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Collateral Events of the 2026 Art Biennale

Discover the 31 Collateral Events of the 2026 Art Biennale

CATALONIA

The Institut Ramon Llull presents the Catalan project by Claudia Pagès Rabal.

WALES

  • Title: Sownd
  • Venue: Istituto Santa Maria della Pietà, Castello 3703
  • Artists: Manon Awst and Dylan Huw

Sculpture, ecology, and cynghanedd—the ancient Welsh art of poetic harmony—intertwine in the project that Manon Awst and Dylan Huw bring to Venice for Wales’s return to the Biennale after seven years.

Awst, an artist from Caernarfon with architectural training at Cambridge and a decade spent in Berlin, creates site-specific works that investigate the tension between human structures and the more-than-human world, while Huw, a writer and critic, treats research as “time-based media” through translinguistic methodologies.

The project is rooted in Welsh traditions of “liveness” and site-specific performance, connecting Cymru and Venice through language, culture, and geographical space. “I was still an Architecture student during the first Wales in Venice in 2003,” Awst recalls. “That show inspired me to think beyond disciplinary boundaries.”

HONG KONG

Two artists, two opposing languages: for the first time since 2009, Hong Kong brings to Venice a dual voice, the technological one of Kingsley Ng and that of Angel Hui’s traditional Chinese painting. Ng constructs immersive, site-specific installations that transform space into meditative experience, while Hui reinterprets the gongbi technique by blending it with everyday objects.
The exhibition explores the poetic rhythms of daily life, seeking connections between two water metropolises like Hong Kong and Venice.

MACAO (CHINA)

A seventeenth-century painter who leaves China to study theology in Macao and becomes a Jesuit priest: the story of Wu Li, known to the Portuguese as Jacone, spans four centuries and arrives at the 2026 Art Biennale through the hands of three contemporary artists: Fok Hoi Seng, O Chi Wai, and Lei Fung Ieng, who construct a polyphonic dialogue between past and present, between traditional Chinese painting and Western spirituality, using the landscape master’s biography as a lens to narrate Macao as a historical crossroads between East and West. The project aligns with the Biennale theme In Minor Keys, investigating the fusion of culture, faith, and identity in a globalized world, with particular attention to paths of intercultural understanding that preserve roots without renouncing dialogue.

PALESTINE

  • Title: “___________” (Gaza – No Words – See the Exhibit)
  • Venue: Palazzo Mora, Strada Nova, Cannaregio 3659

The Palestine Museum US presents a project that chooses ellipsis as its title and names Gaza as its field of meaning.

QATAR

  • Title: إدراك أغرب | Aghrab Idrāk: Thresholds of Perception
  • Venue: Palazzo Cavanis, Fondamenta Zattere ai Gesuati, Dorsoduro 920

VCUarts Qatar brings a project that works on threshold and perception from its bilingual title onward.

TAIWAN

A video installation on the relationship between humans and image-production software. Li Yi-Fan, born in 1989 in Taipei, defines his creative process as a “death match between artist and software“: a physical and exhaustive confrontation from which narrative slowly emerges.
The project analyzes the “Software as a Service” model of image-production tools, the influence of specific media on human perception of the world, and images generated by artificial intelligence.

SCOTLAND

  • Title: Scotland + Venice: Bugarin + Castle
  • Venue: Olivolo, Castello 59/C
  • Artists: Bugarin + Castle (Davide Bugarin and Angel Cohn Castle)
  • Curator: Mount Stuart Trust

Edinburgh’s queer cabaret arrives in Venice: Davide Bugarin and Angel Cohn Castle, known as Bugarin + Castle, bring to the Biennale a project that uses the parade as a lens to explore the emotional legacies of shame, pride, and celebration. The Glasgow-based duo, who also perform in drag as Hairy Teddy Bear and Pollyfilla, unite queer histories, Scottish archives, and Filipino cultural heritage to analyze how sound and costume shape social control.
Their practice spans performance, cabaret, and architectural methodologies with an explicitly decolonial approach. “We met in the chaos and noise of Edinburgh’s queer cabaret,” they recount. “A decade later, that spirit still guides our practice.”

