In the run-up to the 2017 Presidential Elections in Kenya, Michael Armitage attended a major rally by the opposition party in the capital, Nairobi, in part to better understand the relationship between political leaders and their citizens.

The intense and unexpected experiences led to about 18 months of election series paintings exploring what he saw. The body of work includes The Promise of Change (2018), which is featured in a major survey of Armitage’s work at the Palazzo Grassi - Pinault Collection in Venice, titled the same.

'I think I was drawn to the title because it’s open ended. And at that time, it kind of felt very apt for particularly with an opposition [party] that it’s the promise of change that you’re getting with them,' the Kenyan-British artist tells Wallpaper*. 'And then obviously that can work both ways that maybe it’s a promise unfulfilled and as well as the potential for things to get better. That ultimately, it’s also an optimistic idea that with change and reflection, things can improve but it is a promise as opposed to a guarantee.'

Curated by Jean-Marie Gallais, a curator at the Pinault Collection, the exhibition features 45 paintings by the artist made over a decade. The work on view explores themes such as socio-political issues, violence, identity, migration, and memory, often focusing on Kenya and, at times, the world.

'The idea was to have the show kind of unfold like a journey in a way. Starting with figures rooted in real-life stories and day-to-day narratives. Either real people or situations that I have seen first-hand like ‘necklacing’ [extrajudicial torture and or murder] to reflections on migration and the migration route through the Mediterranean to exploring ideas of politics. And the idea was to then progress through myths to landscapes and kind of broader reflections on experience, life and ideas around that,' shares Armitage.

In addition to the Palazzo Grassi show, Armitage’s work has been seen around the world, including at the Venice Biennale, Cape Town’s Norval Foundation, South London Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It is also in collections such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, the Kunstmuseum Basel, the National Galleries of Scotland, Pinault Collection in Paris and the Tate in the United Kingdom.

Armitage was born in 1984 in Nairobi to a Kenyan mother and an English father, and was exposed to art from Kenya and East Africa growing up in the city. The artist attended the Slade School of Fine Art and the Royal Academy Schools, and in 2021 was elected a Royal Academician of Painting by the Royal Academy of Art, all in London.

As his election paintings show, the artist draws from a range of sources, including contemporary events and cinema, for his large-scale oil paintings on Lubugo bark cloth, made from tree bark by the Buganda people in Uganda, which he first encountered in a Nairobi tourist market, sold as a souvenir in 2012.

Deciding to create an artwork can sometimes take on a life of its own and/or take a little while, Armitage discloses. For the Kenya election series, he initially wanted to create a single artwork exploring the relationship between politicians and citizens. Thereafter, he decided to experience that relationship firsthand by attending political rallies.

'I saw very different things being on the ground. How I had seen and reflected on it when not part of it changed what I was doing,' reminisces Armitage. Those experiences transformed his initial thinking from just one painting to a body of work.

An idea becoming a painting can even take over a decade. At about 12 years old, the artist saw a man who had been stripped naked and a car tyre hanging around his neck, while trying to escape from a mob who were after him. To a very young Armitage, the scene looked funny because of his understanding at the time. Years later, an older Armitage realised that the mob were trying to hurt or kill the individual who was likely a thief. He explored the issue later in Necklacing (2016).

And, about a decade ago, the artist heard the song ‘Lampedusa’ by artists Toumani and Sidiki Diabate about the 2013 Lampedusa migrant shipwreck in which more than a dozen people lost their lives trying to journey to Europe, inspiring him for the first time to want to paint about the issue, which didn’t turn out so well. Years later, while in the United Kingdom amid the escalation of hateful rhetoric and policies against refugees and migrants, Armitage felt he was ready and decided to explore the issue through his work, including Don’t Worry There Will Be More (2024), which depicts two people carrying a weary-looking individual.

'We carry around these things in our pocket. [We] can open up our phones and see images which is how the paintings were made,' says Armitage. 'These are images and stories that we carry around with us whether or not we know it. And that we choose to or not to look at them is a form of implication. I felt like that was an approach that I could personally take towards this story. Not one of trying to speak for somebody else but try to speak to something.'

The Promise of Change is on view at Palazzo Grassi - Pinault Collection until 10 January 2027

At home in Brighton, Stanley Donwood is looking forward to looking forwards.

The artist is still sorting the screeds of archive pieces that have been returned to him after January’s conclusion of ‘This Is What You Get’, Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum’s sprawling, five-month retrospective gathering his and Thom Yorke’s visual work together for Radiohead. ‘My studio is just full of boxes and stuff,' says the puckishly energetic artist, 57, a friend and collaborator of Yorke’s since their late 1980s days together at Exeter University. 'It’s really difficult. You have to move everything to move anything. Phew, I’ll get there in the end.'

There has been, too, the work on ‘Motion Picture House’, a Radiohead installation based partly on the visuals Donwood created for the paired albums, Kid A (2000) and Amnesiac (2001). Having launched at California’s Coachella festival in April, it’s currently showing in Brooklyn.

'I haven’t seen it for real. I only saw sketches, mock-ups, then fancy computer fly-throughs of virtual environments. It’s its own little world,' he explains, born out of 'that digital exhibition-slash-game that’s not a game [we made] with Epic during the whole Coronavirus time. It’s the film of that, in this quite out-there installation with giant stick figures.'

Then there was the merchandise Donwood created for Radiohead’s surprise, don’t-call-it-a-comeback tour in autumn 2025. As it happens, when Donwood’s and Zoom call with me clicks into life, I’m wearing my T-shirt from the first show in Madrid. Awks-not-awks.

'Nice to see one in the wild!' says Donwood, chirpily. And nice to have a bespoke T-shirt specifically from that gig, I say. 'Yes, I do like doing different shirts for different shows. I was going to do that for every show when they did a tour some years ago. Then they expanded the tour. It became a nightmare of endlessly making new T-shirts, with different trees on them.'

Donwood is just back from Venice and the 2026 Biennale, returning the slow way with his partner. 'We got the train to Bologna, then walked to Florence. It was a lovely thing to do, to get all the Venice stuff out of my head.'

All the 'Venice stuff' was, at least in part, the excitement around ‘No Go Elevator (not without no keycard)’, Donwood and Yorke’s first exhibition, staged with Tin Man Art, outside the UK. It’s a collection of 15 pieces, ink on Japanese paper, that combine the pair’s mutually completed drawings and paintings with assemblies of the word scree that Donwood found in Yorke’s notebooks.

To highlight one image shown alongside this story, titled I have read, understood & agree to the terms, the text that appears underneath runs thus:

'Let me refresh your glass! Go ask the unicorns! The mad king… no happy ending… Throwing knives reflect what you have in mind. There’s a tranquilliser dart for you; keep a left turn at the exit. Pounded against unseen rocks without mercy, the wind and the tide, the ghost wide-eyed. (But with today’s new air-conditioning methods and extensive satellite connectivity.)'

And then, underneath that, 'The thisness of thatness.'

Wallpaper*: So, Mr Donwood: what’s the this-and-that that made the Venice Biennale the right place for you and Mr Yorke to ‘tour’ your work for the first time?

Stanley Donwood: Ahhhhhhh…. The right place? I don’t know what the right place would be. But this is a really tiny exhibition in a really small space: three metres high, four metres wide and five metres long. It’s basically a small box. But it’s got a posh door. It must have been once the entrance to quite a big townhouse. But it’s just the lobby, small and plain. And Venice as a place to do a show? Why not? There are loads of people who are into art there. Let’s hit them up.

W*: When we spoke last summer, Thom said you would be getting back into the painting studio in the autumn. Are these the works that resulted?

SD: Yes. We did a load of work in October, then more earlier this year. It was all done over the course of two months in total. It was nice to just paint. I’m a bit fed up with computers. I mean, they’re kind of useful. But I’m very bored with computers and the internet. I was really keen in the 1990s and early 2000s on everything digital. But it's soured a bit for me. The unintended consequences of the internet, really. Who’d have thought it would lead to a massive global rise in Nazis? I didn’t see that coming. I thought it was gonna be great!

W*: These painting studios – where are they?

SD: Some of it was here [in Brighton, UK]. But also, Thom’s got a new studio, in London town. So I’ve been going up to work there. We do a lot of work in the same studio, but also over the phone – taking photos of things and saying [to each other]: ‘What should I do next? I’m stuck.’

W*: With this exhibition, were the materials – ink on Japanese paper – a founding principle of what these pieces would be?

SD: When we were doing the paintings that became the artwork for [Yorke’s side-project] The Smile, back in 2022, we were using tempera paint, which is very beautiful. And at the same time, we got interested in Japanese painting and how that’s done. So we ended up using this ink made from walnuts, and the paper is Japanese, made from another tree, the bark of the mulberry. It has lovely, long fibres for making paper.

W*: The image that’s titled I have read, understood and agree to the terms: I’m describing that as seven blobby people on their knees, with their hands behind their backs, looking like… they’re about to be hanged. What was the inspo?

SD: With swapping the paintings back and forth, we do the drawing in the evening, usually in front of the telly. Draw a bit, pass the drawing over to the other guy, and it goes backwards and forwards like that. So Thom drew the sitting figures. And I drew those things coming out of their heads. They’re not supposed to be [being] hanged. But I guess they do look a bit like that. Depends on what’s in your mind, really. I think they were supposed to be thoughts coming out of their heads. But now you mention it, they do look a bit sinister.

W*: Then we have Numbers That You’ve Never Seen – an open-topped, stepped, Mayan temple, I’m going to suggest.

SD: There are loads of paintings in that style. They’re like ziggurat structures. There are so many little reasons things are like what they are. But I find if I try to explain it, it sounds like a garbled load of nonsense. Because by the time [the work] comes out, it is a bit garbled.

With these drawings, they’re not really… considered. They’re not planned. They don’t have a start point and an endpoint. They’re the result of an evolving and unfinished thought process. They’re partly from half-remembered dreams. Mis-remembered dreams, really.

So the pictures are one thing. Then there are the words which go with them, which I think are half of the work…

W*: Ah yes. How do you come by those?

SD: Those come from going through Thom’s [writings]. When Thom’s working on music, he collects loads of words. He’s like a park worker with a leaf-blower, but he’s just blowing loads of words. He ends up with this massive load of words that he then picks through to find lyrics.

So I got all of the words he had, all these pages of writing – well, words really. You can’t call it writing because it isn’t yet, it’s the raw material. So I went through it, picked out what I liked, reordered it, sent that back to Thom and he reordered it again. And from the reordering of the reordering, we extracted sequences of words that looked like titles of paintings.

W*: Was this alongside doing the paintings?

SD: This happened at a different time to making the drawings and paintings. So you’ve got this picture and you apply words to it. You give it a title, then you put some other words where normally a painting in a museum would have a description underneath of what it is.

So it makes a different thing. We might have been thinking one thing when we’re painting a picture, another thing when we’re putting the words together. But when you look at the picture and read the words at the same time, we’ve made another thing that we didn’t plan.

