The Venice Biennale is the oldest and most prestigious international contemporary art exhibition in the world. It is also, depending on the day and your tolerance for curators in expensive trainers, the most maddening. Every two years, 99 nations descend on this improbable, slowly sinking city and compete for attention across the Giardini parkland, the vast Arsenale shipyard, and a constellation of palazzos and churches that seem designed to make you feel perpetually, pleasantly lost. The art world loves Venice the way it loves nowhere else – partly for the art, mostly for the fact that everyone is here at once and nobody has a good excuse to leave early.
This year carries extra weight. The central exhibition was conceived by Koyo Kouoh – Cameroonian-born director of Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town and one of the sharpest curatorial minds of her generation. She died suddenly in May 2025, eight months before opening day. The Biennale’s response was the only correct one: execute her vision exactly as she left it. The theme is In Minor Keys. Resist spectacle. Slow down. Pay attention to the things that don’t announce themselves.
The Arab Pavilions: Your Region On The World Stage
The MENA presence at Venice 2026 is not just larger than before – it is more sure of itself. These pavilions are not making cases for inclusion. They are not explaining themselves to a Western audience. They are doing the work, on their own terms, at the highest level. The UAE interrogates the sound of a nation mid-transformation. Saudi Arabia brings Islamic craft tradition into one of the most emotionally precise rooms in the Arsenale. Qatar builds its first ever official pavilion and immediately makes it a place people actually want to be inside. Pay attention. This is what it looks like when a region arrives.
UAE — Washwasha Arsenale · 9 May – 22 November · Curated by Bana Kattan
Washwasha is onomatopoeic Arabic for whispering – the word sounds exactly like what it means, which makes it the most precisely chosen title in the Giardini. Curator Bana Kattan, associate head of exhibitions at the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Project, has assembled six artists born across Abu Dhabi, Dubai, East Jerusalem, and Moscow – Mays Albaik, Jawad Al Malhi, Farah Al Qasimi, Alaa Edris, Lamya Gargash, and Taus Makhacheva – all connected to a country that transforms faster than memory can keep pace with. The exhibition uses sound as its material: not music, not ambient noise, but the specific acoustic record of a nation constantly becoming something else. Oral histories. Frequencies cities shed as they rebuild. The pavilion moves from intimate listening to total density. The UAE’s ninth Venice participation is its most conceptually tight. Commissioned by the Salama bint Hamdan Al Nahyan Foundation.
Saudi Arabia — May your tears never dry, you who weep over stones Arsenale · Curated by Antonia Carver, Art Jameel
Read that title again. It lands like a line of ancient poetry on a contemporary wall, which is exactly the tension Dana Awartani’s practice lives inside. Palestinian-Saudi, trained at Central Saint Martins before studying traditional arts and manuscript illumination in Turkey – where she earned an ijaza, a formal Islamic licence to transmit knowledge – Awartani does not reference the craft traditions of the Arab world. She speaks them fluently and pushes them forward. Geometry, repair, material heritage as active language rather than archive. Curated by Antonia Carver of Art Jameel with Hafsa Alkhudairi. The kind of room you walk into planning to spend ten minutes and leave forty-five later, still processing.
Qatar — untitled 2026 (a gathering of remarkable people) Giardini · Qatar’s First Official National Pavilion
Qatar does not tiptoe into its Venice debut. The pavilion sits on the actual ground where Qatar’s permanent Giardini structure – the first new pavilion built there in thirty years – will eventually stand. For now: a tent-like gathering space designed by Rirkrit Tiravanija, inside which Sophia Al-Maria shows new film, Tarek Atoui organises live performances, Alia Farid contributes large-scale sculpture, and Palestinian chef Fadi Kattan feeds people. Co-curated by Tom Eccles and Ruba Katrib, commissioned by Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani. The premise is that hospitality is itself a curatorial act. Qatar has understood something most pavilions haven’t: the best rooms at the Biennale are the ones people don’t want to leave.
Lebanon — Don’t Get Me Wrong Arsenale · Nabil Nahas · Curated by Dr Nada Ghandour
Nabil Nahas has spent decades asking the same profound questions – about geometry and nature, science and intuition, the fractal logic hiding inside organic form – and has the rare discipline to keep finding new answers. His canvases are dense, layered, slow-release: they reward the kind of attention most people reserve for their phones. Now they fill the Arsenale in a large-scale immersive frieze. Organised by the Lebanese Visual Art Association and Lebanon’s Ministry of Culture. Lebanon’s cultural output, given everything, remains one of the more staggering facts of contemporary life. Nahas is a reason why.
