“Take a deep breath”: a report from the Venice Biennale — 2026

We’ll tell you how the Biennale – which runs until 22 November – has turned out, and what’s worth seeing there – from the Giardini to the Arsenale.

The exhibition the curator didn’t see

Koua (1967–2025) — a Cameroonian-born curator, founder of the Dakar-based RAW Material Company, director of Cape Town’s Zeitz MOCAA and the first African woman to head the Biennale — died in May 2025, having already finalised the title, the list of participants, the curatorial text and the spatial layout of the exhibition. With the support of her family, the biennial decided to realise the project exactly as Koyo had envisaged it: the work was completed by the team she had assembled, referred to in the catalogue as ‘la squadra di Koyo’. Consequently, *In Minor Keys* is both a major international exhibition and, inevitably, a memorial to its own curator: in the Central Pavilion, visitors are greeted by a monumental painting by María Magdalena Campos-Pons, in which Kuo is depicted alongside the writer Toni Morrison amidst magnolias.
‘Minor Keys’ here is both a musical metaphor (soft tones, whispers, the blues) and a geographical one: small islands, gardens, courtyards and dance floors, where life is reborn in the darkest of times. The promised experience is ‘sensual, not didactic’: as Kuo intended, the exhibition is meant to revitalise, not exhaust. Recurring themes include a procession, a Creole garden, enchantment and the right to rest; the galleries do indeed feature carpeted areas where visitors can sit or even lie down.

Giardini: the garden takes centre stage

The garden theme is evident even before you enter the Central Pavilion: Otobong Nkanga has ‘clad’ the building’s four modernist columns in brick, hanging glass terrariums, clay pots and bee hives — by November, the plants are set to literally engulf the façade. Inside, the procession is led by Big Chief Demond Melanson’s giant, feather-embroidered ‘Amistad Takeover’ costume, created in the New Orleans tradition of Black Masking. Here, the artists are not confined to separate rooms but ‘pop up’ throughout the exhibition — a deliberate departure from the monographic format. An unexpected figure is Marcel Duchamp: a side room reinterprets him not as the father of conceptual art, but as a model of ‘institutional care’ — thanks to the detailed instructions he left for the installation of his final work, *Étant donnés*.
Two late artists serve as the exhibition’s guiding lights: separate ‘sanctuaries’ are dedicated to the Senegalese artist Issa Samb and the American artist Beverly Buchanan. And six artist-founded institutions — from blaxTARLINES in Kumasi to the NCAI in Nairobi and the RAW Material Company itself — are presented as ‘schools’, embodying Kuo’s belief in institution-building.

Arsenal: Procession

At the entrance to the Cordierie, visitors are greeted by a poem by Refaat Al-Alir, a Palestinian poet killed in Gaza in 2023; the exhibition opens with an installation by Khaled Sabsabi. Further on, a long series of former rope-making workshops transforms the tour itself into a procession, marked by dark blue banners bearing quotations — ranging from Toni Morrison to Ben Okri (the exhibition’s architecture was designed by the Cape Town-based firm Wolff Architects).
The scenes follow one another as if in a slow-motion film. Two Venetian firefighters from the vigili del fuoco pause before a transparent column containing soil excavated from beneath Beirut — this is a long-term project by Joanna Hadjitomas and Khalil Joreij, who interpret the history of cities through geological cores, layer by layer. A terracotta figure wearing an ornamental mask reclines on ‘islands’ of clay flowers — *Efflorescence/The Way We Wake* by Rajni Perera and Marigold Santos. A cascade of photographs scattered across mirrored panels is reflected in the glossy floor; red yarn cascades down from chequered blankets suspended from the ceiling; a bronze figure lies on the floor beneath a boat covered in flowers. And somewhere amongst the works — a pencil inscription written directly on the wall: ‘I told you so’.
Among the big names are Nick Cave (the American artist, namesake of the musician), Vangeci Mutu, Kader Attia and Laurie Anderson. In his red ‘cathedral’ *The End of the World*, Alfredo Jaar has compressed eight conflicting metals — from cobalt to lithium — into a tiny block; Kaloki Nyamai’s stitched canvases rise to the full twelve-metre height of the Cordierie; in front of Nolan Oswald Dennis’s *Black Earth Calendar*, visitors lie for long periods on cushions. Critics gave the exhibition a warm reception, though not without reservation: *The Art Newspaper* awarded it three and a half stars, whilst *Apollo* criticised the curators for the dense layout contradicting their own ‘minor-key’ call for slow viewing.

