Abbazia di San Giorgio Maggiore · A major survey of Barry X Ball's sculpture installs 23 works — drawn from five distinct series, most shown publicly for the first time — across Andrea Palladio's Basilica di San Giorgio Maggiore. Renaissance form meets robotic milling and exotic stone, set into deliberate dialogue with the architecture and with newly restored Tintoretto canvases.
Albania Pavilion · Cast entirely in Zaum — the irrational esoteric language of the Russian Futurists — Genti Korini's three-channel video for the Albanian Pavilion examines Albania as a 'somewhere place' defined by a century of external projection, drawing on a 1916 Petrograd avant-garde magazine that satirised Russian imperial pretensions through an orientalised image of the country. A fictional theatre fusing live acting, puppetry, and animation.
AMA Venezia · 'Aura' opens collector Laurent Asscher's AMA Venezia with a show drawn entirely from the AMA Collection — an Ed Ruscha work conceived for the space as a bridge between Venice, U.S.A. and Venezia, Italy, and a live Tino Sehgal performance moving through the rooms — alongside Arthur Jafa, Charles Ray, Christopher Wool, Richard Serra, Laura Owens, and Jenny Saville, each engaging the architecture and shifting between what is seen and what is sensed.
Applied Arts Pavilion · The Applied Arts Pavilion hands the Arsenale's Sale d'Armi to Gala Porras-Kim's drawings, sculptures, and video questioning how museums classify and conserve objects — developed with London's Victoria and Albert Museum, picked by Koyo Kouoh herself before her death.
Archivio di Stato di Venezia · 'Archivio' is the first show ever staged inside the Archivio di Stato di Venezia — Dayanita Singh's 25-year archive of Italian archives, libraries, and storage rooms (Venice, Florence, Naples…) on 15 new architectural pillars, curated by Andrea Anastasio.
Argentina Pavilion · Duville's pavilion drawing uses 30 tonnes of salt and charcoal that visitors walk on — the first Argentine pavilion entirely privately funded.
Arsenale · The Arsenale chapter of 'In Minor Keys' is built around three motifs — Procession (Afro-Atlantic carnival), Schools (territorial ecosystems), and Rest — designed to slow visitors across the more than 110 artists and collectives in Koyo Kouoh's posthumously realised exhibition, which unfolds across both Giardini and Arsenale.
Arsenale - Campo della Tana, Castello 2126/A · Pavilion centres Wu Li (1632–1718) — the Chinese-Catholic priest-painter from Macao, also known as Jacone — pairing his life with works by three contemporary Macanese artists Eric Fok, O Chi Wai, and Lei Fung Ieng.
Montenegro Pavilion · Radulović presents a two-tiered installation: a moulded 'basement' zone below an ethereal photographic zone above, with small-format glass-plate photos mediating the transition.
Cyprus Pavilion · 'It rests to the bones' is Marina Xenofontos's solo of sculpture and film built around fragile, shifting memory and the inevitability of failure in civic life — staged at artist-run Spiazzi Castello, behind the Arsenale.
Ateneo Veneto · Natasha Tontey convenes ritual, myth, and the optics of surveillance in a meditation on what it means to remain sovereign — over territory, over knowledge, over the body itself. Co-commissioned by LAS Art Foundation and Amos Rex, the installation reimagines the story of Len Karamoy — a 1950s female combatant in Indonesia's CIA-backed Permesta movement — through video, sound, light, and sculpture, drawing on quantum ghost imaging, LiDAR, photogrammetry, and thermal cameras alongside Minahasan symbolism.
Australia Pavilion · 'conference of one's self' marks a Biennale first — Khaled Sabsabi appears simultaneously in the Australia Pavilion and inside Koyo Kouoh's main exhibition, after Creative Australia dropped then reinstated him in 2025.
Austria Pavilion · Austrian choreographer and performance artist Florentina Holzinger turns the pavilion into 'SeaWorld Venice' — a permanent live installation and performances drawing on her long-standing research into water as both subject and symbol, with site-specific Études staged across Venice and the lagoon, curated by Nora-Swantje Almes (Gropius Bau, Berlin).
Belgium Pavilion · First time Belgium's Flemish pavilion goes to a performance artist — Warlop's 'It Never SSST' was selected from 21 contenders and grew out of her crowd-pulling 'One Song.'
Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana · Fondazione Bvlgari's first-ever exhibition — site-specific commissions by Lara Favaretto and Monia Ben Hamouda staged in the monumental rooms of Sansovino's Marciana Library on Piazza San Marco.
Brazil Pavilion · 'Comigo ninguém pode' (named after a Brazilian apotropaic plant) puts Adriana Varejão's tile/scar paintings in dialogue with Rosana Paulino's Black-feminist printmaking — the first time the two have shared the Brazilian Pavilion, curated by Diane Lima.
Great Britain Pavilion · 'Predicting History: Testing Translation' fills the British Pavilion with new large multipanel paintings of surreal, magical scenes plus a soundscape with Magda Stawarska — Lubaina Himid's first major Venice solo, from the first Black woman to win the Turner Prize.
Vietnam Pavilion · 'Vietnam: Art in the Global Flow' centres on Lê Hữu Hiếu's 'Silkworm' corpus — lacquer surfaces on which live silkworms have spun cocoons directly onto the work — at Ca' Faccanon, Vietnam's first official Venice pavilion.
Ca' Faccanon · 'Harnessed from Nature' traces five decades of Shim Moon-Seup's sculptural practice across 28 works in painting, sculpture, and installation — from the South Korean artist's 1973 Paris Biennale debut to pieces completed in 2025 — at Ca' Faccanon, curated by Sim Eunlog and organised by the Shim Moon-Seup Art and Culture Foundation.
Ca' Foscari Auditorium Santa Margherita · 'Natura Naturans' pulls CYFEST 17 — CYLAND's nomadic media-art festival — from Thessaloniki to Ca' Foscari's Auditorium Santa Margherita, where Jane Bustin appears in Barbara London's 'What's in a Story?' video programme on May 9.
Ca’ Pesaro, Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna · 'Jenny Saville a Ca' Pesaro' is the British painter's first major Venetian show — 30+ works including 'Hyphen' (1999) and 'Reverse' (2002–13) plus a new cycle made for the city — curated by Ca' Pesaro director Elisabetta Barisoni, supported by Gagosian.
Ca’ Pesaro, Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna · 'I visitatori' fills Ca' Pesaro with 30+ new Hernan Bas paintings of 'spoiled white male American tourists doing objectionable things' — a Venice-residency response to mass tourism, curated by Elisabetta Barisoni with Victoria Miro, Lehmann Maupin, Perrotin.
Ca’ Rezzonico · 'I Guardi di Calouste Gulbenkian' brings ten Francesco Guardi vedute of regattas, the Bucintoro's departure, and the Festa della Sensa back to Venice — Calouste Gulbenkian acquired 19 Guardis between 1907 and 1921 — staged in the portego of Ca' Rezzonico.
Ca’ Tron · 'Venetian Diary' is a participatory portrait of the city assembled by Ilya (1933–2023) and Emilia Kabakov — diary entries and personal objects from ~550 Venetians — at sixteenth-century Ca' Tron, three years after Ilya's death.
Estonia Pavilion · Estna will tile the entire pavilion with 25,000 glazed floor tiles, plus a monumental painting assembled on-site from 22 canvases — framed explicitly as a work about being a female artist and a mother.
Azerbaijan Pavilion · Ahmed makes surrealist 'glitched' Azerbaijani carpets that melt traditional weaving into liquid distortion; pavilion is organised by the Heydar Aliyev Foundation.
