Briton is the big draw as Venice's Biennale opens

The Venice Biennale, the world's most important contemporary art exhibition, opened yesterday with an extraordinary show from the British artist Mark Wallinger, attracting some of the biggest queues.

In darkened rooms flanking a solitary version of his famous statue of Christ, which once stood on the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square, are two video works: Threshold to the Kingdom and Angel. The former consists of a video of people passing through the arrivals lounge of London's City Airport, played very slowly to the grandiose sound of Allegri's Miserere.

"These people have just come through Customs, a process that is a form of judgement and I suppose we all rather dread that," says Wallinger, who adds that he has moved from a position of atheism to being agnostic in the preparation of what is a profoundly religious show.

The other video shows the artist wearing dark glasses and carrying a blind man's white cane as he travels down an escalator on the London Underground, while reciting verses from St John's Gospel. The entire video runs backwards ­ we see puzzled Londoners moving up and down the neighbouring escalators the "wrong" way as Wallinger speaks the verses backwards.

He says it took three months to perfect the speech patterns in reverse so they sound the right way round on the tape. "It's about blind faith, about seeing things but not in the usual way," he says. "The dark glasses are there to make you listen to what I'm saying."

Wallinger's interest in investigating different perspectives is also demonstrated byGhost, an enormous lightbox print of George Stubbs' famous paintingWhistlejacket seen in negative and sporting a unicorn's horn.

While the art crowd crooned over Wallinger's work, other shows were also inspiring gasps and groans.

Robert Gober's excellent sculptures in the American pavilion ­ a mini Capitol affair, all pristine white ­ in which the artist drew hard upon his country's neuroses concerning macho heroism, industrial manufacturing and the falsity of appearances: chunks of polystyrene and rubber sink plungers on the floor and framed newspaper cuttings on the walls turned out to be made of bronze, terracotta and carefully handmade woven paper when examined close up.

At the other end of the political spectrum, the Russians were in mourning: Sergei Shutov's astonishing chamber of praying monks ­ actually mechanised mannequins in black flowing robes ­ accompanied by a dirge-like chorus told of a nation's sufferings and its hope for redemption.

Outside the giardini, in the depths of the Arsenale ­ the rambling, ruined dockyards that once nurtured the Venetian fleet ­ the Grand Old Man of sculpture, the artist Richard Serra, revealed two huge spirals, each 15 metres high and made of rusting steel, inside a boathouse. One spiral turns into itself like a fist as you walk through it, while the other unwinds and releases this tension.

"I distrust Venice," Serra confesses. "It's a city of distracting reflections, thin facades and is all about lightness, whereas my work is about weight and volume and solidity." he adds, though clearly pleased with his installation, one of the largest he has made.