What Venice Got Right / Biennale 2026

Our selection of the loudest moments.

Perturbation as emotional and sensory overstimulation, a forced opening of consciousness. The aestheticisation of disgust, or the most uncompromising articulation of the only operative dystopia we continue to inhabit. We moved through Venice, between whispers and a fragmented sense of spirituality, in pursuit of what persists and does not resolve. We have identified exhibitions that recalibrate attention, insisting on presence as a form of tension. This is what NASTY extracted from the lagoon: a selection of encounters that leave behind a frequency difficult to remove, calling an active response in the spectator.

1. “Seaworld Venice” / Austrian Pavilion

Florentina Holzinger / Cur. Nora-Swantje Almes, Biennale Gardens

Where does disgust stop being a reaction and become an instrument of inquiry? Seaworld Venice takes space without asking permission. The two sides of the scale remain charged: on one, the spectacularisation of discomfort; on the other, its political potential. Choreographer and performer Florentina Holzinger occupies the Austrian Pavilion and transforms it into an organism made of fluids. In a context that preaches purity and sustainability while drowning in natural and social pollution, Holzinger uses the element of water as a field of continuous investigation. The transformation is visceral because it must be. The body moves through states of play and extreme resistance, externalising what we tend to conceal: impurity and irritation. There is no censorship, no desire to render the process more acceptable. Disgust becomes a reality to be reckoned with, not a side effect to avoid. The question remains open: is the display of discomfort a critical instrument, or a spectacularisation of distress? The work offers no definitive answer and that suspension may be precisely its strongest point. It falls to the audience to decide how to inhabit that pressure.
A mark, in any case, has been left.

2. “Helter Skelter” / Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince

Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince / Cur. Nancy Spector, Fondazione Prada
The title opens onto a cultural network: a past built of appropriations and ruptures, from the Beatles to Charles Manson, from a fairground ride to an imagined race war. Moving through this irregular human product, the exhibition assembles as a hypnotic collection of identities that appear familiar at first glance, rock album covers, celebrity memorabilia, Hollywood, biker and cowboy subcultures all concealing, behind the surface, a darker and deeper reality made of fractures. Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince meet by exploiting the distance between their respective trajectories. Separated by generation and personal battles: Jafa within the Black American experience, Prince in the demystification of white masculinity, this dialogue carries with it the full weight of an America built on illusions and wounds that never properly healed. A hypnotic network in which every viewer finds a recognisable symbol, yet behind every symbol there is a crack in the mirror, a scar that refuses to close.

3 “The Shape of Time” / Barry X Ball

Barry X Ball / Cur. Bob Nickas, Basilica Di San Giorgio Maggiore
Within the sacred monumentality of the Basilica di San Giorgio Maggiore, designed by Andrea Palladio, the exhibition of Barry X Ball breaks through temporal perception through a working of matter that preserves the space’s spiritual aura while placing the accent on a contemporary production. A process that employs digital tools entirely devoid of the sacred, 3D scanning, computer-controlled milling, additive printing and which become elements of dialogue: devices that do not compromise the religious monumentality of the space, but amplify it. The twenty-three sculptures, distinct in material and chromatic register, are distributed through the basilica like suspended presences, isolated from the rest of the city. In a continuous layering of references from a Canova reinterpreted through digital modelling to a Buddha placed in the sacristy, the exhibition manipulates time and consolidated aesthetic identities. The result is a meditation on the capacity of contemporary manufacture to amplify sacred aura.

