As the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia opens its gates to the public on 9 May, Venice has already entered its annual state of artistic intensity through a series of previews, inaugurations, and gatherings unfolding across the Giardini, Arsenale, and the city beyond. Curated this year under the title In Minor Keys, the exhibition brings together artists, collectives, and national pavilions that reflect on coexistence, memory, fragility, and forms of relation shaped through sound, material, and lived experience. Alongside the official exhibition, a dense constellation of collateral and coinciding events expands the Biennale into palazzos, foundations, and temporary sites across Venice. Here are Selections’ picks.
National Pavilions at the Giardini
QATAR
At the future site of the permanent Qatar Pavilion in the Giardini, Her Excellency Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani inaugurated untitled 2026 (a gathering of remarkable people), Qatar’s first official participation in the International Art Exhibition. Organised by Qatar Museums and presented by Rubaiya Qatar, the exhibition unfolds within a maroon structure designed by Rirkrit Tiravanija, whose role extends beyond architecture into shaping the pavilion itself as a communal gathering space inspired by Qatari social traditions. During the opening, performances by Lebanese artist Tarek Atoui activated the space through live music rooted in the structures of the takht and wasla, while Palestinian chef Fadi Kattan curated a culinary programme alongside regional collaborators. “Culture connects what conflict tries to break apart,” remarked Sheikha Al Mayassa during the ceremony. Across the exhibition, Sophia Al-Maria presents DAMAR TV (2026), an experimental narrative film, while Alia Farid contributes Jerrican (2022–2026), a large-scale sculptural work engaging histories of extraction, movement, and survival.
CANADA
Representing Canada at the Biennale, Abbas Akhavan transforms the Canada Pavilion into a monumental greenhouse in Entre chien et loup. Reimagining the pavilion as a nineteenth-century Wardian case once used to transport plants across empires, the installation centres on Victoria water lilies cultivated in collaboration with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and the Orto Botanico di Padova. Akhavan’s practice often examines the fragile relationship between landscape, architecture, and political memory, and here the water lily becomes both botanical specimen and imperial symbol. Referencing the plant’s display during London’s 1851 Great Exhibition, the project reflects on how natural forms are absorbed into national narratives and systems of representation. The title, translating to “between dog and wolf,” evokes twilight as a state of uncertainty where distinctions begin to dissolve. Through this suspended atmosphere, Akhavan considers the instability of borders, histories, and belonging itself.
JAPAN
At the Japan Pavilion, Japanese American artist Ei Arakawa-Nash presents Grass Babies, Moon Babies, an immersive exhibition that transforms participation into a gesture of collective care. Curated by HORIKAWA Lisa and TAKAHASHI Mizuki, the project invites visitors to carry one of 208 baby dolls throughout the pavilion, activating the space through movement, intimacy, and responsibility. Each doll bears a specific birthday tied to personal memories and broader historical forces shaped within and beyond Japan, positioning individual biography against longer social and political trajectories. The exhibition culminates in the changing of each doll’s diaper, triggering a QR-generated “diaper poem” that folds ritual, humour, and reflection into the experience. Through these repeated actions, Arakawa-Nash considers caregiving not as private labour alone, but as a shared social choreography. The pavilion ultimately proposes tenderness and participation as ways of navigating inherited histories, precarity, and imagined futures.
FRANCE
In Comme Saturne, Yto Barrada turns to the figure of Saturn – associated with melancholy, contemplation, and cyclical destruction – as a lens through which to reflect on contemporary life. Combining textiles, sculpture, film, and mechanical objects, the pavilion unfolds as an immersive environment shaped by repetition, transformation, and the passage of time. Drawing on histories of weaving, dyeing, and material production, Barrada examines how labour, trade, language, and systems of knowledge are embedded within cloth and colour. References to mythology, political upheaval, and ecological instability intersect with experiments in natural dyes and textile processes, proposing artistic creation as a form of endurance, reinvention, and collective memory.
