It hasn’t even started yet, and La Biennale is already an overheated chamber of opinions, allegiances, projections, and clickbait. Before entering this system of exhibitions and representations, it is worth setting a few preconditions. First: take time to allow the art to exceed the anxiety that surrounds it. Second: drink water. Third: accept the inevitable comedown after the opening days. Fourth: most importantly, resist the temptation to treat art as something that can be instantly judged, cancelled, or morally resolved. Works and artists operate within concrete political, economic, and institutional frameworks. To engage seriously with them means asking what conditions they emerge from, what interests they serve, and what they obscure.
“Though often lost in the anxious cacophony of the present chaos raging through the world, the music continues,” Kouoh wrote in her curatorial statement. “Music” is not necessarily the opposite of silence. To listen, in this context, is not to withdraw from the political, but to sit with forms that refuse the system of power altogether we know. As evoked by the musical title, however, the show is an invitation to engage with motifs and ways of assembling that “are not abstractly determined but rather sifted from a reservoir of art that acts deeply on the soul and mind.”
We didn’t have the privilege to meet Kouoh personally, but what transpires from her professional trajectory is that she was a remarkably driven and inspiring individual. Honoring the theme she had chosen: “an exhibition tuned in to the minor keys […] that invites listening to the persistent signals of earth and life, connecting to soul frequencies,” the curators—La Squadra di Koyo, Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Hélène Pereira, Rasha Salti, Siddhartha Mitter and Rory Tsapayi—sought to fulfill the guiding vision established by Kouoh during an intensive week-long collaborative session in Dakar, part of which was held under a mango tree. Kouoh believed in life after death, “in energies—living or dead—and in cosmic strength.” And yet, considering the tension between Kouoh's cosmic belief and the earthly chaos surrounding the Biennale's pre-opening, many in the press and social media now wonder whether a captainless ship can reach its destination.
That is, of course, the very entitled, clout-hungry take we read routinely in our feeds.
Leading up to the exhibition, polemics insisted on layering an additional rhythm to the curatorial concept, highlighting the friction between participation in the form of National Pavilions and the politics of the represented nations; concerns that have kept artists and cultural practitioners busy in recent years due to ongoing Russian and Israeli belligerency and war crimes. Against this backdrop, the actions around boycotts and politically motivated exclusion keep accumulating. Soon after they were announced, the all-female jury in charge of the Biennale’s awards stated that they will not consider countries whose leaders are currently charged with crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court, thus indirectly referring to Russia and Israel. This announcement came only after a letter co-signed by seventy-four artists and curators involved in the exhibition called for the exclusion of Israel, Russia, and the United States. Additionally, because Russia was allowed to participate, the European Commission announced that it would withdraw funds and the Italian Minister of Culture, Alessandro Giuli, said that he would boycott the opening.
This is what we are left with: a gesture of ethical clarity that instead reinforces a simplified framework in which art is reduced to a proxy for national and moral alignment. The structure of the Biennial itself makes this entanglement tighter. Even if the jury’s position stages transparency, it leaves largely unexamined the conditions under which the Venice Biennale itself operates: uneven resources, diplomatic negotiations, and escalating financial demands: a black hole into which entire national infrastructures are compelled to pour time, labor, and capital—often at the expense of local cultural ecosystems, public infrastructures, and the basic material and mental conditions required to sustain artistic work.
“The Biennale has never not been political. It has merely, at certain periods, been successful at not appearing so,” says Rafal Niemojewski, the director of the independent Biennial Foundation think tank, who makes a thorough attempt at unpacking the many polemics circulated so far this year, including the story of what happened to the US Pavilion (and how its current artist lost representation from two galleries over it).
