Tuesday, August 18, 2026

La Biennale di Venezia - The 61st International Art Exhibition - National Pavilions - Giardini - Part II - France - Austria - Egypt - Romania - Poland - Australia - USA

 

BiennaleArte2026 - National Pavilions - Giardini - Part II
France Pavilion - Comme Saturne
Exhibitor - Yto Barrada
Curator - Myriam Ben Salah

The French Pavilion presents Yto Barrada’s - Comme Saturne - an exhibition that proceeds through a constellation of gestures and words drawn from the long history of textile work. It unfolds across a series of environments: a peristyle of suspended forms; a room dedicated to Saturn, structured by folded wool and weighted matter; spaces devoted to work and exhaustion; and zones where machines stall, colours fade, and gestures repeat out of sync. 


The title - Comme Saturne -  invokes Saturn’s dual nature: the figure who devours his children to suspend generation, and the planet under whose influence artists were once said to be born. Through this cosmological lens, Barrada - above - reflects on our contemporary condition, drawing on the textile technique dévoré, in which matter is selectively eaten away, to evoke exhaustion and a sense of political and ecological burnout.
Yto Barrada


Oral, artisanal and often feminine forms of making and learning shape the exhibition from within. Colour, rhythm and repetition become tools for abstraction, while time unfolds through pauses, returns and gestures that fall out of sync: comme Saturne.


Austria Pavilion - Seaworld Venice
Exhibitor - Florentina Holzinger
Curator - Nora-Swantje Almes

The Austrian Pavilion presents Florentina Holzinger’s - Seaworld Venice - an immersive work that brings together dance, theatre and performance. Drawing on her longstanding research into water as both subject and symbol, Holzinger explores the human body within a radically changing landscape where nature, technology and infrastructure collide. Transforming visitors’ bodily fluids into environments for the performers, she creates a machinic organism that functions simultaneously as an underwater amusement park, sewage treatment plant and sacred space, unsettling oppositions between purity and pollution, sin and expiation.


Seaworld Venice makes visible the waste that is hidden from view yet remains constantly present, turning the pavilion into an ecosystem seemingly out of control. Water becomes both life-sustaining resource and polluted matter, while flooding, waste and technological creatures point towards an unstable future.


Through rituals of contamination and transformation, Holzinger asks us to confront what we consume, discard and leave behind. The body becomes both participant and environment, immersed in a world where nature, technology and waste are inseparably entangled.


Egypt Pavilion - Silence Pavilion : Between the Tangibile and the Intangible
Curator and Exhibitor - Armen Agop

The Egyptian Pavilion, curated and exhibited by Armen Agop, invites visitors to slow down and attune themselves to the imperceptible: the silence between gestures, the vibrations of stone and the quiet murmurs of being. Conceived as a passage through three sensorial movements—from the intangible, to the tangible, to the mystic invisible—the pavilion becomes a space for contemplation, meditation and reflection, encouraging viewers to listen to silence and perceive what lies beyond the visible.


Agop’s works create an environment in which matter, time and memory unfold slowly. Stone carries geological and human histories, while invisible traces accumulate within the viewer, transforming their experience. In this “minor key,” silence becomes a space for meaning, and granite teaches the eye to listen, generating light from darkness and leaving a lasting impression beyond the pavilion.


Romania Pavilion - Black Seas - Scores for the Sonic Eye
Exhibitors - Anna Benera - Arnold Estefan
Curators - Corina Opera - Diana Marincu

The Romanian Pavilion presents Anca Benera and Arnold Estefán’s Black Seas – Scores for the Sonic Eye - listening to the Black Sea as a living archive where ecological, historical and political processes accumulate in sediment, sound and suspended life. Through sound, moving image and sculpture, the artists explore the sea as a space shaped by extraction, displacement, empire and ecological change, proposing listening as a way to attune ourselves to hidden histories, latent futures and possibilities for solidarity and repair.


Poland Pavilion - Liquid Tongues
Exhibitors - Bogna Burska - Daniel Kotowski
Curators -  Ewa Chomicka - Jolanta Woszczenko

The Polish Pavilion presents - Liquid Tongues - an audio-video installation by Bogna Burska and Daniel Kotowski, featuring Chór w Ruchu - Choir in Motion - a mixed Deaf and hearing ensemble interpreting whale communication through spoken English and international sign language. Inspired by more-than-human life, the project explores alternative forms of communication.


Bogna Burska 


Through image, sound and movement, the installation weaves stories of loss, reconstruction and marginalised languages. Drawing on Deaf Gain, it approaches deafness as culture and identity, while water becomes an experimental space where sign language, sound and the body meet, challenging conventional boundaries between senses and modes of communication.


