Chosen by their respective countries, the artists showing at the Venice Biennale’s national pavilions will address urgent questions on a global stage.
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his year, 99 national participations and 31 collateral events make for an expansive Venice Biennale. Spread across the Giardini, Arsenale and a number of venues throughout the city, the national pavilions confer artistic visibility in a striking survey of international contemporary art. Some countries, like Qatar, are participating for the first time; others return for their second biennale, or after long hiatuses. What they share is the opportunity to speak through their work, and, if they choose, address the theme “In Minor Keys,” which takes its cue from music and asks for moments of intimacy and reflection rather than spectacle and bombast. Ahead, our list of national presentations and artists on our radars — and in our calendars — for the biennale opening week in May.
The British painter and cultural activist Lubaina Himid made history as the first Black woman to win the Turner Prize in 2017. Her solo project for the British Pavilion, titled “Predicting History: Testing Translation,” explores the complex and emotional terrain of belonging — the process of establishing home in unfamiliar surroundings — often shaped by uncertainty, discovery, learning and acceptance. Commissioned by the British Council and curated by Ese Onojeruo, the new series of large, multi-panelled paintings presents surreal, almost magical settings rendered in the artist’s signature saturated color. Shown with an immersive soundscape by the artist Magda Stawarska, the installation introduces dissonant tones that create a subtle but persistent sense of tension. The exhibition responds directly to the neoclassical architecture of the British Pavilion itself, reframing the space as one of openness while also unsettling any notion of Britain as a site of uncomplicated refuge.
Aotearoa New Zealand
Fiona Pardington’s “Taharaki Skyside, KākāKura,”2025, and “Taharaki Skyside, Takahē,” 2025.
“Taharaki Skyside” Instituto Santa Maria della Pietà
Of Māori and Scottish descent, photographer Fiona Pardington presents “Taharaki Skyside,” a series of large-scale portraits of taxidermied native birds from Aotearoa New Zealand and the Southern Ocean. Drawn from museum archives — a practice Pardington has used for more than 20 years — the birds are photographed up close on dark, atmospheric backgrounds, each revealing their magnificent plumage and sense of personality. Birds, or manu, hold deep spiritual significance to the Māori as sacred messengers between the human and divine worlds. In resurrecting these dead and many now-extinct subjects, Pardington interrogates colonial histories of ecological loss, suppression of Indigenous culture and museological display.
Scotland
Davide Bugarin, Angel Cohn Castle and Morven Gregor at Mount Stuart. Photo by Charlotte Cullen, courtesy Scotland + Venice
“Shame Parade” Olivolo
Glasgow-based artists and performers, the duo Bugarin + Castle (Davide Bugarin and Angel Cohn Castle) first met in the queer cabaret scene in Edinburgh, where they developed their drag alter egos “Hairy Teddy Bear” and “Pollyfilla.” They will represent Scotland, which last showed at the biennale in 2022, with “Shame Parade,” curated by Morven Gregor of the Mount Stuart Trust. “Shame Parade” explores sound, shame and voice through the complexities of centuries-old shaming rituals once used to discipline social transgressors like prostitutes, cuckolds and sodomizers. The assemblage of performance, sculpture, architecture and moving image crosses time periods and geographic locations, from Scottish castles to Filipino cemeteries, to explore the complex and contradictory histories — not to repress shame — but reimagine it through a contemporary queer and trans lens. Bugarin + Castle’s interdisciplinary works have often explored histories of performance, queerness, colonization and gentrification, shown at venues including Fruitmarket and Tate Modern. “Shame Parade", their most ambitious work to date, will go on view at Mount Stuart on Bute in the summer of 2027 before travelling to venues in Scotland and the UK, supported by Art Fund.