National Pavilions at the Arsenale
UNITED ARAB EMIRATES
Curated by Bana Kattan with Assistant Curator Tala Nassar, the UAE National Pavilion presents Washwasha, an exhibition that approaches sound as a space of memory, migration, and embodied experience. Meaning “whispering” in Arabic, the title reflects the exhibition’s movement between intimacy and sonic overflow through works by Mays Albaik, Jawad Al Malhi, Farah Al Qasimi, Alaa Edris, Lamya Gargash, and Taus Makhacheva. Developed with Büro Koray Duman Architects, the pavilion unfolds through shifting acoustic environments moving from oral storytelling toward technological noise and hyperconnectivity. Among the featured works, Al Malhi’s Naiman revisits wedding rituals through recorded testimonies, while Albaik’s glass sculptures preserve the fragile moment before speech fully emerges. Gargash’s photographic series Majlis examines gathering spaces as sites of listening and exchange, and Al Qasimi’s installation The Curse reflects on communication, guilt, and misunderstanding through multimedia narrative.
LEBANON
The Pavilion of Lebanon opened on 6 May at the Arsenale with Don’t Get Me Wrong, an immersive installation by Nabil Nahas curated by Dr Nada Ghandour. Organised by the Lebanese Visual Art Association under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture, the inauguration gathered cultural figures and officials including Minister of Tourism Laura El-Khazen Lahoud and Ambassador Carla Jazzar. “My artistic practice is deeply rooted in the country’s rich and layered heritage,” Nahas remarked during the opening. Spanning forty-five metres, the installation consists of twenty-six monumental acrylic-on-canvas panels forming an enveloping frieze within the Arsenale space. Drawing from Islamic geometry, fractal systems, Persian miniature traditions, and Mediterranean visual histories, the work moves between abstraction and figuration to consider plurality as a lived cultural condition. Trees, spirals, polygons, and cosmic forms recur across the paintings, linking microcosm and macrocosm within a continuously shifting visual language.
SAUDI ARABIA
At the National Pavilion of Saudi Arabia, Dana Awartani presents May Your Tears Never Dry, You Who Weep Over Stones, a monumental floor installation curated by Antonia Carver. Extending across the pavilion, the work draws on mosaic traditions from Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine to reflect on cultural heritage endangered by conflict and displacement. Composed of more than 29,000 handmade clay bricks produced with 32 Saudi-based artisans over 30,000 hours, the installation transforms the space into an imagined archaeological terrain shaped by fragility and collective memory. Cracked earth surfaces, geometric patterns, and references to threatened historical sites become meditations on preservation, loss, and the enduring relationship between material culture, craftsmanship, and shared histories across the Arab world.
OMAN
For the Pavilion of the Sultanate of Oman, artist and curator Haitham Al Busafi presents Zīnah (Adornment), an immersive installation that reimagines the Omani tradition of al-zaanah – the adornment of horses with silver – as a sensory environment shaped by sound, movement, and collective presence. Installed within the Arsenale Artiglierie, the work invites visitors to move across desert sand beneath suspended silver forms that sway and chime in response to their movement. Developed through collaboration with students and young artists in Muscat, the installation reflects on dignity, reciprocity, and shared presence, proposing quieter, embodied forms of connection in contrast to spectacle-driven experiences.
MEXICO
At the Mexican Pavilion, the collective RojoNegro – formed by María Sosa and Noé Martínez – presents Actos invisibles para sostener el universo, curated by Jessica Berlanga. Conceived as a sensorial environment of sound, clay, salt, gesture, and breath, the project examines ritual knowledge and decolonial forms of perception amid the saturation of contemporary life. A line of salt shaped as a Mesoamerican vírgula guides visitors through the pavilion, where ceramic vessels, tobacco references, and audiovisual works unfold as interconnected acts of care and remembrance. Rather than reconstructing ancestral systems, the installation approaches material itself as a carrier of memory and cosmology. Through shifting textures and rhythms, the work proposes listening as both political and spiritual practice, foregrounding forms of knowledge that persist beyond colonial systems of classification and control.
UZBEKISTAN
At the Uzbekistan National Pavilion, The Aural Sea approaches the ecological transformation of the Aral Sea through myth, fiction, and collective imagination. Presented by the Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation, the exhibition brings together works by Jahongir Bobokulov, Zi Kakhramonova, Aygul Sarsen, Zulfiya Spowart, Xin Liu, Nguyen Phuong Linh, and the collective A.A.Murakami. Through sculpture, sound, installation, painting, and textile works, the pavilion reframes the Aral Sea not solely as a site of environmental loss, but as a living space shaped by memory, storytelling, and the possibility of renewal. Inspired in part by the speculative writings of Karakalpak author Allyar Darmenov, the exhibition proposes imagination as a way of navigating ecological and cultural transformation.
