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collective portrait with a series of ninety sculptures.From Jung's Red Book, to Shinro Ohtake’s scrapbook assemblages, to Xul Solar’s collaged volumes,the exhibition celebrates the book—an object now at risk of extinction—as a depository ofknowledge, a tool of self-exploration, and an escape into realms of fantasy. Yüksel Arslanillustrates the encyclopedia plates of an imaginary civilization that resembles a slightly warpedversion of humanity. The aspiration to create a magnum opus that, like Auriti's Palace, can containand describe everything, also flows through R. Crumb’s visual chronicle of the book of Genesis,Frédéric Bruly Bouabré’s cosmogonies, and the legends recounted by Papa Ibra Tall. CamilleHenrot’s recent video studies the creation myths of different societies, while the nearly twohundred clay sculptures of Fischli and Weiss offer a wry antidote to the romantic excesses of suchsweeping visions of human history.In the drawings of Stefan Bertalan, Lin Xue and Patrick Van Caeckenbergh, we find stubbornattempts to decipher the code of nature, while the films of Gusmão and Paiva, and photographs ofChristopher Williams, Eliot Porter, and Eduard Spelterini, examine ecosystems and landscapeswith an gaze that longs to capture all the Earth’s spectacles, large and small.Video works by Neïl Beloufa and Steve McQueen, and paintings by Eugene Von Breunchenheinreflect various approaches to picturing the future, while memory serves as the point of departurefor Aurélien Froment, Andra Ursuta, and many other artists in the exhibition.At the center of the Arsenale, is a curatorial project by Cindy Sherman— an imaginary museum ofher own devising in which dolls, puppets, mannequins, and idols cohabit with photos, paintings,sculptures, votive offerings, and drawings by prison inmates, composing an anatomical theater inwhich to contemplate the role of images in the representation and perception of the self. The word“image” is linked, by its very etymology, to the body and its mortality: the Latin imago referred tothe wax mask the Romans made to preserve the likeness of the recently deceased.Bodies and desires are illustrated in Hito Steyerl’s cinematic investigation of the culture of hypervisibility,and in Sharon Hayes’s latest documentary—inspired by Pier Paolo Pasolini's film Comizid’Amore—in which a group of young women talk about relationships and sexuality. The quest fortruth that pervaded Pasolini’s career is also evoked by Richard Serra’s sculptural tribute to thefilmmaker and poet.The bodies imagined by Evgenij Kozlov are animated by the fantasies of a rapt adolescent, andseem right at home next to Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern’s seductive matrons and KoheiYoshiyuki’s voyeurs. A similar scopophilic yearning is also found in the paintings of Ellen Altfest,who trains a lenticular gaze on the bodies of her subjects, as if trying to capture and discover theworld one inch at a time.Ryan Trecartin’s volatile, post-human bodies introduce the final section of the Arsenale, whereworks by Yuri Ancarani, Alice Channer, Simon Denny, Wade Guyton, Channa Horwitz, MarkLeckey, Helen Marten, Albert Oehlen, Otto Piene, James Richards, Pamela Rosenkranz, StanVanDerBeek and others examine the blend of information, spectacle, and knowledge that ischaracteristic of the digital era.As a contrast to the white noise of the information age, an installation by Walter De Mariacelebrates the mute, gelid purity of geometry. Like all works by this legendary artist, this abstractsculpture is the result of complex numerological calculations—a self-contained system in whichthe endless possibilities of the imagination are reduced to an extreme synthesis.