Our Guide to New York Art Week 2026 https://ift.tt/cK3FdrI

New York is never short on great art. But New York Art Week is exceptional: Over the course of a week, an unusual collision of high-quality work descends on the city, spanning a half-dozen fairs—including Frieze New York, Independent New York, TEFAF New York, and NADA New York—alongside gallery openings from Tribeca to the Upper East Side, and auction previews ahead of the marquee sales at Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and Phillips.

While it’s an especially exciting time for the out-of-town art crowd, it might be even more of a joy for New Yorkers. The art comes to us. You can go about your regular week with plenty of excuses to slip out of the office to catch a fair, end the day at openings, or make time for a gallery talk or museum visit.

Most gallery shows and auction house previews are free and open to the public, while fairs and many museums require tickets. Plenty of these exhibitions will remain on view after the week is over, yet there is something energizing about seeing it all amid the rush.

Instead of one long list, we’ve mapped three routes for tackling the week, each built around a different neighborhood and mood: polished and grand uptown, high-energy in Chelsea, and fresh and off the beaten path downtown. We’ve also put together a Google Maps list so you can save the key stops to your phone.

Route 1: Uptown, from TEFAF to Sotheby’s to the Studio Museum

Best for: A polished day of museum-quality art, blue-chip galleries, and an uptown finish.

While you might think the city’s art scene revolves around downtown haunts, this itinerary might change your mind. Between TEFAF, Sotheby’s, Madison Avenue galleries, and the newly reopened Studio Museum in Harlem, Upper Manhattan offers a day that feels stylish and very New York.

Take in TEFAF

Begin with TEFAF New York (May 15th to 19th) at the Park Avenue Armory, where the building itself is part of the experience. The main drill hall and corridors lend the fair a sense of occasion that suits TEFAF’s mix of Old Masters, modern and contemporary art, design, and jewelry. I’ll be especially keen to see Kathleen Ryan’s gem-encrusted fruit sculptures at Gagosian’s booth; an Ithell Colquhoun painting presented by Richard Saltoun Gallery; and a presentation of Formafantasma designs with Friedman Benda.

TEFAF also offers a talks program each day. Two I’m eyeing are “Who Supports Art Now? Patronage in a Shifting Cultural Landscape” on Friday, May 15th at 4:30 p.m., and a conversation with the fantastic painter Eva Helene Pade, who has a solo booth with Thaddaeus Ropac, on Saturday, May 16th, at 2:30 p.m.

Pop into the Sotheby’s preview

At Sotheby’s, in its stylish new home of the Breuer Building on Madison Avenue, you can see works from the May marquee sales before many of them leave public view, maybe forever. The best part: Auction previews are free and open to the public, even if you have no intention of bidding. There are exhibitions on view through May 18th, but you’ll need to stop by before May 13th to see the most closely watched piece: Mark Rothko’s Brown and Blacks in Reds (1957), estimated to sell for $100 million, from the “Robert Mnuchin: Collector at Heart Evening Auction.”

Sotheby’s is the most natural stop on this uptown route, but fellow auction houses Christie’s and Phillips are worth keeping in mind, too, especially if you’re near Rockefeller Center or Park Avenue. Their previews are also free and open to the public, and they offer the same low-pressure chance to see major works up close before they head to auction.

Gallery hop along Madison Avenue

With many galleries clustered along or near Madison Avenue, gallery hopping on the Upper East Side is efficient and comes with an air of glamour. The Madison Avenue Spring Gallery Walk takes place on Saturday, May 16th, with participating galleries from East 57th to East 86th Streets. Here are some shows I’m particularly excited about:

• Eliza Douglas at Gagosian’s Park and 75th outpost: Douglas is best known for her gripping performances with Anne Imhof and walking Balenciaga runways, but she’s an accomplished painter, too. This show marks her debut New York solo with Gagosian.
• Magdalena Abakanowicz at GRAY New York: A selection of work from the 1960s to 1990s tracing the Polish artist’s evolving inquiry into the human condition.
• David Hammons and Jannis Kounellis at White Cube: The first two-person exhibition of the legendary artists’ work in more than 30 years.
• “Set in Stone” at David Zwirner’s East 69th Street location: Organized with Paris’s Galerie Kugel, this clever exhibition pairs contemporary works with hardstone sculptures dating from antiquity to the 19th century.