MOROCCO
Marking the Kingdom of Morocco’s first national pavilion at the Arsenale, Asǝṭṭa by Amina Agueznay, curated by Meriem Berrada, explores craftsmanship as a living form of memory and transmission. Named after an Amazigh term associated with ritual weaving, the installation transforms the pavilion into an immersive environment shaped by woven forms, artisanal gestures, and layered narratives. Drawing on Moroccan vernacular architecture and the symbolism of thresholds, the project reflects on movement between public and private, past and present. Developed through long-standing collaborations with craftspeople across Morocco, the pavilion foregrounds inherited knowledge, collective making, and the quieter forms of cultural continuity that persist through material practice.
ITALY
At the Tese delle Vergini, Italy’s pavilion presents Con te con tutto, a project by Chiara Camoni curated by Cecilia Canziani. The exhibition unfolds across two interconnected environments exploring memory, materiality, and collective coexistence. In the first, anthropomorphic ceramic figures assembled from clay, organic matter, and found fragments occupy a dimly lit space charged with ritualistic presence.
The second transforms domestic furniture into an evolving architectural setting where works by modern and contemporary artists enter into dialogue across generations. Blurring distinctions between the handmade, the discarded, and the historical, the pavilion reflects on shared experience, inheritance, and the possibility of finding intimacy within fragmented worlds.
INDIA
India’s pavilion, Geographies of Distance, reflects on displacement, memory, and the shifting meaning of home through the work of five artists. Using materials such as thread, earth, bamboo, and papier-mâché, the exhibition reconstructs fragile personal and collective landscapes shaped by absence and migration. Sumakshi Singh reimagines a demolished family home through suspended embroidered forms, while Alwar Balasubramaniam transforms cracked earth into meditations on rupture and endurance. Organic sculptural forms by Ranjani Shettar, architectural references by Skarma Sonam Tashi, and bamboo structures by Asim Waqif together explore the instability of place, belonging, and contemporary urban life.
National Pavilions at Other Venues
SYRIA
Presented at the Università Iuav di Venezia, Cotonificio campus, Sara Shamma’s The Tower Tomb of Palmyra reimagines one of ancient Syria’s most emblematic architectural forms through a monumental immersive installation. Commissioned by the Syrian Ministry of Culture and curated by Yuko Hasegawa, the pavilion reflects on cultural erasure, displacement, and the destruction of heritage during the Syrian war, while advocating for the restitution of looted antiquities. Inspired by the funerary tower tombs of ancient Palmyra, the structure unfolds as a circular environment combining painting, light, sound, and scent. Rather than reconstructing the lost monuments, Shamma transforms them into a contemporary space of memory and encounter, where psychologically charged figures and sensory elements evoke continuity between past and present, absence and survival.
What to See at the Central Exhibition: In Minor Keys
Curated by Koyo Kouoh, In Minor Keys unfolds through relational encounters between artists, geographies, and practices shaped by resonance rather than fixed categories. Among the participating artists are Lebanese figures Walid Raad and Hala Schoukair. While Schoukair’s intricate paintings reflect on her walks in Mount Lebanon with her mother through mosaic-like structures and layered abstraction, Raad’s street-art approach flirts with the urbanisation of spaces. Palestinian artist Mohammed Joha presents delicate watercolour landscapes of Gaza painted between 2025 and 2026, while María Magdalena Campos-Pons contributes a monumental portrait pairing Kouoh with novelist Toni Morrison in an almost devotional composition. Lebanese artist and musician Raed Yassin presents staged family portraits recalling celebratory studio photography of the 1990s, suspended between intimacy and constructed memory. Elsewhere, the collaborative duo Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige engage geological time through installations developed alongside geologists, tracing sediment, excavation, and the layered histories embedded within the earth itself.
Official Collateral Events
Marina Abramović: Transforming Energy
At the Gallerie dell’Accademia, Marina Abramović becomes the first living woman artist to receive a major exhibition at the institution. Opening during the Biennale and marking her eightieth birthday, Transforming Energy places Abramović’s performances in dialogue with Venetian Renaissance masterpieces across both permanent and temporary galleries. Curated by Shai Baitel, the exhibition centres on the body as a site of endurance, transformation, and spiritual transmission through iconic works including Rhythm 0, Balkan Baroque, and Imponderabilia. Interactive “Transitory Objects” invite visitors into states of contemplation, while the presentation of Pietà (with Ulay) beside Titian’s Pietà creates a charged conversation across grief, ritual, and transcendence.