Campo della Tana · Pavilion turns the plastic bag (used to carry pet goldfish home in Hong Kong) and metal-grille security windows into art — Kingsley Ng and Angel Hui borrow the musical 'fermata' to slow down city tempo.
Canada Pavilion · Akhavan is a devotee of Kew Gardens who treats glasshouses as 'ideal models of life on Earth' — past works include a running stream in the crypt of Mount Stuart House.
Casa dei Tre Oci · 'The-exchange-value-of-language-has-fallen-to-zero' debuts Joseph Kosuth's new neon 'A Chain of Resemblance' (after Foucault) alongside 1960s landmarks like 'One and Three Mirrors' — at Casa dei Tre Oci, curated by Mario Codognato and Adriana Rispoli for Berggruen Arts.
Casa Sanlorenzo · 'Waves' is Sanlorenzo's first proprietary Biennale-year show at its Casa Sanlorenzo — Calder, Melotti, Fontana, Cragg paired with younger artists Christine Safa, Friederich Andreoni and Marcello Maloberti — curated by Sergio Risaliti and Cristiano Seganfreddo, advised by ESA's Ersilia Vaudo Scarpetta.
Ecuador Pavilion · TAWNA is an Amazon-based anti-colonial collective of Sápara, Kichwa, and mestizo filmmakers — paired with Santillán, who made the only artwork ever to leave Earth's atmosphere on a stratospheric balloon.
Central Pavilion · 'In Minor Keys' opens with twin Shrines — to Senegalese Laboratoire Agit'Art co-founder Issa Samb (1945–2017) and American sculptor Beverly Buchanan (1940–2015) — under sweeping indigo banners by Cape Town's Wolff Architects, completed posthumously after curator Koyo Kouoh's May 2025 death.
Central Pavilion · The 'Poetry Caravan' is a procession of poets in the Giardini that re-stages the Dakar-to-Timbuktu trip Koyo Kouoh made with nine African poets in 1999 — a griot chorus performed in tribute to the curator after her death in May 2025.
Chiesa di San Giovanni Evangelista · New paintings by Sergey Grinevich fill the Chiesa di San Giovanni Evangelista alongside work by Vladimir Tsesler, Olga Padhaiskaya, Mikalai Khalezin and chef Rasmus Munk — exiled Belarus Free Theatre's first major art project, in lieu of an official pavilion.
Kosovo Pavilion · Brilant Milazimi presents a seventeen-metre-wide painting of frail bodies composed neatly together across a Kosovar mountain landscape, portraying the act of waiting as the inherited condition of a country whose recognition is still being negotiated. The Kosovo Pavilion reopens the closed 17th-century Chiesa di Santa Maria del Pianto near the Fondamenta Nuove, unsealed specifically for the Biennale.
Chile Pavilion · 'Inter-Reality' converts the pavilion into a slow, multisensory environment of shifting illusion, sound, and unstable perspective — Norton Maza, who only learned of the open call from a collector, won the commission.
China Pavilion · China's pavilion includes Game Science — the studio behind 2024 mega-hit Black Myth: Wukong — alongside fine artists, building a dialogue between gaming, AI, and millennia-old Chinese culture.
CIRCUIT · CIRCUIT's inaugural exhibition, opening in Mestre after two years of renovation: nine works by Federica Di Pietrantonio mapping the post-digital condition as 'sunburn' — the burn of skin no longer accustomed to sunlight. Her video installations descend into the subcultures of constant exposure, from hikikomori to gold farmers, anchored by the recent Quadriennale series 'the edge of collapse' and a new Project Room install built around the video work 'THE FIELD'.
Complesso dell'Ospedaletto · The closing chapter of Fondazione In Between Art Film's 'Trilogy of Uncertainties' — following Penumbra (2022) and Nebula (2024) — Canicula gathers eight new site-specific video commissions referencing the phenomena of extreme light and heat. Works by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Massimo D'Anolfi and Martina Parenti, Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk, Janis Rafa, P. Staff, Wang Tuo, Yuyan Wang, and Maya Watanabe are staged across the Church of Santa Maria dei Derelitti, the frescoed concert room, the old pharmacy, and the modern retirement home of the Ospedaletto.
Holy See Pavilion · The Vatican Pavilion interprets a Biennale tuned to a quieter frequency through the concept of listening as conceived by Saint Hildegard of Bingen, with a 24-artist roster — including FKA Twigs, Brian Eno, Patti Smith, Jim Jarmusch, Dev Hynes, Laraaji, Kali Malone, and Terry Riley — making 'sonic prayers' for the medieval mystic.
Contemporary Forces · 'Who's a Good Boy?' takes its name from a Nora Turato work and gathers 12 Kelterborn Collection artists — Claire Fontaine, Joseph Beuys, Ulay, Gary Hill, Sung Tieu, Laure Prouvost — around nonviolence as an active stance, on Giudecca for the Biennale.
Corte Nuova · Yasuda (b. 1945, Hokkaidō) is a leading living stone-carver — the show creates a 'mineral garden' of marble sculptures presented by the Wilmotte Foundation in Cannaregio's Corte Nuova abbey.
Corte Nuova · A sea of approximately one hundred new paintings strung along the existing laundry lines of one of the last residential streets in Venice — Castello's Corte Nuova — made by Melissa McGill in collaboration with local residents and students. 'Marea' is a meditation on climate change, overtourism, and the fragility of community life, endorsed by the Italian Delegation to UNESCO.
Czech Republic & Slovak Republic Pavilion · Marking the Czechoslovak Pavilion's centenary, 'The Silence of the Mole' follows Mr. M., an exhausted actor who has played the beloved cartoon Mole for decades — using a children's mascot as a vessel for meditation on Czech-Slovak coexistence and collective memory. Staged in the Giardini.
Denmark Pavilion · 'Things to Come' moves between science, fiction, and pornography — Maja Malou Lyse riffs on a study claiming virtual erotic imagery raises sperm motility, asking whether images now act on the body itself.
Iceland Pavilion · Iceland's pavilion moves to a new venue — Docks Cantieri Cucchini, a 19th-century shipyard between Giardini and Arsenale. Artist-poet-composer Ásta Fanney Sigurðardóttir's 'spiritual fluxus' multidisciplinary exhibition spans sound, performance, moving image, sculpture and installation, building dreamscapes around 'Creature Zero' searching for the original rock — an exhibition of encounter rather than spectacle, evolving through live performances throughout the Biennale.
Docks Cantieri Cucchini · Pagès Rabal's installation projects laser-traced watermarks from the Capellades Paper Mill Museum archive — Catalan papermaking marks dating back to the 12th century — onto LED screens.
Docks Cantieri Cucchini · Show is named for Filipino revolutionary painter Juan Luna (1857–1899), creator of the gold-medal-winning 'Spoliarium' — Ronald Ventura, the highest-priced Filipino painter at auction, riffs on Luna's Malabon roots.
Egypt Pavilion · Visitors are asked to refrain from speaking or taking photos inside the Egyptian pavilion — Agop turns the Giardini space into a 'Silence Pavilion' moving from intangible to tangible to 'mystic invisible.'
Espace Louis Vuitton Venezia · Espace Louis Vuitton Venezia is transformed into a 'cybernetic sanctuary' for Lu Yang's DOKU The Illusion — sculptures, a monumental LED screen, and a mirrored ceiling that pulls visitors into the fourth chapter of the artist's ongoing inquiry into digital reincarnation, Buddhist cosmology, and AI-generated worlds.
North Macedonia Pavilion · 'Pietà in the Emergency Blankets' reformulates Michelangelo's Vatican Pietà out of foil rescue blankets, refusing to mourn or memorialise — Velimir Zhernovski's first Venice solo, co-curated by Amanda Boetzkes (author of 'The Ethics of Earth Art').