That’s as close to a… ah… process as I can get. It sounds awful! Maybe it’ll sound better when you write it down.

W*: We’ll let Wallpaper* readers be the judge of that… Anyway, the exhibition title: ‘No Go Elevator (not without no keycard)’. Thom’s said that that’s a reference to a time he was ‘absolutely fucking wasted in some terrible hotel in Miami and the key card wouldn’t let me in’. Any further intel on that?

SD: I don’t know. I wasn’t there at the time when he lost his keycard. He’s probably had quite a lot of keycards in his time. But, yeah, it’s the sort of thing you can lose, I guess. Actually, I was in a hotel in Zurich the other day and you had to use your keycard to get up in the lift. And I did have a keycard and the elevator was going. I felt like a success.

W*: What might that title convey?

SD: Again, I don’t know. We’ve got this bizarre, meaningless title, but it just sounded quite nice. It looked great as a website too. So we’ve got nogoelevator.com. Which for some reason no one had. It’s a brilliant dot.com. And on that, each picture has its words associated with it.

Weirdly, even though the words and the pictures don’t mean anything by themselves, it still took us ages, and a lot of toing and froing, to work out which title goes with each drawing. I don’t know why. But once they were stuck, we thought: ‘Well, of course that picture's called that. What else could it be called?’

I like that sort of thing. The accidental creation of sense from nonsense.

W*: The exhibition runs until early June. Will you then bring it to the UK?

SD: Oooh! I hadn’t thought of that. I… don’t know. I’ll mention it to my agent. But that’s a really good idea. Because we wouldn’t need much space, so the rent would be quite cheap. We could use a Portakabin or shipping container. We don’t even need that. We could do it in a shed to be honest.

W*: Any other new projects with Thom?

SD: We’re going to try to do some more painting soon. But for me and Thom, it’s been a lot of backward looking. There was the 20th anniversary of OK Computer in 2017. Then all this Kid A and Amnesiac stuff. The show at the Ashmolean. It’s like, everything’s back there [cranes head behind him]. You get a crick in your neck after a while. Looking through old things, I don’t think it’s very healthy. So I just want to do new stuff – not on the computer. Computer not OK!

‘No Go Elevator (not without no keycard)’ is at Castello 2432, Fondamenta dei Penini, 30122, Venice until 7 June 2026, veneziatiamo.eu

‘I've always been influenced by Italy’s ecclesiastical spaces. I'm sure it's in my work already,’ says Barry X Ball upon the opening of ‘The Shape of Time’, in Venice’s church and monastery, The Basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore. ‘People tell me my work here looks site-specific – it all came together.’

Ball’s canonical works do look right at home in the church, located on an island of the same name. It is an appropriate marking of the latest initiative from the non-profit branch of the monastic Benedictine community, who work to strengthen the bonds between church and contemporary art by fostering relationships with artists.

The island, open to all, is a beautiful haven in Venice. It is easy to see why Ball’s work, situated in the basilica’s arresting architectural spaces originally designed by Italian Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio, seems site-specific, with imposing sculptures and works cast in a textural prism of materials referencing a classical tradition.

For New York-based Ball, this recontextualisation is a natural part of a practice that has spanned a mix of mediums and methods, and has seen him juxtapose a classic figurativism with a contemporary methodology, uniting raw material with 3D digital-scanning and printing, computer-controlled milling and hand-carving.

‘This church is an incredible example of balance, symmetry, organised space and beautiful mathematical principles,’ says Ball on why he was drawn to exhibiting in the space. ‘It is a service model for civic architecture in my country – Thomas Jefferson admired Andrea Palladio above all architects, and his principles extended to the civic architecture of Washington, DC, and also, at the same time, to Britain. They were then linked to the founding of the world's first democracy in America. At our highest point, we had high aims. We've fallen far from a lot of things in our country of late, but I feel like it's my job as an American to respect this place as a work of art.’

Ball’s work is in dialogue with this deep historicity. ‘The Shape of Time’ unites 23 sculptures in the space, many of which are being shown for the first time. They include the magnificent Pope Saint John Paul II – 12 years in the making and crafted from solid silver and 18ct gold, it cuts a striking silhouette against the basilica’s wooden stalls. It is a classical foil for other works, such as Mirrored Buddha Herms, which mingle both the ancient and contemporary, the Catholic and the Buddhist in stone Buddhas, poised in elegant golden plinths which almost resemble a lunar landing module. ‘The world divides into those who think it's landing, and those who think it’s taking off,’ says Ball.

Ball is adept at utilising modern technology to bring these histories to life, best epitomised in Pietà, which pays homage to Michelangelo's unfinished Pietà Rondanini sculpture. Ball and his team 3D-scanned the work in 2011, and now it is cast in Iranian onyx, its proportions streamlined into a seamless strobilated form.

'I was raised as a fundamentalist Christian Protestant, but I was really affected by my contact with the Catholic Church through my many years of studying art in Italy,' Ball adds. 'I've been touched by the church's interaction with me, and how warm they've been in inviting me here.'

‘Barry X Ball – The Shape of Time' at Basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, until 22 November 2026

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With less than a year to go, speculation on the Venice Architecture Biennale 2027 is ramping up; who will the newly appointed co-curators choose to participate in their main show? And who is poised to win the biennale's coveted awards?

One question was answered today - that of the theme. At a press conference in Venice today, it was announced by Venice biennale president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco and the curators Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu that next year's festival will be centred on: 'Do Architecture: for the possibility of coexistence facing a real reality.'

To expand on this and keep you up to date with news as they come, our biennial, ultimate guide for the world's biggest festival of the built environment is now here, designed to follow rolling coverage, breaking news and, of course, everything you need to know about exhibits, participants and logistics.

At the recent press conference, which revealed the theme for 2027, the two curators emphasised ideas of peace and coexistence in their speech, drawing attention to action and a deep connection with existing environments - both nature and human-made contexts.

They jointly said: 'If somebody asks us what the most beautiful architecture is, we always say the garden, especially the Chinese garden.' This draws on metaphorical uses of the notion of a garden too; they continue to explain, seeing gardens as a symbol of peace. It is about 'an architecture of coexistence. A gentle residence in a violent world. We hope for world peace,' the architects concluded.

Welcome to our Venice Architecture Biennale 2027 ultimate guide

Following architect Carlo Ratti's much-discussed Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 and its theme, 'Intelligens,' and 2024 RIBA Gold Medal winner Lesley Lokko's 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale's influential focus on Africa as 'The Laboratory of the Future', the pressure is on for the next event, which marks the seminal 20th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice. Here is what we know.

The Venice Architecture Biennale 2027 co-curators

In November 2025, the biennale announced Chinese architecture duo Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu, founders of Hangzhou-based Amateur Architecture Studio, as the joint curators of the upcoming 2027 Venice Architecture Biennale. The pair have led their studio collaboratively since 1997, and also teach and are a respected voice within the architecture community.

They are also no strangers to the biennale, having taken part in the main show in 2006, 2010 (when they received the Special Mention for their project 'Decay of a Dome') and 2016.

The prolific architects are behind works such as the Xiangshan Campus of China Academy of Art, the Tiles Hill in Hangzhou, the renovation of Wencun Village, the Lin’An Historic Museum, and the Xi'an Opera House and Concert Hall. Wang Shu won the Pritzker Prize in 2012 and has served as a judge for the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2013.

‘'Conceptual experiments driven to extremes are often divorced from reality, and over-commercialisation tends to [make for] merely popular and short-lived [projects]. [There is a] breaking away from the connection with the real place. It will lead to the death of architecture. Architecture becomes a kind of delusional expression about the future,’ the architects said at their announcement as curators, hinting perhaps at themes they are keen to explore through their show.

The Venice Architecture Biennale 2027 theme: 'Do Architecture'

Much like every biennale iteration, the curated main show revolves around a key theme – from the very first Venice Architecture Biennale in 1980, centred on Paolo Portoghesi's 'The Presence of the Past', to last year's 'Intelligens' which explored the relations, common points and inspiration to be found in the natural and the artificial.

As a response, perhaps, to last year's imaginative speculations and experiments that brought together futuristic technology and themes of science, Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu turn the spotlight this year to doing, action and practice, focusing on not speculative, but hands-on building, bringing notions of natural materials and tactility into the discussion.

Wang Shu said at the theme announcement's press conference: 'The future is full of uncertainty. Overly conceptual experiments are often detached from reality, and in order to survive, we need rapid change. Among the world's crises, the one between nature and human-made construction is the most profound. This does not only refer to untouched nature but also human environments. We must remain highly alert to the power that the technological progress of our times has given to architects.'

Lu Wengyu added, 'Architecture should remain linked to reality. We should not destroy villages and cities that we have inherited. Architecture should not leave this world behind. It is an architecture that should rely on material, not visual power.' She continued: 'For 2027, we decided to confront reality with a series of questions. How can we avoid the vulgar cloning of new buildings? How can architecture acknowledge and practice differences, the authenticity of lived experience?'

'There are different approaches to climate change, and how can they walk next to each other? How can we resolve the conflict between urban and rural through architecture?' pondered Wang Shu.

The main theme will provide conceptual grounding and a common starting point for both the participants to build their submissions around and the national pavilions to riff off on for their own exhibits.

National Participations

Between Giardini della Biennale, where many of the individual countries' national pavilions are, and various locations across Venice's canal city (for those countries not claiming a pavilion in the Giardini), the world comes to showcase its thoughts on architecture during the Venice Architecture Biennale 2027.

Many of the national participations are still to be announced – it's early days for many countries, which are still conducting their internal competitions before they announce the curatorial teams and themes of their respective pavilions. The United Kingdom was among the first to reveal its plans.

The British Council held a competition to determine a UK-Malaysia team to curate next year's pavilion. The move signals the celebration of 70 years of diplomatic relations between the UK and Malaysia. Unveiled earlier this spring, the curatorial team will consist of Grymsdyke Farm's Dr Guan Lee and Mike Lim, director of IDK, alongside a team including Maria McLintock and Ben Swaby Selig. The participation will also include Penang-based artisans Ng Chi Wang, Lee Shao Chin and Koh Eng Keat.

Places, dates and tickets

Opening to the public on 8 May 2027, the Venice Architecture Biennale 2027 will run, as always, for a little over six months, closing on 21 November of the same year. The public opening is typically preceded by two vernissage days – this year, those are expected to be the 6 and 7 May.

Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu's main themed show will take place in two locations - Venice's famed Arsenale and Giardini, the latter occupying the newly reopened Central Pavilion, which underwent extensive restoration for the past year.

Giardini is also the ground for many of the national participations, with countries from around the world presenting their shows and responses to the theme in their respective, dedicated pavilions. Tickets for the main sites are available at the entrance of both sites. Opening hours are 11 am - 7 pm (last admission 6:45 pm), with the venue closed on Mondays.

Do expect a wealth of further events to be spread across Venice. This includes both independent programmes and official programme collateral events, and national participations that may not be accommodated at the Giardini site. There is never enough space for everyone within the two official biennale sites, but what a great problem to have, navigating one's way to the next display or event in the wonderful backdrop of Venice.

