Industrial spaces become exhibition halls: the Arsenale, once a shipyard for the construction of the Serenissima’s fleets, is now at the center of the global contemporary art scene with the Venice Art Biennale 2026
The large red brick buildings where Venetian war galleys were once built will host video installations, artworks, and performances for the 61st Venice Art Biennale from April 17 to November 23, 2026.
The Sale d’Armi, formerly an armaments depot and ceremonial space decorated with the Republic’s weapons, becomes an exhibition venue; the Corderie, with its wooden trusses and three-hundred-meter-long hawsers, welcomes monumental sculptures; the Artiglierie, covering approximately 3,300 square meters; and the panoramic Gaggiandre: the Venice Arsenale, the Republic’s shipyard since the 12th century, is the Biennale’s second hub, alongside the Giardini.
Let us discover, in alphabetical order, the national pavilions hosted in this area:
ALBANIA
- Title: A Place in the Sun
- Artist: Genti Korini
- Curator: Małgorzata Ludwisiak
Archival research, folklore, and imagination explore how collective memory and ideology shape identity and space, navigating the Albanian past and relations with the Soviet Union.
Genti Korini repurposes Albanian photographic archives, reinterpreting them through a surrealist lens and an Eastern European (post-communist) perspective, working between historical fiction and documentary reality.
Paintings, photographs, videos, and sculptural installations analyze how ideology manifests through images and forms, engaging with political aesthetics beyond the legacies of communism, modernization, and the neoliberal present.
SAUDI ARABIA
- Title: May the tears you cry over stones never dry
- Artist: Dana Awartani
- Curator: Antonia Carver
Dana Awartani, who previously appeared at the 2024 Art Biennale in the main exhibition curated by Adriano Pedrosa with the work Come, Let Me Heal Your Wounds, returns to Venice to represent Saudi Arabia.
She works with artisans to reconstruct the geometric tile designs of the Great Mosque of Aleppo, destroyed by the war in Syria, using cracked clay bricks to demonstrate the fragility of cultural heritage under bombardment and the extent of our loss.
ARGENTINA
- Title: Monitor Yin Yang
- Artist: Matías Duville
- Curator: Josefina Barcia
The floor of the entire exhibition space will be covered by a gigantic drawing made with charcoal and salt that visitors must walk upon. The work will progressively transform as visitors wear it down by walking over it: the salt recalls vanished seas and crystallized surfaces, while the charcoal refers to combustion and fossil remains.
Matías Duville works with burnt wood, charcoal, and salt to create desolate landscapes and post-apocalyptic atmospheres where nature and human traces enter into tension.
ARMENIA
- Title: The Studio
- Artist: Zadik Zadikian
- Curators: Tony Shafrazi, Tina Chakarian
Zadik Zadikian works with brick structures and ingots covered in gold leaf, creating abstract sculptures based on repetition and numerology. For the artist, gold represents a noble, chemically stable metal, a perfect witness and carrier of ideas through time.
The title Ode to Lord Byron recalls the English Romantic poet who lived on the island of San Lazzaro degli Armeni in Venice in 1816, studying the Armenian language and financing the publication of the first Armenian-English dictionary.
CHILE
- Title: Inter-Reality
- Artist: Norton Maza
- Curators: Dermis León, Marisa Caichiolo
A water channel with sounds and vibrations runs through the Chilean pavilion, recounting migrations, fake news, and the environmental crisis through large structures and miniature sets. Norton Maza draws inspiration from the Cautín River where he grew up, now reduced from a wide river to a stream due to environmental devastation.
UNITED ARAB EMIRATES
- Title: Washwasha
- Curator: Bana Kattan
From Abu Dhabi to Venice, Bana Kattan will curate the United Arab Emirates pavilion, selecting artists from the Arab world and non-Western contexts.
Born in Abu Dhabi, she serves as curator and deputy director of exhibitions at the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. She has curated exhibitions featuring Mona Hatoum, Wafaa Bilal, and Maryam Taghavi, as well as shows on socio-political and historical themes, creating dialogues between emerging and established artists, such as Permanent Temporariness on the condition of refugees and But We Cannot See Them, which brought to light the community of pioneering Emirati artists between 1988 and 2008.
PHILIPPINES
- Title: Sea of Love / Dagat ng Pag-ibig
- Artist: Jon Cuyson
- Curator: Mara Gladstone
Filipino seafarers are a silent force in global maritime trade, and Jon Cuyson tells their story through painting, sculpture, installations, and film that depict labor at sea, solitude, the bodies of sailors, and the hidden histories of these men. He uses roller brushes to create horizontal movements evoking sediments and tidal rhythms, embedding resin mussels and shells into the painted surfaces. He recreates the ocean as a dynamic space of connection between the islands of the Philippine archipelago and the rest of the world.
