PRESS: Bijutsu Techo by Mami Iida
Source:
Bijutsu Techo by Mami Iida, 30 May 2026, Link to original article:
https://bijutsutecho.com/magazine/news/report/32561
Automated Machine Translation:
From the Nation, the Institution, and Toward “Absence”
Report on the 61st Venice Biennale – National Pavilions
By Mami Iida
May 30, 2026
The effectiveness of the national pavilion system—through which countries officially participate in the Venice Biennale—and the relationship between art and politics it embodies became especially contentious at the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. Questions surrounding the emergence of “artwashing” and the apparent collapse of the Biennale’s expert-driven prize system exposed underlying tensions within the institution.
What has become visible through these developments, and what remains obscured?
Following the first report on the International Exhibition, this second report turns its attention to selected national pavilions and several collateral exhibitions presented throughout Venice.
Who Represents Whom?
At the 61st Venice Biennale, the national pavilion system continues to be organized and presented as a forum in which participating nations are represented. This year, 99 countries are participating—eleven more than at the previous Biennale.
Yet at a moment when the idea of the nation itself is increasingly unstable, shaped by competing political positions and shifting power relations, this framework can no longer be regarded as a stable unit of identity.
Increasingly, the artists and curators selected to represent a country have backgrounds, nationalities, or professional bases that differ from the country they officially represent. At the same time, certain pavilions make their political agendas especially visible, while others seem to select artists whose work is politically innocuous or otherwise advantageous to the image the state wishes to project.
This year also brought renewed debate over the reopening of the Russian and Israeli pavilions, making especially clear the issue of artwashing—the possibility that states may use artistic participation to legitimize their political positions.
The Biennale’s organizers responded by invoking universal institutional principles such as autonomy, openness, and freedom under the rule of law. Yet precisely how those principles should operate within concrete political circumstances remained unresolved.
Over the Biennale’s 130-year history, politics and society have always been inseparable from the exhibition itself. Although the institution continues to uphold the ideal of serving art, these tensions ultimately contributed to the dismantling of the traditional prize system, which had long depended upon expert juries.
At the same time, Taiwan once again participates through the collateral exhibition framework rather than as a national pavilion. The Pinchuk Foundation continues its exhibition in solidarity with Ukraine, while the Palestine Museum US presents an exhibition concerning Gaza. Across Venice, numerous exhibitions held outside the Biennale’s official framework reveal artistic practices that have deliberately moved beyond the national pavilion model and instead operate through alternative institutions, networks, and forms of mediation.
Against this backdrop, this report asks what the current Biennale succeeds in making visible—and what it leaves difficult to see.
Notes
1. During the Biennale’s May 6 press conference, President Pietrangelo Buttafuoco referred to Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s opposition to Russia’s participation while emphasizing the Biennale’s institutional autonomy. Rather than excluding countries engaged in war—including Russia and Israel—the Biennale argued that participation should be governed by institutional principles rather than ad hoc political judgments. In this view, pavilion participation reflects universal rules rather than endorsement of any particular state.
2. The article notes that the legitimacy of states is itself neither fixed nor absolute but continually maintained through legal and political processes. In the case of Israel, reports suggested that the artist’s legal actions may have influenced the Biennale’s judging procedures, while the artist simultaneously responded publicly to cultural boycott campaigns by articulating the pavilion’s own position. Thus, questions surrounding national legitimacy are negotiated within the art world through both legal mechanisms and public discourse.
The Impossibility of Representing the Nation
UAE, Qatar, and the Vatican
United Arab Emirates Pavilion
The UAE Pavilion presents Washwasha, a group exhibition curated by Bana Kattan of Guggenheim Abu Dhabi.
Taking its title from an Arabic word meaning “whispering,” the exhibition brings together several artists whose works form a kind of soundscape reflecting the contemporary condition of the UAE through experiences of movement, language, and memory.
Among the most striking works is an installation by Moscow-born artist Taus Makhacheva, who moves between Moscow and Dubai. Looking into a box, visitors hear the command, “Keep your mouth shut.” Suspended speakers surrounding the viewer broadcast an endless chorus of excuses for having “arrived too late.” These overlapping voices convey the exhaustion produced by social obligations, failed communication, and the constant need to apologize for misunderstandings.
Qatar Pavilion (First Participation)
Although Qatar has already secured a permanent site for a future pavilion in the Giardini, this year it presents its debut in a temporary pavilion resembling an open garden pavilion.
The project centers on internationally renowned artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, whose practice has long challenged conventional exhibition formats.
