The Venice Biennale

The Venice Biennale (Italian: La Biennale di Venezia;
in English also called the "Venice Biennial" is a major contemporary art exhibition
that takes place once every two years (in odd years) in Venice, Italy.

The latest biennale, in 2013, was curated by the Italian Massimiliano Gioni.
His title and theme, Il Palazzo Enciclopedico / The Encyclopedic Palace,
was adopted from an architectural model by the self-taught Italian-American artist Marino Auriti.

Auriti's work, The Encyclopedic Palace of the World was lent by the American Folk Art Museum and exhibited in the first room of the Arsenale for the duration of the biennale.
For Gioni, Auriti's work, "meant to house all worldly knowledge,
bringing together the greatest discoveries of the human race, from the wheel to the satellite," provided an analogous figure for the "biennale model itself...
based on the impossible desire to concentrate the infinite worlds of contemporary art in a single place: a task that now seems as dizzyingly absurd as Auriti's dream."