If you were to pluck a tenth-century Norse Viking from their firelit longhouse and drop them into the twenty-first century so that they could create a film accurate about their life and culture, you would probably end up with something not far off from Robert Eggers’ The Northman, and not just because of the film’s graphic violence, fanatical religious ceremonies, and historically faithful aesthetics. The Northman also successfully depicts the way in which Northerners may well have perceived and spiritually understood the world around them.

There are some circumstances that shift a musical performance into another dimension of significance. Mstislav Rostropovich playing Bach’s cello suites in Berlin on 11 November 1989, two days after the fall of the Wall, is perhaps the twentieth century’s most vivid example.

Caryl Churchill’s Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, first performed in 1976, is a dense and difficult play set during the English Civil War. The period may be distant in time but Churchill, working in a broadly Marxist tradition, sees it as an era when fundamental questions of governance were tested by a mass of ordinary people. From whom does the state derive authority, and is a person bound to obey laws they find unjust? Does the existence of private property – those enclosed lands cultivated for the profit of a few – offend against the common good? Do the rich offend God? ‘For a short time when the king had been defeated anything seemed possible,’ Churchill wrote in a 1978 introductory note. The possibilities included, for some, Christ’s return and with it the instigation of an earthly Paradise.

The Godfather, the first instalment of Francis Ford Coppola’s three-part mafioso epic, premièred fifty years ago last month. Released in March 1972, The Godfather became a huge commercial success. By year’s end it was the highest-ever grossing film. And despite its brutal and salacious content, and its pulpy source material – which may help explain its attraction to moviegoers – it was a critical success. Pauline Kael, writing in the New Yorker, described it as ‘a great example of how the best popular movies come out of a merger of commerce and art’.

If there is a logical successor to the twentieth-century gangster epic, it may well be the modern-day high-stakes corporate drama. Both revolve around merciless protagonists operating by their own dubious moral code, amassing wealth and influence as they leave a trail of bodies (literal or figurative) in their wake. Instead of intimidation and assassination, our new corporate anti-heroes leverage powerful attorneys and hostile takeovers. Instead of doing business in the smoke-filled backrooms of family restaurants, they operate in biophilic, open-plan offices (and on the stock exchange). Instead of working outside capitalist structures, they bend it to their will. And instead of concealing their crimes and leading a double life, they are openly celebrated, sitting on boards and delivering TED talks.

In the middle of Bogotá’s Parque de la Independencia is a statue of Nicolaus Copernicus. Designed by the Polish sculptor Tadeusz Lodziana, it was gifted by the People’s Republic of Poland to the city of Bogotá in 1974, after the resumption of diplomatic relations between the two countries, which had been suspended from 1952 to 1964. This period overlapped with La Violencia in Colombia, a bloody civil war between conservative and left-wing forces, during which roughly 200,000 people were killed.

We all know that emancipatory drives in the late twentieth century dislodged the hegemonic politics of social normativity through the movements of second wave feminism, civil rights, and gay activism, but it’s worth remembering that some rights took longer than others. Homosexuality was only fully decriminalised in Australia in 1997 (Tasmania being the last state to do so); same-sex marriages were not legalised until 2017.

The twenty-third Biennale has been highly anticipated through two long years since Brook Andrew’s twenty-second Biennale suddenly closed in March 2020 as Covid took hold of the country, not to reopen for three months.

This year’s guiding idea, rīvus – meaning stream, but embracing rivers, fresh water, saltwater, lagoons, banks, confluences – is peculiarly topical, as water resources, in both scarcity and flood, become every year a more urgent issue.

I don’t remember why we were talking about The Phantom of the Opera, the nuclear-proof blockbuster that has rung out from multiple cities every day since its London première in 1986. But I do remember the question posed so absurdly by my psychiatrist that it made me scoff, like the diva Carlotta discovering that she’s been relegated to a minor role in the masked one’s fiendish new score.

‘Do you think you enjoy the musical because you relate to the protagonist?’

Not long into Will Arbery’s Heroes of the Fourth Turning a character brings out an acoustic guitar and is asked to play a song. He chooses Townes Van Zandt’s ‘Nothin’’, a melancholy ballad pulled from the annals of American folk music. When it was released in 1971, many assumed it represented Van Zandt’s struggle with drug addiction. In fact, as he explained two years before his death, the song was inspired by Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation of Christ, a novel banned by the Catholic Church in 1955 for representing a Christ figure prone to human fallibilities.