The Best National Pavilions at the 2026 Venice Biennale
This Venice Biennale has been tainted by politics both before and during its opening, exposing the contradictions and complications embedded within its nationalist structure. While the national pavilions often reveal the socioeconomic, political and even psychological condition of a country—from the tensions surrounding Israel/Palestine and the Venezuelan Pavilion, left empty and awaiting rebirth, to the police stationed outside the Russian Pavilion after the Pussy Riot protest, or the monumental yet conceptually hollow presentation of the U.S. Pavilion—some of the strongest national presentations this year instead turned toward forms of mnemonic and spiritual awakening rooted in shared histories and collective consciousness. Embracing lower frequencies to rediscover what we still hold in common.
Across many of the most compelling pavilions, the sea and maritime histories of exchange, migration and conflict emerge as symbolic and metaphorical anchors, alongside broader forms of geographical and ecological attunement. Together, the best pavilions foreground narratives of human and non-human interdependence, where harmony arises not through equilibrium or separation but through the dynamic, vital interplay of diverse forces.
The Peruvian Pavilion, “From Other Worlds”
The Peruvian Pavilion by Sara Flores creates a space of spiritual, sensory and collective reattunement grounded in the ancient knowledge of the Shipibo-Konibo people. Through the intricate visual charting of micro- and macrocosmic connections of the traditional language of kené—labyrinthine networks of lines and geometries traditionally transmitted across generations of Shipibo women—Flores constructs immersive cosmological fields that collapse distinctions between the earthly and the celestial, the visible and the invisible, the human and the non-human. Emerging through dreams, plants, ritual knowledge and altered states of perception, these patterns operate simultaneously as language, medicine and cosmological mapping systems, channeling forces that connect individual existence to larger energetic and ecological structures. Rather than treating tradition as a fixed inheritance, Flores approaches kené as a living, continuously evolving vocabulary open to recombination, reinvention and future projection. The pavilion positions artistic practice as necessarily collective, part of an intergenerational continuum rooted in reciprocity, kinship and care. At a moment marked by ecological crisis, cultural fragmentation and social alienation, Flores’s work proposes another model of coexistence and symbiosis in which healing, memory and sustainability are inseparable. Marking the first time an Indigenous artist has represented Peru in Venice, the pavilion signals a broader recognition of Indigenous cultures as living systems of knowledge that have long articulated alternative relationships between humans, nature and the cosmos.
The Icelandic Pavilion, “Pocket Universe”
The Icelandic Pavilion unfolds as a fluid exercise in mythmaking and imagination, where storytelling emerges through a sequence of gestures, whispering presences and sensory associations dispersed across the space. Ásta Fanney constructs the pavilion as what she calls an “invisible performance” in constant transformation—a threshold where this ludic storytelling exercise can be revived, reactivating elemental archetypes that intermingle to generate alternative ways of perceiving reality. Rather than imposing fixed meanings, the exhibition activates imagination itself as a shared and generative force, capable of expanding outward into multiple speculative worlds. Through recurring motifs of portals, spheres, caves, oceans and the enigmatic Creature Zero, “Pocket Universe” hints at the existence of a collective subconscious rooted in intuition, ritual and primal memory, which, operating on a pre-linguistic level, can exceed and surpass language barriers to become a catalyst for shared emotional and metaphysical landscapes. In this state of perpetual flux, embracing water as an inherent metamorphic element, the pavilion proposes optimism and wonder not as escapism but as ontological tools for reconnecting fragmented realities through shared acts of imagination.
The Philippines Pavilion, “Sea of Love / Dagat ng Pag-ibig.”
