From May to November, the 61st International Art Exhibition of the La Biennale di Venezia, titled In Minor Keys and curated by the late Koyo Kouoh, transforms Venice into more than an exhibition site – it becomes a dispersed, living field of artistic exchange. While the national pavilions in the Giardini and the Arsenale remain its symbolic core, the true texture of the Biennale unfolds across the city itself.
Beyond these central sites, museums, foundations, artist-run spaces, and historic palazzi open their doors in synchrony, hosting a dense programme of exhibitions, talks, and curatorial interventions that extend the Biennale’s reach. What emerges is a layered cultural ecosystem, one that invites movement, encounter, and discovery across Venice’s shifting geographies.
Here is our curated list of must-see events to experience alongside the Biennale this season – including and extending beyond the official collateral events.
Screen Melancholy: Li Yi-Fan
7 May 2026 – 22 November 2026, Palazzo delle Prigioni, Venice, Italy
Presented by the Taipei Fine Arts Museum as an official collateral event of the 61st International Art Exhibition of the La Biennale di Venezia, Screen Melancholy: Li Yi-Fan brings the acclaimed Taiwanese artist’s practice into the charged architectural setting of Palazzo delle Prigioni. Curated by Raphael Fonseca, the exhibition runs from 9 May 2026 to 22 November 2026, offering a reflection on image culture, digital alienation, and the psychological impact of screen-based life.
During opening week, from 7 May 2026 to 9 May 2026, the exhibition is accompanied by a dynamic public programme that includes a live performance by Korean artist Eunju Hong in collaboration with Isu Kim Lee, alongside a series of curator-artist conversations that extend the conceptual framework of the project beyond the gallery walls.
Darkness Visible: The Long Shadow of Dictatorship
6 May 2026 – 22 November 2026, Spazio Punch, Giudecca, Venice, Italy
Developed by the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires in collaboration with Spazio Punch, Darkness Visible: The Long Shadow of Dictatorship marks the fiftieth anniversary of the coup that initiated Argentina’s last military dictatorship. The exhibition offers a deeply considered reflection on state violence, censorship, disappearance, and collective memory.
Curated by Victoria Noorthoorn and Patricio Orellana, in collaboration with Augusto Maurandi, the exhibition brings together nineteen artists and collectives whose practices span from the 1970s to the present. The result is a multilayered dialogue between historical trauma and contemporary resistance, situated within one of Venice’s most compelling independent venues.
Gabrielle Goliath, Elegy
5 May 2026 – 31 July 2026, Chiesa di Sant’Antonin, Castello, Venice, Italy
South African artist Gabrielle Goliath presents Elegy, a highly anticipated independent exhibition staged within the atmospheric setting of Chiesa di Sant’Antonin.
Originally conceived as a performance work, Elegy takes the form of a multi-channel video installation that moves through questions of grief, ritual, mourning, and social justice. Bringing together sound, performance, and moving image, the work addresses structures of violence, with particular attention to femicide and Palestinian lives.
A collective public reading is scheduled for 7 May 2026, 5:00–7:00 PM, offering an expanded communal engagement with the work’s themes of lament and witness.
As Above, So Below
9 May 2026 – 8 June 2026, Ex Church Santi Cosma e Damiano, Giudecca, Venice, Italy
Curated by Elizabeth Zhivkova and Farah Piriye Coene and created in collaboration with One Ocean Foundation and ZEITGEIST19, As Above, So Below transforms the former Church of Saints Cosmas and Damian on the island of Guidecca into an immersive site of ecological and philosophical reflection.
Positioned as an official collateral event, the exhibition approaches the ocean as both archive and agent, a living system through which planetary instability, deep time, and environmental precarity may be understood. The historic space becomes a contemplative environment where questions of technological acceleration and ecological fragility are held in productive tension.
Tadeusz Kantor (1915–1990). Emballage, Cricotage and Madame Jarema
9 May 2026 – 22 November 2026, Procuratie Vecchie, St Mark’s Square, Venice, Italy
Organised by the Starak Family Foundation as an official collateral event, this major presentation revisits the relationship between post-war avant-garde figures Tadeusz Kantor and Maria Jarema, and her influence on Kantor’s work.
The exhibition traces Kantor’s most significant painterly and performative threads, from his informal compositions of the late 1950s to the emballages of the 1960s and 1970s, concluding with his final painting cycles. Original props and objects from his performances deepen the dialogue between painting, theatre, and material memory.
Installed within the historic Procuratie Vecchie, the exhibition offers a rigorous examination of post-war experimental practice.