Drawing inspiration from the majlis—the traditional gathering place found throughout the Middle East and North Africa—the pavilion hosts an ongoing sequence of meals, conversations, film screenings, musical performances, and live events involving chefs, musicians, and other participants.
Rather than presenting a completed exhibition, the project treats the act of gathering itself as its primary medium. In doing so, it quietly departs from the conventional logic of the national pavilion, which traditionally presents the nation as a unified cultural subject.
The UAE, now participating in Venice for the ninth time (or fifteenth including the Architecture Biennale), has steadily strengthened both its international cultural presence and its domestic cultural infrastructure.
Qatar is pursuing a similar strategy. As stated on the pavilion’s website, the project aims to provide
“a space for both critical insight and fellowship… celebrating the enduring and evolving nature of Arab culture while anticipating the arrival of Qatar’s future permanent pavilion.”
Viewed in this context, the selection of internationally mobile artists begins to resemble the strategic assembly of a football team—carefully composed to maximize global visibility.
Vatican Pavilion (Holy See)
The Holy See’s pavilion, curated jointly by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Ben Vickers, is titled The Ear is the Eye of the Soul.
Inspired by the medieval German mystic and composer Hildegard of Bingen, the exhibition places listening at its conceptual center. It unfolds across two sites: a monastery garden near Santa Lucia Station and a religious complex in the Castello district.
At the first venue, Soundwalk Collective, led by Stephan Crasneanscki and Simone Merli, presents headphone-based sound works created in collaboration with artists including Patti Smith and Brian Eno. These pieces emphasize inner perception and spiritual experience through concentrated acts of listening.
At the second site, texts and moving images accompany visitors as they move between interior and exterior spaces, between sound and silence.
Unlike secular nation-states, the Vatican occupies the unusual position of representing both a sovereign state and a religious institution simultaneously.
This raises an intriguing question: now that this year’s Golden Lion is determined by public vote rather than an expert jury, how can such a singular entity be evaluated alongside ordinary national pavilions?
Uncertain Nationhood
Albania and Somalia
Albania Pavilion
The Albanian Pavilion features Genti Korini’s video installation A Place in the Sun (2026).
Blending live-action footage, puppetry, 3D animation, and sound into a hybrid visual language, the work incorporates Zaum, the “transrational” language developed by the Russian avant-garde poets of the early twentieth century, while also referencing the representations of Albania found in the writings of Slovenian author Janko Lavrin.
Rather than using language to communicate meaning, the work systematically dismantles language itself.
Against the historical backdrop of Albania having long been portrayed by outsiders as an exotic and uncivilized land, Korini’s installation critically embraces that external gaze. Through the disintegration of language, it destabilizes the very foundations upon which meaning and knowledge are constructed.
The work suggests that nations themselves are never entirely self-defined; they are continually produced through the expectations, fantasies, and projections of others.
Here, Albania appears simultaneously as a specific place and as “no place”—a condition shared by other European pavilions from the continent’s margins, such as Kosovo and Malta. In doing so, these pavilions expose the instability of the nation-state as a conceptual framework.
Somalia Pavilion (First Participation)
Somalia also makes its Biennale debut with an exhibition entitled SADDEXLEEY, named after a three-part structure found in Somali poetry.
The exhibition brings together three artists from the Somali diaspora, each based in a different city:
- Ayan Farah (Stockholm), whose textile works explore memory and material culture;
- Asma Jama (Bristol), presenting a video installation;
- Warsan Shire (Los Angeles), contributing poetry.
Their works occupy three floors of a house-like exhibition space.
Where the UAE Pavilion constructs an immersive soundscape, Somalia instead quietly explores themes of belonging, memory, and inheritance through language and multiple media.
Somalia’s participation carries particular historical significance. The country was once divided among colonial powers, including Italy, and has since endured decades of international intervention and regional conflict.
Yet the pavilion has itself become politically contentious.
A statement issued by Somali artists and cultural organizations declares:
“This pavilion does not represent Somalia.”
The statement criticizes the opacity surrounding the selection process for the national representatives and questions the involvement of Italian organizers in producing the pavilion.
In this sense, even Somalia’s long-awaited first appearance reveals the persistent difficulty of determining who has the authority to represent a nation in the first place.
Violence Within the Home
Austria, Germany, and Japan
Austrian Pavilion
The Austrian Pavilion presents SEAWORLD VENICE (2026) by Florentina Holzinger, a large-scale live installation developed from the artist’s long-standing investigation of water as both material and metaphor.
Set against the intertwined crises of environmental collapse and technological acceleration, the work transforms the human body into part of a larger operating system.