The Venice Architecture Biennale 2027 will run 8 May to 21 November 2027 at Venice's Giardini and Arsenale sites.

The 61st edition of the Venice Biennale opened just over a week ago (see our picks for what to see) and has already caused a stir with collectors and critics alike. Amid the distinct complexities of the 2026 edition, it’s also the first time in the institution’s storied history that it has appointed an exclusive partner. Bulgari, the Roman jewellery maison, is no stranger to cultural patronage, having restored ancient monuments such as the Eternal City’s Spanish Steps and partnered with contemporary art institutions like the MAXXI in Rome and New York’s Whitney Museum. Following the launch of the Fondazione Bulgari in 2024, the maison’s latest role as exclusive partner will continue through to 2030, marking a long-term commitment to the city's artistic legacy.

‘The maison did a lot of these activities before the inauguration of the foundation,’ managing director, Matteo Morbidi, told Wallpaper*. ‘It's not something new, it's just been formalised to manage the work we started many years ago.’ Debuting with two exhibition initiatives, the foundation establishes a presence that bridges the Biennale proper and the city’s historic heart of San Marco. Significantly, the foundation has chosen to work with artists who were already linked to the maison through previous residencies and awards. ‘It’s very important that if we begin a collaboration with an artist, that we are able to support them long term,’ Morbidi added.

The first of the foundation’s two exhibitions takes place at the new, purpose-built Bulgari pavilion within the Giardini, where Canadian artist Lotus L. Kang has created a deeply poetic, site-specific installation titled The Face of Desire Is Loss. Working through themes of transition, cycles of generation, exhaustion and repair, the New York-based artist channels her own Korean heritage to expand the specific into something universal. The show's title borrows from a line in Lara Mimosa Montes’s poetry book Thresholes, an exploration of how structural gaps and voids can become generative sites of strength. It’s an idea that physically manifests the moment you approach the pavilion and notice a large, cast bronze lotus root outside. The root's porous architecture – where its voids lend it the structural capacity to bear a thousand times its own weight – echoes through the exhibition's skeleton. Suspended above the show are industrial ‘superjoists’ that match the root's form, functioning as an incredibly light yet strong framework from which Kang hangs large sheets of unfixed photographic film that chemically change their colours over time, continuously absorbing the light and atmosphere around them.

Suspended alongside these films (or what Lang refers to as ‘skins’) are overhead sculptures of cast aluminum tatami mats and fiberglass-and-plaster kelp knots. The mats act as devices that record sedimentary traces of life, like mattresses collecting the invisible history of the bodies that sleep, love, and convalesce upon them. A Super 8 film loop shot in South Korea plays on a wrapped monitor, capturing Korean mudflats where coastal and land ecosystems overlap. Kang operates entirely within these fluid, permeable boundaries: turning living seaweed inert through casting, while making a still photograph reactive and alive. A choreographed lighting score, synchronised to a rhythm inspired by contemporary Korean poet Kim Hyesoon, cycles the pavilion through the distinct light of dawn, noon, and dusk. Nearby, 49 bottles of spirits sit quietly around the space – a poignant nod to the 49 days a soul hovers in a liminal state before reincarnation in Buddhist tradition, anchoring the entire show in cycles of death and rebirth.

A twenty-minute walk from the Giardini, Bulgari stages its official collateral event in the majestic Salone Sansovino of the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana on San Marco Square. ‘We first selected the location, then presented this to the artists and asked if they would like to respond to it,’ explained Morbidi. ‘We never want to impose something on the artists, but instead give them total freedom of creation.’ Here, Monia Ben Hamouda and Lara Favaretto confront concepts of language and knowledge in radically different ways.

In the library’s vestibule, Monia Ben Hamouda – the latest recipient of the MAXXI Bulgari Prize and a former fellow at the American Academy in Rome – presents Fragments of Fire Worship. Her monolithic, neon wall sculptures introduce a searing, restless energy to the historic venue. As the daughter of a calligrapher, Ben Hamouda treats language as a physical gesture, creating an expressive though nonexistent alphabet out of script-like marks. The use of orange neon also subtly references Marciana's multiple close calls with obliterating fires, positioning language as a similarly ambivalent force that both reveals and destroys.

Stepping into the main salon, Lara Favaretto’s Momentary Monument – The Library approaches language as a completed form: the book. Acting as a library within a library, the installation consists of a bespoke shelving unit which stretches the length of the hall and is stacked with donated books. Prior to the exhibition, a custom software randomly paired titles with unique images from Favaretto’s personal archive and printed them inside each tome. By scattering these images randomly inside books that themselves contain marginalia, annotations and other traces of use, Favaretto subverts the idea of permanent preservation, proving that even recorded knowledge is fragile and constantly shifting. This is mirrored formally, where visitors are encouraged to take a book home, transforming the installation over time as shelves gradually empty. ‘It’s really a work about the conservation of memory,’ Morbidi notes of the dialogue between the artists and the setting. ‘That’s something really important for the future generation. It's a reflection on time, on heritage.’

For the foundation, their role as exclusive partner demands a familiar approach of exchange rather than imposition. ‘We had a very delicate approach with Venice. It's a very fragile environment and we wanted to be in conversation with that,’ Morbidi added. By championing creative freedom and honouring the unique fabric of the city, the Maison is establishing a thoughtful new blueprint for luxury patronage – one that acts as a guardian of cultural heritage while nurturing the next generation of contemporary artists.

'Too many tourists' reads a scrawl of lipstick-red graffiti on the roller shutters of a shop in Venice’s Rialto district. It is a growing sentiment across global travel hotspots, sparking protests and government-enforced restrictions everywhere from Barcelona to Kyoto. For the 61st Venice Biennale, that tension is addressed at Ca’ Pesaro, where Hernan Bas presents The Visitors, one of Wallpaper’s must-see exhibitions during this year’s festival.

Spanning 40 paintings – some of which were created while the artist was in residence in the city – Bas depicts tourists in both real and imagined scenarios as they navigate bucket-list attractions, historic sites, sacred spaces, seedy entertainment venues and sanitised examples of the natural world. 'I’ve been thinking about this series for a while,' Bas noted at the opening of the exhibition. 'But when I found out I was able to work in this city, it was the perfect opportunity. There’s no better example than Venice for overtourism.'

As a native Miamian, Bas is no stranger to the friction tourism can bring into local communities. Though while it is easy to cast the tourist as a villain, his work resists any over-simplified delineation. His characters - notably all white males - are presented along a spectrum: variously sympathetic and naive, but also smug, entitled, and disengaged. 'It's a mix of people behaving badly, but also some of them, I think, are just sweet individuals,' Bas explained. In one a young man fingers the cheeses of a market stall, flagrantly defying the ‘do not touch’ sign; in another, a midday visitor to a strip club is made all the more disturbing by the pair of binoculars hung around his neck. Other characters are shown innocently indulging their niche interests; a timid-looking boy visiting the crab migration on Christmas Island, say, or a sci-fi fan who’s made the pilgrimage to Little A'Le'Inn in Area 51.

Formally, Bas is a master of surface with a gift for rendering the peculiar, plastic shimmer of a cheap souvenir. His use of photographic cropping, highly saturated colours and dense arrangement recalls the sensory overwhelm of an Instagram feed. But here we are offered a glimpse beyond the highlight reel. 'Online, you only see the best examples of people on vacation. You don’t see the photo of a mom yelling at their son, dragging their suitcase through Venice. No one takes a picture of that.'

Still, there is something performative about Bas’ Visitors that reveals how travel has changed our age of technology. In Alone with Lisa (the Louve, Paris), a fresh-faced boy stands in front of the Mona Lisa, his presence eclipsing the much larger masterpiece hanging directly behind it. 'I always loved that at the Louvre, the biggest painting is behind the Mona Lisa and no one ever looks at it, because they're all there to see the Mona Lisa, or to photograph themselves with the Mona Lisa,' Bas continues, 'There's plenty more photos of people with the Mona Lisa than there is of the actual Mona Lisa.'

The Visitors probe what’s behind the impulse to document ourselves next to these significant objects and landmarks, circling the point where searching slips into self absorption. They highlight how the motivation behind our travels has shifted, moving away from a Grand Tour-eque pursuit of knowledge to a pursuit of social capital. Confident in Kyoto is one such example. In it, a smug-faced boy eats sushi with a fork, a practice generally perceived as disrespectful across Asia. Bas deftly weaves an additional layer of irony into the scene by painting him in a The Smiths Meat is Murder t-shirt, exposing his flimsy, performative ethics. Why bother crossing oceans only to ensure your home comforts and customs remain entirely unperturbed by the reality of the destination, it seems to ask. In his Baudrillardian staging, the world becomes a collection of backdrops rather than a place to be inhabited and engaged with.

The exhibition further probes this voyeurism by turning its gaze toward the industrial machinery of the souvenir. Through Bas’s lens, these trinkets raise uncomfortable questions about their hidden costs. Who pays for the mass-produced ‘Hawaiian’ shirt or the captive animal encounter? Is it the local artisan priced out of their district, the worker on a distant production line, or nature itself? The authenticity of these experiences is treated with equal suspicion. In Feasting off Infamy (Vlad Dracul House, Romania), a visitor stands before the supposed birthplace of Vlad the Impaler - now a quintessential tourist trap pedalling cheap capes and mugs. 'You can go and meet Dracula in his room,' Bas noted, 'but you have to pay extra to get a selfie with him.'

The Visitors hold up a mirror to the 21st-century traveller. As Elisabetta Barisoni, director of the Ca’ Pesaro, aptly notes in the exhibition catalogue: 'In these works, which at first glance appear to be souvenir photos or mementos of exotic travels, the fragility of the values of history and memory is revealed, and our sense of reality is shaken.' Stepping back into the labyrinthine streets of Venice, Bas’ satire loses distance. You realise with a prickle of unease that the ‘visitors’ are not just the characters adorning Ca’Pesaro’s walls, but all of us.

Held at Ca’ Pesaro – International Gallery of Modern Art, Venice Dom Pérignon Galleries, from 7 May – 30 August 2026

Multidisciplinary creative studio PlayLab has collaborated with some of the biggest names across music, fashion and design – including Virgil Abloh, A$AP Rocky, Pharrell Williams, and Justin Timberlake, as well as brands such as Vans, Adidas, Louis Vuitton, Marc Jacobs, Nike, Rimowa, Fenty and Skims. Now, the practice can add Golden Goose to its expansive portfolio after collaborating on this year’s ‘Haus’ exhibition.

‘Golden Goose Haus’ is quickly becoming an annual highlight. The Italian footwear brand, which was founded by Francesca Rinaldo and Alessandro Gallo in 2000, launched ‘Haus’ in 2024, a platform which invites a series of international talents to create genre-spanning installations in an event which coincides each year with the Venice Biennale.