Make a museum visit—or two

When it comes to museums, you’ll need to make some tough choices. Here are the ones I’d prioritize:

• “Costume Art” and Raphael at The Met: The Costume Institute’s annual exhibition pairs roughly 200 garments with 200 artworks spanning 5,000 years in the Met’s new 12,000-square-foot Condé M. Nast Galleries. While there, don’t miss the sweeping Raphael survey.
• Carol Bove at the Guggenheim: The sculptor’s first museum survey spans 25 years of work and sings in the museum’s architecture.
• Joan Semmel at the Jewish Museum: A long-overdue New York museum moment for the 90-year-old artist. The show closes May 31st, so this is an opportune time to catch it.
• The Studio Museum in Harlem: My top recommendation, especially if you haven’t yet visited the museum’s stunning new home on 125th Street. Newly on view is “Fade,” featuring 17 early-career artists of African and Afro Latinx descent, plus Kapwani Kiwanga’s new site-specific commission. On May 17th, the museum hosts Studio Sundays, with free admission and programming for kids.

Route 2: From Frieze to NADA and Chelsea galleries

Best for: Those who want the week’s biggest fair, major galleries, and an easy Chelsea itinerary.

Frieze New York (May 13th to 17th) is the anchor of the week—and conveniently, it’s an easy walk to younger counterpart fair NADA (May 13th to 17th) and major gallery shows in Chelsea. If you’re seeking out the week’s greatest hits, this route is for you.

Frieze first

Frieze New York returns to The Shed in Hudson Yards. This year’s theme, “Bold Solos, Global Dialogues,” promises a high percentage of single-artist presentations, which typically make for a more enjoyable fair. Some solo booths I’m looking forward to include Pia Camil at OMR, Reika Takebayashi at Public Gallery, and Joe Bradley at David Zwirner.

NADA next

For a change of register, head to NADA New York at the Starrett-Lehigh Building—which is also where you’ll find the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair. NADA typically hosts smaller and younger galleries, with a focus on emerging and lesser-known artists. Some booths and painters to watch include Shangfeng Zhang at Latitude Gallery, Margaret R. Thompson at Red Arrow Gallery, and Emily Ponsonby at Gillian Jason Gallery.

If you want guidance, NADA is offering tours of the fair on May 16th. And if you’re serious about buying and need help, you can book a private walkthrough with an advisor—though it will set you back $500.

Hop through Chelsea galleries

Chelsea galleries are a moving target, with plenty of new shows opening and more already on view. Thursday, May 14th is a solid night to visit, as galleries stay open late for the ADAA Chelsea Gallery Walk. A few shows at the top of my list:

• Lisa Yuskavage and Gerhard Richter at David Zwirner: From Yuskavage’s lush, humorous figurative paintings to Richter’s celebrated landscapes, there’s a feast of major painting across Zwirner’s spaces in Chelsea.
• David Hockney, Emily Kame Kngwarreye, and Paul Thek at Pace Gallery: Pace shows the range of its program, from Hockney’s iPad drawings to Kam Kngwarray’s celebrated paintings to its debut Thek survey.
• Giuseppe Penone at Gagosian: Major installations lend fresh spotlight to the Arte Povera artist’s interest in nature, human intervention, and time.
• Katharina Fritsch at Matthew Marks Gallery: A must for anyone drawn to sculpture that is deadpan, uncanny, and instantly memorable.
• Huguette Caland and Kelly Akashi at Lisson Gallery: Two starkly different yet equally intriguing shows. Akashi is known for visceral bronze and glass sculptures, while Caland’s show traces five decades across painting, drawing, sculpture, and writing.
• Tony Lewis at Olney Gleason: Lewis’s debut New York solo brings together drawings reflecting his ongoing research into the Atlantic slave trade.
• Erwin Wurm at Lehmann Maupin: A survey of Wurm’s absurdist sculptures, with a focus on the humor of the figure.

Make time for a gallery talk or Whitney stop

If you’d like something more structured than gallery hopping, Saturday brings several programs. On May 16th at 10:30 a.m., Sean Kelly Gallery hosts a talk between Lindsay Adams, whose solo show is on view, and curator Sadaf Padder. A few blocks away at 11 a.m., Galerie Lelong hosts a walkthrough of its Lucia Laguna exhibition with curator Larry Ossei-Mensah. Later that day, Hauser & Wirth launches the latest issue of its Ursula magazine with Firelei Báez, whose work is on view at the gallery’s 22nd Street location. Earlier in the week, on May 12th at 5 p.m., Karma is hosting a talk at its Chelsea gallery between artist Jeremy Frey and art historian Thom Collins.

