VENICE 2026: CRITIC'S DIARY
- Marta Orsola Sironi
- 15 hours ago
- 9 min read
A survey weakened by curatorial absence and institutional timidity, redeemed by a handful of pavilions with the courage to say something, and overturned, finally, by the largest protest the Biennale has seen since 1968: Marta Orsola Sironi reports from the 2026 Venice Biennale.
Usually, my mother doesn’t ask me much about the art system. For her contemporary art is just something I do, for which she supports me, but doesn’t give a damn, as for her, everything ended with Picasso. On Monday, my mother called me specifically to ask about the Biennale situation; “we are under everybody’s eyes, what’s happening?” That, for me, says everything.
On Thursday, I sent a video to my father from the mass protest organised by ANGA and various associations of art workers across Italy. He was so proud he reposted ANGA’s statement on his Facebook page. The following day, he sent me the cover of Le Monde Diplomatique, which reported on the strike, as did many other outlets — the first major Biennale strike since 1968.
Sit-in of art students and artists in St. Mark’s Square, June 1968. Courtesy of Silvestro Lodi.
Right after graduating, I worked with the archive of Leoncillo Leonardi, a key figure in post-war Italian sculpture. Leoncillo was among the young artists at the Venice Biennale 1968 who, in that moment of rupture, turned their works to the wall in protest. It was then that I came to believe something I still hold today, which that a Biennale should present the most compelling artists of its time, and that it should, inevitably, be political.
In the 2026 edition, however, these premises seem to fall short.
Photography courtesy of Wangechi Mutu/Nick Cave
I will not comment on Koyo Kouoh’s exhibition: while the project seemed remarkable on paper when it was announced, its realisation feels far less resolved, lacking curatorial clarity. Kouoh’s passing, and the resulting absence of a guiding curatorial voice, is perceptible throughout. Moreover, in my opinion, a biennial should offer a snapshot of contemporary artistic research —however, in this case, the majority of participants were born in the 1960s and 1970s, with a significant presence also of those born in the 1950s, while younger generations (particularly artists from the 1980s and 1990s) remain a clear minority. This imbalance raises questions about how “contemporary” is framed, and to what extent the exhibition was able to give stage to emerging voices.
At the Giardini, I was hoping for something genuinely groundbreaking. Instead, the vast majority of national presentations were—as Miranda Priestly would say—“groundbreaking.” As a gallerist friend from London put it: you can tell there’s a war on. No one has the courage to say anything, god forbid they get bombed.
It’s hard to disagree, considering how little urgency most pavilions, Japan, Korea, the UK, and France included, have to offer. Thankfully, Germany, with Henrike Naumann and Sung Tieu, along with Poland, Austria (damn the queues), Belgium, and Finland with its sperm bank, manage to salvage the situation.
Photography courtesy of Jens Ziehe/Andrea Rossetti
Luckily, if the Giardini and Arsenale felt paralysed by caution, it was elsewhere in the city that contemporary art seemed to regain its urgency. The exhibitions that stayed with me most were precisely those unafraid to confront the political conditions of the present: borders, displacement, conservatism, algorithmic alienation, systems of restriction, and the quiet violences embedded in everyday life.
These are not simply the “best” exhibitions in Venice. As far as I am concerned they are the ones that still understand what art can do.
I wish I had new eyes each day, just to return, again and again, to the Kosovo Pavilion by Brilant Milazimi, curated by José Esparza Chong Cuy.
Brilant Milazimi, Hard Teeth (Dhëmbë të Fortë), 2026. Photography courtesy of Lorenzo Palmieri.
Hard Teeth portrays a line of figures dissolving into a vast landscape, evoking both historical and contemporary experiences of displacement. Rooted in the country’s history, where mobility has long been shaped by war and contested sovereignty, the work reflects a condition of prolonged waiting and uncertainty.
The image of the queue becomes a global motif: people suspended between departure and arrival, caught in systems that delay, decide, and often deny. Milazimi’s painting captures how this extended state of deferral is not only political but deeply psychological, embedding itself in the body and reshaping perception, endurance, and expectation.
