Venice Biennale. What was interesting on preview days and more. Part 2

The Kazakhstan Pavilion

The atmosphere inside the Kazakhstan Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale feels less like a traditional exhibition and more like a deliberate act of attunement. Housed within five interconnected halls of the Museo Storico Navale, the project—titled “Qoñyr: The Archive of Silence”—doesn’t compete with the surrounding noise. Instead, it asks its visitors to slow down, to listen for something deeper.

Image: Ministry of culture, Kazakhstan

Curated by Syrlybek Bekbota, the pavilion builds its entire sensory world around the word “Qoñyr,” a term from Kazakh cosmology that defies simple translation. It suggests the color brown, the specific scent of dry earth, a particular acoustic frequency, and a form of dense, generative silence where unspoken words still carry profound weight. This singular concept, drawn from Abiken Khasenov’s traditional 20th-century küy (a type of musical composition), becomes the exhibition’s philosophical backbone—a quiet counterpoint to the Biennale’s central theme “In Minor Keys.”

The journey begins not with a visual but with a pulse. Dübir, a sound piece by the artists’ group ADYR‑ASPAN, fills the space with layered recordings of horse-hoof rhythms, immediately transporting you to the steppe while attuning your perception to subtler modes of feeling. This leads into Steppe Architectonics by Smail Bayaliyev, Akmaral Mergen, Gulmaral Tatibay, and Natalya Ligai, a courtyard installation where monumental horse figures, the sound of hooves, and patches of native steppe grass transform the indoor space into a tactile, disorienting landscape.

Elsewhere, memory manifests as a material rupture. Anar Aubakir’s Matrix of a New Subject takes the inner layer of an old camel‑wool blanket—a family heirloom—and reassembles it into a sculptural object. What was once a source of warmth and continuity now reads as a silent, fraying archive of generational memory. Nearby, Asel Kadyrkhanova’s Machine incorporates an old typewriter connected by a red thread to worn arrest warrants, while Nurbol Nurakhmet’s The Life of a Soviet Home reconstructs a domestic interior as a ruin of lived experience.

The exhibition culminates in a space of total immersion. Ardak Mukanova’s Qoñyr Äulie: Immersion into the Quiet Depths is a digital work that combines LIDAR scans of an ancient sacred cave with the voices of nearby villagers. Light and myth are not narrated here; they are felt on a level of internal sensation. Throughout the five halls, the artists—including Mansur Smagambetov, Oralbek Kaboke, and others—use sound, object, and installation to show how trauma, adaptation, and continuity are preserved not in grand monuments, but in the quiet, everyday textures of life. The result is a space where history is not displayed but inhabited, and where silence becomes its own resonant, unforgettable language.

The Austrian Pavilion

The Austrian Pavilion at this year’s Biennale does not greet you so much as swallow you whole. Florentina Holzinger, already the most talked‑about and widely quoted artist of the 61st edition—her name buzzing through every preview-day conversation and saturating social feeds with equal parts outrage and awe—has transformed the pavilion into something that resists easy naming. Part underwater theme park, part sewage treatment plant, part ritual architecture: Seaworld Venice is a living, breathing contraption where water, bodies, and machines collide in a state of perpetual, precarious performance.

Image: Florentina Holzinger, source: https://www.rheinpfalz.de/

Walking in, you are immediately disoriented. The space is neither dry land nor aquarium, but a humid, industrial twilight. Tanks bubble, pipes pulse, and performers move through an ever-shifting landscape that seems to sweat and exhale around them. Holzinger, known for pushing flesh and spectacle to their breaking points, here expands her vocabulary: the body becomes just one element among many—a pump, a filter, a vessel for leaks and surges. There is a queasy beauty to it, the kind that makes you check whether the floor beneath your feet is real or a membrane.

The project spills beyond the pavilion walls. A series of public performances titled Études spreads through Venice like a slow tide, appearing on canals, in courtyards, on forgotten stairways. Each one is a fragment of a larger meditation on ecological precarity: not the distant, abstract kind, but the visceral sensation of a world where nature, technology, and human survival have stopped trusting one another. Holzinger stages this distrust as a kind of dark circus. You laugh, then flinch. The water looks artificial until it suddenly seems too real.

What made Holzinger the Biennale’s most cited artist even before the official opening is precisely this refusal to separate scandal from sincerity. Online, clips of her performers writhing through murky tanks or interfacing with custom‑built machines have gone viral not merely for shock value but for their strange, unnerving tenderness. Seaworld Venice is not a critique of theme parks or sewage plants—it is both, operating simultaneously. In Holzinger’s hands, the Austrian Pavilion becomes a place where we are forced to ask: what does it mean to perform survival? And can a machine, a body, or a drop of Venetian lagoon water still hold an answer?

