The Observer's art critic, Laura Cumming: 'Deller, whose material is drawn straight from the life around him, from people's experiences, from writing and history almost as it happens, is an enabler, intermediary, collaborator and all-round enlightenment artist. He has more intelligence and generosity of spirit than many of his predecessors in Venice and entirely deserves this pavilion.'
Photograph: David Levene for the Observer
Mural of a hen harrier snatching away a Range Rover. 'A wondrously Reithian experience,' says Cumming. Photograph: Gabriel Bouys/AFP/Getty Images
The Irish pavilion displays Mosse's stills and videos of rebel-filled forests in eastern Congo 'made using military surveillance film that turns the world psychedelic cobalt, magenta and puce. A forgotten war, in all its horror, yields a wonderland of cruel and indelible beauty.' Photograph: PR
A female rebel from Mai Mai Yakutumba simulates battle at a secret base in the jungle near Lake Tanganyika in South Kivu, eastern Congo February 2012. Photograph: Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
At the Russian pavilion, 'a brave and ingenious artist who worked underground in Moscow for decades; his startlingly powerful drama clearly centres on Putin's regime. But it carries many other levels of metaphor too, some of them piquantly lost on this audience.' Photograph: Grabriel Bouys/AFP/Getty Images
'Cascades of bright coins rain down from the cupola. A sinister middleman draws the money back up from the basement by the bucket-load, returning it by conveyor belt to the roof – where the cycle begins all over again ... You could break the system by refusing to put the coins in the middleman's bucket, but that would bring an end to the spectacle in which all the art-worlders at the biennale have become willing stooges, picking the money from the floor.' Photograph: PR
'Up the Grand Canal, a 14th-century palazzo transformed into an Iraqi home is filled with sharp art. How else would one ever come across the succinct political cartoons of Abdul Rahim Yasser?' Photograph: Courtesy of the artist and RUYA Foundation
'A picaresque film trip through the cosmos from marble chips to moons to broken teeth and home-cooking in a tiny backstreet chapel; James Joyce with added humour.' Photograph: PR