Step into Golden Goose and PlayLab’s ‘The Forest For The Trees'

The installation took visitors away from the bustling canals of Venice and into the city’s industrial outskirts in Marghera, where Golden Goose was founded. Much like last year, where we saw Italian-Canadian artist and film director Marco Brambilla present ‘Altered States’, this year's exhibition, titled ‘The Forest For The Trees’, was also presented at the Italian footwear brand’s ‘Haus Marghera’ hub. Opening in 2024, it is split into different areas, including an archive, a library, a ‘playground’ – which is an auditorium – and a ‘hangar’, a large-scale exhibition area.

Coinciding with the opening of the 61st Venice Biennale, PlayLab's exhibition was focused on whimsy and wonder, conjuring a storybook-style scene – an analogy, said the brand, for the idea of possibility. The title of the exhibition is derived from the expression used by someone who is too involved in the details rather than seeing the situation as a whole; using this as a foundation, guests were encouraged to partake in the immersive installation to help create a bigger picture.

Tasks included throwing paper leaves into the soothing water feature, which was then followed by an arts and crafts-style activity, whereby miniature tree models were set up in the ‘academy’ area to be painted by guests. They were then added to the larger display, which had a joyful, childlike feel.

‘I think the world needs more people to listen to each other. The common ground is empathy and kindness,’ says Silvio Campara, CEO of Golden Goose. ‘I think what PlayLab has done is to bring you back to your youth when you still had emotional space to feel tender. No limits, no back-thoughts, simply be open-minded to listen, first of all to yourself, and then to other people.’

Other details of the installation, which was open for two days during the Biennale’s opening weekend, included a looping soundscape of nature sounds and illuminated visuals in a digital tunnel, creating a futuristic vision of the natural world. This 'tunnel' led guests to the ‘hangar’ space, where large-scale, theatrical trees were displayed, spotlit in the otherwise candle-lit space.

Campara is clear that Golden Goose strives to redefine luxury by stripping back the glamour and injecting playfulness into its work. ‘If I have to give a suggestion to all luxuries, I would say stop speaking for one second. Stop desire, and start dreaming. Stop excluding, and keep on including. Stop coolness, welcome kindness. Take your body, your soul, and your mind and dive deep into empathy. This is the future,’ he said.

haus.goldengoose.com

Just a 14-minute water taxi from the chaos of Venice Biennale’s epicentre, 27-year-old designer Chiara Angelica Gandini is finalising the launch exhibition for her fashion-label-cum studio, Haus Nuller. Clad in a crimson Issey Miyake plissé dress and fishnet flats, the Central Saint Martins-educated textile designer is tall with slicked back hair and an Italian lilt that reveals her Brescian upbringing. We’re stood inside the shell of a classic Venetian building, her family’s home in the quieter locale of Dorsoduro, which has been repurposed for the occasion.

Spread across palazzo-style rooms, her signature textiles – woollens hand-woven with stainless steel chains – are displayed at various stages in the painstaking design process, spanning digital patterns (each pixel corresponds to one thread) through to double-loom swatches framed as singular artworks. Design duo Formafantasma have curated the layout as a pared-back series of plinths, LED lighting and partitions tiled with the studio’s inaugural campaign, art directed by Stefanie Barth.

‘Haus Nuller: Breaking the Chain’ at the Venice Biennale

Entitled ‘Breaking the Chain’, the collection in question is a tight capsule of long coats, dresses, separates and capes – distressed just so on the outside. Gandini pores over a clothes rail, gesturing as she weighs up why a satellite event during the most prestigious art expo of the year was the right place and the right time to share her work – and not, say, fashion week. ‘Venice, it’s very interesting,’ she says, smiling. ‘The engineering of the city is super complicated, but it's also very fragile, right? I saw a connection with my practice.’ An assistant models one of the made-to-order designs, deliberately revealing its underside where the sparkling threadwork appears like a lining.

A longstanding interior design buff and Anni Albers fanatic – Gandini also calls out Yohji Yamamoto and anyone ‘that creates their own system when there wasn’t one that fit’ – takes visible joy in demonstrating the technical process behind her work, prompting me with snapshots from her phone. She takes me to another room to watch a process video. The footage shows merino and alpaca wool threads spread on the loom while a weaver’s hand applies metal chains across the weft. ‘It takes a while,’ she laughs. The weavers (all women, Gandini notes) behind the handiwork are spread across Europe: Barcelona, Prato, the UK and Finland. ‘We did a lot of research to find these machines and these women. It takes a lot of skill to weave something like that. You can’t just have a junior weaver.’

For Gandini, it’s worth the wait. After trialling various formulas over a two-year period for her knitwear – itself a feat at the intersection of mathematics and art – she landed on the golden ratio for her crack team. In fact, many weavers she trialled refused to work on the concept for fear of destroying their machines. There’s also issues that come with the crafty territory. Each weaver’s work comes out differently. ‘Everyone has a different hand,’ she says. ‘The weavers now know – after doing it and doing it – how much tension to apply, but if one day one of them is a bit tired, it’s going to come out wrong, and she has to start from scratch.’

The pieces – hand-wrought and one-of-a-kind – reflect the weaving process. Hold them in one hand, and they’re heavy; but wear them, and they’re effortless. ‘I like the idea of this weight, because it's making a political statement, in a certain sense, regarding gender,’ says Gandini, whose studio has intentionally blended a traditionally masculine industry (metalwork) with a historically undervalued and feminised one (textiles). Indeed, the name itself is a play on the Bauhaus movement and the German word, nuller, which translates to ‘of little value’.

The thinking first came to Gandini while in her studies when she clocked that CSM’s weaving studio was only used by women. ‘I started to study the history of textiles, and I noticed that even at the Bauhaus, even though women could finally enroll, they were confined to the weaving studio,’ says Gandini. ‘Threads were considered easier to work with, and women are [stereotypically considered] more gentle, so they can only work with things that are softer, you know – all that kind of narrative.’

Haus Nuller is a sincere and thoughtful proposition, both for the fashion market and a more textile-led one, artfully reevaluating craft in a way that doesn’t rush to quick-buck demands. It’s also more than just a clothing label, open to a wide spectrum of opportunities. Recently, the studio worked as the upholstery consultant for B&B Italia’s contemporary re-edition of the 1958 ‘Catilina’ chair by Luigi Caccia Dominioni.

‘For me, Dominioni’s architecture is really line-based,’ she says. ‘It made me think of an artist called Willem Cole, who works only with lines and the three primary colours.’ Cole produced a series of drawings, and Gandini translated them into textiles. ‘You know, I don’t only love fashion,’ she says. ‘But I do think fashion is more fun. Upholstery has a lot of rules.’

Of course, rules – including the one to not incorporate metalwork into weaving – have sown the seeds of this potentially game-changing studio practice. For now, the plan is to only produce one collection per year while consulting and working on special projects. ‘I don't think we need more clothes,’ says Gandini. ‘But we do need more ideas.’

Haus Nuller, ‘Breaking the Chain’, Sestiere Dorsoduro 3907 30123, Venezia, Italy.

The collection will be available for viewings and purchase at Via Ludovica Settala 45, Milano 20124 on 20-21 May, 2026.

Also read: What to see at the Venice Biennale

There has been much anticipation for the 61st Venice Biennale’s main exhibition, curated by Koyo Kouoh, since it was announced in 2024. When Kouoh passed away quite suddenly in 2025, she had selected the title, ‘In Minor Keys’, the artists, the work and the theoretical framework, as well as the architecture of the venue. It was left to a designated team of seven to realise her vision for the biennale.

The resulting exhibition is, perhaps unavoidably, steeped in mourning, but in light of the framework Kuouh laid out, the grief that radiates through many of the artworks is counterbalanced by a gentle meditative thread that runs throughout the show.

‘In Minor Keys’, the 61st Venice Biennale main exhibition

The exhibition features 110 artists, including the high-profile – like the great Wangechi Mutu, based between Nairobi and Brooklyn – and the up-and-coming – such as Ranti Bam, based between London and Lagos – whose sculptures are made by crushing thick clay with her body to mould it.

There is also work from American artist Nick Cave, who uses beauty and dance to question and heal. We see work, too, by Chilean artist Alfredo Jarr, in which he questions our toxic relationship to rare earth minerals. There are many names we know and some we don’t, making this show a pleasant learning experience for artists and practices unfamiliar.

The exhibition is preluded by statement that asks us to take a moment and breathe, and then to contemplate 'the songs of those creating beauty in the face of tragedy' before opening with the poem If I Must Die by the late Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer, which acts as a reference to both the time of war we are living through and the choice to continue the exhibition after Kouoh’s passing. This does not fall lightly, given the fact that the biennale’s jury, which decides the famous Golden Lion and other awards, resigned after legal action was taken by the artist representing Israel in the wake of the jury’s stating that it would not be considering artists representing countries led by people who have been convicted in the International Criminal Court. There are only two pavilions this affects, Russia and Israel, and today (7 May) there have been large protests at both.

‘In Minor Keys’ goes on to open with an installation by Lebanese-Australian artist Khaled Sabsabi, Khalil, meaning ‘friend’ in Arabic. The circular work uses film, scent and sound to explore the Sufi belief about the inner and outer self and the divine. Intended as a meeting point to encourage conversation in a healing space, the undulating forms shift through the abstract and the figurative. It sets a contemplative tone and a slower pace for considering the exhibition. It is followed by a series of films by the South African artist Berni Searle – whose works bookend the exhibition – dealing with grief and mourning.

Smaller countries and minority perspectives are also considered in the exhibition. Art from the Caribbean rarely takes centre stage, but there are many works by artists working in Central and South America and the Caribbean islands. Florence Lazar’s work It’s All Thanks to Bad Weather, 2024, uses film to look at the moment a hurricane unearthed a necropolis of Amerindian and African bodies, highlighting past colonial crimes in the present day. We hear from a man who talks us through these events and gives us his perspective, highlighting another theme of the exhibition – where it confronts us with unwieldy and heavy subjects, it is often through the lens of human experience, be that through film or photography.

The series Observatorio de lagunas (Lacuna Observatory) by Sofía Gallisá Muriente uses film, photography and found footage to fill in missing gaps in Puerto Rican history. She interprets the images she collects in many ways, from blowing up film stills into large-scale images to processing images to create short films and installations.

American photographer Carrie Schneider’s work is also installed in a unique way, with huge rolls of images stacked on top of one another to the ceiling. The images include those she has taken with a room-sized camera she made, alongside vitrines of framed work. She experiments with how to take and display photos rather than being wedded to one single practice.

American artist Cauleen Smith is presenting The Wanda Coleman Songbook, a meditation on Los Angeles that turns observations of everyday life in the city into an immersive video installation, and also showcases books, records and music by the poet.

A beautiful film and installation work by South Korean artist Yo-E Ryou, Breath Orchestra, a two-channel video work made with divers who can descend up to ten metres without oxygen. The score is composed of four specific breaths used to complete the dives and accompanies a film depicting young women on a rough sea.

Nature is addressed in the exhibition, from the depths of the sea and up to space; humans’ connections to the land, and what is happening to that land, recur throughout.

