Venice Biennale's quiet pavilions draw record crowds

The most-visited national pavilions at this year's Venice Biennale share a curatorial bet: that audiences exhausted by screens will queue for rooms that ask almost nothing of them.

The Nordic pavilion — a single daylit room with felt walls, a bench and a slowly shifting soundscape — has averaged 40-minute queues since June. Japan's contribution, an unlit space that reveals a suspended sculpture only as visitors' eyes adjust, has become the edition's most photographed work despite prohibiting photography for the first ten minutes.

Curators describe the turn as a correction rather than a movement. "We spent a decade competing with phones," one national commissioner said. "The pavilions people remember this year are the ones that stopped trying."