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In an age of globalism, the national pavilions in the Giardini della Biennale in Venice seem like quaint throwbacks to another time, particularly when you can read in their lineaments the features of a nation's self concept. Britain's is a lordly neo-classical manse overlooking the tree-lined allée that forms the central spine of the gardens. The French pavilion sports a voluptuous deco curve. Germany's has a handsome but authoritarian façade. The American pavilion is a democratic, one-storey Jeffersonian affair, its two outspread wings evoking reason and high purpose.

And then there's Canada. Designed by Italian architects BPPR Group in 1957, our pavilion is a diminutive teepee-shaped structure of glass, brick and steel. Centred around a tree, which grows up through its central atrium, it says "modern" and it says "nature," but it also whispers "tourist information centre," or even "toilette pubbliche." Not good.

Over the years, Canadian artists have struggled to mount exhibitions in this eccentric space, usually with limited success. Never, though, has it been turned to advantage, as is so spectacularly the case this summer with the installation of work by 32-year-old Canadian artist David Altmejd.

The artist grew up and received his early art training in Montreal , and he is now based in Brooklyn, showing regularly with his dealers in New York and London.

His presentation at Venice has done two things: It has reintroduced him to the country that formed him, Canada, and it has brought him sudden international acclaim. Until now, Altmejd has been a well-regarded but somewhat underground phenomenon. Now, with the pollen from this year's Biennale blowing in the wind, he's a star.

This was a shrewd pick on the part of the Canadian jurors (Vancouver Art Gallery's Bruce Grenville, the Université du Quebec à Montréal's Anne-Marie Ninacs and Illingworth Kerr Gallery director Wayne Baerwaldt): He's terrifically talented, we've caught him on the rise, and his work marries naturally with the pavilion's architecture.

Mirrors, faceting, and glass have long been elements of his art - along with decorative floral elements, gems and jewellery, crystals, birds, and the decomposing corpses of the fur-bearing faux werewolves he fashions by hand, symbols of transformation and regeneration in his art.

At Venice he is presenting two major works. The first, titled The Index, is a sprawling quasi-architectural structure, its metal armature seeming like an internal extension of the building's steel support struts.

Within this mirrored, many faceted armature, he has arranged plastic trees and flowers, shrubbery and mushrooms (made from Sculpey), assorted squirrels, and an array of fake and taxidermied birds (including owls with human glass eyes and bizarre vulva-like openings in their chests).

He adds to this threads of fine gold chain, and a mini-gallery of black, hand-sculpted dildos and butt plugs, some of which appear to be morphing back into mushrooms.

Within this aviary-like space, he has also placed several man-sized birdmen dressed in snappy menswear, one of which sports a hairy, scrotum-like appendage dangling from beneath his chin (in lieu of wattles). All of this unfolds within the pavilion's mirrored walls, a phantasmagoria of sexual display all the more pointed during the flaunting and strutting peacock afternoons of the Biennale opening.

The other piece in the pavilion is titled The Giant 2: an enormous semi-reclining man whose body cavities have fallen in, seemingly in an advanced state of decay. Where rot has set in, crystals erupt. His arms and legs sprout a variety of vegetation and moss, and his penis lolls to one side like a great scoop of half-melted vanilla ice cream. If our nation still had a reputation for excessive modesty and politeness, I think we can consider it dispatched. Altmejd has created an imaginary erotic realm that is extraordinarily intense and entirely his own. (In this regard, the American artist Matthew Barney, who is showing this summer at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection on Venice's Grand Canal, may be his only living contender.)

The Canadian pavilion was one of the favourites during the press days, but we had lots of great company. Britain, next door, housed an unexpectedly moving exhibition of drawings, paintings and neon works by Tracey Emin, a YBA celebrity who has been notorious for her in-your-face bad girl sexuality and publicity mongering.

Here, though, she stunned her critics with her subtle touch, and intimate painterly confessions.

One work, titled Abortion: How it Feels Now, combines a descriptive passage of writing by the artist and a series of watercolours that reveal her vulnerability, complexity and intelligence. Another series of languid paintings in violet pigment describe the lazy, splayed legs of a nude woman.

And her suite of caustic, small-scale drawings read like a sexual Rake's Progress, except the Rake in question is female, visited by a variety of phallic assailants.

One of these drawings features a nude female body suspended upside-down with parted legs. Above her, the inscription reads: "studio" (crossed out) "stupid girl." For me, this drawing provides the key to the whole pavilion. Having posed for years as a sensationalist and a slut, she has come to Venice to finally set the record straight. It turns out she's the studio girl after all.

Emin has presented her softer side, but the same cannot be said of French artist Sophie Calle, who has turned the French pavilion into an extended, highly detailed iteration of white-hot female rage, which she expresses with a kind of rarefied, diamond cutting precision. On entrance to the pavilion we learn from a wall plaque that Calle's boyfriend recently broke up with her via e-mail.

The document, which Calle includes in her exhibition, displays the writer's penchant for heroic self-aggrandizement, narcissism and cowardice, concluding with the false endearment "Take care of yourself," a phrase that she has borrowed for the title of her show.

