The Best National Pavilions at the 2026 Venice Biennale

Standing within the green walls of the German Pavilion—Henrike Naumann’s posthumously realized installation—a persistent feeling took shape: the Giardini feels like a ghost town, dotted with haunted houses. Naumann and her co-exhibitor, Sung Tieu, gave these ghosts form, name, and blame: their exhibition, “Ruin,” curated by Kathleen Reinhardt, identifies the pavilion as “fascist architecture,” a reference to its 1938 redesign by the Nazi Party.  

Within that pavilion sits The Home Front (2026), a sculptural assemblage that folds Germany’s Cold War domestic memory—particularly the Soviet-inflected design environment of Naumann’s East German upbringing—into the country’s ideological sediment. The green walls are an echo of disused army barracks in former East Germany. The work is a grid of miniaturized, mundane objects lining the walls: toys, chairs, portraits, an axe, and a hoe. She called them “hieroglyphics.” Interspersed among them is a wood relief after her artist-grandfather, who was criticized by his socialist realist peers for refusing to depict smiling subjects. Here, the figures are rendered faceless.  

Tieu’s contribution shifts the tone but not the aim. Largely covering the pavilion’s facade is Human Dignity Shall Be Inviolable, a mosaic composed of 3 million tesserae that depicts the remnants of a prefabricated socialist housing block in East Berlin, where the artist once lived. That block is part of a broader network of complexes built for foreign contract workers in the GDR, and is now slated for demolition.  The title cites Article 1 of the German Basic Law, which asserts human dignity as inalienable. Meanwhile, They Have Eyes, But They See Not, They Have Ears, But They Hear Not consists of eight hundred ladybird sculptures that accumulate in the corners of the pavilion, scurrying forward. Determination and dignity—pure, spontaneous desires—develop piece by piece, permeating the nationalist monument with a new reading. 

Florentina Holzinger’s show, titled “Sea World”, was the sort of experience I’d dream to witness in the company of John Waters. It is preparation-proof viewing: a bold baptism in human waste. We are animals born from the primordial ocean, who grew legs only to piss back in its shores millions of years later.

Holzinger, a master of spectacle, swung naked inside a bell, sounding the alarm of imminent environmental collapse. That was only the introduction: a nude collaborator floated inside a dunk tank flanked by port-a-potties visitors were encouraged to use (the urine is being filtered into the tank). The crowd went wild for it, surging into the pavilion upon its opening in a briefly disconcerting wave.

Once it became clear no one would be trampled, awe settled in. People are hungry for grotesque art; if nothing else, it is honest about the conditions of the present. “What is seen as poor?” Holzinger asked. “As polluted? What do we hide and not want to see?”

The Peruvian Pavilion is titled “From Other Worlds,” though the land the artist evokes in her tapestries and a related video installation resembles our own—if only one governed by conviction, attention, and ecological balance. A steady insect drone fills the pavilion—cicadas or grasshoppers, perhaps—along with birdsong, the kind that signals a living, thriving landscape. 

The artist Sara Flores belongs to the Shipibo-Konibo, making her the first Indigenous representative of Peru at the Venice Biennale—an overdue distinction. Here, one receives only what one offers the natural world, a principle that takes on greater urgency, given the stakes of deforestation and the cultural annihilation it entails. 

In an interview preceding the show, she described kené, the design philosophy of the Shipibo-Konibo, as a practice of repair. The painted sculptures are executed entirely by hand; their patterns trace steadfast paths and sustained curves. Healing, in this sense, is a time-consuming discipline of precision and attention—a learned practice. The question, then, is simple: Do we have the patience? 

For no profound reason, I’ve never held a baby. But I have some sense, now, of their physical and metaphorical weight after visiting the Japanese Pavilion, which was transformed into a nursery this year by the performer and sculptor Ei Arakawa-Nash. Countless baby dolls, each weighing a realistic five to six kilograms, crawl on all fours and lie waiting within. Attendees select babies at random to hand to the visitor; there’s no say over who your child will become. The diapers reveal a unique poem by Arakawa-Nash, who has recently welcomed twins. Parenthood seems like a beautiful secret, difficult to spot, it being buried in shit.