Its sacrificial structure openly exposes violence.
Performers—including Holzinger herself—appear restrained within a carefully choreographed environment. Water, including the urine of visitors, circulates continuously through the installation, while performers live, sleep, and eat inside aquarium-like enclosures, pushing their physical endurance to its limits.
Within this closed ecosystem, the “home” becomes a self-contained mechanism in which living bodies are rendered consumable.
The audience watches an ecology that has itself become an object of consumption.
German Pavilion
Germany presents a two-person exhibition by Henrike Naumann and Sung Tieu.
Naumann passed away unexpectedly in February, and the exhibition was completed posthumously by her family together with the curatorial team.
Entitled Ruin, the exhibition examines the ideological ruptures that followed German reunification and the material traces they continue to leave behind.
Inside the pavilion, Naumann reconstructs domestic interiors from everyday life in the former East Germany.
Outside, Sung Tieu addresses histories of migration and structural violence.
Particularly striking is Tieu’s mosaic installation referencing the “Sunflower House” in Rostock-Lichtenhagen, the apartment complex that became the site of violent anti-foreigner riots in eastern Germany in 1992.
Here, the home no longer appears as a place of security.
Instead, it becomes a site of exclusion and violence.
Installed within a pavilion whose architecture itself dates to Germany’s Fascist era, the exhibition overlays one historical layer upon another. The building ceases to function merely as an artifact of the past and instead reveals history as something that remains active in the present.
Japanese Pavilion
The Japanese Pavilion features an exhibition by Arakawa Nash Medical.
The artist, who entered into a same-sex marriage and became a parent through surrogacy, presents their own family—not as documentary subject matter but as the artwork itself.
Only a small number of countries and local jurisdictions currently recognize both same-sex marriage and surrogacy, and realizing this family required the artist to relinquish Japanese nationality.
As both a parent and Japan’s official representative, Arakawa records the intertwined responsibilities of educating future generations about war while also foregrounding the often invisible labor of care.
The exhibition is deliberately dense.
Its abundant materials are interwoven with collaborations involving numerous guest artists, while encounters with neighbors and surrounding communities expand the work outward.
Rather than presenting an isolated artistic statement, the exhibition unfolds as an ongoing process of building relationships.
Visitors may carry one of 208 baby dolls while moving through the pavilion.
However, they cannot choose which doll they receive.
Nor are they obliged to accept one at all.
This simple gesture transforms participation into an ethical decision rather than a symbolic one.
The exhibition has been realized through an extensive network of collaboration involving two Japan-based curators working across Asia—Mizuki Takahashi and Risa Horikawa—alongside the artist’s mother and numerous other collaborators.
Several projects continue to evolve throughout the Biennale itself.
Yet this practice also acknowledges its own contradictions.
Building a family inevitably places burdens upon others and carries the possibility of causing harm.
A family, the exhibition suggests, is never simply given.
It comes into being through difficult choices, compromises, and the costs they entail.
Beyond the Pavilions
The article then turns away from the official national pavilions toward exhibitions occurring elsewhere in Venice, arguing that some of the Biennale’s most compelling artistic and political statements are now emerging outside its institutional framework.
Elegy
The South African Pavilion ultimately withdrew after political intervention by the country’s government over the content of its proposed exhibition.
Artist Gabrielle Goliath therefore found herself excluded from the official Biennale.
Rather than disappearing, however, her project found new life within a Venetian church and throughout the city’s public spaces.
Titled Elegy, the project responds to histories of imperialism, colonialism, and patriarchal violence.
Developed over more than a decade across multiple countries, the work consists of ritualized performances of mourning.
Inside the Church of Sant’Antonin, eight monolithic video structures display three interconnected performances.
Groups of performers breathe together and sing together.
The work transforms mourning into a shared ritual in which collective voices gradually fill the architectural space.
Visitors receive a booklet containing texts for reading aloud, including the poem “I Grant You Refuge” by the Palestinian poet Heba Abu Nada, who was killed in Gaza.
Even amid overwhelming violence, the poem offers shelter to another human being.
During the performances, these words echoed through the streets of Venice in the voices of those who participated.
Co-travellers
At Palazzo Grassi, the Pinault Collection presents a major solo exhibition by Indian filmmaker Amar Kanwar.
The exhibition consists of two multi-screen works:
- The Torn First Pages (2004–08)
- The Peacock’s Graveyard (2023)
Both works combine moving image and text across multiple screens.
The Torn First Pages draws upon the history of Myanmar’s democracy movement and military censorship.