Still Joy — From Ukraine into the World
9 May 2026 – 1 August 2026, Palazzo Contarini Polignac, Venice, Italy
Presented by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation and PinchukArtCentre as an official collateral event, Still Joy — From Ukraine into the World convenes Ukrainian and international artists around the notion of joy as an act of endurance, fragile yet insistent within conditions of ongoing conflict.
Rather than consolidating a singular narrative, the exhibition unfolds through a constellation of perspectives shaped in part by testimonies gathered by Ukrainian story collectors, including veteran and former prisoner of war Hlib Stryzhko. These accounts circulate throughout the exhibition as points of orientation, subtle yet persistent presences that anchor the works within the immediacy of lived experience while resisting closure or resolution.
Official. Unofficial. Belarus
9 May 2026 – 22 November 2026, Chiesa di San Giovanni Evangelista, San Polo, Venice, Italy
Official. Unofficial. Belarus brings together a group of Belarusian artists working in response to the pressures of authoritarian governance, censorship, and the gradual erosion of cultural visibility. Installed within the sacred interior of the Chiesa di San Giovanni Evangelista and designated as an official collateral event, the exhibition offers a charged dialogue between contemporary artistic practice and the historical weight of religious space.
Across the surrounding chapels and architectural niches, site-specific interventions extend this discourse into spatial form. Among them, a significant installation by Nicolai Khalezin confronts the systematic destruction of artistic and literary memory in Belarus, transforming the exhibition space into a fragmented archive of loss, erasure, and persistence. Together, the works construct a layered environment in which visibility itself becomes both contested and urgent.
Marina Abramović, Transforming Energy
6 May 2026 – 19 October 2026, Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice, Italy
Marina Abramović becomes the first living artist to be honoured with a major solo exhibition at the Gallerie dell’Accademia, marking a significant institutional encounter between contemporary performance and the canonical histories of Venetian art. Curated by Shai Baitel, Transforming Energy stages a sustained dialogue between Abramović’s performative language and the symbolic, devotional intensity of the Venetian Renaissance.
Moving across both permanent and temporary galleries, the exhibition unfolds as a sequence of spatial and conceptual thresholds, where works engage the viewer through presence, duration, and embodied attention. Historical paintings and contemporary interventions are placed in deliberate tension, allowing shifts between stillness and action, image and experience, to emerge gradually across the museum’s architecture.
TURANDOT: To the Daughters of the East
9 May 2026 – 31 October 2026, Palazzo Cavalli-Franchetti, Venice, Italy
Presented by the Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art, TURANDOT: To the Daughters of the East gathers eleven women artists from Central Asia and beyond, staging a polyphonic exploration of cultural memory, myth, and geopolitical imagination within the layered interiors of Palazzo Cavalli-Franchetti.
Artists including Huma Bhabha, Mona Hatoum, Tala Madani, and Nazira Karimi engage “the East” not as a stable geography but as a contested and continually reconfigured site of representation. Within this framework, the exhibition resists singular narratives of origin or identity, instead foregrounding fragmentation, displacement, and reinterpretation as generative conditions. The result is a curatorial proposition in which multiple temporalities and mythologies coexist, allowing the exhibition space itself to function as a site of ongoing negotiation between visibility, voice, and historical inscription.
Baile, Botella y Baraja
9 May 2026 – 22 November 2026, Via Giuseppe Garibaldi 1735, Castello, Venice, Italy
Organised by Consolato REM, Baile, Botella y Baraja unfolds as a collateral event of the La Biennale di Venezia, bringing together a multigenerational group of artists connected to Puerto Rico and its diasporic contexts. Presented in Castello, the exhibition takes its title from the cultural triad of dance, drink, and play, gestures that function here as both social rituals and critical frameworks.
Through installation, moving image, and material practice, the exhibition engages with questions of identity, colonial legacy, and cultural continuity. Rather than offering a singular narrative of place, it constructs a layered and shifting field of references, where Caribbean histories and diasporic experiences intersect with broader conversations around migration, memory, and resistance.
Kan Yasuda: Isole del Silenzio (Islands of Silence)
9 May 2026 – 22 November 2026, Fondazione Wilmotte, Cannaregio, Venice, Italy
Presented by the Fondation d’Entreprise Wilmotte, Isole del Silenzio (Islands of Silence) by Kan Yasuda unfolds as a spatial meditation on form, material, and stillness. Installed within the architectural setting of the foundation, the exhibition takes shape as a “mineral garden,” where marble sculptures articulate an interior landscape defined by restraint, clarity, and quiet resonance.
