Italian
The Venice Biennale 2026 will take place from May 9 to November 22, 2026 (with a preview on May 7, 8, and 9) across the Giardini, Arsenale, and numerous venues throughout Venice. The 61st International Art Exhibition is titled In Minor Keys, a curatorial project conceived by Koyo Kouoh, who passed away unexpectedly in May 2025.
VENICE. The Biennale has chosen to fully realize the exhibition as conceived by Kouoh, together with her curatorial team and in respect of her vision, transforming the 2026 edition into an act of cultural continuity and responsibility.
The heart of the project is already all in the title: “the minor tones” as a language of resistance, fragility, and regeneration. They are the songs of those who create beauty despite tragedy, the melodies of the fugitives emerging from the ruins, the harmonies of those who heal wounds and worlds. They are low frequencies, murmurs, forms of deep listening that become tools of emotional and political survival.
The exhibition is configured as an archipelago of “small artistic islands”: spaces of coexistence, gardens, courtyards, and creative communities that persist within broader global systems. A project that rejects the spectacularization of the crisis and instead proposes a sensory, regenerative, and relational dimension of art.
A Biennale Crossed by the Fractures of the Present
If the curatorial vision arises as a poetic and reparative gesture, the reality of the Biennale presents a completely different scenario: an exhibition deeply marked by contemporary geopolitical tensions.
In front of the national pavilions, the boundary between art and politics continuously dissolves. The Russian Pavilion is among the most controversial, guarded and surrounded by intense media attention. Just before the opening, the Pussy Riot, a Russian feminist collective known for protests against Vladimir Putin, also passed through, transforming the space into a symbolic scene of dissent.
A few meters away, other national pavilions tell the story of contemporary disaster: the Dutch bunker becomes a metaphor for oppression, the Czech-Slovak pavilion reflects on the impossibility of the world’s regeneration, while Austria stages Venice itself as a submerged city.
A global and hyper-political exhibition
The numbers confirm the expanded scale of the edition: 111 artists from 110 countries, with seven national debuts from Africa, Oceania, and the Middle East.
Alongside the main exhibition, Venice becomes a widespread system of events and installations: from Marina Abramović to Anish Kapoor, with over 150 collateral events, the highest number ever recorded.
The result is a Biennale that no longer just “represents the world,” but directly absorbs it, reflecting its contradictions, wounds, and misalignments.
End of Traditional Awards and Crisis of the Institution
One of the most radical changes concerns the awards system: for the first time, the Golden Lions will not be awarded by an international jury, but by the public.
A choice that marks a profound turning point in the model of the Biennale and has already sparked debate about the critical authority of the institution.
The main pavilions
Italy: “With you with everything”, matter, relationship, and co-creation
The Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2026 presents With You With Everything, a project that serves as a collective call for connection, sharing, and a different way of inhabiting the world through contact with the living.
At the center of the proposal is matter, understood as the common element of all that exists and a space for transformation, encounter, and contamination. The installation imagines the exhibition space as a landscape in continuous change, where artworks and visitors enter into a reciprocal relationship.
The two large sections of the pavilion create complementary environments: an almost archaic dimension, populated by sculptural figures suspended between past and present, and a space in transformation that develops as open architecture, traversed by the body and the gaze.
Chiara Camoni’s project redefines sculpture starting from everyday gestures and domestic materials, favoring co-creation over individual authorship.
The pavilion thus becomes a space for exchange between bodies, works, and different times, enriched by contributions from invited authors and a public program dedicated to the voice as a tool for recognition and relationship.
France: like Saturn, the time between memory and transformation
The France Pavilion entrusted to the artist Yto Barrada and curated together with Myriam Ben Salah unveils the project titled Comme Saturne which explores the theme of time through the mythological figure of Saturn. The work focuses on fabric as a symbolic and political material, using techniques such as “dévoré” to transform absence and alteration into new visual forms. The pavilion is configured as an open laboratory where matter, memory, and transformation intertwine. The setup, inspired by Oulipo and Surrealism, invites a free and non-linear journey. The project engages with the overall vision of the Biennale, based on the idea of “minor tonalities” as a language of poetic resistance. In this context, the pavilion proposes a more intimate and material reflection on the contradictions of the present.
Great Britain: identity, home, and belonging
The British Council presents at the Venice Biennale 2026 the installation Predicting History: Testing Translation by Lubaina Himid for the British Pavilion. The project transforms the space into an immersive environment made of painting, reclaimed objects, and soundscapes, created in collaboration with Magda Stawarska. At its core is a reflection on what “home” and belonging mean in a world marked by migration, inequalities, and constant movement.
The large paintings stage figures such as architects, builders, and gardeners discussing how to create safe and livable places. The Pavilion thus becomes a theatrical and narrative space in which the visitor is emotionally engaged. Between welcome and unease, sounds and images introduce elements of disorientation, while the architecture of the pavilion is reinterpreted as a space for questioning national identity.
