{"id":1926938,"date":"2026-05-07T23:56:33","date_gmt":"2026-05-07T20:56:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1926938"},"modified":"2026-05-07T23:56:33","modified_gmt":"2026-05-07T20:56:33","slug":"the-best-national-pavilions-at-the-2026-venice-biennale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1926938","title":{"rendered":"The Best National Pavilions at the 2026 Venice Biennale"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\tA sense of ruin permeates this Venice Biennale; we knew that already. More pointedly, several standout national pavilions in the show are steeped in decay\u2014bodily, infrastructural, archaeological: broken, bloody political machines pumping the present full of their reek.<\/p>\n
\n\tRubble and stone line the Slovenian Pavilion, where the Nonument Group repurposes materials from previous Biennales into a ruin of a mosque built for Bosnian Muslim soldiers during World War I. Meanwhile, Sara Shamma, representing Syria in its first national pavilion since the Civil War, invokes Palmyra, the ancient site whose tower tombs were obliterated by ISIS during its campaign of cultural erasure.<\/p>\n
\n\tGermany\u2019s presentation, titled \u201cRuin,\u201d treats the pavilion\u2019s architecture as a lens through which to question the exhibition\u2019s structure. In the logic of art-washing: is history ever wiped cleaned, or does nationalist residue merely metastasize under a different name? The answer proposed by its artists\u2014Henrike Naumann, who died in February, and Sung Tieu\u2014 would surely merit award consideration\u2014if the Venice Biennale still had a jury. (Its five members resigned abruptly last week, having previously said they wouldn\u2019t consider nations charged with crimes against humanity in the International Criminal Court. The awards will now be chosen by a public vote.)<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cIn Minor Keys,\u201d Koyo Kouoh\u2019s main exhibition, was also roiled, in that case by the death of its curator. How this Biennale will be remembered, following a succession of shocks that began with Kouoh\u2019s passing, remains uncertain. Will it be recalled as a spectacle stoked by controversy or a much-needed breath of fresh air?<\/p>\n
\n\tArtist Florentina Holzinger, who literally rang in the Austrian Pavilion, suggested these conditions as one in the same, saying in an opening speech: \u201cWhat the fuck! There is no jury, there is no prize. We are seeing a system crumble. Let\u2019s not despair. All we need is a shift of wind, a new direction, a reshaping of the symbols of the past.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tAt the link in our bio, read Solomon on the Biennale\u2019s stand-out pavilions, which present critical takes on the past or visions of the future we deserve.<\/p>\n
\n\tStanding within the green walls of the German Pavilion\u2014Henrike Naumann\u2019s posthumously realized installation\u2014a 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,\u00a0\u201cRuin,\u201d curated by Kathleen Reinhardt,\u00a0identifies\u00a0the pavilion as \u201cfascist architecture,\u201d a reference to its 1938 redesign by the Nazi Party.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tWithin that pavilion sits\u00a0The Home Front<\/em>\u00a0(2026), a sculptural assemblage that folds\u00a0Germany\u2019s Cold War domestic memory\u2014particularly the Soviet-inflected design environment of Naumann\u2019s East German upbringing\u2014into the country\u2019s\u00a0ideological sediment. The green walls are an echo of disused army barracks in former East\u00a0Germany. The work is a grid of miniaturized, mundane objects lining the walls: toys, chairs, portraits, an axe, and a hoe. She called them \u201chieroglyphics.\u201d 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\u00a0rendered\u00a0faceless.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tTieu\u2019s contribution shifts the tone but not the aim.\u00a0Largely covering the pavilion\u2019s facade is\u00a0Human Dignity Shall Be Inviolable<\/em>,\u00a0a 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.\u00a0\u00a0The title cites Article 1 of the\u00a0German\u00a0Basic Law, which asserts human dignity as inalienable. Meanwhile,\u00a0They Have Eyes, But They See Not, They Have Ears, But They Hear Not<\/em>\u00a0consists of eight hundred ladybird sculptures that accumulate in the corners of the pavilion, scurrying forward. Determination and dignity\u2014pure, spontaneous desires\u2014develop piece by piece, permeating the nationalist monument with a new reading.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
\n\tFlorentina Holzinger\u2019s show, titled \u201cSea World\u201d, was the sort of experience I\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n
\n\tHolzinger, 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.<\/p>\n