Ukraine in Venice

The Ukrainian project ‘Security Guarantees’ (artist Zhanna Kadyrova, curators Ksenia Malykh and Leonid Marushchak) is one of the most powerful national statements of the year. At its centre is a concrete ‘Deer’ from the ‘Origami’ series, created in 2019 for a park in Pokrovsk on the site of a dismantled Soviet aircraft that had once carried nuclear weapons. In August 2024, as the front line approached the town, the sculpture was evacuated; it travelled more than 3,000 kilometres across Europe on an open-top lorry and now hangs ‘in limbo’ in a public space in Venice. The project alludes to the 1994 Budapest Memorandum: “These guarantees were supposed to protect us. But they existed only on paper,” says Kadyrova. The Arsenale is showing a multi-channel video installation about ‘The Deer’s’ journey, alongside archives relating to the memorandum.
Anyone planning a trip to Venice in the coming weeks should make haste to see the parallel programme: the exhibition *Still Joy – from Ukraine into the World* at the Palazzo Contarini-Polignac runs only until 1 August.

The pavilions everyone’s talking about

The most talked-about pavilion is the Austrian one: choreographer Florentina Holzinger has transformed it into a flooded Venice of the future (Seaworld Venice), and above the entrance she has suspended a bronze bell from a crane bearing the inscription ‘O tempora o mores’ — every hour, a performer swings inside it, striking the bell with her own body. Germany is presenting the ‘Ruin’ project: Henrike Naumann, who died suddenly in February 2026 at the age of 41, managed to complete *The Home Front* — an ‘East German’ interior with mint-green walls the colour of Soviet barracks and chairs cut in half and mounted on the walls. Meanwhile, Ei Arakawa-Nash’s Japanese installation *Grass Babies, Moon Babies* proved to be the most heart-warming experience at the Giardini: visitors are invited to pick up one of 208 weighted baby dolls wearing sunglasses, carry it around the pavilion and even change its nappy.

Background: what made the opening memorable

The biennale’s opening in May was accompanied by the most high-profile political crisis in its recent history. The jury awarding the ‘Golden Lions’ announced that it would not consider artists representing Russia and Israel for the awards; following a legal challenge by an Israeli jury member, the entire jury resigned nine days before the opening, and the Russian exhibition was withdrawn from the competition. Russia’s return to its pavilion – for the first time since the full-scale invasion of 2022 – sparked a wave of protests: on 6 May, Pussy Riot and FEMEN attempted to block the pavilion’s press opening, whilst the group Bluemoloko launched a black body bag nearby (as part of their performance ‘Cargo to Heaven’); whilst military officer and cameraman Yuri Gruzinov, together with artist Alexei Say, turned up carrying a notebook entitled ‘List of Bastards 2026’. As a result, the Russian pavilion was only open during the preview days and remains closed to the public, whilst the Russian Federation’s participation is reportedly set to cost the Biennale around 2 million euros in EU funding. South Africa has also cancelled its pavilion — due to Gabrielle Goliath’s project *Elegy*, a video lament for murdered women; the work is now being shown independently at the Church of Sant’Antonino and is considered one of the key works of this year’s Venice Biennale.

Background

The 61st International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, is taking place from 9 May to 22 November 2026 in the Giardini, the Arsenale, at Forte Marghera and at dozens of venues across the city. The main exhibition, *In Minor Keys*, brings together 110 participants; in total, the Biennale comprises 100 national participations and 31 parallel events. During the summer (until 27 September), the exhibition is open from 11.00 to 19.00 (the Arsenale is open until 20.00 on Fridays and Saturdays); in the autumn, it is open from 10.00 to 18.00; it is closed on Mondays. A full-price ticket costs 30 euros, a concessionary ticket 20 or 16 euros, a three-day ticket 40 euros, and a season pass 80 euros.

All the photographs in this feature were taken by Olena Hrynevych — an artist from Ukraine who now lives in Germany — and this is evident in the very visual style of the series. Her photographs also cover the main exhibition, ‘In Minor Keys’, at the Giardini and the Arsenale — Ebony J. Patterson’s beaded peacock, the terracotta ‘islands’ by Rajni Perry and Marigold Santos, the Beirut-inspired ‘kerns’ by Hajitomas and Joreiza — as well as the national pavilions of Austria, Germany, Japan, the Scandinavian countries, the UK, France and the USA. At the same time, she captures not only the artworks themselves, but also the life surrounding them: a performer swaying inside a bronze bell, Venetian firefighters frozen in front of a column of earth, and spectators on the threshold of the British pavilion. As a result, the series reads not as a catalogue, but as a diary of slow viewing — in that very ‘minor key’ that Koyo Kuo had in mind.