4. “Canicula” / Fondazione In Between Art Film

Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Massimo D’anolfi & Martina Parenti, Roman Khimei & Yarema Malashchuk, Janis Rafa, P. Staff, Wang Tuo, Yuyan Wang, Maya Watanabe / Cur. Alessandro Rabottini and Leonardo Bigazzi, Complesso Dell’Ospedaletto.
With Canicula, the third and final chapter of Fondazione In Between Art Film’s Trilogy of Uncertainties, following Penumbra (2022) and Nebula (2024), the exhibition installs itself in the space as an immersive and disturbing organism. The sensation is one of descending ever deeper into the earth, approaching the magma, yielding to the pressure generated by exposure to a constant, oppressive heat. Everything is submerged in a red nucleus, austere yet strangely ceremonial, where the path constructs itself as a labyrinth of video installations, blinding lights and alienating sound. The alternation of eight installations triggers a continuous disorientation: an extreme sensory stimulation that carries the viewer into something close to a hypnotic state, without spatial or emotional bearings. Canicula reflects on the hallucination of the present, wars, power imbalances producing a constant fragmentation of values and collective identities. The work attempts to generate an active disturbance. A red desert, an aseptic almost surgical hemisphere, a hypnotic black hole, these are only some of the universes we can find inside the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto. A sound and video journey capable of continuously challenging sensory perception and opening a passage into contemporary despotism.

5. “The Only True Protest Is Beauty” / Fondazione Dries Van Noten

Cur. Dries Van Noten In Collaboration With Geert Bruloot, Palazzo Pisani Moretta.
“We are interested in beauty not as an answer, but as a question,” state founders Dries Van Noten and Patrick Vangheluwe. The Foundation moves by challenging contemporary superficiality, positioning the viewer in a state of reasoning. This is an invitation to identify a beauty that refuses the tasteless, that seeks an ambiguous, spectral or sacral visual impact. The title comes from Phil Ochs, American songwriter and activist who wrote those words during the Vietnam War. A provocation, not a decoration.
Palazzo Pisani Moretta lends itself through sheer imposition: with an almost institutionalised subordination, one feels participant in a dark passage that opens onto crystalline glimpses of light. Tiepolo frescoes coexist with contemporary ceramics; Comme des Garçons and Christian Lacroix speak to Murano glass and the design of Ettore Sottsass. Art, design and fashion accompany one another without hierarchy, each as co-protagonist. What the Foundation invites us to practice is a search that refuses to stop at the surface of things.

6. “The Ear Is The Eye To The Soul” / Holy See Pavilion

Cur. Cardinal José Tolentino De Mendonça, The Mystical Gardens of the Discalced Carmelites and Santa Maria Ausiliatrice Complex.
The contemporary moment places us constantly in a state of saturation. A continuous stimulation of images and visual input: one quickly grows accustomed to the noise and to the speed with which everything is consumed. But are we still capable of adjusting to slow, meditative thought? This is what the pavilion activates, silently screaming from within the Biennale. In a reality built on conflict and overexposure, the pavilion seems to suggest the necessity of learning again to listen, of recovering that spiritual contact which transcends every external context. The curators invoke the polyphonic profile of Hildegard von Bingen as a possibility of rediscovering the emotional dimension of word and melody. It is in sound, understood as vibration, sensory and emotional stimulation, that the pavilion constructs its most powerful charge. A tension that runs also through the interventions of artists such as Jim Jarmusch, capable of inserting into the exhibition a suspended dimension, far from the logic of the immediately consumable image. In a kind of interior procession, the natural garden becomes a transcendental path. The Holy See has no need to raise its voice, with a melodic whisper it invites the viewer to stop and incline their ear.

7. “Spiral Economy: Charrière And Canova” / Julian Charrière

Julian Charrière / Cur. Chiara Squarcina & Pier Paolo Pancotto, Museo Correr.
At the Museo Correr, a temporal dialogue installs itself, investigating the monumentality of Antonio Canova’s sculptures through the works and video installations of Julian Charrière. What draws attention first is a contrasting dualism: a confrontation that is almost antithetical in chromatic register and visual approach, where everything appears to occupy opposing poles, yet manages to resolve itself into a harmonious exchange. Canova’s works emerge as the archive of a past that constructed an entire identity around the idea of perfection and the permanence of marble. Charrière shifts the gaze and places before us a different role for matter: the mineral studied as an agent of dissolution and transformation, in connection with the natural world and a geological temporality. The same material, marble, is explored through two distant visions whose contrast creates a continuous visual tension: an ongoing dialogue between preservation and dissolution.

