At the Venice Biennale this year, visitors to the city’s Arsenale will see a replica of the Lincoln Memorial’s marble throne being thrashed, with vicious and terrifying force, by a rubber hose.

The work, by Chinese artists Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, is certainly one kind of response to an era of phallic power gone mad.

Cathy Wilkes, however, the artist officially representing Great Britain at the world’s most celebrated international art event, has taken a completely opposite path. She has offered visitors something subtle, mournful and melancholy; something that might inspire not shock or amusement but contemplation and reflection.

The visitor enters a room dominated by a low rectangular structure, covered by a gauzy, semi-transparent material, that resembles a tomb. There are scraps of dried flowers and foliage atop it, a little like offerings.

As you move through the rooms, lit by soft natural light, there are sculptural figures of children with swollen bellies, and a woman in a green dress, “like a figure that is alienated from itself, not a representation of anything that’s real”, she said. Other rooms contain paintings in pale, smudgy tones; suggestions of domestic interiors with china plates on the walls; a structure that might remind you of a child’s high chair.

Of the tomblike structure, she said: “I grieve for things over and over again for a long long time. The work is about repeatedly coming towards something, something you don’t quite understand.” Glasgow-based Wilkes, who guards her privacy fiercely, has not given an interview about her work since a single short film in 2008, when she was nominated for the Turner prize.

An undated picture of Cathy Wilkes distributed in 2008, since when she has given no interviews. Photograph: Lauschmann/Tate Britain /HO/EPA

Wilkes said that she had been “very uncomfortable” with accepting the British Council’s invitation to represent Great Britain at the Biennale. “I’m not into countries – any countries,” she said. “It’s equally a bad idea for everybody, full stop.” Wilkes, who was born in Northern Ireland in 1966, had accepted in the end on the grounds that “Great Britain isn’t a worse idea than any other country as a concept … I don’t like borders. I know that from being a wee girl and experiencing that.”

She had “certainly” thought about turning down the invitation, regarded as the British art world’s highest honour, bestowed in past years on Phyllida Barlow, Jeremy Deller and Sarah Lucas. She accepted in the end, “knowing that it’s easier to say no, and more difficult to say yes.”

Fiona Bradley, the director of Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery and one of the expert panel who advised the British Council on Wilkes’s selection, said: “It’s a melancholy, dark work. There is the suggestion that dark things have happened, and might happen. And the membrane between different states – life and death, for instance – might be very thin. There is something both very wintry and very uplifting about it. It is low and quiet. She has given us something extraordinarily laden with potential for meaning, without dictating what that is. You bring your own meaning to it, in the moment that you encounter it.”

The 58th Venice Art Biennale opens to the public on Saturday. It consists of two parts. The first is a huge central exhibition organised by an invited curator, in this case Ralph Rugoff, the director of the Hayward Gallery in London. This exhibition is titled May You Live in Interesting Times – a reference to the supposed Chinese curse that entered common parlance after Austen Chamberlain quoted it in the 1930s, alluding to the perils of fascism.

The second aspect is 90 national pavilions, organised by the individual participating countries, scattered around the city’s public gardens (the Giardini) and its vast former arsenal (the Arsenale).

For visitors, the national pavilions represent an accelerated, if eccentric, world tour of contemporary art. For the nations themselves, the event is an important platform for the best of their artists, as well as an opportunity to conduct soft diplomacy through culture.

New national pavilions to be inaugurated this year include those of Pakistan, Madagascar and Ghana, and Saudi Arabia returns after a hiatus. The event might be said to act as a rough barometer of the ups and downs of geopolitics. Venezuela, in the thick of a political crisis, will be late opening its presentation this year.

Scotland and Wales present their own “collateral events”. This year they show work by Turner prize-winner Charlotte Prodger and Sean Edwards, respectively.

In the preview days of the Biennale, before the doors open to the public at the weekend, thousands of members of the international art world descend on Venice – everyone from artists and ill-paid curators to the shadowy billionaire owners of the yachts, registered in the Cayman Islands, that are moored in the Venetian lagoon alongside the Giardini.