There are many works that look at resistance, through empathy, research and dialogue, through collaboration and collective action and through art – from Avi Mograbi’s dialogue on the history of the Middle East to the collectives changing the art eco-system in Ghana and Nigeria, through Yinka Shonibare’s GAS Foundation and the trailblazing BLAXtarlines.

In response to the premise laid out at the start of the show, the works within it could be seen as a blueprint for coping with the barbarism of the modern day. Poems and writing hang from the ceiling and monumental fabric works and large sculpture and installation break up the gargantuan exhibition space.

Listening as a practice is also explored, through Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening and Laurie Anderson’s immersive protest work that looks at counterculture as resistance. Michael Joo’s work also calls us to listen, through suspended fossil-like forms. An extension of the presentation in The Giardini alongside the national pavilions is a bucolic celebration of the garden in its many forms, a joyous end to a thoughtful exhibition.

Kuouo’s posthumous exhibition follows a career in which she brought art from outside the West to the fore through support, exhibitions and in her work at the Cape Town art museum Zeitz MOCAA. Elements of the premise feel unresolved, but perhaps this was inevitable given the circumstances.

This exhibition feels truly international, featuring work from places rarely platformed in Europe. It feels like a call to push forward into a new era and new modes of thinking for whatever the world throws at us next.

labiennale.org

'I work very intuitively,' says Sanya Kantarovsky on the eve of the opening of his exhibition ‘Basic Failure' at Palazzo Loredan in Venice – one of Wallpaper’s must-sees during the Venice Art Biennale 2026. ‘I rarely start with a preconceived notion or an idea. I have some vague sense of an effect, or even maybe a theme, which is usually a reaction to the circumstances of the exhibition.'

Kantarovsky, who was born in Moscow before emigrating to New York when he was ten, studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design. His instincts take shape in haunting works – mostly painting, but also drawing, sculpture, printmaking and animation. Drawn to the complexities and contrasts that make up the spectrum of human emotion, the only thing certain in Kantarovsky's eclectic subject matter, which criss-crosses religion, history, philosophy and spirituality, is an appeal to the raw intuitiveness of human nature.

It's natural to want to read into Kantarovsky's richly emotional figures, but he eschews traditional storytelling as we normally understand it. ‘I have a complicated relationship to narrative,' he says. ‘Of course, the paintings are representational, often figurative, and there is an implied narrative. I liken it to when you're walking down the street and you catch someone's eye, and you witness them for a second. You're aware that there was a moment before you witnessed them and a moment after, but you just have this fleeting second to see this fragment of their struggle or their existence.' These glimpses resist a linear narrative (‘For me, it's the way to make an interesting painting,' he adds), but they are sensitive and highly attuned to their surroundings.

The grand Palazzo Loredan is an appropriately atmospheric location for this new exhibition, running concurrently to the Venice Art Biennale, until November 2026. It unites a series of Kantarovsky's paintings, as well as ceramic work and a glass sculpture created in collaboration with a Murano studio.

‘It's an ancient, historical and extravagant space, and it's filled with ancient books. Those things have their own energy. This show questions what that means, and tries to engage in a generative conversation with the space. I try not to get attached to anything within each painting, and then I try not to get attached to any particular painting, and keep the exhibition itself as the priority. Once the paintings start happening, and they all start talking to one another, and I start talking to them, it becomes like you're writing out a kind of poem composed of fragments or stanzas.'

In the works, the figures are caught in heightened states, contorted or cringing, intimately revealing and yet elusive. ‘The narrative and subject matter are very slippery, and so things could be read in a number of different ways. It is very important to keep that dimension of the painting open. There are innocuous and banal ways to interpret something, and then there are very dark ways to interpret something. And sometimes it's even unclear whether a subject is in distress or ecstasy, and what exactly is at stake.'

It is also unclear where or when these very real moments are taking place. The scenes are slippery in both narrative and time – often, scenes could be medieval, mythical or biblical, but modern detailing stops us short. ‘I'm pulling from just existing in the world,' Kantarovsky says. ‘I'm pulling from my lived experience and those of my friends, from art history. Everything's game. Everything is up for grabs. And I think that's a really exciting part of it.'

Featured in the show is a dying centaur, a favourite motif of artists in ancient Greece, but also popular in the 19th century as a symbol of the end of ancient, spiritual regimes. ‘It is also this kind of basic failure – the name of the show – of integration between our animal selves and our socialised selves,' says Kantarovsky. Caught, helpless, we are reduced to the essential. Witnessing this in the works makes them deeply empathetic.

This vulnerability runs throughout in powerful symbols, which are separated from their source of power, whether it is in a dying classical era or in a painting of a submissive without his dominant. ‘You go grandiose into this poetic narrative, and then you fall down into this mundane, indescript bedroom with the overweight older man and his little white dog, and the viewer has to make those shifts. I'm interested in these sorts of juxtapositions. I think with paintings, it's really interesting, because you can shift a viewer from one place to another.'

The works aren't about him, Kantarovsky says. ‘I can't avoid them representing something specific about myself, because they come from my mind. But at the same time, I'm utterly uninterested in my uniqueness or my specificity. What I think is so interesting is when good art can splinter off the subjective and find its way into somebody else's identification. It's part of the reason I'm interested in figurative painting, because there is this empathy or over-identification that it tends to produce in the viewer. You start to feel that certain pictures touch you in a way, and it's extremely powerful, despite seeming somewhat anachronistic.'

‘Basic Failure' runs 6 May – 22 November 2026 at the Istituto Veneto di Scienze Lettere ed Arti, Palazzo Loredan, istitutoveneto.it

This article appears in the June 2026 Issue of Wallpaper*, available from 7 May in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

In our new monthly series, we highlight the products, places and experiences we’ve bookmarked – and that you won’t want to miss.

Spring in London is without equal. This May, our editors plan to make the most of it, plotting days around alfresco interludes on the city's reopened terraces. Yet spring also stirs a desire to roam: in Oxford, the Ashmolean Museum has launched an exhibition about florals, while a quick hop to Paris promises a Pedro Almodóvar extravaganza. For those with Europe in their sights, the Venice Biennale opens to the public on 9 May. Long haul, the USA is marking its 250th anniversary this year, with no shortage of pomp and pageantry to accompany it.

At home and abroad, here is what to know about and see this month.

The exhibition: ‘In Bloom’, Ashmolean Museum

Ellie Stathaki, architecture & environment director

I am heading to Oxford this month to visit ‘In Bloom’ at the Ashmolean Museum. It's a fitting theme for May. This show explores the beauty of flowers, yes, but also their influence in many other spheres – from global trade to science and world exploration. It is a fascinating subject, and it's also designed by an exciting London-based architect, DaeWha Kang. Kang crafted the show cleverly and sustainably, reusing, in collaboration with the museum, some 85 percent of showcases from a previous show. He and his team reduced waste where possible and worked with low-impact materials throughout the displays and in the space's cafe, too. It only reinforces the exhibition's nature exploration. If you think you know about flowers, you should visit this show – and you might learn something new.

The event: Venice Biennale

Hannah Silver, art, culture, watches & jewellery editor

This month I am looking forward to being in Venice for the opening of the Art Biennale. While it runs until November, the first week is always a buzzy, busy sprint across Europe's most magical city. Discovering the pavilions in the Giardini is a great way to while away a day, but I particularly enjoy the collateral events in beautiful palazzos. If you're planning a visit, make sure to keep an eye on our guide – and don't forget to stop for a spritz and some cichetti.

The restaurant: Honey & Co

Tianna Williams, staff writer

Usually a social recluse, I am breaking out of my introverted mould and diving into the deep end of social activities this month. One of the main things I am looking forward to is spending time with my closest friend, who has jetted over from Australia. To celebrate, we are looking forward to dining at the new Honey & Co outpost in Great Portland Street. I was scouting for a dining destination that felt cosy and fresh, with no waitlist, and a menu that looked delicious without the pretence (and without breaking the bank).

A fiend for Middle Eastern cuisine, I also can’t get enough of Iranian-Iraqi cafe Logma and Palestinian restaurant Akub (don’t sleep on their breakfast!). Honey & Co ticked the boxes. A fragrant bakery by day, turned restaurant at night, its interior is simple, pared back and intimate – taking on the form of a local establishment with Mediterranean design codes. I am looking forward to tucking into its house pickle plate, the seared pork belly and candied lemon, and the honey cheesecake. It is the perfect location to enjoy a couple of glasses of wine and catch up without a time zone.

The other restaurant: Bistro Sablé

Anna Solomon, digital staff writer

I spent three years renting next to the beautiful north London enclave of Canonbury before making the inevitable trade-down to buy. So when I heard that former neighbourhood favourite Smokehouse had reinvented itself as Bistro Sablé, I had to book a visit. The pivot feels entirely sensible: barbecue trends come and go; French bistro cooking is forever.

The space, tucked inside a red-brick pub, is dressed with white tablecloths, mismatched chairs, candles, blackboards, blue-and-white tiles and artwork sourced from Parisian flea markets. It genuinely nails that elusive balance of effortlessness without trying too hard to look effortless. The prices are just as breezy: most mains are under £26, wine starts at £6 a glass, £5 negronis.

The menu is full of winners done well: escargots in a Staub pan, a Comté and cheddar soufflé, moules marinière, beef bourguignon, crème brûlée, a whole tarte Tatin for the table. There’s no need for novelty with a concept this assured.

The screening: ‘Pedro Almodóvar. Attachments’, Paris

Gabriel Annouka, art editor

As an Almodóvar-obsesionado, and someone who has watched every single moving image Pedro Almodóvar has ever made, including the questionable and misunderstood ones, I am more than willing to travel to Paris for one reason only: the Almodóvar retrospective at MK2 Bibliothèque, organised in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou. The prospect of seeing his 80s and 90s films, such as The Flower of My Secret or Kika, which remain his true masterpieces in my opinion, projected on the big screen already feels like a small cinematic pilgrimage.

The retrospective runs until 25 May 2026.

The installation: 'Alfarero del Barrio’ by Roberto Lugo, New York

Anna Fixsen, US editor

In case you missed it, America is celebrating a big birthday this year – its 250th. There’s a lot of pomp accompanying the semiquincentennial (say that five times fast!), including time capsules, parades and fireworks.

Philadelphia-based potter and artist Roberto Lugo is contributing something different to the festivities via a monumental installation in New York’s Madison Square Park. ‘Alfarero del Barrio’, Spanish for ‘village potter’, is an all-out celebration of Puerto Rican culture and heritage via a gigantic, 20-foot-tall urn and a 15-foot-tall fire hydrant, decorated with vibrant images of Puerto Rican luminaries and graffiti. Visitors will be invited to step inside the gigantic vessel, hang out for a game of dominoes, or take a selfie in front of the gigantic fire hydrant. It promises to be a playful mix of past, present and – most importantly – people. ‘During the semiquincentennial, celebrate us, all of us,’ Lugo said in a statement.