Kyrgyz Republic Pavilion · Morosov's installation pairs Kyrgyzstan's hydro-engineering dams with footage of kok-boru — the brutal nomadic horseback game where teams fight over a goat carcass — staging cavalry of centaurs.
Pakistan Pavilion · Pakistan's second-ever pavilion (after 2019). Faiza Butt's 'Punj•AB' deliberately punctuates the name to recover the partitioned Punjab from the narrow framing of state-curriculum history.
Ex Istituto Idrografico · 'Iván Tovar: Le Retour' positions the late Dominican-Parisian Surrealist's transatlantic trajectory inside the global history of Surrealism — Tovar's (1942–2020) first Venice Biennale showing since 1972, in the Ex Istituto Idrografico of the Museo Storico Navale.
Fabbrica H3 · The One Ocean Foundation curates a rotating cast of speakers and performance artists alongside seven artists transposing the Ocean onto land, immersing viewers in precarious ecosystems at the mercy of human interaction. Programming includes cetacean-call recordings, plankton bioluminescence, and bioelectric signals from olive trees — staged at the deconsecrated Church of Santi Cosma e Damiano on Giudecca for one month only.
Finland (Aalto) Pavilion · 70th anniversary of the Aalto-designed Finnish pavilion — Sutela's installation uses meteorological data, a clothesline, wind machines, and children's instruments to turn the wood-panel pavilion into a 'windscape.'
Portugal Pavilion · Drawing on centuries of tradition reading animal behaviours as a warning system for impending earthquakes, Alexandre Estrela's Portuguese Pavilion encases replicas of harbinger animals in a desktop computer environment — proffering humanity's deviation from natural, animal instincts as a root cause of the contemporary collapse of trust in science. The pavilion functions as a 'living seismic operating system,' with luminous 'Replicas' populating the cracks of aluminium plates.
Giangiacomo Rossetti. The Dead
Giangiacomo Rossetti
Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa
Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa · 'The Dead' is Giangiacomo Rossetti's first solo at Bevilacqua La Masa — the Milan-born, New York-based painter (b. 1989) embeds his own face among Pre-Raphaelite, Böcklin, and Renaissance citations, curated by Milovan Farronato.
Fondazione ERES · 'Shifting Waters' tracks human–water relationships through Pamela Rosenkranz, the late Lawrence Weiner, and Gutai pioneer Sadamasa Motonaga alongside younger artists — split into two runs around Venice's autumn low-tide closure at the ERES Foundation's Ca' Sarasina.
Fondazione Giorgio Cini · 'Eroi d'Oro' shows Georg Baselitz's most recent large-scale paintings — bodies in sharp lines floating on flat gilded grounds reminiscent of medieval icons or Stefan Lochner — at Fondazione Cini, curated by Luca Massimo Barbero with Thaddaeus Ropac.
Fondazione Marchesani · 'Resonance' is a Georges Adéagbo presentation curated by Grace Aneiza Ali and Selene Wendt at Fondazione Giorgio e Armanda Marchesani — first venue project of the foundation's new Venice base.
Fondazione Nicoletta Fiorucci · Lydia Ourahmane's '5 Works' culminates in a fully functioning pier joining the lagoon island Poveglia — built with the Poveglia per tutti citizens' association — at Fondazione Nicoletta Fiorucci, curated by Polly Staple after a Venice residency.
Fondazione Prada, Ca’ Corner della Regina · 'Helter Skelter' stages a never-examined dialogue between Arthur Jafa (b. 1960) and Richard Prince (b. 1949) — a shared 'ethos of lawlessness' in image appropriation — across two floors of Ca' Corner della Regina, curated for Fondazione Prada by Nancy Spector.
Fondazione Querini Stampalia · Querini Stampalia's 2026 exhibition 'The Dreamer (In Dreams Begin Responsibilities)' takes its subtitle from Yeats's 1914 poem and Delmore Schwartz's 1937 short story — staging 'cinematic sets' across the foundation's Castello palazzo.
Fondazione Querini Stampalia · Twelve monochrome panels arranged as a constellation alongside carved stone steles, marking Ding Yi's pivot from the fluorescent canvases of the past decade. 'Cosmotechnics: Ding Yi as a Planetary Code' is staged in dialogue with the Area Scarpa wing of Fondazione Querini Stampalia — title borrowed from philosopher Yuk Hui — curated by Alfredo Cramerotti and Auronda Scalera.
Fondazione Querini Stampalia · 'Bad Habits' caps Nigel Cooke's residency as Querini Stampalia's first artist-in-residence with new paintings staring back at Venice's historical legacies — curated by Evelyn C. Hankins; Cooke holds a PhD on Bataille and Serres.
Fondazione Querini Stampalia · 'The Invisible Chord' brings nearly 80 Hans Hartung paintings, archives, and studio tools into dialogue with the music he played as a young pianist — at Querini Stampalia, curated by Thomas Schlesser with the Hartung-Bergman Foundation and Perrotin.
Forte Marghera · 'In Minor Keys' spills onto the Mestre mainland at Forte Marghera, where Temitayo Ogunbiyi's recliner-sculptures, Uriel Orlow's botanical maps of the Biennale, and Fabrice Aragno's three-dimensional rework of Godard's 'Image Book' invite visitors to wander, play, and rest.
France Pavilion · First Biennale in the newly renovated French pavilion (closed for years for restoration) — Tangier-based Barrada gives the comeback show, framed under the sign of melancholy/Saturn.
Lithuania Pavilion · Budvytytė was part of the Lithuanian collective whose 'Sun & Sea' won the 2019 Golden Lion — her first solo pavilion is a three-channel 16mm film staged inside a former blacksmith's forge near the Arsenale.
Galerie Alberta Pane · 'The Materiality of Judy Chicago' tracks six decades of refused craft hierarchies — porcelain plates, spray-painted car hoods, needlework, glass — and debuts a new body of work at Galleria Alberta Pane, curated by Allison Raddock with a Massimiliano Gioni catalogue interview.
Galleria 10 & Zero Uno · 'Aquae' is Melissa McGill's gallery counterpart to her participatory street project 'Marea' — a focused show on water, territory, and community at Chiara Boscolo's via Garibaldi gallery 10 & zero uno, opening with the Biennale.
Galleria Michela Rizzo · 'L'Esperimento del Tempo' marks the Fabio Mauri (1926–2009) centenary at Galleria Michela Rizzo — taking its title from the 'Esperimento del Mondo' association Mauri founded in 2000 to preserve his work and archive.
Gallerie dell’Accademia · The first living woman artist to mount a major exhibition at the Gallerie dell'Accademia in its 250-year history, Marina Abramović — in a show marking her 80th birthday — gathers historic performance works including 'Rhythm 0' (1974) and a re-enactment of 'Imponderabilia' (1977), alongside 'Pietà (with Ulay)' (1983) hung in dialogue with Titian's unfinished 'Pietà' on its 450th anniversary, plus newer works incorporating quartz and amethyst organised around her 1988 Great Wall Walk with the late artist Ulay. Curated by Shai Baitel.
Germany Pavilion · Henrike Naumann (b. 1984, Zwickau), one of the two artists, died unexpectedly weeks before the opening — her work probing East German furniture and post-1989 right-wing extremism is a centerpiece of the pavilion.
Tanzania Pavilion · "Minor Frequencies: The Inner Life Of A Nation" assembles 35 artists around 2024 Frieze Artist Award winner Valerie Asiimwe Amani — a heavily mixed Italian-East Asian roster curated by Lorna Benedict Mashiba and Martina Cavallarin, raising the recurring debate about who actually represents Tanzania in Venice.