The Philippine Pavilion, “Sea of Love / Dagat ng Pag-ibig,” a multimedia opera by Jon Cuyson, presents the sea as a fluid and immersive space of memory, migration, labor and human connection. Through Cuyson’s fragmented orchestration of paintings, films, sculptures and sound, the pavilion foregrounds the often invisible Filipino seafarer—whose labor has sustained global maritime trade for centuries—as both a historical force and an intimate emotional figure shaped by longing, sacrifice and displacement. Rather than approaching maritime history solely through geopolitics or colonial trade routes, the project considers submerged histories, diasporic identities and fragile forms of kinship forged across distance. Structured through overlapping perspectives—that of the sailor, his trans lover, his shamanic mother and the sea itself as a sentient presence—the installation unfolds through accumulation, relation and “minor frequencies” rather than linear narrative, inviting viewers to navigate fragmented emotional and historical currents much like drifting through an archipelago. Queer desire, historical spirituality and maritime labor continuously intersect within a sensory environment where films, paintings and sculptural elements operate less as fixed representations than as shifting relational constellations. Drawing on what curator Mara Gladstone describes as “archipelagic thinking,” the pavilion proposes the ocean not as a space of separation or danger but as a connective and living body through which communities, memories and alternative forms of belonging continue to circulate beyond the rigid divisions embedded within national borders and the Biennale’s own geopolitical structure.
The Irish Pavilion, “Dreamshook”
In the Irish Pavilion, artist Isabel Nolan has staged a fascinating visual meditation on the systems of belief and collective imaginaries that continue to shape human consciousness across time. Drawing on medieval cosmologies, Renaissance humanism, dreams, myths and religious iconography, Nolan presents a sequence of tapestries, sculptures and drawings that operate as fragments emerging from a shared subconscious. The presentation is anchored around the figure of Venetian printer and humanist Aldo Manuzio, whose revolutionary pocket-sized books helped reshape the circulation of knowledge during the early Renaissance, as the artist retraces a historical moment when technological, cultural and ideological upheavals radically altered the very notion of the human. These luminous, mandala-like entanglements emerge in continuous, fertile cultural dialogue with the history of art, Christian iconography and paganism alike, in a fabulation that blends these elements through drifting forms and dream states. Moving fluidly between the intimate and the monumental, the tapestries reveal how symbols, desires and systems of knowledge persist beneath historical crises, resurfacing across generations in moments of uncertainty and transformation, from the Middle Ages to today. Resonating strongly with the contemporary condition, the pavilion suggests that myth, imagination and dreams are never detached from political and social realities, but remain fundamental mechanisms through which humans seek meaning, orientation and connection amid instability and accelerating historical change.
The Uzbekistan Pavilion, “The Aural Sea”
The Uzbekistan Pavilion also turned to myth, imagination, oral storytelling and elemental memory as ways of confronting collective trauma and era-defining ecological shifts. The exhibition brings together newly commissioned and recent works by local and international artists, including Jahongir Bobokulov (Uzbekistan), Zi Kakhramonova (Uzbekistan), Aygul Sarsen (Karakalpakstan, Uzbekistan), Zulfiya Spowart (Uzbekistan), Xin Liu (China), A.A. Murakami (U.K. and Japan) and Nguyen Phuong Linh (Vietnam), creating an engaging dialogue between East and West. At the center is the disappearance of the Aral Sea and the alternative histories and futures the vanished sea has inspired: the exhibition approaches the environmental catastrophe through a series of speculative narratives told from the perspectives of sand, salt, water and spirits. In doing so, the pavilion becomes a site of living knowledge shaped by generations who have witnessed its transformation, where speculative mythology and fiction already constitute alternative systems of knowledge capable of carrying emotional and ecological memory beyond the limits of political discourse. Through immersive sound, sensory environments and fragmented narratives across a sprawling multimedia choreography, “The Aural Sea” evokes landscapes that continue to exist culturally and spiritually even after their physical disappearance, embedded in collective memory and shared imagination. Take, for instance, Xin Liu’s The Permanent and the Insatiable: Born to Sea (2026), in which hand-woven post-consumer plastic submerged in tanks containing an enzymatic solution shows both industrial and organic matter in transformation, melting and blending toward a new unstable symbiosis. Activated by heat, the reaction gradually breaks down the material over the course of the Biennale, revealing the chemical and alchemical substructure of the materials as much as of the process itself: the skeleton of a disappeared organism that exposes the afterlives of materials and infrastructures left in the wake of the vanished sea. Taking center stage in the room is Zi Kakhramonova’s Archive of Lost Forms (2026), a participatory salt-based installation in which viewers physically recreate lost marine life through touch and play. Hanging nearby is A.A. Murakami’s large-scale tapestry The Sun Sets in a Shell (2026), which captures environmental transformation through the coded patterns of zebra mussels, a species native to the Aral Sea, explores how nature transforms disorder into new harmonious patterns through a principle of entropy.