\n\tOnce 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. \u201cWhat is seen as poor?\u201d Holzinger asked. \u201cAs polluted? What do we hide and not want to see?\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tThe Peruvian Pavilion is titled \u201cFrom Other Worlds,\u201d though the\u00a0land\u00a0the artist evokes in her tapestries and a related video installation resembles our own\u2014if only one governed by conviction, attention, and ecological balance. A steady insect drone fills the pavilion\u2014cicadas or grasshoppers, perhaps\u2014along with birdsong, the kind that signals a living, thriving\u00a0landscape.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tThe artist Sara Flores belongs to the Shipibo-Konibo, making her the first Indigenous representative of Peru at the Venice Biennale\u2014an 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tIn an interview preceding the show, she described\u00a0ken\u00e9<\/em>, 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\u2014a learned practice. The question, then, is simple: Do we have\u00a0the patience?\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
\n\tFor no\u00a0profound\u00a0reason,\u00a0I\u2019ve\u00a0never 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\u00a0nursery 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\u2019s 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\u00a0in\u00a0shit.<\/p>\n
\n\tArakawa-Nash\u2019s handwritten message\u00a0accompanying\u00a0the pavilion foreword reflects on the complicated path to parenthood as a queer artist\u2014one who is already positioned outside the norms of mainstream Japanese society\u2014and the\u00a0particular pressures\u00a0that\u00a0accompany\u00a0the demand, in the artist\u2019s words, to be \u201cgood.\u201d Arakawa-Nash writes that the show, titled\u00a0\u201cGrass Babies, Moon Babies,\u201d reflects in part on the hypocrisies of\u00a0history, whose\u00a0warmongering, ultranationalist authors condemn unconventional identities while\u00a0leaving devastation in their\u00a0wake.\u00a0In contrast, this pavilion gives life.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
\n\tTwo artists represented Korean this year:\u00a0Hyeree\u00a0Ro and Choi Goen, the latter of whom is responsible for a work that visitors\u00a0encounter\u00a0before even entering the building. A monumental industrial pipe by Choi erupts from the structure before burrowing back inside,\u00a0ultimately snaking\u00a0toward the Japanese Pavilion. Forged from a highly malleable, heat-intensive metal, the work evokes the historical entanglements between Japan and Korea\u2014colonizer and formerly colonized\u2014as well as the two nations\u2019 first-ever Biennale collaboration.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tAs Arakawa-Nash noted in his statement, that dynamic was\u00a0largely obscured\u00a0within his Japanese public education, though it\u00a0remains\u00a0central to Korea\u2019s 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.\u00a0The Korean presentation, titled \u201cLiberation Space: Fortress\/Nest\u201d and curated by Binna Choi,\u00a0imagines that brief window of self-determination as a fertile dreamscape partitioned into eight intimate sectors devoted to life\u2019s inevitabilities: mourning, remembering,\u00a0observing, living, waiting, planning, sharing, and repairing.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tAll of which is cocooned in membranous installation by Ro consisting of 4,000 pieces of organza.\u00a0The presentation is deepened by a \u201cfellowship\u201d of creatives, including Nobel-winning writer Han Kang, who here offers Funeral<\/em>, a 2018 installation made in memory of\u00a0those\u00a0killed\u00a0during the Jeju Island\u00a0uprising, a\u00a0brutal\u00a0state crackdown shaped\u00a0by US intervention in the newly bifurcated nation.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
\n\n
Brazil<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Rafa Jacinto\/Courtesy Funda\u00e7\u00e3o Bienal de S\u00e3o Paulo\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n
\n\tThe newly restored Brazilian Pavilion is inaugurated with two of the nation\u2019s totemic artists, S\u00e3o Paulo\u2013based Rosana Paulino and Rio de Janeiro\u2013based Adriana Varej\u00e3o, shown here through historical works spanning more than three decades. Curated by Dina Lima, the exhibition is titled\u00a0\u201cComigo\u00a0ningu\u00e9m\u00a0pode,\u201d a Brazilian expression\u00a0roughly translating\u00a0to \u201cnobody can handle me\u201d or \u201cnobody can beat me,\u201d which also refers to the Dieffenbachia plant (known in English as dumb cane or leopard lily). <\/p>\n
\n\tBeautiful, 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.\u00a0Varej\u00e3o and Paulino, two artists with revolutionary sensibilities, make a power excavation team.\u00a0Paulino\u2019s\u00a0Aracnes<\/em>\u00a0(1999\u20132026), a concrete wall embedded with printed photographs of enslaved women, is shown alongside Varej\u00e3o\u2019s Still Life amid Ruin<\/em> (2026), a series of reliefs and murals that appear to puncture the pavilion\u2019s walls, as if the building itself cannot contain the tragic histories it holds.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
\n\n
Denmark<\/h2>\n<\/figure>\n
\n
\n\tMaja 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\u2019s strangely persuasive vision of motherhood.<\/p>\n
\n\tIn another room, videos installed almost like devotional works play footage of \u201csperm racing\u201d\u2014an 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
\n\tClose your eyes in Morocco\u2019s 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\u2014which you should not do\u2014you might mistake yourself for a guest inside the atelier that produced the monumental installation.<\/p>\n
