There is a particular kind of arrival in Venice during opening week that the city has perfected: the vaporetto is impossibly crowded, every gallerist in a linen suit is checking their phone for a press preview, and somewhere, already outside a pavilion, there is a protest.
This year, the protests came early. Days before the doors opened, the international jury, handpicked by the late Koyo Kouoh, resigned over their own Statement of Intention refusing to consider awards for countries whose leaders are charged with crimes against humanity. By the press preview, Pussy Riot and FEMEN had appeared outside the Russian Pavilion in pink balaclavas and pink smoke, protesting Russia's first return to the Giardini since 2022; the European Commission was threatening to pull two million euros in funding. Then, on the final day of the preview, the Art Not Genocide Alliance (ANGA) called a cultural workers' strike over Israel's inclusion, and about a dozen pavilions shuttered in solidarity, several of them (the Belgian, Dutch, Austrian, Japanese, Macedonian and Korean) for the entire day. Inside In Minor Keys, artists signed on too: Tabita Rezaire hung a Palestinian flag in her room, and posters outside several pavilions read "Palestine is the future of the world" and "We stand with Palestine." Israel was up; Russia was up; Greta Thunberg had been banned from the city. The Golden Lions for Lifetime Achievement, this edition, would not be awarded at all. Koyo had not had time to choose them before she died.
This is the atmospheric pressure in Minor Keys. And it is, oddly, exactly the weather Kouoh was writing into.
The exhibition we walked into
The 61st International Art Exhibition opened to the general public on 9 May 2026 and runs through 22 November 2026, across the Giardini, the Arsenale, and various sites around the city. It carries the posthumous signature of Koyo Kouoh, the Cameroonian curator and director of Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town, who died unexpectedly in May 2025 after defining the framework, the artist list, the catalogue, and the exhibition’s graphic identity. La squadra di Koyo Kouoh (Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Hélène Pereira, and Rasha Salti as advisors, Siddhartha Mitter as editor-in-chief, and Rory Tsapayi as research assistant) carried the project through, refusing the role of “replacements.” The result is an exhibition haunted by its curator’s absence and entirely shaped by her hand.
There are 111 invited participants: individual artists, duos, collectives, and artist-led organisations selected, in Kouoh’s words, with attention to resonances and affinities between practices. There are 100 national participations (29 in the Giardini, 25 in the Arsenale, 46 across the city), and seven first-time participants, including Guinea, Equatorial Guinea, Nauru, Qatar, Sierra Leone, Somalia, and Vietnam.
Kouoh’s curatorial text opens with an instruction. Take a deep breath. Exhale. Drop your shoulders. Close your eyes. It is the cadence of meditation, deliberately. She wanted the exhibition, she said, to be “renewing rather than exhausting” — to invite us to “shift to a slower gear” and tune in to the lower frequencies, the whispers, the consolations of poetry. Though often lost in the anxious cacophony of the present, the music continues. Threaded through her writing, there are references to James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Édouard Glissant. The Baldwin line she pulls in “about those who would colonise the moon and those who would dance before it as an ancient friend” is so poignant and contextualised beautifully. It is a manifesto about who gets to define presence on a planet that is currently on fire.
Whether or not the show fully delivers on this (and you’ll read plenty of critics arguing that the present world breaks too violently into the room for the sotto voce register to hold), there is something very moving about walking through a Biennale that does not pretend to be louder than its grief.
Highlights from the main exhibition (Arsenale & Giardini)
A handful of works refused to let me go…
Pio Abad (born 1983, Manila; lives in London) continues his ongoing project of reactivating looted objects through patient, almost devotional drawing. Here, colonial-era artefacts re-enter the world, reframed inside everyday domestic settings: things stolen from elsewhere, asked to sit on the dining table and explain themselves. After his Tate Britain commission, this felt like the sharpening of an already incisive practice.
Kader Attia (born 1970, France; lives in Berlin & Paris)’s monumental installation is one of the show’s anchoring works. His thinking around repair, especially wounds visibly mended rather than concealed, the politics of restitution and the metaphysics of injury, has rarely felt more apt than it does in 2026.
