If you have mistaken the Venice Biennale for some waterside arty party, let us disabuse you: It takes real effort to see the world’s most significant exhibition of contemporary art.
A big group exhibition is not even the half of it; almost 100 nations mount their own exhibitions of new painting, sculpture, video and performance. Some nations give the honor of showing at Venice to museum-approved names (Lubaina Himid for Britain, Yto Barrada for France). Others go for total unknowns, and some favor group shows by two, three or even 10 artists from home and abroad.
As for the United States pavilion, an irregular selection process last year — in a country without a culture ministry, this is a rare case where the federal government has a direct hand in art — ended with the selection of the sculptor Alma Allen.
The bulk of the national pavilions can be found at the Biennale’s two main sites in Venice’s east: the Napoleonic-era pleasure gardens called the Giardini della Biennale, and the much older Arsenale, the Venetian republic’s former naval yard. Dozens more, from newcomers like Somalia and Vietnam, as well as from not-quite-full participants such as Scotland and Catalonia, are scattered in temporary venues all across the floating city.
It takes aesthetic discernment and physical endurance to make it through, and you should never wear that cute new pair of leather shoes when you’re on Biennale duty. I made that error once, not twice.
A panel of curators and scholars bestows an award on the best national presentation — or at least they did until this year. Just before opening day, the Biennale jury resigned en masse amid public tension over whether countries involved in wars, such as Israel and Russia, should be considered for the prizes. The organizers responded by promising a Eurovision-style “people’s vote” for this year’s awards, but that will probably not settle any debates.
My colleagues and I have spent the Biennale’s preview week sprinting around the lagoon to see art in big museums and small churches, canalside palazzi and humble storehouses. And we’ve been talking to people, too. Here are the national pavilions that are on everybody’s lips. — JASON FARAGO
There are always buzzy pavilions at the Biennale. But there’s rarely buzz like what Austria’s is generating this year.
People have waited in line for over two hours to glimpse “Seaworld Venice,” a performance piece by Florentina Holzinger, an Austrian previously best known for staging far-out theater spectacles.
Holzinger has flooded the Austrian pavilion, and her show includes a naked performer on a roaring jet ski in one room, and more nude performers climbing a huge weather vane in another.
At the pavilion’s rear, there’s also a naked performer in a water tank alongside two portable toilets. Visitors are invited to urinate in the johns, which tops up the water levels — after filtration, of course.
Signs near the pavilion ask visitors not to take any photos or videos, but the art crowd has been ignoring those pleas, desperate to prove on social media that they’ve seen the hottest show in town. Others have been forking out 60 euros, about $70, on the pavilion’s official T-shirts to make sure everyone knows they were there.
Holzinger and her team explained in interviews that the performance is about issues including environmental degradation, over-tourism and the nefarious power of the church. To give the art world its credit, visitors were debating those possible meanings throughout the week.
Sometimes, though, a spectacle is just a spectacle. On Thursday at lunchtime, Lila Boros, a 23-year-old student, was last in line with her mother waiting to see the pavilion. “Everyone talks about it, and says you have to experience with your own eyes,” Boros said. Plus, she added, “we heard about the naked thing, you know?” — ALEX MARSHALL
The Pavilion of the Holy See
Pope Leo XIV has been a rare world leader to forcefully condemn President Trump’s attack on Iran, and at this Biennale the Vatican is furthering its message of peace with a contemplative garden pilgrimage, soundtracked by an unorthodox group of musicians.
Just beyond Venice’s train station lies the hidden 17th-century Giardino Mistico, or mystic garden, tended by Carmelite monks — a rare green oasis in Venice that has been transformed into the Pavilion of the Holy See by the curators Hans Ulrich Obrist and Ben Vickers, in collaboration with Soundwalk Collective.
Now Biennale visitors can stroll the leafy grounds equipped with spatially aware headphones that pipe in compositions by experimental musicians that have aficionados perking up their ears.
Musicians heeded the Vatican’s call for submissions with modern choral pieces, minimalist piano works, ambient drones and more that accompany the listener’s walk: Brian Eno between the lavender and laurel bushes, Terry Riley under a pergola of grapevines, Meredith Monk by the calla lilies, Suzanne Ciani amid the asters.
