Venice Biennale 2026 - Ukraine

Perhaps the most effective, engaging, and moving offerings at the Venice Biennale, at least for me, were two displays from Ukraine, one the Ukraine Pavilion the small building that is part of the Arsenale, and the other, much a larger exhibition in the Dorsoduro area of Venice. Each of them captured my attention far longer than most of the other displays.

The first, the Ukraine Pavilion, features a concrete origami sculpture titled Deer by the artist Zhanna Kadyrova. It’s hard to believe concrete could make something that resembles origami, but Deer does it. Kadyrova made Deer for the pedestal that had previously displayed a Soviet jet aircraft in the city of Pokrovsk, Donetsk Oblast, but the jet had been removed. The sculpture had become part of the cityscape. As the Russian army approached Pokrovsk, a team dismantled the sculpture to move it to safety. In 2025 Deer traveled more than 6000 kilometers across Europe to arrive in Venice for the Biennale. We saw Deer at the Giardini entrance, suspended from a boom on a truck, and I remembered the story that it had been transported from Ukraine.

In the center of a space in a small building in the Arsenale was a pillar with several videos around it, each depicting parts of Deer’s journey. Watching the videos, I began to see Deer as a living creature, exploring all the cities on the circuitous route it proudly took to Venice. It also reminds me of Little Amal, the 12-foot high puppet of a Syrian refugee child searching the world for her mother, which traveled across Europe and the United States in 2021 and 2022.

 

(Please forgive the crazy spacing in this section. Blogger seems to have its own ideas about design.)

A much larger, and even more evocative experience was the “collateral” exhibition, titled “Still Joy: From Ukraine into the World,” presented by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation in the Palazzo Contarini Polignac in the Dorsoduro area of Venice, near the Peggy Guggenheim Museum and the church of Santa Maria della Salute. Multiple artists, from Ukraine and elsewhere show works expressing joy, alternating with statements from Ukrainians of their experiences and the importance of maintaining joy in life. This was a powerful expression of joy in the midst of horror and suggests the resilience of the Ukrainian people. I have chosen just six of the artists who impressed me and whose work I understood. One, British artist Ryan Gander, I keep thinking about, but I couldn’t make personal sense of his work in the context of the exhibition. A link to the exhibition with photographs of the objects does not replicate or even evoke the experience of a nation promoting joy in the midst of an endless-seeming war, but one can at least search information online about each artist.

 Zhanna Kadyrova, the artist who made the origami deer, in 2023 created Refugees, in which she found plants that had survived attacks and bombings, rescued them from schools, libraries and clinics, kept them in a safe location and lent them to exhibitions, along with photographs of living plants in the original locations. Emblematic of human refugees, the plants do not have permanent homes and it is not known where they will be next.

 Bangladeshi artist Ashfika Rahman created Than Paru – No Land Without Us, a huge installation of 4849 brass temple bells, each with a red mark on it. The label refers to the Chittigang Hill Tracts on the Bangladesh border, where the non-Bengali inhabitants had their lands appropriated by the state for commercial development. The artist invited each refugee to put a red fingerprint on a bell, making the installation a golden monument to displaced people.

Canadian artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller photographed reflections of the sky in water, lovely impressionistic videos that I couldn’t capture in photographs. British Tacita Dean made photochemically modified images of an ancient Sakura tree with multiple supports to keep its branches from breaking.  The huge image is delicate and touching. 

Pavlo Kovach, a Ukrainian artist and serviceman, partially covered individual laurel leaves with brass and inscribed the case number of a missing serviceman on each. The work is titled Laurel Leaf in the Mouth, You Will Receive a Message, referring to a folk belief that a bay leaf in your soup is good luck. While the fate of the missing soldiers is undetermined, the leaves suggest both life and memory.

 

Finally, the Dutch Simone Post, who uses candy as a medium, filled a room with chandeliers and other objects, copied in sugar from those in the Palazzo. Materials listed are marshmallow, sour satellite wafer, and candy chain. The work is titled She Knew She/It/They Would Melt. The pastel-colored copies of precious objects spark a childlike delight, at least in me.