Morocco — Asǝṭṭa Arsenale · Amina Agueznay · Curated by Meriem Berrada
Morocco’s Arsenale debut, Amina Agueznay has spent years working alongside weavers, embroiderers, and craftspeople across the country – not collecting their techniques but building with them as genuine co-authors. The installation draws on the âatba, the threshold in Moroccan vernacular architecture: that charged in-between space that is neither fully inside nor outside, neither private nor public. The title is Tamazight. The work carries centuries of embodied craft intelligence into the present without nostalgia, without apology, and without needing to explain itself to anyone. Morocco did not come to Venice to be understood. It came to be seen.
Syria — The Tower Tomb of Palmyra Sara Shamma · Curated by Yuko Hasegawa
The lesser version of this pavilion would have shown you the destruction. Sara Shamma shows you the form that survived it. Palmyra’s tower tombs stood for centuries as proof that culture outlasts the forces trying to erase it. Shamma takes that structure and asks what it still holds, what it refuses to release, what persists even when the physical object is gone. Commissioned by the Syrian Ministry of Culture, curated by Yuko Hasegawa. Syria’s return to international cultural visibility. Handled with archaeology in its thinking and not a gram of sentimentality.
Palestine — Gaza: No Words — See the Exhibit (Official Collateral Event) Palazzo Mora · 9 May – 22 November
No diplomatic pavilion. Instead: one hundred works of tatreez – the Palestinian cross-stitch tradition whose patterns have carried cultural identity across generations – made by women in refugee camps and villages in Lebanon, Jordan, and the West Bank. Each piece, 55,000 individual stitches, documents without commentary what war in Gaza has cost the hands that made it. Organised by Palestine Museum US at Palazzo Mora. The title is an instruction, not a description. Walk in. Look. Let the stitches do what words cannot.
Five More Worth Your Time
Austria: Florentina Holzinger — Seaworld Venice Austrian Pavilion, Giardini
One of performance art’s most fearless practitioners, in her first full exhibition-scale project – a hybrid of installation and live action built around water, myth, and embodied physical risk that most institutions are too cautious to touch. Stunt coordinators are listed among the collaborators. Something will happen that you did not expect. Go twice.
Japan: Grass Babies, Moon Babies Japanese Pavilion, Giardini
Over one hundred baby dolls. A conversation between a building and its garden. Ei Arakawa-Nash weaving care, interdependence, and experimental art history into something genuinely strange and genuinely moving. The Japan Foundation’s 70th anniversary. One of the most visually alive rooms in the Giardini – and one of the most difficult to forget.
Great Britain: Lubaina Himid British Pavilion, Giardini
A foundational figure of the Black British Art Movement, new large-scale paintings, and a question asked with full force: what does it actually take for a place to become home? Bold, political, uncompromising. The British Pavilion at its most necessary in a generation.
Nordic Countries: Kristalova, Orlow & Wrånes Nordic Pavilion, Giardini · Curated by Anna Mustonen
Three artists inside one of the most beautiful buildings in the Giardini – Sverre Fehn’s iconic modernist structure – sharing a vocabulary of mythology, transformation, and the kind of considered Nordic darkness that never announces itself. Kristalova’s ceramic figures, Orlow’s monumental spatial work, Wrånes’s immersive sound world. The architecture and the art, for once, deserve each other.
USA: Alma Allen — Call Me the Breeze US Pavilion, Giardini · Curated by Jeffrey Uslip
Allen makes sculpture by feel – following material and intuition until the object tells him where it wants to go. The results are sensuous, formally unusual, and charged with a physical intelligence that photographs never fully capture. New site-responsive works, including a large-scale piece for the forecourt. The right artist in the right pavilion at the right moment.
Off The Pavilion Circuit
Wallace Chan: Vessels of Other Worlds — Chapel of Santa Maria della Pietà, 8 May – 18 October. Self-taught, spent six months as a monk, gave up everything he owned, came back and made the most complex sculptures of his career. Wallace Chan fills the Pietà Chapel with three monumental titanium works referencing the sacred oils of Catholic ritual. The largest – Birth – stands seven metres high, contains over 5,500 individual titanium parts, 922 human figures, and 725 interlocking gears. A live video triptych connects the chapel in real time to the Long Museum in Shanghai. One of the most extraordinary objects you will see this year, in Venice or anywhere else.
Chihuly: Venice 2026 — Grand Canal and Campo Santo Stefano, 5 May – 14 November. Thirty years after Chihuly Over Venice the man returns at 90 with three new glass sculptures up to nine metres high along the Grand Canal itself, visible from the Accademia Bridge. The Gold Tower in Palazzo Franchetti spirals thirty feet upward. Age has not shrunk the ambition. If anything, the opposite.
Anish Kapoor: Palazzo Manfrin — Cannaregio, 6 May – 9 August. A 16th-century palazzo, four years of restoration, five decades of work. Around 100 architectural models alongside Descent into Limbo – that black void in the floor that never gets less vertiginous – and new immersive works. Kapoor on space, perception, and architecture is Kapoor operating at full power. Don’t rush it.Buy tickets