IRELAND
- Title: unannounced
- Artist: Isabel Nolan
- Curator: Georgina Jackson
Arches, fallen chandeliers, swelling waves, dying suns: the artist Isabel Nolan has worked for years on cosmology, history, religion, mythology, mortality, and love through sculptures, textiles, paintings, drawings, photographs, and texts to answer the existentialist question of how we humans make sense of the world.
ISRAEL
- Title: The Rose of Nothingness
- Artist: Belu-Simion Fainaru
- Curators: Sorin Heller, Avital Bar-Shay
The Israeli pavilion at the Giardini is under renovation, and for the first time since 1950, Israel is exhibiting at the Arsenale alongside countries such as the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia.
Belu-Simion Fainaru presents an installation previously shown in 2015 at Galeria Plan B in Berlin: sixteen pipes release drops of black water into a basin, where the number recalls transformation in the Jewish Kabbalah and the dark liquid evokes the “black milk of daybreak” from Paul Celan’s poem Todesfuge, written after the Holocaust.
ITALY
- Title: Con te con tutto
- Artist: Chiara Camoni
- Curator: Cecilia Canziani
The project Con te con tutto, selected by the Minister of Culture Alessandro Giuli, employs, according to the official press release, “a conceptual use of ceramics that allows for the overcoming of boundaries between minor and major arts, pure art and craftsmanship,” exploring female friendship as a practice of material transformation.
Piacenza-born Chiara Camoni represents Italy with curator Cecilia Canziani through an artistic practice that dissolves the boundaries of individual authorship, favoring co-creation workshops with women from the Tuscan village of Fabbiano, where she lives, using organic materials gathered in the woods and clay from the rivers of the Apuan Alps.
LATVIA
- Title: Untamed Assembly: Backstage of Utopia
- Artists: Bruno Birmanis, MAREUNROL’S (Mārīte Mastiņa-Pēterkopa and Rolands Pēterkops)
- Curators: Inga Lāce, Adomas Narkevičius
Unpublished archives of the Untamed Fashion Assemblies in Riga from the 1990s are juxtaposed with contemporary scenographic interventions: the pavilion exhibits materials from experimental fashion festivals organized by creative Bruno Birmanis between 1990 and 1999, which drew on performance, drag, club culture, and visual art during the collapse of the Soviet system. The duo MAREUNROL’S creates new scenographic installations inspired by that subversive energy.
LEBANON
- Title: unannounced
- Artist: Nabil Nahas
- Curator: Nada Ghandour
Cedars, palms, and starfish from Lebanon transformed into fractal forms on canvases with thick, layered surfaces. Nabil Nahas presents enormous paintings where the patterns of the trees from his childhood in Beirut meet Islamic geometry and the Abstract Expressionism of 1970s New York, where he trained. He has lived between the two cities since 1993, creating compositions where organic natures expand through layers of acrylic mixed with pumice in saturated colors.
LUXEMBOURG
- Title: unannounced
- Artist: Aline Bouvy
- Curator: Stilbé Schroeder
Sculpture, drawing, photography, and sound interrogate the relationship between body and space, creating ambiguous experiences between attraction and repulsion. Aline Bouvy, born in 1974, represents Luxembourg after a 25-year international career with art that subverts the norms applied to power and domination through a feminist vision. She lives between Belgium and Luxembourg, working with polymorphic techniques that question bodies, spaces, and aesthetic and political conventions related to surveillance.
MALTA
- Title: No Need to Sparkle
- Artists: Adrian Abela, Charlie Cauchi, Raphael Vella
- Curator: Margerita Pulè
Three works systematically dismantle universal beliefs, identities, and distinctions between right and wrong through layered fictions and shifting realities—Adrian Abela, a sculptor based in Los Angeles; Charlie Cauchi, a Maltese interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker; and Raphael Vella, a professor of socially engaged art at the University of Malta—in a space contrary to political convictions, inviting doubt as a philosophy in reaction to our times.
NEW ZEALAND
- Title: Taharaki Skyside
- Artist: Fiona Pardington
- Curators: Chloe Cull, Felicity Milburn
In Maori culture, birds are messengers between the world of the living and the spirits, reminding us of the fragility of life. Fiona Pardington presents photographs of dead and taxidermied New Zealand birds preserved in museums to recount the losses caused by colonization and human impact on the environment.
