On May 9, 2026, the sixty-first Venice Biennale opened to the public. Since its inauguration in April 1895, the Biennale has grown into one of the world’s leading cultural events, bringing together contemporary art, architecture, film, dance, and performance. Long regarded as the “Olympics of Art,” it offers national pavilions a platform to explore local identities while engaging in broader international conversations.

This year’s edition spanned an expansive range of media and ideas—from a curated selection of Marcel Duchamp’s avant-garde miniatures to Manuel Mathieu’s immersive multimedia installations. Mathieu’s works, including Pendulum (2023) and the mosaic Abundance and Drought (2024), weave together Haitian visual traditions, literature, music, and spirituality into deeply layered narratives.

Beyond the exhibition spaces, the 2026 program also celebrated achievements across architecture, film, dance, and live performance, reinforcing the Biennale’s role as a meeting point for multiple creative disciplines.

Europe

Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein (2025) arrived as one of the Biennale’s major cinematic highlights, following its three Academy Award wins for Best Production Design, Best Costume Design, and Best Makeup and Hairstyling, alongside nine additional nominations, including Best Picture.

The Czech and Slovak Pavilion presented The Silence of the Mole, an ambitious synthesis of film, architecture, and sculpture. The project posed a deceptively simple question: what happens when imagination becomes an instrument of control? Its central figure, Mr. Mole, is a performer whose body and agency no longer fully belong to him, functioning instead as a vessel for an external force.

Austria’s Seaworld Venice invited visitors to reconsider water as both material reality and conceptual metaphor. Here, H₂O becomes a vehicle for exploring the tensions between purity and contamination, sin and redemption. Confronting viewers with images of human waste transformed into performance, the installation presents the body in its most exposed and vulnerable state. Among its most widely shared images was a nude woman suspended upside down inside a translucent bell.

Asia

The Philippine Pavilion presented Sea of Love / Dagat ng Pag-ibig, an oceanic narrative unfolding through four perspectives: a sailor, his mother, his lover, and the sea itself. The exhibition reflects on longing, distance, and devotion while placing Filipino migrant workers—whose labour quietly sustains global maritime commerce—at the centre of its narrative.

China’s pavilion translated Shen Kuo’s 11th-century Dream Pool Essays into spatial form through monumental metallic sunflowers, classical calligraphy, and video installations featuring the acclaimed game Black Myth: Wukong (2024). Shen Kuo’s writings explore the relationship between observation, science, and philosophy, emphasizing “investigating underlying principles through the observation of phenomena” and “the unity of heaven and humanity.” Often described as “a milestone in the history of Chinese science,” the text continues to resonate far beyond its historical origins.

Africa

The Democratic Republic of Congo centred its pavilion on the transformative power of fire, introducing its premise with the declaration:

Fire can burn everything, destroy everything, but to harness it, as a blacksmith does, is to transform, to give shape, to create. Seize the fire! Bring forth the world.

– The Democratic Republic of Congo centred its pavilion on the transformative power of fire, introducing its premise with the declaration.

Simba Moto! Seize the Fire! Saisis le feu! explored cycles of destruction and renewal through the work of nine artists. Fire became both subject and method, shaping reflective metals, elongated forms, and stories rooted in personal memory and regional history.

No reflection on this Biennale would be complete without acknowledging the legacy of Koyo Kouoh, one of the most influential curators of her generation. A committed advocate for Pan-Africanism and artists from across the continent and its diaspora, Kouoh was appointed Artistic Director of the 2026 Venice Biennale before her untimely passing in May 2025. Her vision for a more open, polyphonic, and globally connected exhibition continued to resonate throughout the Biennale.

North America

The United States Pavilion repurposed materials sourced from iconic national monuments—including elements associated with the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and the Lincoln Memorial—into new sculptural forms. Robotic fabrication techniques were combined with traditional craftsmanship, bringing together American walnut burl, Cantera Verde volcanic stone, and Colorado Yule marble to connect historical memory with contemporary methods of making.

The Bahamas Pavilion drew upon the centuries-old tradition of Junkanoo, rooted in the history of resistance across the British Caribbean. Artists John Beadle and Lavar Munroe reassembled abandoned Junkanoo costumes, focusing on what had been discarded, forgotten, or left behind. Through these remnants, they proposed a form of “posthumous collaboration,” allowing the labour of previous generations to remain visibly present.

South America

Argentina’s Monitor Yin Yang unfolded as a layered landscape where salt, charcoal, drawing, sound, video, and installation converged. Rather than presenting Yin and Yang as opposing forces, the exhibition explored coexistence, asking how beauty, resilience, and human agency endure even amid collapse. Visitors walked directly across the installation, experiencing ideas of ruin and renewal beneath their feet.

El Salvador’s Cartographies of the Displaced examined the relationship between bodily memory and migration through simplified figurative forms. Internal displacement was presented not as an isolated event but as a defining condition of contemporary life. Rather than remaining temporary, displacement gradually becomes almost a second skin—a reality that shapes identity itself.

Australia

Australia’s pavilion unfolded as an immersive choreography of colour and rhythm, dissolving the boundaries between physical reality and inner reflection. Drawing inspiration from the Sufi poem The Conference of the Birds, Khaled Sabsabi created a space for contemplating shared human experience through themes of doubt, love, knowledge, loss, devotion, and coexistence.

Resonances in a Minor Key

This year’s overarching theme, In Minor Keys, gave rise to a remarkable diversity of artistic responses. Rather than advancing a single curatorial thesis, the sixty-first Venice Biennale brought together different ways of thinking about memory, ecology, labour, spirituality, identity, and coexistence. Some pavilions became spaces for quiet reflection; others confronted visitors through spectacle, material experimentation, or political urgency.

Together, they revealed an international art world still searching for new ways to connect personal experience with broader cultural and social realities.

Ultimately, the 2026 Venice Biennale offered a portrait of a world searching for common ground—not through certainty or grand declarations, but through nuance, contradiction, and the subtle, often dissonant harmonies of minor keys.