Alvaro Barrington (born 1983, Caracas; lives in London), Labour Day Parade ‘91 is a whole environment: painted textiles, rope sculptures, industrial materials, metal figures, channeling Brooklyn’s West Indian Day Parade from his childhood. It is loud in the right way, the joy of a procession that is also a mourning ritual, a Caribbean diaspora claiming public space. After his Tate Britain commission Grace, I’d been waiting to see where he would take this scale next.
Sabian Baumann (born 1962, Zug; lives in Zurich)’s quieter contribution is a counterweight to the maximalism around it. Their work has long sat at the intersection of queer embodiment, drawing, and material thinking, and it lands here as one of the show’s most genuinely minor-key presences — slow, careful, refusing legibility.
Alfredo Jaar (born 1956, Santiago; lives in New York)’s punctuating installation is one of those works that justifies the whole walk. Decades into a practice built around the politics of the image and the ethics of looking, he can still construct a room that quietly devastates you. He’s also, importantly, one of the artists who later signed on to withdraw from awards consideration — the show and the politics around it are inseparable.
Tabita Rezaire (born 1989, Paris; lives in Cayenne, French Guiana)’s work, which braids Black feminist thought, decolonial healing, ancestral technology, and the cosmic, finds its most resonant context here. There is something exactly right about encountering her practice inside an exhibition explicitly tuned to “soul frequencies.”
Khaled Sabsabi (born 1965, Tripoli, Lebanon; lives in Sydney)’s inclusion is the politically loudest story in the show. Originally selected to represent Australia, then dropped by Creative Australia in early 2025 after press attention to his earlier work, then reinstated after backlash from the artistic community, Sabsabi is now in the main exhibition rather than the Australian pavilion. His large-scale installation is a meditation on faith, sound, repetition, and the idea of devotional looking. The fact that we get to see it at all feels like a small institutional victory.
National pavilions that stayed with me
In a Biennale this politically frayed, the pavilions read like a map of where the energy actually is.
Austria: Seaworld Venice, by Florentina Holzinger. The most viral pavilion of the year, and not by accident. Holzinger has flooded the Austrian pavilion: rising water, a glass tank with a performer breathing through scuba gear, robot dogs, a jet ski as monument to ecological catastrophe, and (the image that broke the internet) Holzinger herself suspended naked, upside down, as the clapper inside an enormous bronze bell. The water in the tank, by the way, is filtered urine from visitors using portable toilets either side. The pavilion is daring you to be implicated. Curator Nora-Swantje Almes has framed this honestly: we are critical of the spectacle, and we are part of it. It is the loudest possible scream-into-the-bell about the climate, in a Biennale otherwise asking for a whisper. I loved it precisely for that contradiction.
Canada: Entre chien et loup, by Abbas Akhavan. Akhavan has reimagined the modernist Canada pavilion as a 19th-century Wardian case, the sealed glass terrarium British botanists used to ferry plants across empire. Inside, Victoria water lilies, cultivated in collaboration with Kew and the Orto Botanico di Padova, sit at the centre of a meditation on the imperial life of plants. (The Victoria lily was famously displayed at London’s 1851 Great Exhibition.) The title, “between dog and wolf,” is the French phrase for twilight, that hour when you can no longer tell one from the other. The pavilion holds you in that hour.
Slovenia: Soundtrack for an Invisible House, by Nonument Group (Neja Tomšič, Martin Bricelj Baraga, Nika Grabar, Miloš Kosec). Possibly my favourite pavilion of the show. The Nonument Group, who research forgotten or contested monuments, have filled their Arsenale space with the literal rubble of last year’s Architecture Biennale, and built a polyphonic soundtrack drifting in Slovenian, Bosnian, Hungarian and Italian, interleaved with birdsong and water. The “invisible house” of the title is a temporary wooden mosque erected by the Austro-Hungarian army in WWI for Bosnian Muslim soldiers, then dismantled. Mirrors at either end of the space extend the rubble infinitely. It is a perfect minor key work: contested memory, attunement rather than reconstruction, history refusing to be finished.