The obvious museum pairing here is the Whitney, especially if you’re moving downtown from The Shed through Chelsea. The Whitney Biennial 2026 is on view, and a highlight of the week will likely be Jonathan González’s three-hour durational performance on the museum’s outdoor terraces from May 15th to 17th, co-presented with Frieze. On Friday, May 15th, it’s also the museum’s Free Friday Night, and González performs from 6 to 9 p.m.

Route 3: Downtown, from Independent to Tribeca

Best for: Discovery, younger galleries, downtown energy, and a Friday night gallery crawl.

Finally, we follow the art-world crowd downtown. Independent (May 14th to 17th) takes over Pier 36, Tribeca openings abound, and a visit to the New Museum may be in order. This route offers a sleeker fair experience, smaller galleries, and an evening of openings that will almost certainly be buzzing.

Start with Independent

Begin with Independent at Pier 36, the fair’s new, larger home on the Lower East Side waterfront. Compared with the week’s bigger fairs, Independent tends to feel more edited, with strong solo presentations—more than 70% of this year’s 70-plus booths—and fresh work by younger and underrecognized artists alike.

I’ll be looking out for Uffner & Liu’s first solo presentation of Bernadette Despujols, as well as PENTIMENTI’s solo presentation of Dan Gunn, part of Independent’s Debuts program for artists having their first New York solo outing.

Take a lunch break in SoHo

While Tribeca is the place to be on Friday evening, Hauser & Wirth’s Wooster Street gallery offers a strong midday anchor. At noon, the gallery hosts a walkthrough of Allison Katz’s first major New York solo show, “Outta the Bag,” with curator Cecilia Alemani. Katz’s paintings often consider the act of looking itself, usually with a wry sense of humor. To stay in the mood, make a reservation across the street at Manuela, the gallery’s restaurant, for lunch surrounded by eye-watering art.

Spend the night in Tribeca

The centerpiece of the downtown scene is Tribeca Gallery Night on Friday, May 15th when more than 80 galleries stay open from 6 to 8 p.m. The streets will be thick with gallery-goers, and some spaces will be packed. This is a nice opportunity to forego too much planning and instead wander door to door, following the crowds spilling onto the sidewalk.

Some shows I’d recommend:

• Julie Mehretu at Marian Goodman Gallery: Mehretu’s seventh solo with the gallery brings together recent bodies of work featured in her 2024 Venice exhibition at Palazzo Grassi.
• Lynette Yiadom-Boakye at Jack Shainman Gallery: New paintings and works on paper by the London-based artist, on view across both Jack Shainman locations.
• Martin Wong at P·P·O·W: Wong’s first New York solo in more than a decade is anchored by Popeye cutouts painted in his signature brick motif.
• Usha Seejarim at Southern Guild: The inaugural exhibition at the Cape Town–founded gallery’s new Tribeca space, and Seejarim’s U.S. solo debut. The show runs through May 17th.
• Janet Werner at Anat Ebgi: Werner’s first New York solo with the gallery features the Montreal-based painter’s strange, alluring figures, often women culled from fashion imagery.
• Jane Yang-D’Haene at Bienvenu Steinberg & C: The Brooklyn-based, South Korean–born ceramist is increasingly known for fresh takes on the Korean moon-jar tradition.

Make a museum visit

For a change of pace, take a more leisurely stroll through one of these downtown museum shows:

• “New Humans: Memories of the Future” at the New Museum: The first show in the museum’s expanded OMA-designed building explores how artists, writers, and scientists have shaped what it means to be human, with more than 150 artists, including Meriem Bennani, Pierre Huyghe, Wangechi Mutu, Anicka Yi, Francis Bacon, and Salvador Dalí.
• Ceija Stojka at The Drawing Center: The first major U.S. exhibition of the self-taught Austrian Romani artist, writer, and Holocaust survivor brings together more than 60 paintings, drawings, books, and archival materials.

Explore East Side galleries

If you find yourself heading to the Lower East Side or East Village, I’d recommend making time for:

• Nick Doyle and GaHee Park at Perrotin: Doyle continues his explorations with denim, while Park offers typically wonderful, strange paintings of figures, still lifes, and interiors.
• Keith Haring at The Brant Foundation: This sprawling show focuses on Haring’s breakthrough years of 1980–83, fittingly set in the neighborhood where the artist had his formative years. It’s a quintessentially New York art story—and a fitting endpoint to New York Art Week.
• Aiza Ahmed at Half Gallery: Ahmed is a closely watched, rising artist exploring issues of migration and diasporic histories, particularly on the Indian subcontinent. She opens this new show, curated by Los Angeles gallerist Rajiv Menon, on May 15th at 6 to 8 p.m.