Offering his letter to 107 women in a variety of different fields (an actress, a Latinist, a dancer, a proofreader, a chess player, a Talmudic exegete, etc.), Calle has invited each to respond, either with text or in the form of a video, or both.

The results are exquisitely funny, and would wilt even the most fiercely tumescent males among us. An editor subjects him to a mutilating grammatical comeuppance. A criminologist profiles him for symptoms of psychiatric dysfunction. A clown reads the letter aloud, grasping with mock rapture at the crumbs of positivity amid the bitter diet of rejection. Taken as a whole, the work takes on the human (particularly female) capacity to overanalyze emotional life to absurd extremes. Calle makes a wry monument to emotional overfunctioning. You could spend hours in here.

Spectacular as this was, the centre of gravity for this year's Biennale was undoubtedly the American pavilion, which housed an exhibition of work by the late Felix Gonzalez-Torres, a Cuban-born American artist who died of AIDS in 1996. This artist lived and died by some of the more painful contradictions in American democracy: The exhibition here felt like both a moral and aesthetic triumph.

Organized by Nancy Spector, chief curator of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the show took a disciplined, carefully edited view of the artist, combining his hanging light bulb sculptures (one, titled America, made with black electrical cable and white bulbs, hung in the pavilion's neo-classical rotunda) with a limited selection of other key works: stacks of his giveaway posters (a dark sea, a black-edged death announcement titled Republican Years); a rectangular floor sculpture comprised of black, individually wrapped licorice candies, there for the taking and the sucking; and a series of 13 black-and-white photographs of sometimes litter-strewn stone benches at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Carved into the stone wall behind these benches are the words "scholar," "explorer," "statesman," "humanitarian," "ranchman," "conservationist," etc., designations that describe that museum's founder, Teddy Roosevelt, but that also seem to evoke an American ideal. The piece feels like an elegy.

The final room combines a white hanging light bulb piece from 1993 (Untitled: Leaves of Grass) with a mural-sized photo-image of a flying bird against the open sky, a poignant image of the fleeting nature of life. Gonzalez-Torres created a number of such murals during his lifetime, and the exhibition organizers, following his lead, have arranged for this image to also be exhibited at locations around the fringes of Venice, where it will be seem by passing motorists.

It's a light touch, not the kind of touch the world has come to know from the U.S. in recent years. Gonzales-Torres's exhibition came across as a solemn act of atonement to America's fellow nation states, a moving monument to the best of the American legacy of democratic thought and compassionate stewardship that now seems so deeply imperilled. Along with U.S. art history professor Robert Storr, who served as artistic director of this year's Biennale as a whole, Spector emerges from this show as indisputably one of the leading curators working today. Her timing is perfect, and her eye is too.

The Venice Biennale continues until November 21. For more information, see http://www.labiennale.org.

The Other Canadian Pavilion

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer represented Mexico this year at the Biennale, but the Montreal-based artist is a Canadian citizen, and the maker of the spectacular Pulse Front searchlight work which recently lit up the skies over Toronto during Luminato. In Venice, he is showing a selection of his earlier works, the strongest of which is a precursor to the Toronto work. In Pulse Room, the visitor's heartbeat is recorded in a pulsing light bulb, one of hundreds that hang from the ceiling of the historic palazzo where the exhibition is mounted. S.M.

The African pavilion

Biennale organizer Robert Storr has taken some heat for the Africa Pavilion, which houses works drawn from the private collection of Congolese businessman Sindika Dokolo. (According to The Art Newspaper, aspersions have been cast regarding his father's role in the collapse of the Kinshasa Bank.) All the same, the selection of artists is highly sophisticated, including both white artists (like Kendell Geers and Minette Vari) and black artists (among them, Olu Oguibe and Ghada Amer).

The show also combines artists working in Africa with artists of the diaspora, such as Yinka Shonibare, Chris Ofili, DJ Spooky and Jean-Michel Basquiat. It's a refreshing break from the usual at these "international" events: rambling roomfuls of naive African art made from battered and painted wood and recycled roadside garbage, selected by European white curators during a continental fly-by. The standouts: Geers's black light installation Seven Deadly Sins (which gave white visitors the appearance of dark skin and blindingly white teeth and eyeballs, an interesting racial inversion), and Alfredo Jaar's moving cinematic testimonial to a continent in crisis. T.M.

Chinese Pavilion

Standouts here are Kan Xuan's marvellous short videos, including one featuring the artist frolicking naked in a forest, chirping to the birds, and Yin Xiuzhen's suite of giant space-needle shaped forms clad in recycled sweater material and suspended overhead like artillery. S.M.

Italian Pavilion

Lymph Sculptures is beautifully spare installation in two parts: in one room, a pair of simulated logs covered in leather affixed with tiny brass nails, and, in the adjacent gallery, a split log oozing sap, with the surrounding walls clad in leather. The installation provides a deep sense of enclosure and security among ruggedly natural materials. During the press days, people got quiet in here; the only chirping was the occasional birdcall of the international cell phone.

Next door, Francesco Vezzoli is exhibiting his two-part projection Democrazy, a flawless pastiche of paid TV advertising for two faux U.S. presidential candidates, Patrick and Patricia Hill (equally scary, and believable). S.M.