Türkiye: A Kiss on the Eyes, by Nilbar Güreş, curated by Başak Doğa Temür. The title comes from a Turkish phrase of tender address, the kind that closes a letter. Güreş, based between Istanbul, Naples and Vienna, has filled the pavilion with works in fabric, macramé, wool, copper, steel, all produced in Istanbul with sculptors, metalworkers and tailors. There’s a tenderness here that is also a refusal: bodies, gendered codes, structures of seeing, all softened into hanging, leaning, hovering forms. The most quietly radical pavilion in the show.
Morocco: Asǝṭṭa, by Amina Agueznay, curated by Meriem Berrada. Morocco’s first official pavilion, and they have arrived. Asǝṭṭa is an Amazigh term for ritual weaving; the work is the result of six months of collaboration with 166 Moroccan artisans in weaving, embroidery, basketry and jewellery. Woven panels wrap the vaulted Arsenale hall, draping like tapestries; sequins evoke Venetian water, Murano glass nods to old trade routes, protective “eye” motifs honour Agueznay’s mother. There is a bed of snow-white wool where you can lie down. (Lie down.)
India. Geographies of Distance: remembering home, curated by Amin Jaffer. India’s return after seven years, in the historic Isolotto warehouse at the Arsenale, brings together five artists, Alwar Balasubramaniam (Bala), Ranjani Shettar, Sumakshi Singh, Skarma Sonam Tashi, and Asim Waqif, working in clay, thread, bamboo, papier-mâché and natural structures. Sumakshi Singh’s Permanent Address is a weightless white-thread translation of her demolished childhood home in Delhi; Skarma Sonam Tashi’s Echoes of Home renders Ladakhi vernacular architecture in recycled cardboard, paper-mâché and clay; Asim Waqif builds a vast bamboo-and-rope architecture mourning a fading craft. Together they make “home” something fractured, suspended, scaffolded. It is one of the most coherent pavilions of the year.
Uzbekistan: The Aural Sea. Curated by the inaugural cohort of the Bukhara Biennial Curatorial School, the Uzbek pavilion turns toward the Aral Sea, once the world’s fourth-largest inland body of water, drained almost out of existence by Soviet irrigation projects. Folkloric storytelling becomes a tool for ecological grief; Zulfiya Spowart’s carved woodblocks of sea creatures and working hands open the show. It pairs beautifully with the Slovenian pavilion next door: both are exercises in attunement to what is no longer there.
Beyond the Biennale: the collateral shows that, honestly, ran the table
I’ll say what some critics have been saying more cautiously: parts of In Minor Keys are weaker in execution and several of the institutional shows around it are doing the heavier lifting. These were my favourites:
Marina Abramović with Transforming Energy at Gallerie dell’Accademia (through 19 October 2026). Curated by Shai Baitel, this is the first ever major exhibition of a living woman artist at the Accademia, marking Abramović’s 80th birthday and her return to the city where, in 1997, she became the first woman to win the Golden Lion for Best Artist. The genius of the install is that her work is woven through the permanent collection, in dialogue with the Renaissance — most strikingly, her 1983 Pietà (with Ulay) is hung beside Titian’s unfinished Pietà of c.1575–76. Then there are the Transitory Objects: the crystal- and geode-studded chairs and beds you actually lie down in, designed to “transmit energy.” I sat in one for a long time. Whether or not you believe in the metaphysics, the body believes something.
Jenny Saville at Ca’ Pesaro (through 22 November 2026). Saville’s first major Venice exhibition, building on her Anatomy of Painting retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery in London, and curated at Ca’ Pesaro by Elisabetta Barisoni. Over thirty paintings and works on paper, from the YBA-era nudes that made her name through her recent abstraction, culminating in a final room of new works made for Venice itself. Saville’s relationship to the Venetian School — Titian, Tintoretto — has always been there in the brushwork, and inside Ca’ Pesaro it becomes the explicit subject. Flesh as cathedral. Stunning.
