Venice Biennale. What was interesting on preview day and more. Part 1

Yesterday, the 61st International Art Exhibition opened its doors for the first professional preview. Critics, curators, collectors and invited guests streamed through the Giardini and the Arsenale, eager to see what the world’s most important contemporary art showcase has to offer when the public is allowed in from 9 May until 22 November 2026. Today, Wednesday 6 May 2026 at 12 noon CEST, the official presentation takes place at the Teatro Piccolo Arsenale in Venice. On stage will be Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, President of La Biennale di Venezia, and the team of curator Koyo Kouoh: Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Helene Pereira, Rasha Salti, Siddhartha Mitter and Rory Tsapayi. This should be a celebration of artistic vision. But…

Image: Alvaro Barrington, Mangrove Sound Truck, Notting Hill Carnival, London , 2025. Courtesy the artist and the Notting Hill Carnival Community. Photo Alex Kuru

The official materials distributed by the press office are strikingly dry and sparse. The main document that journalists received is a performance programme for the first few days – nothing more. It lists events with exact timings, locations and technical notes. For example, on Thursday 7th May at 11 AM in the Arsenale – Giardino delle Vergini, Victoria Idongesit-Udondian presents “Kayavei Momome”, activating her installation “Obroni Wavu” – an Akan term meaning “dead white man’s clothes”, referring to second-hand garments imported from Western countries into African markets. Seven women wearing handcrafted headdresses inspired by the kayayei (women who carry heavy loads) process through the garden, reminding viewers of migrant communities whose everyday workloads are rendered invisible in Western geographies. The description says the performance transforms labour, resistance and care into a site of empowerment and energetic renewal.

Another entry: on the same day at 3 PM in the Giardini Biennale, “Poetry Caravan” lasts 120 minutes. The programme quotes Koyo Kouoh from 2000: “Words hang in the air, move from tongues to ears au gré des vents, words penetrate the soil as clandestine fertiliser, their sounds, rhythms and melodies perfuming the air.” In 1999, Kouoh brought together nine African poets for a poetry caravan by road from Dakar to Timbuktu. This procession of poets and musicians honours that journey. Poets assemble and cycle through seven stations in the Giardini, gathering others as they hum, recite, sing, improvise, chant and howl. Performers are listed: Batool Abu Akleen, Ken Bugul, Christian Campbell, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons & Kamaal Malak, Natalie Diaz, Mohsen Emadi, Gabrielle Goliath, Rajyashri Goody, Robin Coste Lewis, Werewere Liking, Momtaza Mehri, Maneo Mohale, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Rodney St-Éloi, Anne Waldman. Musicians: Saliou Cissokho, Philippe Mall, Raed Yassin.

Image: Nolan Oswald Dennis Studio

There is also Big Chief Demond Melancon from New Orleans on Thursday 7th May at 11 AM in the Giardini Biennale: “Blessing the Ancestors” for 30 minutes. For over two centuries, the Black Masking Culture of New Orleans has carried forward an ancestral ritual. Demond Melancon wears his 2020 Jah Defender suit, accompanied by members of the Young Seminole Hunters from the Lower Ninth Ward. He calls for the blessings of those who have departed but stay alive as sentinels. Performers: Big Chief Demond Melancon, Alicia Winding, Rashaud Brown, Walter Fair, Askia Bennett.

At 2 PM on Thursday in the Arsenale – Giardino delle Vergini, Uriel Orlow presents “Reverie of Collective Walkers (Reading to Plants)” for 30 minutes. An ambulatory reading performance where participants walk among plants and read aloud from a site-specific library of texts in multiple languages, or bring their own stories where plants are protagonists. The collective gesture creates a horizontal dialogue with the more-than-human world. The addressees are the plants themselves, who receive the CO2 released in the act of reading.

At 3 PM in the Arsenale – Sala d’Armi E, Yoshiko Shimada + BuBu de la Madeleine present “Procession for Fallen Comrades and Fallen Angels” for 45 minutes. A rubber boat moves through the crowd. Onboard, DJ LaLa plays live as drag queens lead the way. The boat is pulled by participants as shared burdens and acts of care. The performance honours those who refused to be silenced: activists, artists, friends taken too soon by AIDS. Quoting the programme: “Cabiria, where a grief-stricken woman’s resolve is boosted back to life by a crowd of strangers singing and dancing in the street, the Procession for Fallen Comrades and Fallen Angels moves from mourning to solidarity. The boat carries loss, but also resilience and joy.” Performers: toru yamanaka / DJ LaLa, Afreeda O Breat, Takahiro “Harry” Kitte, Aase Nielsen, mogmin, Sabina, Lily Lux, Corinzia.

Image: Ebony G. Patterson

At 5 PM on Thursday in the Arsenale – Tese dei Soppalchi, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons + Kamaal Malak present “Whispering in III Movements” for 30 minutes. “Where Sound Becomes Color, Color Becomes Breath.” A multi-sensory performance that dissolves boundaries between music, visual art, aromatherapy and neural frequency therapy. Live music, painting, botanical essences and various materials are drawn into a single unified field of sensation. Scent moves through the air. Bass frequencies resonate through the body. Images shift and dissolve in real time.

On Friday 8th May at 10.30 AM in the Arsenale – Giardino delle Vergini, Guadalupe Maravilla presents a “Sound Meditation Ceremony” for 60 minutes. Gongs, voice and percussion. Sound as medicine, vibration as care. Rooted in Maravilla’s own journey – from fleeing civil war in El Salvador as an undocumented child to healing from cancer – this ceremony binds activism and tenderness. A limited number of yoga mats are provided. Audience members may bring their own mat or blanket. Sound healers: Guadalupe Maravilla, Fanny Pérez, Hilary Ramos. At 3.30 PM the same day, a second ceremony dedicated to the Cancer Community.