Statements from Ukrainians that were displayed in conjunction with the art objects:

Venice Biennale 2026, Japan Pavilion

One of the most popular displays in the Giardini, popular with both critics and the public, is an exhibition titled “Grass Babies, Moon Babies” at the Japan pavilion. We did not participate in this interactive activity, but I watched it with delight. At the entrance, visitors are offered a life-size artificial baby, apparently weighing about as much as a baby would. They are directed to carry the baby throughout the pavilion, and they are encouraged to change its diaper at a changing station in the building. If they change the diaper, they receive a QR code with a poem based on the baby’s birthdate and related to the twentieth-century histories of Japan, the United States, and Asia. Inside the pavilion is a large jungle gym with more artificial babies climbing all over it, often in perilous positions. Babies also climb up and down ropes and watch tv screens showing film scenes related to Japanese identity.

 The exhibition label addresses the decline in global birth rates, which has been particularly apparent in Japan. Apparently, the artist, Ei Arakawa-Nash, who lives in the United States, recently had a twin babies and has been inspired to encourage more people to have them, a possible mission of this installation.  The babies, recklessly climbing around the pavilion, were so joyous that they made it an amusing and uplifting place to be. One of them was even crouched under a bench outside the pavilion.

 

The Danish pavilion, “Things To Come,” by Maja Malou Lyse, also expressed concern about population decline, but their solution derives from a scientific project that concluded that “immersive pornography could increase male fertility” (exhibition brochure). The video on display was derived from this research; the small part I viewed depicted a series of well-endowed women (evidently porn actors) running topless very bouncily through a forest.. Sorry, I didn't take a photo. Interestingly, my casual impression was that men seemed to spend more time in that gallery than women. Another section of the Danish pavilion displayed containers used to transport sperm, somehow related to “an internet subculture that stages competitive sperm races,” something beyond my ken.

 

Venice Biennale 2026 Spanish Pavilion

There have been several articles about the ‘best’ pavilions at the Venice Biennale, and we agree with some of them. When we were there, on a Tuesday in July, two performance pavilions – The Netherlands and Austria - were closed, so we did not see the much-talked-about Austrian pavilion performance, only the bell hanging outside it. Three other venues were closed: Russia, Israel (although there was a separate Israel pavilion in the Arsenal), and Venezuela (said to be renovating, but it’s hard to know for sure).

The Spanish Pavilion, the first one along the left pathway, has walls covered with postcards, an exhibition titled “Los Restos” (The Remains) by Oriol Vilanova, whose practice involves acquiring a range of “devalued” objects at flea markets, He has collected postcards for the past twenty years. The booklet accompanying the exhibition by Carles Guerra, says “His use of postcards serves none of the archival or documentary purposes that are so common nowadays, but instead entails the recognition that even decrepitude and waste constitute areas not necessarily associated with melancholic stasis, or even with the recovery of that inevitable past so essential to photography” Whatever…

I was taken first just by the number of postcards, arranged in orderly blocks by subject, color, or format (i.e. buildings all oriented in the same direction). All those cats and flamingos, next to rows of classical statues, monumental buildings, the Twin Towers, snowscapes, then bands featuring a single color, sometimes making a vertical stripe in the room. One image shows yellow flowers, two rows of flying squirrels, and buildings with American flags.  Another juxtaposes multiple views of the Twin Towers and various birds. So on the one hand it’s a vast abstract design. But looking at the individual cards and the groups of cards evokes various emotional responses.

Wandering through the rooms, you’re reminded of places you’ve seen or read about, struck with the varieties of familiar animals and plants, engaged with the diverse objects in some sections. It’s a panoply of the world in rectangular cards, all the same size. The list of topics includes 161 items in alphabetical order, for example, Pagoda, Painter, Parasol, Parrot, Pink, Playground, Pool, Pope, Pulpit, Pyramid. There seem to be endless things to discover and multiple ways to look at the project.

These cards are probably all unused, but I wasn’t sure if there aren’t messages on some of them, and that calls up the way postcards are a means of communication, the short form of a letter, keeping in touch with a note and a picture.

