For one, it’s the most unsettling experience on offer: Space travel, somnambulant beings, booming noises, a humungous pile of dirt, and an all-around air of mystery can be found at this pavilion. lapakqq

For another, it’s geographically expansive, with art set not only in the Giardini, where Germany has a dedicated pavilion, but also on La Certosa, an island with almost nothing on it. Mass transit does run there, albeit infrequently, but there’s not much to do once you arrive, other than seeing the art. That makes viewing this pavilion in full an odyssey in its own right, and that appears to be by design.

Çağla Ilk, the pavilion’s curator and the director of Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, writes in the text accompanying the exhibition that its title, “Thresholds,” came to her while she was walking the length of the metal dock that connects the vaporetto to La Certosa. This is a transitional space that one generally ignores. After exiting the vaporetto, most will focus on the connecting trail that brings viewers through this forested island, not on what leads up to it. But the German Pavilion draws attention to and confers value on these in-between places, perhaps even more than the sites bordering them.

To underline the point, Ilk has placed a sound work by Nigerian-born, US-based writer Louis Chude-Sokei along that dock. “We move through doorways too quickly,” Chude-Sokei can be heard saying, his voice echoing as he somberly speaks. In slowing down to experience this work, visitors end up having to pay mind to one such threshold that’s usually rushed through. lapakqq

Notably, Chude-Sokei is one of several artists here who was born outside the country where they are now based, and that, too, is part of this pavilion’s endgame. Ilk has devised a show that attempts to move away from the national pavilion model, which, in the case of Germany, has historically relied on fixed understandings of what constitutes Germanness—a problem made all the more evident by its structure’s infamous fascist architecture. She and the German Pavilion’s artists refute the idea that borders define Germany—or any other nation, for that matter.

Past Germany representatives have attempted, with varying degrees of success, to undertake a similar project. In 2022, Maria Eichhorn blasted out portions of the pavilion’s floor, in an attempt to excavate the pavilion’s fascist origins and leave them exposed. It was a limp, unconvincing gesture, because a true subversion of the pavilion’s history requires something more dramatic. And that, thankfully, is what Ersan Mondtag has done with Monument eines unbekannten Menschen (Monument to an unknown person), 2024, a work which partially involves covering the German Pavilion’s building in a mound of dirt that obscures it.

This is an ominous, menacing work, and one which finds an even spookier counterpart inside, where Mondtag has built a three-level, walk-in structure. Its exterior is covered in Eternit, a branded form of asbestos and the name of the company that produces it. Eternit employed Mondtag’s father, who ended up dying prematurely from the toxic fruits of his labor. Inside, Mondtag has created something like a disused home caked in dirt and scum; performers slowly walk around, alienated from each other and seemingly ignorant of the people observing them. When I visited, up top, a nude man standing in for Mondtag’s dad lay against a wall like a corpse. Mondtag is saying that the dead never really disappear—they return periodically to scare the crap out of those who don’t suspect their presence. lapakqq