On Saturday 9th May at 3 PM in the Arsenale – Artiglierie, Hagar Ophir presents “Bound with the Living: Gathering in Venice” for 165 minutes (three 45-minute sessions with intervals). Around a table in a dark room, a séance unfolds. Objects – relics of displaced and uprooted lives, witnesses to colonial violence – sit at the centre. A historian acts as medium, calling forth absent guests through a multi-alphabetical Ouija board and the collective mental presence of those gathered. Medium: Juna Suleiman. Second Medium: Hana Umeda. Experts: Maisan Hamdan, Rima Najdi, Faysal Bibi, Emet Ezell, Ariella Aisha Azoulay, Tamar Novick, Maya Avis. Protocol writer: Sereen Dhamshi. With entities and objects: a Silver Rattle, a Copper Tray, a Kite and a Gazelle Skull, their original owners, and other guest entities. Sound: Miriam Schickler. Costumes: Antonia Eckardt. Dramaturgy: Hana Umeda.

All these descriptions come from the official programme PDF. And that is almost all the information the press has received. No substantial overview of the main exhibition. No detailed presentation of national pavilions. No coherent curatorial statement beyond vague hints. The document reads like a technical schedule: timings, locations, warnings about limited yoga mats, instructions that audiences may enter only at the start of each 45-minute session, gathering points. Thousands of hours of work by hundreds of artists reduced to bullet points in a faceless template.

But the real frustration is not just the dryness of the press materials. It is what the press chooses to write about. Instead of discussing art, major news outlets have focused on one topic: Russia’s participation in the 2026 Biennale. The question of whether Russia should be present, who is representing the country, what political message it sends – all of this has exploded onto front pages. The art itself has become a footnote.

This is beginning to infuriate participants. Scrolling through social media, particularly LinkedIn, over the past two days, one cannot miss the growing irritation. Curators, art managers and artists from different countries are posting almost identical complaints: “We have prepared something important, and you write about politics. We are being ignored. Our stories are drowning in news about who shook whose hand.”

The reason for this informational black hole is clear: Russia’s participation in the 61st International Art Exhibition has become a media magnet. Regardless of what exactly is shown in the Russian pavilion, the mere fact of the Russian flag being present at the Giardini is treated as a political statement. For some, it is an act of cultural isolation; for others, a demonstration of defiance. A third group believes any Russian participation in international events today is inappropriate.

The paradox is that the more the media write about this conflict, the less space remains for actual art. Journalists chase clicks, and clicks come from scandals, not from analysis of new installations. The result is absurd: the press, which should be a bridge between artists and the public, becomes a deaf wall. Artists try to shout, but their voices drown in the decibels of political battles.

The informational noise generated by the Russian question acts like a black hole. It sucks in all attention and releases nothing but already chewed-up arguments about boycotts, ethics and the boundaries of art. In this chaos, genuinely important projects are lost. The séance of Hagar Ophir, which through a multi-alphabetical Ouija board attempts to conjure the spirits of colonial pasts. The nine-hour Poetry Caravan honouring Koyo Kouoh’s 1999 journey from Dakar to Timbuktu. The procession of Victoria Idongesit-Udondian, where heavy loads become ritual dance. The sound meditations of Guadalupe Maravilla, a survivor of cancer and civil war, now healing others with gongs. All of this is reduced to a few lines in a PDF, then buried under headlines about geopolitics.

Participants are taking their frustration to LinkedIn precisely because official channels fail them. The Biennale’s own press materials are so anaemic that they cannot generate any meaningful coverage. When the only information available is a schedule of times and locations, with technical notes about yoga mats and entry intervals, what are journalists supposed to write about? They default to the easiest story: the political controversy.

And the political controversy is real. Russia’s presence is a legitimate subject of debate. But it has become so dominant that it eclipses everything else. This is unfair not only to Russia (though also to Russia) but to dozens of other countries that have spent years preparing projects about urgent topics: memory, the body, land, lost languages, healing from colonial wounds. Their works hang on walls. Their bodies move through performance spaces. And the world discusses something completely different.

One might hope that after the first wave of political headlines subsides, journalists will finally turn their gaze to the art itself. The Biennale runs until November – there is time. But the precious preview days, when professional attention is at its peak, are already slipping away. And that sand is not just Venetian sand – it is informational sand, running through fingers, leaving only a bitter taste of missed opportunities.

The artists in these performances are now like the plants in Uriel Orlow’s piece: they read their texts aloud, putting their breath into them, and in return they receive only the carbon dioxide of political news exhaled by the press. It is possible that this situation will improve. It is possible that real art – hidden behind the dry lines of press releases – will eventually break through the noise. But so far, on the first day of previews, it is hard to believe. The 61st Venice Biennale opened with a programme full of ritual, mourning, solidarity and healing. Yet the only ritual that anyone seems to be talking about is the endless political dance around the Russian pavilion. And that, for the artists who came to Venice to share their stories, is the greatest loss of all.

The Russian Pavilion in Venice: A Tree Rooted in the Sky, but Information Buried Underground

The 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia is in full swing, at least for the professional preview days. While much of the art world’s attention has been swallowed by political controversy surrounding Russia’s participation, the Russian Pavilion itself has quietly opened its doors. Its project is titled “The tree is rooted in the sky” – a phrase borrowed from Simone Weil, who wrote: “It is only from the light which streams constantly from heaven that a tree can derive the energy to strike its roots deep into the soil. The tree is in fact rooted in the sky.” The pavilion’s press release adds an epigraph from Alexander Pushkin’s Ruslan and Ludmila: “By the seashore stands a green oak; A chain of gold is on that oak: And day and night a learned cat walks round and round upon that chain.”

Photo: The Associated Press (a photograph from a foreign source has been published, as the Russian pavilion’s management has so far provided nothing but Shvydkoi’s quotes)

The project is described as a collaborative effort by young musicians, philosophers, and poets from different geographies. It takes as its starting point that paradoxical image of a tree rooted not in the ground but in the light descending from above. According to the official press release, this logical flip allows visitors to broaden their understanding and reconsider habitual definitions. The context of the Biennale Arte 2026 – titled “In Minor Keys” – led the curators to reconsider the musical minor-major binary. The project transposes this binary onto the socio-cultural field to analyse relationships between peripheries and centres.

From 5 to 8 May, invited artists from Argentina, Mexico, Mali, Brazil, and various regions of Russia are participating in a daily programme that unfolds as a continuous sonic process, almost like a music festival. They operate in hybrid formats that evade the constraints of pure musical genres, asking audiences to renounce the inertia that sustains canonical interpretations.

