VENICE, Italy — Sculptor Fusun Onur never laid eyes on her installation at the Turkey pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale. Coronavirus restrictions forced her to cancel travel plans and to instead scout the setting and install the work over Zoom, exemplifying the challenge of staging the world’s premier art event during the pandemic. 

The Venice Biennale, which concludes this weekend, has attracted more than 300,000 visitors since it opened in April after a yearlong delay due to the coronavirus pandemic. This year’s show was a breakthrough, curated by an Italian woman for the first time, and overwhelmingly featured female artists from around the world, correcting a long record of overrepresenting male artists and curators. 

Much of the 59th edition, called “The Milk of Dreams,” explored the margins, showing work by or about the dispossessed, the nonconformers and those unsanctioned by the canon. Curator Cecilia Alemani described her decision to make 90% of the featured work by women “a deliberate rethinking of man’s centrality in the history of art and contemporary culture.” That feminist ethos was reflected in work from the Middle East, both in the international exhibition and many of the national pavilions. 

Onur, 84, spent a half-century expanding the boundaries of contemporary art in Turkey before she was given the distinction of representing her country in Venice. In “Once Upon a Time … ,” Onur invites the viewer into her inner world while confronting some of the pressing problems of our age.