I often read mention of people collecting postcards. Decades ago, I used to collect them for my work as an art historian. The color postcards in museums and churches were better than the black and white slides we had for teaching and I planned to use them to make color slides. They also were reminders of works of art I saw in obscure locations.  Computers, the internet, and PowerPoint have eliminated any use for the postcards, but they’re still stored somewhere, and I have to resist buying them still. Vilanova’s display calls attention to the things in the world people value enough to want a picture to keep or share.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Venice Biennale 2024 The Curated Exhibition

 

A major part of the Venice Biennale is the curated exhibition, whose theme often inspires many of the national pavilions and the collateral and other additional exhibitions that accompany the Biennale, spreading across Venice in museums and a panoply of other spaces.  This year’s curator was Adriano Pedrosa, who adopted the title “Foreigners Everywhere,” “Stranieri Ovunque,” from an installation initiated by a Paris-born, Palermo-based collective Claire Fontaine in 2004. This series of neon sculptures, each of which shows the expression in a different language was installed in my favorite part of the Arsenale, the large arcaded internal dock .

Claire Fontaine, Foreigners Everywhere, suspended neons,
framework, transformers, cables and fittings.

 Pedrosa is the director of the Sao Paolo Museum of Art in Brazil, which explains many of the choices he made for the exhibition. The subject lends itself to a variety of interpretations, and for Pedrosa it meant including a very large number of artists from the Global South, most of whom had not been seen at the Biennale before. This doesn’t mean they were unknown, just not shown at the Biennale. And a great many of them are represented by a single work of art in one of three rooms he designates as the Nucleo storico (historical nucleus), works dating from 1915 to 1990 hung salon-style, described by him as showing about 100 Portraits and about 40 Abstractions in the Giardini section, and about 40 Italians Everywhere in the Arsenale. The first two sections show one work per artist and for me the result was that they were difficult to differentiate, hung salon style. Even though I was familiar with most of the Latin American portrait artists, I hardly noticed them, except for the Frida Kahlo, which had its own security guard.

Wall of portraits with tiny Kahlo and its security guard

I was pleased to recognize an image by Twins Seven Seven, 

Twins Seven Seven, The Architect, 1989
Ink on plywood, glued and carved

a Nigerian artist I had recently discovered, who was included in the famous 1989 exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, “Magicians of the Earth.” And among the abstractions was a characteristic painting by Esther Mahlangu, 
a South African artist known for painting her abstract designs on buildings.  She also was included in “Magicians of the Earth,” and was also commissioned by BMW to decorate a car.

Esther Mahlangu, Untitled, 1990
Acrylic on canvas. Work on top

The Italians Everywhere section in the Arsenale was a different viewing experience. The section included artists who were born in Italy but emigrated elsewhere. Each work is hung on a single glass panel with the label on the back. The installation is the one Lina Bo Bardi (1914-1992) used for the audacious building of the Sao Paolo Museum of Art (curator Pedrosa’s home institution), which she designed and which opened in 1968. Bo Bardi won the Golden Lion for Architecture posthumously in 2021. She herself was an Italian - born in Rome – who moved to Brazil in 1946. I remembered this celebrated installation design from when I was in Sao Paolo in 1981. There, as in Venice, it was unusual and also problematic. If you wanted to look at the painting and glance at the label, you couldn’t; if you wanted to compare two works, or look at a group together, it was very difficult. All the works of art face the same direction, so you cannot turn around and see a group in a room. Looking is harder work, unless you only want to see one thing at a time and don’t need label information. It never surprised me that the system was not adopted elsewhere, but it was still fun to see it again in Venice. 

Bo Bardi installation objects from the front

Bo Bardi installation, objects from the back

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Here's also a Joseph Stella from that section.

Joseph Stella, Fountain, 1929, oil on canvas

And I did enjoy the photograph by Tina Modotti (1896-1942)

Tina Modotti, Falce, Pannocchia e Cartucciera,
1928/1985-1995 ca, gelatin silver print

 Pedrosa acknowledges the “robust presence” of indigenous artists, many of which I had identfied as I was walking through the shows as “folk” artists, not professionally trained or exhibited. The works were in a simplified, perhaps abstracted, narrative style, often charming or powerful manifestations of local issues, people or events.  The upper image, by Santiago Yahaurcani, reflects myths, memories, knowledge of plants, and climate catastrophes representative of his clan in upper Amazonia. The lower two are details of a huge cityscape depicting daily activities of a coastal village in Chile where the group worked between 1967 and 1980

Santiago Yahuarcani, Peru, b. 1960, Aqui esta caliente, 2024
Natural pigments and acrylic on llanchama