Arakawa-Nash’s handwritten message accompanying the pavilion foreword reflects on the complicated path to parenthood as a queer artist—one who is already positioned outside the norms of mainstream Japanese society—and the particular pressures that accompany the demand, in the artist’s words, to be “good.” Arakawa-Nash writes that the show, titled “Grass Babies, Moon Babies,” reflects in part on the hypocrisies of history, whose warmongering, ultranationalist authors condemn unconventional identities while leaving devastation in their wake. In contrast, this pavilion gives life. 

Two artists represented Korean this year: Hyeree Ro and Choi Goen, the latter of whom is responsible for a work that visitors encounter before even entering the building. A monumental industrial pipe by Choi erupts from the structure before burrowing back inside, ultimately snaking toward the Japanese Pavilion. Forged from a highly malleable, heat-intensive metal, the work evokes the historical entanglements between Japan and Korea—colonizer and formerly colonized—as well as the two nations’ first-ever Biennale collaboration.  

As Arakawa-Nash noted in his statement, that dynamic was largely obscured within his Japanese public education, though it remains central to Korea’s seismic historical and social experience. Japan relinquished control of Korea in 1945 after 35 years of occupation; the resulting power vacuum was swiftly exploited by the United States and the Soviet Union, foreclosing Korean agency over the shape of reconstruction. The Korean presentation, titled “Liberation Space: Fortress/Nest” and curated by Binna Choi, imagines that brief window of self-determination as a fertile dreamscape partitioned into eight intimate sectors devoted to life’s inevitabilities: mourning, remembering, observing, living, waiting, planning, sharing, and repairing.  

All of which is cocooned in membranous installation by Ro consisting of 4,000 pieces of organza. The presentation is deepened by a “fellowship” of creatives, including Nobel-winning writer Han Kang, who here offers Funeral, a 2018 installation made in memory of those killed during the Jeju Island uprising, a brutal state crackdown shaped by US intervention in the newly bifurcated nation.   

The newly restored Brazilian Pavilion is inaugurated with two of the nation’s totemic artists, São Paulo–based Rosana Paulino and Rio de Janeiro–based Adriana Varejão, shown here through historical works spanning more than three decades. Curated by Dina Lima, the exhibition is titled “Comigo ninguém pode,” a Brazilian expression roughly translating to “nobody can handle me” or “nobody can beat me,” which also refers to the Dieffenbachia plant (known in English as dumb cane or leopard lily).

Beautiful, resilient, and highly toxic, the flower blooms across Brazil. And here, it blooms here as a symbol of a country blessed with natural beauty but scarred by its buried legacy as one of the principal sites of enslavement in the Americas. Varejão and Paulino, two artists with revolutionary sensibilities, make a power excavation team. Paulino’s Aracnes (1999–2026), a concrete wall embedded with printed photographs of enslaved women, is shown alongside Varejão’s Still Life amid Ruin (2026), a series of reliefs and murals that appear to puncture the pavilion’s walls, as if the building itself cannot contain the tragic histories it holds. 

Maja Malou Lyse, the artist behind the Danish Pavilion, is admirably solutions-based: According to a study cited in the exhibition, the encroaching biological crisis of declining birth rates can be combated by watching VR porn. Here, in collaboration with the collective DIS, she presents fertility PSAs featuring a scintillating striptease: Porn actors relay reproductive data between cuts of babies and scantily dressed women. Any impulse to objectify never fully materializes, waylaid instead by the work’s strangely persuasive vision of motherhood.

In another room, videos installed almost like devotional works play footage of “sperm racing”—an entirely real sport in which men ejaculate under supervision while their sperm compete in an effective long jump under microscopes. One exits the pavilions reassured of the possibilities of the future. 

