Some things that can be said of every Venice Biennale: it is overshadowed by world events; its colonial-era model of national pavilions should be abandoned; it is a festival of hypocrisy; it privileges rhetorical grandstanding over real change; it is attended by some terrible people; it props up the academic forms of art taught at profitable western schools; it is always raining; it is the fruit of a rotten system; it announces significant new artists and contains much great work and many transformative ideas to which everyone else in the field is obliged to respond.
Take your pick from the above if you find yourself on Viale Garibaldi in need of a conversation starter. But having got these perennials out of the way, we should acknowledge that not every edition coincides with genocides that have forced the resignation of a jury with the courage to take a position on the relationship of art to human rights. That a model of competition between rival nation states takes on a ghastly new light as the world order breaks down. That censorship and intimidation is on the rise. And that, after the untimely death of Koyo Kouoh last year, this song “in minor keys” must play out without its chief orchestrator.
Given all this, the Venice Biennale risks becoming less an exhibition of contemporary art, and more a gathering at which the impossibility of a shared world is put on display. Indeed, its 61st edition promises to be a contest between those who, in Kouoh’s words, aim to bridge “the void of alienation” that makes it possible for one group of people to deny another’s humanity, and those who seek to widen it. In this respect, at least, it is absolutely of its time.
Next week, we’ll report back on the international exhibition conceived by Kouoh and executed by her collaborators. We’ll be going to satellite events ranging from the Belarus Free Theatre to the independent staging of Gabrielle Goliath’s Elegy, and reviews of national and collateral exhibitions will follow in the coming weeks. But as a point of entry, we’ve put together a small selection of less-heralded pavilions that have piqued our editors’ interest.
AUSTRALIA
Khaled Sabsabi, curated by Michael Dagostino
The announcement, in early 2025, that Khaled Sabsabi had been removed as Australia’s representative—ostensibly to avoid “divisive debate” around earlier works depicting former Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and the 9/11 attacks—occasioned an outpouring of support for the artist, who moved from Tripoli to Sydney at the age of twelve. Having been reinstated, Sabsabi will now present two installations in Venice: one in the Australian Pavilion, and another in Kouoh’s international exhibition. Both will draw on the artist’s Sufi heritage, exploring themes of spiritualism and displacement, and what he calls the “constant flux between the everyday and the metaphysical.”
AUSTRIA
Florentina Holzinger, curated by Nora-Swantje Almes
Holzinger’s “Seaworld Venice” extends her longstanding research into the properties and possibilities of water, with performances spilling beyond the Austrian Pavilion into Venice and its lagoon. From an artist whose latest public installation is a twelve-ton skateboard ramp perched on a pile of mangled cars (now blocking traffic outside Kunstverein Hannover), the work will examine Venice’s fraught relationship with its own aquatic environment. Evoking a submerged theme park, sacred ritual, and sewage plant, Holzinger’s spectacle promises to conjure past and future Venice, melding ecological interrogation with feminist critique.
BRAZIL
Adriana Varejão and Rosana Paulino, curated by Diane Lima
The title of Adriana Varejão and Rosana Paulino’s dual exhibition, “Comigo ninguém pode,” derives from the vernacular name for a plant often placed at the entrance of Brazilian houses to serve as talisman and warning. That the phrase might loosely be translated as “Don’t mess with me!” might give some indication of how these storied artists position their work in relation to the country’s colonial history, as enshrined in a pavilion in the Giardini at Venice. The curator has stated that getting two such significant artists to agree to collaborate was the “greatest achievement of this project”: it will be interesting to see whether the combination works, and what new meanings it might produce.
