ATHENS— Located along the coast, about a 45-minute tram ride from the city center, the second Athens Biennial, titled “Heaven,” is an ambitious, if somewhat disjointed, exhibition bursting with surprises from 141 artists and collaboratives from 26 countries. Organized by artistic directors XYZ (independent curator Xenia Kalpaktsoglou, artist Poka-Yio, and critic Augustine Zenakos), the expansive show includes five central exhibitions housed in a disused indoor parking garage left over from the 2004 Olympics, as well as performatory events — namely “Heaven-Live,” a series of temporary performance-based works curated by Dimitris Papaioannou and Zafos Xagoraris — and a host of off-site projects and installations in seven other venues along the waterfront.

While the main goal of the biennial, which runs from June 15 through October 4, was for the curators to assemble a group of artworks responding to the theme of heaven (the public beach where the biennial is staged is referred to as “Eden”), one result of the undertaking seems to be showing Greek artists alongside their international counterparts, giving them a global context and broader exposure.

Despite the unifying idea, each of the five curated sections in the sprawling, long, and narrow concrete garage has its own agenda and visual approach. The first of these, Chus Martinez’s “World Question Center,” lives up to its name, definitely raising more questions than it answers, with an open-ended methodology that doesn’t necessarily make for a cohesive grouping. Martinez, the chief curator of Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), asked each artist to respond to the heaven theme on his or her own terms and received very different responses.

While an interesting approach, the cacophony resulting from installing almost 40 works, many of them videos, in a relatively open setting made it hard to focus on individual pieces. (Also, the temporary walls in this section are slanted inward, giving the whole installation a DIY, somewhat disorienting feel.) Of the two-dimensional works, highlights include the India-ink-on-paper drawings by the late Greek artist Alexis Akrithakis (think Keith Haring, but more refined) as well as Dorothy Iannone’s graphic stylized silkscreen print The Next Great Moment in History is Ours (1970), a work trumpeting female empowerment and sexuality. The neo-primitive embroidery works on canvas by Aris and Lakis Ionas/The Callas call to mind the American collective Forcefield but suffer, unfortunately, from their informal installation on a freestanding, slanted piece of Sheetrock.

The maze-like layout of the biennial might cause viewers to completely miss, appropriately enough, the second section, Diana Baldon’s “For the Straight Way is Lost.” Baldon takes an anti-white-cube aesthetic to the extreme, forcing viewers to confront the existing architecture of the space, a series of small rooms with extremely low ceilings in which viewers were forced to crouch and bend to see the work. This section, too, relies heavily on film and video installations, the most effective of which is German artist Christoph Schlingensief’s Stahlweg I–XII (2006), a series of freestanding storage lockers outfitted with small monitors playing videos inside and a hole to peer through. Also included was Carolee Schneemann’s Fuses (1965), a silent film of collaged and painted sequences of lovemaking between Schneemann and her then partner, composer James Tenney, with their cat, Kitch, as a witness.

Cay Sophie Rabinowitz, the former artistic director of Art Basel, opted for a more traditional format for her contribution, “Splendid Isolation, Athens,” by using a large, open room — albeit with a sloping, un-museum-like floor on the right side — in which you might catch your breath while taking in works dealing with the natural environment and utopian ideals. Cypriot artist Christodoulos Panayiotou’s 2008 (2008) consists of a pile of shredded bank notes from Cyprus, useless after the country’s transition to the euro, in a commentary on not only the current global economy but also the complex political situation of a country dealing with internal conflict and an uncertain future.