The press release emphasises that despite geographical distances, these artists share an experience of working on the peripheries of cultural centres that traditionally define content and set rules. Their position of externality does not lead to solitude but opens a space for multiple viewpoints. The figurative core of the project is the tree understood as a living organism, a habitat and a network of connections that varies depending on the ecosystem. Works centred on the voice unite listeners into a shared sonic field where meaning emerges as a process, not a message. Some participants preserve musical material at risk of being forgotten; others turn to local folklore, preserving and renewing traditional material.

Who are these artists? The press release provides a list, but no interviews, no personal statements – just dry biographical lines.

Oleg Gudachev, born 1988 in Saint Petersburg, is a composer of electronic and electroacoustic music, spatial audio installations, and music for theatre, dance and film.

DJ Diaki, born 1976 in Sanankoroba, Mali, is a key figure of the balani show genre – high-speed African electronic music that evolved from traditional dance practices and street parties in West Africa. Balani show is known for its polyrhythmic nature, fast tempo and dense percussion structures.

Roman Malyavkin, born 1994 in Moscow, is an accordionist, performer, researcher and teacher. He graduated from the Gnessin Russian Academy of Music and is a guest soloist with the Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble and the Studio for New Music.

Jailiu, born 1992 in Washington, USA, is an artist and music producer originally from Buenos Aires, currently based in Montreal. His music merges club-oriented electronic music with traditional Argentine percussion and popular rhythms, including elements of murga.

Alexey Retinsky, born 1986 in Saint Petersburg, composes chamber, symphonic, choral and electroacoustic works, as well as music for theatre and film.

The Intrada Ensemble, founded in 2006, is a vocal ensemble led by Ekaterina Antonenko, a graduate of the Moscow Conservatory. They regularly collaborate with leading Russian and international ensembles and have been the first to perform many 20th and 21st century works.

Alexey Sysoev, born 1972 in Moscow, is a composer and improviser whose works have been presented at leading international contemporary music festivals.

Timofey Dudarenko, born 2004 in Moscow, is an artist, set designer and flower enthusiast, researching olfactory art, the anthropology of the senses, and alternative forms of perception.

Toloka Ensemble, founded in 2022, is a contemporary ensemble of young folk performers and professional researchers of Russian authentic music. They study intangible heritage and musical traditions, transcribing rare songs collected during expeditions to villages across Russia – songs from the Belgorod region, wedding choral laments of the Russian North, spiritual music of the Molokans, and lyrical drawn-out songs of Siberian old-settlers.

Petr Musoev, born 2001 in Moscow, is a pianist and cultural researcher, a regular participant in the Gnesin contemporary music week.

Phurpa, founded in the mid-1990s, is a musical project based on ritual vocal techniques and a meditative drone aesthetic. For thirty years, its members have toured major international music festivals.

Tatyana Khalbaeva, born 2003 in Lensk, Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), is a sound artist of Buryat origin, exploring identity and the cultural landscape of Buryatia through spatial multichannel sculptures.

giorgino, born 2004 in Avellino, Italy, is an accordionist, equilibrist and specialist in planned improvisations, working for the preservation of imaginative peripheries.

Alexey Khovalyg, born 1980 in Kyzyl, Tuva Republic, is a multi-instrumentalist and folk performer, a master of throat singing proficient in all five existing styles, and one of the finest performers of the kargyraa style. He also plays all traditional Tuvan instruments: igil, byzaanchy, shoor, demir-khomus, and doshpuluur.

Atosigado y Herrica, born 2002 in Hermosillo, Mexico, is a collaboration of Mexican producers Oscar Landgrave Ortega and Julio Montañez Herrera, weaving cumbia, footwork, guaracha, techno and tribal into a unique path through club music.

Lukas Sukharev, born 2000 in Syktyvkar, is a composer and percussion performer, a graduate of the Moscow Conservatory, working with the folklore of various peoples, especially the Komi song and dance traditions.

JIZ, born 1998 in Ceilândia, Brazil, is João Luiz, a music producer who has developed a new direction in contemporary electronic music, combining current trends with local subgenres of Brazilian funk. He is a member of the Weird Baile collective and a resident of Oroko Radio in Ghana, working in electro, batida, funk, hard drum, gqom, amapiano, and pre-Hispanic-inspired tribal styles.

This is an impressive roster. For any artist, participation in the Venice Biennale is a career breakthrough – a moment of global visibility, a chance to reach curators, critics, and audiences from every corner of the world. But in Russia, that breakthrough has not happened. There has been no wave of interviews with these musicians in Russian media. No profiles. No behind-the-scenes footage. The leadership of the Russian Pavilion ignores requests from journalists. The only voice heard in the press is that of Mikhail Shvydkoy, a well-known cultural figure, who gives interviews and quotes about the political meaning of Russia’s presence. But the musicians themselves remain silent – not because they have nothing to say, but because no one is letting them speak.

Ironically, it is foreign media that have told the story of the Russian Pavilion – albeit with a heavy emphasis on politics. The New York Times, Reuters, The Guardian, and several French and Italian publications have covered the pavilion’s opening. They noticed, for example, that guests were offered vodka – a detail that immediately overshadowed any artistic discourse. Yet these same foreign outlets have done what Russian ones have not: they published professional photographs from the preview. High-quality images. Several video clips. All of this material appeared in Western media before any official Russian press release with decent visuals.

There is, to be fair, some content from the Russian Pavilion representatives themselves. But here is the strange part: it is published on Instagram – a social network that is recognised as extremist in Russia and is officially banned. The account has about 3,000 followers. It does not appear in search results because of its name. You can only find it if a friend sends you a direct link. The account posts Instagram Stories – short videos shot on a phone, no professional sound, no editing. They show glimpses of musicians performing, snippets of the installation. It is an honest attempt to show the artists rather than Mr. Shvydkoy. But the quality is amateurish. It feels as if the musicians were invited to a private VIP party, rather than the VIP preview being timed to the grand opening of the Venice Biennale. The hierarchy is inverted: the art seems secondary to the social event.