The Vietnam Pavilion

The Vietnam Pavilion at the 61th Venice Biennale doesn’t announce itself with a bang. It arrives as a quiet tide — an intimate, evocative flow that slips into the Venetian cityscape almost unnoticed. For the first time in the country’s history, Vietnam appears at the world’s most prestigious art forum not with a manifesto, but with a question: how does art travel without losing its roots? The answer is being given in the ancient halls of Ca’ Faccanon, a 15th-century Gothic palace that has just reopened after more than a year of renovation — a space itself caught between memory and renewal.

The exhibition is titled “Vietnam: Art in a Global Flow,” and the keyword here is flow. Movement without rupture. A stream that carries tradition forward rather than abandoning it on the shore. Curated by Do Tuong Linh, the pavilion brings together ten Vietnamese artists working primarily in lacquer — that most unforgiving of materials, built through slow, patient layering. Lacquer is not applied; it is lived with. Each coat demands time. Each surface holds — quite literally — the memory of its making.

Among them, Lê Huu Hiêu has created something rare. His installation, the only solo presentation by a Vietnamese artist at this Biennale, refuses the very grammar of exhibition-making. There are no pedestals here. His sculptures rest directly on the ground — on the earth, the origin — as if they have simply always been there. He works with hom dat: jakwood covered in clay mixed with water, straw, and chaff, then fired for days inside a pit. The result is a material with its own ancient patina, a surface that no modern artifice can reproduce. Nothing is superficial. The clay remembers.

But the real strangeness — the detail that stays with you — is the silkworms. Lê Huu Hiêu raises an ancient species of silkworm directly on his works. These creatures move across the sculptures, spinning, eating, transforming. They become a perfect, living metaphor for the human: they build, they mutate, they evolve. Silent transformations, patient and internal, until the wrapping is broken. And then: flight.

The pavilion’s curatorial voice is remarkably disciplined. There is no direct acknowledgment of war, no reenactment of trauma. The gaze is turned elsewhere: toward work, toward spiritual practices, toward the land, toward shared everyday memory. Ordinary people become the protagonists of this story. You walk through the space not as a spectator but as someone immersed in the same unstoppable current.

This gentle insistence on peace as a cultural horizon is not naive. It echoes something larger: the foreign policy principle Hanoi calls “bamboo diplomacy” — flexibility of the roots, resistance of the stem. The pavilion navigates gracefully between adaptation and integrity, tradition and the global contemporary. Whether consciously or not, it becomes the most precise aesthetic translation of that balancing act.

And yet the lacquer holds everything together. Across painting, installation, and spatial experimentation, artists like Thanh Chuong, Trinh Tuan, Cong Kim Hoa, Bui Huu Hung, and Doan Thi Thu Huong explore the medium as both a traditional craft and an evolving artistic language. Lacquer here is not a relic. It is a living, breathing practice — a surface that breathes with time, that reflects the cyclical rhythm of life itself.

Vietnam’s debut at the Biennale is not a splash. It is a slow immersion. In a year when the global theme is “In Minor Keys” — foregrounding subtlety, resonance, and quieter forms of expression — this pavilion fits like a key turned softly in an old lock. You do not leave it stunned or shouting. You leave it carrying something lighter, more persistent: the sense that art can flow across continents without breaking, and that silence, sometimes, is the most eloquent language of all.

Erwin Wurm’s Dreamers at the Museo Fortuny

In a city where every stone is loaded with the weight of centuries, Erwin Wurm has done something almost mischievous: he has invited you to laugh. Not politely, not from a distance, but a full, destabilizing laugh — the kind that catches in your throat because you suspect the joke might be on you. His exhibition Dreamers, staged within the labyrinthine halls of the Museo Fortuny, does not announce itself with grandeur. It sidles up to you, offers you an absurd instruction, and then waits. The result is one of the most quietly radical shows of this Biennale — a space where humour is not a side effect but the main instrument, and where the dismantling of your certainties happens precisely at the moment you are smiling.

The setting could not be more pregnant with tension. The Museo Fortuny is a palimpsest: the former studio of Mariano Fortuny, the polymath designer, painter, and inventor whose textiles and lamps still haunt the building‘s every corner. Tapestries, theatrical backdrops, and the famous pleated Delphos gowns occupy the space like sleeping ancestors. Wurm does not ignore this inheritance. He inserts himself into it like a foreign body — or perhaps like a restless guest at a very formal dinner party. His deformed cars, his squeezed houses, his anthropomorphic sausages and swollen garments do not merely coexist with Fortuny’s refined legacy. They argue with it. The quiet patience of Fortuny‘s craft becomes a calm witness, making Wurm’s distortions feel more pointed, more urgent — not just goofy, but genuinely uncomfortable.

