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New Zealand has just opened its national pavilion at the Venice Biennale—Simon Denny’s Secret Power. The Biennale is one of the world’s biggest contemporary-art events and the mother of all art biennales. City Gallery is a partner in the New Zealand pavilion project. I’m here, as curator; so is City Gallery Registrar Amber Baldock, who has been overseeing the installation.

In the past, New Zealand has sent great artists and great projects to Venice, but this year things are different, because Denny is not only a great artist, he is ‘in play’—there’s huge interest in the work internationally. Denny has a big solo show on at MOMA PS1, New York. Secret Power has already been reviewed by the New York Times and the Guardian, and there are features on Denny in new issues of Art in America, Artforum, Mousse, and Frieze (indeed, Frieze just launched its new issue in the show). Secret Power has also been listed by numerous pundits as one of the Biennale’s must-sees.

The show is bizarre and stunning. There are two venues. In both, old meets new.

In the Renaissance-period Marciana Library, Denny has installed a ‘server room’, in which server racks double as vitrines. In them, Denny explores the ‘visual culture’ of the intelligence agencies responsible for global mass surveillance, New Zealand’s GCSB among them. The ensemble of server-vitrines is framed, in turn, by the Library, with its paintings by Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, and Co. (which celebrate knowledge, wisdom, and civic duty) and masterpieces of cartography by Fra Mauro, Vincenzo Coronelli, and others. In short, Denny has framed a current representation of world power within a historical one, generating semiotic correspondences and allegorical ricochets. His display combines the seductive and the repulsive, the awesome and the trivial.

The other venue is the arrivals lounge in the terminal at Marco Polo Airport. The terminal opened just after 9/11, as the world entered a new political epoch. Here, Denny has framed a historical representation of world power within a contemporary one, transposing actual-size photographic representations of the decorated interior of the Marciana Library (with those old-master paintings) onto the floors and walls. Visitors can ponder these obsolete examples of power-knowledge as they are themselves surveilled and processed. Denny’s Airport installation looks like marketing—many assume it is.

There’s lots more to be said—perhaps too much. Secret Power is an expansive project about big ideas. In it, the artist’s grand ambitions are scrambled with the grand ambitions of both today’s intelligence agencies and yesteryear’s librarians. All of whom would—in NSAese—‘sniff it all, collect it all, know it all, process it all, exploit it all’. It’s been a pleasure. (Here’s my essay.)