The must-see pavilions at the 61st Venice Art Biennale And what they say about us

We attended the 61st edition of the Venice Art Biennale, and more than any recent edition, this one has undoubtedly been among the most eventful in years. The theme of the 61st Exhibition, In Minor Keys, is a direct tribute to curator Koyo Kouoh, who passed away prematurely: «The joy of authentic art, which so closely resembles real life,» commented Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, «It is an Exhibition permeated by spirit, by a sense of sacredness that places the human being back at the center, rediscovering what it means to exist in the world by reconnecting with the elements of the earth and looking once again toward the sky.» Indeed, from the pre-opening days onward, the 2026 edition appeared deeply aware of the current sociopolitical climate and the tensions defining it, from endangered funding to protests and strikes.

As chaotic and turbulent as it was, we experienced the 61st International Art Exhibition of Venice in a way that perhaps had not happened in years, and not only through the exhibitions themselves. While criticism has once again resurfaced from those who believe that art should not be political and absolutely must avoid politics in order to preserve its sacredness and expressive authenticity, which is already a paradox in itself, this year the stories and humanity of the artists were not simply about making art, but about a way of living in all its layered complexity, including what it means to be citizens of the world. Through a curatorial narrative that was attentive, sincere, and profoundly realistic, In Minor Keys succeeded in leaving a mark on the contemporary art landscape.

Spain Pavilion - Los Restos

Accustomed as we are to video installations and immersive “digital” environments, Los Restos is an environmental intervention that reclaims the analogue through an operation that simultaneously recalls both the dynamism of images, which entirely cover and invade the space, and the stubborn slowness of the mental processes required to contemplate each individual image. It is an invitation into a kind of flea market or wunderkammer conceived by Oriol Vilanova, an artist long engaged in collecting and reactivating ephemeral materials, here accompanied by curator Carles Guerra. The project, born from twenty years of obsessive collecting, gathers postcards and tourist photographs that contemplate global tourism while simultaneously replicating its overwhelming dimension.

A potentially infinite composition of ephemera, devoid of a linear narrative yet deeply immersive. Upon entering the pavilion, the multicolored and seemingly shapeless mass of images is indistinguishable, but moving closer reveals an underlying organizational logic that arranges them according to themes, colors, and visual semantic groups. In this way, Los Restos operates within a constant tension between accumulation and loss. Originally intended to transmit an individual experience, the postcards become relics of a fragmented and unstable memory over time. Reactivated within the context of the Biennale, they do not recover their original meaning but instead generate new ones, challenging traditional systems of cultural legitimization tied to museum institutions.

France Pavilion – Comme Saturne

The project by French-Moroccan artist Yto Barrada, titled Comme Saturne and curated by Myriam Ben Salah, unfolds as an immersive environment where textiles become both narrative and critical devices. While other pavilions embrace more direct forms of social and political critique, the French Pavilion works through a sense of unease and reflection surrounding the fragile sociopolitical fabric we all inevitably wear. The title itself already functions as a statement of intent, evoking the planet Saturn, ruler of melancholy temperament, slow thinking, and patient creation. But it also recalls the terrible shadow of revolution which, like the mythological god, ultimately devours its own children. Yto Barrada translates this ambiguity through dévoré (“the devoured”), a textile technique involving the use of acids to corrode fabric and which, within a poetics suspended between generation and destruction, gives form to the spirit of contemporaneity.

A multidisciplinary portrait moving through complexity, balancing irony and unease without surrendering to the paralysis of melancholy: from the goatskin kite suspended between sky and earth to the pavilion’s soft tones concealing a gradual fragmentation into narrative blocks; from the Room of Folds, where wool draperies slowly react to natural light by bleaching over time and evoking mythological Cronus, to the Laboratory, a space dedicated to overturning hierarchies and echoing the Saturnalia, and finally the Study Room, a garden of dye plants developed by the artist in Tangier. The exhibition culminates in the Room of the Devoured. Here, the tension of a chemical process that is simultaneously violent and generative materializes into an assault on matter itself, causing it to disintegrate and fragment while generating an aesthetic of erosion and formlessness. A place where fragility emerges as both a political and existential condition.

Greece Pavilion - Escape Room

Representing Greece is Andreas Angelidakis with the project Escape Room, curated by Giorgos Bekirakis. The immersive installation fits within the artist’s hybrid practice, proposing a critical reflection on the ways in which we interpret the past and inhabit the present, suspended between classical ruins and digital architectures. Here, Plato’s cave is reimagined as an immersive and inhabitable environment that, in today’s era of post-truth and rising nationalist populism, takes on the form of an escape room: between reality and play, collective experience and simulation, within a world of images saturated by digital replicas and illusions.