Pope Leo XIV may be feuding with a certain world leader this week, but his taste remains divine, as the Vatican’s pavilion at the 2026 Venice Art Biennale will show.

Today the Holy See – the governing body that represents Vatican City and the Catholic church – announced the 24 artists that will be participating in this year’s Biennale presentation, an all-star roster that includes musicians like Brian Eno, FKA Twigs, Dev Hynes, Patti Smith and many more.

The exhibition, titled ‘The Ear is the Eye of the Soul,’ honours the 12th-century Saint Hildegard of Bingen, a German Benedictine abbess, who in addition to authoring scientific works and experiencing heavenly visions, was a prolific musician.

According to a press release from the Holy See, the theme responds to Koyo Kouoh’s broader Biennale theme, ‘In Minor Keys,’ and will offer up a ‘sonic prayer’ for visitors to quietly contemplate. Holy See Commissioner Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça enlisted curators Hans Ulrich Obrist and Ben Vickers to assemble the group of creatives.

The showing will take place across two venues in Venice, The Mystical Garden in the Cannaregio neighbourhood, and the Complex of Santa Maria Ausiliatrice in Castello. In the garden, visitors will be able to listen to specially-commissioned compositions via headphones as they wander through the secluded garden’s vegetable plots and arbours, first planted by Catholic Carmelites in the 17th-century. The works were created in collaboration with the Berlin and New York-based experimental music group Soundwalk Collective, which has also created a site-specific instrument that creates music by ‘listening’ to the verdant space.

The curators conceived the Complex of Santa Maria Ausiliatrice, meanwhile, as a ‘contemporary scriptorium’ and archive, where visitors will be able to view the last work of filmmaker Alexander Kluge, who died earlier this year; books by Portuguese painter Ilda David; an installation by Mexican architect Tatiana Bilbao; and a library of texts by Saint Hildegard herself.

It’s all designed to encourage Biennale-goers to savour a moment of solitude amid a busy festival and an ever-chaotic world. To quote Pope Leo: ‘Defend slowness when it serves a purpose, silence when it speaks and difference when evocative. Beauty is not just a means of escape; it is above all an invocation.’

Read the full list of participants below.

• Alexander Kluge
• Benedictine Nuns of the Abbey of St. Hildegard Eibingen
• Bhanu Kapil
• Brian Eno
• Carminho
• Caterina Barbieri
• Devonté Hynes
• FKA Twigs
• Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst
• Ilda David
• Jim Jarmusch
• Kali Malone
• Kazu Makino
• Laraaji
• Meredith Monk
• Moor Mother
• Otobong Nkanga
• Patti Smith
• Precious Okoyomon
• Raúl Zurita
• Soundwalk Collective
• Suzanne Ciani
• Tatiana Bilbao
• Terry Riley

The Venice Art Biennale is upon us, and this time, it’s the turn of the art world to flock to the city’s squares, get lost in the labyrinth walkways and drink endless Aperol spritzes with a side of gossip. The Venice Art Biennale and collateral exhibitions take place concurrently around the city, from 9 May to 22 November 2026, and are open to all.

It is a big year for the biennale, which this year marks the 61st International Art Exhibition with a newly designed central pavilion, which opens its doors following an extensive restoration. For this year’s theme, titled ‘In Minor Keys,’ curator Koyo Kouoh is dialling down on the dramatic moments, choosing to celebrate the small undercurrents that impact daily life, from our moods to our planet. Artists – those in the Central Pavilion, and those representing their country in the national pavilions – have provided an enthusiastic response.

There is a lot to see at the Giardini and the Arsenale, which house the pavilions, and at satellite events in churches, galleries and museums around the city. The programme, while exciting, can be overwhelming – keep an eye on this frequently updated guide to make the most of your visit to Venice.

Where to stay: The St Regis, Venice

There is, indisputably, nowhere more magical to stay in Venice than the St. Regis. A stroll away from tourist hotspot Piazza San Marco, it's a truly indulgent haven with panoramic views, gorgeous food - particularly at Gio's Restaurant, with a terrace overlooking the Grand Canal - and service which is second to none.

Now, a contemporary art project also makes it a natural stop when in town for the Biennale. Komorebi - named after the Japanese word for the way sunlight filters through the leaves - unites six artists, whose work will be exhibited at the hotel until April 2027. The work of Nina Carini, Gaia De Megni, Marco De Sanctis, Joan Jonas, Jure Kastelic and Marinella Senatore is displayed alongside bespoke Murano glass pieces from the Berengo Studio throughout public spaces, in a celebration of the essential nature of art in the city.

Curator Marta Cereda worked closely with St Regis, in collaboration with Artelier Art Consultancy, on the project, with each work considering and uniting themes of space, light and perception. From Marco De Sanctis' epic, living bronzes, to Joan Jonas' intimate drawings and Gaia De Megni's impactful photography, works run the spectrum of medium and theme. A focus on materiality, particularly in Nina Carina's glass and aluminium works, Jure Kastelic's gorgeously-rendered paintings and Marinella Senatore's neon, lends an evocative edge.

'In Komorebi, light operates as a condition that alters perception,' says curator Marta Cereda. 'Each work introduces a moment of suspension in which space, matter and image are continuously reconfigured, in direct dialogue with the layered architecture of The St. Regis Venice.'

marriott.com

Andreas Angelidakis at the Greek Pavillion

Artist Andreas Angelidakis, who is representing Greece this year, is interested in the distortion of our accepted narratives. His work isn’t easy to define, drawing from the fields of performance, architecture and theory, a mish-mash of influences we expect to see referenced in Venice. His installation in the Greek Pavillion, Escape Room, explores the phenomenon of escaping as a commercial sell through the allegory of Plato’s cave, bringing Plato’s text to life as an immersive, atmospheric space. Through a bathroom selfie, visitors will be drawn into a mirror set to Year Zero, or 1934, the year the Greek and Austrian pavilions began, Hitler and Mussolini met in Venice and the Nazis began to persecute homosexuals.

labiennale.org

Chiara Camoni for the Italian Pavilion, curated by Cecilia Canziani

How do we move through the world? It is a question considered by artist Chiara Camoni at the Italian Pavillion, who explores the forms of life and transformation in a moving show. It is a natural project for main sponsor Zegna, who draw on a historical precedent of supporting arts and culture with this latest initiative. 'With Chiara Camoni, we share a dialogue that has lasted for more than ten years,' says Gildo Zegna, executive chairman of the Ermenegildo Zegna Group. 'Her work reflects this attention to material, landscape, and evolving tradition. Seeing her today, together with Cecilia Canziani, at the Italian Pavilion represents an important recognition of their journey and the coherence of their research - one we are proud to support.'

Hernan Bas at Ca’ Pesaro – International Gallery of Modern Art, Venice

Running concurrently to the Biennale, at the International Gallery of Modern Art, Venice, is Hernan Bas's exhibition, The Visitors. Presenting over 30 new artworks by the American artist, work here is sharply observed and often punctuated by moments of humour. There will be a strong narrative throughout, as Bas looks to Venice’s thriving tourism industry to create a world populated by figures hovering, ridiculously, at spots from the Trevi Fountain to Chernobyl.

Held at Ca’ Pesaro – International Gallery of Modern Art, Venice Dom Pérignon Galleries, from 7 May – 30 August 2026

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Barry Ball at Basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore

American artist Barry Ball looks at the historicity of his Venetian surroundings through a contemporary lens for his exhibition, The Shape of Time. Encompassing 23 works, the exhibition builds on Ball’s interest in the possibilities inherent in materials, particularly in marble and metal, which will feature here. A series of figurative sculptures, rethinking historical and religious motifs in modern forms, is consistent with Ball’s practice of bringing an avant-garde technicality to the ancient art of sculpture.

Held in Venice, Basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore, from 9 May to 22 November 2026

abbaziasangiorgio.it

Sanya Kantarovsky at Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arte, Palazzo Loredan

We’re looking forward to Moscow-born, New York based artist Sanya Kantarovsky’s exhibition, which promises to unite paintings and ceramic works alongside a sculpture made together with a Murano glass studio. The vulnerability in Kantarovsky’s works, which brings a dark and wry humour to his distinctively-rendered figurative style, will be best experienced in the atmospheric surroundings of the beautiful Palazzo Loredan.

Sanya Kantarovsky, Basic Failure, from 6 May – 22 November 2026 at Istituto Veneto di Scienze Lettere et Arti, Palazzo Loredan, San Marco 2

Lubaina Himid at the British Pavillion

It was a treat to catch up with Lubaina Himid last year, who will be unveiling her British Council commission for the British Pavilion at this year’s Biennale, an exhibition titled Predicting History: Testing Translation. In the Pavillion’s neo-classical architecture, Himid will explore what it takes for a place to become home in large, surreal and boldly-coloured paintings.

labiennale.org/en/art/2026

Fondazione Prada at Ca’ Corner della Regina

At Fondazione Prada, curator Nancy Spector places American artists Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince in conversation through photographs, installations, sculptures and paintings - a move, she says, which isn’t as incongruous as it may first appear. ‘They are both image scavengers. Seeking no prior permission, they dip into the overflowing reservoir of visual culture to take whatever they want and convert it into art by choice alone.What comes into focus through the refracting lens of Jafa’s and Prince’s appropriation-based practices is an unflinching exposé on America.’ We are looking forward to the results.

'Helter Skelter' will be presented at Ca' Corner della Regina, Fondazione Prada's Venice venue, from 9 May - 23 November

Maja Malou Lyse at the Danish Pavilion

Are images powerful enough to affect our fertility, asks the youngest artist to represent the Danish Paviliion, Maja Malou Lyse. Reflecting on the global decline in male fertility, and drawing on scientific resources which point to the benefits of sexual stimuli on sperm mobility, Lyse underlines the jarring benefits and toxicity of pornogaphy. Expect a large-scale video work featuring porn star Nicolette Shea as a laboratory scientist working in a sperm bank in the year 2045.

labiennale.org/en/art/2026

Nalini Malani at the Magazzini del Sale

In a large-scale, multi-medium installation, Nalini Malani considers women and myth with 67 animations and soundscapes. Malani rewrites the Greek myth of Orestes - who avenged his father’s death by murdering his mother and her lover - in a contemporary consideration of today’s culture around accountability and women’s experience of patriarchal violence. The resulting soundscape will make for an immersive, fluid and poignant experience.

'Nalini Malani – Of Woman Born' at Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Magazzini del Sale n. 5, from 9 May through 22 November 2026

Venice's famed Central Pavilion, one of the key landmarks within the Giardini della Biennale, which hosts several of the Venice Biennale events every year, is about to reopen, following an extensive restoration. The building, a beloved destination during the world's seminal art and architecture festivals that alternate on site every other year, was in need of a refresh back when works began in December 2024. Now, the revamped structure is about to throw open its doors again, just in time for the unveiling of the 2026 Venice Art Biennale.

