The Venice Biennale, contemporary art’s most closely watched international showcase, has opened its 61st edition, with more than 80 countries staging their own national pavilions across the city.
“In Minor Keys,” the theme of the Biennale, envisioned by the late curator Koyo Kouoh, is felt across the city as artists and curators ask visitors to slow down and pay attention—to their surroundings, and to a great deal of art.
And while controversy and loss have characterized the run-up to the Biennale’s opening, that spirit of careful contemplation registers across the national pavilions, from major presentations in the Giardini to an audio experience in a monastic garden next to the train station.
Here, we share the 10 standout national pavilions at the 2026 Venice Biennale.
The Bahamian pavilion
Artists: John Beadle and Lavar Munroe
Curated by: Dr. Krista Thompson
Venue: San Trovaso Art Space, Dorsoduro
The late artist John Beadle has long deserved a Venice moment. The Bahamian artist was originally slated to represent his country at the Biennale in 2015, but that presentation never came to be. After his death last year, The Bahamas’s arts community rallied to give his work the international platform it had long warranted. Largely privately funded by the country’s creative community, “In Another Man’s Yard” is itself an act of communal love—and one of the Biennale’s most affecting national pavilions.
Curated by Dr. Krista Thompson, the exhibition places Beadle in dialogue with fellow Bahamian artist Lavar Munroe, who is based in Baltimore. The two artists are connected by Junkanoo, The Bahamas’s centuries-old processional festival, whose traditions of costume-making, performance, and collective labor shaped Beadle’s practice both conceptually and materially.
That ethos carries through the works’ materials—cardboard, salvaged objects, remnants of Junkanoo costumes, and sailcloth—which tell stories of migration, labor, and survival. Beadle’s recurring forms, including mobile houses and oars, point to lives often pushed to the margins.
The exhibition’s emotional core is a sculptural installation that channels Junkanoo’s “rush out,” a procession honoring the deceased. Though the project began taking shape only last September, Munroe created the installation on-site in Venice in just a month, with extensive community support. Conceived as a posthumous collaboration with Beadle, it incorporates salvaged Junkanoo costumes and materials from Beadle’s studio, including tiny cardboard bird sculptures.
Upstairs, Munroe’s monumental 11-panel painting deepens the tribute, imagining a Junkanoo procession for Beadle. Together, the works feel less like a memorial than a collective act of remembrance and legacy- building—created, as the organizers noted, by thousands of hands.
—Casey Lesser
The Austrian Pavilion
Artist: Florentina Holzinger
Curated by: Nora-Swantje Almes
Venue: Austrian Pavilion, Giardini della Biennale
Austrian choreographer and theater-maker Florentina Holzinger is insistent that her performance-turned-installation is not a spectacle. This might be hard to believe given the shock value of confronting things we generally try to avoid—our own waste, nudity, bodily discomfort—but once the initial provocation wears off, the implications of system failure (ecological, civic, even the Biennale itself, now without a jury) begin to sink in.
“SEAWORLD VENICE” turns the Austrian Pavilion into a closed-loop system powered by the bodily waste of the audience. In the central courtyard, visitors are encouraged to use one of two portable toilets that feed a filtration system connected to an aquarium-like tank inhabited by a live performer wearing nothing but a scuba mask. Like a siren or a mascot, the performer watches the chaos unfolding in the adjacent engine room, where pavilion attendants attempt to contain murky brown water spewing from valves and tubes. “It’s flooding,” one calls out as another scoops buckets in what increasingly feels like a futile attempt.
The pavilion’s energies are calibrated. A massive weathervane spins slowly, performers suspended from rigging and harnesses. Traditionally used to signal shifting winds and impending floods, the weathervane becomes both a symbol of hope and a warning system. Turn around, and a jet ski circles through the flooded interior—a nod to tourism-fueled ecological catastrophe.
The project opened on the Venetian lagoon with Holzinger herself suspended as the clapper of a recovered bell hoisted from the canal by crane, striking violently against its sides above the water. Those familiar with the artist’s body-horror performances had the chance to wince as another performer hung beneath Holzinger by hooks piercing the skin of her shoulders. The bell now sits outside the pavilion, where, every hour for the next seven months, a performer’s body tolls it in the same suspended fashion. If Venice has long aestheticized its own fragility, Holzinger forces visitors to sit inside the infrastructure of collapse itself.