Close your eyes in Morocco’s first national pavilion for a moment: a man hums by an open window; somewhere beyond him, a car horn cuts through gentle rain. Nearby, the wooden clicks of a whirling loom punctuate his song. If you reached out to touch the intricate textile suspended ahead—which you should not do—you might mistake yourself for a guest inside the atelier that produced the monumental installation.

Titled Asetta—which translates to both “loom” and “ritual of weaving” in Amazigh languages—the presentation celebrates Morocco’s centuries-old craft traditions through one of its contemporary masters, the artist Amina Agueznay, working alongside curator Meriem Berrada and around 150 weavers, the majority of whom are women.

Agueznay resists fixed titles such as “craftsperson” or “artisan,” referring to everyone involved instead as artists. “Craft is cutting edge—it’s not something that looks toward the past, but toward the future,” she said, noting that in Morocco these categories are not separated. “We don’t have the same divisions: contemporary art, design, traditional savoir-faire.” Agueznay trained as an architect, a background evident in the installation’s spatial precision: Beneath the pavilion’s high ceilings, textiles soar and fold midair, forming a floating doorway. The concept of the spiritual threshold, or âatba, separating public and private, figures critically in Moroccan architecture. “It’s all about movement and pause—movement and stop. That’s rhythm,” Agueznay said.

In what amounts to slow-acting social and ecological annihilation, the once-vast Aral Sea has diminished by 90 percent over the last century. Soviet irrigation projects diverted its waters for industrial agriculture, devastating the millions across Central Asia who relied on it for their livelihoods; the occupation ended, but the disaster did not.  

Today, the Aral remains a hypersaline wound between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan—stage and subject in what I’ve begun thinking of as Land(less) Art, following a performance-based retelling of the Aral’s mythology I encountered in Kazakhstan last fall. A similar desire to summon the missing water, to locate within it a viable postcolonial path, animates the assembled Uzbek artists, though they speak from a culturally distinct vantage point. The exhibition takes its speculative cues from the fiction of Uzbek Karakalpak writer Allayar Darmenov, whose world revolves a replenished Aral; as well as the material cultures of the Karakalpak people, who have inhabited the northwestern shores of the Aral since the 18th century. 

Visitors can mold crystallized salt in the shape of fishes in Zi Kakhramonova’s interactive installation Lost Form Archive (2026); the same sea life magically metamorphoses in Aygul Sarsen’s paintings. Meanwhile, Zulfiya Spowart’s Untitled (The Cradle), from 2026 quietly mediates on the motherhood fables through textile sculptures, carvings, and a beshik cradle. The pavilion doubles as a display of Uzbekistan’s ascendant cultural profile: The exhibition, titled “The Aural Sea,” was curated by the inaugural cohort of the Bukhara Biennial Curatorial School—Sophie Mayuko Arni, Kamila Mukhitdinova, Nico Sun, Thái Hà, and Aziza Izamova. 

Turner Prize–winning artist Lubaina Himid is only the second Black woman to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale, following Sonia Boyce in 2022. Born in Zanzibar in 1954, Himid came to Britain as a baby and grew into an artist known for exposing histories of racism and xenophobia—those swept up in the rush to label some as “Other.”

For Venice, she has created a contemplative body of paintings and sculptures foregrounding family, migration, and cultural assimilation, accompanied by a soundscape by Magda Stawarska, Himid’s partner in life and art. The show’s title—“Predicting History: Testing Translation”—belies the inherent impossibility of the position it describes. One panel in the commanding Architects features two figures, a man and woman, in disagreement on how one wrestles back autonomy within a biased system, according to Himid.

Speaking to the Art Newspaper, she framed the project as an attempt to explore “what home is, what home could be, and what it must be like if you have to leave the place you thought you’d spend the rest of your life in for a place that seems welcoming, but clearly isn’t.” The works are large and cleanly articulated. Amid a spread of pavilions heavy on immersive installation, I appreciated the chance to quietly consider questions of complicity.