The 61st edition of the Venice Biennale unfolds under the title In Minor Keys, a curatorial framework conceived by the late curator Koyo Kouoh. Borrowing its metaphor from music, the “minor key” signals quieter emotional registers, melancholy, intimacy, and reflection, proposing an exhibition that moves away from spectacle toward more nuanced and attentive modes of listening.
Bringing together more than 100 artists and collectives, the exhibition is structured around seven thematic strands, including Procession–Invocation, The Creole Garden, and The Shrines. Across the Giardini and Arsenale, projects explore collective memory, spirituality, and ecological and diasporic connections.
Together, these pavilions show the Venice Biennale’s enduring capacity to spark dialogue, bringing translation, ecology, diaspora, and memory into shared focus. In 2026, Venice is more than a city of canals; it becomes a network of voices and perspectives, inviting us to listen differently, perceive deeply, and inhabit the world with heightened awareness. Above all, the Biennale attunes us to the subtle, transformative power of the minor key, where art resonates not through spectacle, but through reflection, intimacy, and the quiet insistence of connection.
Poland
Bogna Burska & Daniel Kotowski, curated by Ewa Chomicka & Jolanta Woszczenko
Liquid Tongues at the Polish Pavilion is an immersive audio-video installation that explores communication between Deaf and hearing cultures. The project draws on the concept of “Deaf Gain,” reframing deafness not as loss but as a generative cultural and perceptual difference.
Presented by Bogna Burska, a Polish multimedia artist working across film, installation, and photography whose work has been exhibited internationally, and Daniel Kotowski, a Deaf artist working in performance, video, and installation whose practice explores Deaf culture, embodiment, and alternative forms of communication, the installation unfolds through several sensory layers. Curators Ewa Chomicka and Jolanta Woszczenko, who work within contemporary Polish art through interdisciplinary, research-driven exhibition projects, present a moving image by Burska and cinematographer Magda Mosiewicz, a sound composition by Aleksandra Gryka, and a spatial dimension shaped by acoustic waves inspired by the vocalisations and echolocation of right whales. A collective choreography by Alicja Czyczel, performed by a choir, draws on the fluid movement of schools of fish.
Through layered soundscapes, visual rhythms, and embodied gestures, the Polish Pavilion challenges conventional hierarchies of speech and listening. Rather than focusing on absence, the artists propose an expanded sensory field in which language becomes fluid, spatial, and shared, offering a reflection on access, translation, and the politics of voice.
Albania
Genti Korini, curated by Małgorzata Ludwisiak
A Place in the Sun, a moving-image installation by Albanian artist Genti Korini, curated by Małgorzata Ludwisiak, offers a pointed and speculative exploration of language, identity, and the politics of representation.
The exhibition unfolds as a three-channel video installation combining live action, puppetry, animation, and an original score, staged in Zaum, a transrational language developed by Russian Futurists to disrupt conventional meaning. Here, language is both material and method, stretched beyond coherence to open a space for rearticulation.
Drawing on the 1916 avant-garde publication Bloodless Murder and its satirical “Albanian Issue,” Korini interrogates how Albania has been shaped through external projections and orientalist fantasy. A Place in the Sun reframes these narratives as a speculative theatre where history, ideology, and imagination collapse, positioning Albania not as a fixed identity, but as a fluid and contested construct.
The Bahamas
Lavar Munroe & John Beadle, curated by Krista Thompson
The Bahamas Pavilion brings together artists John Beadle and Lavar Munroe in In Another Man’s Yard: John Beadle, Lavar Munroe, and the Spirit of (Posthumous) Collaboration, curated by Krista Thompson.
Munroe is a Bahamian artist known for large-scale installations and mixed-media works combining found materials, drawing, and sculpture to explore identity, spirituality, and postcolonial histories. Beadle is a multidisciplinary Bahamian artist whose practice spans painting, sculpture, and installation, often drawing on Junkanoo traditions and Caribbean cultural heritage. The exhibition honours Beadle through a series of paintings by Munroe depicting a memorial procession, inspired by photographs by Bahamian photographer Jackson Petit. The work extends Munroe’s broader engagement with spiritual practices shaped by recent travels to Tanzania, Senegal, and Zimbabwe.
