In Western thought, eschatology deals with the end of time and the final events of history.

Fiona Hall's exhibition, Wrong Way Time, has a strongly expressed eschatological orientation, where our obsession with greed and capitalism, militarism and global politics, and our disregard for the environment, are revealed as pushing the world to self-destruction.

The exhibition was first shown last year at the Venice Biennale, where it was the inaugural exhibition at the new Australian Pavilion, an elegant and functional black cube designed by Melbourne architects Denton Corker Marshall, which replaced the much maligned and more modest shed-like space designed by Philip Cox. Over 250,000 people visited the exhibition in Venice.

Australia first participated at the Venice Biennale in 1954, in an ad hoc manner, and then systematically, since 1978, when the Australia Council took over the management of our national representation. Called the "goldfish bowl" of international art, many of Australia's entries were an embarrassment and entirely forgettable. Hall's exhibition is an outstanding exception and comes to Canberra as an exact transplant from Venice, at the initiative of the National Gallery's director, Gerard Vaughan.

The exhibition's 800 items are again presented within a darkened space, with walls painted black, as part of a deeply immersive installation. It is a troubling, dark, gothic experience, where the artist appears as a shaman who, through alchemy, transforms the materials drawn from a commonly experienced reality into mystical and wondrous creations. Wall-pieces create an outer boundary and vitrines, which are set up as wunderkammer-like cases or cabinets of curiosities, frame the central space that is occupied by the installation All the king's men.

A major artistic strategy in Hall's repertoire is that of "bricolage", where the artist improvises with the materials at hand. It is a sort of DIY approach to art making, where the artist will take aluminium sardine and fish tins, US dollar bills, as well as other foreign banknotes, old clocks, models aeroplanes and ships, damaged books, a carburettor, car light and radiator hose, light switches, driftwood, pool balls, mobile phones, camouflage military garments, deer teeth, a zebra hoof, credit cards, bones and horns, together with coal, bread, perfume bottles and living spiders and employs these to create alternative realities. The French term "bricolage" comes from the verb "bricoler" (to tinker) and in some ways this characterises this artist's method of work. She shreds metal cans to weave with the strands of metal; she slices up US dollar bills to become the threads out of which to build a bird's nest, while camouflage military fatigues serve as yarn to knit the 18 haunting masks that make up All the king's men, into which bones, horns, teeth and miscellaneous found objects are enmeshed.

The artist's choice of materials is never arbitrary, nor are the newly created forms. The US banknotes are woven into an 86-piece installation called Tender, consisting of bird nests, accurately replicating the nests of extinct birds from areas logged by American interests. The nests are now bird-less, silent and deserted. The title itself plays with an array of associations from "legal tender" to emotional tenderness. Hall combines the empirical knowledge of a scientist, working in the natural sciences, the creative associative imagination of the artist, together with an obsessive and frenetic manual dexterity and technical precision.

Her large and dramatic wall-piece, Manuhiri (Travellers), looks from a distance like a collection of bones in the form of a strange organic installation. On closer inspection I saw that it consisted of pieces of expressive driftwood, arranged in a loose mandorla-like pattern. The artist explains that she collected the driftwood from a beach at Awanui on New Zealand's East Cape, where the Waiapu River flows into the sea. Over-farming has led to widespread erosion and the trees have fallen and have been swept out to sea, while the waves and the tide have returned them to shore in the form of driftwood. Manuhiri is like a shrine or graveyard of the forest, or in the artist's words, these bits of driftwood appear like "travellers from a former forest life, reshaped by the ocean currents and now journeying to another life back in the world of the living".

The exhibition is neither homogeneous, nor entirely created for Venice, but is made up of pieces executed between 2003 and 2015 and unified by the general theme of "a world out of joint" and heading for disaster. One of the strongest parts of the show is Kuka irititja (Animals from another time), where Hall collaborated with 11 artists from the Tjanpi Desert Weavers from the NPY lands on a 40-piece installation. Many of these figures are woven from tjanpi (native grasses), plus a variety of other materials, and represent native animals, most of which are extinct in the wild. They are strange, whimsical creations that serve as a commentary on loss and absence.

Throughout the exhibition there is a combination of immediate high visual impact followed by a slow release of associative meanings that each individual viewer brings to the experience. Although it has become fashionable to speak of "slow art", where beyond the immediate "wow factor" there lies a rich, slowly developing cultural resonance, Hall's art creeps along at a subversive pace. The high-pitched dramatic, emotional and intuitive level in her art is to some extent supplemented by its cerebral and philosophical content. It is art that is simultaneously visually exciting and at times intellectually profound.

In the gallery next door, there is a complementary exhibition of Hall's work from the collection of the National Gallery as well as other pieces on loan from the artist's dealer, the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Sydney. Her earlier classics, including the erotic/botanical sardine tins, Paradisus terrestris and the sprawling and memorable Leaf litter, appear together with her most recent creations. It is a curious coincidence how this commercial Sydney art gallery has dominated Australia's participation at Venice through the artists it represents, with Hall last year, Hany Armanious in 2011, Cullum Morton in 2007, Patricia Piccinini in 2003 and Tracey Moffatt announced for 2017.

Hall's Wrong Way Time is a strong, disturbing and subversive exhibition that not only challenges us visually, but makes us question the sustainability of our species if we continue along our present path.