Venice in May smells like low tide, espresso and ambition. The boats are louder, the queues longer, the sunglasses more architecturally striking. Every two years the global art world migrates here – curators with rolling luggage, collectors in linen, critics with opinions they haven’t quite formed yet – and for six months the city becomes the most interesting, most maddening, most gossip-saturated square kilometre on earth. Welcome to the Venice Biennale.
The 61st International Art Exhibition, running for the public from 9 May to 22 November 2026, is unlike any before it. Its theme, In Minor Keys, was conceived by Koyo Kouoh – the Cameroonian-born curator and then-director of Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town – who was appointed to lead this edition in December 2024. She died suddenly on 10 May 2025, before the world had even heard what she was planning. The Biennale made the only decision it could: carry on, exactly as she envisioned it. This edition is, in every sense, her memorial and her manifesto.
And what a vision it is. Drawing from jazz, Caribbean poetry and the metaphor of the creole garden, In Minor Keys proposes mood over monumentality, intimacy over dominance, and fragility over spectacle. The central exhibition unfolds across the Giardini and the Arsenale as a series of what Kouoh called “oases” – gardens, shelters, micro-worlds where art operates at lower frequencies, emotional, social, political – as antidote to the noise of crisis and acceleration. Whether the art world has the patience for it will be one of the great tests of this edition.
The Main Event
The central pavilions at the Giardini and the Arsenale are your anchor points. Block out at least two full days – one for each venue. The Arsenale, in particular, rewards patience: you will get lost in the vast space and somewhere in that magnificent industrial labyrinth is probably the best thing you’ll see all year. The newly restored central pavilion opens its doors for the first time this edition, adding another space to the Giardini that is well worth the detour.
With 99 national participations and 31 official collateral events – plus the sprawling ecosystem of unofficial exhibitions, gallery shows and foundation presentations that colonise the city during Biennale season – the scale is overwhelming. Accept this early. You cannot see everything. Curate your visit like you would a playlist: a few anchors, room for discovery and the willingness to abandon the plan when something unexpected pulls you through a different door.
National Pavilions: The MENA Edit
UAE – Washwasha Arsenale · Commissioned by the Salama bint Hamdan Al Nahyan Foundation
Washwasha is the Arabic word for whispering, and it is the perfect title for a pavilion operating in the register this Biennale demands. Curated by Bana Kattan – associate head of exhibitions at the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Project – alongside assistant curator Tala Nassar, the UAE’s ninth Venice participation brings together six artists: Mays Albaik, Jawad Al Malhi, Farah Al Qasimi, Alaa Edris, Lamya Gargash, and Taus Makhacheva. Born across Abu Dhabi, Dubai, East Jerusalem and Moscow, they share a connection to a country defined by transience, speed and the collision of the deeply rooted with the perpetually arriving. Sound here is about archive; evidence of how a place remembers itself through oral histories and everyday noise.
Qatar – untitled 2026 (a gathering of remarkable people) Giardini · Qatar’s first official national pavilion. Co-curated by Tom Eccles and Ruba Katrib, commissioned by Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani
Qatar doesn’t just show up – it arrives with architecture, ambition and a guest list. This is the country’s first official national pavilion, staged on the very site where Qatar’s permanent Giardini structure – the first to be 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 a new film, Tarek Atoui organises live performances, Alia Farid contributes large-scale sculpture, and Palestinian chef Fadi Kattan runs a culinary programme rooted in Middle Eastern food culture. This is hospitality as curatorial strategy and The Biennale couldn’t have enough of it.
Saudi Arabia – May your tears never dry, you who weep over stones Arsenale · Curated by Antonia Carver of Art Jameel, with assistant curator Hafsa Alkhudairi
The title of this work arrives like a line of poetry and refuses to leave. Dana Awartani – Palestinian-Saudi, trained at Central Saint Martins before studying manuscript illumination in Turkey where she earned an ijaza, a formal licence to transmit Islamic knowledge – represents Saudi Arabia with work that positions ancient craft as both cultural act and political statement. Her practice is built on geometry, repair and the material histories of the Middle East: she inhabits these traditions rather than references them, treating the handmade as a living language. In an edition built around intimacy and resistance, Awartani’s insistence on craft as survival feels like exactly the right answer to the moment.
