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The Venice Biennale 2026 brings Morocco's first official pavilion and Syria's long-awaited return to the event, from threads stitched by Palestinian refugees to evocative Gulf soundscapes – here are the Arab world and South Asia's most compelling presentations at this year's Venice Biennale.
The 61st Venice Biennale is set to open to the public on 9th May. Its main exhibition was set into motion by curator Koyo Kouoh who passed before she could see her vision brought to life, but its theme, In Minor Keys, comes carrying a particular weight in the circumstances under which it opens. "In Minor Keys," she wrote, is made up of "sequences of exhilarating journeys that address the sensate and the affective" – an invitation to slow down, to feel rather than process, to dream rather than simply read and to tune into what she called "the lower frequencies" at a moment when the world is very loud.
She continued that these minor keys refuse "orchestral bombast" and instead come alive in "the quiet tones, the hums, the consolations" – and such a sentiment could not ring more true for many parts of the Arab world and their surrounding regions across Asia, which in recent months and years have continued to be impacted by conflict on many scales. This year though, through their national pavilions and collateral events, voices from the Gulf nations to South Asia have turned not to those challenges (both in contemporary contexts and historically) but to what survives them, celebrating stories of their heritage, land, memory and craft.
Stretching across the Giardini and the Arsenale and stretching outward into the palazzos threaded across the lagoon city, here are the pavilions and collaterals you can’t miss this year at the Venice Biennale 2026.
Egypt
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Armen Agop, known for his sculptures and paintings that explore the relationship between the physical and spiritual realms, is representing Egypt with a meditative showcase. Amid the buzz of the biennale, and indeed the world around it, the exhibition is intended as a space for listening and reflection.
The atmosphere that Agop has created with Silence Pavilion: Between the Intangible and the Tangible mirrors the restraint of his works, too, in which he favours forms that hold their shape without directing interpretation too tightly. Across his practice, the artist and sculptor has continued to look inwards to his Egyptian heritage, including the regions’ sculptural traditions, desert timelessness, and Mediterranean cultural landscape bridging East and West, to connect ancient traditions with contemporary practice. @armen.agop
Location: Giardini
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UAE
Led by Bana Kattan with assistance from curator Tala Nassar, the UAE pavilion’s group exhibition titled Washwasha (“whispering,” in Arabic), conjures the evolving sonic cultural landscapes of the Gulf nation, from its land to its sea.
It takes the perspective of six artists – Mays Albaik, Farah Al Qasimi, Alaa Edris, Lamya Gargash, Jawad Al Malhi and Taus Makhacheva – and considers the idea of the voice. It draws on oral histories and everyday speech to reflect on ideas of social or infrastructural shifts across the country, particularly following how language has moved across the communities that have come and gone. @nationalpavilionuae
Location: Arsenale
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Lebanon
Titled Don’t Get Me Wrong, the Pavilion of Lebanon features a large-scale installation by the artist Nabil Nahas. It spans 45 metres and is composed of 26 acrylic-painted panels, each three metres high, which are arranged side by side to form a continuous frieze that visitors move along a sequence of shifting compositions.
Nahas brings together geometric abstraction, figuration, repeating patterns, and references to both Islamic and Western visual traditions, alongside the recurring motifs drawn from nature that the artist is recognised for, including trees such as the cedar and olive. The installation extends concerns that have run through his practice over several decades between Lebanon and the United States, particularly the relationship between structure, repetition, and natural form.
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With curation by Nada Ghandour and an immersive scenography designed by EAST Architecture Studio, the pavilion reflects on Lebanon as a site of confluence, shaped by communities that have lived alongside one another for centuries. It also draws on the country’s layered histories, where Greco-Roman, Byzantine, Judeo-Christian, and Islamic influences sit within the same cultural field. @nabilrnahas
Location: Arsenale
Palestine
While remaining outside of the Biennale’s national pavilion structure, Palestine’s presence is organised this year, once again, by the Palestine Museum US. Their collateral exhibition titled “_____________” * Gaza – No Words – See the Exhibit brings together around 100 tatreez embroideries produced by Palestinian women, some diasporic and many working from refugee camps across Lebanon, Jordan and the West Bank. They have intricately stitched together a dense field of patterns carrying both individual and shared histories into what they call the Gaza Genocide Tapestry.
Tatreez has long been used as a form of cultural expression, and it appears here as a way of holding memory in the face of the ongoing harsh realities of destruction and displacement, with each piece tied to the conditions under which it was made. @palestinemuseum.us
Location: Palazzo Mora, Strada Nova, Cannaregion 3659
Morocco
Morocco’s inaugural pavilion weaves and knots a homage to the country’s centuries-old craft traditions. Curated by Meriem Berrada and conceived by artist Amina Agueznay, Asetta is an immersive showcase built from suspended bands – almost 200 of them – that extend through the space in repeated vertical strips, each carrying different interventions in weaving, embroidery and metalwork.
Here, Agueznay, who trained as an architect, worked closely with a network of artisans across different regions of Morocco to bring the installation to life, grounding it in the transmission of craft knowledge and on the threshold as a spatial idea in Moroccan vernacular architecture, carried here into the way visitors move through the suspended structure at close range. @aminaagueznay
Location: Arsenale
Syria
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Syria’s much-anticipated return to the Venice Biennale comes with The Tower Tomb of Palmyra, an immersive step inside the lost funerary architecture of the ancient city of Palmyra. Artist Sara Shamma, working with curator Yuko Hasegawa, creates a spatial reconstruction of these tower tombs, many of which were destroyed by ISIS during the civil war, alongside hundreds of funerary portraits that were looted or dispersed.