Romania Pavilion · Pavilion treats the Black Sea as a 'living archive' — Benera/Estefán, longtime collaborators investigating ecological violence, work with anoxic-water hydrography and sonic-eye scoring.
Grand Duchy of Luxembourg Pavilion · Aline Bouvy's film follows an anthropomorphic piece of excrement through everyday rituals of bodily restraint to examine shame as the social mechanism that sorts and disciplines bodies — especially around gender, hierarchy, and cleanliness. Staged inside Bouvy's mirror-glassed steel architecture in the Sale d'Armi at the Arsenale, curated by Stilbé Schroeder of Casino Luxembourg.
Greece Pavilion · Half-Greek/half-Norwegian Angelidakis turns the Greek pavilion into a 'Byzantium goth disco' anti-fascist escape room — a queered reactivation of Plato's Cave for the post-truth era.
Hotel Metropole · 'The Room Is Shared' converts a Hotel Metropole room — where Sigmund Freud stayed in the 1890s — into a space of painting, slow looking, and resonance. Bracha L. Ettinger shows seven paintings made between 2006 and 2025, video work, and an installation of seashells and St. Mary's milk thistle, gathered around her Matrixial framework of borderlinking as ethical artistic gesture; curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev for Andrew Kreps Gallery.
Hungary Pavilion · Endre Koronczi's Hungarian Pavilion is presented as a fictional research project tracing the cosmic breath that animates the world — featuring elements constructed from ventilation parts removed during the renovation of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (founded 1825), a 'breathing wall,' and a film documenting a year-long walk to find the most important sigh, with sound design by Máté Balogh.
Cuba Pavilion · Diago is grandson of mid-century Cuban modernist Roberto Diago Querol; his salvaged-material installations treat scar and surface as a language of Afro-Cuban memory and resistance.
India Pavilion · Working in clay, embroidered thread, paper mâché, and recycled organic materials, five artists — Alwar Balasubramaniam (Bala), Sumakshi Singh, Ranjani Shettar, Asim Waqif, and Ladakhi thangka-and-pashmina artist Skarma Sonam Tashi — render the concept of home as a portable condition: part memory, part material, part ritual, held as a diasporic counterweight against the speed of contemporary Indian urbanisation. India's first Venice pavilion in seven years, curated by Amin Jaffer and presented by the Ministry of Culture, Government of India, in partnership with the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre and Serendipity Arts Foundation.
Ireland Pavilion · Pavilion is curated by Georgina Jackson and produced by The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College Dublin — Nolan presents a room of tapestries, sculptures, and drawings about how meaning is made between people.
Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore · First time a synagogue has been suspended over the Venice lagoon — Anna Kamyshan's airborne structure floats off San Giorgio Maggiore as the first project of the conceptual 'Yiddishland Pavilion' to gain official Biennale status.
Guinea Pavilion · Guinea's first-ever national pavilion at Venice (one of seven 2026 debutants), staged on San Servolo — though the artist list is mostly Italian with a handful of Guineans like Bella Bah and Bachir Diallo.
Israel Pavilion · 'Rose of Nothingness' fills the pavilion with a shallow black pool, drips falling from ceiling pipes to form rippling patterns — Belu-Simion Fainaru's response to Paul Celan, mounted as the Biennale's loudest 2026 boycott calls play out around it.
New Zealand Pavilion · Pardington (Ngāi Tahu, Kāti Māmoe, Ngāti Kahungunu) photographs taxidermied native birds held in colonial museum collections — pavilion staged at the Vivaldi-era Pietà orphanage where the foundling girls' choir performed.
Istituto Santa Maria della Pietà · 'Sownd' is a continuous sculptural environment of organic materials, found objects, texts, and sonic interventions where 'everything is sculptural — including language' — Manon Awst and Dylan Huw's response to Vivaldi's Pietà orphanage complex, Wales's first Venice show since 2019.
Italy Pavilion · Camoni is the first woman to represent Italy alone at the Biennale — she will install 24 anthropomorphic terracotta statues in a 'forest' inside the Tese dell'Arsenale.
Japan Pavilion · 'Grass Babies, Moon Babies' brings Ei Arakawa-Nash's chaotic LED-painting performances to the Japan Pavilion — the first openly queer artist to represent Japan solo at Venice, with the project launched by artist-led crowdfunding.
Korea (Republic of) Pavilion · Curator Binna Choi, with artists Goen Choi and Hyeree Ro, reframes the Korea Pavilion as a living monument to 'liberation space' (haebang gonggan) — the 1945–48 window between Japanese colonial rule and Korea's partition, read here as an unfinished, durational practice extending through the 2024–25 assemblies in the wake of South Korea's illegal Martial Law decree. Two intertwining sculptures anchor the exhibition: Goen Choi's 'Meridian,' built from cut and torn copper pipes, and Hyeree Ro's 'Bearing,' constructed from thousands of wax-coated organza circles around stationary wood and clay structures. Programmed alongside a historic collaboration with the Japan Pavilion.
Latvia Pavilion · MAREUNROL'S and designer Bruno Birmanis revisit the Untamed Fashion Assembly — a legendary 1990s Riga collision of experimental fashion, performance, and visual art held in post-Soviet basements.
Le Stanze del Vetro · The third chapter of Le Stanze del Vetro's long-term study of Murano at the Biennale: over 160 works covering the 24th–29th editions of the Biennale, when the Venice Pavilion gave glass its own dedicated 1952 show. Sommersi, blown forms inspired by Nordic design, solid sculptural pieces — Venini, AVEM, Barovier & Toso, Seguso, Aureliano Toso, Fratelli Toso, plus Gino Cenedese, Alfredo Barbini, Archimede Seguso, and Spatialist Vinicio Vianello.
Lebanon Pavilion · Nabil Nahas made his name in 1980s New York painting starfish-encrusted canvases; the pavilion is a 45-metre installation merging Islamic and biblical motifs across his five-decade abstraction practice.
Sierra Leone Pavilion · 'Mondi Presenti / Worlds of Today' threads four Sierra Leonean artists with ECOWAS and international peers into a Pan-African dialogue — Sierra Leone's first national pavilion, staged at Liceo Guggenheim and commissioned by First Lady Fatima Maada Bio.
Magazzini del Sale n. 5 · Malani's 9-channel iPad 'animation chamber' is the first Venice Collateral Event produced by Delhi's Kiran Nadar Museum of Art — staged in the 14th-century salt warehouses on the Zattere.
Magazzino del Sale 3 - Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia · 'XIV Steps' is Pedro Cabrita Reis's cycle of fourteen large works on the Stations of the Cross — staged at Magazzino del Sale 3 of the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia, curated by Luca Berta and Michael Short.
Malta Pavilion · Title 'No Need to Sparkle' is taken from Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own — pavilion places its trust in 'radical uncertainty' as a counter to today's loud political convictions.
Mexico Pavilion · RojoNegro is a duo (María Sosa and Noé Martínez) from Michoacán whose practice is rooted in Purépecha and Huastec cosmovisions — they treat the pavilion as a 'dispositivo de cura' (healing device).
Morocco Pavilion · Morocco's first official national pavilion at Venice — Agueznay (architect-turned-artist) installs handwoven structures inspired by 'asǝṭṭa,' the Amazigh word for ritual weaving.
Museo Correr · 'Spiral Economy' alternates Julian Charrière (b. 1987) installations with Antonio Canova marbles — 'Venus Italica' opposite 'Albedo,' Canova's Self-Portrait against 'Imperfect Lovers' — in the Canova Galleries of Museo Correr, curated by Chiara Squarcina and Pier Paolo Pancotto.