Click here to save Artsy’s New York Google Map so you can navigate Art Week with ease.

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5 Standout Artworks at Carnegie International 2026 https://ift.tt/CZrpe0x

This spring, Abraham González Pacheco’s monumental series of murals, collectively titled Orogenic (2026), engulfs the façade of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. These concrete, metal, and pigment depictions of a maelstrom of archaeological objects take inspiration from the museum’s collection and introduce viewers to the 59th edition of the institution’s Carnegie International. The newly commissioned work suggests a key theme of the show: the ways in which museums and history itself have assigned value to certain civilizations, acquiring and displaying their objects in fraught ways.

Carnegie International is the longest-running contemporary art survey in North America. Industrialist Andrew Carnegie established the annual show in 1896 with a vision to boost the city’s cultural footprint. Though it initially centered on European painting and Gilded Age art, the exhibition has evolved over the past century to become a research-driven project that enlivens the city every four years. Different curatorial teams take the helm each time, bringing diverse, global art practices to Pittsburgh in order to consider timely sociopolitical questions.

This edition of the exhibition, which opened on May 2 and will be on view through January 3, 2027, is its most expansive to date. It features over sixty artists and collectives, as well as more than thirty commissions. Curators Ryan Inouye, Danielle A. Jackson, and Liz Park have chosen the title “If the word we,” from an essay by the Egyptian writer Haytham el-Wardany, which considers collective experience and connection in the face of global challenges. The curators propose that the world “cannot be fully understood from a single point of view or universal framework,” but rather through ongoing inquiries that help us “navigate [the] contradictions of life while being receptive to the frequencies of our surroundings.”

Their ideas unfold in the museum and sites across Pittsburgh, from the Kamin Science Center to the Mattress Factory. Throughout, artists consider themes ranging from geopolitics to diasporic and Indigenous histories, often through immersive, site-responsive installations and architectural interventions. During the opening days, Artsy was on-site to discover standout works. The following five newly commissioned projects offer compelling entry points to the show:

Cinthia Marcelle, Green Hall Annex (2026)

B. 1974, Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Lives and works in São Paulo.

A centerpiece of the exhibition, Cinthia Marcelle’s monumental installation reflects on political and cultural parallels between the United States and Brazil. Its subject is the aftermath of the far-right attacks on the U.S. Capitol and on federal buildings in Brasília, Brazil’s capital city, on January 6, 2021, and January 8, 2023, respectively, and the subsequent processes of renovation and repair.

The work takes the form of a flat-roofed pavilion with minimalist pillars, which evokes the targeted government buildings in Brasília, designed by Brazilian modernist architect Oscar Niemeyer. The curators have installed the piece in the museum’s striking Hall of Sculpture, which features white marble pillars sourced from the same quarries used for the Parthenon. Here, the curators reference the Neoclassical architecture of the U.S. Capitol.

Marcelle has blanketed the gallery and structure of her roof with green carpet. It’s sourced from the same manufacturer responsible for the green carpet removed from Brazil’s government buildings following the attacks. On the underside, the artist collaged newspaper clippings in English and Portuguese from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the New York Times, and Brazilian publications that address political events and legal proceedings. In one corner of the room, the carpet is slightly lifted, revealing fragments of these newspaper clippings beneath. The work prompts reflection on how we record, interpret, and circulate history and current events.

The installation furthers Marcelle’s larger project to explore how political systems are organized and dismantled. It expands on her 2023 exhibition “Blue Hall Annex” at Galeria Luisa Strina in São Paulo, which similarly took blue carpet—which replaced the damaged carpet in the Brazilian government buildings—as a metaphor.

Dineo Seshee Bopape, Fiela, fiela (I’ve come to take you home) (2026)

B. 1981, Polokwane, South Africa. Lives and works in Johannesburg.

Dineo Seshee Bopape aligns with the exhibition’s larger theme of “we” as she continues her research into the relationship between land, memory, and healing. Her immersive, multimedia environment in the Carnegie Museum’s lobby gallery references Yoruba cleansing rituals. The circular structure, made of clay and soil, invites visitors to gather and pause; jute mats and plastic chairs encourage respite and extended viewing. Bopape produced an ambient soundtrack that loops from various speakers suspended throughout the space. Mounds of dirt, rocks, cowrie shells, and crystals are dispersed throughout alongside several projections onto the walls and floor that show nature scenes and snippets of Yoruba rituals. One, projected onto a stone, features a figure who rhythmically sweeps the earth.