Australia Pavilion - conference on one's self 
Exhibitor - Khaled Sabsaki
Curator - Michael Dagostino

Australian Pavilion presents - conference of one’s self - a meditative work by Khaled Sabsabi inspired by the Sufi poem - The Conference of the Birds - Through shifting images, sound and colour, audiences are invited to reflect on identity, belonging and coexistence, tracing a journey through doubt, love, knowledge and self towards the possibility of shared humanity. Grounded in Sabsabi’s journey from Lebanon to Australia and his connections with Western Sydney, the work explores multicultural and multi-faith experiences of belonging.


United States of America Pavilion - Call Me the Breeze
Exhibitor - Alma Allen
Curator - Jeffrey Uslip

In the  USA Pavilion, Alma Allen presents - Call Me the Breeze - a series of abstract sculptures inspired by the landscapes and geological formations of the Americas. Using materials such as American walnut, volcanic rock and Colorado marble, Allen combines traditional hand-carving with advanced robotic technology to transform solid matter into fluid, organic forms.


The work explores elevation as both physical form and a symbol of optimism and self-realisation. As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary, the pavilion reflects on deep time, remembrance and freedom of thought through Allen’s vision of art as an experience of transformation.


Seen in then Giardini
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Thursday, August 13, 2026

La Biennale di Venezia - The 61st International Art Exhibition - National Pavilions - Spain - Belgium - Switzerland - Denmark - Japan - Germany - Great Britain - Giardini - Part One


BiennaleArte2026 - National Pavilions - Giardini - Part One
Spain Pavilion - Los restos
Exhibitor - Oriol Vilanova
Curator - Carlos Guerra

Los restos transforms the Spanish Pavilion into a surrogate museum built around accumulation, repetition, memory and subtle deviance. At its centre is Oriol Vilanova’s extensive collection of thousands of postcards, gathered obsessively for more than twenty years through flea markets and second-hand shops. Once circulated as everyday objects of personal correspondence, these modest images have been written on, sent, forgotten and discarded. Removed from their original contexts, they become fragments of lived experience and traces of fading memory.


Exhibitor - Oriol Vilanova


Presented as a seamless mural of accumulated postcards, Los restos rejects hierarchy, monumentality and fixed narratives. Instead, Vilanova turns the act of collecting into a reflection on what remains when personal and collective histories pass through ordinary materials. The postcards’ repetition and accumulation challenge the institutional authority of the museum, allowing marginal objects and everyday gestures to reveal alternative ways of remembering and preserving the past.


Curator - Carlos Guerra


Belgium Pavilion 
IT NEVER SSST
Exhibitor - Miet Warlop
Curator - Caroline Dumalin

With IT NEVER SSST, Miet Warlop transforms the Belgian Pavilion into a charged arena where language, music and collective disorientation collide. Plaster words circulate through the space, carried, passed along, dragged and broken, while musicians and dancers search for meaning within these unstable fragments. Together, the words form the lyrics and emotional score of an energetic exhibition-performance shaped by absurd physical rituals and a growing sense of doom. Warlop’s characters confront a world wavering between despair and the desire to transform it into something meaningful and beautiful. As they navigate overload and the instability of language, they sing towards a vulnerable threshold where words are felt rather than understood.




Even after the performance ends, the pavilion remains filled with traces of this encounter. Words scattered across the tribunes stand frozen in time, like remnants of a prayer wall or a karaoke machine from a vanished civilisation, awaiting new voices and new forms of connection.



“The gays did not stick with their habitual, defensive attitude, which was expected of them, even demanded. On the contrary! They climbed the barricades!”

Switzerland Pavilion
The Unfinished Business of Living Together
Exhibitors - Miriam Laura Leonardi - Lithic Alliance - Yul Tomatala 
Nina Wakeford
Curators - Gianmaria Andreetta - Luca Beeler - Nina Wakeford

In the Swiss Pavilion, The Unfinished Business of Living Together revisits this moment of public visibility through Telearena, a 1978 Swiss television programme in which the “problem of homosexuality” was debated live on air. Together with the 1984 francophone talk show Agora, the project explores how television staged debates around homosexuality, exposing individuals to both public voice and reprisals.


Co-curators - Gianmaria Andreetta


Using these histories as a starting point, the project considers coexistence as both a social promise and a contested form. Archival footage is combined with new images in a spatialised video installation, bringing together voices, places and perspectives to reflect on memory, surveillance, moral panic and the unresolved challenges of living together.