Munroe’s psychologically charged compositions intersect with Beadle’s mythic visual language, forming a speculative collaboration that reaches beyond mortality. Together, their works reflect on inheritance, authorship, and the idea of the “yard” as both a domestic and geopolitical space, one shaped by colonial histories and ongoing creative resilience. Alongside this, the pavilion presents sections dedicated to each artist, as well as collaborative works Beadle produced with Antonius Roberts and Stan Burnside as part of the Junkanoo-based Jammin collective.
Czech Republic & Slovakia
Jakub Jansa; Selmeci Kocka Jusko (duo), curated by Peter Sit
The Silence of the Mole, a collaborative project by Jakub Jansa and Selmeci Kocka Jusko, curated by Peter Sit, examines collective memory and ecological fatigue through the lens of shared national histories.
Jansa is a contemporary Czech artist working across installation, video, and performance, whose practice explores memory, identity, and the human relationship to the environment. Selmeci Kocka Jusko is a Slovak art duo known for experimental installations and collaborative projects addressing ecological, social, and political systems. Together, they explore transitional identities and the ways narratives are buried, resurfaced, or quietly reshaped over time, reflecting on Czech–Slovak coexistence, collective memory, and ecological exhaustion, asking what happens to imagination when it becomes a kind of public mask. The mole, an emblem of subterranean labour and limited vision, serves as a metaphor for historical processes unfolding beneath the surface. Through installation and speculative storytelling, the pavilion considers post-socialist transformation and the lingering emotional residue of political change.
Estonia
Merike Estna, curated by Natalia Sielewicz
Estonian Pavilion becomes a living studio with The House of Leaking Sky, which brings together the work of Merike Estna, curated by Natalia Sielewicz.
Estna, an Estonian multidisciplinary artist working across painting, installation, performance, and public interventions, explores memory, identity, and the intersections of visual culture with social and political contexts. Throughout the Biennale, she will paint in situ, merging performance with material experimentation. By inviting visitors into the unfolding process, Estna challenges long-standing assumptions about where art, and by extension where women, are permitted to exist.
The artist’s cross-disciplinary practice blurs the boundaries between fine art and craft, surface and action. Here, painting is not a finished object but an evolving event, an architecture of gestures and stains shaped by time and presence. The “leaking sky” becomes a metaphor for permeability, dissolving borders between inside and outside, tradition and improvisation.
The pavilion will also host The School of Strange Weather from 11 to 16 August, expanding the space into a site for exchange and collective learning.
Hong Kong
Kingsley Ng & Angel Hui, organised by the Hong Kong Museum of Art / HKADC
Kingsley Ng and Angel Hui represent Hong Kong with a project that blends spatial mediation and the rich traditions of ink art. Their immersive installation bridges historical techniques with contemporary sensory design.
As keen observers of urban life, Ng and Hui transform everyday reflections into a creative dialogue connecting Hong Kong and Venice, two global cities, highlighting the dynamism and achievement of Hong Kong’s art scene for an international audience. Drawing on the philosophical depth of ink painting while expanding into installation and sound, the pavilion investigates how space can be translated across cultures. It offers a contemplative environment where material minimalism meets subtle technological sophistication.
Kosovo
Brilant Milazimi, curated by José Esparza Chong Cuy
Hard Teeth (Dhëmbë të Fortë) features the work of Brilant Milazimi, curated by José Esparza Chong Cuy. The centrepiece by the artist known for surreal, often brutal, and darkly humorous portrayals of human and animal figures is a 17-meter-long landscape painting depicting a single line of figures, closely aligned across mountains reminiscent of Kosovo’s rural terrain. Evoking the visual language of processions, the fragile bodies seem to linger in the landscape, caught between endurance and exposure.
Milazimi’s surfaces pulse with resilience, the “hard teeth” of the title suggesting strength under pressure. The pavilion transforms painting into a spatial experience, reflecting on collective strain, the fragility of political structures, and the persistent will to survive.
Lebanon
Nabil Nahas, curated by Nada Ghandour
Don’t Get Me Wrong, curated by Nada Ghandour, spotlights Nabil Nahas, a Lebanese-American painter whose richly textured canvases fuse layered geometry with organic motifs. Working between Beirut and New York, his practice explores transnational identity, memory, and movement, bridging personal experience with global cultural geographies.
The Lebanese Pavilion stands as a celebration of creativity and solidarity, offering a platform for artistic voices in a world marked by uncertainty and instability. Nahas’s intricate compositions, evoking marine life, cellular structures, and natural patterns, oscillate between abstraction and nature, suggesting both continuity and transformation.
