São Paulo biennale review – chanting trees and hormonal humming create a cacophany of art

Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion, São Paulo
Everywhere you turn, there’s an installation making a total racket – but this overwhelming multi-artist sensory blowout comes to life when the images speak for themselves

Meditation and spiritual connection may be OK in small doses, but after three floors and 30,000 sq metres of darkened rooms, theatrical installations, altars and votive sculpture, more sound work than I’ve ever encountered in a single show, and a general encouragement to be moved, mesmerised and in touch with my spiritual side, my ears are ringing and I feel quite on edge.

The São Paulo biennale, the second oldest art exhibition of its type in the world, takes the title Not All Travellers Walk Roads for its 36th edition, a line, which, with some irony, is from Of Calm and Silence, a poem by the Brazilian writer Conceição Evaristo. In Cameroonian curator Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung’s show of 120 artists, this translates as imagining alternative forms of consciousness, invariably looking to nature and non-western belief systems.