Venice Biennale Off #1: beyond the Art Biennale in Venice, exhibitions, installations, performances, fashion.
Exhibitions, installations, and city-wide projects during the 2026 Art Biennale. Create your itinerary through art, fashion, and contemporary research, from the inaugural presentation of the Dries Van Noten Foundation at Palazzo Pisani Moretta to the reopening of Palazzo Manfrin with the Anish Kapoor Foundation, from exhibitions by contemporary painters like Amoako Boafo and Jenny Saville to the research of Joseph Kosuth. Here is the first of the Venice Biennale Off guides, featuring exhibitions and projects across historic palaces, museums, and independent spaces during the Biennale period.
- Dries Van Noten Foundation
The Only True Protest Is Beauty
Palazzo Pisani Moretta, San Polo, 2766
From April 25 to October 4
On the feast day of Saint Mark, the patron saint of Venice, Palazzo Pisani Moretta opens to the public for the first time in its history with The Only True Protest is Beauty, the inaugural presentation of the Dries Van Noten Foundation. With a project that offers an extraordinary opportunity to explore the intersections of fashion, art, and craftsmanship, the new foundation kicks off the opening period of the 2026 Art Biennale.
Fashion, jewelry, art, design, photography, glass, and ceramics coexist with videos and conversations with the creators: The Only True Protest is Beauty is an exhibition path across 20 rooms, featuring over 200 works by established and emerging creatives in the fields of art, design, fashion, architecture, photography and beyond, whose hybrid and experimental practices foster exchange, dialogue, and connections between the creative community and the public.
Fashion punctuates the entire journey as a cultural language that transcends time. The works engage in a dialogue with the frescoes and furnishings of one of Venice’s most iconic locations, creating a direct relationship between historical context and contemporary research.
The Foundation, a non-profit cultural institution conceived by Dries Van Noten and Patrick Vangheluwe to bear witness to the vital importance of craftsmanship, is a platform dedicated to creators, artisans, and emerging talents.
How to visit Palazzo Pisani Moretta and the Foundation
Palazzo Pisani Moretta is a private historic building. The Dries Van Noten Foundation offers the opportunity to discover it through the Become a Friend affiliation program (Membership starting from €20, €10 for under 26s).
Become a Friend of the Foundation and book your visit
- Anish Kapoor
Palazzo Manfrin
6 May – 8 August 2026
The Anish Kapoor Foundation reopens its Venetian headquarters to coincide with the 2026 Art Biennale, following four years of restoration, with an exhibition on the artist’s design archive. Approximately one hundred architectural models share fifty years of work and creative processes with the public.
How are the sculptures and projects of one of the world’s most influential contemporary artists born?
From projects transformed into monumental works like Cloud Gate—the mirrored steel sculpture in Chicago’s Millennium Park—to ideas that remained on paper: alongside the models, a series of mirror and stainless steel works, a new immersive architectural installation made of silicone and paint, and two large installations that will become permanent.
Descent into Limbo (1992), previously exhibited in the 2022 retrospective, plays with optical illusion, creating what appears to be a black circle painted on the floor but is actually a hole about two and a half meters deep, lined with light-absorbing dark blue pigment that prevents the eye from perceiving depth, giving the sensation of looking into an infinite void.
At the Edge of the World (1998) (featured on the cover) arrives in a new black version—the original was a red dome—made with a material similar to Vantablack that absorbs over 99% of visible light and nullifies the perception of depth, transforming the space into an absolute void.
The British-Indian artist has chosen Venice as the permanent home for his foundation, establishing it at Palazzo Manfrin, an imposing building on the Cannaregio Canal. In 2022, a major retrospective curated by Taco Dibbits, art historian and director of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam (who will also curate this 2026 exhibition), temporarily opened the spaces to the public with an exhibition split between Palazzo Manfrin and the Gallerie dell’Accademia.
Four years for a restoration project designed by UNA/UNLESS (Giulia Foscari), featuring structural interventions and system upgrades to meet museum and educational standards. The restoration also focuses on distribution: the ground floor features an exhibition hall on Calle del Vergola, a bookshop on the fondamenta, and a café facing Parco Savorgnan.
The upper floors are designed in collaboration with Ca’ Foscari University Venice as an educational outpost connected to the university’s main campus, where the Kapoor Project is a cultural initiative woven into the fabric of the city.