—Jameson Johnson
The Holy See pavilion
Artists: Alexander Kluge, Benedictine Nuns of the Abbey of St. Hildegard Eibingen, Bhanu Kapil, Brian Eno, Carminho, Caterina Barbieri, Devonté Hynes, FKA Twigs, Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst, Ilda David, Jim Jarmusch, Kali Malone, Kazu Makino, Laraaji, Meredith Monk, Moor Mother, Otobong Nkanga, Patti Smith, Precious Okoyomon, Raúl Zurita, Soundwalk Collective, Suzanne Ciani, Tatiana Bilbao – MAIO Architects – DOGMA, and Terry Riley
Curated by: Hans Ulrich Obrist and Ben Vickers
Venue: The Mystical Garden of the Discalced Carmelites, Cannaregio and Santa Maria Ausiliatrice Complex, Castello
At the Mystical Garden of the Discalced Carmelites, a hidden monastic garden near the train station in Cannaregio, visitors to the Holy See pavilion put on headphones before setting out on a path through lush greenery. Almost immediately, celestial music fills the ears. The opening work, by Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, is warm and all-consuming, setting the tone for an exhibition that is less about looking and more about physically and spiritually absorbing the work.
Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Ben Vickers, the pavilion centers on Saint Hildegard of Bingen, the 12th-century abbess and mystic whose many talents included major contributions to musical composition. “Fundamental to her theology was the union of heaven and earth through song,” Vickers told Artsy. Hildegard understood “sound and song and music” as “the truest act of prayer.”
That idea comes alive as you move through the garden, listening to new commissions by artists including Brian Eno, FKA twigs, Meredith Monk, and Patti Smith. The musical group Soundwalk Collective helped shape the pavilion’s ambitious audio experience, weaving the works into a seamless journey. As you drift from one part of the garden to the next, and from one sound piece to the next, it becomes difficult to tell where the art and reality begin and end. FKA twigs’s piece surrounds you with the anxious buzz of bees; Patti Smith’s voice arrives whispering in the ears. The effect is enveloping, occasionally eerie, and—cliché as it may sound—heavenly.
The setting deepens the experience. Vickers noted that the garden already carried “this incredible contemplative context”: it is overseen by a Carmelite order and organized around Saint Teresa of Ávila’s seven “mansions” of the soul. Soundwalk Collective extends that spiritual architecture through a site-specific instrument—an antenna that tracks plant life, bioelectricity, and atmospheric shifts. Vickers described it as “almost like a technological sensing” that brings to life Hildegard’s idea of viriditas, the greening force of nature.
—C.L.
The Saudi Arabian pavilion
Artist: Dana Awartani
Curated by: Antonia Carver
Venue: Campo della Tana, Arsenale
Dana Awartani transforms the Saudi Arabian pavilion into an imagined archaeological site of fragile clay mosaics that crack slowly under the pressure of time and movement. Curated by Antonia Carver, “May your tears never dry, you who weep over stones” draws on the geometries and material histories of destroyed hammams and mosque floors across the Arab world while nodding to Venice’s own history of mosaic and craft traditions. The installation invites visitors to move through intricate geometric, floral, and faunal floor patterns that reference sites across Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine damaged or destroyed by war and violence in recent years.
Awartani—who is of Palestinian and Syrian heritage, holds Jordanian nationality, and was born and raised in Saudi Arabia—has long worked through questions of craft, preservation, and inherited forms of making. Here, those concerns extend beyond the imagery itself into the labor required to produce the work. Created over 30,000 hours in collaboration with 32 Saudi-based artisans, the installation comprises more than 29,000 handmade clay bricks.
Rather than asking viewers to tower over the work as they might at an archaeological site, Awartani raises the installation just enough that visitors move alongside it, shifting the relationship between audience and artifact away from detached observation. The pavilion is visually arresting in scale and detail, but it refuses to become a purely aesthetic encounter—each crack and fissure pulls visitors back toward the histories of violence and loss embedded in the sites it references.
—J.J.
