallic air conditioning ducts, which look like smoke extractors from a glitzy nightclub, have made the environment suitable for the display of priceless paintings, at the expense of the dematerialised and ephemeral artworks that have typically been the trademark of Venice.      

The national pavilions are what make the Venice Biennial truly unique, giving visitors the chance to sample the artistic production of countries from around the world, most of which are conveniently located in the green and shady expanse of the Giardini. Among the pavilions of the ‘major’ nations, the UK, like Hungary but on a bigger scale, played safe by rebuilding a decrepit urban maze installation by Mike Nelson, which was first realised in Istanbul in 2003. Germany achieved the ‘wow!’ effect, and won the Golden Lion prize for best pavilion, with a theatrical makeover of their pavilion into a strange church for the projection of uncanny artist horror films. The United States pavilion, by artist duo Allora and Calzadilla, contains a cathedral to the god of global capitalism, with a working cash machine installed under a church organ that rings out with each withdrawal.

While many of the East European pavilions dwell, as usual, on the trauma of communism, from Russia’s surprisingly dated presentation of the artistic underground of the 1970s, to a familiar reworking of totalitarian symbols in the Serbian pavilion, Croatia avoided the clichés and stereotypes of East European art by enlisting a contemporary dance troupe to reinterpret the oeuvre of performance artist Tomislav Gotovac. The Polish pavilion went one step further by inviting an Israeli artist, Yael Bartana, to represent their country with a mesmerising trilogy of films about a campaign to bring three million Jews back to Poland. Lighter themes are to be found in the Indian pavilion, where Gigi Scaria, an Indian artist who happens to be represented by Budapest gallery Videospace, has created a brilliant lift installation that takes you up and down without moving.