Tour the thoroughly refreshed Central Pavilion at Venice's Giardini

The sensitive 16-month-long process, which cost Italy's Ministry of Culture a €31 million investment as part of the country's PNC-PNRR, ‘Great Cultural Heritage Attractors’ programme, aimed at both protecting the building and enhancing the biennale's infrastructure and future potential.

The original structure, named Palazzo Pro Arte when it was first created between 1894 and 1895, was the product of the transformation and repurposing of existing buildings on site, including the Cavallerizza, designed by Tommaso Meduna, and the Palazzo dei Concerti (inaugurated at the 1887 exhibition). The Central Pavilion was developed by Venice's city engineer Enrico Trevisanato and features a façade design by the painter Marius De Maria.

The project was overseen by the biennale's Special Projects department (headed by architect Arianna Laurenzi with engineer Cristiano Frizzele). The team worked with a range of specialist professionals to complete the works to the desired high quality, among them BuroMilan - Milan Ingegneria (lead firm), Labics and architect Fabio Fumagalli for the architectural design; ia2 Studio Associato for MEP systems engineering and fire prevention; and geologist Francesco Aucone. Site supervision was entrusted to engineer Massimiliano Milan.

The Central Pavilion's restoration included a series of interventions which will bring spatial clarity and enhance functionality in the interior. Sala Chini becomes the building's main distribution core. From here, a series of clean, white and flexible exhibition areas fan out, ready to be used as needed by curators during the annual shows. Special attention was paid to details, such as the pavilion's window fixtures, which were designed by Carlo Scarpa – they have now been refurbished and reinstalled.

More key restoration points include the project's goal to obtain the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Gold certification sustainable architecture standard; a clever integration of technical and architectural systems throughout; the creation of additional space for the café and multipurpose use in the shape of two new outdoor structures, inspired by Venetian roof terraces, called altane; and the aim to maintain the continiuty of the spirit of the building and its original intention, without compromising 21st-century needs in both use and building performance.

The restored Central Pavilion's debut will involve hosting an exhibition titled ‘In Minor Keys’, curated by Koyo Kouoh. The show and building will open to the public on 9 May, following the 2026 Venice Art Biennale vernissage, and will remain open till 22 November 2026.

In partnership with Porsche

Venice’s public transport system – ancient, predominantly aquatic, reliant on the gondola since the 11th century and last revolutionised by the city’s first steam-powered, mechanically propelled vaporetto (water bus) back in 1881 – is having a rare radical rethink.

Gateway to Venice’s Waterway is an urban mobility collaboration between the Norman Foster Foundation and Porsche and the star of the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale; architects from the foundation and designers from the German sports car manufacturer worked together on a construction that represents a visionary transportation hub for a Venice of the future.

Inspired by the network of 435 foot bridges that span the city’s 150 canals and connect its 121 islands, the project is a 37m-long, physical manifestation of the intersection between design and architecture and the latest iteration of Porsche’s The Art of Dreams initiative.

Resembling a 21st-century interpretation of a vaporetto dock, the installation’s sinuous aluminium space-frame/lattice-tube construction references classic Porsche race cars such as the 908. The kinetic surface, meanwhile, is inspired by the cube pattern of the new Porsche Macan Electric. Throughout construction, recycled materials and environmentally friendly systems have been used.

A practical, fully working and operational endeavour, the hub functions as a gateway to e-mobility on both land and water. Emission-free water bicycles by California’s Schiller Bikes and Frauscher x Porsche 850 Fantom Air sports boats equipped with the all-electric drive of the Porsche Macan provided alternative transport for attendees during the biennale’s opening week (10 May). Other alternative ideas for urban transportation developed by students from Style Porsche and Studio FA Porsche Zell am See are also on display.

With ‘Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective’ as the theme of this year's biennale, the Norman Foster Foundation and Porsche envisage their collaborative work as a response to transport challenges facing the Italian port city, a catalyst for a discourse on sustainable, urban change and a physical exercise in design reconciling the complex demands of modern urban infrastructure.

‘Design and architecture share the same attributes,’ says Michael Mauer, Vice President Style Porsche. ‘Both disciplines stand for an interplay of aesthetics and technology as well as functionality and realisability. The exchange with creative colleagues beyond the boundaries of classic automotive design is always enriching for us. Creativity thrives on communication and freely conceived ideas.’

Porsche and the Norman Foster Foundation believe that through the integration of technology, insights from nature and lessons from the past, cities can be reimagined as more sustainable, connected and efficient, a holistic approach bringing together experts from different fields to shape the future of mobility.

‘Gateway to Venice's Waterway is a testament to this vision,’ says Norman Foster. ‘It shows how innovation and tradition can co-exist to inspire new solutions for the urban landscapes of tomorrow.’

Gateway to Venice’s Waterway can be visited throughout the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, which runs until 23 November.

porsche.com/stories

The sun shone brightly last week as an American curatorial team inaugurated the 2025 US Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025. A who’s who of American architects and design journalists mingled beneath a zig-zagging timber roof that was purpose-built for the pavilion, titled PORCH: An Architecture of Generosity. There were celebratory speeches, music and a dance performance. Even Diane von Furstenberg swung by.

Making a Venice pavilion happen

But the spritzes and the sunshine belie the financial and logistical feat it takes for architecture curators and co-commissioners to get to Venice in the first place. Organisers work on an extraordinarily compressed time frame, with less than eight months between the announcement of their appointment and the Biennale’s official opening. This year, proposals for displays were due by mid-January, leaving just 73 days for the organisers to select the top participants, get them built and ship them overseas.

The most pressing logistical challenge for US architecture pavilion commissioners, though, is fundraising. While the Architecture Biennale’s more glamorous sister event, the Biennale Arte, can rely on deep-pocketed patrons and galleries, pulling together funding for an architecture biennale is a more hardscrabble undertaking.

Historically, US pavilions receive a small grant from the United States Department of State. Records show that $375,000 was allocated for the 2025 architecture pavilion. That money only goes so far; there is work to ship, structures to build and staff to accommodate – an enterprise whose costs can mount to as much as $2 million. And to make it all happen, the most ambitious pavilion curatorial teams have to know how to find the cash.

‘It is important to know how to fundraise,’ says Peter MacKeith, dean of the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design at the University of Arkansas. ‘It's important to know that this is an entirely public, private enterprise from the get-go.’

MacKeith was one of three co-commissioners for this year’s US Pavilion, an Arkansas-based team representing the University of Arkansas’s architecture school, DesignConnects and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, an institution founded by Alice Walton, the Wal-Mart heiress and philanthropist.

‘Part of the advantage we had going into this was [we had] three experienced organisations, each with their own depth and each with their own capacity,’ says MacKeith, who has been curating exhibitions in Venice since 1991. His team was advised to budget at least a $2 million for the project.

‘There is, as yet, no guidebook for this work,’ he adds.

Niall Atkinson, who was one of the co-curators for the 2018 US Pavilion, themed ‘Dimensions of Citizenship,’ concurs. That edition’s co-commissioners included the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago. ‘We were two educational institutions coming together,’ he tells us. ‘I mean, those already come with fundraising machines.’

If you’re a small organisation, though, the story’s more complicated. In summer 2022, Tizziana Baldenebro got a call from the State Department letting her know that she would be the curator and co-commissioner for the 2023 US pavilion. ‘I got off the call, and I just remember crying, because our organisation had never fundraised that much money,’ she tells us.

At the time, Baldenebro was the director of SPACES, a Cleveland-based arts and culture organisation with an operating budget under $500,000 a year. ‘Our organisation was probably the smallest to do it,’ she says. ‘We weren't affiliated with a major institution– like, it was me knocking down everyone's door.’

What ensued was a flurry of fundraising to pull off her exhibition, ‘Everlasting Plastics.’

'Of the $375,000 [awarded by the State Department], $125,000 is like a pass-through grant for the Guggenheim Foundation [which owns the US pavilion]. They manage the pavilion, and they have a liaison. So effectively, you have $250,000 that's directly apportioned to your project, and that becomes seed money,' Baldenebro explains.

'It's also a hell of a lot more money than other countries get sometimes,' she adds.

In addition to the State Department award, Baldenebro found funding through the Ford Foundation as well as local nonprofit organisations, including the George Gund Foundation and the Cleveland Foundation.

‘One of the things that was very tricky for us was that SPACES was an arts organisation, and we were fundraising for architecture,' she says. 'Architecture doesn't have the same philanthropic backing that art does.’

In the end, the budget for ‘Everlasting Plastics’ wound up being around $1.3 million, according to Baldenebro. (By comparison, the 2024 Biennale Arte needed to raise $5 million, according to the New York Times) ‘It was a really intense effort,’ she says. ‘You’re working on your pitch in different ways, and sometimes reapplying [for grants], and it was all within a six-month span.’

Though Baldenebro collaborated with Lauren Leving, a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, and relied on the advice of past commissioners, she still feels like there is room for more support for smaller, independent teams.

‘One of my goals is to create a wiki,’ she says. 'I would love to see more alternative art and small art organisations do this program. They have something to say. They don't have the same resources, so maybe the polish isn't there in the same way, but it's almost more radical and more interesting.’

Radical ideas, though, will be taking a backseat at Biennales for the foreseeable future.

While the US government will maintain its $375,000 grant for the 2026 Biennale Arte, participants must adhere to guidelines established by the Trump administration. According to the official grant opportunity posted earlier this month, the US pavilion must ‘promote American values’ and applicants must certify that they may ‘not operate any programs promoting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion that violate any applicable anti-discrimination laws.’

‘[The administration] is getting rid of the whole critical aspect of the fine arts,’ says Atkinson, the 2018 curator. ‘I can't imagine how the US [architecture] pavilion would not fall under that purview and suddenly have an agenda which is quite different in terms of representing architecture and the United States.’

(Wallpaper* has reached out to the State Department for comment, but did not hear back by the time of publication).

For MacKeith and the organisers of this year’s pavilion, it’s important to keep the greater mission in mind. ‘It’s in the national interest, so to speak – it's to a greater good,’ he says. MacKeith is inspired by the individual supporters who made this year’s pavilion, PORCH, come to life. ‘Sometimes it’s $250, sometimes it’s $1,000, sometimes it’s many more times that, but it’s been truly rewarding to have these conversations.’

A new intervention by the Norman Foster Foundation in collaboration with Porsche appeared along the waterfront of the Arsenale at the opening of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025. Gateway to Venice’s Waterway is part installation, part platform for dialogue around infrastructure and the future of movement in Venice. Created as part of Porsche’s The Art of Dreams cultural programme, the project explores sustainable transportation in a place defined by its relationship to water, rather than roads.

Step through Norman Foster's ‘Gateway to Venice's Waterway'

'[We wanted] to provoke a discussion about mobility,' says Foster of the project, which takes the form of a floating pontoon that extends across the water from the banks of the Arsenale, one of the Venice Biennale’s two main locations. According to Foster, himself an avid collector of vintage automobiles, the 37-metre long aluminium structure took cues from 'the tubular frame of old racing cars,' he said. Composed of a curving, diagrid frame inset with diamond-shaped aluminium panels of varying sizes, the structure was envisioned to catch the light like the rippling water in the canal.

