CURATED by Hayward Gallery’s Ralph Rogoff, May You Live in Interesting Times is the title and organising principle of this year’s Venice Biennale.

The phrase itself, deployed across the political spectrum from as far left as Bertholt Brecht and as far right as Hillary Clinton, references a presumed ancient Chinese curse, although there is no trace of it in Chinese.

The more astute artists on show translate “interesting” as horrifying, blood-curdling and perilous, while others seem to reaffirm Rogoff’s catalogue description of the phrase as “complex” and, in so doing, come dangerously close to reaffirming a virtual utopia or simply wallowing in the chaos that the combination of climate disaster, impending recession and continual appropriation of more resources by the wealthiest have wrought.

Rogoff has done an excellent job of organising the section of the exhibition under his jurisdiction, often juxtaposing or combining elements that enhance their impact.

Thus art-world breakout star of the exhibition Kaari Upson’s eerie full-scale dollhouse, with its destroyed furniture and a video of herself in grotesque doll costume, with blotchy smeared red lipstick, is paired with Mari Katayama’s images of herself as a Japanese doll, with the stubs of her limbs or her prosthetic legs appearing amid the eroticised stockings and accoutrements of the trope of the Japanese human doll.

These are splendid representations of women as toys for male desire.

Rula Halawani’s sodden black-and-white images of walls and enclosures built by Israel since 2000 which, in their sad bleakness suggest images of the earlier Berlin Wall, link to Teresa Margolles’s stone wall with barbed wire and bullet holes depicting the enclosed structure in the Mexican city of Juarez.

It has the highest murder rate in the world, with women disproportionate victims of the violence.

Those works and others much in abundance criticise the global right-wing resurrection of borders and they’re perhaps summed up by two more abstract but equally powerful installations.

Shilpa Gupta’s great mechanical door with spikes on top that bangs shut and revolves from one side of a wall to another, slowly breaking it down in the process, stresses the violence of the border.

Sun Yan and Peng Yu’s giant robotic arm has 32 different movements, all of which end in it sweeping what looks like blood on the floor, perhaps the result of not only automated systems of walls and surveillance but also suggesting the blood that is the residue of the drive towards automation as more and more workers lose their jobs.

Women’s installations were the most powerful in the exhibition, with US trans-Latina artist Martine Gutierrez enacting a kind of post-colonial Cindy Sherman, where she places herself amid dummies that she has constructed framing black-and-white scenes of the exploitation and exoticisation of black women.

The most striking has her as a maid in what might be a Cuban resort of the Batista era, while another shows her rising out of the water at the feet of a besuited man with black polished shoes.

The climate crisis was everywhere and many of the works centre around either the questioning or the reaffirmation of the age of the Anthropocene and the melding of man and machine as the virtual world becomes our world.

The complexity of Christine and Margaret Wertheim’s yarn coral reefs show how nature, in the multitudinous shapes of the reefs, thwarts the more rigid rationality and logic of Euclidean geometry, diagrammed on a board next to their colourful concoctions.

Even more to the point, Irish artist Jimmie Durham, whose body of work was honoured at the Biennale this year, displays the maimed but proud heads of animals tortured on the bodies of industrial pipes or electrical wiring, emphasising the growing number of species becoming extinct as the race to exploit the world’s resources heats up, even as Donald Trump and the Pentagon are trying to claim Greenland as their own while the Amazon burns.

48 War Movies by Christian Marclay is a compilation of films which, instead of being juxtaposed, are obliterated, with only the outline of each visible and accompanied by the screeching sounds of war.

This is more The Hurt Locker’s emotional battlefield with no more context than Stanley Kubrick’s deconstruction of aggression in Full Metal Jacket.

Embracing the Dystopia by Ian Chang assembles algorithms to create artificial creatures in environments that embrace both the destructive chaos of neoliberal capitalism and at the same time its extreme orderliness.

Alexandra Bircken’s stunning Escalation is a series of ladders reaching to the sky, intercrossing as they ascend with hollowed-out black figures draped over or hanging from them like so many corpses, victims of the ever-increasing drive to “get ahead” and its accompanying human waste in the accelerated competition for ever-accelerating quarterly profits and increase in GDP.

In the national pavilions, Chile’s Hegemonic Museum is a truly remarkable work by Voluspa Jarpa which trace histories of colonial expansion and exploitation in just four rooms.

The first focuses on the DeWitt brothers in Holland, lynched in 1672 for challenging the place of the Dutch East India Company and pushing for a more democratic state.

This is followed by tiny models of a vicious attack on women who demanded their rights in the Vienna uprising of 1848, part of a wave of revolutionary activity that year.

In the next room a taped opera has Western men singing: “Blessed be the whiteness of my skin” and “I cannot own slaves and love them too,” while a chorus of non-Western peoples, women and children, respond.

A final room contains redacted official documents tracing the CIA’s involvement, through Operation Gladio, in not only interfering with but overturning the results of the 1948 Italian election.

The display culminates with an illustrated three-dimensional rogues gallery of Western violence — an exemplary tour-de-force of an exhibit.

The outstanding national pavilion, a Biennale prizewinner, is Belgium’s Mondo Cane. A dog’s world indeed, but that’s not apparent at first sight, with the exhibition appearing to be a celebration of different aspects of the orderliness of bourgeois life.

Its idyllic mannequins of a knife sharpener, zither player, minister and town crier each make their own sounds, yet the text accompanying the display tells other stories.

The knife sharpener is by night a Sweeney Todd monster whose knife could cut off the legs of a horse, while the town crier, whose thin moustache suggests Hitler, is actually bawling out an off-colour, bigoted joke while the musician is based on a character wanted for mass murder.

Circling them are three jails which house the overtly violent, repugnant or rebellious members of the town such as the rat lady, a harbinger of death.

The exhibit is an exceptional exposure of the violence that underlies all aspects of the repressed normalcy of capitalist life.

In contrast, Kathy Wilkes’s works in the British Pavilion suggest a solemn and sepulchre-like female interiority. Only 15 visitors could view them at a time, to guarantee a privileged moment of privatisation of the experience.

The work was, in a way, a reflection of YBA (Young British Artists) ageing into more conservative maturity. But the idea that reflection must be done in private, that the group reflection the Biennale everywhere else encourages is somehow false or wrong, is worth challenging.

The best exhibits are critical works meant to be shared and thought about in their public context, not fetishised as some wholly private revelation. Salvation from the dystopias so well created elsewhere cannot be achieved by individual contemplation.

What May You Live in Interesting Times conveys implicitly is that the only way out of the impending doom humankind has created for itself is in being together — we may yet transform “interesting” meaning terrifying into “interesting” meaning abundant.

The biennale runs until November 24, details: labiennale.org.