Helter Skelter: Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince — Fondazione Prada (Ca’ Corner della Regina). Curated by Nancy Spector, this was, easily, my exhibition of the year. The premise — pairing Jafa and Prince through their shared lineage of appropriation and their shared love of Duchamp — sounds tidier than the experience. In a year of compounding US political violence and the continued reckoning with race, looking, ownership and the image, the show feels almost dangerously timely. Jafa’s Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death still does what it does. Goosebumps. I left wanting more, which is the highest compliment.
Where to eat (and drink) between the encounters
The unofficial rule of the Biennale: walk yourself into a stupor, then sit down and let Venice do the rest. Below, places I went or would send a friend to, clustered by the venue you’ll most likely be coming from.
Castello — for Giardini and Arsenale days
This is where you’ll spend most of your Biennale time, and Castello is the right place to land afterwards. Less San Marco theatre, more local rhythm.
Osteria alle Testiere. Tiny — about twenty-four covers — and rightly worshipped for its short, precise seafood menu. Book in advance. Truly. Days in advance. Their handling of fish is the kind of restraint Kouoh would have approved of: very minor key.
Hostaria Castello. An honest, neighbourhood spot for cuttlefish in its ink, bigoli in salsa, anything with the catch of the day. The kind of meal that re-orients you after a long Arsenale.
Al Covo. A Castello classic, off Riva degli Schiavoni, run for decades by Cesare Benelli and Diane Rankin. Lagoon ingredients treated with reverence; great for a slower lunch on a day you’ve over-pavilioned.
Dai Tosi. A laid-back trattoria deep in Castello — pizza and pasta, nothing precious, and exactly what you want after a 9-hour Giardini day. It’s locals in there as much as art-world.
La Nuova Perla. Quieter still, conveniently near both Giardini and Arsenale. Good for a long, undisturbed lunch when you can’t face another conversation about the jury.
Dorsoduro — for the Accademia (Marina Abramović) and the Zattere
Il Ristorante Adriatica at Palazzo Experimental. Inside the design-hotel-of-the-moment on the Zattere, with the lagoon outside the window. Dishes leaning Adriatic-coastal including squid, vongole, sea bream, in a room that knows it’s beautiful. A natural pre- or post-Accademia stop.
Cantine del Vino già Schiavi (also known as Al Bottegon). Off the Accademia bridge on the Dorsoduro side, this is the Venice cicchetti institution. Order at the counter, eat outside on the canal-edge. The cicchetti — especially the inventive open-faced varieties — are the city’s best, and you can be in and out in 30 minutes between exhibitions.
San Marco — the obligatory ritual
Harry’s Bar. Yes, it’s expensive. Yes, the carpaccio is the original carpaccio (it was invented here for Countess Amalia Nani Mocenigo in 1950). Even if you don’t sit down for dinner, do go for a Bellini at the bar, invented by Cipriani circa 1948, still poured the way it should be. It’s a tax on being in Venice, and worth paying once.
San Polo / Santa Croce — for Ca’ Pesaro (Jenny Saville) and Fondazione Prada (Jafa & Prince)
Bacareto da Lele. A standing-room hole-in-the-wall near the Frari and Piazzale Roma, mostly populated by university students and dock workers who know exactly what they’re doing. Tiny glasses of wine for one or two euros, panini for similar money. This is the most efficient lunch in Venice and also one of its purest pleasures — go before or after Ca’ Pesaro and Fondazione Prada, both of which are walkable from there.
Cannaregio — worth the detour
Vino Vero. On the Fondamenta della Misericordia in Cannaregio, the natural-wine north star of the city. The cicchetti are inventive and seasonal, the wine list deep and a little nerdy, and the canal-side seating in the evening is one of Venice’s most reliable small joys. Slot it in for your second or third night, when you want to be off the main drag.