Recurring is the reference to water and British maritime history, linked to the themes of empire and colonial memory, which run through the work as a critical backdrop. The result is a journey that puts belonging and disorientation in tension, leaving the question of what “home” really means open.
Austria: Submerged Venice
The Austria Pavilion with Seaworld Venice by Florentina Holzinger transforms the space into a flooded landscape between a water park and a post-apocalyptic ritual. Performance, bodies, water, and mechanical devices construct a radical reflection on overtourism, climate crisis, and urban decay.
The installation stages water as a vital yet contaminated element: a natural resource, biological fluid, and controlled infrastructure, in a continuous cycle that intertwines life and waste. The pavilion takes the form of a hybrid environment between a water park, a purification plant, and a ritual space.
A performer occupies the space living in a tank fed by the bodily fluids of visitors, symbolizing a closed system where waste becomes a condition for survival. The work thus reflects on inequalities and vulnerabilities within a global order based on waste.
China: “Dream Stream”, tradition, technology, and cosmic imagination
The China Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale presents Dream Stream, a curatorial project inspired by classical and scientific Chinese thought, particularly the Dream Stream Essays by Shen Kuo, a medieval text that combines reflections on science, art, and nature.
The work evokes the idea of unity between man and sky and a vision of art as a spiritual space where different cultures can enter into dialogue, in a time marked by global uncertainty. The artistic practice is described as rooted in the earth but capable of moving in the space of the world and imagination.
The project addresses three dimensions: spiritual, technological, and cultural. On one hand, art as an emotional and shared experience; on the other, as a field traversed by fragmented information, artificial intelligence, and algorithmic systems.
At the center emerges a reflection on the evolution of the relationship between man, nature, and technology, summarized in the new triad “Sky, Earth, Man, and Algorithms,” which does not break with tradition but reinterprets it in a contemporary key.
The Pavilion is configured as an immersive environment that intertwines classical thought and innovation, offering a vision of art as a bridge between cultural roots and technological future.
Czech Republic and Slovakia: the true tragic hero of the Biennale
The Czech-Slovak pavilion, The Silence of the Mole, constructs one of the most melancholic tales of this edition.
In the center is Mr. M, “the mole man”: a forgotten street artist who continues to perform in an imaginary world where kindness and empathy still exist.
Between sound and video installations, the pavilion becomes a portrait of a society of lonely people, unable to listen to each other.
India: memory, distance, and identity
India returns to the Biennale with Geographies of Distance: Remembering Home, a poetic reflection on the concept of home and belonging.
Clay, bamboo, embroidery, and traditional materials are used by five contemporary artists to tell the story of the connection between memory, migration, and cultural identity.
One of the most delicate and meditative pavilions of the edition.
Chile: a spaceship crashed at the Arsenal
The Chilean pavilion looks like a sci-fi relic.
With Inter-Reality, Norton Maza transforms the white cube into a perceptual environment made of corridors, openings, and unsettling bodies.
To enter, you must take off your shoes: a minimal gesture that immediately changes the relationship with the space and forces the visitor to slow down.
Taiwan: a video game gone wrong
At the Palace of Prisons, Taiwan presents Screen Melancholy by Li Yi-Fan.
The installation mixes video games, deformed avatars, animations, and virtual environments, creating a constant feeling of discomfort and surveillance.
It feels like entering a collapsed digital universe.
Denmark: the birth crisis as a disturbing spectacle
The Danish pavilion addresses the issue of declining birth rates through digital pornography, artificial fertility, and “sperm competitions” turned into entertainment.
Things to Come by Maja Malou Lyse stages a future where sexuality and reproduction are completely redefined by technology.
Cicciolina was also present at the inauguration.
Canada: imperial water lilies and botanical colonialism
The Canadian pavilion by Abbas Akhavan appears as a large aquatic greenhouse.
The enormous water lilies on display tell a colonial story: imported to Europe during the British Empire, they were transformed into imperial symbols and tools for the appropriation of nature.
One of the most elegant and political installations of the Biennale.
Uzbekistan: art, ecology, and new cultural identity
With The Aural Sea, Uzbekistan tackles the ecological disaster of the Aral Sea through folklore, sound installations, and speculative fiction.
The country now uses art, architecture, and design as tools to redefine its international image, building an increasingly sophisticated cultural presence.
United Arab Emirates: sound as invisible architecture
The United Arab Emirates pavilion, Washwasha, works on the concept of whisper and soundscape.
Videos, installations, and sculptures transform sound into a physical element, telling stories of migrations, urban transformations, and oral traditions.
Here, you don’t just look: you listen.
The most absurd pavilion? It’s called “La Merde”
Luxembourg presents La Merde by Aline Bouvy, a video installation that uses the body and excrement to reflect on the concept of social shame.
Grotesque, absurd, and disturbing, the project transforms what is normally hidden into a political and subversive gesture.