Museo Correr · 'Principe — Il Nottambulo del Pensiero Magmatico' installs Italian-Iranian Bizhan Bassiri's 'Hermes Aurea' among 90 chosen artist faces (Piero della Francesca, Caravaggio, Duchamp, Burri…) in Carlo Scarpa's Sala delle Quattro Porte at Museo Correr, curated by Squarcina and Bruno Corà.
Museo di Palazzo Grimani · 'It Doesn't Have to Always Make Sense' is Amoako Boafo's first Italian solo — new portraits drawing directly on Renaissance Palazzo Grimani's architecture — staged in collaboration with Gagosian on the museum's second floor, opening days before the Biennale.
Museo Fortuny · 'Dreamers' is Erwin Wurm's first extensive Italian solo — One Minute Sculptures plus new work redefining body, object, identity — at Mariano Fortuny's old Palazzo Pesaro degli Orfei (Museo Fortuny), curated by Elisabetta Barisoni and Cristina Da Roit.
Kazakhstan Pavilion · Pavilion takes its title from 'qoñyr' — the colour of ripe Kazakh soil, used as a metaphor for collective loss; first Kazakh pavilion selected through an open competitive call instead of ministerial appointment.
Negozio Olivetti · 'Hybrids' installs around twenty Leandro Erlich sculptures (some unseen) inside Carlo Scarpa's 1958 Olivetti showroom on Piazza San Marco — the Argentine illusionist behind 'Swimming Pool' (2001) returns to Venice in one of its modernist gems.
Netherlands Pavilion · First time Gerrit Rietveld's 1954 modernist pavilion — a literal monument to post-war optimism — becomes part of the artwork itself; Verhoeven turns it into a fortress against geopolitical anxiety.
Nordic Countries (Finland, Norway, Sweden) Pavilion · Klara Kristalova (ceramic figures), Benjamin Orlow, and Tori Wrånes (known for her singing-while-suspended performances) build a 'mythical landscape' of decay, renewal, and hybrid forms inside Sverre Fehn's 1962 pavilion.
OCD Gallery × Aizenev · OCD Gallery and Aizenev pair contemporary artists with Venetian craftspeople in a show that reads transformation as it is lived — uneven, resistant, often unresolved. Working against a Venice shaped by mass tourism, rising costs, and the displacement of local makers, the works hold the labour of their making at the surface: long-standing artisanal techniques in dialogue with the formal languages of artists working today. Process is not concealed but foregrounded.
Ocean Space · 'Tide of Returns' treats repatriation as a 'living, ceremonial, polyphonic' practice rather than bureaucracy — the Repatriates Collective's 'From My Mother's Country' (sand, shell-character cloth, video) and Verena Melgarejo Weinandt's braided 'Weaving Connections' — at Ocean Space.
Olivolo · Bugarin + Castle (both Glasgow-based) reimagine 'rough music' / charivari — centuries-old European public-shaming rituals — as queer, trans contemporary parade, with cross-references to Filipino cemetery rituals and Scottish archives.
Oman Pavilion · 'Zīnah (Adornment)' takes Omani silver horse trappings as its anchor, returning Haitham Al Busafi from VR back to sand, metal, and sound — the artist studied architecture under Zaha Hadid, Kazuyo Sejima, and Hani Rashid in Vienna.
Haiti Pavilion · 'Yelena's Garden' weaves painting, moving image, and viewer interaction into a perceptual field — Enock Placide's installation in Palazzo Albrizzi-Capello, curated by University of Camerino's Mario Savini.
Ethiopia Pavilion · Tegene Kunbi won the Grand Prix Léopold at the 2022 Dak'Art Biennale and is presenting a 30-year retrospective of his abstract textile-and-oil paintings at Palazzo Bollani.
Palazzo Bragadin Carabba · 'LETTERA' is Giulia Colussi's emerging-art project with Elena Re at Palazzo Bragadin Carabba — collateral programming with limited public press as of April 2026.
Somalia Pavilion · 'SADDEXLEEY' takes its name from a triadic Somali poetic form, spatialising oral tradition through Asmaa Jama, Warsan Shire (who wrote text for Beyoncé's 'Lemonade'), and painter Ayan Farah — Somalia's first-ever pavilion, protested by Mogadishu artists who weren't consulted.
Cameroon Pavilion · Line-up includes Yaoundé hip-hop label Jail Time Records, founded by inmates of Kondengui prison, and choreographer Zora Snake, whose 'Buy Buy World' featured at Documenta Fifteen.
Palazzo Cavanis · 'Aghrab Idrāk: Thresholds of Perception' presents faculty research from VCUarts Qatar's interdisciplinary Institute for Creative Research labs — staged at Palazzo Cavanis on the Zattere, in Qatar Foundation's Doha branch of Virginia Commonwealth University.
Palazzo Cini Gallery · 'Painting in the Present Tense' is David Salle's first Venetian solo: he trained an AI on his 1989–91 Tapestry Paintings, prints those generations onto canvas, and overpaints them — at Palazzo Cini, curated by Luca Massimo Barbero with Thaddaeus Ropac.
Palazzo Contarini della Porta di Ferro · Fifty years after the Basque Country's landmark 1976 Venice Biennale appearance — staged amid the uncertainty of Spain's transition to democracy — 'I Baschi alla Biennale 1976/2026' returns to the lagoon as a living archive: audiovisual and documentary materials from 1976 placed in dialogue with new performances by Itziar Okariz and the Tripak collective across Palazzo Contarini della Porta di Ferro, Scuola Grande San Giovanni Evangelista, and Ca' Foscari's Auditorium Santa Margherita.
Palazzo Contarini-Polignac · PinchukArtCentre's first Venice Collateral combines wartime stories collected by a former Ukrainian soldier-turned-journalist with works by Tacita Dean, Zhanna Kadyrova, and others, framing joy as 'an act of resistance.'
Palazzo delle Prigioni · A monologue in Li Yi-Fan's signature pseudo-educational style probing software-as-a-service and AI image generation to challenge our habits of perception, staged at Palazzo delle Prigioni — Venice's old Doge's prison — for the Taipei Fine Arts Museum.
Palazzo Diedo - Berggruen Arts & Culture · 'Strange Rules' coins 'Protocol Art' — an exploration that inverts the algorithm itself into medium — across three floors of Palazzo Diedo. The exhibition pairs new work by Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst (in collaboration with sub) with around twenty contributors spanning art, music, AI research, and biology — Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Joshua Citarella, Primavera De Filippi, Simon Denny with Venkatesh Rao, Stephanie Dinkins, Fabien Giraud, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Ho Tzu Nyen, Ayoung Kim, Agnieszka Kurant, biologist Michael Levin, New Models, Trevor Paglen, Philippe Parreno, Lorenzo Senni, Avery Singer, AI researcher Kenneth Stanley, terra0, and He Zike — curated by Dryhurst, Herndon, and Hans Ulrich Obrist with Adriana Rispoli for Berggruen.
Palazzo Diedo - Berggruen Arts & Culture · 'Unfinished' is the first major posthumous Ceal Floyer show after her December 2025 death — video, photography, sound, readymades, and sculpture — curated for Berggruen at Palazzo Diedo by Ann Gallagher and Jonathan Watkins, with support from Esther Schipper and Lisson.
Equatorial Guinea Pavilion · First-ever Equatorial Guinea pavilion at the Biennale — staged at Palazzo Donà dalle Rose, though the line-up is dominated by non-Equatoguinean artists.