‘______’ *Gaza – No Words – See The Exhibit
Within the eighth edition of Personal Structures – exhibition organised by European Cultural Centre Italy – the Palestine Museum US presents Gaza – No Words – See The Exhibit at Palazzo Mora. The exhibition brings together one hundred Palestinian tatreez embroideries produced by women across refugee camps and communities in Lebanon, Jordan, and the West Bank. Each work records scenes from Gaza through meticulous stitching, transforming embroidery into testimony, archive, and witness. Through these collective gestures of labour and remembrance, the exhibition insists on visibility amid ongoing destruction and displacement.
Aghrab Idrāk: Thresholds of Perception
Opening in June at Palazzo Cavanis, (أغرب إدراك) Aghrab Idrāk: Thresholds of Perception is presented by VCUarts Qatar as an official Collateral Event of the Biennale. Bringing together projects from ten research labs within the Institute for Creative Research, the exhibition explores perception as a relational mode of knowing through environments shaped by sound, light, movement, and material presence. The participating artists and researchers examine mobility, collective memory, and embodied forms of experience rooted in Gulf histories of exchange and encounter. A symposium titled Relational Ecologies will accompany the exhibition in June.
Coinciding Events
Erwin Wurm: Dreamers
At Museo Fortuny, Austrian sculptor Erwin Wurm receives his first major exhibition in Italy. Curated by Elisabetta Barisoni and Cristina Da Roit, Dreamers traces Wurm’s longstanding expansion of sculpture beyond static form through his celebrated One Minute Sculptures, distorted architectural objects, and anthropomorphic everyday materials. Humour and absurdity operate throughout the exhibition as tools to examine social pressure, consumerism, and the instability of reality itself.
Jenny Saville
The International Gallery of Modern Art at Ca’ Pesaro presents the first major Venetian exhibition dedicated to British painter Jenny Saville. Bringing together over thirty paintings and drawings spanning the 1990s to the present, the exhibition traces Saville’s transformative role within contemporary figurative painting. Known for monumental depictions of flesh, gesture, and bodily presence, Saville engages the traditions of Venetian painting while interrogating contemporary perceptions of the body. A final room of newly created works pays homage directly to Venice, positioning the city itself as both subject and historical interlocutor.
Amar Kanwar: Co-travellers
At Palazzo Grassi, Indian filmmaker and artist Amar Kanwar presents two large-scale multimedia installations curated by Jean-Marie Gallais for the Pinault Collection. Known for his poetic engagement with politics, resistance, and memory, Kanwar brings together The Torn First Pages and The Peacock’s Graveyard in a meditation on violence, justice, and fragility across South Asia. Through layered archives, projected texts, moving images, and sound, the exhibition constructs spaces where political testimony and metaphysical reflection converge.
Michael Armitage: The Promise of Change
Also at Palazzo Grassi, Kenyan-British painter Michael Armitage presents a major exhibition bringing together forty-five paintings and over one hundred preparatory studies. Curated by Jean-Marie Gallais in collaboration with Hans-Ulrich Obrist, the exhibition considers migration, political violence, social instability, and collective memory through Armitage’s lush figurative language. Painted on Ugandan bark cloth, his works merge East African visual culture, literature, mythology, and global art histories into layered dreamlike compositions where political reality and hallucination remain inseparable.
A Necessary Fiction: Maps, Art, and Models of Our World
Presented by the Saudi Ministry of Culture at the Abbazia di San Gregorio, A Necessary Fiction unfolds as a coinciding exhibition rather than an official Collateral Event. Curated by Sara Almutlaq and Aurora Fonda with associate curators Zaira Carrer and Amina Diab, the exhibition brings together historical cartographic material alongside contemporary works by artists including Manal AlDowayan, Trevor Paglen, Yoko Ono, Wael Shawky, and Monira Al Qadiri. Through manuscripts, globes, speculative geographies, and installations, the exhibition examines cartography not as neutral description but as a system shaped by imagination, ideology, and belief.
