The Art Biennale

The 2026 edition.

The 61st Art Biennale is called In Minor Keys. It was conceived by Koyo Kouoh and carried forward after her death in 2025 by the team she had chosen. In her curatorial introduction, Kouoh writes about memory, listening and the ways people keep creating through difficult times.

The main exhibition occupies the Central Pavilion in the Giardini and the Arsenale. At the Giardini, you walk through gardens from one pavilion to the next. The Arsenale is on quite a different scale: Venice’s former shipyards, with long halls and columns. This edition runs from 9 May to 22 November 2026.

Magnolias and animals in the blue room.

The red flower in the photograph belongs to Anatomy of the Magnolia Tree for Koyo Kouoh and Toni Morrison, María Magdalena Campos-Pons’s work from 2026. The magnolias, sculptures and portraits are accompanied by music by Kamaal Malak. The dedication brings together Koyo Kouoh and the writer Toni Morrison.

In the same room, Celia Vásquez Yui’s ceramic animals stand on a blue platform. The work is called The Council of the Mother Spirits of the Animals and draws on the Shipibo-Conibo tradition of the Peruvian Amazon. Daniel Lind-Ramos’s assemblages can be seen to either side. Our wider photograph shows them together, though they are works by different artists.

Paintings to look at closely.

High on the blue wall is Lampedusa, Werewere Liking’s painting from 2019. It speaks of crossing the Mediterranean and of the people who lose their lives on the way. The other paintings in the photograph are part of the same presentation of her work.

In another room, Sohrab Hura works on the intimate scale of a diary. The paintings on the walls belong to Things Felt But Not Quite Expressed; the painted boxes in the centre are part of Timelines. They are small, so you have to move closer to each one to see what is happening inside.

Romania. Listening to the sea.

Romania’s pavilion is dark. Inside are buoys, images of water and sound. Anca Benera and Arnold Estefán called their project Black Seas: Scores for the Sonic Eye, curated by Corina Oprea and Diana Marincu.

The wall text begins with a simple idea: a sea is more than water. Rivers carry sediment, pollution and traces of history into it. Wars, resource extraction and environmental change leave their marks on the seabed too. The sea becomes an archive.

In Floating Sensors, buoys become sound instruments. Built to measure and to withstand the sea, they now become part of a composition. The textiles in Rivers of Residue show sonar images of the seabed, embroidered with the courses of the Danube, the Don and the Dnieper. The title’s “sonic eye” refers to this ability to learn through sound what we cannot see.

The video installation How to Mend a Broken Sea? follows Diana Miron as she translates the movement of water into voice. Simina Oprescu’s composition Reading Waves as Notations takes its cue from the waves and from the way sound travels through the pavilion. A geological core sample brings deep time into the room, preserved in the Black Sea’s layers without oxygen.

The panel gives a duration of 18 minutes and 15 seconds. The question holding it all together is how to mend a fractured sea. Once you have read the text, the buoys and the images on the walls begin to make sense together.

And a second venue.

Romania’s project continues at the Romanian Institute’s New Gallery in Palazzo Correr, in Cannaregio, a separate venue from the pavilion in the Giardini. Here are Blue Ground, about the connections between diamond mining, the Atlantic and the Black Sea, and The Delusion of the Commons, a sculpture that brings together the forms of a hydrothermal vent and the Tower of Babel. We have marked this venue on the map too, as another place to see the exhibition.

Japan: take a baby for a walk and change its nappy.

At Japan’s pavilion, visitors were carrying dolls around. Some wore sunglasses; others sat on the edge of a wall beside the plants. Our three short films show people picking them up and taking them along.

Ei Arakawa-Nash’s Grass Babies, Moon Babies grows out of the artist’s experience as a parent of twins. The 208 dolls can be carried through the garden and inside the pavilion. At the end, visitors are invited to change their nappies, and a QR code offers a poem linked to each doll’s assigned birthday. To take part, you pick up a doll and look after it.

France. Comme Saturne.

At Yto Barrada’s exhibition in France’s pavilion, light enters from above. The photograph shows a stepped stone form surrounded by pale and dark curtains. It is a detail from Comme Saturne, curated by Myriam Ben Salah. After the darkness of Romania’s pavilion, the scene here feels entirely different.