The artist says that sweeping, a recurring motif in her work, is a metaphor for spiritual cleansing and a meditative gesture with a mantra-like potential. The artist also noted in a catalogue interview with curator Danielle A. Jackson that the “vibrations and rhythms of the strokes” collectively resemble waves and currents. The theme of “waves” also connects to various drawings on display from Bopape’s series “Master Harmoniser” (2020), in which the artist used soils from various sites related to the transatlantic slave trade to render water-like forms. These pieces suggest the metaphysical properties of water and earth and their capacity to hold memory.

Claudia Martínez Garay and Arturo Kameya, La ceniza ya no recuerda qué causó el incendio. / The ash no longer remembers what caused the fire. (2026)

B. 1983, Ayacucho, Peru. Lives and works between Amsterdam and Lima.

B. 1984, Lima. Lives and works in Amsterdam.

This dual presentation by the Peruvian artists Claudia Martínez Garay and Arturo Kameya, whose practices both engage with colonialism and national identity, brings together sculptures, multichannel videos, paintings, and other works. It takes over three floors of a building within the Mattress Factory complex in Pittsburgh’s North Side and examines how state power shapes history and collective memory.

The artists take inspiration from Túpac Amaru II, an Indigenous chief and descendant of the last Inca ruler, who led an Andean rebellion against the Spanish in Peru in the 1780s. He became a lasting symbol of anti-colonial resistance and emancipatory movements. The installation of nine interconnected rooms unites mythic narratives with such political history. Martínez Garay presents psychedelic sculptures and acrylic paintings that reference contemporary Peruvian and ancient Andean visual traditions, often marked by distinct symmetry and geometric patterning. Kameya assembles a sprawling amalgamation of found and sculptural objects, from iPhones looping the news on social media to everyday domestic materials. They are strewn across debris-filled galleries that appear dilapidated or in a state of construction, evoking the plastered adobe houses of the artist’s childhood and reflecting on fragmentation and reconstruction.

Torkwase Dyson, Tomorrow Was Yesterday (2026)

B. 1973, Chicago. Lives and works in Beacon, New York.

Torkwase Dyson presents an approximately eight-minute animation in the Kamin Science Center’s Buhl Planetarium on select days throughout the run of the exhibition. The work continues the artist’s research into the effects of oil and gas drilling in the Caribbean, particularly off the coast of Trinidad and Tobago. The film immerses viewers in an underwater environment, where a robotic figure taps and chips at the seabed until the bedrock collapses. Before the animation begins, we see the artist in her studio creating abstract sculptures from fragments of stone that aim to evoke the broken bedrock. Dyson anchors her practice in broader questions about the pervasive effects of colonization and the slave trade in the Caribbean, and how the degradation of the environment will disproportionately affect Black diasporic communities in the region.

The artist works across disparate media to consider how the Black diaspora exists within and resists extractive systems of power. At the Carnegie Museum, she presents a series of drawings, paintings, and sculptures that expand this inquiry, using abstract spatial compositions to evoke underwater topographies and infrastructural systems such as pipelines and drilling sites. The project addresses urgent themes of environmental depletion, infrastructure, and architecture in contemporary life.

G. Peter Jemison, Across the Crick (All Roads Lead to Irving) (2026)

B. 1945, Silver Creek, New York. Lives and works in Victor, New York.

G. Peter Jemison’s newly commissioned, multi-panel painting is part of a larger reimagining of Iroquois and Native American art. The artist organized the touring show in 1975 to display the work of artists from the six tribes that make up the Haudenosaunee Confederacy in the northeastern United States and Canada. An enrolled member of the Heron Clan of the Seneca Nation, the artist has been a lifelong advocate for Native American art. He has served as a curator for many pioneering institutions including the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the Ganondagan State Historic Site in New York, while maintaining his studio practice.

Across the Crick (All Roads Lead to Irving) depicts a map of Cattaraugus Reservation, where Jemison was born. His motifs, such as wildlife and rivers, speak to themes like the displacement of Native Americans, persistent colonial policies, land and water rights, and the preservation of Native knowledge and culture. Alongside his canvas, Jemison has mounted works by the artists Jay Carrier, Tom Huff, Craig Marvin, Diane Schenandoah, and Randee Spruce, whose works were in the original exhibition. These pieces, which range from beadwork to stone and animal bone carvings, demonstrate other contemporary expressions of Haudenosaunee art. Jemison transported all these artworks to the museum from his studio in upstate New York in a vintage van that is parked in the museum’s plaza. It’s splashed with a painting of the Ganondagan State Historic Site, where he established the Seneca Art and Culture Center in 2015, a Native American–led arts and education institution dedicated to preserving and sharing Seneca and Haudenosaunee history and culture.