Lebanon – Don’t Get Me Wrong Arsenale · Nabil Nahas, curated by Dr Nada Ghandour
Nabil Nahas has spent decades navigating the space between painting and sculpture, science and intuition, the cosmos and the canvas. His richly textured works – dense with fractal geometries and botanical forms, surfaces that seem to breathe – now fill the Arsenale in an immersive large-scale frieze. Organised by the Lebanese Visual Art Association in collaboration with Lebanon’s Ministry of Culture, the pavilion is an assertion of creative continuity from a country that has refused to stop making art under every conceivable pressure. In Venice, that stubbornness reads as pure strength.
Morocco – Asǝṭṭa Arsenale · Amina Agueznay, curated by Meriem Berrada
This is Morocco’s first presence at the Arsenale and one of the most grounded pavilions at the Biennale. Amina Agueznay works directly alongside weavers and embroiderers across Morocco, treating artisans as genuine co-authors, not suppliers of texture. The installation draws on the âatba, the threshold space in Moroccan vernacular architecture; the charged passage between inside and outside, private and shared. The title comes from the Tamazight language and the work carries centuries of embodied knowledge into the present without nostalgia. In a Biennale asking art to slow down, this is one of the clearest possible responses to Kouoh’s brief.
Syria – The Tower Tomb of Palmyra Sara Shamma, curated by Yuko Hasegawa
Sara Shamma takes as her starting point the ancient tower tombs of Palmyra – funerary structures that stood for centuries as monuments to continuity, and that became, in recent years, symbols of devastating erasure. Her pavilion does not dwell in destruction; it asks what such a form means when reactivated, what it still has the capacity to hold and transmit. Commissioned by the Syrian Ministry of Culture and curated by Yuko Hasegawa, this marks Syria’s return to the international stage and does so with archaeology in its heart rather than grief on its surface.
Palestine – Gaza: No Words – See the Exhibit (Official Collateral Event) Palazzo Mora
Palestine has no national pavilion and no official diplomatic ties with Italy. What it has is this: one hundred works of tatreez, the Palestinian embroidery tradition whose stitched motifs have carried cultural memory for generations, made by women in refugee camps and villages across Lebanon, Jordan, and the West Bank. Each piece contains roughly 55,000 individual stitches. This exhibition does not ask you to read a wall text. It asks you to stand in front of what those hands made and understand in your body what that means.
National Pavilions: International
Nordic Countries – Klara Kristalova, Benjamin Orlow & Tori Wrånes Nordic Pavilion, Giardini · Curated by Anna Mustonen
Three artists, one of the most architecturally beautiful pavilions at the Biennale – Sverre Fehn’s iconic modernist structure – and a shared language of myth, transformation and imagined realities. Klara Kristalova brings her psychologically charged ceramic figures; Benjamin Orlow contributes monumental investigations of space and narrative; and Tori Wrånes fills the pavilion with immersive, performative sound environments. The exhibition blurs fantasy and lived experience into a landscape where vulnerability becomes its own kind of power. Visually, it will be extraordinary.
Italy – Con te, con tutto Italian Pavilion, Arsenale · Curated by Cecilia Canziani
Chiara Camoni’s contribution to the Italian Pavilion is what the Biennale catalogue describes as “magical materialism” – nature as a living artistic laboratory, myth and Mediterranean resonance woven into sculpture through collective making, friendship and shared ritual. The pavilion dissolves the boundary between fine art and craft, between the ancient and the urgently contemporary. Camoni’s work is tactile, wonder-struck and rooted in the kind of feminine genealogy that has always existed in Italian art and rarely been given a room this size. It will be beautiful.
Estonia – The House of Leaking Sky Former Church, Castello · Merike Estna, curated by Natalia Sielewicz
For the entire duration of the Biennale, Merike Estna will paint in public view, transforming the pavilion into a live studio where a single large-scale composition grows daily across twenty-two canvases. Beginning from a blank space activated by pouring paint directly onto the floor, the work expands to eventually fill the former church in Venice’s Castello district. Garments designed in collaboration with Lilli Jahilo become part of the performative process; ceramic tiles extend the work across the floor. This is painting as a living system rather than a finished object. Come back twice – it will have changed.
Australia – Khaled Sabsabi Australian Pavilion, Giardini
Set aside whatever you’ve read about the controversy and walk in with fresh eyes. Khaled Sabsabi – working in Venice with long-term collaborator and curator Michael Dagostino – has spent three decades building a practice centred on collectivity, belief systems and the generous politics of coexistence. The pavilion is framed as a site for cultivating conversation rather than delivering certainty; art as ethical gesture rather than statement. Formally, the work is rich and considered. It rewards the kind of attention this Biennale is asking everyone to bring.
