Art Biennale 2026, a look at the Pavilions/4

Ranging from marginalized languages and Deaf culture (Poland) to Maya women made invisible within everyday gestures (Guatemala), from diaspora and uprooting (El Salvador) to forgotten postcards as an archaeology of mass tourism (Spain), from Venetian winds transformed into characters (Finland) to a Holy See Pavilion that brings together Brian Eno, Patti Smith, and Jim Jarmusch in a sonic prayer inspired by Hildegard of Bingen. An irregular, polyphonic atlas not to be missed.

ARGENTINA PAVILION – Monitor Yin Yang

Matías Duville’s huge environmental drawing in salt and charcoal dust explores a dreaded apocalyptic future. The sound of footsteps, the crackling of materials, and a soundscape of overlapping frequencies activate an unstable, almost tactile perception. Salt and charcoal evoke divergent timeframes and recall the early plains of southern Argentina, transforming the drawing into a living landscape suspended between memory, fragility, and energy.
Arsenale

FINLAND PAVILION Alvar Aalto Pavilion – Aeolian Suite

The space is transformed into an aeolian landscape made of sounds, movements, and environmental simulations. Visitors take part in a sort of drama moving through a scene animated by five personified Venetian winds, which “sing” with voices and gestures inspired by grammelot. The work, both itinerant theatre and immersive installation, weaves together science and sensory perception, inviting visitors to listen to atmospheric forces and to reflect on their impact on the environment.
Giardini 

GREAT BRITAIN PAVILION – Predicting History: Testing Translation

A pioneer of the Black British Art Movement, Lubaina Himid has brought for decades Black history and culture into contemporary art exploring race, feminism, and colonial memory. Himid combines historical research and narrative in a layered, vibrant language that makes long-marginalized cultural identities visible. The project for this Biennale is conceived as a guide through the unpredictability of life: one must therefore learn to recognise what “home” means even far from one’s own place of origin.
Giardini

GRENADA PAVILION – The Poetics of Correspondence

A constellation of international artists constructs a trajectory that explores correspondences between islands, currents, and languages as networks of meaning, memory, and materiality. Layered installations, time-based works, and collaborative interventions compose a polyphonic space in which Grenada emerges as a node of exchange between local specificity and global horizons. Practices diverse in media and processes converge in a reflection on the relational dynamics of the present.
Spazio Berlendis, Cannaregio 6301/A

GUATEMALA PAVILION – Las Invisibles

Mayan women, who from dawn to dusk grind corn, feed the fire, and prepare tortillas on clay comales, are the invisible protagonists of a millennia-old history. Tortear – the repeated gesture of passing wet hands over the heated stone to prevent the corn from sticking – often erases every fingerprint, every trace of individual identity. And yet, that daily silence preserves the collective memory of a people, their cultural survival and the unbreakable bond between humans, nature, and the traditional Mayan cosmos.
Spazio Berlendis, Cannaregio 6301/A

EL SALVADOR PAVILION – Cartographies of the Displaced

Marking El Salvador’s debut at the Biennale Arte, J. Oscar Molina presents a sculptural practice devoted to the intimate geographies of diaspora. Born in Madrid and raised in the United States, the artist weaves together personal memory and collective history, exploring belonging and uprootedness as existential conditions. At the core of the project is the series Children of the World, figures shaped as watchful presences, symbols of scattered yet resilient communities. The exhibition conceives displacement not only as the crossing of borders, but as an ontological state – a fragile yet tenacious map of identities in motion.
Palazzo Mora, Cannaregio 3659

IRELAND PAVILION – Dreamshook

An installation of hand-tufted tapestries, drawings, and sculptures evokes dreamlike states and perceptual thresholds, where the real and the immaterial blur. The project reflects on the structures that organize knowledge and on the human desire to give shape to chaos, weaving together references to the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance as periods of crisis and transformation. Across humanism, print culture, and figurative art – with a focus on Aldo Manuzio – Nolan develops a meditation on the ambivalence of European tradition, probing the relationships between knowledge, power, and imagination.
Arsenale

POLAND PAVILION – Liquid Tongues

The Polish installation explores marginalized languages and forms of communication beyond the human, focusing on Deaf culture and the concept of “deaf gain,” reframing deafness not as a deficit but as a cultural and cognitive resource. The project involves the Choir in Motion, a choir of deaf and hearing performers, combining spoken voice, International Sign Language, whale songs, underwater environments, and collective choreography.
Giardini

HOLY SEE PAVILION – L’orecchio è l’occhio dell’anima / The Ear is the Eye of the Soul

Inspired by the life and spiritual legacy of Hildegard of Bingen, proclaimed Saint and Doctor of the Church in 2012 by Benedict XVI, the participating artists come together in a sonic prayer that invites contemplative listening. Brian Eno and Patti Smith, Jim Jarmusch and Meredith Monk are among the contributors whose sound works can be experienced through headphones, alongside a film installation in twelve stations by filmmaker Alexander Kluge, who recently passed away and to whom the project’s title is owed. The project is curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist e Ben Vickers.
Complesso di Santa Maria Ausiliatrice, Fondamenta S. Gioacchin, Castello 450
Giardino Mistico dei Carmelitani Scalzi, Cannaregio 54

SENEGAL PAVILION – «WURUS*» – What the Earth provides us with…

Wurus (“gold” in Wolof) is the title of a Pavilion carefully structured through secondary walls, openings, and thresholds. Some works reveal themselves only through wide slits, others are visible within spaces you can’t have a direct access to. Reflective surfaces, brass, bronze, and polymer sculptures, compressed passageways create an environment made of echoes and displacements. Gold never appears as a material, but manifests instead as tension: its value is measured in distance, in what is reflected, in what you can glimpse and in what you desire without being able to own it.
Palazzo Navagero, Riva degli Schiavoni, Castello 4147

SPAIN PAVILION – Los restos

What remains of images once they have lost their function? Thousands of postcards collected by Oriol Vilanova over more than twenty years cover the walls of the Spanish Pavilion, transforming it into a pseudo-museum built through accumulation. Mass-produced tourist photographs – sent, forgotten, or rediscovered in flea markets – are brought together without hierarchy in a potentially infinite wall composition. These stereotyped images, which once were part of the most ordinary forms of communication, re-emerge as visual residues and traces of individual experiences, fragments of a fragile and dispersed collective memory.
Giardini

Democratic Republic of TIMOR-LESTE PAVILION – Across Words

The exhibition, conceived by artists from different generations, takes shape from the linguistic plurality of Timor-Leste, where ancestral idioms and current languages, such as English and Indonesian, coexist within a complex ecosystem. At the center, the textile work Tais Don transforms historical memory into material testimony, bearing the names of over 250 pro-independence demonstrators killed in the 1991 Santa Cruz massacre. The surrounding audiovisual installations develop a reflection on language as a space of identity, transmission, and collective construction, offering an image of a culture that finds its cohesion in multiplicity.
Arsenale

Featured image: Grenada Pavilion