Adriana Varejão, Parede com incisões à la Fontana (Istambul) [Wall with Incisions à la Fontana (Istanbul)], 2011
© Adriana Varejão. Foto [Photo]: Vicente de Mello
Brazil Pavilion
Comigo ninguém pode, Rosana Paulino and Adriana Varejão
Giardini
Two superstars of Brazilian art—Rosana Paulino and Adriana Varejão— participate in a joint show in the Brazilian pavilion. “The exhibition brings together historical works from more than three decades of production by the two artists, in which both address colonial wounds and traumas,” says a project statement. “What is interesting is that these two artists are around the same age but have never collaborated,” Giovanna Querido, the curatorial assistant of the pavilion, tells The Art Newspaper.
The plant popularly known as comigo-ninguém-pode, a majestic but highly toxic flora, is the focus of the exhibition, which includes Aracnes (1999-2026) by Paulino, a concrete wall covered with printed photographs of slave women alongside Varejão’s Still Life amid Ruin (2026), a series of reliefs and murals jutting out from the walls of the pavilion. Atlantic Vermelho (2026), a digital print by Paulino, depicts and mimics the shape and forms of Varejão’s wall reliefs, reflecting the synergy between the two women artists.
Bosnian pavilion
Domus Diasporica, Mladen Bundalo
Palazzo Malipiero
Every Time You Leave, You Are Born Again, 2026, photography, 30 x 21 cm, © Mladen Bundalo. Courtesy the Artist
Bosnia and Herzegovina’s national pavilion at the Venice Biennale invites visitors to do the unusual at an art presentation: touch. In Domus Diasporica, the artist Mladen Bundalo examines themes of diaspora, migration and identity, tracing how notions of home are reshaped by personal, social and political forces. It’s an idea with a strong cultural context: the Bosnian War of the early 1990s displaced more than half the country’s population. Installed in the Palazzo Malipiero, the Biennale presentation encourages visitors to sit at a modest arrangement of tables and chairs and leaf through four photo books documenting the living rooms of Bosnian émigrés, some of whom relocated as far afield as Hawaii and Thailand. Visitors can also hold and explore Bundalo’s interpretation of imagined refugee passports. In adjoining rooms, home videos and archival footage unfold alongside drawings, photographs and installations of moving boxes and letters addressed to absent loved ones. The result is an understated but immersive display, grounded in a meaningful tactile experience.
Japan pavilion
Grass Babies, Moon Babies, Ei Arakawa-Nash
Giardini
Installation of Japan Pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia 2026
Photo: Uli Holz
One of the breakout crowd-pleasers at this year’s Venice Biennale is Ei Arakawa-Nash’s presentation for the Japanese pavilion, a work that balances Instagrammable whimsy with an unexpectedly sharp emotional charge. Grass Babies, Moon Babies invites visitors to pick up and carry one of 208 reflective sunglass-wearing infant dolls through the pavilion and surrounding garden.
Throughout the installation, the babies are shown scaling scaffolding, hanging suspended from ropes and gathering around televisions, while a changing station reveals QR-linked “diaper poems” tied to each doll’s assigned birthday.
The work’s emotional force lies in its physicality. Carrying the dolls through the exhibition gives literal weight to the pavilion’s engagement with themes such as war, care, declining birthrates and human rights. Arakawa-Nash became a parent to twins in 2024, and the exhibition draws on their experience as a queer parent and being part of the Japanese nikkei diaspora. Seeing even the most seasoned art-world figures instinctively and happily cradle the dolls made the exhibition one of the biennale’s most joyful presentations.
Austria pavilion
Seaworld Venice, Florentina Holzinger
Giardini
Seaworld Venice (2026)
Nicole Marianna Wytyczak
The one pavilion on everyone’s lips this year is the Austrian pavilion, which is making waves with its multitude of in-your-face nude participants immersed in and around pools of water, aquatic tanks and damp containers. The exhibition functions as an underwater theme park, sewage treatment plant and sacred building, imagining Venice as a flooded metropolis. “Seaworld Venice complicates the dualisms of purity and pollution, sin and expiation, making visible the waste that is kept out of sight yet remains constantly present,” says the wall text.