Beginning with the seemingly simple act of tearing out the opening pages of books, Kanwar constructs a meditation on missing archives, erased histories, and acts of resistance.
Although grounded in historical documents and testimony, the films never function as straightforward documentary records.
Instead, stories emerge only to disappear again, unfolding as fragments, parables, and memories.
For Kanwar, these narratives are not merely expressions of grief.
They become intellectual devices through which political solidarity itself can be imagined and carried across borders.
In The Peacock’s Graveyard, peacocks appear as guardians of the dead.
As text and sound accumulate, individual lives become connected with actual places and historical events.
Canicula
The exhibition Canicula, organized by the In Between Art Film Foundation, presents eight newly commissioned video installations across a former hospital and church complex.
The Latin title refers to the “dog days”—the hottest period of the year—and serves as a metaphor for contemporary conditions marked by excessive heat, overwhelming information, perceptual instability, and political pressure.
Among the strongest works is Maya Watanabe’s Jarkov (2026).
Born in Peru and shaped by the country’s civil conflict, Watanabe has long investigated mass graves and bodies suspended between life and death.
In Jarkov, she films an extraordinarily close view of a frozen mammoth.
The extreme magnification renders the animal almost abstract.
Rather than depicting death directly, the work reveals its residue—an absence preserved within matter itself.
Time expands beyond human history into geological time.
The work suggests that what remains unseen may endure far longer than visible political events.
Where Is the “Iran Pavilion”?
On the afternoon of 8 May, during the Biennale’s preview days, a newsletter unexpectedly arrived bearing the logo of the Iran Pavilion.
Like the previous Biennale—when Iran had been scheduled to participate but never opened, at least during the preview period—it had generally been assumed that there would once again be no Iranian pavilion.
Yet this newsletter announced otherwise.
It described an exhibition entitled Hulul: On Incarnation and Incantation, stating that an opening party had been held the previous evening (7 May). It listed the names of two curators, exhibition dates, and a Venetian address.
Curious, I checked the accompanying website and Instagram account.
The images were strangely underwhelming.
They showed what appeared to be a rather anonymous building, hardly recognizable as Venice, alongside photographs of a party complete with a DJ booth and a cake decorated with national flags.
Since the address matched that of the previous Iranian Pavilion, I went there myself.
Nothing was there.
No exhibition.
No pavilion.
No sign of any activity.
When I asked Biennale officials and people connected with the event, everyone confirmed the same thing:
The official Iranian Pavilion did not exist.
No one had heard of the exhibition titled Hulul.
I then contacted the organization that had distributed the newsletter—a Finland-based non-profit arts collective called Perpetuum Mobilε.
Their reply revealed the truth.
The project was entirely unofficial.
It belonged to what they called the Hyperstitional Pavilion of Iran.
The pavilion, the architecture, and even many of the reported events were deliberate fictions designed to resemble reality.
Then another detail emerged.
Searching for the names of the exhibition’s supposed curators, I discovered that one belonged to a young person who had been killed by the current Iranian regime only a few months earlier, in January.
The fiction had concealed a very real political absence.
The organizers explained that actual Iranian artists and curators were indeed involved in the project.
However, many participated anonymously, fearing retaliation from the Iranian government.
The project therefore deliberately blurred the boundary between fiction and reality.
This strategy, the author argues, mirrors the way states themselves often manufacture legitimacy through institutional forms and legal procedures.
The Hyperstitional Pavilion was not simply a prank.
Nor was it merely an artistic intervention.
Rather, it forms part of a continuing alternative public sphere known as the Tehran Summit, initiated in 2022 as an ongoing platform for discussion and dialogue outside the structures of the Iranian state.
Between the pavilion’s simultaneous existence and nonexistence, the project destabilizes the conditions through which institutions normally make themselves visible.
Instead, it opens new ways of thinking that cannot easily be captured by the state.
In Closing
Throughout this Biennale, national pavilions continue to open and close according to the decisions of states or state-like institutions.
Although artists may shape what is exhibited, their work is constantly vulnerable to political pressures, whether from within or outside those institutions.
At times, pavilions even foreground the human rights of individual artists while remaining silent about the political systems that determine their participation.
The essay returns to the metaphor of the home.
Like the family explored in the Japanese Pavilion, the home is also a closed system.
It can contain violence as readily as care.
Yet outside its boundaries, other forms of practice emerge—embodied through memory, physical presence, traces, and acts of remembrance.
At the same time, the institutional framework of the pavilion itself is beginning to lose its stability.
It now fluctuates between visibility and invisibility—between what can appear publicly and what must remain hidden in order simply to survive.