The videos are shaky. The audio is muddy. There is no commentary, no context. Still, the effort exists. Someone behind the pavilion clearly wants the public to see the musicians – the real protagonists – not just the political figurehead. But the medium chosen (a banned platform in Russia) and the production quality (mobile phone clips) undermine the message. For a project that claims to be about slowing down, attentive listening, and resisting immediate understanding, the communication strategy is paradoxically rushed, hidden, and amateurish.

Meanwhile, the musicians themselves deserve better. They are serious artists. Oleg Gudachev’s electroacoustic works. DJ Diaki’s balani show. Roman Malyavkin’s site-specific accordion performances. Alexey Khovalyg’s Tuvan throat singing – a living heritage. Phurpa’s thirty years of meditative drone rituals. These are not random names. They represent a genuine cross-section of contemporary music from the periphery: Mali, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and the many Russias – from Yakutia to Tuva to Moscow to Saint Petersburg. The curators, who chose to remain anonymous according to the press release (the project was conceived and developed by young musicians, philosophers, and poets who “believe it important to present the project as a result of collective thought rather than highlighting their names”), have put together a fascinating programme. The tree rooted in the sky is a beautiful, complex metaphor. But the tree of information about this pavilion has its roots in the wrong soil: not in the light of transparency, but in the darkness of silence.

We are left with a paradox. Foreign journalists – from The New York Times, Reuters, The Guardian – have provided more visual material and factual reporting about the Russian Pavilion than any Russian source. Russian journalists cannot get answers. The pavilion’s own Instagram account is hidden, difficult to find, and technically crude. The only person quoted in mainstream Russian coverage is Shvydkoy. The musicians, the very heart of the project, remain faceless names on a PDF.

What we desperately need are proper press materials. Professional videos. Audio teasers. Interviews with DJ Diaki about balani show, with Alexey Khovalyg about Tuvan throat singing, with Tatyana Khalbaeva about Buryat soundscapes, with the Toloka Ensemble about their expeditions to remote villages. We need to hear their voices, not just read their biographies. We need to see the tree, not just the chain of gold around it.

For now, the Russian Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale is a project caught between two worlds: one of genuine artistic ambition, and another of political noise and informational failure. The musicians are ready. The world is waiting. But the only light streaming from heaven – at least for now – seems to be coming from the flashes of foreign photographers, not from the pavilion’s own communication. And that is a loss not just for Russia, but for everyone who believes that art should speak for itself.

The Estonian Pavilion

The complaints about lack of media attention at the Venice Biennale are growing louder. Among the most vocal is the team behind the Estonian Pavilion. Their grievances have even been published in Russian – a rare move that underscores their frustration.

On Wednesday 6 May, the Estonian exhibition titled “Lekkiva taeva maja” (The Leaking Sky House) opens in Venice. But this is not a typical national pavilion. The artist Merike Estna will begin her work with the first brushstrokes on empty canvases. Over the course of the Biennale, which runs until 22 November, these blank surfaces will transform into a monumental painting. “I believe that a painting is most alive at the moment of its birth, and that is exactly what I want to show in Venice,” Estna said. Although more than 25,000 glazed ceramic tiles were produced as preparatory work for the exhibition – covering the entire floor of the pavilion – the large-scale canvases will be born in front of visitors’ eyes over several months. Estna has moved to Venice for the duration of the Biennale, together with her family and two small children, so that she can paint on site.

The Estonian Pavilion is housed in a former church building that became a community centre in the 1990s. The theme of the exhibition is the artist’s own vision of “living painting”. According to Kaarin Kivirähk, it is quite unusual for an artist to begin painting right there on the spot. Most exhibitions in Venice are fully completed by the opening, after which the artist and team leave. But the Estonian Pavilion will be created in full view of the public, evolving over months.

Kivirähk explained that Merike Estna has long been interested in the history of women’s art and the theme of motherhood. These motifs will inevitably appear in her paintings. Hints of these themes can already be seen in the ceramic tile floor. Estonia’s message, Kivirähk said, is about bringing forgotten stories to light – and the act of bringing them to light is itself magnificent.

But here lies the problem. The Estonian Pavilion, like many others, is struggling to be heard. In a television interview on “Terevisioon”, Kivirähk did not hide her disappointment. She noted that the media’s obsessive focus on Russia’s participation has drowned out almost everything else. Her words, published even in Russian, are a cry for attention: “Russia’s participation at the Venice Biennale is receiving considerably more attention than it would warrant,” she said. The implication is clear. The political noise around the Russian Pavilion – whether justified or not – has created an informational imbalance. Small countries with ambitious, thoughtful projects are being pushed to the margins.

The irony is that Estonia’s project is genuinely unique. A painting born over months. An artist living in the pavilion with her two small children. The floor covered in thousands of handmade ceramic tiles. A former church transformed into a community-centred art space. This is not a dry, pre-packaged installation. It is a living process. Yet the world’s press has largely ignored it. The headlines continue to circle around the same question: should Russia be here? And as long as that question dominates, pavilions like Estonia’s remain invisible.

The Ecuadorian Pavilion

While the 61st International Art Exhibition hums with the usual frenzy of preview days, the Pavilion of Ecuador offers something rare: a space of attention. Not attention as in looking quickly and moving on, but attention as a practice – a deliberate slowing down, a willingness to listen to forms of knowledge that dominant cultural frameworks usually overlook. The pavilion, located at Castello 1636/A in Venice, presents an exhibition titled “Tawna & Oscar”, featuring two contemporary artistic practices: the Tawna collective and the artist Oscar Santillán. Curated by Manuela Moscoso, with the support of the Museum of Anthropology and Contemporary Art of Ecuador (MAAC), the project approaches art not as a statement but as a relation.

The exhibition opens on Wednesday 6 May at 4 PM by invitation, and from 9 May until 22 November it welcomes the public daily except Monday, with free entry. This generosity of access already signals something unusual. The Pavilion of Ecuador is not hiding behind high walls or paid tickets. It is open. And what it offers is a journey through Andean and Amazonian territories, where breath and pace change quickly with the land.

