If the Venice Biennale is indeed the �arts Olympics�, it is a curious Olympics where winners, and alleged losers, are decided by committees of pen-chewing critics, businessmen and cogitating magazine writers.

If the Venice Biennale is indeed the "arts Olympics", as it has been claimed, it is a curious Olympics where winners, and alleged losers, are decided by committees of pen-chewing critics, businessmen and cogitating magazine writers. Jesse Owens would not have won his heroic gold medals in Berlin if the press of his time had voted for the winners.

Thankfully, the worth of art is usually judged, if it can be judged at all, in subtler ways. There is no podium for medallists in the gardens of the Giardini. As it is, then, the Biennale is essentially an exercise in showing off for each of the (more than 50) countries concerned, and highly entertaining it all is too.

Scotland has, so far in its three exhibitions here since 2003, taken a definite step back from the silent battle of names and reputations that dominates the countries in the main arena, the Giardini. This year's pavilion - which, it seems, may be the last of its kind in Scottish terms - features six young artists, mainly schooled or based in Glasgow, and it is the strongest showing by Scotland yet. It is not flashy or suffused with ego, and by its nature it is multi-faceted, a mix of voices and styles. But it is rich, varied and rewarding, a quiet but assured voice amid the Venice sound and fury.

The Collegio Armeno, where the Scottish contribution is displayed in a series of seven rooms, is a solid building at the Palazzo Zenobio, with a garden at its rear and a large courtyard.

In the courtyard, created by Charles Avery, is a large white sculpture of the numeral 2, which is good for leaning against in the summer heat. Inside is his more interesting work: large, pencil-drawn depictions of his ongoing project to create an entire world, with its own legend and myth, and curious inhabitants.

These include bearded cobras, ill-looking drinkers and a bustling (and bizarre) bazaar. It is all beautifully drawn, absurdly detailed, slightly distorted and distended. What is shown here makes you want to know more about this whimsical, grotesque place immediately. I hope Avery's world is documented in its totality one day.

Louise Hopkins also charts her own, crepuscular world, but with fabric and real maps. Here she has reversed the fabric so its furnished patterns glow dimly, ghostlike, behind her own beautiful pattern and designs, which are painstaking and gorgeous.

Lovely too, and with the odd moment of lambent beauty typical of her work, is Rosalind Nashashibi's film, Bachelor Machines Part I, which is her contemplation (shown in a very dark room) on life aboard an Italian cargo ship called Gran Bretagna as it made a trip from Italy to the Baltic.

Perhaps, unlike previous films, there is a sense of humour at work here - the steady shot of two crew obsessively trying to fix a recalcitrant door made me chuckle, anyway - as well as the artists' usual timing and grace: one image of the moon drifting in and out of shot, with the rise and sink of the ship, is luscious. It really requires repeated viewing.

Lucy Skaer, in the next room, has created oddly chilling imagery in large ripped sheets. The darkness in the disrupted, febrile patterns and sense of living decay in the works is very Venice, and rather oblique.

Also unsettling is the work of Tony Swain, on the other side of the courtyard. Melding newspaper images and cuttings and his own imagery, this is skilful surrealist montage with a tingly sense of dread and abandon.

Henry Coombes has been obsessed with Edwin Landseer for a time; that artist's own fixations, and sense of unapologetic pagan doom, has bled into a dark series of tortured paintings that seem to lurch from the walls like scenes from a nightmare.

But most startling is a brilliant film, expertly shot and utterly involving, of a deer being gutted on a hill, somewhere in Dumfriesshire.

As the deer has its bloodless, corpulent guts removed, human eyes blink inside its skull, and as its guts cool in a steaming puddle of viscera, a hawk circles, then flies in to claim its carrion. The effect is quite mesmeric.

Mesmeric too, in a different way, is Tracey Emin's show at the British Pavilion. Her smudgy, squiggly drawings have always been more affecting than her work with material and neon (contemporary art is neoned-out, in my opinion).

Here her drawings are resolutely open, abject in their tremulous depiction of mental and physical violation. Her post-abortion watercolours are equally pretty and heart breaking. There is too much, and her wooden sculptures are pretty dispensable, but there's no doubting her power, with a few of these images as arresting as a bleeding wound.

Elsewhere, the French pavilion sees Sophie Calle exploring a risible e-mail she received that informed her she was, effectively, dumped in every possible way you could imagine.

Here, psychologists, translators, artists, actors, friends and punters all have their take on the text. One wonders if the letter itself can bear the strain of art. I bet the poor chump wishes he had just texted her. Finally, the Australians (very good at real sports, apparently) provide a most visceral thrill: Callum Morton's immense Valhalla: a ruined, burning, thundering version of his own family's house, transformed into a gateway to Hades. Outside, the ruin smokes, inside, a pristine, antiseptic hotel lobby seems to lead to something unnameable and unimaginable.

It's in the garden next to the Scottish Pavilion, so if you get to Venice this summer, you can see both the home-grown and the antipodean works of art.

The Venice Biennale: Scotland in Venice 2007, until November 2, Palazzo Zenobio, Collegio Armeno.