MEXICO
- Title: Actos invisibles para sostener el universo
- Artists: RojoNegro (María Sosa, Noé Martínez)
- Curator: Jessica Berlanga Taylor
Installations, performances, and organic materials draw on Mexico’s indigenous, Afro-descendant, and peasant traditions as living sources of knowledge. The duo RojoNegro, composed of María Sosa and Noé Martínez, uses rituals, body movements, and ancestral memories to interrogate the effects of colonization on bodies and territories today, creating works that question how the colonial past shapes contemporary racial and social dynamics in the Americas.
PERU
- Title: De otros mundos
- Artist: Sara Flores
- Curators: Issela Ccoyllo, Matteo Norzi
Sara Flores is the first indigenous artist to represent Peru in Venice. She presents Kené: a visual language passed from mother to daughter in the Shipibo-Konibo culture of the Peruvian Amazon, where every geometric pattern tells the story of the relationship between body, nature, and cosmos. Her raw cotton canvases with vegetable dyes extracted from trees and clay are the representation of her dreamlike visions.
SERBIA
- Title: From Golgotha to Resurrection
- Artist: Predrag Đaković
- Curator: Tomáš Koudela
A 320-square-meter project featuring paintings, installations, figures, projections, and 14,600 artifacts analyzes how wounds can become sites of transformation. Predrag Đaković brings together individual experience, collective memory, and human destiny in a work of original archival materials and photographs that address Europe’s historical traumas, translating them into a language that transcends national and political boundaries and contributes to the international dialogue on memory, identity, and consciousness.
SINGAPORE
- Title: unannounced
- Artist: Amanda Heng
- Curator: Selene Yap
The body as a site of memory and care through performance, installations, and everyday gestures. Amanda Heng brings a project that draws on forty years of feminist practice born in the late 1980s.
She is the oldest artist and the second woman to exhibit at the Singapore pavilion after Shubigi Rao in 2022.
Founder of The Artists Village and Women in the Arts, she has created actions such as 1999’s Walking the Stool, where she walked a stool through the streets in protest against the ban on performance art.
TIMOR-LESTE
- Title: Across Word
- Venue: Arsenale – not yet specified
- Artists: Veronica Pereira Maia, Etson Caminha, Juventino Madeira
- Curator: Loredana Pazzini-Paracciani
Second participation for Southeast Asia’s youngest nation, with a project bringing together a 94-year-old weaver, a sound artist, and an installation artist: Veronica Pereira Maia, Etson Caminha and Juventino Madeira bring three generations of Timor-Leste art to Venice.
TURKEY
- Title: unannounced
- Artist: Nilbar Güreş
- Curator: Başak Doğa Temür
Female figures with a woman’s head and a spider’s body, tropical trees dressed in transparent evening gowns, climbing plants made of fabric and copper wire invading the space. Nilbar Güreş creates sculptures and performances where humans, animals, and plants mingle to speak about gender and sexuality in Turkey, collaborating with local artisans to create works in painted fabric that stem from her personal life in Istanbul and become an ironic commentary on social conventions and those marginalized by society.
UKRAINE
- Title: Security Guarantees
- Artist: Zhanna Kadyrova
- Curators: Ksenia Malykh, Leonid Marushchak
Musical instruments constructed from Russian bullets that play music, market stalls with salami and fruit sculpted in concrete. Zhanna Kadyrova transforms war materials into works that recount betrayal: in 1994, Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons for security guarantees that Russia violated by invading the country.
UZBEKISTAN
- Title: The Aural Sea
- Artists: Jahongir Bobokulov, Zi Kakhramonova, Aygul Sarsen, Zulfiya Spowart, Xin Liu, A.A.Murakami, Nguyen Phuong Linh
- Curators: Sophie Mayuko Arni, Aziza Izamova, Kamila Mukhitdinova, Nico Sun, Thai Ha
In the Quarta Tesa space, the pavilion project begins with the Aral Sea region in Karakalpakstan, marked by radical environmental transformation: since the 1960s, the diversion of rivers has reduced the lake by over 90%, transforming one of the world’s largest inland bodies of water into desert. The inspiration comes from Karakalpak writer Allayar Darmenov, who at 18 began to imagine the Aral Sea’s return to life through writing. Myth and storytelling thus become tools for reading loss and envisioning new possibilities.
Discover the national pavilions in the other areas dedicated to the Venice Art Biennale 2026 as well.
GIARDINI
IN THE CITY
COLLATERAL EVENTS
Article by Lucia Pecoraro.
Cover photo by Marta Formentello.
Photos have been provided by the respective artists or pavilions.