Co-curator and exhibitor - Nina Wakeford


Switzerland Pavilion


Denmark Pavilion
Things to Come
Exhibitor - Maja Malou Lyse
Curator - Chus Martinez

Things to Come in the Danish Pavilion asks whether images could be powerful enough to alter humanity’s fertility potential — and whether pornography might even help rescue the human species. Created with design studio Common Accounts, the exhibition combines film, speculative fiction and contemporary ideas of fertility, imagining a future shaped by technology and reproductive anxiety.


Curator - Chus Martinez




At its centre is a surreal film set in a sperm bank in 2045, while the adjacent gallery becomes an eccentric sperm altar  - above - featuring cryogenic containers and a new fertility ritual: “sperm races.” Drawing on online subcultures and anxieties surrounding the fertility crisis, the work turns reproduction into a strange spectacle of science, desire and competition.


Japan Pavilion
Grass Babies - Moon Babies
Exhibitor - Ei Arakawa-Nash
Curators - Lisa Horikawa, Mizuki Takahashi

In the Japanese Pavilion, Grass Babies, Moon Babies by Ei Arakawa-Nash - below - explores queer parenthood, art making and collective care. Created for the pavilion’s 70th anniversary, the project draws on architect Yoshizaka Takamasa’s idea of - DISCONT - discontinuous unity - bringing individual and collective experiences together. Visitors carry one of 200 baby dolls through the pavilion, where sound, film and gardens create an immersive reflection on identity, diaspora and the future.


"How can we celebrate a new generation of babies while we, as caregivers, undertake the unfinished work of reparations and amends that shape the world they enter?"
 Ei Arakawa-Nash


The work concludes with an act of care: visitors change their baby’s diaper and receive an oracular poem based on its birthday, drawing on twentieth-century histories of Japan, the US and Asia. The pavilion ultimately asks how we can welcome a new generation while addressing the unresolved histories and responsibilities that shape the world they inherit.


Japan Pavilion


Germany Pavilion
 Ruin
Exhibitors - Henrike Naumann, Sung Tieu
 Curator - Kathleen Reinhardt 

The German Pavilion explores unresolved histories of East Germany, reflecting on memory, political violence and the persistence of the past.   Henrike Naumann explores the relationship between political beliefs, taste and everyday aesthetics through an immersive installation. Drawing on post-war Germany, the GDR and the violence of the 1990s, she presents East Germany as a continuing “internal front” within the present.


Sung Tieu covers the pavilion’s façade with a trompe-l’oeil mosaic depicting the ruins of an East German housing complex in Berlin, where she grew up and where Vietnamese contract workers once lived. The work connects personal memory with histories of migration, surveillance and state control.


 Curator - Kathleen Reinhardt 


Germany Pavilion


Great Britain Pavilion
Predicting History: Testing Translation
Exhibitor - Lubaina Himid
Curator - Ese Onojeruo

In the British Pavilion, Lubaina Himid explores belonging and the challenge of making a home in a new place. Her vibrant, large-scale paintings depict Architects, Boatbuilders, Chefs, Tailors and Gardeners discussing, arguing and collaborating over whether to move or stay. Through these everyday encounters, Himid reflects on the tensions of navigating different cultures, behaviours and climates.


Embracing the pavilion’s architecture, Himid presents an apparently welcoming Britain while introducing an underlying sense of uncertainty through sound, text and imagery. Viewers become active participants, invited to imagine themselves within the scenes and question their own ideas of belonging.


Great Britain Pavilion
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La Biennale di Venezia - The 61st International Art Exhibition
In Minor Keys by Koyo Kouogh
Until 22nd November
Giardini + Arsenale +  Around Venice


























 

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Sunday, August 02, 2026

La Biennale di Venezia - The 61st International Art Exhibition - In Minor Keys - Artists and Highlights - Giardini


"Take a deep breath - Exhale
Drop your shoulders - Close your eyes" 

La Biennale di Venezia - The 61st International Art Exhibition  
In Minor Keys -  Koyo Kouoh
Artists and Highlights - Giardini - Central Pavilion

At La Biennale di Venezia - entitled - In Minor Keys - curated by the late - Koyo Kouoh - realised by the team selected by her - Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Hélène Pereira and Rasha Salti -  Siddhartha Mitter - Rory Tsapayi - until - November 22 - at the Giardini, and at the Arsenale. The title In Minor Keys reflects Kouoh’s belief that art does not need to be loud to be powerful. Like music played softly, it asks for attention, sensitivity, and time. Rather than fixed sections, the exhibition moves through recurring motifs — shrines, processions, schools, and spaces of rest — allowing visitors to drift between works and meanings.
 