Manuela Moscoso, the curator, is the inaugural Executive and Artistic Director of the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA) and curated the 2nd Bienal das Amazónias in 2025. Her approach is relational, political, and embodied. In her curatorial concept for the pavilion, she writes that life unfolds through varied rhythms of language, labour, gathering, and joy, each carrying its own relation to memory and return. Belonging takes shape in repetition, in the gestures through which a place becomes lived rather than merely occupied. Earth persists here as force and sediment, shaping the texture of the everyday even as it is continually reworked by extraction and by economies that enter ordinary life. To perceive or imagine the world, in this context, is also to ask how it is inhabited, contested, and continuously remade.

The two exhibitors could not be more different, yet together they create a productive tension. The Tawna collective is an anti-colonial group formed by Sapara, Kichwa, and mestizo artists who create from the rainforest as a territory of memory, resistance, and vision. Founded in 2017, the collective takes its name from the ancestral tool that propels a canoe – a fitting metaphor for connecting territories, affections, and futures from Amazonian roots. The members are Sani Montahuano, Enoc Merino, Mukutsawa Montahuano, Boloh Miranda, Ipiak Montaguano, Tatiana Lopez, and Lucia Ferré. They work with video, photography, and living archives, reimagining narratives through dreams, ritual, and the embodied. Their practice is deeply community-based, involving educational processes with Amazonian communities that converge toward the creation of intimate, collective, and experimental narratives from their territories.

Over the past five years, Tawna’s work has been shown at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, at Tate Modern as part of Cecilia Vicuña’s “Brain Forest Quipu”, at MK&G Hamburg, at the 14th Cuenca Biennial, and at the 2nd Bienal das Amazónias in 2025. They won the National Geographic Storytellers program with their documentary “Allpamanda”, which received an award at the Edoc festival. Their films have screened at the Toronto Film Festival, Vancouver, and many others.

For the Venice Biennale, Tawna presents two video works. The first, titled “Llaki” (2025), runs 26 minutes in colour with sound.

The second work, “Kawashima” (2026), runs 8 minutes and is projected onto a Llanchamakara textile. Vessels formed from forest soil become sites of passage, return, and transformation. Drawing from Sapara ceramic practices sustained by women, the work approaches clay as a living ground for grief, continuity, and transmission. The film is shaped by artist Sani Montahuano’s experience of becoming a mother alongside the death of a grandmother, holding arrival and departure within the same field of relation. Dreams form an integral part of this continuum. In dreams, human and non-human beings communicate with the living, part of a sacred, shared environment. Yet these dreamscapes are not untouched: extraction from the land and the ongoing pressures of colonialism have begun to alter their rhythms. The kawashima – the ceramic vessels – carry knowledge and care across generations of women, keeping memory in motion and the threshold between life and death open. As light moves across their surfaces, they appear as points of transit between material and immaterial worlds.

Oscar Santillán, the other half of the exhibition, is an Ecuadorian artist working between Ecuador and the Netherlands. His artistic formation has been productively nonlinear: it began with an unsuccessful attempt to become a writer, which evolved into a self-directed education within the artist collective Lalimpia. He later earned an MFA in Sculpture at Virginia Commonwealth University in the United States, and in 2013 was appointed artist-in-residence at the Jan van Eyck Academie in the Netherlands – a turning point that allowed him to live and work across continents.

In recent years, the concept of the “Anti-world” has become central to his practice. At first glance, being “anti-world” might seem paradoxical, but it hinges on distinguishing between “world” and “planet”. Our planetary reality is vast and capable of hosting multiple worlds. The Anti-world suggests the plurality of worlds obscured by hegemonic frameworks – normative systems that attempt to delimit what can be imagined. Beyond its political implications, the concept also gestures toward a planetary imagination that dissolves boundaries between beings and things, the natural and the artificial. Santillán’s work has been exhibited at the Guggenheim Bilbao, LACMA, the Yokohama Triennale, MUAC, the Diriyah Biennale, and many others. He has published essays and books, including “The Andean Information Age” and “La Luz Del Sol Menos Una Luciérnaga”.

For Venice, Santillán presents four works. The first is “Crisalida” (2025), an oil painting on canvas. It belongs to his Antimundo series, which challenges the binary conceptions of “nature” and the “artificial” inherited from Western scientists. Carl Linnaeus’s eighteenth-century Systema Naturae organised the world into animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms, establishing taxonomic distinctions that still shape how life is classified. Refusing these colonial distinctions, Santillán insists that all elements are part of a cosmic whole. Boundaries between territories break down in the Antimundo series. Each object depicted initially appears recognisable, but then refuses legibility, gradually revealing itself as alien and untranslatable.

The second work is “Voyager” (2016), a found shirt with cast meteorites replacing its missing buttons. Santillán brought together two wandering materials whose paths were never meant to cross. An abandoned shirt found during a walk in the rainforest, its buttons long missing, is repaired using new buttons cast from melted meteorites. Sewn carefully into place, fragments of matter that have travelled across cosmic distances become part of an ordinary textile for daily use. The gesture is quiet and speculative: a meeting between the intimacy of clothing and the vast trajectories of outer space. Repair becomes an act that folds seemingly distant scales of existence together, allowing the cosmic and the personal to inhabit the same surface.

The third work is “Placenta” (2026), made from stripped computer motherboards. Taking motherboards – a computer’s primal circuit system – as its basis, Santillán strips the machinery of its function by cutting away and sanding each component until its surface reveals an uncharted landscape. Electronic nodes transform into mineral-like patterns, exposing what the artist calls a “new geology”. The boards appear less as instruments of computation than as fragments of a new world, shaped by a planetary transformation that shows how incredibly sophisticated devices are metabolised back into raw matter. Through this process, Santillán brings the technological and the geological into intimate conversation, creating an almost hallucinatory terrain of machine, mineral, and earth.

The fourth work is “Blister (Uncontacted Blister)” (2026), an installation made of aluminium cast, wood carvings, ABS resin, automotive paint, metal tubes, pipe fittings, and “alien DNA”. This sculptural ecology is animated by planetary vitality. Blister activates imaginaries integrating ambiguous anomalies: animal-plant entities combined with pipes containing alien DNA (human genetic material modified with cosmological algorithms), and an aluminium structure that reactivates ancient comet iconographies. Together, these elements evoke life as a continuum extending beyond Earth’s atmosphere. Drawing on the botanical abundance of the Chocó region (from Panama to Ecuador), as well as on the orchidarium tended by his parents and his exchanges with astrophysicists in the Netherlands, Santillán evokes a world in constant transformation, where intimacy, cosmology, and earthly desire converge.