Palazzo Donà dalle Rose · "Fissures of Light – Diaspora: dissonances in Fa minor" frames an African diaspora group exhibition through a single elegiac key signature — organised by Geneva-based Tissali Arts & Cultures at Palazzo Donà dalle Rose.
Palazzo Franchetti · Title 'Turandokht' is Persian for 'daughter of Turan'; Puccini's 1926 opera frames a gathering of 11 women artists from Central and West Asia, including Afghan exile Lida Abdul.
Palazzo Franchetti · Akhunov is a Central-Asian art legend — a documenta 13 alumnus whose Soviet-era underground samizdat works circumvented Khrushchev-thaw censorship.
Palazzo Franchetti · A three-stage path through Giosetta Fioroni's six-decade practice — silver-grey enamel portraits, ceramics, drawings, and texts — at Palazzo Franchetti, presented by Fondazione Franco and Roberta Calarota.
Palazzo Franchetti · Commissioned by Autotelic Foundation, RAGE BAIT spans installation, video, and generative AI to map the gap between online culture's polished surface and its murky ethical depths. The Mattes treat 'rage bait' — content engineered to provoke before reason can intervene — as the logical endpoint of platforms optimised for engagement. The main exhibition is at Palazzo Franchetti on the Grand Canal (May 6 – Jun 30, 11am–7pm, closed Mon/Tue except May 11–12 and Jun 1–2). A satellite component runs at Le Cabanon, a private swimming pool on Giudecca (May 6–31, 12–6pm by registration). Additional support from Palazzo Bentivoglio and Apalazzo Gallery.
Palazzo Grassi · 'The Promise of Change' fills Palazzo Grassi with 45 paintings and 100 studies by Michael Armitage — works on Ugandan bark cloth turning sociopolitical violence and migration into Old-Master visions — Pinault's flagship Biennale-year solo, curated by Jean-Marie Gallais.
Palazzo Grassi · 'Co-travellers' pairs two Amar Kanwar installations made twenty years apart — 'The Torn First Pages' on resistance to Burma's military regime and 2023's 'Peacock's Graveyard' — in a darkened Palazzo Grassi, curated by Pinault's Jean-Marie Gallais.
Palazzo Loredan · 'Basic Failure' is Sanya Kantarovsky's first major Venice solo — paintings, ceramics, and a Murano-glass sculpture site-specific to Palazzo Loredan — Soviet-satire wit through the Istituto Veneto di Scienze Lettere et Arti.
Bosnia-Herzegovina Pavilion · Domus Diasporica addresses BiH's mass-emigration reality — staged at Palazzo Malipiero, Casanova's birthplace and a former Mocenigo residence on the Grand Canal.
El Salvador Pavilion · El Salvador's first-ever national pavilion in 130 years of the Biennale — a debut by Salvadoran-American sculptor J. Oscar Molina with 15–18 huddled-figure sculptures from his 'Children of the World' series at Palazzo Mora.
Palazzo Mora · Palestine has no national pavilion (Italy doesn't recognise the state) — Palestine Museum US fills the gap with 100 tatreez embroideries made by women in refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan, and the West Bank.
Senegal Pavilion · Gueye is an astrophysicist and visual artist (rare combination); WURUS uses analog lunar-dust polymer murals and centres gold's neutron-star origin to ask what 'value' means in a data economy.
KAMPALA
Group Exhibition
Uganda Pavilion
Uganda Pavilion · Uganda's pavilion is commissioned by Acaye Kerunen — the artist who herself represented Uganda at Venice 2022 — and includes Stacey Gillian Abe and London-based muralist Lakwena Maciver.
Palazzo Nervi Scattolin · Open ONLY at night (6 May–7 June), the show projects video by Kandis Williams, Meriem Bennani & Orian Barki, and Turner-winner Tai Shani onto Pier Luigi Nervi's modernist Palazzo Nervi Scattolin — sole sponsor: Bottega Veneta.
Palazzo Pisani Moretta · 'The Only True Protest is Beauty' inaugurates Fondazione Dries Van Noten with 200+ works by 50 makers — Steven Shearer, Peter Buggenhout, Misha Kahn, Sottsass alongside Comme des Garçons archives — in 20 rooms of Palazzo Pisani Moretta, opened to the public for the first time.
Palazzo Pisani Santa Marina · Artists from GO FOR KOGEI — a Hokuriku-region (Ishikawa, Toyama, Fukui) craft project led by curator Yuji Akimoto — present what he calls 'sensory fieldwork': objects rendered in clay, grass, urushi, and fabric that visibly transform across the seven months of the Biennale. Staged at Palazzo Pisani Santa Marina, the exhibition slows the act of making against an accelerated society.
Palazzo Priuli Manfrin · Anish Kapoor turns his own 16th-century Cannaregio palazzo into a 100-model survey of his realised and unrealised architecture, plus a new Vantablack 'At the Edge of the World' and the permanent 'Descent into Limbo' — second public opening of Palazzo Manfrin since restoration.
Georgia Pavilion · Pavilion staged at Palazzo Querini in Dorsoduro with 17 artists and a curatorial team led by Shalva Khakhanashvili — a sprawling group show under the Modern Argonauts theme of crossroads.
Palazzo Rocca Contarini Corfù · Curated by Dr. Apinan Poshyananda for the Bangkok Art Biennale Foundation, twenty artists from Southeast Asia, Ireland, and Serbia — including Marina Abramović and Pichet Klunchun — work across performance, film, and ceramics as inspired by their encounters with diaspora, migration, and ritual crossing. Staged at Palazzo Rocca Contarini Corfù.
Palazzo Rota Ivancich · Koen Vanmechelen's first solo sculptural exhibition in Venice spreads more than 40 new works across three floors of Palazzo Rota Ivancich — bronze, marble, glass, photography, and video that pull at the seams between organism and environment, breeding and identity, form and transformation.
Palazzo Soranzo Van Axel · Thirty-five works tracing Su Xiaobai's two-decade transfiguration from oil paint to natural lacquer — a 7,000-year-old Chinese material historically reserved for ritual practice — implemented here in the creation of post-industrial abstraction. Anchored by the centrepiece 'Niao Niao' at Palazzo Soranzo Van Axel, presented by the Su Xiaobai Foundation in collaboration with LACMA.
Palazzo Tiepolo Passi · 'Interiors' debuts ~35 rarely-seen and never-before-shown Matthew Wong (1984–2019) paintings of psychological and physical interiors made 2015–19, with a Nancy Spector catalogue, curated by John Cheim at Palazzo Tiepolo Passi — admission free.
Palazzo Vendramin ai Carmini · 'Outta Love' threads Francesca Woodman's self-portraits, Jenny Saville's fleshy paintings, and Wolfgang Tillmans's intimate photography around the emotional aftermath of fractured intimacy — at Palazzo Vendramin ai Carmini.
Palazzo Vendramin Grimani · Patrick Saytour's first Italian solo exhibition — a posthumous survey staged three years after his death — unfolds his Supports/Surfaces vocabulary of folds, burnings, solarisations, and stitched fabrics through the frescoed rooms of Palazzo Vendramin Grimani. Daniela Ferretti pairs Saytour with selected Achromes and Lines by Piero Manzoni: two refusals of ornament, one obsessed with reduction to zero, the other with what matter does when 'left to its own devices'.
Croatia Pavilion · 'Compelled by Fright and Beauty' is a site-specific installation by Dubravka Lošić in the UNESCO-listed Palazzo Zorzi — visitors will be told 'literally nothing can be touched.'
Peggy Guggenheim Collection · 'Peggy Guggenheim in London: The Making of a Collector' is the first museum survey of her 1938–39 Guggenheim Jeune gallery — Kandinsky's first London solo, the UK's first collage group show — at her Venice palazzo before travelling to the Royal Academy and the Guggenheim, NY.
