Sownd: Manon Awst + Dylan Huw

Arts Council of Wales will participate as a Collateral Event of the 61st Venice Biennale, following its last presentation in 2019, marking the 10th exhibition at this significant international visual arts festival.

Manon Awst, Dylan Huw and collaborators will represent Cymru yn Fenis / Wales in Venice with Sownd: Manon Awst + Dylan Huw, curated by Steffan Jones-Hughes, with the support of two galleries, Oriel Davies and Oriel Myrddin.

The presentation will be held for the first time at the Istituto Santa Maria della Pietà in Castello. La Pietà is a monumental complex built in the fourteenth century, adjacent to Riva degli Schiavoni and within accessible walking distance of the Biennale Giardini and Arsenale sites. It will run from Saturday, May 9 to Sunday, November 22, 2026 and will be free to visit.

Manon Awst and Dylan Huw’s Sownd will be a collaborative sculptural environment that navigates the materialities of language and landscape. Conceived as one continuous installation, it will combine organic materials, found objects, texts, and sonic and architectural interventions in response to the historic Istituto Santa Maria della Pietà. Everything within the work will be sculptural—including language—guided by a poetic associative logic.

Sownd is a Cymraeg/Welsh word meaning both “stuck” and “foundationally sound,” encapsulating the project’s exploration of tension and resilience. This duality frames an inquiry into how landscapes and languages—particularly minoritised ones—become sites of persistence and vulnerability. The artists have drawn on research in Welsh peatlands, sticky and unstable environments that both conceal and reveal vast scales of material history. These sites, layered with organic matter and cultural memory, become a terrain from which the artists navigate sedimented histories of language, culture, and ecology. The collaboration between Awst and Huw invites connections across borders, informed by Wales’ celebrated history of site-specific collective practice and its oral poetic tradition.

In parallel to the Venice exhibition, the artists will host a series of site-responsive live events on peatlands in Wales, Sownd [ar safle] [on site]. This programme invites artists and audiences in Wales to sink deeper into Sownd’s themes and materials, continuing the project's investment in layered cultural legacies of "liveness" with collaborators including Naomi Pearce, Anushiye Yarnell, Eddie Ladd and Becca Voelcker.

There will be an exhibition walkthrough and in-conversation on Friday, May 8, 10:30–11:30am with Manon Awst, Dylan Huw, Steffan Jones-Hughes, Ursula Ströbele and We are here Venice ETS.

This project establishes Wales’ return and commitment to presenting at La Biennale di Venezia in 2026, 2028 and 2030.

For international press enquiries and to RSVP for the press view on Tuesday, May 5, 9–11am, please contact: Emily Gates, emily.gates@reesandco.com and Ava Turner, ava.turner@reesandco.com

For enquiries within Wales please contact: Gwen Sion, gwen.sion@arts.wales