Patti Smith has also contributed a spoken-word piece that begins by a rose trellis; FKA Twigs, a chant by olive trees. Contributions by 24 artists create a shifting, meditative garden soundscape.
The curators said the project was inspired by Hildegard of Bingen, the 12th-century mystic and polymath composer, artist and scientist who has inspired Roman Catholics, creatives and feminists. (Monk even released a 1996 album that alternates her own compositions with Hildegard’s vocal works.)
The artists of the Holy See’s garden pavilion may be spiritually and culturally distant from the Vatican, but Vickers explained: “Everyone involved shares a belief in music’s ability to create a transformative interior experience.” — LAURA RYSMAN
Abbas Akhavan has transformed Canada’s pavilion — which is built around a tree that grows through the center — into what might be the sexiest hothouse ever.
Hot pink lights hang from the ceiling, misters create an atmospheric haze and frosted silver mirrors create a soft glow. All these highly aesthetic features serve a very pragmatic purpose: to support the growth of a species of a giant water lily, Victoria cruziana, growing in a water-filled steel and glass tank that occupies half the space.
That flower took the world by storm when it was displayed at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851. Originally from the Amazon region, the plant has had many indigenous names, but when it was imported to Britain, botanists from Kew Gardens, hopeful for royal patronage, renamed it in honor of Queen Victoria.
The artist describes the pavilion as a portal: to the gardens at Kew, to the transportation of the water lily in Wardian cases (mini greenhouses used by scientists to bring the exotic plants to the center of empire) — and even further back, through the floral specimen’s million-year history.
The exhibition schedule parallels the life cycle of the plants themselves. Their leaves will grow to 3 feet in diameter by June, and will bloom in July or August. They’ll produce seeds just before the Biennale closes in the fall.
The title of the show, “Entre chien et loup,” is a French phrase describing twilight as the time when the shepherd mistakes a wolf for his dog — an elegant reminder that things we perceive as simple and innocent, like a beautiful flower growing in a garden, can telescope centuries, sometimes millenniums, of history. — ARUNA D’SOUZA
The Japan Pavilion
Edgy offerings at this year’s Biennale include a video dedicated to feces (Luxembourg), a naked woman riding on a jet ski (Austria), and a giant screen showing A.I.-generated porn (Denmark). Yet none has been as polarizing as the Japanese Pavilion, an interactive installation by the artist Ei Arakawa-Nash featuring over 200 baby dolls.
Visitors are greeted by dozens of the playthings awkwardly propped on low tables. An attendant asks if you would like to carry one while you explore the show. As in real life, you can’t pick your child; the doll is chosen for you. Depending on your personal history, the physical sensation of holding a roughly 12-pound baby on your hip may provoke a variety of feelings: nostalgia, curiosity, discomfort, grief.
According to the wall-text, Arakawa-Nash was inspired to develop the project, titled “Grass Babies, Moon Babies,” after becoming a parent to twins in 2024. A timeline on the wall of the pavilion presents important dates that the artist plans to teach the children about, from the death of Arakawa-Nash’s father to the birth of the first I.V.F. baby.
Walking around the space, there are babies everywhere: climbing on scaffolding, hanging from ropes by their pudgy arms, perched in trees outside. And for some reason, they are all wearing sunglasses.
To get the full experience, visitors must bring their baby to a changing table, open up its onesie, and scan a QR code tucked inside, which delivers an individualized poem by the Japanese writer and astrologer Ishii Yukari. (Somehow, explaining this feels even weirder than doing it.) Each poem is informed by the date and location of the fictional baby’s birth, which corresponds to an entry on Arakawa-Nash’s timeline.
The installation implies that caring for others is both a physical act and a collective responsibility of memory. But it’s all made murky by the goofiness of the exercise, and it’s difficult to discern much meaning over visitors’ laughter. — JULIA HALPERIN
With all those pavilions, some nations struggle to stand out. Not Belgium.
Outside the country’s building in the Giardini, the artist Miet Warlop has installed two large wooden racks on which she has stacked hundreds of brilliant white plaster tablets with embossed words on them in languages including Bengali, English, French and Italian.