Alvaro Barrington
Barrington’s installation - above -  
Labor Day Parade ’91 
references memories of the - West Indian Day Parade in Brooklyn.


"The path is one that reappraises human relationships, the little things, which are also great ones. The human dimension, the benchmark of everything, which a part of the world, yet the most opulent and over developed world – identified in the name “West” – has long since lost sight of, misplaced." 
Pietangelo Buttafuoco

Team Kouoh
In Minor Keys was the title chosen for La Biennale by the late Koyo Kouoh that vision has been carefully realised by her assembled and trusted team: Marie Hélène Pereira, Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo and Rasha Salti - advisors - Siddhartha Mitter - editor-in-chief - Rory Tsapayi - research assistant -  above with - President La Biennale di Venezia - Pietrangelo Buttafuoco and Koyo's husband, Philippe Mall. 

Big Chief Demond Melancon
Melancon - above - Big Chief of the Young Seminole Hunter tribe, creates intricately beaded ceremonial suits central to New Orleans' Black Masking culture. Since 2017, he has exhibited these works internationally, bringing the tradition to museums and galleries. For the Biennale he created - above - Amistad Takeover.


The Artists
The 110 invited participants – among them - individual artists - collaborative duos - collectives - artist-led organisations – hail from many geographies and regions selected by Koyo with particular attention to resonances, affinity, and and possible convergences between practices, even when far apart.

Seyni Awa Camara
Seyni Awa Camara - above - was a Senegalese ceramic artist who transformed inherited pottery traditions into visionary clay sculptures inspired by dreams, memory, and nature. Her enigmatic hybrid figures blur the boundaries between human and animal, reflecting a deeply personal spiritual world. Her work has become an important contribution to contemporary African art and ceramic practice.


Beverly Buchanan  
White Shacks - 1987

 
Marcel Duchamp



María Magdalena Campos-Pons 
Campos-Pons - Anatomy of the Magnolia Tree for Koyo Kouoh and Toni Morrison - 2026 - above - is a monument in floral form. Eight tall panels hold portraits of Morrison, the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature, and Kouoh, the first African woman to curate the Biennale Arte, while seven sculptures in resin and glass express forms of the magnolia, the iconic flower of the American South. Anchored in Black women’s solidarity, the work holds its subjects in relation across disciplines, generations and geographies.


Sohrab Hura
Sohrab Hura is an Indian artist whose paintings and films explore the tension between everyday life, memory, and the instability of images. His intimate pastel works - above - Timelines - 2024 - often layered with hidden images and handwritten notes, evoke the feeling of personal diaries. Blending documentary observation with fiction, his practice reflects on perception, politics, and contemporary life.




 Daniel Lind-Ramos
Daniel Lind-Ramos - Above with a collaborator - is a Puerto Rican artist who creates large-scale assemblages from found and salvaged objects, many gathered after hurricanes or donated by his community. His sculptures transform everyday materials into powerful reflections on memory, resilience, and collective history. Through these works, he explores the deep connections between people, place, and survival.


Edouard Duval-Carrié 
Edouard Duval-Carrié is a Haitian artist whose work explores the history, spirituality, and cultural identity of Haiti. Drawing on the lwa of Haitian Vodou, he creates richly layered works that connect migration, memory, and the legacy of the Haitian Revolution. His practice reimagines history through myth, resilience, and collective imagination.


Manuel Mathieu
Manuel Mathieu, art begins where time fractures, opening an infinite field. His work is informed by the liberatory legacy of Haiti’s art, literature, music and spirituality, as well as by Haiti’s contemporary challenges. While painting anchors his practice, ceramics, mosaic, film and scent extend the inquiry and material vocabulary. In his mixed-media works on canvas, marked boxes become metonyms for corporeality, interrogating the body’s perimeter and its relational field.


Leonilda González
Leonilda González was born in rural Uruguay in the 1920s. There, she developed her drive to affect social change through printmaking as her main medium – xylography - woodcuts - in particular – believing that its replicable and accessible qualities would help her communicate with larger audiences.  At the height of the independent culture movement, González created Novias Revolucionarias - Revolutionary Brides - above - a series that combined irony, anger, and striking graphic contrast. She portrays the brides as defiant figures protesting a system that seeks to "imprison" them. Following the 1973–1985 military dictatorship, the prints came to be seen as powerful symbols of political resistance in Uruguay.