At the far edge, a mother and child remain still, bearing witness to the scene. The child is haloed, though the aura offers no promise of redemption. If anything, it casts them as a fragile, contemporary messiah. In front of them (of us), the human line tightens, condenses, until it dissolves into a serrated horizon of teeth. Bodies are worn down, hollowed out; flesh seems to falter. A figure drifts in the river, finally skipping the queue. Jaws clench, eyes empty out, consumed by a hope that persists even as it erodes.
Brilant Milazimi, Hard Teeth (Dhëmbë të Fortë), 2026. Photography courtesy of Lorenzo Palmieri.
You access the pavilion through a garden overlooking the sea. The stillness of the horizon tunes with the monumentality of the nearby cemetery, anchoring the work within a geography of memory and loss. Inside, the church unfolds in its solemn grandeur, holding this suspended procession of bodies in a kind of secular vigil. It becomes a contemporary altar, not to transcendence, but to what remains most urgent and fragile: the right to survive, to live, to hope for what lies after the wait.
I hug Brilant at the entrance, almost in disbelief. Two years ago, when I interviewed him for his participation in Art Basel Statements, he had not been able to leave Kosovo. This time, he made it. The condition his work traces is not abstract but something he has lived.
Marina Xenofontos represents Cyprus with It rests to the bones, curated by Kyle Dancewicz. The exhibition brings together fifteen years of her practice, combining kinetic works, archival reconstructions, and audiovisual forms.
Marina Xenofontos, Threads, 2026, detail. Photography courtesy of Jacopo La Forgia
At its core is an “unconditional archive”: a web of memories shaped by historical loss and Cyprus’s post-1974 reality. Among the works, Interior of a Nightclub recreates the ceiling of the Perroquet, a once-symbolic venue of postcolonial optimism, now sealed within the abandoned city of Varosha. The exhibition is further accompanied by folk songs by the Ayisilaou sisters, elderly women from the artist’s family, recorded for the first time in their village in 2020 and remixed by the musician Panagiotis Mina: an intense protest against everyday conservatism, placing alterity within traditional forms. Their voices spill outside, reverberating through the calli and across the canal, moving in and out of the structure like sirens for contemporary Odysseys. Yet they do not seek to lure or deceive, but rather to introduce a subtle form of resistance within tradition. Xenofontos ultimately reflects on how a “nearly lived” past might endure, turning inherited memory into a condition of the present.
Lydia Ourahmane presents 5 Works at the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation, curated by Polly Staple. Developed during her residency in Venice, the exhibition brings together site-responsive works shaped through collaborations with local craftspeople, organisations, and activist groups, offering an alternative image of the city beyond tourism.
The first thing you feel upon entering is the familiar smell of broth and the sound of birds coming from the small garden at the back. It brings you back to your mother’s kitchen, to those afternoons returning home from school and finding the table already set. In the first room stands a long monolithic structure: a wooden pier, a dry altar within this very wet city. Upstairs, a large stockpot murmurs while broth boils endlessly. To your right, a faint clinking sound draws your attention, inviting you through a beaded curtain reminiscent of those found in old seaside houses.
Installation photography courtesy of artist.
Working across sculpture, sound, and installation, Ourahmane explores displacement, systems of restriction, and the movement of people and objects. Many works emerge from real negotiations and exchanges (notably with groups such as Poveglia per tutti) culminating in a functional pier that will be relocated to the island of Poveglia to enable public access. 5 Works unfolds as a series of encounters where absence, latent energy, and anticipation become material. Through minimal gestures and visceral elements, the exhibition reflects on the politics of everyday life and asks how art can operate within and intervene in reality itself.
One of my favourite spots in Venice is AplusA Gallery in Calle Malipiero. Going there means seeing very good art, that’s for sure. For this Biennale they present Counterforms, organised by Neue Alte Brücke and Matt Williams, which brings together works by Hannah Black, Yvo Cho, Anna Clegg, Racheal Crowther, Ufuoma Essi, Nat Faulkner, Amelia Gill, Jason Hirata, Anna Howard, Vincenzo Ottino, and Nina Porter. Borrowing its title from typography, where “counterforms” describe the negative spaces shaping legibility, the exhibition explores how meaning is constructed through absence, fragmentation, and mediation.