Anish Kapoor
Palazzo Manfrin
Fondamenta Venier, Cannaregio 342
6 May – 8 August 2026
Info and tickets
- AMOAKO BOAFO
Palazzo Grimani Museum, Rugagiuffa 4858
6 May 6 – 22 November 2026
The first solo exhibition in Italy for Amoako Boafo—the Ghanaian artist chosen by Dior to represent a men’s collection with his portraits—presents new site-specific works, large portraits of Black individuals painted with pigment applied with fingers, on the second floor of Palazzo Grimani.
The Maison Dior used those faces as the creative matrix for the Spring/Summer 2021 men’s collection. Kim Jones, then creative director of Dior Men, translated Boafo’s Black Diaspora onto textile. The collection was also released as a film: Portrait of an Artist, featuring a cast of Black models.
“One of the things designers can do is reflect the time they live in. For me, diversity is a natural thing; a reflection of the wider world,” Jones said in an interview with The Guardian.
- Joseph Kosuth. The-exchange-value-of-language-has-fallen-to-zero
Casa dei Tre Oci, Fondamenta Zitelle 43, Giudecca
28 March 28 – 22 November 2026
The father of American conceptual art returns to Venice with a major exhibition curated by Mario Codognato and Adriana Rispoli for Berggruen Arts & Culture. His works are in the world’s most important museums, and two of them are in the city, freely visible to all: The Matter of Ornament, the twelve neon signs on the facade of the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Campo Santa Maria Formosa, and To Invent Relations (for Carlo Scarpa), the vinyl on glass on the window of the Aula Magna Mario Baratto at Ca’ Foscari University Venice, overlooking the Grand Canal.
The exhibition brings sixty years of research by Kosuth to Venice on how words become works of art: at the entrance of the palace, A Chain of Resemblance (2026), a warm white neon based on a text by Michel Foucault, demonstrates how words change meaning depending on the context in which they appear. On the first floor, One and Three Mirrors (1965) pairs a mirror with its photograph—capturing the reflection of the environment where it is displayed—and the definition of the word ‘mirror’: each time the work is installed, it is unique, as the mirror always reflects a different place and moment. The viewer’s reflection enters the work, unconsciously transforming every visitor into an artistic subject.
Expanding Kosuth’s research on authorship are: The Fifth Investigation (1969), Text/Context (1978-1979), and Where Are you Standing? (1976), the poster created for the Venice Biennale as part of the International Local collective—Kosuth, Sarah Charlesworth, and Anthony McCall—choosing collaboration over individual signature.
- Helter Skelter: Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince
Fondazione Prada, Ca’ Corner della Regina, Calle de Ca’ Corner, Santa Croce 2215
9 May – 23 November 2026
Two artists who for decades have drawn from American popular culture to reveal its rawness and myths: the exhibition brings them together for the first time and places them in dialogue through their shared obsessions, bringing to light a creative conversation that has remained under the radar until now.
Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince work with existing images, taking them from films, comics, YouTube videos, record covers, rock posters, pulp novels, and social media posts, and reusing them to make us see something different. Jafa edits them with the rhythm of Black music to tell the African American experience (Golden Lion at the 2019 Biennale, music videos for Jay-Z and Solange). Prince re-photographs and exhibits them to unmask clichés of white masculinity and the dark side of the American psyche (Cowboys and Nurses series, Instagram posts transformed into paintings).
- CHIHULY: Venice 2026
Three sculptures on the Grand Canal and at the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti (Campo Santo Stefano)
5 May – 14 November 2026
Three glass sculptures up to nine meters high on the Grand Canal for CHIHULY: Venice 2026, the urban art project by Dale Chihuly returning to Venice on the thirtieth anniversary of Chihuly Over Venice.
In 1996, the American artist—considered the world’s most important for artistic glass—installed fourteen glass chandeliers in the city that lit up with brilliant, vivid colors in the evening.
The project celebrates the bond between Chihuly and Venice, the city that shaped his career. In 1968, he worked at the Venini furnace in Murano, where he learned teamwork, changing his professional approach and creating organic forms similar to jellyfish, flowers, or marine creatures.
At the Istituto Veneto in Campo Santo Stefano, the exhibition curated by Suzanne Geiss documents his creative process through photographs, drawings, and videos. Also on display are the Golden Celadon Baskets, asymmetrical vessels that intentionally distort the symmetry and technical precision of traditional Murano glassmaking.