Billie Zangewa
Billie Zangewa - above - creates hand-stitched collages from fragments of raw Dupion silk, transforming discarded fabrics into intimate scenes from everyday life. The silk's shifting texture and sheen give each work a distinctive luminosity. This suite of seven collages depicts moments of cooking, resting, caring for family, and quiet reflection. Through these scenes, Zangewa explores motherhood, identity, and what she calls "daily feminism"—finding strength, beauty, and agency in the routines of ordinary life.


Walid Raad
Raad's imagines artworks as beings in need of rescue. Through shifting narratives, fictional archives, and elusive documents, he traces the journeys of lost, damaged, or displaced works, creating labyrinthine stories that blur fact and fiction. Raad suggests that war transforms artworks beyond physical destruction, altering their colours, forms, and meanings. These elements, he proposes, survive by hiding in unexpected places, where they quietly endure until they can reappear.


Adebunmi Gbadebo
Adebunmi Gbadebo uses materials drawn from the land to honour the lives of people enslaved in the American South. She makes clay from red soil collected at the True Blue plantation in South Carolina, where her ancestors were forced to labour, combining African American ceramic traditions with coil-building techniques rooted in Nigeria and Cameroon. Incorporating rice and human hair into her vessels, Gbadebo creates memorial objects that commemorate her family and reclaim the land. Screenprints and works on paper made with handmade inks and pigments extend these themes, evoking the landscape surrounding the plantation.



Kaloki Nyamai
Kaloki Nyamai - above - draws on personal memory, Kamba heritage, and the social and political realities of Kenya. Using rope, sisal, fabric, newspaper, photographic transfers, and yarn, he builds richly layered canvases that evoke intimate domestic scenes.His works explore memory, belonging, and resilience through fragmented figures and stitched surfaces. More recently, Nyamai has engaged allegorically with cycles of political violence in Kenya, using the stitch as a metaphor for both rupture and repair.


Marcia Kure
Marcia Kure works across drawing, collage, pigment, and assemblage to explore the relationships between materials, history, and systems of value. Using substances such as indigo, charcoal, gold, and synthetic hair, she reveals the entanglement of natural resources, industry, and everyday life. Her Hair Jackets - above - combine carved wood and synthetic hair to examine labour, extraction, and identity. Across her practice, Kure uses line and material to trace the ecological, economic, and technological forces that shape contemporary experience.


Godfried Donkor
Of Asante descent, Godfried Donkor - above - explores the histories and legacies of the African diaspora through collage, painting, embroidery, and archival research. His work traces connections between West Africa and the Americas, with a particular focus on the transatlantic slave trade. Drawing on comic books, historical imagery, and archival materials, Donkor reimagines Black historical figures and questions inherited ideas of masculinity, memory, and identity. His works propose new narratives of Black resilience grounded in vulnerability and emotional strength. 


Annalee Davis
Annalee Davis lives and works on a former plantation in Barbados, where she explores the legacies of colonialism, plantation economies, and possibilities for healing through art, agriculture, and ecology.  Created for - Biennale Arte 2026 - Let This Be My Cathedral - above - combines a herbarium of plants from her garden, hand embroidery, palm drawings, and a life-sized reproduction of the extinct Eskimo curlew. Together, these elements invite reflection on loss, restoration, and our relationship with the natural world.


Nina Katchadourian
Nina Katchadourian transforms everyday life into playful acts of imagination. For  La Biennale, she recreates the elaborate fictional world she and her brother invented as children on the Finnish island of Pörtö, complete with named toy families and invented rituals.  Also featured is her celebrated - Seat Assignment - series - above - 2010–2021- in which the ordinary objects of air travel become the raw material for witty photographic illusions that reveal the extraordinary within the everyday.


Vera Tamari
Over four decades, Palestinian artist Vera Tamari has developed a distinctive process for creating monumental clay reliefs. Made through intensive research, experimentation, and collective labour, her sculptures are fired in sections before being reassembled. Tale of a Tree - above - 2002 - is composed of hundreds of individually made clay elements that evoke memory, resilience, and the natural world. Working across ceramics, painting, photography, and installation, Tamari continues to expand the expressive possibilities of clay.



arms ache avid aeon 
arms ache avid aeon is a collaborative project by Jo-ey Tang and founding members of the collective fierce pussy—Nancy Brooks Brody - Joy Episalla -  Zoe Leonard - Carrie Yamaoka. Bringing together works from 1991–2026, it reflects on queer activism, collective practice, and resistance in a time of climate crisis and rising authoritarianism.On view are Joy Episalla's - above - chemically altered photographic works - above - alongside sculptures, photographs, and installations by the other artists that transform found materials through processes of repair, decay, and renewal. Two new fierce pussy public projects across Venice extend the collective's long-standing commitment to visibility and inclusion.










































 

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