The Brazilian Pavilion, “Comigo ninguém pode”
The Brazilian Pavilion is a dense ecology of ancestral symbolism and postcolonial repair, bringing together for the first time the mutually resonating practices of Rosana Paulino and Adriana Varejão under the curatorship of Diane Lima. Taking its title from the toxic and protective plant commonly placed at the entrances of Brazilian homes, the exhibition approaches nature not as passive landscape but as a living repository of spiritual, historical and material knowledge capable of confronting colonial trauma and envisioning forms of continuity. Across paintings, sculptures, drawings and installation-based interventions conceived in direct dialogue with the pavilion’s modernist architecture, the exhibition dissolves linear understandings of history, weaving together colonial wounds, Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous cosmologies, bodily memory and botanical imagery into a shifting ecosystem of metamorphosis and resistance. The visceral reality of flesh and blood blends with plants’ roots, organic relics, flourishing branches and celestial presences, suggesting processes of healing that are simultaneously human, ecological and spiritual. In this rich choreography, Paulino’s work centers the Black female body as a site of transmission, suturing and continuity, while Varejão’s sculptural practice transforms the architecture itself into a porous surface where colonial violence, organic matter and symbolic reconstruction remain in constant tension. Rather than simply revisiting Brazil’s colonial past, the pavilion proposes a broader process of re-enchantment and repair, as lineal forms of knowledge and community become tools for imagining coexistence beyond extractive and colonial logics.
The Timor-Leste Pavilion, “Across Words”
The Timor-Leste Pavilion presents language as a living system of transmission, as weaving, sound and oral memory become interconnected codes of communication across generations. Located between Australia and Indonesia, Timor-Leste is Southeast Asia’s youngest nation and a recent member of ASEAN. After more than 400 years of Portuguese colonization and a subsequent 24-year Indonesian occupation beginning in 1975, it gained independence only in May 2002. For centuries, the nation’s heritage was carried by more than 30 distinct local languages, and only within the last three decades has Tetum Prasa transformed from an oral trade language into a formalized register for government, education and literature—one still anchored in kinship and territoriality as fundamental pillars of social organization, as curator Loredana Pazzini Paracciani notes. At the center of the pavilion stands Verónica Pereira Maia’s Tais Don, a handwoven textile work that transforms the traditional Timorese tais into both archive and testimony, inscribing the names of the victims of the Santa Cruz massacre directly into its woven surface. Here, weaving operates not simply as craft but as a mnemonic shared language and a site of mending and repair, an embodied form of writing through which histories, kinship structures and shared grief are preserved and transmitted. Oral storytelling and sonic traditions are equally central to the pavilion, with its layered polyphony of lullabies, voices and audiovisual installations serving as a living archive of Timor-Leste’s diverse idioms and oral traditions, suggesting how identity emerges not through a singular unified language but through the coexistence of multiple forms of expression.
The Indian Pavilion, “Geographies of Distance: Remembering Home”
Marking India’s return to the Venice Biennale after several editions, the country’s pavilion stages a collective reflection on home, belonging and memory within an increasingly fluid, rapidly transforming world. Pairing ambitious architectural constructions with the fragility of embroidery, flowers, bamboo, thread and handmade organic materials, the pavilion forms what feels like a village of interconnected histories and emotional traces. Rather than treating home as a fixed geography, the exhibition approaches it as something portable and continually reconstructed—a communal act sustained through ritual, material memory and care between humans and their environment, in dialogue with the landscape and its resources as an embodiment of community knowledge. Evoking domestic space, the works range from the delicate embroidered structures by Skarma Sonam Tashi to the precarious, temple-like wood assembly by Asim Wasif, gestures of coexistence with monumental structures that mirror the tension between permanence and disappearance defining contemporary experiences of migration, urban transformation and displacement. Through shared material vocabularies rooted in India’s artisanal traditions, the pavilion proposes a communal landscape where personal histories intertwine into a broader consciousness, revealing how memory, craftsmanship and acts of making become ways of sustaining an empathic connection with place even amid constant change and a disrupted sense of national identity and belonging.
