Seven pavilions to catch at the Venice Biennale

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Ninety-six countries have contributed national pavilions at this year’s Venice Biennale. Here are seven to catch:

In the Giardini

Spain

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The Biennale is full of art that you can’t appreciate unless you read a didactic text exploring the artist’s motives and materials. What a joy to enter the Spanish pavilion and be instantly enthralled and enlightened. For more than 20 years Oriol Vilanova has collected postcards in Spain and Belgium, and now he has covered every wall of the pavilion, right up to its soaring ceilings, with his carefully organized hoard. There are categories – landscapes, flowers, artworks, architecture, interiors, churches, crucifixes, and royals ­­– and, since they are grouped together, they create shifting passages of different colour palettes. Of course, you can discern themes in this array: the frailty of memory, the obsession of the collector, the saturation of photographic imagery foreshadowing our digital age. Or you can simply delight in the scale and multiplicity of this remarkable installation.

One can’t mention the Spanish pavilion without noting rather similar work at the Serbian pavilion. Predrag Djakovic has plastered the walls with vintage postcards, historic newspapers and photographs, all heralding the Second World War. The piece is visually impressive if somewhat didactic: Djakovic’s point is that history is now repeating itself, and including a pile of battered leather suitcases at one end of the room does seem overemphatic. Still, the scale and rarity of his archive make the installation engrossing.

Poland

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Water is a recurring theme at the 2026 Biennale. (At the provocative Austrian pavilion, nude performers are swimming in it; at the more reflective Canadian pavilion, lilies are growing in it.) For a take that is otherworldly, try the Polish pavilion where the Liquid Tongues installation features two giant screens presenting videos of an underwater ballet by figures in red bathing suits who are both signing and singing. They are deaf and hearing performers from a group called Choir in Motion offering compositions inspired by whale songs. The piece about communication, created by Bogna Burska and Daniel Kotowski, is initially startling and eventually hypnotic.

At the Arsenale

India

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Five Indian artists have been asked by curator Amin Jaffer to consider the idea of home, and the results – commenting on the emotional losses of unfettered development – are breathtaking. Alwar Balasubramaniam presents a simple wall of cracked clay, noting the fragility of a foundational building material; Ranjani Shettar provides the garden, suspending an oversized garland of flowers on another wall in the gallery; Skarma Sonam Tashi has built miniature versions of disappearing mountain architecture. You enter the pavilion under a massive bamboo scaffolding created by Asim Waqif. The showstopper, however, is Sumakshi Singh’s fragile house of white thread. The piece, a full-scale recreation of her grandmother’s house before it was demolished, extends the themes to memory and belonging.

Morocco

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The pavilions at the Arsenale are basic boxes of varying sizes, sometimes generous, sometimes cramped, but always featuring high ceilings. Amina Agueznay’s massive woven panels in earthy reds and browns reach to the very top. They are hung on large metal armatures as though they were still on giant looms. In a Biennale that sees many artists struggle to make an effective postcolonial statement with historic crafts, Agueznay has taken North African textile traditions and successfully enlarged them to the monumental.

Applied Arts

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The specialized Applied Arts pavilion features a collaboration among the Biennale, Britain’s V&A Museum and artist Gala Porras-Kim, a witty discourse on museology. It includes her highly specific drawings of a collection of disassociated objects – museum artifacts for which all cataloguing information has been lost so that nobody knows exactly where they came from. A work on paper offers random dot patterns created by propagating mould spores found in the storage areas of the British Museum.

Ukraine

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The Ukrainian pavilion at the Arsenale features a series of informative videos about the long journey of the Origami Deer. It’s a concrete statue designed by Zhanna Kadyrova that was erected in a public park in the Donetsk region in 2019 to replace an old Soviet jet on the site. When the area was evacuated in the face of the Russian advance in 2024, the statue went too. The videos feature its incongruous journey through Western Europe to Venice. You can see the actual statue on a flatbed truck at the entrance to the Giardini.

Off site

New Zealand

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The Maori artist Fiona Pardington presents 17 large-scale photographic bird portraits at the New Zealand pavilion in the Castello neighbourhood. They are uncanny creatures, greatly enlarged and disconcertingly close. How did she ever capture their images? They seem vividly alive, yet the dodo might be a giveaway: They are taxidermized specimens from New Zealand and Australian collections in a suite that opens reflection about our relations with nature.