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Radiohead singer Thom Yorke opens Venice exhibition with Stanley Donwood. https://ift.tt/vYEOWaF

Radiohead singer Thom Yorke and writer and artist Stanley Donwood have unveiled a new body of work in a solo show at Castello 2432 in Venice this week. Timed to the start of the 61st Venice Biennale, the show, titled "No Go Elevator (Not Without No Keycard)," brings together new ink drawings and a large-scale painting, the majority of which were executed in London earlier this year. It is the duo's first-ever exhibition outside the UK and will run through June 7.

Yorke and Donwood have collaborated for more than thirty years on original paintings for Radiohead album covers, lyric sketchbooks, and digital compositions. This exhibition, which is accompanied by a website, brings together fourteen walnut ink drawings on mulberry paper and one painting, which was executed in tempera and gold leaf on linen. The works are united by a visual language that employs stacked geometric towers, haunting orb-like entities, and liminal spaces reminiscent of the works of M. C. Escher.

I have read, understood & agree to the terms (2026), for instance, sees a row of these bulbous figures with antennae-like protrusions extending from their heads, cast upward as if plugging into something. It is accompanied by a text that reads, in part, "Let me refresh your glass! Go ask the unicorns! The mad king… no happy ending… Throwing knives reflect what you have in mind." Works such as Everything's Brilliant (2026), meanwhile, depict a landscape of these stacked towers while anonymous, shadowed figures approach, and The Voice from the Empty Chair (2026) and Numbers That You've Never Seen (2026) expand the contours of this visual world.

Details surrounding the show are intentionally vague. There is no press release, artist's statement, or information on the artworks. The exhibition poster offers only dates and an address, and is accompanied by a string of text scrawled in ink that reads like a poem, lyrics, or perhaps a track list: "joyless / pointless / senseless / worthless / loveless / what's best? / darkness / blindness / sleepless / thoughtless / witless / your mess."

In an email interview with Artnet News last month, the Radiohead frontman cryptically shared, "There is no unifying theme, no concept… What is left out is more important than what is included right now… what may appear simple has a whole forest of confusion behind it!" Added Donwood, "It is very important to look at the words, and if you do not, then you will have missed half of the work… However, it is not important to understand the words, so do not worry about that."

"No Go Elevator (Not Without No Keycard)" is the latest exhibition for the duo, who have collaborated on past shows, including a two-part exhibition in 2023 titled "The Crow Flies" at Tin Man Art in London, and "This Is What You Get," their first institutional show, held at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. The latter gathered more than 180 objects and ran from September 2025 through January 2026.

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6 Artworks That Define the 2026 Venice Biennale’s Main Exhibition https://ift.tt/UAGPeQx

It’s the art world’s most important art exhibition. But for 2026, the Venice Biennale arrives carrying unusual baggage. Koyo Kouoh was announced in 2024 as the curator—the first African woman to hold the role—for the 61st edition of the main show, which opens this week and runs through November. A tour de force, she had built her name connecting the international art world to artists and institutions from Africa and the Global South.

She passed away suddenly in 2025, leaving behind an artist list and a theme—“In Minor Keys”—for the five members of her curatorial team to execute. The curatorial text frames the show through a musical metaphor (a “minor key” refers to a somber musical mood) to explore the subtle and atmospheric power of art today. Despite this framing, the exhibition contains little music or sound work. The whispered rhythms and subtle melodies it references appear most clearly in human bonds across generations and in the raw materials extracted from contested land. For example, in Theo Eshetu’s Garden of the Broken Hearted (2026), a real olive tree rotates on a pedestal to the sound of tinkling chimes, like a poignant ballerina in a jewelry box.

The show is unavoidably tinged with loss, and the strangeness of living under the knowledge of certain death. Cut flowers, a perfect metaphor for blooming but stunted potential, recur throughout: from Dan Lie’s flower garlands in Ephemeral temple for decaying beings (2026), which give off strong vegetal whiffs, to Eric Baudelaire’s five-channel video of a commercial flower factory, Death Passed My Way and Stuck This Flower in my Mouth (2026).

