The world's foremost contemporary art festival has opened in Venice for its 55th year of presenting the most wonderful--and weird--art being made today. Newcomers and exhibits outside the official pavilions are turning heads.

Laura Cumming writes in The Guardian, "The biennale is sombre, provocative and rich in art for anyone prepared to walk the needful treasure-seeking miles across the city. For the usual order has been turned on its head. The official Giardini is dense with dud pavilions, including every one of the so-called Big Three--[America, Germany and France.]

Of interest, off the Grand Canal is a 14th-century palazzo transformed into an Iraqi home filled with the succinct political cartoons of Abdul Rahim Yasser.

A newcomer exhibitor, The Bahamas has a "counterintuitive meditation on the weightless white world of the north pole, beautifully strange with starry bears and smoking columns of ice," says Cumming.

From the official pavilions, Cumming's favorite was the British Pavilion where "a towering William Morris hurls Roman Abramovich's superyacht into the lagoon in disgust."