Bordadores de Isla Negra, Chile, 

two details from Untitled, 1972

Embroidered canvas

Coincidentally, a surprising number of the works were fiber: woven, collaged, or painted with narratives or abstractions. Some of these, like the two above, were also by outsider artists. I photographed at least 15. While there has been an increase in the presentation of fiber works in art exhibitions, artists such as Faith Ringgold, Olga de Amaral and Magdalena Abakanowicz, and while Yinka Shonibare incorporates African textiles in his works, it is still perceived more as a craft then a contemporary art medium, much like clay and glass. Several of the abstract fiber works were monumental and stunningly lovely. Here are just four:

Nour Jaouda, If the Olive Trees Knew, 2023
Libyan, born in Cairo, lives in Cairo and London
Hand-dyed textile, steel

Dana Awartani, Palestinian, born in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia,
Lives in Jeddah and New York
Come, Let Me Heal Your Wounds, Let Me Heal Your Broken Bones
2024, darning on medicinally dyed silk

Shalom Kufakwatenzi, Zimbabwe, Under the Sea, 2023
Fabric, wool, tobacco twine, fishing line

Antonia Jose Guzman and Iva Jankovic
Panama and Serbia, live in Amsterdam
Orbital Mechanics, 2024
Installation with Ayrakh hand block printed indigo dyed fabrics

Several of the artists are no longer alive, including Susanne Wenger (1915-2009), Anna Zemánková (1908-1986), and Sàngódáre Ġbádégẹsin Àjàlá (1948-2021)

Sàngódáre Ġbádégẹsin Àjàlá, Nigeria, Unknown title, batik

Another focus of the exhibition is Queer art, seen throughout the show and in two designated sections in each of the two main buildings, one devoted to Queer abstraction.  In the Short Guide he identifies himself as “the first openly Queer curator in the history of the Biennale Arte.”

 A lot of the artists, perhaps the majority, are unfamiliar to most critics, but it surprised me that Pedrosa focused on two well-known American Indian painters, Emmi Whitehorse and Kay Walkingstick, each of whom had a focused section of the larger theme exhibition. Jeffrey Gibson, the artist of the American Pavilion, was an indigenous artist less known to me. I hope to mention him in a later post. This one's running out of space.

 While the exhibition itself is exhausting with so many artists, reviewing the booklet a month or so later, one has to be impressed by the number of artists the curator has assembled and recognized.  I wonder if he has hopes that this exhibition and celebration of artists who are not all well-known will have the impact for their careers that Magiciens de la Terre had for those artists.

 

 

 

Venice Biennale, Collateral Exhibition from Ukraine

Going through my photographs, trying to get organized, I found the image of another work by Wilfredo Prieto, the subject of the Cuba Pavilion. This was in a special pavilion from Ukraine - not the Ukraine Pavilion - sponsored by the Viktor Pinchuck Foundation and housed in the Palazzo Contarini Polignac in the Dorsoduro district.  The exhibition is titled "Daring to Dream in a World of Constant Fear," and the blurb for the show characterizes the works not as specifically relating to Ukraine and the war there, but more universal: "We are at a crucial moment where the future is hidden while fundamental changes are on the horizon."

The Wilfredo Prieto, which amused me at first, is Untitled (Globe of the World), 2002 (Collection of Jesus Villasante) and consists of a dried chickpea drawn with an ink map of the world, attached to a yellow/gold wall.  This small-world image first reminded me of all the artist miniaturizations that have amazed viewers for centuries, but the chickpea, a grain that is common virtually throughout the world, can refer to both the universal need for food and to globalization in a world of global warming.

A few other works in this large exhibition caught my interest. Yarema Malaschuk and Roman Khimei, You Shouldn't Have to See This, 2024 is a group of six videos of children sleeping. They are among the estimated

20,000 to one million Ukrainian children who have been deported to Russia during the war, and among the few who have been  able to return. 

Yana Kononova's Izyum Forest, 2022 is one long composite black and white photograph of the exhumation process of mass graves found in the city of Izyum after the Russians were driven out. Most of the dead were civilians and there was evidence of torture.

In the articles about the Biennale, I remembered the image of Fatma Bucak's Damascus Rose, 2016 ongoing, a pile of soil with green plants emerging from it, somehow a hopeful image. The artist acquired Damascus rose cuttines from Syria (where they are a symbol of the threatened city of Damascus), grafts them onto other rose plants, and plants the seedlings in other countries, as in Venice. If they survive, the plants remain in the country of the exhibition  Apparently, in Venice they didn't.