At the same time, the installation examines the history of the building itself, inaugurated in 1934, the year marked by the meeting between Hitler and Mussolini in Venice and the beginning of Nazi persecution. Angelidakis interprets the national pavilions of the Giardini as “frozen colonial and fascist caves” created to convey specific political agendas. Through a language blending the real and the virtual, the artist challenges visitors to escape not only the room itself, but also propagandistic narratives and nationalist populism. A contemporary bacchanal translating a nocturnal experience into an alternative parallel space where strange artifacts emerge: figures with multiple arms suspended between divinity and avatar, alongside elements resembling stage sets or relics from an unstable world.

Japan Pavilion - Grass Babies, Moon Babies

The immersive journey imagined by Japanese-American artist Ei Arakawa-Nash is perhaps one of the most popular exhibitions on social media, where visitors themselves become part of the exhibition and an implicit performance: a shared and interactive space designed to experiment with gestures of care through an informal and joyfully kitsch perspective. The entire pavilion is oriented toward blurring the boundaries between private life and public performance. Inside, and partly outside the pavilion as well, visitors are invited to hold and carry around one of the 200 dolls available, each weighing between five and six kilograms and wearing mirrored sunglasses, while other dolls climb ropes and the pavilion’s architecture.

If you attempt to change their diaper, you will discover a QR code allowing you to claim your own “diaper poem,” coordinated with the “birth date” assigned to the doll by the pavilion staff. These dates are not random but evoke symbolic moments connected both to the artist’s personal experiences, having become a father in 2024, and to the social dynamics that have transformed, and continue to transform, Japan and the world.

Luxembourg Pavilion - La Merde

La Merde, requiring no translation, is the video installation created by Aline Bouvy or perhaps the defining epithet of the contemporary individual. Curated by Stilbé Schroeder, the work addresses shame as a social mechanism, questioning how bodies are classified, tolerated, disciplined, or relegated to the shadows. All through the language of excrement. It is precisely the sense of shame attached to an act as intimate as it is disgusting, despite being entirely natural, that materializes in a cinematic essay exploring shame as a social construct through the figure of a “being-excrement” moving through different stages of life and embodying everything society attempts to repress. Suspended somewhere between absurdity, grotesque humor, inexplicable familiarity, repulsion, and empathy, the work analyzes the concept of the “abject” through something so universal and yet so deeply tied to shame, transforming the body that can no longer contain itself into a powerful political and subversive statement.

La Merde, which combines film, spatialized sound composition, and a mirrored steel architecture, is paradoxically grounded in a very serious body of research that expands into a broader reflection on violence and social repression. It simply does so through the figure of a large anthropomorphic excrement that speaks, walks, and farts like a puppet, interacting with other characters and “spraying” the audience. As absurd as it appears, the film, screened on a continuous loop, confronts everyday situations in which moderation is imposed and learned through collective judgment. All of this unfolds inside a semicircular immersive structure lined with mirrored surfaces that extend the work throughout the pavilion. The reflections multiply visitors and immerse them in a dynamic of mutual observation and judgment. The installation also includes E.T. The Excremential, a sculptural alter ego merging the artist’s body with Spielberg’s extraterrestrial figure.

There’s still something to say

Between the days of pre-opening dedicated to the press and the first official day open to the public, the Venice Biennale recorded 27,935 accredited attendees, with a growth of 4% compared to the pre-opening days of 2024. On May 9, the first official day of the Exhibition, around 10,000 visitors arrived, with an increase of about 10% compared to the first day of the Biennale Arte 2024. These figures show how contemporary art is capable of attracting increasingly larger audiences.

Despite the numerous controversies, art continues to be a tool of expression and representation. The mental shift whereby art should remain “abstract”, detached from reality almost to preserve its sacredness, is therefore being called into question. This is evident from the artists on display: each of them, with their respective curatorial contributions, reads and interprets reality, returning a fragment of it in the form of an exhibition path. What emerges from the 61st Venice Biennale is precisely this: a plurality of voices and visions that do not come from a single country, but from many, and in critical times like the present, such a vast and varied collection of fragments of an external reality is extremely valuable, and it is important that it be preserved.

The meaning of art

The Art Biennale is not intended to be a court: to be intellectually honest, it is often the same polemical spectators who add a judicial burden to the artworks. Art tells, sometimes takes a position, yes, but it does not judge. It represents, interprets and reorganizes but, above all, in doing so it brings together: it becomes a space for dialogue in which harmonies and dissonances coexist, in which the contradictory nature of contemporaneity is not a value to escape from, but a terrain to move within, grasping its suggestions and the field of possibilities it represents.

Perhaps, from the constellation of visions of the 61st International Art Exhibition of Venice, we should learn something fundamental: a simple, but not simplistic, invitation to pause and relearn how to observe without prejudice. Contemporaneity is layered and complex, therefore it is necessary to take one step further to «rediscover the sense of being in the world by remeasuring ourselves against the elements of the earth, and looking at the sky again», as Buttafuoco says.