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
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.
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
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.
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