BULGARIA
Gery Georgieva, Maria Nalbantova, Rayna Teneva, and Veneta Androva, curated by Martina Yordanova
Can you imagine a future in which our own monstrous time will be seen as a preliminary stage in the struggle to bring forth a better world? That is the difficult task taken on by Bulgaria’s representatives, if we understand correctly a scenario that looks back from the future to a “fictional research lab” dedicated to proving that “attention, care, and play” might usher in a “post-sovereign” world. For all that the word “care” is liable, in this context, to have us reaching for our revolvers, any work which envisions a future in which borders have been lowered rather than raised, and in which the lives of the majority have got better rather than worse, is worth checking out.
CANADA
Abbas Akhavan, curated by Kim Nguyen
With the disastrous war launched on his native country by the US and Israel as a backdrop to the biennial, Abbas Akhavan’s attention to cultural environments that have been plundered or destroyed should carry an extra charge. At the 2018 Liverpool Biennial, for example, the Tehran-born artist (who emigrated to Canada during the Iran–Iraq War) presented a monumental soil sculpture referencing Assyrian artifacts destroyed by ISIS. Underscoring the thoughtless ease with which such material culture can be destroyed—not least by bellicose presidents who threaten to demolish “whole civilizations”—Akhavan’s work suggests how artists can not only preserve histories, but move them forward.
CYPRUS
Marina Xenofontos, curated by Kyle Dancewicz
Marina Xenofontos’s haunting installations reflect on the systems of power, money, and technology that underpin our experience of the world (and this biennale), and how these foundations can be unsettled. They present us with uncannily familiar scenarios, from looping machines on the verge of obsolescence (the pavilion will include “an animatronic sculpture of a sparrow clinging to life”) to out-of-time architectures (it will also replicate part of an iconic nightclub preserved in no-man’s-land since the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974). In a biennale set to be defined both by overt declarations of art’s political import and their suppression, Xenofontos’s gently destabilizing work reflects on the patterns in which we are trapped, and offers a tentative mode of escape.
CZECH AND SLOVAK PAVILION
Jakub Jansa and Selmeci Kocka Jusko, curated by Peter Sit
With the possible exception of The Wind in the Willows, the mole does not occupy an especially heroic position in world literature (the role tending to go to lions, eagles, white whales, etc). Czechoslovakia, as was, provides the exception, with a history running from Kafka’s paranoid bunker-builder to Zdeněk Miler’s iconic animated character Krtek. That “little mole” is a cultural touchstone for both Czechs and Slovaks, and so would seem an ideal symbol for gentle and companionable countries. Here, however, visitors will meet “an exhausted actor who has played the character of the mole for decades.” What will this disillusioned mascot tell us about the neighbors’ identity, thirty-three years after their separation?
FINLAND
Jenna Sutela, curated by Stefanie Hessler
“Aeolian Suite” is described as “a windscape of sound and movement,” in which the five Venetian winds—Tramontana, two Boras, Scirocco, and Garbin—will appear personified (it bodes well that the press release name-checks the contribution of a hair artist, Sara Mathiasson). The performance—taking its theatrical cues from commedia dell’arte traditions and referencing Alvar and Elissa Aalto’s mobile 1956 pavilion—dramatizes the shifting patterns of weather in the era of climate emergency. The project continues Sutela’s work in the realm of what she has called “tech povera”: an approach to materials and technology focused on living process, unpredictability, and porosity.
GREECE
Andreas Angelidakis, curated by George Bekirakis
Visitors to the biennale are regularly asked to believe that a colonial institution characterized by conspicuous displays of wealth and power is also a crucible for class revolution and amplifier of dissident voices. Andreas Angelidakis promises to cut through the cognitive dissonance. Framed as a dive into the history of the Greek Pavilion—inaugurated in the year that Hitler and Mussolini met in Venice—the show will transform the space into something between a recreation of Plato’s cave and a contemporary escape room. In Plato’s allegory, let’s remember, the enlightened philosopher must return to the cave to forcefully disabuse the people living comfortably inside it of their happy delusions. The people don’t like it.