Amid all these recent developments, one question remains curiously under-articulated: the role of Qatar within this ecosystem. Only a few days ago, e-flux released a report by Antonia Majaca, which shone a light on the neo-colonial economic role of Qatar, including a €50 million donation to the Venice municipality, which granted a 90-year land concession and future infrastructural expansion concessions within the Giardini, an exceptional acceleration within a system otherwise defined by long waiting lists, diplomatic negotiation, and inherited institutional presence. What appears as inclusion is, in fact, a form of expedited entry into one of the most tightly regulated cultural spaces in the world. That said, we are looking forward to seeing their Pavilion and many of this year’s presentations.
Being in Venice—that’s a privilege in itself. It is also a condition structured by exclusions, pressures, and uneven access. In light of this understanding, we hold on to the words attributed to Sergei Parajanov (1924-1990), one of the greatest masters of cinema: “I will take revenge on the world through love.” An eccentric genius, he was persecuted during the Soviet era and imprisoned for 15 years on charges of Ukrainian nationalism and homosexuality. His work was featured in the 1977 Biennale of Dissent (another Venetian exhibition born of turbulent times), and pleas for his release and the free circulation of his films were made by many in Italy and beyond. A chance encounter between Elsa Triolet, Louis Aragon, and the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev at the Bolshoi Theater was said to have finally freed him. Whether it is true that the artistic couple succeeded in convincing the Soviet leader to release Parajanov, it feels important to emphasize how vital it is that we actually see the art in person, in Venice or in a theater near you.
If the Parajanov anecdote above has direct relevance to the present in Venice, the question must be seen as not a matter of whether to engage, but how. Ultimately, there are many moments where friction becomes explicit and generative. The following are sites of such friction from this Biennale: exhibitions and positions that confront infrastructure, contradiction, and rupture directly, rather than merely absorbing them as background noise.
A functioning pier destined for the island of Poveglia, a church lighting system activated by coin, an industrial laundry, casts, residues, and a continuously cooking pot: each element emerges from a specific negotiation, binding the work of Lydia Ouramahne to the conditions of its making. In 5 Works, presented by Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation and curated by Polly Staple, Ourahmane constructs a set of situations that unfold through transactions rather than declarations. Developed in close collaboration with Venetian craftspeople, technicians, and local organizations, the exhibition traces the material and social infrastructures that sustain the city beyond its touristic image. What holds these gestures together is a logic of exchange, where objects carry the imprint of agreements, dependencies, and transfers of use. The exhibition does not step outside the economic and institutional frameworks it inhabits. It moves within them, redistributing attention toward the often invisible networks that make both art and the city possible.
At the first-ever Ecuador Pavilion (opening May 6, 2026, Castello 1636/A), the works of the Amazonian collective TAWNA and Oscar Santillán open a new chapter of art history for the country. The show is curated by Manuela Moscoso and commissioned by Stephanie García Alban and the MAAC (Museo Antropologico y Arte Contemporaneo of Guayaquil). Santillán approaches scientific systems through speculative displacement, while TAWNA insists on knowledge as an ecological relation. Within the Biennale’s economy of visibility, this introduces a friction: knowledge circulates, but it resists capture. The work does not strictly oppose the system an entire art demography has longed to be part of. It rather complicates its capacity to fix meaning.
Meaning follows movement in the Lithuanian Pavilion, Animism Sings Anarchy by Eglė Budvytytė (opening May 6, 2026, 1–3 PM, Fucina del Futuro), commissioned by the Lithuanian National Museum of Art and curated by Louise O’Kelly. Developed between Vilnius and Amsterdam, the 16mm film draws on Marija Gimbutas’s research into Neolithic matrilineal and animist societies, translating archaeological material into song, gesture, and shifting bodily states. Shot across museum interiors and the Apulian coastline near Grotta Scaloria, the work is choreographed through sites shaped by water, burial, and excavation. Modest 3D-printed and photocopied figures appear as fragile points around which movement briefly stabilizes before dispersing again.