Noise blares out from the pavilion entrance, and the spectacle inside is drawing lengthy lines.
Inside, performers scurry up and down another wooden rack, throwing the plaster tablets to one another, smashing them on the floor and ritualistically chanting, singing, dancing and banging drums.
It’s a raucous scene that builds throughout the day — and it is winning Warlop many fans. One critic in The Art Newspaper said Warlop’s show provided a “sense of release” from the world’s troubles. (Although another said it reminded him of the Blue Man Group.)
Warlop has gained a reputation across Europe in recent years for her visually spectacular theater pieces. Her work “One Song,” in which musicians in sports gear exercise nonstop while performing a song about grief, was a breakout hit at the 2022 Avignon Festival. And her more recent “Inhale Delirium Exhale,” which involved performers creating tableaux using four miles of silk, also wowed theater critics.
Warlop started out studying art, and only later moved to theater. Maybe this is the moment she becomes a star in her first medium, too. — ALEX MARSHALL
The Peruvian Pavilion
Some Venice pavilions are blockbusters and some are critical darlings. But there is also a third category: the FOMO pavilion. These presentations may be less Instagrammable, more remote or subtler than others, but they benefit from evangelists who talk them up any chance they get.
This year’s FOMO show — whose advocates included Obrist, the mega-curator behind the Vatican pavilion — is the pavilion of Peru, which features the hypnotic work of Sara Flores, the first Indigenous artist to represent the country. It occupies one of the easiest-to-miss locations in the Arsenale, in a small corner of the second floor.
Inside, the light is low. The walls are filled with intricate, geometric paintings that look like labyrinths or rhizomes. Every canvas is covered with inky interconnected lines and hard-edge shapes, many filled with yellow, green and red pigments. If you look at them long enough, they appear to vibrate.
Flores, 76, is a leading practitioner of Kené, an art form and matrilineal tradition of the Shipibo-Konibo people in the Peruvian Amazon. She began learning the craft from her mother when she was 14, after she had a vision while lying under a mosquito net. (The pavilion includes two painted cloth nets; one is suspended high from the ceiling so visitors can pass underneath and experience Flores’s view.) Today, the artist creates her enveloping canvases in collaboration with her daughters.
Kené’s designs are associated with ayahuasca ceremonies and created with dyes derived from plants, including psychoactive ones. The exact connection between Flores’s work and plant medicine, however, is conspicuously vague.
Perhaps the organizers recognize that the simple and exotic story of a medium making art while hallucinating appeals to Western audiences. The notion that a community of women is collectively, rigorously pushing an ancient tradition in new directions may be a bit more nuanced — but it’s a lot more interesting. — JULIA HALPERIN
The (Unofficial) South African Pavilion
Even in a Biennale roiled by controversies, South Africa’s decision earlier this year to sideline its chosen artist and shutter its pavilion sent out shock waves.
A group commissioned by the South African government had selected Gabrielle Goliath’s “Elegy,” a project she has been developing since 2015. It is a series of videos in which classically trained opera singers sustain a single note for an hour, stepping in for one another as they run low on breath, all clad in black and set against a dark backdrop.
According to the artist, the works honor victims of femicide and violence, like Ipeleng Christine Moholane, a South African student who was raped and murdered in 2015, as well as victims of the 1904-08 genocide of the Herero and Nama by German colonists in Namibia.
For the Biennale, Goliath planned to present those videos alongside a newer installment of “Elegy” dedicated to Hiba Abu Nada, a poet from Gaza who was killed by an Israeli airstrike in 2023. Although it’s similar to its predecessors, the culture minister of South Africa, Gayton McKenzie, declared this addition too divisive, choosing to close the pavilion rather than exhibit it. Goliath’s attempt to overturn his decision in court failed.
Support for Goliath poured in, though, and “Elegy” is being shown at an alternative, and perhaps even more affecting, space for the work. Goliath’s video screens now encircle the interior of the 17th-century Chiesa di Sant’Antonin, filling the church with the singers’ keening laments. The nave’s reverberating acoustics and the celestial Baroque frescos only intensify the sense of grief. — LAURA RYSMAN
