Poverty is everywhere at this year’s Venice Biennale. It’s there in the photographs: here a street child, there a raggedy mother and her clearly ill toddler; round the corner, an image of a piece of plastic in a rundown building being used as a makeshift bed.

It’s there in the haunting message of many of the exhibits, which speak time and again of the desolation and desperation of our age: a marble chair, reminiscent of that of a Roman emperor, empty save for a piece of rubber hose that every so often fills with gas and thrashes around, as though to symbolise the inadequacies of our leaders. Not far away, a huge rag doll sits in an aeroplane seat in the “brace” position: the world is hurtling towards a catastrophic crash, and she, and we, are tensing ourselves for the inevitable moment of destruction.

These artworks are by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, and Yin Xiuzhen respectively; another Chinese artist, Yu Ji, has hung from the ceiling a series of chains covered with glossy resin. They resemble the empty shells of people, perhaps the people who should have done something to change the world before the disaster. There’s a similar message from the American Jimmie Durham, recipient of the Biennale’s Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement award: he’s made animal sculptures out of furniture. Each species represented is on the verge of extinction.