India
Sumakshi Singh uses thread to make ethereal architectural works. Photo by Tanya Singh
“Geographies of Distance: remembering home.” Arsenale
Not since 2019 has India presented a national pavilion at the Venice Biennale — then only the second showing in history — and this year it returns with five artists sharing the privilege in “Geographies of Distance: remembering home.” Alwar Balasubramaniam (Bala), Sumakshi Singh, Ranjani Shettar, Asim Waqif and Skarma Sonam Tashi together with curator Amin Jaffer reflect a contemporary India. Hailing from different regions and working across varied media, they each address the idea of home — conceived less as a fixed place than as a portable condition, especially in light of their rapidly changing country. All the artists work using organic materials traditional to India, for example Singh, a New Delhi-based artist who crafts embroidered threads into ethereal works; in Venice this will take the form of the Delhi house built by her grandparents, since demolished. Tashi’s installation “Echoes of Home” is grounded in the traditional building materials of his home of Ladakh, a Kashmir region of India, recreating fragments of its distinctive architecture using recycled cardboard, discarded books and other materials drawn from everyday life.
Saudi Arabia
Hafsa Alkhudairi, Dana Awartani and Antonia Carver in Venice, 2025. Photo by Alvise Busetto, Courtesy of Ministry of Culture
“May your tears never dry, you who weep over stones” Arsenale
The Palestinian-Saudi artist Dana Awartani will represent Saudi Arabia with May your tears never dry, you who weep over stones, curated by Antonia Carver, director of Art Jameel, alongside Assistant Curator Hafsa Alkhudairi. Awartani’s practice is rooted in the culture and craft traditions of the Middle East — many of which she has studied and practiced — and addresses themes of repair, geometry, ancestry and material heritage. After attending Central Saint Martins in London, Awartani studied traditional arts before training in manuscript illumination in Turkey, where she attained an ijaza — a license to transmit religious knowledge. Her works seek to bring these traditions out of history and into the present, and she often positions handmade practices as both cultural preservation and a form of resistance — drawing on craft’s long history as part of political and social movements. The Saudi pavilion is organised by the Visual Arts Commission, part of Saudi’s Ministry of Culture, and marks the country’ fourth participation in its permanent space in the Arsenale.
United Arab Emirates
Alaa Edris is one of the artists representing the UAE. Photo courtesy of the artist
“Washwasha” Arsenale
“Washwasha,” the Arabic word for “whispering,” is the starting point for the United Arab Emirate’s group exhibition featuring six artists: Mays Albaik, Jawad Al Malhi, Farah Al Qasimi, Alaa Edris, Lamya Gargash and Taus Makhacheva. Their works engage with soundscapes of a country shaped by migration and rapid transformation, contrasting early sound practices with contemporary counterparts. Across the exhibition, sound becomes a means to explore themes of movement, technology, oral histories and the relationship between language, body and identity. Curated by Bana Kattan, curator and associate head of exhibitions at the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Project, alongside Assistant Curator Tala Nassar, the pavilion unfolds as a sequence of chambers that move from zones of close listening to spaces consumed by noise. “Washwasha” is commissioned by the Salama bint Hamdan Al Nahyan Foundation and supported by the UAE Ministry of Culture.
Li Yi-Fan. Courtesy of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum 2026 Venice Biennale Taiwan Pavilion
“Screen Melancholy: Li Yi-Fan” Palazzo delle Prigioni
Taipei-born artist Li Yi-Fan will represent Taiwan in an official collateral event curated by Raphael Fonseca, curator and head of modern and contemporary Latin American art at the Denver Art Museum. Working with game engines since 2021, Li employs real-time rendering and improvisation in his works, often using dark humor to probe the uneasy relationship between technology and people in our internet age. “Screen Melancholy: Li Yi-Fan,” his third work in this mode, presents a video work staged within a simulation of the Palazzo delle Prigioni — the very building where it is shown — in an act of meta-doubling: the real made virtual, the virtual projected back into the real. Li’s interest in puppetry, control, movement and the human body forms the basis of a work that invites viewers to follow a mischievous character through a tutorial-inflected narrative, tracing the story of an eyeball trying to find its way home. Three-dimensional printed sculptures in the exhibition space will echo dismembered body parts of the digital performers and double as seating, dissolving the boundaries between “real” and “virtual.”