“In Minor Keys” offers many such satisfying, quiet echoes that connect between rooms—and yet it’s hard to find a resounding message. Perhaps that is the point. In a moment of chaos on all sides, the quieter modes of human connection may be all we have left.

Here are six artists’ works that define the 2026 Venice Biennale.

Cauleen Smith, The Wanda Coleman Songbook, 2024

While “In Minor Keys” is not organized around themes, poetry is a recurring motif—blue hangings printed with poems by writers and artists such as Palestinian poet Refaat al-Areer and artist Big Chief Demond Melancon (whose artwork opens the Giardini) appear throughout the Arsenale. American multimedia artist Cauleen Smith’s installation The Wanda Coleman Songbook (2024) crystallizes these threads—an experimental four-channel video and installation paying homage to its namesake poet.

Huge screens enclose two sofas cozily huddled atop layers of Turkish rugs. The films are hazy and memory-laden, portraying the sights and sounds of Los Angeles—seagulls, dog walkers, and a close-up of the Hollywood sign—interspersed with shots zooming in on the pages of Coleman’s poetry books. Known as the unofficial poet laureate of L.A., Coleman wrote with clear-eyed lucidity about the realities of L.A.’s poor and Black communities, with humor that shadows the unflinching content. Her books are also displayed in a glass case in the installation.

Lyrical reworkings of her jazz- and blues-inspired poetry by contemporary musicians play through the speakers while a scent designed to recreate the smell of Griffith Park drifts through the space.

Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Anatomy of the Magnolia Tree for Koyo Kouoh and Toni Morrison, 2026

Kouoh’s presence is felt throughout the show, but this work by Cuban American artist Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons pays direct tribute.

Huge vertical panels form a kind of delicate paper mural portraying the curator in a long dark cloak alongside the author Toni Morrison. Stalks of magnolia weave between them in delicate watercolor, ink, and gouache, sprawling across an entire wall near the Giardini’s entrance. Morrison, the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature, was a crucial inspiration for this Biennale: a quote from her essay “The Site of Memory” hangs from a banner in the Arsenale.

A symbol of the American South, the magnolia in the panels is also recreated in glass and resin flower sculptures arranged on seven plinths in front of the mural. The luxuriant blooms’ gold-and-red leaves droop and curl, a stunning tribute to these women’s advocacy. A 15-minute score by Kamaal Malak, layering bass and synth, accompanies the work.

The installation honors the gigantic impact of these Black women who worked to make quiet interiority the star of the show, placing them on the center stage themselves.

Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Ruinous, 2026

Throughout “In Minor Keys,” artists work in subtext, a theme that is at the heart of Tiona Nekkia McClodden’s new suite of works, all centered around the new two-channel video, Ruinous (2026). The two screens are placed apart from each other like stereo speakers framing the rest of the room. On them, McClodden plays an abstract painter—a character loosely based on herself, per the wall text—contemplating a painting she has mixed feelings about.

The viewer watches from behind the artist as she gazes at the canvas, narrating; her face stays unseen. On the other screen, a tenuous narrative of queer longing and family unfolds in a restaurant, centering around the theme of scarring.

Pleasure and pain seem to intertwine in these images: hurt and rejection are threaded with flashes of joy, like a halo of light around a beloved’s head. Alongside the videos are several sculptural works (also props in the film): a delicate chainmail head covering embroidered with 24-karat gold thread, and an épée sword mounted in a custom box titled The Giver of Scars (2026). Behind them hang three small leather canvases, scratched and sliced, raw and alive. Together, the installation captures the intense poetic rush of being alive through it all—the depth of longing and the way it marks us, sometimes forever.

Alfredo Jaar,The End of the World, 2023–24

Critical minerals— such as rare earth minerals—are the unseen sacred objects of modern Western economies, essential to everything from solar panels to semiconductors to batteries.

Chilean artist and architect Alfredo Jaar makes that reverence material: an extra-long room flooded with eye-popping red light, a single pedestal at the far end.

Inside the small glass box is a tiny, four-centimeter cube of thin-layered metals, each described on a wall label according to its uses and the geopolitical web it plays a role in. Like a radioactive church aisle, the artwork conjures the toxic violence these materials are linked to: the wars and global tensions they help create.

The long walk to reach these tiny deposits is one of the Biennale’s boldest reminders of the political volatility of the present. It’s an unmissable image of how minuscule elements of contemporary geopolitics, as recent trade escalations have shown, can have an outsized impact on everyday life.