Exhibitions To Bookmark
Anish Kapoor: Palazzo Manfrin Palazzo Manfrin, Cannaregio · 6 May – 9 August
After four years of restoration, the Anish Kapoor Foundation reopens its Venetian headquarters – a 16th-century palazzo in Cannaregio – with an exhibition spanning five decades of practice. Approximately 100 architectural models sit alongside large-scale installations including Descent into Limbo (that illusionistic black hole in the floor that never gets less vertiginous) and new immersive works in silicone and paint. Kapoor on architecture and space is Kapoor at his most philosophically alive.
Wallace Chan: Vessels of Other Worlds Chapel of Santa Maria della Pietà · Curated by James Putnam. 8 May – 18 October
If you see one non-pavilion exhibition this Biennale, make it this one. Hong Kong-born artist and jeweller Wallace Chan – the self-taught jeweller began carving gemstones at 16, spent six months as a monk in the early 2000s, gave up all his possessions, then came back to make the most extraordinary sculptures of his career – returns to Venice for the fourth time with Vessels of Other Worlds. Three monumental titanium sculptures fill the Pietà Chapel, each referencing the Olea Sancta, the sacred oils of Catholic ritual. Their architecture echoes the layered cosmologies of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. The largest sculpture, Birth, stands seven metres tall and is composed of over 5,500 titanium parts, 922 individual human figures, and 725 interlocking gears – assembled like fate, standing as witnesses to the endlessness of time. A live video triptych connects the chapel in real time to a parallel exhibition at the Long Museum in Shanghai, collapsing the distance between East and West, Venice and the world. Chan describes both cities as intimately tied to water and its ability to hold, reflect and transform. So, evidently, are his sculptures.
Also worth catching while you’re in the city is Wallace Chan: Mythos at Scala Contarini del Bovolo. It is a site-specific companion project winding through the tower’s famous spiral staircase architecture, and is open daily until 18 October.
Nalini Malani: Of Woman Born Magazzini del Sale · 9 May – 22 November
Nalini Malani rewrites the Greek myth of Orestes – who murdered his mother to avenge his father – across 67 animations and soundscapes in a large-scale immersive installation. It serves as a contemporary meditation on accountability, patriarchal violence and what myths do to women. Fluid, poignant and loud in the quietest possible way.
Chihuly: Venice 2026 Grand Canal / Istituto Veneto, Campo Santo Stefano · 5 May – 14 November
Thirty years after his groundbreaking Chihuly Over Venice, Dale Chihuly returns – on the occasion of his 90th birthday – with three new glass sculptures up to nine metres high installed along the Grand Canal itself, visible from the Accademia Bridge. The Gold Tower in Palazzo Franchetti spirals thirty feet upward in cascading luminous tendrils. Venice made Chihuly; Chihuly returns the favour.
The Holy See Pavilion: The Ear is the Eye of the Soul Giardino Mistico, 17th-century Carmelite Convent, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Ben Vickers
The Vatican’s pavilion is hidden inside a monastery garden – the Giardino Mistico, tended by Discalced Carmelites – and features new commissions by 22 musicians, composers, poets and artists responding to the life and legacy of 12th-century abbess and polymath Saint Hildegard of Bingen. Patti Smith, Brian Eno, and FKA Twigs are among those representing the Holy See. This is, objectively, an event that could only exist in 2026.
The Fashion Bonus
Palazzo Pisani Moretta, one of Venice’s most mythologised private palaces, opens to the public for the very first time this Biennale as home to the inaugural presentation of the Dries Van Noten Foundation – titled The Only True Protest is Beauty. Curated by Dries Van Noten and Geert Bruloot, the presentation explores craftsmanship as a language of expression and gathers more than 200 works from both emerging and established artists. Running until 4 October.
The Venice Biennale is not a fair. It is not Instagram content. It is not a networking event. It is, at its best, a city-wide argument about what art is for – who makes it, who it speaks to, whose stories are centred, whose are finally heard after decades in the wings. In In Minor Keys, Koyo Kouoh asked the art world to slow down and listen to the frequencies it usually drowns out. It is, you might say, the most urgent possible instruction for 2026. Buy tickets