The Moroccan pavilion
Artist: Amina Agueznay
Curated by: Meriem Berrada
Venue: Arsenale, Artiglierie
Traditional Moroccan carpets are revered worldwide—and the techniques behind them are increasingly finding a place in contemporary art. For Morocco’s first national pavilion at the Arsenale, artist Amina Agueznay foregrounds that legacy through her sweeping installation Asǝṭṭa (2026)—the title is an Amazigh term for ritual weaving.
he pavilion brings together the work of 166 Moroccan artisans from across the country who collectively completed the ambitious project in six months. The result reflects deep expertise in weaving, embroidery, basketry, jewelry-making, and other specialized techniques.
Agueznay approaches weaving not merely as decoration or function, but as a communal space where ideas, histories, and forms of creativity intermingle. Woven panels wrap around the room and drape from the ceiling like tapestries or suspended sculptures, blending the earthy palette and geometric patterns of Morocco with details that nod to Venice: shimmering sequins that evoke reflections on water, abstract forms suggesting the city’s map, and Murano glass pieces that reference historic trade routes.
Personal symbols run through the installation, as well, including protective “eye” motifs that pay homage to Agueznay’s mother, the Moroccan artist Malika Agueznay. There is even a bed of snow-white wool where tired visitors can rest. The result celebrates Morocco’s stunning textile traditions while also revealing how such rituals shift and build over time—how even the most ancestral art forms evolve through collaboration and experimentation.
—C.L.
The Belgian pavilion
Artist: Miet Warlop
Curated by: Caroline Dumalin
Venue: Belgian Pavilion, Giardini della Biennale
Miet Warlop turns the Belgian pavilion into something between a locker room, an arena, and an active construction site. “IT NEVER SSST” marks the first time Belgium has centered performance in its pavilion at the Venice Biennale, unfolding continuously over the run of the exhibition as performers in black jerseys move through waves of music, sweat, noise, and destruction.
A bleacher-like wooden armature lines the space, numbered towels hang from hooks, and instruments cling to the walls as if the entire pavilion were waiting to be played.
Throughout the installation, plaster tiles bearing fragmented greetings, commands, and utterances in multiple languages—“hello,” “salam,” “stop,” “why,” “ha”—move from hand to hand as both language and sound. Some read as attempts at communication, while others function more like rhythm. Tiles bearing “SSST” (the equivalent of “shhh”) are gradually replaced by words and utterances in the performers’ own languages. Nearby, workers continuously pour plaster into silicone molds only for the newly formed objects to be smashed apart during performances.
The pavilion borrows heavily from the visual language of sport, but it feels less about competition than repetition and endurance. The performances drift closer to ritual and to children’s games: hand-clapping sequences performed with plaster hands, a giant parachute wave, spinning, dancing, stomping. Elsewhere, newly produced relief sculptures made by students from the nearby Accademia di Belle Arti depict performers mid-action, monumentalizing fleeting athletic gestures inside a system that never fully stops.
—J.J.
The Argentinian pavilion
Artist: Matías Duville
Curated by: Josefina Barcia
Venue: Arsenale
Upon arriving at the Argentine pavilion, visitors are told to stay on the white paths. Inside, that instruction immediately makes sense: The entryway opens into a dark, almost cinematic environment where a field of snow-white salt undulates across the floor, marked with drawings in black charcoal. This is Monitor Yin Yang (2026), a site-specific installation by the Buenos Aires–based artist Matías Duville, curated by Josefina Barcia.
Duville has long worked with drawing, but here he pushes it off the page and into an environment visitors can physically enter. The yin-yang of the title goes deeper than the use of black and white; it’s felt in the tensions running through the space—the bright salt against the black charcoal, the invitation to wander versus the instruction to keep to a path, the soft, impressionable surface against the weight of bodies moving across it.
The work is a landscape of sorts, its marks suggesting topographies and plant life, though it could also be read as one giant abstract composition. A sound piece created from environmental data gathered in Venice deepens that sense of disorientation. Duville draws us in, but also keeps us slightly off balance, asking us to move with attention and care.
—C.L.
The Indian Pavilion
Artists: Alwar Balasubramaniam, Ranjani Shettar, Sumakshi Singh, Skarma Sonam Tashi, and Asim Waqif
Curated by: Amin Jaffer
Venue: Isolotto, Arsenale
Curated by Amin Jaffer, “Geographies of Distance: remembering home” is India’s first Venice pavilion in seven years. It brings together five artists representing India’s geographic diversity, with installations using materials deeply rooted in the country’s craft traditions, including clay, thread, bamboo, and papier-mâché.
Though the works occasionally veer in different formal directions, they settle into a shared atmosphere shaped by scale and material precision.