\n\tTitled Asetta<\/em>\u2014which translates to both \u201cloom\u201d and \u201critual of weaving\u201d in Amazigh languages\u2014the presentation celebrates Morocco\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\n\tAgueznay resists fixed titles such as \u201ccraftsperson\u201d or \u201cartisan,\u201d referring to everyone involved instead as artists. \u201cCraft is cutting edge\u2014it\u2019s not something that looks toward the past, but toward the future,\u201d she said, noting that in Morocco these categories are not separated. \u201cWe don\u2019t have the same divisions: contemporary art, design, traditional savoir-faire.\u201d Agueznay trained as an architect, a background evident in the installation\u2019s spatial precision: Beneath the pavilion\u2019s high ceilings, textiles soar and fold midair, forming a floating doorway. The concept of the spiritual threshold, or \u00e2atba<\/em>, separating public and private, figures critically in Moroccan architecture. \u201cIt\u2019s all about movement and pause\u2014movement and stop. That\u2019s rhythm,\u201d Agueznay said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Uzbekistan<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Photo by Gerda Studio. Courtesy of the Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation.\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tIn 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.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tToday, the Aral\u00a0remains\u00a0a hypersaline wound between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan\u2014stage and subject in what\u00a0I\u2019ve\u00a0begun thinking of as Land(less)\u00a0Art, following a performance-based retelling of the Aral\u2019s mythology I\u00a0encountered\u00a0in Kazakhstan last fall.\u00a0A similar desire to summon the\u00a0missing\u00a0water, to\u00a0locate\u00a0within it\u00a0a viable\u00a0postcolonial path, animates the assembled Uzbek artists, though they speak from a culturally distinct vantage point.\u00a0The exhibition takes its speculative cues from the\u00a0fiction\u00a0of\u00a0Uzbek Karakalpak\u00a0writer\u00a0Allayar Darmenov,\u00a0whose world revolves a replenished Aral; as well as the\u00a0material cultures of the\u00a0Karakalpak people, who\u00a0have inhabited the northwestern shores of the Aral since\u00a0the 18th century.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tVisitors can mold\u00a0crystallized salt in the shape of fishes in\u00a0Zi\u00a0Kakhramonova\u2019s\u00a0interactive\u00a0installation\u00a0Lost Form Archive<\/em>\u00a0(2026); the same sea life magically metamorphoses in Aygul Sarsen\u2019s paintings. Meanwhile,\u00a0Zulfiya Spowart\u2019s\u00a0Untitled (The Cradle)<\/em>, from 2026 quietly mediates on the motherhood fables through textile\u00a0sculptures, carvings, and a\u00a0beshik<\/em>\u00a0cradle.\u00a0The\u00a0pavilion\u00a0doubles as a display of Uzbekistan\u2019s ascendant cultural profile: The exhibition, titled\u00a0\u201cThe Aural Sea,\u201d was curated by the inaugural cohort of the Bukhara Biennial Curatorial School\u2014Sophie Mayuko Arni, Kamila Mukhitdinova, Nico Sun, Th\u00e1i H\u00e0, and Aziza Izamova.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
\n\n
Britain<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Courtesy British Pavilion\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n
\n\tTurner Prize\u2013winning 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\u2014those swept up in the rush to label some as \u201cOther.\u201d <\/p>\n
\n\tFor 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\u2019s partner in life and art. The show\u2019s title\u2014\u201cPredicting History: Testing Translation\u201d\u2014belies the inherent impossibility of the position it describes. One panel in the commanding Architects<\/em> features two figures, a man and woman, in disagreement on how one wrestles back autonomy within a biased system, according to Himid.<\/p>\n
\n\tSpeaking to the Art Newspaper<\/em>, she framed the project as an attempt to explore \u201cwhat home is, what home could be, and what it must be like if you have to leave the place you thought you\u2019d spend the rest of your life in for a place that seems welcoming, but clearly isn\u2019t.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/25e0054267dd3f3c9c964277937a6639b725d708-3000×2000-2.jpg?w=1024″] A sense of ruin permeates this Venice Biennale; we knew that already. More pointedly, several standout national pavilions in the show are steeped in decay\u2014bodily, infrastructural, archaeological: broken, bloody political machines pumping the present full of their reek. Rubble and stone line the Slovenian Pavilion, where the Nonument Group repurposes materials from […]<\/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-1926938","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\/1926938","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=1926938"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1926938\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1926938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1926938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1926938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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