- CANICULA
Ospedaletto Complex, Castello, Barbaria de le Tole 6691
6 May – 22 November 2026
Canicula concludes the Fondazione In Between Art Film trilogy on perception and visibility. Following Penumbra (2022) on the scarcity of light and Nebula (2024) on fog, the final exhibition addresses excess: too much light blinds, too much heat paralyzes, too many images confuse.
Curators Alessandro Rabottini and Leonardo Bigazzi use the title Canicula (from “canicola,” the period of the hottest summer days) as a metaphor for the present: we live in a daily overload of images, news, social media, notifications, and online content that overwhelms us without giving us time to understand or reflect.
The Fondazione In Between Art Film—created by Beatrice Bulgari, of the eponymous jewelry house, to produce artist videos and films—presents eight video installations created specifically by international artists: Lawrence Abu Hamdan (Turner Prize 2019) analyzes audio recordings for investigations into human rights violations. Italian documentarians Massimo D’Anolfi and Martina Parenti film places and people of post-industrial Italy. Janis Rafa films animals in factory farms and abandoned dogs to show the invisible victims of the economic system. British artist P. Staff works on how the state and medical institutions monitor and regulate trans and queer bodies. Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk document the consequences of the war in Ukraine. Wang Tuo (Sigg Prize 2023) uses actors and archives to reconstruct episodes of 20th-century Chinese history that the government attempted to erase. Chinese artist Yuyan Wang captures the repetitive work of laborers producing the LEDs and screens we use every day. Maya Watanabe collaborates with anthropologists to document mass graves from the Peruvian civil war.
- A Glimpse of Brancusi
Galerie Negropontes, Palazzina Masieri, Dorsoduro 3900
Until December 18
On the 150th anniversary of Constantin Brancusi’s birth, Galerie Negropontes celebrates him at Palazzina Masieri—the building designed by Carlo Scarpa in the 1960s on the Grand Canal—with an exhibition running parallel to one in Paris.
The primary asset of the exhibition path is the photography of Dan Er. Grigorescu, taken between ’64 and ’67 in Romania: black and white, natural light without filters, and tight framing that isolates the sculpture from any context. On the ground floor, sculptures by Mauro Mori in Pink Albizia wood—a local essence from the Seychelles—are arranged in stacks as in Brancusi’s studio, where one sculpture became the base for another.
On the first floor, Mircea Cantor presents Add Verticality To Your Seat (To Socrates): chairs carved from centuries-old Romanian oak and cherry trees that become abstract portraits of Socrates, a symbol of intellectual resistance. On display are onyx sculptures on iron bases, Egg Static III & IV by Gianluca Pacchioni, and two glass totems by Perrin & Perrin, created specifically for the exhibition.
On the top floor, Grigorescu’s black and white photographs are displayed alongside color ones by Mircea Cantor: both dedicated to Brancusi’s monumental installation in Târgu Jiu, the same work seen from two different eras.
- Hernan Bas: The Visitors
Ca’ Pesaro, Dom Pérignon Rooms (second floor), Santa Croce 2076
7 May – 30 August 2026
Thirty new works, all conceived for Ca’ Pesaro: American artist Hernan Bas populates the rooms of Ca’ Pesaro with ephebic and solitary dandies, placed in dreamlike spaces with details that blend French symbolism, decadent literature, mythology, and the paranormal. Young men painted as if they stepped out of an Oscar Wilde novel, a fin-de-siècle imaginary filtered through a contemporary queer sensibility.
- Jenny Saville at Ca’ Pesaro
Ca’ Pesaro – International Gallery of Modern Art, Santa Croce 2076
28 March – 22 November 2026
Jenny Saville is the world’s highest-valued living female artist—one of her self-portraits sold for £9.5 million (€11 million) at Sotheby’s in London—and she arrives at Ca’ Pesaro with her first major exhibition in Venice, bringing her monumental paintings of female bodies. Canvases up to two meters high where oil paint, applied in layers, itself becomes flesh, folds, muscles, and skin.
The exhibition traces thirty years of work, from her beginnings with the Young British Artists in the 1990s to new works created for this show.
Article by Lucia Pecoraro.
Cover photo: Anish Kapoor – At the Edge of the World (1998) Ph. David Stjernholm. Photo of Palazzo Pisani Moretta by Laura Scarpa, photo of Dries Van Noten Foundation by Settimo Cannatella, photo of Joseph Kosuth by Jason Wyche and Peter Lindbergh, photo of Anish Kapoor by Jack Hems, courtesy of Lisson Gallery.
