{"id":1923457,"date":"2026-05-06T11:25:37","date_gmt":"2026-05-06T08:25:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1923457"},"modified":"2026-05-06T11:25:37","modified_gmt":"2026-05-06T08:25:37","slug":"venice-biennale-2026-abbas-akhavans-canada-pavilion-is-a-living-greenhouse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1923457","title":{"rendered":"Venice Biennale 2026: Abbas Akhavan’s Canada Pavilion Is a Living Greenhouse"},"content":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/11.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n

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\n\tStep through the glass door of the Canada Pavilion\u2014particularly amid Tuesday\u2019s persistent rain\u2014and you are likely to be taken aback by the humidity that greets you. That blast of warm air is just the first indication of the many adaptations made by artist Abbas Akhavan to transform the glass-and-brick structure into a literal greenhouse for \u201cEntre chien et loup,\u201d his presentation for this year\u2019s Venice Biennale.<\/p>\n

\n\tAmong the alterations to the structure are a series of grow lights and water misters, a new ventilation system, a film across the wood ceiling to protect it from moisture, and various structural improvements to accomodate the 6,000-gallon water tank that encompasses over half the floorplan and weighs roughly 25 tons. The transformations are meant to render the pavilion into a building-sized Wardian case, a Victorian-era terrarium used to transport foreign plants across the British Empire. It also recalls London\u2019s Crystal Palace, built in 1851 for that year\u2019s Great Exhibition, in which a genus of water lilies named after Queen Victoria were displayed as a natural wonder. Inside the pavilion\u2019s new pool is the exhibition\u2019s centerpiece, a group of giant Victoria<\/em> water lilies, which will grow and bloom and eventually die through the exhibition\u2019s run, which happens to map to their life cycle.<\/p>\n

\n\tIf all of this seems laden with meaning of the kind that often attends conceptual art in 2026\u2014colonialism, empire, fraught ideas of foreigness and exoticness\u2014you, like me, will have read Akhavan\u2019s intentions completely wrong. Things are rarely so pat for the beguiling artist. <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI\u2019ve been looking at these lilies for many years, and I was really interested in them,\u201d Akhavan told me in a video call ahead of the opening. \u201cI didn\u2019t actually know the Queen Victoria connotation in the beginning. I think part of how we make work is through intuition.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAkhavan said he is less interested in an anti-colonial or post-colonial reading of the exhibition. Rather, he wants viewers to \u201clook at these objects that have been heightened through historical inheritance, politics, migration, import\u2013export, currencies of many forms\u201d and, perhaps, for a moment, let them become \u201cunburdened.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n\tThe exhibition at its core is a feat of collaboration. According to curator Kim Nguyen, who spoke with me at the opening on Tuesday, the water lily seeds came from Kew Gardens, and she and Akhavan worked closely with the Orto Botanico di Padova to cultivate the plants ahead of installation, and to create the ideal conditions for the plants to thrive once installed inside the pavilion. Nguyen and Akhavan also worked with architects and engineers to make the necessary alternations to Canada\u2019s permanent building in the Giardini, while protecting the tree that it is constructed around. While past artists have often seen that tree as something to negotiate, according to Nguyen, Akhavan saw it as \u201cthe inspiration for everything.\u201d The pavilion is already integrated with nature; he took it one step further and brought nature literally inside.<\/p>\n