The encounter between Tawna and Santillán, as curated by Manuela Moscoso, does not aim for synthesis or resolution. It sustains an open space in which different ways of inhabiting and understanding the world can coexist without being reduced to a single framework. Art operates here as a practice that holds this openness, creating conditions for new forms of perception, relation, and coexistence. The Pavilion of Ecuador does not try to represent a fixed national identity. Instead, it proposes a contemporary position grounded in situated knowledge, relation, and material responsibility – offering tools to think with the present and imagine multiple possible worlds.

The commissioner is the Museum of Anthropology and Contemporary Art of Ecuador (MAAC), a key cultural institution that preserves 60,000 pre-Hispanic archaeological objects and 3,500 works of modern and contemporary art. With approximately 120,000 annual visitors, MAAC has established itself as a dynamic institution with an international outlook. The production and press are handled by Anna Shvets of TAtchers’ Art Management, with exhibition design by Studio Manuel Raeder. Supporters include the Vice Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ecuador, the Ministry of Education, Sports and Culture, the Vice Ministry of Tourism, the Embassy of Ecuador in Italy, and several foundations and galleries.

The pavilion’s address is Castello 1636/A, Venice. Opening is Wednesday 6 May at 4 PM (RSVP required). From 9 May, entry is free for all. No ticket needed. No political noise. Just art that asks you to slow down, to listen, and to imagine worlds that exist beyond the ones we have been taught to see.

The Polish Pavilion

The Polish Pavilion, located in the Giardini, has opened its doors to the public on 6 May 2026 as part of the 61st International Art Exhibition. Titled “Liquid Tongues”, the project is an immersive audiovisual installation that investigates the very essence of human and non-human communication, reaching far beyond the limits of conventional spoken language. The exhibition runs until 22 November 2026.

At the heart of the project lies an attempt to rethink the established hierarchy of communication methods. The artists challenge so-called “phonocentrism” – the deeply ingrained assumption that verbal, vocal communication is the only full and dominant form of human expression. In their search for alternative models, they turn to cetaceans – whales and dolphins – whose complex communication systems in the aquatic environment combine sound, vibration, and movement.

This artistic research is the result of a collaboration between Polish artist Bogna Burska and deaf artist Daniel Kotowski. Their partnership allows the project to be viewed from two fundamentally different yet equally important perspectives. The key theoretical foundation of the installation is the concept of “Deaf Gain” – a radical rethinking that proposes viewing deafness not as a limitation or loss, but as a distinct culture and a unique way of perceiving the world that enriches human diversity.

The central element of the installation consists of two screens. One, mounted on the wall, presents the main narrative. The other, suspended from the ceiling, creates for visitors a total sense of immersion, as if they were underwater. In the centre of the room, a large bench‑bed invites visitors to lie down and look up at the floating screen, surrendering completely to the sensory experience.

The screens display stories built from sequences of loss, recovery, and rebirth of cultures and languages. Among them is the story of a Native North American community that used sign language as a common means of communication for all its members, both deaf and hearing. Another narrative recounts the story of the qilaut drum and the return of almost extinct Greenlandic songs – traditions nearly erased by brutal colonisation. A recurring image moving from one story to the next is the whale rider – a figure from Māori mythology.

“Liquid Tongues” unfolds as a layered, polyphonic space. The artistic team was accompanied by the “Chór w Ruchu” (Choir in Motion) – a collective of deaf and hearing performers. Following choreography by Alicja Czyczel, inspired by the movement of fish schools, the choir performs a libretto co‑written with Bogna Burska, using both spoken language and International Sign (IS). The musical composition for the installation was created by Aleksandra Gryka.

One of the most important artistic references for the project is the recordings of humpback whale songs made by American biologist Roger Payne in the 1970s. This gesture – revealing to the world the complexity and beauty of whale voices – played a significant role in halting whaling and helped save these creatures from extinction. In this context, art appears as a force capable of giving voice to those who were previously unheard.

The project fits perfectly into the curatorial concept of the 61st Biennale, “In Minor Keys”, proposed by curator Koyo Kouoh. The metaphor of the minor key refers to the quiet, non‑obvious frequencies of life that are often lost in the noise of modernity. The Polish Pavilion, exploring the boundaries between human and whale, air and water, voice and gesture, invites listeners to tune into these quiet yet vital vibrations – to rediscover the richness of communication in its many diverse and not always obvious forms.

Fondazione Dries Van Noten

The 61st Venice Biennale is in full swing, with the Giardini and Arsenale buzzing with visitors, critics, and artists from around the world. Yet, away from the crowded pavilions, a different kind of conversation is unfolding – one that moves at a slower pace, speaks in whispers, and builds bridges between centuries rather than headlines. This is the quiet revolution of new private foundations choosing Venice as their home, and at its forefront stands the legendary Belgian fashion designer Dries Van Noten.

Image: Tolia Astakhishvili, to love an devour, 2025. Installation view. Courtesy the artist and the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation. Photo by Dylan Peirce.

Since retiring from his eponymous fashion label in 2024, Van Noten has poured his creative energy into the Fondazione Dries van Noten. Rather than opting for a sterile, minimalist white cube, he and his partner Patrick Vangheluwe fell under the spell of the Palazzo Pisani Moretta, a magnificent rose-hued 15th-century palace on the Grand Canal. The building, a former noble residence, is anything but minimal. Its halls are adorned with 24-arm crystal chandeliers, inlaid marble floors, and dramatic ceiling frescoes by artists including Tiepolo. Van Noten soon realised that such a demanding space had a will of its own, stubbornly determining what could be placed within its historic embrace. Instead of fighting it, he chose to listen, learning to respect the building’s autonomy and allowing the past to enter into a powerful dialogue with the present.

The foundation’s inaugural exhibition, running until October, is titled “The Only True Protest Is Beauty”. It spans 20 rooms across three floors, bringing together over 200 objects from fashion, jewellery, art, design, photography, glass, and ceramics. This is not a sterile display. It is a material conversation – a contemporary dress communing with a Rococo wall, a piece of artisanal glass reflecting a Tiepolo sky. The message is clear: craftsmanship is not a relic of the past but a vital language of cultural identity for the future. The palazzo will soon undergo a careful restoration led by Venetian architect Alberto Torsello, and a second, more experimental space is set to open for radical, process-based practices.