Peru Pavilion · Sara Flores (b. 1950) is the first Indigenous artist to represent Peru at Venice — a Shipibo-Konibo painter whose kené geometric designs translate ayahuasca-vision cosmology onto bark-cloth.
Philippines Pavilion · Cuyson is a Manila-based painter and filmmaker; pavilion is organised by Senator Loren Legarda — the long-running political force behind the Philippines' Venice presence since the 2015 reboot.
Poland Pavilion · Liquid Tongues centres Deaf culture — a hearing-and-Deaf choir interprets whale songs in spoken English and International Sign, alongside Deaf artist Daniel Kotowski and Bogna Burska.
Procuratie Vecchie · Kantor's 'emballage' (object-wrapping) and Cricotage performances are paired with works by Maria Jarema, the Polish painter and his collaborator at Cricot 2 theatre — fifth Starak Foundation Biennale show, in the Procuratie Vecchie.
Procuratie Vecchie · 'We Rise by Lifting Others' fills The Human Safety Net's Procuratie Vecchie space with Marinella Senatore's new Baroque-luminaria forms and six Mumbai-woven Chanakya tapestries — co-created with Warsaw, Mestre, and Palermo families with children aged 0–6.
Punta della Dogana · 'Third Person' is the first European retrospective of Lorna Simpson's painting practice — fifty works including new commissions for Tadao Ando's spaces — at Punta della Dogana, curated by Pinault director Emma Lavigne with the Met, sponsored by Bottega Veneta.
Punta della Dogana · 'Algebra' takes the Arabic 'al-jabr' — recomposing what's broken — as Paulo Nazareth's lens on the slave-ship architectures buried in Punta della Dogana's old customs house, curated for Pinault by Fernanda Brenner with new performance walks across Americas, Caribbean, Africa.
Qatar Pavilion · Qatar's first national pavilion in the Giardini takes the form of Rirkrit Tiravanija's relational tent assembling Sophia Al Maria, Tarek Atoui, Alia Farid, and chef Fadi Kattan to perform, cook, and gather.
Radio Vanessa · The Biennale gets its own pirate radio station — broadcasts (5–10 May) from the studios of Radio Vanessa, a clandestine FM 101.8 station founded in Venice in 1978 and still operating today. Programming includes commissioned soundwork by Nyokabi Kariũki, with conversations and contributions from Éric Baudelaire, blaxTARLINES KUMASI, Eglė Budvytytė, Natalia Lassalle-Morillo, Nonument Group, Gala Porras-Kim, Himali Singh Soin & David Soin Tappeser, Aliaskar Abarkas, Sammy Baloji, Chiara Bersani, Chiara Camoni, Gabrielle Goliath, Ahmet Öğüt, Hito Steyerl and Cecilia Vicuña, alongside scholars and theorists Ute Meta Bauer, Janna Graham, Philippe Pirotte, Sam Thorne, McKenzie Wark, Tim Ingold, Marie Moïse, Telmo Pievani, Aurélie Herbelot, Tommaso Calarco, Paolo Fresu, Els Silvrants-Barclay, Juan Carlos De Martin and Georg Fuchs.
Re Rebaudengo, San Giacomo · Adrián Villar Rojas's 'Return the World II' (2012) anchors the inaugural exhibition of Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo's third venue — a former military powder magazine on the lagoon island of San Giacomo — opening with site-specific commissions and performances.
Re Rebaudengo, San Giacomo · 'Don't Have Hope, Be Hope' is Claire Fontaine's permanent installation for Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo's new island venue on San Giacomo — companion to the inaugural collection show of the same title.
Re Rebaudengo, San Giacomo · Hugh Hayden's 'Huff and a Puff' — a slanted American/Italian fairytale chapel — anchors the outdoor commission programme on Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo's new lagoon-island San Giacomo venue, opening alongside the inaugural exhibitions on May 7.
Re Rebaudengo, San Giacomo · Marking the inauguration of Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo's third permanent venue — a self-sustaining island in the Venetian lagoon — Matt Copson's Fanfare/Lament merges exhibition with performance, fostering a dialogue between visual and sonic. Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist with original music composed by Oliver Leith, extending Copson and Leith's prior operatic collaborations into Sandretto's new island laboratory for art and ecological research.
REM Project · "Baile, botella y baraja" takes its name from the Cuban son lyric for the three things that bring men down — Puerto Rican naïf painter José Ruíz brings his popular-culture canvases to REM Project, Castello, curated by REM Escobar.
Riva San Biasio · Crespo's installation explicitly invokes Borges's Library of Babel and Malraux's 'museum without walls' — title 'Infinito Cabinet' positions ceramic-and-mixed-media objects as relics of an imaginary library.
Russia Pavilion · 'The Tree Is Rooted in the Sky' is a 50-plus roster of young Russian musicians, poets, and philosophers staged in the Giardini — Russia's first pavilion since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, confirmed by Putin's special envoy for cultural cooperation.
Bulgaria Pavilion · The pavilion is staged as the headquarters of a fictional 'post-sovereign, care-oriented' research lab called the Federation of Minor Practices, set just ahead of the present and looking back at the early 2020s.
Salone Verde · The four-time Grammy nominee Jewel presents her largest visual art exhibition to date — paintings, sculptures, tapestries, and sound works that approach motherhood and feminine knowledge as historically situated systems eroded by extraction and acceleration. Anchored by the 8-foot LED-and-NASA-data sculpture 'Heart of the Ocean,' curated for Salone Verde by Joe Thompson in partnership with Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.
San Clemente Palace, Isola di San Clemente · Chris Levine activates a site-specific laser installation above the San Clemente Palace during Biennale opening week — a forest-green beam climbing into the lagoon sky south of Giudecca. An evolution of his 'Higher Power' series first staged on the Al Faisaliah Tower for Noor Riyadh 2024.
San Gregorio's Abbey · 'A Necessary Fiction' wraps a Saudi-led mapping show around San Gregorio's Abbey — historical maps from the 13th century onward inside, Monira Al Qadiri's façade installation tracing thousand-year-old Arab journeys to Northern Europe outside — curated by Sara Almutlaq and Aurora Fonda.
Bahamas Pavilion · A posthumous collaboration: Lavar Munroe finished work begun by John Beadle (1964–2024). Both artists' practices are rooted in Junkanoo, the Bahamian processional festival.
Zimbabwe Pavilion · Pavilion is held at Santa Maria della Pietà, the Vivaldi-era foundling-girls' orphanage on Riva degli Schiavoni; title 'Manyonga' is a Shona word for neuroplasticity used as metaphor.
Santa Maria della Pietà · 'Vessels of Other Worlds' installs three biomorphic titanium vessels — referencing the Catholic Olea Sancta and Bosch's 'Garden of Earthly Delights' — on the altar of the Pietà chapel, with a video triptych live-feeding the show's twin half at Shanghai's Long Museum, marking Wallace Chan's 70th.
Santa Maria della Pietà · Three painters, three approaches to the object: fourteen Picasso still lifes from the Musée national Picasso-Paris meet Morandi's flacons and a new monumental Parmiggiani 'Delocazione', plus an unseen group of objects from Morandi's atelier. A meditation on the Vanitas across three generations, and the first time Cécile Debray has curated outside Paris since taking over the Picasso museum.
Saudi Arabia Pavilion · Awartani is a Saudi-born artist of Palestinian heritage and the fourth woman to represent the Kingdom — her work cites Mahmoud Darwish's poem 'May your tears never dry over stones.'