In the pavilion, visitors encounter a phalanx of nude women climbing up and down a vast metallic shaft, their bodies entwined around the ledges and handles. Nearby, a naked performer occasionally zooms around on a jet ski while harried pavilion attendants warn onlookers to back away from sewage splashing around a fabricated treatment facility (tip: use the on-site toilets at your discretion). The overall vision is of a dystopian universe drowning and sinking into oblivion.
Belgium pavilion
Miet Warlop, IT NEVER SSST
Giardini
Performers taking part in Miet Warlop’s IT NEVER SSST
© Reinout Hiel
A lot of people, in the moment we are living in, might feel like stomping their feet, shouting, crying, and hitting something with a stick. At the Belgium pavilion, that sense of release bursts through the doors, as long as you make sure to stop by during one of the regular performances. Dancers interact with a wide library of plaster slabs, each one imprinted with simple words, in different languages: hey, dai, sans, salut, etc. The artist Miet Warlop chose these words, in part, for their double meanings when spoken aloud: a nod to our fragile relationship to the truth. She explains that another core mission is to give participants a chance to express their real, raw feelings. “We think it’s important for [participants] to show some humanity, almost as a statement,” she says. It’s a statement that feels worth shouting about.
Canada pavilion
Entre chien et loup (Between dog and wolf)
Giardini
Installation view of Abbas Akhavan: Entre chien et loup
© Abbas Akhavan. Photo: Francesco Barasciutti
Canada’s pavilion this year stands out for its unassuming zen, and for the thoughtful way in which it touches on both a very particular moment in history and a much deeper time. The artist Abbas Akhavan has transformed the space into a greenhouse, steam misting the windows and a large, reflective pond taking up one corner. In that pond are giant Victoria waterlilies, named after the British monarch and exhibited at the Great Exhibition of1851 in London, but whose genus goes back some 200 million years. “What is the relationship to the future if your past is that deep?” Akhavan asks. “What does it mean to look at these plants at another world fair?” Amid the Biennale rush this is a poignant reminder, in the spirit of Koyo Kouoh’s In Minor Keys, to slow down and think.
Congolese pavilion
Simba Moto! Seize the Fire! Saisis le feu!, Sammy Baloji, Arlette Bashizi, Patrick Bongoy, Damso, Gosette Lubondo, Nelson Makengo, Aimé Mpané, Léonard Pongo, Géraldine Tobé
A work from Simba moto! Seize the fire! Saisis le feu!
Photo: Antoine Assumani. Courtesy the Pavilion of the Democratic Republic of the Congo
The Democratic Republic of the Congo has mounted the country’s first national pavilion to successfully debut at the Venice Biennale, centring on fire and other elements as both destructive forces and agents of transformation. Installed in the former refectory of the Scuola Grande di San Marco—a 15th-century building now functioning as a hospital—the exhibition brings together a wide-ranging group work, from tapestries, paintings, photographs, glasswork, sculpture and video. The materiality of the exhibition reflects the diverse practices of young artists working in the Congo and across the country’s diaspora—with the exception of two, the group of artists representing the Congo are all under 40 years old. The pavilion’s trilingual title in Lingala, English and French, is a nod to the country’s layered history. The importance of fire in Congolese cosmology and the cultural importance of blacksmiths emerge as a strong theme, from Géraldine Tobe’s smoke paintings created with a kerosene lamp to Damso’s blown glass containing volcanic sand. For the artists, curator Nadia Yala Kisukidi says, fire has the capability for devastation but is also generative when harnessed.