“In Another Man’s Yard: John Beadle, Lavar Munroe, and the Spirit of (Posthumous) Collaboration” San Trovaso Art Space
Returning to the biennale for only the second time, The Bahamas will display works by the late John Beadle together with artist Lavar Munroe in a presentation curated by the art historian Krista Thompson. The posthumous, intergenerational dialogue will showcase both artists‘ use of unconventional materials and Bahamian cultural influences, while addressing themes of transformation, resilience and the politics of visibility. Beadle, who died in 2024, was a multidisciplinary artist and mentor central to the contemporary art scene on the island. In 2015, he was chosen to represent the country in what would have been its second attendance, but funding fell through; his inclusion now honors that unrealized opportunity. Beadle’s works, often built using found objects — salvaged cardboard, tarp and wood — drew inspiration from Junkanoo, the national processional festival, and addressed the history of colonialism, migration, precarity and overlooked labor. Munroe's practice is equally shaped by this tradition: his large-scale sculptural installations mix painting with discarded materials, informed by his travels and cultural research across the African diaspora. For Venice, he will present monumental sculptures made from strips of discarded Junkanoo costumes, as well as a series of paintings made in tribute to Beadle, which depict a memorial procession — another tie to the Junkanoo community, whose traditions honor the dead through collective processions and performance.
Denmark
Curator Chus Martínez and artist Maja Malou Lyse
“Things to Come” Giardini
At the Danish pavilion, Maja Malou Lyse makes history as the youngest artist to represent the country. Her exhibition “Things To Come,” curated by Chus Martínez, takes its title from the 1936 science-fiction film adapted from H.G. Wells’ “The Shape of Things to Come” — a work that speculated on future technology and the fate of humanity. Like this source material, Lyse’s project turns toward the future, specifically through recent scientific research suggesting that exposure to virtual sexual stimuli can increase sperm motility — a striking instance of digital imagery directly influencing biology. The large-scale video installation mixes erotic imagery, scientific rationality and speculative narrative into what the artist describes as a “conceptual pornographic fairytale," starring Nicolette Shea and other well-known performers from the adult film industry. Set against a documented global decline in male fertility, the work expands into larger questions about technology, power and the role of erotic imagery amid a wider period of civilizational anxiety and collapse.
“untitled 2026 (a gathering of remarkable people); Rirkrit Tiravanija, Sophia Al-Maria, Tarek Atoui, Alia Farid, Fadi Kattan” Giardini
The Thai contemporary artist Rirkrit Tiravanija is known for participatory installations that center community and exchange, like his landmark “Untitled (Free),” which served green curry and rice at 303 Gallery in New York. In Venice he has designed a tent-like structure on the site of the future permanent Qatar Pavilion, the first nation in 30 years building one. Inside, visitors can gather together for a diverse range of cultural offerings co-curated by Tom Eccles and Ruba Katrib, including a film by Qatari-American artist Sophia Al-Maria, live performances organized by Lebanese artist Tarek Atoui, a large-scale sculpture by Kuwaiti-Puerto Rican artist Alia Farid and a culinary programme of Middle Eastern cuisine designed by Palestinian chef Fadi Kattan.
Macao
“Jacone’s Polyphony” Campo della Tana
In the early Qing dynasty, the great Chinese literati painter, poet and calligrapher Wu Li studied theology in Macao before entering the Jesuit order and becoming a Catholic priest. Known in Portuguese as Jacone, his story becomes the point of departure for “Jacone’s Polyphony,” the collaborative presentation for Macao by Eric Fok Hoi Seng, O Chi Wai and Veronica Lei Fong Ieng, curated by Feng Yan and Cindy Ng Sio Ieng. Addressing past and present, East and West, faith and artistic practice, the project unfolds as a “polyphony” — emphasizing a cross-cultural understanding and Macao’s unique position as a site of exchange between China and the West. Eric Fok Hoi Seng is known for intricate and highly detailed drawings and paintings inspired by ancient maps; O Chi Wai works across video, image and installation to explore conceptions of space and the movement of belief systems; and Veronica Lei Fung Ieng employs color, form and texture to evoke memory and site.