Toward the end of the exhibition, there's a large room with blossoms strewn across the floor. This installation is by Allora and Calzadilla, artists based in Puerto Rico who represented the United States in the 2011 Venice Biennale and had shown in the Biennale exhibition earlier. I remember getting money from the musical cash machine in that installation. 

The blossoms are actually made of handpainted recycled polyvinyl chloride, depicted in various stages of decomposition. The flowers depicted are from the Baobab tree, which is sacred in Africa, and called 'the Tree of Life," because it can sustain entire ecosystems. The trees can live up to 2000 years but apparently 9 of the oldest and largest 13 trees have perished due to climate change. The flowers also trace colonial trade routes that brought the trees from Africa to the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent.  Visitors are encouraged to walk carefully through the installation, which I did. 

This last installation, with its multiple elements of lovely but low value items and colonial ramifications, seemed related in meaning to the Venetian beads of the Canada pavilion I described earlier. Similarly, connections across the multiple venues in Venice make a full explanation of the richness of the experience there difficult to transmit. One never knows which venue will offer some new revelation.

The online description of the exhibition offers photographs and discussion of all the various offerings there.

Venice Biennale: Three Favorite Pavilions in the Giardini

Founded in 1895, at first the Biennale occupied what is now the Central Pavilion. Individual national pavilions date from 1907 (Belgium) to 1995 (Korea) and the development of the layout of the Biennale spans the twentieth century. Since each country chooses the artist or artists who represent it, and each country has its own system for making the choice, the pavilions, each a unique building designed by an architect, host diverse exhibitions, 29 in all. For more information on the Biennale history click here.

Most of the exhibitions are one-person shows, but a few include artist groups or multiple artists. This year the Netherlands gave its pavilion to an artists' collective of Congolese plantation workers from a plantation formerly owned by Unilever. They sell their art for funds to buy back their ancestral lands. The Israeli pavilion remained closed for the duration of the war in Gaza and the Russian pavilion was given to a group of artists from Bolivia. We did not visit that pavilion and I think we missed Switzerland.

Amid all the densely installed installations, videos, and complex concepts, the Canada pavilion was a relief, a simple, clean installation of geometric forms and subtly changing colors, both minimal sculptures and colored walls. Before we visited it, we had a snack in a new outdoor cafe next door, and I noticed that the exterior walls were covered in a dark blue textured substance. Upon closer examination we found that the walls were all covered with strings of Venetian seed beads, the artist using media from the host country to create the exhibition. I watched a visitor finger one of the strings, confirming that they were beads. 

The introductory label, and the booklet that we were given, address the use of glass beads as trade items throughout the world. For us their use by Native American artists was particularly meaningful, but African and Asian cultures used them as well. The artist of this installation, titled Trinket, is Kapwani Kiwanga, a Canadian who lives and works in Paris and whose work, according to Wikipedia, deals with issues of colonialism, gender, and the African diaspora. The booklet includes an essay about the history of trade beads and their use in exchange for ivory, gold, furs and slaves, casting a dark light on perhaps the most beautiful installation of the Biennale, and certainly the best one I have seen from Canada in the forty years I have been attending.

Even the outside walls were covered with strings of beads, in this case all blue beads, a color that was especially valued in many cultures to which the beads were traded.
 

The second pavilion that impressed us was Austria, across a bridge in a kind of secondary section of pavilions. The building was designed by Josef Hoffman in 1934.

The artist is Anna Jermolaewa, who was born in Leningrad, USSR, and has lived in Vienna since 1989, having come to Austria as a refugee. Among the items in her installation was a 2006 video titled "Research for Sleeping Positions," depicting her trying to sleep on a bench in the Westbahnhof in Vienna, the train station where she arrived seventeen years before and where she slept for her first week in Austria. Since then the station has added armrests to prevent people from sleeping there.

A second object is six pay phone booths from the refugee camp in Traiskirchen, Austria. The label says that the most international calls made in Austria came from these phone booths. They are the ones the artist used to contact her family when she arrived in Austria. The phone booths work.