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Several of the water lillies in \u201cAbbas Akhavan: Entre chien et loup.\u201d They are expected to grow to as much as three feet in diameter.<\/span>Photo Francesco Barasciutti\/\u00a9Abbas Akhavan<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tFor Akhavan and Nguyen, the project has been a \u201cleap of faith.\u201d No one knows exactly how the lilies will fare over the next six months. In the best conditions, the lilies might take over the entire pool, growing to three feet in size each. If they do, pruning will be in order. They are, after all, known for being aggressive plants in the Amazon. But, inside, under grow lights, are not their ideal conditions. They might flower or they might wither. Surrendering to nature is core to the project.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI have no choice. I didn\u2019t even have to choose to surrender. I had surrendered,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\n\tWorking across installation, sculpture, performance, and video, Akhavan, who was born in Tehran and now splits his time between Montreal and Berlin, is no stranger to the loaded nature of certain materials, or identities. In Study for a Monument <\/em>(2013), he created bronze casts of plant species native to Iraq, while cast for a folly <\/em>(2019\/2022) re-creates the lobby of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, solely from a photograph of its looting during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. A follow-up work, 2021\u2019s curtain call, variations on a folly<\/em>, re-creates Palmyra\u2019s 2,000-year-old Arch of Triumph, which was destroyed by ISIS in 2015, out of cob, a historic British building material made of soil, water, and straw. Akhavan has said that his work often has to do with \u201ca defense of art\u201d and his many works referencing the Iraq War came from his opposition to that war not from some allegiance to nationality, but as a politically active twenty-something living in Montreal. And yet, according to Akhavan, critics have repeatedly come up to him and said those works were about his \u201chomeland\u201d or in some other way working through his identity\u2014he\u2019s Iranian, by the way.<\/p>\n

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Installation view of \u201cAbbas Akhavan: Entre chien et loup,\u201d 2026, Canada Pavilion.<\/span>Photo Francesco Barasciutti\/\u00a9Abbas Akhavan<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tAkhavan is tired of the art world\u2019s insistence that art must always be \u201ccritiquing\u201d something, or that artists must only care about their own kind. \u201cI\u2019ve been thinking about how artists are only supposed to care about things that they benefit from,\u201d he explained. \u201cSo I need to fight for Iranian-ness right now, or maybe atheist Iranians living in Montreal,\u201d he added with a shrug. In the run-up to the Biennale, one journalist asked him if the goal of \u201cEntre chien et loup\u201d was to \u201cunsettle the concept of Canada.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI\u2019m not here to destabilize or unsettle or destroy the concept,\u201d he said, exasperated. \u201cBut I can guarantee you that, as we\u2019re talking about this, it\u2019s as clear as daylight\u2014because of the way I look and where I come from, there are more flammable connotations that arise inevitably.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\"A<\/div>\n<\/div>
A stack of birch branches cast from bronze in \u201cAbbas Akhavan: Entre chien et loup,\u201d 2026, Canada Pavilion.<\/span>Photo Francesco Barasciutti\/\u00a9Abbas Akhavan<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tThe title of the exhibition comes from a French phrase that means literally \u201cbetween dog and wolf,\u201d recalling the time of twilight, when those animals might be mistaken. It\u2019s a fitting title. Like the waterlillies, there are multiple objects in the show that are not what they seem. A stack of birch branches are revealed as bronze casts upon closer inspection. Two boulders outside the entrance seem to have always been there, and yet they are volcanic rocks sourced in Italy and placed for the show. An old fur coat doubles as a water fountain. In each case, Akhavan dares the viewer to look closer, and perhaps, for a moment, let an object become more than our preconceptions. <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThey\u2019re 100 million years old,\u201d Akhavan says of the water lilies. \u201cThere\u2019s a historical lineage that is outside of our entire comprehension of what time is. As much as Queen Victoria is part of that, they go way further back to the Amazon rivers. Maybe that\u2019s the timeline we should be thinking about\u2014how fleeting these markers are in the history of this thing that\u2019s before us.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAs Akhavan speaks, the absurdity of reading the lilies as emblems of colonialism is impossible to ignore. It\u2019s often said that human history is a mere blip in the 4.5-billion-year existence of the Earth. Perhaps, he seems to be saying, we might all do well to approach the world, its materials, and its people with a little more humility and openness, as one does when meeting a stranger.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/11.jpg?w=1024″] Step through the glass door of the Canada Pavilion\u2014particularly amid Tuesday\u2019s persistent rain\u2014and you are likely to be taken aback by the humidity that greets you. That blast of warm air is just the first indication of the many adaptations made by artist Abbas Akhavan to transform the glass-and-brick structure into a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1923457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1923457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1923457"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1923457\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1923457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1923457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1923457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}