In Venice, these surfaces resonate as metaphors for layered histories, ecological interdependence, and the enduring ties between place, diaspora, and memory, inviting viewers to consider the subtle interplay of movement, belonging, and artistic imagination.
El Salvador
José Oscar Molina, curated by Alejandra Cabezas
Making its debut at the Biennale, El Salvador presents José Oscar Molina’s Cartographies of the Displaced. Drawing from his Children of the World series, Molina’s art builds bridges across cultural borders, using abstraction and symbolism to open space for dialogue about identity, resilience, and community.
As Molina observes, migration “transforms a human into a different type of human… the self existing neither here nor there, but somewhere in between.” The pavilion traces these liminal spaces, presenting sculpture as both a record of trauma and a testament to resilience. Through fractured forms and gestural abstraction, Cartographies of the Displaced maps the emotional, social, and geographic contours of migration, inviting reflection on identity, movement, and survival.
Malta
Charlie Cauchi, Raphael Vella, Adrian Abela, curated by Margerita Pulè
Across the pavilion, No Need to Sparkle: Experiments In Love and Revolution emphasises how clarity is achieved not through complexity, but through attentiveness to edges, thresholds, and what remains after the unnecessary has been excised.
The installation brings together the work of Charlie Cauchi, Raphael Vella, and Adrian Abela, curated by Margerita Pulè. Cauchi is a Maltese interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker whose practice engages moving image, spatial composition, and material experimentation. Vella is a contemporary artist working across drawing, installation, and stop motion, exploring process, repetition, and the construction of meaning through layered visual narratives. Abela’s contribution to the pavilion incorporates digital technologies alongside sculptural elements and hand-drawn pieces, bringing together analogue and digital gestures to examine surface, form, and perception.
Pulè, known for curatorial projects that foreground material presence and perceptual nuance, frames No Need to Sparkle: Experiments In Love and Revolution as an inquiry into clarity and reduction, how forms and meanings emerge through subtraction, division, and line. The pavilion situates each artist within a shared field of attention: Cauchi’s calibrated installations that define light and form, Vella’s rhythmic protocols that register presence through systematic action, and Abela’s pared-back surfaces where nuance and intensity reside in restraint.
Macao
Eric Fok Hoi Seng, O Chi Wai & Lei Fong Ieng, Curated by Feng Yan & Ng Sio Ieng
Jacone’s Polyphony takes its cue from the life and cultural trajectory of the Qing‑dynasty artist and theologian Wu Li (known as Jacone in Portuguese), who studied in Macao and embodied a synthesis of East–West thought that resonates across time and place.
Curated by Feng Yan and Cindy Ng Sio Ieng, the installation brings together the work of Eric Fok Hoi Seng, O Chi Wai, and Veronica Lei Fong Ieng. Eric Fok Hoi Seng works in pen drawing and installation, merging maps and architectural forms to explore memory and urban identity. O Chi Wai creates across image, video, and installation, experimenting with visual structures, space, and perception. Lei Fong Ieng, trained at Macao Polytechnic Institute, uses colour, form, and texture to probe cultural experience.
Jacone’s Polyphony uses ‘polyphony’ as its organising principle, creating a layered conversation between past and present, East and West, faith and artistic practice, where each work resonates as a distinct voice within a collective dialogue. The pavilion invites viewers to navigate these intersections, reflecting on cultural continuity, transformation, and the shared rhythms that connect history with contemporary experience.
Morocco
Amina Agueznay, curated by Meriem Berrada.
Asǝṭṭa marks the first national pavilion of the Kingdom of Morocco at the Venice Biennale, presenting a monumental installation by Amina Agueznay, curated by Meriem Berrada. Conceived for the Arsenale, the project centres on ritual weaving as both material and method, unfolding as an immersive environment shaped by gesture, texture, and spatial rhythm.
Agueznay’s practice draws on decades of collaboration with artisans across Morocco, working with weaving, braiding, and stitching as forms of embodied knowledge. With a background in architecture, she approaches installation as something to inhabit, attentive to scale, structure, and the sensorial qualities of materials.
Asǝṭṭa navigates the threshold as both form and concept, tracing passages between interior and exterior, individual and collective. Layers of material and suspended forms evoke a tactile archive of gestures, where craft is activated rather than displayed. Asǝṭṭa positions heritage as a process, fluid, collaborative, and continuously rearticulated through making.