Drawing on the Japanese concept of Ma, an interval understood not as absence but as an active, generative space, the project constructs a nuanced dialogue between presence and void. A constellation of sculptural forms is arranged as dispersed “islands” within a carefully modulated environment, inviting a slowed mode of viewing in which light, shadow, and surface shift in relation to the viewer’s movement. Here, sculpture is encountered less as a fixed object than as a durational experience, foregrounding perception, stillness, and spatial awareness.
Ibrahim Mahama: A Shea Garden
4 May 2026 – 18 July 2026, Rio Terà della Carità, Dorsoduro, Venice, Italy
Presented by Galleria Barovier&Toso in collaboration with Apalazzogallery, A Shea Garden by Ibrahim Mahama marks a shift toward a more concentrated, object-led practice. Installed near the Gallerie dell’Accademia, the exhibition centres on clay vessels from northern Ghana reimagined in Murano glass.
Through this material translation, functional forms tied to agricultural life and women-led shea production are rendered fragile and translucent, foregrounding absence as much as presence. In bringing these forms into dialogue with Venetian glassmaking, Mahama reflects on the movement of objects, labour, and knowledge across geographies, where transformation becomes a means of tracing both continuity and displacement.
Shifting Waters
9 May 2026 – 28 June 2026 & 4 September 2026 – 1 November 2026, Fondazione ERES, Castello, Venice, Italy
Presented by the ERES Foundation as an official collateral event, Shifting Waters brings together seven international artists in a focused examination of the evolving relationship between human life and aquatic systems. Installed within Ca’ Sarasina in Castello, the exhibition situates Venice not merely as context but as a critical point of reference, with its lagoon foregrounding the fragile balance between environment, infrastructure, and survival.
Through sculpture, installation, and image-based work, the exhibition develops a layered inquiry into water as both a material condition and a conceptual framework, moving through a range of tonal registers: from tension and erosion to fluidity and transformation. Organic forms, remnants of built environments, and speculative underwater imaginaries coexist within a spatial composition that reflects on adaptation and uncertainty. In this shifting terrain, water emerges as a force that continually reshapes not only landscapes, but the conditions through which future modes of living must be imagined.
La Villa | The Key to Art from Poznań
4 May 2026 – 23 May 2026, Villa Farsetti, Santa Maria di Sala, Venice, Italy
La Villa unfolds at Villa Farsetti as a layered presentation of the contemporary art scene of Poznań, articulated through a polyphonic curatorial approach. Extending across the villa and its surrounding cultural complex, the exhibition stages an encounter between academic tradition and contemporary artistic languages.
Emerging from an ongoing exchange between Venice and Poznań initiated in 2024, the project draws on the architectural thinking of Marino Zancanella, whose research into urban memory and morphology informs the exhibition’s conceptual framework. Through the notion of “parallel worlds,” La Villa traces subtle correspondences between the two cities, foregrounding the circulation of forms, ideas, and cultural practices across European histories.
The exhibition operates through spatial and historical layering, where architecture, art, and research intersect. Influenced by methodologies associated with longue durée thinking, the project situates local artistic production within broader systems of exchange and power, reflecting on how cultural identities are shaped through networks of continuity, dependency, and transformation.
The Ear is the Eye of the Soul — Pavilion of the Holy See
9 May 2026 – 22 November 2026, Giardino Mistico dei Carmelitani Scalzi & Complesso di Santa Maria Ausiliatrice, Venice, Italy
Presented by the Dicastery for Culture and Education of the Holy See, The Ear is the Eye of the Soul is an official Biennale Pavilion, included here as it unfolds beyond a single exhibition site, bringing together newly commissioned works by 24 artists responding to the writings and legacy of Hildegard of Bingen. Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Ben Vickers in collaboration with Soundwalk Collective, the project centres on listening as a mode of attention, proposing sound as both medium and method.
In the enclosed garden of the Carmelite convent in Cannaregio, a sequence of sonic works by artists including Brian Eno, FKA Twigs, Patti Smith, and Otobong Nkanga unfolds through a headphone-based experience. These compositions are interwoven into a responsive acoustic environment, where subtle shifts in wind, plant life, and ambient conditions are translated into an evolving auditory field, inviting a sustained, contemplative engagement with the surrounding space.
Across the lagoon in Castello, the Complesso di Santa Maria Ausiliatrice is reconfigured as a contemporary site of inscription and transmission. Here, an evolving repository of texts, sound, and spatial interventions intersects with architectural gesture and moving image, including the final multi-part installation by Alexander Kluge. These elements converge to extend Hildegard’s influence into the present, positioning the Pavilion as a dispersed environment in which voice, memory, and knowledge circulate across time and form.