Indonesia Pavilion · Indonesia's pavilion is the first in Biennale history to be a working printmaking residency — seven Indonesian artists made the works on-site at Cannaregio's Scuola Internazionale di Grafica.
Serbia Pavilion · 'Through Golgotha to Resurrection' is a cycle of figurative paintings reading collective Serbian suffering as Christian passion — selection of Prague-based Predrag Đaković drew Belgrade petitions calling it Serbia's culture-policy nadir.
Congo (Democratic Republic) Pavilion · 'Simba Moto / Seize the Fire' fills the Antico Refettorio of San Marco with nine artists ranging from photographer Sammy Baloji to Belgian-Congolese rapper Damso — one of the few national pavilions including a chart-topping pop musician.
Singapore Pavilion · 'A Pause' elevates the everyday gestures of sitting, waiting, and watching into a slow, contemplative pavilion — Amanda Heng (b. 1951), pioneer of Singaporean performance art and 1988 co-founder of The Artists' Village.
Slovenia Pavilion · The Nonument Group is an artist-research collective mapping 'nonuments' — 20th-century buildings stripped of meaning by political shifts — turning the pavilion into a soundtrack for an erased Yugoslav-era house.
SMAC – San Marco Art Centre · Show is presented by Dia Art Foundation in eight galleries of the new SMAC Venice (Procuratie Vecchie) — opening synchronised with Lee Ufan's 90th birthday and a parallel new display at Dia Beacon.
SMAC – San Marco Art Centre · ~100 Alighiero Boetti works across eight galleries trace 25 years of Arte Povera through the Mappe and Aerei — embroidered Mappe woven by Afghan artisans, Biro drawings on identity — at SMAC San Marco Art Centre, curated by Elena Geuna with Ben Brown Fine Arts.
Spain Pavilion · Vilanova has been collecting found postcards for over twenty years; he turns the Spanish pavilion into a 'postal-shop' that asks how memory and history are constructed and re-sold.
Spazio 996/A · Song E Yoon (b. 1983, Busan) is paired in dialogue with Frédéric Bruly Bouabré (1923–2014), the late Ivorian artist who invented the Bété alphabet of 401 syllabic pictograms.
Grenada Pavilion · 'The Poetics of Correspondence' treats islands, archipelagos, and currents as poetic networks of meaning, sending and receiving signals across the Caribbean — Grenada's ninth pavilion, run since 2015 by commissioner Susan Mains.
Guatemala Pavilion · Las Invisibles centres Maya women whose daily ritual of grinding maize on the comal — a household task — quite literally erodes their bodies; pavilion features the SOY artistic group of three women.
Nauru Pavilion · Nauru's first national pavilion approaches the world's smallest island country (21 km², ~12,500 people) as a symbol of human impact on the natural landscape — both a site manipulated by earth-altering colonial phosphate extraction and the first victim of rising sea levels, facing complete absorption into the Pacific. Beyond catastrophe imagery and spectacle, the artists centre the cultural knowledge and environmental connection that will be lost with the land, composing a metaphysical dialogue on erasure.
Spazio Punch · 'Darkness Visible' marks 50 years since Argentina's 1976 coup with 18 mostly-Argentine artists from León Ferrari to Marta Minujín — title borrowed from Milton's 'Paradise Lost' — co-curated for Spazio Punch by Buenos Aires Museo Moderno's Victoria Noorthoorn and Patricio Orellana.
Moldova Pavilion · Moldova's first-ever official pavilion — Brăila installs an ensemble of carpets suspended by drones inside the deconsecrated Santa Veneranda church, riffing on surveillance turned to support.
Mongolia Pavilion · Pavilion deliberately maps the Mongol Empire's 13th-century connection to Venice (Marco Polo) — Nomin Bold paints in the centuries-old Mongol zurag style with flattened perspective and demon iconography.
Switzerland Pavilion · Project draws on the 1984 Swiss-TV documentary 'Agora — Homosexualité' and queer-public archives — turning the Bruno Giacometti pavilion into a sociological inquiry into living together.
San Marino Pavilion · Northern-Irish painter Mark Francis makes optically-intense paintings driven by science — sonic-vibration patterns, seismic graphs — staged at the new Tana Art Space, a converted timber-and-coal warehouse.
Teatro Goldoni · 'This is Life' is a single-night performance at Teatro Goldoni — Roberto Cuoghi, Gelitin, Luigi Ontani, and Paola Pivi each made unaware of the others' contributions, all responding to Karma Culture Brothers' 2020 song; Cuoghi's piece used a giant crocheted ball that doubles as a legal urn.
Armenia Pavilion · The pavilion is a working sculptor's studio: Zadik Zadikian and assistants cast plaster bricks live for six months, rearranging them as the show unfolds — co-curated by Tony Shafrazi (the dealer who once spray-painted Picasso's Guernica).
Panama Pavilion · Pavilion focuses on the 'lost towns' submerged when Lake Gatún was created for the Panama Canal — Guzmán and Jankovic worked with indigo textiles, sound, and archives rooted in colonial slave-trade indigo cultivation.
The Venice Venice Hotel · 'Il Gesto' transposes Veronese's 'Le Nozze di Cana' (1563, now at the Louvre) into 176 faces — guests, volunteers, and chefs from JR's Refettorio Paris — across the Venetian-Byzantine façade of Palazzo Ca' da Mosto (The Venice Venice Hotel) for the Biennale opening week.
Timor-Leste Pavilion · 'Across Words' centres on Juventino Madeira's video 'FRAZE NE'EBE SEIDAUK HOTU' (An Unfinished Sentence), spoken in Tetun — the youngest of the UN's official languages, and Timor-Leste's debut at Venice.
Türkiye Pavilion · Title 'Gözlerinizden öperim' is the Turkish closing remark literally meaning 'A kiss on the eyes' — Güreş works in textile collage and queer-feminist imagery rooted in Turkish-Kurdish ritual.
Ukraine Pavilion · 'Origami Deer,' the sculpture Zhanna Kadyrova evacuated under fire from frontline Pokrovsk, anchors the pavilion — its title 'Security Guarantees' indicts the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, under which Ukraine surrendered its nuclear arsenal.
United Arab Emirates Pavilion · Pavilion is a sound-architecture by Büro Koray Duman — visitors move through 'zones of close listening' built around oral histories and water-whisper recordings from across the Emirates.
United States of America Pavilion · 'Call Me the Breeze' fills the pavilion with Alma Allen's biomorphic sculptures in bronze, parota wood, marble, and obsidian — the first US Pavilion run by a brand-new nonprofit, after Eggleston and Chase-Riboud declined to participate.
Syrian Arab Republic Pavilion · Syria's first solo-female-artist pavilion and first Biennale appearance after the fall of the Assad regime — Shamma reconstructs the Palmyra funerary towers ISIS destroyed in 2015.
Uruguay Pavilion · Whyte is 85 years old — among the oldest pavilion artists at Venice 2026; her 'soft sculptures' are made from textiles and consumer waste, and the title borrows Nassim Taleb's concept of antifragility.
Uzbekistan Pavilion · The inaugural cohort of the Bukhara Biennial Curatorial School gathers seven artists to consider the Aral Sea — once the world's fourth-largest lake, now over 90% gone after Soviet-era cotton-irrigation diversion — through the storytelling traditions of the Karakalpak-Uzbek peoples. Curated by a team across Tashkent, Tokyo, NYC, and Hanoi for the Uzbekistan Pavilion at the Arsenale.
Victoria Miro Venezia · 'Egg' shows new Flora Yukhnovich paintings at Victoria Miro Venezia, the gallery's San Marco branch — a quick eight-week run timed to the Biennale opening.