Van Noten is not alone in this mission. A constellation of new private foundations has chosen Venice as their home, enriching a lineage that includes the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and the Pinault Collection. These new guardians embrace the unique rhythms and profound beauty of La Serenissima. Nicoletta Fiorucci, for example, has transformed a humble, dilapidated palazzo into a residency for artists, celebrating its raw, imperfect state and its history as a painter’s studio. Collector Laurent Asscher has converted a 16th-century soap factory into AMA Venezia, a soaring industrial space for large-scale multimedia art, deliberately preserving the patina of 500 years of history.

In a city that demands a slower pace, these new institutions offer a model of deep listening. They prioritise local communities, students, and artisans, aiming to create spaces of authentic belonging and long-term dialogue rather than attracting fleeting crowds. As Van Noten himself reflects, Venice has a way of making you slow down and open your heart. Amid the lively energy of the Biennale, Dries Van Noten and his fellow patrons are building a quieter, more enduring legacy: proving that the most profound gesture, in a world of fleeting images, is to create beauty that lasts for centuries.

In the final days before the opening of the 61st Venice Biennale, the Giardini are a hive of activity. Trees are being planted, last‑minute installations are being finished, and in the midst of it all, artist Yto Barrada is putting the finishing touches on “Comme Saturne” – the project with which she represents France in the neoclassical pavilion, freshly reopened after a year‑long renovation.

Image: Yto Barrada, The Power of Two or Three Suns, 2020. Courtesy of Pace Gallery and Sfeir-Semler Gallery.

Barrada, who was born in Paris and raised in Tangier, speaks with a lucidity that ranges across mythology, colour theory, textile history, the literary movement Oulipo, and more, as she traces the genesis of her exhibition. The seed of the idea, she explains, was the fabric technique of devoré – also called “burnout”. The process, which was developed in the 18th century (possibly as a cheaper alternative to lace), involves blending a cellulose‑based fabric like cotton or viscose with a protein‑based one such as silk or wool. A chemical paste is then applied, dissolving the cellulose fibres and leaving the protein‑based ones intact, thereby creating a raised, patterned design. The technique came back into vogue in the 1920s – think of shift or drop‑waist evening dresses – and again in the 1980s and 1990s, thanks to designers like Yves Saint Laurent and Ann Demeulemeester.

Barrada, whose work often incorporates handmade, organically dyed textiles, had long collected devoré samples but had never understood how the fabric was made or known its centuries‑old history. From this special cloth, a series of threads – both literal and metaphorical – multiplied and interwove, leading her to the core of her Venetian project.

The pavilion itself, Barrada reveals, is largely covered in huge drapes of wool. The scent of the wool, she notes, is powerful and pervasive. The space is divided into rooms that operate as spaces for thinking. The devoré fabric, burned out in places, already “holds two dimensions at once,” Barrada says: “that of destruction and that of beauty”. This paradox – beauty and damage, creation and erasure, existing in the same object – is central to the exhibition.

The artist is fascinated by the accidental poetry of the technical terms used in textile processes. The accompanying catalogue opens with a glossary that highlights the slippery, double‑layered nature of language. Dye baths can be “exhausted”. Colours that fade too much are considered to have “failed”. A dulled hue has been “saddened”. And Barrada’s focal point, devoré, means “to devour”. It might also be a surname, de Voré, which originates in the Haute‑Loire region of France, not far from Lyon – the historic centre of silk production where the devoré technique originated.

For Barrada, how multiple dimensions coincide in one object, image, or word is vital. Something can be ugly and beautiful, destructive and productive, all at once. This understanding underpins her sense of both art and life as infinitely complex arenas in which many truths coexist and frequently contradict each other.

The artist, who studied history and political science at the Sorbonne, is a polymath who works across photography, sculpture, painting, film, publishing, and printmaking. Her material choices embody a wide range of contexts: pedagogy, urban landscapes, geography, botany, and more. Her work is less defined by a specific aesthetic impetus than by intricate, in‑depth research that suggests its own formal approach. Past projects have included photography series exploring public life in Tangier and the Strait of Gibraltar; sculptures inspired by Moroccan human pyramids, French colonial urban planning in Casablanca, or even plumbing materials; and films that montage Super 8 home movies from the 1960s or document facilities that test the commercial durability of colour.

A 2024 film made for Tate Modern gives a sense of her process. In it, she describes The Mothership, an “eco‑campus for growing, making, and learning about natural dyes and Indigenous traditions”, just ten minutes from Tangier’s city centre and overlooking the Strait of Gibraltar. The Mothership hosts artist residencies and workshops, and has been envisioned by Barrada as “a place to conjure pan‑African ecofeminist practices into being”. In the film, she is shown moving around stacks of books and papers in a sunny library room, describing how she works in the spaces of The Mothership. “What matters here is that there are a lot of piles,” she says, “and that’s part of my work. Moving things around, making associations. There’s an entropy to the piles, they’re alive, and that’s how I start thinking.” She adds, “There’s this relationship to the archival material that is very carnivorous. I will chew it up and spit it out again.”

That carnivorous, devouring quality is also the key to the French pavilion. To devour is part of an artistic practice: to consume voraciously, to be hungry for substance, knowledge, art, beauty, escape, meaning, sense, consolation. Whether those things arrive or not, the act of chewing up and spitting out creates something new – for better or for worse.

Barrada calls the pavilion “a suite for Saturn and the Saturnalian religion”. The reference is to the Roman god who famously ate his own children, which led to his association with time – the edict that time destroys whatever it creates. “The revolution, like Saturn, devours its children,” is a quote from the French Revolution, when many of its original agitators were executed during the Reign of Terror. The artist’s use of metaphor and materiality allows for a subtle but forceful relationship to history.

In keeping with the overarching theme of this year’s Biennale, “In Minor Keys”, curated by Koyo Kouoh, Barrada’s pavilion foregrounds the so‑called “marginal”. The textiles on display reveal their own making, usually hidden; they foreground trial and error, and the long process involved in dyeing. The artist speaks of “the treacherous power of words” as a kind of guide – a vocabulary that could mean one thing (exhaust, devour, sadden) or another, depending on how or where it is uttered.

