by Alison Hugill // May 14, 2026
Last weekend, the Biennale of Art officially opened in Venice. The national pavilions and main exhibition, curated by Koyo Kouoh under the theme ‘In Minor Keys,’ are also accompanied by a rich selection of collateral exhibitions and events across the city. Below are some of the highlights that we’ve selected for the coming Biennale months.
Chiesa di Sant’Antonin
Gabrielle Goliath: ‘Elegy’
Exhibition: May 5-July 31, 2026
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Salizada S. Antonin, 3477, 30122 Venice, Italy, click here for map
In January 2026, South African artist Gabrielle Goliath’s pavilion for the Venice Biennale was cancelled by the country’s Minister of Sport, Arts and Culture, after Goliath refused to remove references to Gaza from her acclaimed long-term performance project ‘Elegy’ (2015-ongoing). Despite this all-too-familiar political scandal, the multi-channel video installation was mounted off-site in the Chiesa di Sant’Antonin, as an independent exhibition, realized in partnership with Ibraaz and other supporters.
The installation, which is described as a “call to mourn,” is one of the most moving works on view during the Biennale this year. The show is made up of three newly realized video works that document staged performances of Goliath’s ‘Elegy’ across South Africa and the world. In them, a group of seven women singers collectively sing a single tone for the course of an hour; as one singer falters, the other steps in. The recent performances shown here are responses to ongoing racial and sexualized violence, and commemorate, in turn, South African student Ipeleng Christine Moholane, two murdered Nama women ancestors and Palestinian poet Heba Abunada, killed in Gaza in October 2023. To accompany the last suite of ‘Elegy,’ the artist commissioned an experimental ghazal, written by South African poet Maneo Mohale. The fifth and final screen in the suite remains empty, as a “specter of genocide” and a call for future performances.
It’s hard to imagine this piece presented in the crowded setting of the Arsenale, where the South African pavilion normally stands. In the small church, one can experience it fully in a space of refuge and calm, away from the Biennale’s over-saturation of artworks. Alongside the exhibition, Goliath invited poets, scholars and artists to take part in a public presentation during the preview of the Biennale, including a reading by Eyal Weizman and Emily Jacir of ‘Broken Ghazal, Before Balfour’ by George Abraham. The ‘Elegy Reader,’ co-produced with Ibraaz Publishing, was launched at the event, and brings together texts from South Africa, Palestine, Lebanon, Iran, Sudan, Namibia, Haiti and beyond.
Gabrielle Goliath: ‘Elegy,’ 2026, installation view in Chiesa di Sant’Antonin // Photo by Anna Russ
Lithuanian Pavilion
Eglė Budvytytė: ‘animism sings anarchy’
Exhibition: May 9-Nov. 22, 2026
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Fucina del Futuro, Calle S. Lorenzo 5063/B, 30122 Venice, Italy , click here for map
I was first introduced to Eglė Budvytytė’s work almost a decade ago, through her performance ‘Liquid Power Has No Shame’ at the Lofoten International Art Festival (LIAF) in 2017. Now, in the off-site Lithuanian Pavilion in Venice’s Castello neighborhood, I experience the profound continuity of her practice. On Lofoten, performers probed the coastal landscape, becoming one with the moss-covered rocks and local kelp. Here, the embodied research proceeds almost seamlessly.
Budvytytė’s three-channel film installation ‘animism sings anarchy’ is inspired by Lithuanian anthropologist and archeologist Marija Gimbutas’ studies of Neolithic matrilineal animist societies and shot at the Museo delle Civiltà and near Grotta Scaloria, a Neolithic water-cult site. Budvytytė transforms archaeological research into a poetic, performative exploration of movement, ritual and altered states. Through museum interiors and cave-filled coastlines, bodies appear in an incessant state of agitation, shaking and quivering as if moved by something beyond themselves. Replicas of anthropomorphic deities, including 3D printed figurines and photocopies, become devotional focal points for their trembling gestures, drawing viewers into their hypnotic state.