Walid Raad, Postscript to the Arabic Edition, 1938–2025

At the end of the Lebanese Civil War in 1990, the country’s militias sold off their weapons. The readiest customers were combatants in the Balkans. When fighters opened their pallets full of weapons, they discovered something surprising: Their slatted undersides were painted with copies of famous Turkish and Arabic paintings. In the Arsenale, several of these pallets stand upright in Lebanese artist Walid Raad’s installation, their painted undersides exposed. The pallet paintings appear exactly as they were unloaded into a Ljubljana, Slovenia, warehouse—tarpaulins for a backdrop, duct tape, and A4-printed DIY notations giving an ad-hoc impression of a show mid-install.

As with much of Raad’s work, it’s a clever reframing of fiction, anecdote, and geopolitical complexities. Within “In Minor Keys,” the piece becomes a striking example of how art historical influence travels along unexpected paths—and surfaces in the least expected places.

Kaloki Nyamai, Kwata Kau, Ithyonze nitwavika vaa, and Ithyonze nitwavika vaa, all 2026

The vast, curtain-like paintings of Kaloki Nyamai are unmissable as visitors move through the Arsenale. Sewn together from horizontal strips, the works are built up in rough layers of splattered, bright paint, their surfaces studded with oversized faces and bodies stitched through with hairy tufts of yarn—a symbol of deep social connection in Nyamai’s home region of Kitui, Kenya.

In a triangular installation of new works—Kwata kau, Ithyonze nitwavika vaa, and Ithyonze nitwavika vaa II (all 2026)—Nyamai portrays crowds of people, visible only in their raised arms against the dense, layered surface.

Hung so the viewer can walk around all sides, the paintings reveal the hems and details that hold them together. Kwata kau is painted on both sides; up close, the figures’ faces almost disappear. Textiles carry a generational charge for Nyamai: his mother is a textile artist, and he cites his grandmother’s storytelling as an inspiration. The works hold the breadth of community and the closeness of family all in one.

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Indonesian artist Dian Suci wins 2026 Max Mara Art Prize for Women. https://ift.tt/s2hWqdy

Indonesian multimedia artist Dian Suci has been named the winner of the 10th edition of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women. The news was announced by the prize’s curator and jury chair, Cecilia Alemani and others today in Venice at a celebration held at the Serra dei Giardini. Suci was selected from a shortlist of five finalists that included Betty Adii, Dzikra Afifah, Ipeh Nur, and Mira Rizki. She was chosen by a jury organized and chaired by Alemani and made up of Museum MACAN director, Venus Lau; Jakarta-based curator, Amanda Ariawan; gallerist Megan Arlin of Sullivan+Strumpf, Indonesian performance artist Melati Suryodarmo, and collector Evelyn Halim.

The award, which honors emerging and mid-career female artists at an inflection point in their careers, will provide Suci with a six-month traveling residency in Italy to embark on an ambitious new project. The resulting piece will be presented in a solo show at Museum MACAN in Jakarta in summer 2027, before being presented again that fall at the Collezione Maramotti in Italy, which will acquire the work.

Yogyakarta-based Suci works across painting, sculpture, installation, and video. Drawing upon her experience as a single mother, she makes art that addresses the oppressive forces of patriarchy, capitalism, authoritarianism, and fascism that women face. The project for which she was selected, Crafting Spirit: Cultural Dialogues in Heritage and Practice, examines the tension between commerce and spirituality inherent in mass-produced devotional objects, comparing practices across Italy and Indonesia. Her research will take her to Assisi in Umbria to study the lifestyle of monks; to Rome, for a special Mass at St. Peter’s Basilica; to a papier-mâché training program in Lecce, Puglia; and finally to Florence, Tuscany, to learn the art of egg tempera and ancient hand-weaving.

“I am deeply honored to be selected as the recipient of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women. My proposal, Crafting Spirit: Cultural Dialogues in Heritage and Practice, emerges from stories of the body and memory within the lives and gestures of women artisans, whose work often exists between devotion and survival,” said the artist in a press statement. “I receive this opportunity with gratitude and a commitment to listen, to learn, and to translate these encounters into forms that honor the intimacy of human labor and the depth of cultural continuity.”

This is the 10th cycle of the prize, which will run through 2027. With this edition, the event has transitioned to a traveling event, whereas previous editions were organized in collaboration with Whitechapel Gallery in London and centered on U.K.-based women artists. Previous prize winners include Dominique White, Emma Talbot, and Helen Cammock.

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The 10 Best National Pavilions at the 2026 Venice Biennale https://ift.tt/MN2oxPp

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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