“Comme Saturne” insists on the importance of metaphor and materiality, art and labour. The world around us, Barrada suggests, “can be disabling, but it can also be a force of resistance because there is work to do. I think imagination is one of the last radical places for work to happen, and we must insist on it.”

In a Biennale that can often feel overwhelming in its scale and noise, the French pavilion offers a different kind of experience: immersive, sensory, and deeply thoughtful. The scent of wool, the play of light on burned‑out fabric, the echo of centuries‑old technical terms, and the looming presence of Saturn’s myth – all of this invites visitors not merely to look, but to slow down, to breathe, and to engage with the complexities of creation and destruction that coexist in every thread.

Anish Kapoor at Palazzo Manfrin

On the occasion of the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Anish Kapoor has returned to the city of canals with an ambitious new exhibition at Palazzo Manfrin. This 16th-century palazzo, a Venetian landmark in the Cannaregio district, holds special significance: it is home to the artist’s Foundation. This marks only the second time the historic building has been opened to the public, and Kapoor has filled it with around 100 architectural models documenting projects both realised and unrealised from the past 50 years of his practice, alongside a series of large-scale installations and stainless-steel works. The exhibition runs from 6 May to 8 August 2026.

For decades, Kapoor has occupied a unique territory where sculpture and architecture blur into one another. As he himself puts it: “For a long time I’d been thinking of my work as potential architecture. I’ve always been convinced by the idea that to create new art you have to create new space.” This conviction lies at the heart of “Anish Kapoor: Palazzo Manfrin”. The exhibition presents Kapoor’s idiosyncratic approach to the space of the object and its potential to create new space in our encounter with it. He is renowned for making sculptural objects on an architectural scale and for architecture that exists as a sculptural object. From the stretched-PVC installation “Taratantara” for the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead (1999), to the world’s first inflatable concert hall “Ark Nova” (2013), to the Monte Sant’Angelo Metro Station opened in Naples last year – the genesis of such monumental works is always the sketchbook and the model. These playful experiments in scale and form, often using the most basic materials found in the studio, enable thinking and propositions to occur. Some are followed through into the world; others, yet unrealised, retain their potency as moments in thinking.

Visitors are welcomed into the palazzo via a monumental new iteration of Kapoor’s seminal work, “At the Edge of the World” (1998). This new version, made using black pigment, measures eight metres in diameter and is suspended from the ceiling. It is a commanding presence, absorbing light and space in equal measure. A new towering mirror work will also be exhibited, alongside the iconic “Descent into Limbo” (1992). Kapoor manipulates materials and concavity in these works to both expand and absorb the space around them. In experiencing them, the viewer enters what Kapoor has named the realm of the “non-object” – a zone where the sculpture itself seems to disappear into void, pulling perception along with it.

The exhibition also includes the grotesque and scatological cement extrusions of “Ga Gu Ma” (2012), which oscillate between the mechanically-made and the organic. These strange, bodily forms stand in stark contrast to the gleaming mirrors and the soft black voids, yet they share a common fascination with the boundary between interior and exterior, between the formed and the formless. An immersive room composed of silicone and paint marks a symbiotic moment with Kapoor’s current painting practice, surrounding the visitor in a field of viscous, almost fleshy colour. The ethereal wall-based monochrome voids, “Majic Blue” (2015) and “Apple Red and Candy over Black” (2011), exemplify the artist’s ongoing interest in the possibilities of colour and depth. These works appear at first as simple coloured panels, but they are, in fact, deep cavities – infinite spaces contained within a flat surface.

This investigation is further extended by an arresting Vantablack sculpture. Vantablack is a groundbreaking nanotechnology material that absorbs 99.96% of light, effectively erasing all reflections and shadows. Kapoor has used it to extend his lifelong exploration of the void, creating forms that both appear and disappear before our eyes. This series is presented here four years after its first unveiling at Palazzo Manfrin in 2022, and it remains as disorienting and mesmerising as ever.

What makes this exhibition particularly compelling is the dialogue between the palazzo and the works within it. Palazzo Manfrin is not a neutral white cube. It is a building with centuries of history, with its own rhythms, proportions, and light. Kapoor does not fight this context. Instead, he allows his sculptures to converse with the architecture – the mirrors reflecting the frescoed ceilings, the black voids absorbing the Venetian light, the silicone walls echoing the palazzo’s own layered surfaces. It is a conversation between the 16th century and the 21st, between traditional craftsmanship and advanced nanotechnology, between the solidity of stone and the illusion of void.

For those who know Kapoor’s work, this exhibition offers both a retrospective glance and a glimpse of new directions. The 100 architectural models, many never seen before, reveal the extraordinary range of his thinking over five decades. Some led to actual buildings – concert halls, metro stations, public sculptures. Others remain as pure propositions, unrealised but still potent. Together, they demonstrate that for Kapoor, architecture is not a fixed end point but a continuous process of imagining. The model is not a blueprint for a finished object; it is a thinking device, a way of testing possibilities, a moment of speculation frozen in cardboard, plaster, or plastic.

In the context of the Venice Biennale – where national pavilions compete for attention and the sheer volume of work can be overwhelming – Kapoor’s exhibition at Palazzo Manfrin offers something different. It is quiet, immersive, and deeply contemplative. There are no manifestos, no political statements, no attempts to shock. Instead, there is a simple, almost elemental invitation: to enter a space, to look, to feel, and to allow oneself to be absorbed by the void. In a city that has always been about thresholds – between water and land, between East and West, between the living and the remembered – Kapoor’s work feels perfectly at home. His sculptures are thresholds too: passages from the known to the unknown, from the material to the immaterial, from the world as it is to the world as it might be.

“Anish Kapoor: Palazzo Manfrin” is on view from 6 May to 8 August 2026. Tickets are available through the official booking platform. For those attending the Biennale, this exhibition rewards the detour away from the crowded Giardini and Arsenale, into the quieter streets of Cannaregio, where a 16th-century palazzo has opened its doors to one of the most visionary sculptors of our time.