Eglė Budvytytė: ‘animism sings anarchy,’ 2026, installation view for Lithuanian Pavilion in Venice // Photo by Anna Russ
Estonian Pavilion
Merike Estna: ‘The House of Leaking Sky’
Exhibition: May 9-Nov. 22, 2026
estonianpavilion.com
Calle S. Domenico, 1285, 30122 Venice, Italy, click here for map
Just outside the Giardini, in an unassuming local community center off Via Garibaldi, Estonian artist Merike Estna has set up her studio for the duration of the Biennale. Here, Estna transforms painting into a live, durational performance with ‘The House of Leaking Sky.’ Beginning with a blank canvas and an initial act of pouring paint onto the floor, she paints daily in public view, gradually building a monumental 22-canvas work. Collaborating with fashion designer Lilli Jahilo, Estna incorporates specially designed garments into the performance, creating an aesthetics of artistic labor and evoking, more clearly than most other pavilions, the Biennale’s curatorial call to attune to the “minor keys”—the everyday practices of care, endurance, repetition and reproductive labor that often go unnoticed.
Having moved to Venice with her family for this work, Estna also foregrounds motherhood in the pavilion, as well as the visibility of women artists historically excluded from recognition, considering figures such as Marietta Robusti Tintoretta and Lavinia Fontana, so-called “pittore senza opera” (painters without recognized works), whose artistic practices were constrained by patriarchal systems. Designed in collaboration with architect Diogo Passarinho and the studio D_P_S, the pavilion evolves alongside the paintings, integrating canvases, painted ceramic floors and studio tools into the exhibition space.
Merike Estna: ‘The House of Leaking Sky,’ 2026, installation view at Estonian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale // Courtesy of CCA, photo by Agne Raceviciute
Irish Pavilion
Isabel Nolan: ‘Dreamshook’
Exhibition: May 9-Nov. 22, 2026
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Campo de la Tana, 2169, 30122 Venice, Italy, click here for map
For this year’s Irish Pavilion in the Arsenale, Isabel Nolan presents ‘Dreamshook,’ an exhibition exploring dream states, uncertainty and the fragile boundary between imagination and reality. The title describes the destabilizing sensation of waking from a dream, when a sense of possibility still lingers. Drawing parallels between present politics and the upheavals of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance—periods shaped by plague, war and technological change, ‘Dreamshook’ is a vibrant yet haunting installation of hand-tufted tapestry, drawing and sculpture.
Central to the exhibition is the figure of Aldo Manuzio (aka Aldus Manutius), the influential Renaissance printer and publisher based in Venice, who revolutionized reading through portable books and edited classical texts. Nolan uses his ideals of humanism and intellectual exchange to reflect on contemporary crises. Large tapestries such as ‘Aldus Dreams of a Plentiful Supply of Good Books’ (2026) and ‘Dreamshook’ (2026) combine Renaissance imagery with surreal forms, while her sculpture ‘Oh!’ (2026) captures an uncanny stillness-in-motion. Nolan presents the surreal scenography of ‘Dreamshook’ as an ambivalent meditation on European cultural inheritance, balancing admiration with critique while searching for hope and humanity amid contemporary uncertainty.
Isabel Nolan: ‘Dreamshook,’ 2026, installation view at the Pavilion of Ireland at the 61st International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia // Photo by Mark Blower, courtesy of the artist and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin
Bvlgari Pavilion
Lotus L. Kang: ‘The face of desire is loss’
Exhibition: May 9-Nov. 22, 2026
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Spazio Esedra, Giardini della Biennale, Calle Giazzo, 30122 Venice, Italy, click here for map
Canadian artist Lotus L. Kang was selected by Bvlgari as the inaugural artist for its pavilion in the Giardini this year, which marks the beginning of a partnership with the Biennale that will extend into 2030. Known for her immersive installations combining sculpture, photography and site-responsive environments, Kang has created a major new installation here, which examines time as layered, fluid and non-linear, continuing her ongoing interest in processes of becoming.
Kang has cloaked the façade of the Spazio Esedra building with 35mm film shot in Korean mud flats, turning it into a translucent filter that alters the light and atmosphere of the space. Inside, a series of sculptures—including plaster-cast birds and dried roots hanging from what appear to be large, steel steamers—are semi-hidden throughout the space, playfully punctuating the installation of falling curtains of unfixed photographic film, suspended from steel joists. Kang refers to the works as “skins”: the film will remain sensitive to its environment for the duration of the Biennale, its organic hues developing in response to the light and humidity of the space. With the title, ‘The face of desire is loss,’ Kang references the poet Lara Mimosa Montes’ book ‘Thresholes,’ and speaks to the grief inherent to the experience of pursuing and achieving ones desires: the loss of the pursuit itself. This liminality forms the core of her practice, as the sculptural objects she creates materially reflect this state of becoming.
Lotus L. Kang: ‘The face of desire is loss,’ 2026, installation view in the Bvlgari Pavilion, 61st Venice Biennale // Photo by Andrea Rossetti