The standout installation belongs to Sumakshi Singh, whose life-sized reconstruction of her demolished family home in New Delhi stretches through the back of the pavilion in suspended embroidered thread. Visitors move through and around walls, doorways, staircases, and even individual bricks that the artist measured by hand before the home was torn down. The structure of a home becomes something ghostly and delicate. Singh recently received a Special Mention at the 2025 Loewe Foundation Craft Prize for Monument, a thread-based recreation of a historic column from Delhi’s Qutb Minar complex.
Nearby, Asim Waqif’s sprawling bamboo scaffolding installation cuts through the pavilion like a structure permanently caught mid-construction—or evolving out of itself. The bamboo was brought in raw and assembled on-site. Several exhibitions in the Biennale are using fragrance as a material, but this pavilion produces its own: sweet bamboo, clay, and dust linger in the air—surely the familiar smells of someone’s home.
—J.J.
The Japanese pavilion
Artist: Ei Arakawa-Nash
Curated by: HORIKAWA Lisa and TAKAHASHI Mizuki
Venue: Giardini
At the Japanese pavilion, visitors can temporarily adopt a baby—a baby doll, that is. Each one wears tiny sunglasses and has the weight of a four-month-old infant. Grass Babies, Moon Babies (2026) is by Japanese American performance artist Ei Arakawa-Nash, who was inspired in part by their recent experience becoming a parent to twins.
There are 208 dolls in all: some sit on tables waiting to be picked up; others lounge in the greenery around the pavilion, dangle from armatures, or sit facing a film by the artist. Visitors are invited to carry them through the space and, at the end, change their diapers and scan a QR code to receive a short poem corresponding to each doll’s assigned birthday.
The premise is wonderfully strange, and the pavilion is undeniably humorous—but the humor doesn’t flatten the experience. Holding one of these weighted bodies in public quickly shifts from silly to alert, even vulnerable, especially as the dolls’ reflective sunglasses mirror the caregiver back to themselves. The work makes you acutely aware of your own gestures, how you hold the baby, and how you see yourself in this act of public caregiving. Arakawa-Nash turns the pavilion into a playful, wonderfully chaotic reflection on care—from the awkward and performative to the unexpectedly moving.
—C.L.
The German pavilion
Artists: Sung Tieu and Henrike Naumann
Curated by: Kathleen Reinhardt
Venue: German Pavilion, Giardini della Biennale
No national pavilion weaponizes institutional self-consciousness quite like Germany’s. Curated by Kathleen Reinhardt, “Ruin” continues a decades-long tradition of artists turning the pavilion’s Nazi-era architecture into both subject and antagonist—a lineage that includes Hans Haacke’s 1993 destruction of the marble floor in Germania and Maria Eichhorn’s 2022 excavation of the building’s foundations.
This year, Sung Tieu and Henrike Naumann eschew destruction for accumulation. The pavilion becomes a dense tableau of charged symbols and competing narratives in which East German history, migration, militarization, and bureaucracy surface through the aesthetics and objects of daily life.
Tieu wraps the pavilion’s façade in a 1:1 trompe l’œil mosaic reconstruction of the East Berlin housing complex where she grew up—once one of the largest dormitory sites for Vietnamese contract workers in the GDR and now in the process of being torn down. Built from more than 3 million marble tesserae, the façade overlays the visual language of socialist housing onto the pavilion’s fascist architecture through the Venetian tradition of mosaic. Inside, her minimalist steel and aluminum sculptures gesture at the bureaucratic systems that governed those same Vietnamese workers in East Germany—many of whom were left without work or legal certainty after reunification.
Naumann’s The Home Front (2026) transforms the central hall into an East German interior pushed to the point of ideological overload. Mint-green walls reference former Soviet barracks while tacky curtains line the pavilion’s towering windows. Chairs sliced in half are mounted to the walls or tucked beneath crown molding, forming a domestic frieze around the hall.
Furniture, locks, weapons, and decorative objects flatten into relief-like, almost hieroglyphic forms.
Naumann, who died suddenly in February after finalizing plans for the installation, spent much of her practice examining the unresolved aftereffects of reunification and the ways ideology survives through taste, décor, and the home itself. The exhibition keeps returning to the idea that history settles into ordinary objects long after political transitions are declared complete.
—J.J.
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