A ritual lament of shared breath and song, Elegy by Gabrielle Goliath (May 5–July 31, 2026, Chiesa di Sant’Antonin) builds a place for mourning. Made possible through the support of the Bertha Foundation and realized in partnership with Ibraaz, Fondazione ICA Milano, Galleria Raffaella Cortese, and the Friends of Elegy, in the wake of its cancellation as a national representation for South Africa, the presentation marks a significant moment in the ongoing life of the project. Installed across eight monumental video monoliths within the historic church, three newly realized suites of Elegy performances respond to interconnected contexts of violence and loss, commemorating the South African student Ipeleng Christine Moholane, two murdered Nama women ancestors, and the Palestinian poet Heba Abunada, killed in Gaza in October 2023.
A similar shift of medium structures Pedagogy of Hope—Radio Vanessa (May 5–10, 2026, Fondamenta de la Tana 1923, Castello, Venice; online until November 22nd), the new season of Radio GAMeC, curated by Lorenzo Giusti and Lara Facco, moves from Bergamo to Venice as a collateral event of the Biennale. Instead of an exhibition, it activates a live broadcast from Radio Vanessa, a historic independent station founded clandestinely in 1978 and still transmitting between the Arsenale and the Giardini. Developed in dialogue with Paulo Freire’s pedagogy of emancipation, the project treats radio as a tool for collective learning under conditions shaped by algorithmic information flows.
The Tadeusz Kantor exhibition Emballage, Cricotage and Madame Jarema (May 9–22 November, 2026, Procuratie Vecchie, Piazza San Marco 139–153/A, Venice), curated by Ania Muszyńska and presented by the Starak Family Foundation, operates like a time capsule of unresolved historical material, where practices from a period stretching from 1915 to 1990 are reactivated. Bringing together works by Kantor and Maria Jarema with stage objects and archival fragments, it reconstructs a shared avant-garde field shaped through the Cricot 2 Theatre and preserved today by Cricoteka in Kraków.
This sense of structuring extends into Strange Rules at Palazzo Diedo/Berggruen Institute (May 4– November 22, 2026, Fondamenta Diedo, Cannaregio 2386, 30121 Venice), where exhibition-making itself becomes a field of regulation. Rather than presenting a coherent thematic statement, the project operates through constraints, behavioral, spatial, and procedural. What can be done, where, and for how long become aspects of the work. The exhibition does not simply host artworks; it organizes the conditions under which they can appear. In doing so, it makes visible something often left implicit: that participation in the art world is already governed by a set of rules that are unevenly applied and rarely questioned. In this frame, Joshua Citarella and New Models created a museum shop to materialize internet soft culture and the aleatory nature of contemporary experience.
The negotiation between structure and experience contracts further in Bracha. The Room Is Shared (May 4–10, 2026, Hotel Metropole, Venice), an exhibition by Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. Installed in a room where Sigmund Freud once worked on The Interpretation of Dreams, the exhibition limits itself to seven paintings and a few video works. It unfolds over the course of a single week. Access is restricted; time is finite; attention cannot be dispersed. Painting here operates through slow emergence. In this context, the “shared room” is not simply a setting but a condition: viewing becomes a matter of presence, proximity, and duration. Within a system organized around circulation and accumulation, this insistence on limited access and concentrated attention introduces another kind of resistance, one that does not declare itself loudly but reorganizes the terms of encounter from within.
Organized Rest For Times of Uprising (May 5–June 15, 2026, Terzospazio), co-curated by Arts of the Working Class, Osservatorio Futura, Parsec, and Sara d’Alessandro Manozzo, shifts the terms of engagement. If the preceding works remain entangled in systems of production, visibility, and constraint, this project addresses the cost of that entanglement directly. Through conversations, workshops, and collective pauses, it proposes rest not as withdrawal, but as a condition for sustaining any form of practice at all. Within a context that rewards constant presence and output, to rest becomes a way of interrupting extraction without exiting the field entirely.
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- Cover Image:
Lydia Ourahmane, "5 Works" Dorsoduro 2829, 30123 Venezia, Italia. Curated by Polly Staple. Image: Courtesy of the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation.