BELARUS

The Belarus Free Theatre presents a project that works on the gap between formal representation and non-institutional reality.

UKRAINE

The Victor Pinchuk Foundation brings a project that works on the persistence of joy in times of war and diaspora.

As Above, So Below

  • Venue: Fabbrica H3, Ex Chiesa dei Santi Cosma e Damiano, Giudecca 624
  • Curators: ZEITGEIST19 (curatorial collective)

One Ocean Foundation brings to Venice a research program on the ocean, biodiversity, and artistic practices. The exhibition is part of a broader project that interweaves editorial content, talks, and residencies.

BAILE, BOTELLA Y BARAJA

The project revolves around the figure of José Ruìz and a naïf imaginary linked to Puerto Rico.

Fissures of Light

Displacements, frictions, stratifications.

Hybrids

If All Time Is Eternally Present

  • Venue: Palazzo Nervi Scattolin, Campo Manin, San Marco 4866
  • Artists: Kandis Williams; Meriem Bennani & Orian Barki; Tai Shani

The Pier Luigi Nervi Foundation constructs a multi-voiced exhibition, declared from the title onward.

Infinito Cabinet. Maria Cristina Crespo

Eclettica Cultura dell’Arte presents a project dedicated to Maria Cristina Crespo.

Iván Tovar: Le Retour

Fundación Iván Tovar centers on Tovar’s return through a monographic exhibition at the former Istituto Idrografico, within the Museo Storico Navale.

Kan Yasuda – Islands of Silence

Lee Ufan

Fondazione Bvlgari (Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana)

  • Title: Lara Favaretto, Momentary Monument – The Library / Monia Ben Hamouda, Fragments of Fire Worship
  • Venue: Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Piazza San Marco 7

Nabatele

  • Venue: Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore

Montreal Jewish Museum presents…

Of Woman Born

The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art presents a monographic project on Nalini Malani with a title that evokes genealogies, birth, and the cultural construction of the body.

Pedagogy of Hope

  • Venue: Radio Vanessa, 1923 Castello (FM 101.8 MHz) + online until November 22
  • Website: www.radio.gamec.it

A Collateral Event in radio form: a few days on FM, then online. The project shifts the exhibition from the white cube to the broadcast schedule.

Ronald Ventura: Luna

Shifting Waters

A title that works through images: shifting water, mobile boundaries, forms in transition.

Song E Yoon: Songs Across Time

  • Venue: Spazio 996/A, Fondamenta Sant’Anna, Castello 996/A
  • Artist: Song E Yoon

The Foundation of ART NYC dedicates a project in which Song E Yoon establishes a temporal axis between archive, memory, and crossings.

Su Xiaobai’s Alchemical Universe

  • Venue: Palazzo Soranzo Van Axel, Cannaregio 6099, 6071, 6072
  • Artist: Su Xiaobai

A monographic project on Su Xiaobai that declares an “alchemical” lexicon.

Tadeusz Kantor (1915–1990). Emballage, Cricotage and Madame Jarema

Venue: Procuratie Vecchie, Piazza San Marco 139 – 153/A

The Starak Family Foundation brings Kantor to the Procuratie Vecchie with a project that aligns three nuclei: packaging as gesture, “cricotage” as theatrical device, and the figure of Madame Jarema.

The Spirits of Maritime Crossing 2026

  • Venue: Palazzo Rocca Contarini Corfù, Dorsoduro 1057/D

Bangkok Art Biennale Foundation constructs a project on the sea as cultural infrastructure: crossings, routes, passages.

TURANDOT: To the Daughters of the East

  • Venue: Palazzo Franchetti, San Marco 2847

Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art presents a project that works through dedication and genealogy: “to the daughters of the East.”

Vyacheslav Akhunov: Instruments of the Mind

  • Venue: Palazzo Franchetti, San Marco 2847

The work as mental instrumentarium: concepts, signs, devices. A project presented by the Centre for Contemporary Art Tashkent.

Article by Lucia Pecoraro.

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