8. “We Travel to Know Our Own Geography” / Kuboraum Editions Showcase

Castello 1808.
Kuboraum returns with We Travel to Know Our Own Geography (6–9 May 2026) and the sensation is one of entering a breathing organism, more than an event. For four days Castello 1808, ceases to be a school and becomes a collective body. This is the third time Kuboraum has occupied the Biennale’s inauguration weekend as a succession of collisions. Tianzhuo Chen with Siko Setyanto, KADAPAT and Nova Ruth in Moyang 先祖 & Seaman 漁師 built something resembling a sonic ritual, between myth and matter, an experiment that shifts the methodology of listening. From there everything continues as a series of crossings: Joshua Serafin with Görkem Şen and Pierre Bayet, Ziúr with Kianí del Valle, FRANKIE with Kelman Duran. Each set feels like a mental room. Emiliano Maggi, Cosimo Damiano, Romain Azzaro’s solo performances invite you to participate and let yourself be crossed by a sound built of interlocking parts. What emerges is a geographic path that you must build while losing yourself inside what you are watching and hearing.

9. “Rage Bait” / Eva & Franco Mattes

Cur. Nadim Samman & Luisa Haustein, Presented By Autotelic Foundation, Palazzo Franchetti.
How well do we truly know the dark reality we are submerged in? Rage Bait closes this selection by pushing to an extreme everything that until that moment had only been suggested: a mental glitch, a short circuit of contemporary social systems. We are immersed in a dimension whose obscure foundations appear increasingly artificial, constructed and contaminated. Inside Palazzo Franchetti, Eva & Franco Mattes impose a rupture in the machinery of artificial intelligence through an investigation into the now ambiguous, inhumane and profoundly disturbing relationship we have established with it. The characters of “Italian Brainrot”, in their unsettling reproduction, introduce the theme of psychological fragility and the tendency toward self-destruction, showing how the digital apparatus is today idolised and made absolute. The future seems to move toward a world in which we entrust our salvation to an algorithm that is nothing more than a reworking of the data we ourselves deliver to it. We are trapped in a social loop of which we are simultaneously victims and architects. The human being conforms to the machine while the machine assumes human semblance: a contradiction to which we have grown far too accustomed. What remains authentic? How does one wake from a hallucinated dream of which we are the creators? Rage Bait materialises the question and leaves the fracture open.

10. “Cosmotechnics: Ding Yi as a Planetary Code” / Ding Yi

Ding Yi / Cur. Alfredo Cramerotti & Auronda Scalera, Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Area Scarpa.
In a dialogue between nature and matter, sheltered from the chaos of the Biennale, Cosmotechnics inhabits one of the most identity-defined structures in the city, both historically and architecturally. The Querini Stampalia makes water its strength: Carlo Scarpa’s restoration transformed the acqua alta into a performance. A palazzo renowned for flooding voluntarily at high tide could not but enter into perfect dialogue with the work of Ding Yi, an artist who for decades has placed the gesture of the incision and repetition at the centre of his practice.
The crosses and the + sign that define Ding Yi’s work, so linear in form, so polyhedric in outcome, give life to works profoundly different from one another. The stone steles are not relics: they position themselves as a meditative and manual practice, apparently alienating, yet carrying a connection that extends far beyond the modular gesture. Curators Cramerotti and Scalera, specialists in digital art, find here an unexpected meeting point with matter: anticipating the immaterial world through the artisanal mark, they trigger a reflection on the bridge between two universes.

What Venice Got Right / Biennale 2026

Credits:
Edition: La Biennale di Venezia 2026 / @labiennale
Editor: Maria Abramenko / @mariabramenko
Junior Editor : Annalisa Fabbrucci / @annalisa_fabbrucci

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