THE HOLY SEE
Group show, curated by Ben Vickers and Hans Ulrich Obrist
You know times are bad when you find yourself cheering on the Pope as the last standing defender of ideological freedom. And when the Holy See puts together the buzziest collaboration since Michelangelo met Raphael, then the end must be nigh. Curated by Ben Vickers and Hans Ulrich Obrist, no doubt maneuvering into position in plenty of time for the next conclave, this “sound prayer” is inspired by Hildegard of Bingen and will feature the Soundwalk Collective, Bhanu Kapil, Brian Eno, Dev Hynes, FKA Twigs, Meredith Monk, Otobong Nkanga, Patti Smith, Terry Riley, and some nuns, among others. Who says the devil gets the best tunes?
MEXICO
RojoNegro. curated by Jessica Berlanga Taylor
The name of María Sosa and Noé Martínez’s collective, RojoNegro, is informed by the colors of the cardinal points in Mesoamerican cosmology—red represents east, black west—and the sacred inks used to map the universe. This multimedia installation will extend their research into Indigenous frameworks of memory and knowledge, and any reflection on how our perspective on the world is contingent on our (unacknowledged) position within culturally conditioned systems feels timely at a moment of increasingly entrenched opinion. Whether the Mexican Pavilion will succeed in reorientating its visitors’ perspectives—or, at the very least, alerting them to the existence of other ones—remains to be seen.
PERU
Sara Flores, curated by Issela Ccoyllo and Matteo Norzi
Sara Flores’s work draws from the knowledge systems of the Shipibo-Konibo people, of which she is a part. Her intricate paintings are rooted in kené, complex geometric designs that transmit spiritual, ecological, and medicinal knowledge. Working with natural dyes and materials sourced from the rainforest—bark from the yacushapana tree, pigments from turmeric—Flores keeps up a tradition threatened by the encroachment of corporate interests on the forest. “De otros mundos” (“From Other Worlds”) marks the first time an Indigenous artist has represented the nation, and will feature large-scale immersive paintings and a video work, foregrounding her model of art and culture as a living epistemology.
SOMALIA
Ayan Farah, Asmaa Jama, and Warsan Shire, curated by Mohamed Mire and Fabio Scrivanti
Somalia’s pavilion would be worth paying attention to even if it weren’t its first showing at Venice. The title, “SADDEXLEEY,” derives from a tripartite Somali poetic form rooted in the country’s oral tradition. That structure is here reflected in the bringing together of two artists and a poet—Ayan Farah, Asmaa Jama, and Warsan Shire—over the pavilion’s three floors. That none of these artists are based in Somalia has drawn criticism from those who would prefer the pavilion to represent a domestic art scene, but is at least consistent with the idea of giving voice to stories of displacement through the construction of a “living poem.”
SOUTH KOREA
Goen Choi & Hyeree Ro, curated by Binna Choi
The first part of the title “Liberation Space: Fortress / Nest” describes the few years between Korea’s liberation from Japan in 1945 and the civil war that divided it. Goen Choi and Hyeree Ro were inspired by the failed coup of 2024 to reflect on the fragility of democratic nationhood and the unending work of maintaining it. That the insurrection was thwarted by a coalition across society—from protestors on the streets through to lawmakers in the national assembly and soldiers who refused orders from a rogue president to implement martial law—might offer some hope to citizens elsewhere in the world. Certainly it is worthy of the “living monument” to solidarity and resistance that the artists will present here.
TAIWAN
Li Yi-Fan, curated by Raphael Fonseca
Li Yi-Fan has described the process behind his virtuosic digital videos and monstrous installations as a “death match between the artist and software.” As our visual culture is saturated with AI slop, this sentiment strikes a nerve. “Screen Melancholy” comprises a video installation that puts digital avatars to the service of revealing the all-too-human affects that underpin the technologies shaping our worlds. It’s worth noting that Taiwan’s pavilion is classified as an “official collateral event,” after having been downgraded from formal national representation in 2001 under pressure from Beijing. Who is represented, and on what terms, defines this and every edition of the biennale.