The installation – holding both cultural loss and personal memory – draws directly from Shamma’s long-standing figurative practice, where painting begins from the psychological weight of lived experience and the attempt to render what sits beneath the surface of a face. Here, the focus on portraiture extends into space, with painted presences entering the architecture of the tomb itself. @sara.shamma.artist
Location: Università IUAV Venezia, Cotonificio, Dorsoduro 2196
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Turandot
Turandot: To the Daughters of the East is a collateral exhibition curated by Dr Ziba Ardalan, bringing together eleven women artists whose practices move across Central Asia, West Asia and surrounding regions, and whose work sits at different distances from the historical and political framing of the “East” the title refers to. Its timing is poignant, too, arriving at a Biennale where Iran is notably absent from the national pavilion programme following its withdrawal amid ongoing conflict, though several Iranian artists appear within the exhibition.
The exhibition takes its title from Turandot, a figure whose earliest traces lie in Persian literary tradition before moving through Central Asian retellings and later European and operatic reinterpretations. That shifting history becomes a way of holding together a group of different practices (featuring artists from Iran, Afghanistan, Turkey, Lebanon, Pakistan and Central Asia) placed in proximity through overlapping questions of memory, myth and inherited narrative when engaging with the fractured histories of place and belonging across these regions. @parasolunit
Location: Palazzo Franchetti, San Marco 2847
Saudi Arabia
At the biennale’s previous edition, Dana Awartani’s installation mourning the Palestinian lives lost during the mass destruction of Gaza was a highlight of the main exhibition. This year, she returns to Venice with the Saudi Arabian pavilion with a project similarly dedicated to honouring cultural histories destroyed by human conflict.
Curated by Antonia Carver, who is assisted by Hafsa Alkhudairi, May Your Tears Never Dry, You Who Weep Over Stones takes the form of a large-scale floor installation built from tens of thousands of hand-formed clay bricks arranged into mosaic patterns, with narrow walkways running through them. The motifs are drawn from more than 20 cultural heritage sites across the Arab world that have been damaged or destroyed through conflict, spanning mosques, churches, synagogues, and secular buildings. Instead of focusing on any singular site, Awartani brings these fragments together into a shared surface that holds multiple histories at once, conceived to shift and crack over time due to its natural materiality. @danaawartanistudio, @antoniamcarver
Location: Arsenale
Qatar
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On the site of its upcoming new permanent national pavilion, Qatar’s presence this year takes the form of a group exhibition and a multi-part project led by Rirkrit Tiravanija and curated by Tom Eccles and Ruba Katrib. Untitled 2026 (a gathering of remarkable people) is organised around a tent-like structure that hosting various contributions – including a film by Sophia Al-Maria, live and improvised performances arranged by Tarek Atoui, a large-scale sculptural work by Alia Farid, and a culinary programme by Fadi Kattan.
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Drawing on various cultural forms of assembly across the Arab world and modelled after Qatari gathering spaces, the temporary structure functions as an open site for encounter, activating the pavilion through a shifting multi-media programme and use for the duration of the biennale.
Location: Giardini
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Oman
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In Omani culture, silver horse adornment, or Al-zanaah, is shared between rider and horse as an act of mutual recognition. That relationship forms the basis of Oman’s pavilion, presented by Haitham Al Busafi, who serves as both its lead artist and curator.
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Titled Zīnah (“adornment” in Arabic), the installation is atmospheric and immersive, extending this tradition into a spatial environment, installed across a sand-covered floor beneath suspended metal elements that glisten in the darkness of the interior. The visitor enters the work directly, moving across the sand and setting the forms into motion. Meanwhile, sound is generated through these interactions, with each step subtly altering the space over time. @haithamnow_
Location: Arsenale
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Pakistan
Pakistan’s pavilion marks the country’s second participation at the Biennale, with Punj•AB: A Sublime Terrain, a solo exhibition by Faiza Butt curated by Beatriz Cifuentes Feliciano. The project centres on Punjab, a region the artist is closely tied to, and one that in the history of the Subcontinent has been repeatedly reshaped over centuries by movement across it (be it of people, goods or empires) from the time of the Indus Valley Civilisation to now. That history is taken into consideration as the pavilion returns to how it continues to shape the region’s present-day social and material conditions.
The installation is built around a series of large-scale textile works suspended within the space, extending traditional weaving practices into vertical, immersive forms. Drawing on techniques such as dhurrie weaving, ikat and hand-spun cotton, Butt brings together architectural motifs and recurring patterns associated with the region’s visual culture and material production, allowing them to move across multiple media – painting, sculpture and video – and between rural and industrial sites in Punjab, tracing both everyday life and the systems that shape it. @faizaaugust7, @thebeatrizcifuentes
Location: Ex Farmacia Solveni, Dorsoduro 993-994
India
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India returns to the Biennale for the first time since 2019 with Geographies of Distance: remembering home, a group exhibition curated by Amin Jaffer. Five artists working across different regions of India present their perspectives as they each approach the idea of “home” and reflect on how rapid urban and infrastructural transformation, alongside long histories of migration and movement, continues to affect how home is understood and experienced.
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Across the works, the artists Alwar Balasubramaniam, Sumakshi Singh, Ranjani Shettar, Asim Waqif and Skarma Sonam Tashi make use of organic local materials such as soil, bamboo, thread and organic matter – each of which carries associations with different regions and ways of making, and are used here to register changing relationships between landscape, construction and lived experience. @indiainvenice
Location: Arsenale
The biennale will run from Saturday 9 May to Sunday 22 November 2026.
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