This is the exhibition’s secret engine: the dialogue between the ordinary and the absurd. “The ordinary is so close and so familiar to us that we are inclined to overlook it,” Wurm has said. “Looking at the ordinary from the perspective of the absurd and the paradox gives us the opportunity to see something different, perhaps more interesting”. And so, inside the palazzo, you encounter sculptures that feel like visual one-liners. A dress without a body becomes a ghostly shell, a substitute that remembers the form it once contained. An oversized pillow, suspended by human limbs, shapes an unstable, almost grotesque configuration — a body dreaming itself into softness. The celebrated One Minute Sculptures, initiated in the late 1990s, are installed on the second floor as invitations. Instructions on the wall ask you to perform simple actions with everyday objects — a chair, a bucket, a piece of fruit — transforming your own body into a temporary, ephemeral sculpture. You become the material. You also become the punchline.

But the laughter, here, is never innocent. Wurm uses irony to lower your guard, and then — precisely then — he hits exactly where you are most rigid. Not your body, but your habits. Not the object, but your attachment to it. A Fat Car sits bloated and compromised, a symbol of power that has eaten its own tail. Narrow House takes the familiar warmth of domestic life and compresses it into something tense and claustrophobic. These are not mere distortions. They are sculptural critiques of a society that Wurm sees as increasingly farcical, shaped by capitalist pressures that run contrary to our inner ideals.

And yet, despite the sharpness, there is tenderness here, too. The Dreamers series from which the exhibition takes its name alludes to the psychological sphere of the unconscious, to states of vulnerability and suspension. The anthropomorphic objects do not mock. They mirror. They remind you that awkwardness is part of being human, that the line between dignity and absurdity is thinner than we care to admit.

By the time you step back into the Venetian sunlight, something has shifted. You find yourself looking at a chair, a coat, a cucumber with slightly different eyes. Wurm has not changed the objects. He has changed the space between you and them. And in that space, as in a dream, anything can become sculpture.

Above Venice’s Canals, Mechanical Flowers Open and Breathe

Venice has always been a city of negotiation—between water and stone, memory and flood, the monumental and the provisional. The Dutch studio DRIFT does not interrupt this conversation. They add a new voice to it. Suspended over the canal outside Palazzo Balbi, their installation Shy Society does not announce itself. It exhales.

A constellation of robotic blooms—each built from polished stainless steel, aluminum, silk, and embedded LEDs—drifts above the dark water. They do not stand still. They move the way plants move: slowly, nearly imperceptibly, responding to something deeper than command. The mechanism mimics nyctinasty, the biological process through which flowers close at dusk and reopen with the morning light. But here, the trigger is not the sun. It is presence. Wind. The hush of a passing boat. The accidental pause of a stranger looking up.

Five years of research led to this choreography. Each silk petal unfolds and retracts not with mechanical precision but with something closer to breath—specifically, the rhythm of a human heart at rest. Soft, steady, almost vulnerable. Layers of translucent fabric catch the Venetian light, turning each bloom into a hovering ghost of itself. The effect is weightlessness. The intention is connection.

“Public spaces often emphasize permanence, power, and structure,” says Lonneke Gordijn, who leads DRIFT with Ralph Nauta. “With Shy Society, we explore how softness, light, and movement can create connection.” And so the rigid Renaissance façade of Palazzo Balbi becomes, for a few suspended moments, a living skin. The installation does not dominate the canal. It listens to it. Wind shifts the blooms. Reflections double them. The city’s own restless water becomes a collaborator.

This is not spectacle. It is attunement. DRIFT argues that movement is a universal language—one shared by humans, animals, trees, and tides. No translation is needed. As the blooms open and close in their slow, patient cycle, strangers on different bridges find themselves synchronized. Not through an app. Not through speech. Through shared attention. Through the soft pulse of light and silk against the Venetian dusk.

There is a quiet radicalism here. Venice is a city acutely aware of its own fragility, of the acqua alta that licks at its foundations. Shy Society does not deny that precarity. It mirrors it. The same breeze that sways the robotic flowers ripples the canal below. The same light that gilds the palazzos passes through translucent petals. Softness, the installation suggests, is not weakness. It is adaptation. It is survival.

Later this year, DRIFT will open its own museum in Amsterdam—a vast 8,000-square-meter space dedicated to immersive works at the intersection of nature and technology. In 2027, the studio will mark two decades of practice. But here, on this canal, none of that matters. What matters is the slow unfurling of silk above dark water. The way a mechanical flower can feel more alive than a living one. The way you find yourself standing still in a city that never stops moving—and breathing with something that has no roots, no soil, no season. Only rhythm. Only light. Only the improbable, fleeting fact of being, for a moment, together.