The Italian Pavilion, “Con te con tutto”
The Italian Pavilion by Chiara Camoni is a fragile-feeling yet deeply embodied sculptural ecosystem, where clay, ritual and domestic gestures merge into an evolving landscape of tactile spirituality. Emerging from the semi-darkness like a reassuring assembly, Camoni’s totemic matriarchal figures are simultaneously archaic and intimate: gentle deities shaped through sedimentations of clay, organic matter, traditional memory and ritual labor. Antimonumental and maternal, her figures evoke forms of communal resilience grounded in care, reciprocity and transformation. Across the pavilion, domesticity becomes inseparable from archaeology, as her installations gather domestic fragments and nature-inspired forms into an earthy landscape that oscillates between indoor and outdoor space, intimate and public, nature and civilization—a living oscillation in which bodies, materials and temporalities continuously contaminate and reshape one another. Centered on the word “con,” or “with,” the pavilion proposes an alternative social imagination that moves from memory to craft traditions through touch and sharing. Part home, part sanctuary, part gathering space, the Italian Pavilion foregrounds a feminine dimension of fragility and gentle care in which interconnectedness emerge as tools for social evolution and transformation.
The Hong Kong Pavilion, “Fermata: Hong Kong in Venice”
Evoking the overlooked cyclical rhythms, pauses and temporalities of everyday urban existence in Hong Kong, “Fermata: Hong Kong in Venice” turns the pavilion into a suspended environment, a poetic landscape where past, present and future converge. Through site-specific installations by Kingsley Ng and Angel Hui, the pavilion constructs a subtle choreography of light, sound and movement rooted in the sensory experience and memory of Hong Kong. Ng transforms ordinary urban rituals and fleeting encounters into meditative situations that invite visitors to slow down and inhabit the emotional texture of passing moments, while Hui redirects attention toward neglected objects, minor gestures and peripheral forms of life that quietly sustain the city’s invisible pulse. Borrowing its title from the musical notation indicating a prolongation determined by the performer, the exhibition approaches daily life itself as a shifting composition of interruptions, repetitions and moments of attentiveness unfolding against the accelerated pace of contemporary cities. Resonating with the broader Biennale theme “In Minor Keys” and with the aquatic dimension shared by both Hong Kong and Venice, the pavilion presents slowness, listening and heightened attentiveness as forms of resistance against contemporary regimes of speed, distraction and overstimulation, revealing how the smallest and most ephemeral dimensions of daily life can become the fertile pretext for intimacy, care and shared forms of perception.
The Korean Pavilion, “Liberation Space: Fortress/Nest”
The Korean Pavilion is an exercise in collective thinking, as Seoul-based Goen Choi and New York-based Hyeree Ro worked to combine their divergent sculptural practices into a shared choreography that transforms the pavilion into a “living, breathing monument,” as curator Binna Choi describes it. At the center is the notion of national identity and nation-building as a shared, continuous effort, shaped through negotiation and compromise—and a necessarily “unfinished project,” as liberation is always still being realized and exercised. Referencing the fraught three-year period between Korea’s liberation from Japanese colonial rule in 1945 and the country’s division in 1948, the exhibition approaches nationhood not as a fixed historical achievement but as a continuous and unfinished process of negotiation, rupture, compromise and renewal.