Singapore Pavilion
A Pause, Amanda Heng
Arsenale
Installation view of A Pause (2025–26)
Image courtesy of Singapore Art Museum
Amidst the Venice frenzy, Amanda Heng offers A Pause at this year’s Singapore pavilion. The space has been transformed with a platform sloping down to the space’s picture window’s over the Arsenale, while showing the artist’s new two-channel video documenting how five Venice residents spend their leisure time. Curated by Selene Yap, the pavilion also shows large editions of her 1990 photos Parts of My Body (reprinted 2026), close-up nude self-portraits, a commemoration of time’s passing and its physical transformations.
Heng, now 75, is best known for her interactive performance projects that provoke considerations of gender and labour, and was an early advocate for both feminism and performance art in Singapore’s conservative 1990s. She founded Singapore’s first artist-run space The Artists’ Village in 1988 and Women in the Arts (WITA) in 1999.
Poland Pavilion
Liquid Tongues, Bogna Burska and Daniel Kotowski
Giardini
Installation view of Liquid Tongues
Photo: Jacopo Salvi (altomare)/ Zacheta Archive
Poland’s ambitious, transfixing, cross-disciplinary pavilion draws on whale song to ponder how we can better communicate—a subject that has never felt more relevant. Artists Bogna Burska and Daniel Kotowski worked with Choir in Motion (Chór w Ruchu), comprising both hearing and Deaf people, to create a series of underwater performances that convert whale sounds into spoken and signed musical compositions. The resulting films are a remarkable testament to collaboration: others involved in the project include the bioaucoustics researcher Ellen C. Garland and the composer Aleksandra Gryka.
It’s also a potently layered conceptual work: the underwater setting, for example, is a space in which sign language can be much more easily understood than spoken word, a hint towards the power and potential of less prevalent forms of communication. It’s also a poignant ode to whales and other non-human beings: many of the songs celebrating the culture, mythology and sense of community surrounding these wonderful creatures.
Saudi Arabia pavilion
May your tears never dry, you who weep over stones, Dana Awartani
Arsenale
An installation view of May your tears never dry, you who weep over stones in the Saudi pavilion © Alvise Busetto
The Saudi Palestinian artist Dana Awartani has recreated 23 floor mosaics that have been destroyed over the past 15 years in Palestine, Syria and Lebanon, from sites including the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the Apamea Synagogue in Hama and the Bureij mosaic in Gaza, which was only discovered in 2022.
Working with craftspeople, she remade the mosaics out of four different types of clay found in Saudi Arabia, choosing the material for its variations of colour. Unlike typical mud brick architecture, she did not add hay to the mud, which she dried in the hot Riyadh sun before arranging them—“like a puzzle”—for the pavilion in Venice. Without any binding agents the mosaics have already begun cracking, in a low note of the sites’ vulnerabilities.
Awartani first began work of this type when she re-created the mosaic of the Grand Mosque of Aleppo in 2022, which had been destroyed by Isis, and then later the floor of an ancient bathhouse in Gaza. But the exhibition here, curated by Antonia Carver with Hafsa Alkhudairi, represents a step up for the artist in its creation of an almost sepulchral atmosphere, with crunchy gravel underfoot evoking an archaeology site. The installation suggests both the continuity of creativity, in the connections between the mosaics despite some being thousands of years apart, and the relentlessness of destruction, particularly in the present moment. Just within the past week the Beiteddine Palace in Lebanon, which Awartani recreated after its 2024 damage, was hit again by another Israeli airstrike.
Korea pavilion
Liberation Space: Fortress/Nest, Goen Choi, Hyeree Ro, Han Kang, Yezoi Hwang, Huju Kim, Chrstian Nyampeta
Giardini
Installation view of Liberation Space: Fortress/Nest
Photo: Donghwan Kam
As protests pepper Venice, Korea’s long, rich culture of activism receives a thoughtful examination in Liberation Space: Fortress/Nest. Works by artists Goen Choi and Hyeree Ro hark back to Korea’s hopeful pocket of years following the Second World War and Japanese colonial rule, but before the 1948 partition sparked the Korean War and decades of American-backed military dictatorship.