Finally, another video shows four dancers rehearsing to perform Swan Lake, a project in collaboration with the Ukrainian dancer and choreographer Oksana Serheieva. Apparently at times of political unrest, especially at the death of the head of state, Soviet television replaced their regular broadcast with a loop of Swan Lake, sometimes for days. Tchaikovsky's ballet became a code for a change in power. So rather than a tool of censorship it had been traditionally, the artists transform Swan Lake into a hopeful rehearsal for regime change in Russia.

We've seen a lot of displays addressing issues of migration, oppression, colonialism, and injustice and often they generalize, use multiple adjectives, and seem to be charging the viewer with evil. By connecting the objects with her specific biography, describing the events clearly, and not expressing an opinion, Jermolaewa made it possible to empathize with her as a refugee and a migrant.

Our third favorite pavilion also involved video, a surprise since in general we do not embrace video installations. This was Egypt, and the artist is Wael Shawky. The video is titled Drama 1882 and stages the Urabi revolution of 1879 to 1882, a relatively unknown event in which a cafe fight results in riots that inspired the British forces to bomb Alexandria in the Battle of Tel El Kebir. In response to the riots, the British ordered the Egyptians to disarm and when they didn't the British bombarded Alexandria and drove the Egyptian troops from the city.  As a result, the British occupied Egypt until 1956. 

We did not photograph the video, but it is available online. The video in six sections is a sort of operatic rendering of the conflict, composed and staged by Shawky in a mesmerizing, stylized performance. With the subject of the Biennale being "Foreigners Everywhere," it was unusual for the foreigners to be British, rather than migrants from non-European continents. Through the staging, Shawky calls attention to this important and under-recognized event, and to an aspect of the history of colonialism. 

Venice Biennale, Cuban Pavilion

 We spent a week in Venice in July, just to see the Biennale.  This year, even with all the previous articles in art publications and newspapers, it was more difficult than usual to locate the sites, on account of inadequate maps. We were able to plan by using three different maps, each listing different exhibitions and attractions at varied locations. The Giardini and Arsenale are easy, as are the major museums, but the off-site national pavilions and other exhibitions occupy spaces around the city in sundry offices, shops, palaces, and apartments. Of course, in a week it's impossible to see everything, or even most of what's on view. I estimate that we went to about 75 national pavilions, collateral events, and other exhibitions, from a total of 244, according to one map. In addition, it was a particularly hot July, not life-threatening, but certainly tiring. 

My plan is to write about various aspects of the city-wide event. Of course, other writers have discussed virtually every exhibition, often listing "the best," and those they consider of greatest interest. 

 I begin with the Cuban Pavilion a simple installation by the artist Wilfredo Prieto, titled "Curtain." It was located on the Fondamenta Nuove, the side of Venice that faces Murano and the San Michele cemetery island, a relatively quiet quay. A young intern welcomed us and we walked into the very dark room and saw this spotlighted rock. We looked at it for a minute and walked out.

 

The young woman said, "Did you see one rock or two?" and we realized that we needed to go back into the pavilion and let our eyes adjust to the dark. After a few minutes, we saw this:

You can just barely make out the second rock diagonally back to the left of the spotlighted one. We spent a few minutes looking at the two rocks and thinking about how important it is not to assume you know everything just from what you first see, how taking some time can offer different perspectives and more information. How things you might need to know can be hidden if you don't give them time. It seemed much more profound than just two rocks.

When we left, we picked up the information sheet offered by the pavilion. In addition to information about Wilfredo Prieto's history, other exhibitions, and poetic practice, it included this paragraph about the work:

"The installation highlights, with a poetic gesture, the weight of identity, the significance of identity and the complexities surrounding integration and belonging. It challenges the notion of luck and its implications within the context of evolution and natural selection, represented by the changes, diversity, social, racial, ethnic, political and economic differences. In his exploration of reality, Prieto proposes an analysis that revolves around the interplay of opposites, and varying levels of sensitivity: the tangible physical realm and the realm of representation, which serves as a metaphorical reflection of ourselves. It is an introspection of human thought, for despite the many ways in which individuals think, feel and behave, we are part of the same thing."

I struggle to see how that paragraph connects to the two rocks, one in the spotlight and one in the dark, that we saw, and wonder if other viewers could make a connection. Is it because one rock is included and the other is left out? If someone can explain it to me, please do.