Rather than simply staging works within the pavilion, the exhibition transforms the building into a dynamic choreography oscillating between the opposing yet complementary conditions suggested by the subtitle “Fortress/Nest.” Goen Choi extends her long-standing manipulation of infrastructural materials, intervening in the architecture by using copper pipes in an acupuncture-like operation performed directly on the pavilion’s body. Thin metal structures pierce, traverse and rupture the architecture with the ambiguity of needles, spears, branches or beams of light, exposing the building itself as an ideological apparatus continually “shaking, shifting, and reorganizing,” as the artist explains. By liberating the architecture from its apparent structural stability, Choi reveals nation-building as a condition of permanent tension and reorientation. Meanwhile, Hyeree Ro constructs an intimate counter-space of care, endurance and collectivism. Her installation, Bearing, forms what the artist describes as a “pavilion within the pavilion,” an environment composed of roughly translucent organza circles coated in wax and layered like fish scales or lotus leaves with a delicate, almost membrane-like materiality, yet acquires resilience through accumulation into a collective body. Her installations of metal and clay parts invite visitors to move slowly through a sequence of stations devoted to mourning, remembering, waiting, sharing and repair: sanctuaries and infrastructures for meditation and healing that suggest how liberation is sustained not through singular heroic acts but through forms of mutual support and continuous adjustment.
The Polish Pavilion, “Liquid Tongues”
At the Polish Pavilion, “Liquid Tongues” transforms the space into a plurisensory environment that unsettles the conventional hierarchies through which humans organize perception, communication and reality itself. Conceived by deaf artist Daniel Kotowski together with artist and playwright Bogna Burska around the concept of “Deaf Gain,” the pavilion reframes deafness not as absence or deficit but as an alternative sensory structure capable of generating other forms of attention, empathy and shared resonance. Bringing together underwater choreography, whale vocalizations, sign language and acoustic frequencies, the installation proposes a fluid communicative system that moves across species and between visible and invisible forms of perception. In water, established communicative hierarchies collapse: while spoken language dissolves underwater, gesture, vibration and spatial awareness intensify, opening a space where sign language acquires expanded expressive power. Through the movements of a choir composed of hearing and Deaf performers, inspired by schools of fish and cetacean communication, the pavilion imagines language less as a fixed rational code than as an embodied and relational process built through rhythm, movement and attunement. At a moment when hyperconnectivity increasingly coexists with alienation and communicative overload, the Polish Pavilion proposes a radically different model of coexistence—based on heightened attentiveness to difference and interdependence—by exposing the multiplicity of ways humans and non-humans perceive and inhabit the world.
The Romanian Pavilion, “Black Seas – Scores for the Sonic Eye”
The Romanian Pavilion immerses visitors in a multisensory, polyphonic environment where the turbulence of the Black Sea becomes both a material condition and a geopolitical metaphor, suggesting alternative ways to feel and interpret the world. Conceived by Anca Benera and Arnold Estefan through moving images, sound, sculpture and scientific instruments, the project approaches the sea as shaped by ecological collapse, extractive violence and unresolved historical conflict. At its core is the notion of the “sonic eye.” In underwater environments, sound replaces vision as the primary tool for orientation and measurement. Drawing on sonar technologies, the artists transform oceanographic data into a multi-channel sound environment registering the Black Sea’s turbulence, where wave dynamics are entangled with naval blockades, energy infrastructures and geopolitical tensions.
Central to the pavilion is a two-channel video installation titled How to Mend a Broken Sea? (2024-ongoing), which draws on Romanian spectral music and ecofeminist approaches to listening, translating waves into sound, vibration and resonance. Floating buoys gathered from the Mediterranean, Atlantic, Baltic and Black Sea appear throughout the installation as sculptural sound instruments, transformed from scientific measuring devices into resonant bodies bearing the traces of storms, erosion and environmental stress. At the entrance, maritime signal flags evoke fragmented ecological disasters across the Black Sea region, transforming coded communication into abstract wounds marking a contested territory shaped by blocked routes, environmental degradation and geopolitical tension. Anchored by a geological core extracted from the Black Sea’s anoxic depths, the project stages the sea itself as a fractured body through which questions of coexistence, repair and survival continue to reverberate.
More from the Venice Biennale