AplusA Gallery, Counterforms. Installation photography courtesy of gallery.
The works appear displaced, incomplete, or marked by traces of use and removal. As you enter the space, you are met with a cacophony of voices, rhythms, and agitation: sound, gaps, and spatial discontinuities become active elements, turning absence itself into a structure for seeing and understanding.
Sound and spatio-temporal discontinuity are also central to RAGE BAIT by Eva and Franco Mattes, presented by Autotelic Foundation and curated by Nadim Samman and Luisa Haustein across two venues: Palazzo Franchetti and Le Cabanon in Campo del Santissimo Redentore.
RAGE BAIT, Eva and Franco Mendes. Photography courtesy of Melania Dalle Grave
Through installation, video, and generative AI, the exhibition examines how online content is engineered to provoke immediate emotional reactions, exposing the darker ethical dynamics of digital culture. How often do we now come across AI-generated reels, anthropomorphised logs, hyper-sexualised girls with cappuccino cups for heads, talking chairs? How often do we lose ourselves in the para-real comedies that the internet serves up as simulacra of our own reality?
If I were to draw conclusions from this Biennale, I’m not sure I could identify a single coherent thread other than its being a glaring mirror of an extremely complex and uncertain global situation, so uncertain that world powers, and Europe in particular, seem to have collapsed into a complete inability to take a clear position. Between tariffs, nuclear threats, and shifting power dynamics, we live in a condition of collective brain fog, like that little monkey covering its eyes, ears, and mouth.
And yet art should never allow itself the luxury of silence. If anything, one of its responsibilities should be precisely to call us back to ourselves: to remain present to the present, to remain critical. This is exactly where this Biennale failed (suffice it to say that it opened its doors to the pavilion of a genocidal state).
Photography courtesy of Marta Orsola Sironi
When “official” art becomes hesitant and fearful, it falls to its workers, to artists, curators, and everyone composing the living body of contemporary art, to remind the system where it should stand. ANGA’s letter may not have been heard, the Israeli Pavilion is still there (while the Russian one closed over the absurd bureaucratic technicality of a public entertainment licence), and yet on Friday 8 May 2026, on that narrow strip of land and water between Via Garibaldi and the Arsenale, something happened that had not been seen since 1968: a united body of more than 2,000 art workers from every sector shut down the pavilions, reclaimed the streets—and the bridges—and yes, also took blows from the police, in order to call on this Biennale, and the world beyond it, to remove the salami from their eyes, as we say in Italy, and stop accepting everything unquestioningly.
Photography courtesy of Riccardo de Cal
The Giardini of the Biennale are marked by two figures: one absent, one present. Along the Riva dei Partigiani stands the monument to the Partigiana, a reclining female figure honouring the women of the Resistance and their role in the fight against Nazifascism. Installed near the Riva dei Sette Martiri, once the site of partisan executions in 1944, it remains a powerful symbol of liberation and memory. The current bronze by Augusto Murer replaced an earlier ceramic work by Leoncillo Leonardi, destroyed in a neo-fascist attack in 1961.
Venice, 1968. Photography courtesy of Silvestro Lodi.
Today, the pedestal where Leoncillo’s Partigiana once stood remains empty. An altar designed by Carlo Scarpa reminds us that fascist violence has no end, that if it could target a statue sixteen years after the war, then it has neither restraint nor shame. And yet Leoncillo, Scarpa, and Murer understood something essential: even if they blow up statues, schools, and homes; even if we fear being bombed; even if we would rather be in Venice drinking spritzes than marching in the streets; even if it is easier to photograph the dolls in the Japan Pavilion than to confront the brutal reality of our times, our work, because yes, it is work, as art workers, is not to exempt ourselves, not to remain timid, not to look away. The moment art stops taking risks, it simply becomes decoration. Perhaps the problem was never the minor keys, but the absence of dissonance.