Ro’s fragile wall work Bearing (2026), constructed from about 4,000 organza circles coated in wax and layered like scales or leaves, divides the space and invokes a womb or a sanctuary. Goen Choi’s metal rods of Meridian (2026) course through the space, including one that reaches out in symbolic conciliation to the adjacent Japan pavilion. The pavilion, whose other contributors include cultural luminaries including the Nobel literature prize winner Han Kang, also invokes the protests in South Korea that thwarted the 2024 coup attempt, positing that liberation and community are actions not objects.
French pavilion
Comme Saturne, Yto Barrada
Giardini
This thoughtful, layered presentation by the Moroccan-French artist Yto Barrada reflects on the construction of meaning and historical narratives. Using textiles and word play, Barrada nimbly allows technical terms for the weaving and sewing of fabric to transform into descriptions of emotion and metaphor, gliding seamlessly—or rather, with visible seams, in the many textile works on show—from material to evocation. In this her guide is the figure of Saturn, who is the god of agriculture and time—but who also devoured his own children. As she states in a characteristic pun: “Saturne se tourne”.
Comme Saturne is curated by Myriam Ben Salah and includes a celebration of the other women who have represented France at the Biennale before her, as well as the French literary traditions of OuLiPo and Surrealism.
Irish pavilion
Dreamshook, Isabel Nolan
Arsenale
Installation view of Isabel Nolan, Dreamshook
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy of the artist and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin
Isabel Nolan’s pavilion for Ireland, Dreamshook, looks to the Middle Ages—a time of social and religious upheaval that left its mark in the art and culture of the Renaissance. In a suite of tapestries and installation, Nolan reckons with the legacy of that high water mark in European culture, celebrating its achievements while also confronting the realities of class and privilege that it participated in.
She looks to Aldo Manuzio, a 15th-century Venetian who invented the paperback, thereby making literature vastly more widely available—a scenario she pictures in her tapestries of books flying on wings. The work also grounds itself in the architecture of the pavilion space, echoing its windows and arches in an installation that brings her critique of art and class to bear on the biennial itself.
Official. Unofficial. Belarus, Belarus Free Theatre
Chiesa di San Giovanni Evangelista (San Polo, 2351, Venice)
Installation view of Official. Unofficial. Belarus
Courtesy of Belarus Free Theatre. Photo: Dasha Trofimova.
Such is the potency of this collateral exhibition, completely unconnected to the Belarusian government, is that it hits you as soon as you walk through the door. A field of wheat, constructed by a group of recent political prisoners from the country—where freedom of expression is harshly repressed—rises up from a soil bed. Above it, straw spiders, a Belarusian symbol of home protection, have been cast out of metal prison bars. The scent of what the co-curator Daniella Kaliada describes as “a warm August afternoon at a small cemetery in a village with a freshly dug grave”, created by Ukrainian studio ol.factory, fills the air, while testimonies from the prisoners are read out by A-list celebrities including Stephen Fry and Gillian Anderson.
If this sounds like a lot, that’s because it is, and the rest of the pavilion is equally hard hitting. A number of works explore the issue of surveillance, including a 17th-century Dutch confession booth that, when you enter, runs a (randomised, for GDPR purposes) facial recognition process on you. It’s unsettling and, as Belarus’s first independent contribution to the Biennale, important.
The action, organised by the campaign group Art Not Genocide Alliance, will culminate in a rally in the city
In this week’s special Venice Biennale episode, Ben Luke reviews In Minor Keys along with Louisa Buck and Jane Morris, interviews artists Gabrielle Goliath and Lubaina Himid and meets writer Saidiya Hartman. Digital editor Alexander Morrison hears about a collateral event by Belarus Free Theatre, and Ben Luke learns about the restoration of two paintings by Tintoretto.
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