'The idea was to use very simple materials with a high degree of engineering sophistication,' Foster explains, 'to create something that would respond to nature – to the wind, the light, the shadows – and would move with the waves.'

Though it might seem counterintuitive for a car brand to make a statement in a city with no roads, Porsche’s vice president of style, Michael Mauer, sees it as an inquiry into the nature of movement – even in the most unexpected of environments. 'If you’re in the car industry, you talk about mobility,' he says. 'This gateway is a symbol of how mobility in a city like Venice could work.' Indeed, the bridge allows access to a fleet of Schiller bicycles, pedal-powered watercrafts that combine the form of a traditional bicycle with lightweight pontoons, enabling riders to cycle across water.

Porsche and the Norman Foster Foundation see the project as highlighting Venice’s myriad transportation challenges. Aside from traditional hand-powered gondolas that have been entirely usurped by the tourism industry, there are no electric or renewable-powered boats operating in the city. With the introduction of the Schiller bikes, as well as a fleet of Frauscher x Porsche 850 Fantom Air boats powered by electric propulsion, which were present during the Biennale opening days, they hope to spark a conversation about new and sustainable ways of traversing the ancient floating city.

The project is just the latest instalment in Porsche’s The Art of Dreams program, which explores the intersection of art, design, and urban innovation. Previous editions have seen the artist Thomas Trum install large-scale artworks in southern France and the art collective Numen/For Use build a massive interactive sculpture formed of climbable nets in the centre of a Milanese palazzo.

But for Mauer, the collaboration embodies, above all, the spirit of multidisciplinary exchange. 'It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work with Norman Foster,' he says. 'The car industry is a very streamlined process, so exchanging opinions with a creative community is so important to us. Norman Foster is a car collector and very much interested in the history of cars, so hearing his ideas on car design was a very exciting moment for us. Though the creative process of car design and architecture can be very similar, the outcome is vastly different. We really understood each other.'

The 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Carlo Ratti and titled Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective., is open to the public from 10 May to 23 November 2025.

fosterandpartners.com

Koyo Kouoh, a towering figure in the contemporary art world, has died at the age of 57 as a result of a recently-diagnosed cancer. She is best known for her work advocating for African creatives and institutions, as well as curating a number of high profile international shows. Kouoh was due to curate the 2026 Venice Biennale, making her the second African to lead the exhibition following Okwui Enwezor’s edition in 2015, and the first African woman to do so.

Kouoh was born in Cameroon in 1967, moving to Switzerland at 13, where she later studied Business Administration and Banking. However, as she explained in a 2023 interview, ‘[she was] fundamentally uninterested in profit’, and left her studies to became a social worker assisting migrant women. It was at this point that Kouoh began to get involved in the art world.

She returned to Africa in 1996 and settled in Dakar, Senegal, where she founded Raw Material Company, an independent art hub for West African creatives. She believed in engaging with the region first and foremost, weaving an ‘Africa-first’ narrative that challenged the Western canon.

In 2019, Kouoh was appointed executive director and chief curator of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA) in Cape Town, South Africa. At the time, the institution was facing a controversy; Kouoh is widely credited with turning its fortunes around. She revamped Zeitz, placing a renewed focus on African art for African people, including a 2022 show titled When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting, which is currently on display in Brussels. The museum has released a statement expressing its ‘profound sorrow’ at the news of Kouoh’s passing, and explaining the museum will be closed ‘until further notice’.

Although Kouoh prioritised African voices and perspectives, her influence extended beyond the continent. She worked on curatorial teams for Documenta, the international contemporary art exhibition held every five years in Kassel, Germany; EVA International, Ireland's biennial of contemporary art; and the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh.

She was also, as mentioned, due to curate the 2026 Venice Biennale; sadly, Kouoh passed away before details of her exhibition could be released, although the biennale has said that a conference to discuss her work will still go ahead. It also said that her death ‘leaves an immense void in the world of contemporary art’, and reflected upon the ‘passion, intellectual rigor and vision’ that characterised her work.

Throughout her career, Kouoh was unwavering in her advocacy for African artists. She also prioritised institution-building over personal advancement, aiming to leave a legacy that supports artists. There is no doubt that she achieved her aim.

There's a positional arrogance to the British Pavilion, placed as it is to terminate the grand axis of the Giardini, flanked by France and Germany on either side but raised up above both. Dating from 1909, just before the extent and scale of the British empire reached its peak, the building was designed by the architect Edwin Alfred Rickards. With its grand cascade of steps, classical columns and the bearing of a temple, not a gallery space, it is a prime example of how culture projects soft power.

Enter the 2025 British Pavilion in Venice: 'GBR: Geology of Britannic Repair'

Inside, apart from the main space, things are a little different. A tight, awkward procession of smallish rooms, with high ceilings, the pavilion is a throwback to an earlier age, a world of rigour and hierarchy. Unsurprisingly, this small but significant symbol of an evaporated empire frequently serves as a backdrop for exhibitions questioning and challenging the long-term legacy of the country that built it. And so it proves at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025, with the installation GBR: Geology of Britannic Repair.

This year’s curatorial team, Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi of Nairobi-based architecture studio Cave_bureau, and UK-based writer Owen Hopkins and academic Professor Kathryn Yusoff, are not the first to react against the structure and its inherent symbolism. At the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023, a curatorial team responding to the festival assembled by Lesley Lokko created a celebration of the new spaces of multiculturalism, Dancing Before The Moon. GBR goes further, literally digging into the fabric of the structure to represent past and present challenges to colonialism.

This physicality starts with the exterior and a piece called Double Vision, consisting of a beaded veil that shrouds the structure and obscures its overt classical symmetry through a new texture formed from red glass beads and spheres made from clay and agricultural waste. The exhibition is part of a wider British Council project, the UK/Kenya Season 2025, forming a waypoint between London and Nairobi, with a ‘geographical, geological and conceptual focus’ on the Rift Valley.

The central installation, Earth Compass, this connection is made explicit, reproducing the stars in the sky on the night of 12 December 1963, the date of Kenya’s independence. Paths subsequently diverged but cultural ties remained, with the post- empire realities for each country illustrated via a representation of national cumulative carbon emissions.

This is followed by the Rift Room, an installation centring around a bronze cast of a Kenyan cave system frequented by baboons, whilst the pavilion walls are peeled back to brick to allow the insertion of Kenyan and British bricks into the original structure. The room was created in collaboration with e-flux Architecture.

Objects of Repair comes next, a project by Yara Sharif, Nasser Golzari and Murray Fraser of the Palestine Regeneration Team (PART). An exploration of the changed and blasted landscape of Palestine, forever tortured by its twentieth century role as a colonial bargaining chip, part of this piece is practical, imagining how the scars of war and destruction could be repurposed as practical building materials. An animation tumbles through a three-dimensional world of shattered concrete, conjuring beauty and reflection out of past and ongoing horrors, layer upon layer of them.

The installation that follows, formed from rattan weave, also ekes beauty out of a historic terror that continues to reach into the present. A collaboration between Nairobi-based practice Cave_bureau and Professor Phil Ayres at the Royal Danish Academy, the structure is a 1:1 recreation of part of the Shimoni Slave Cave in Kenya. This natural cave system was once used to hold enslaved Africans ahead of their transportation. Although there was an arduous and terrifying underground escape route to another complex, the Three Giant Sister Caves, these jagged, angular forms, pierced by patterns of light, are intended to ‘reimagine a space of trauma as a space for repair and healing.’

Dr Thandi Loewenson’s Lumumba’s Grave is a celebration of the dream of the African space programme, paired with imagined remnants of satellites as ‘technofossils’ and in the final gallery is the installation Vena Cava.

Taking the geometry of Decimus Burton’s Palm House at Kew, a vessel and symbol of the physical transplantation of the tropics, the Ghanaian-Filipino designer Mae-ling Lokko and Argentinean architectural designer Gustavo Crembil have created Vena Cava, an empty timber structure filled with panels of new material possibilities. These include fly ash, bioplastics, and fungi, a world away from the industrialisation of mineral extraction and exploitation that is one characteristic of colonialism.

As in 2023, the British Pavilion was awarded a Special Mention by the jury of the 19th International Architecture Exhibition. The exhibition was supported in part by The Dalmore Scotch Whisky, who also sponsored the British Council’s opening night party at the Archivio di Stato di Venezia.

The British Council commission GBR – Geology of Britannic Repair is at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 until Sunday 23 November 2025, VeniceBiennale.BritishCouncil.org, LaBiennale.org

In partnership with Rolex

Precision, design vision and sustainability form an integral part in all Rolex projects – from the brand’s finely crafted watches to its discerning architectural endeavours. The latter, with a list of collaborators that reads like a who’s who of the field’s contemporary scene, include the Rolex Learning Center for EPFL in Lausanne by SANAA, and the Rolex USA headquarters in New York by David Chipperfield. In the same spirit, Rolex, a long-standing supporter of the Venice Architecture Biennale, has announced that it is launching a new pavilion in the Giardini for this year’s event, which is open from 10 May to 23 November 2025.

The building, designed by architect Mariam Issoufou, was conceived to represent the brand’s commitment to long-lasting, quality design with a sustainability-minded soul. Drawing on Issoufou’s architecture practice and experience (her studio, Mariam Issoufou Architects, has bases in Niamey, Zurich and New York), the pavilion is composed of natural materials – it features a recycled timber exterior; a translucent, coloured glass ceiling composed of elements made by Murano craftspeople; and terrazzo flooring, comprising an aggregate that includes recycled crushed ‘Cotisso’ glass (a leftover from the glassmaking process).

This palette not only brings texture and an artisanal, handmade approach to the forefront, but it also connects the building to its location, nodding to Venice’s rich cultural tapestry, as well as its fragile, precious historical context and ecological vulnerability.

Within the new space, a multi-layered exhibit is set to hone in further on these themes through film-led displays. A piece on the making of the pavilion itself will take the visitor on a journey through its different stages, telling the story of its creation.

A second film, a documentary titled Bourj Hammoud: The Value of the Existing, broadens the lens of exploration. Through the 2023-2024 Rolex mentoring programme, French architect Anne Lacaton, a firm proponent of building reuse and redesign in architecture, worked with young Lebanese-Armenian architect Arine Aprahamian. The results of their two-year collaboration, Aprahamian’s research project, are captured in this piece, which ‘explores how small and targeted interventions are the right strategy to improve daily life in Bourj Hammoud, a dense neighbourhood of Beirut where [the architect] grew up’.

Two slide shows examine the traditions and processes behind the careful refurbishment of two Rolex boutiques – in Milan, within the prestigious Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, and in Tokyo, occupying four floors in the Rolex Tower. ACPV Architects spearheaded the former, and Gwenael Nicolas of Tokyo-based design studio Curiosity was behind the latter, each author working closely with local artisans to achieve an interior that both nods to the past and looks to the future.

Drawing on themes that feel current and urgent, such as sustainability and a striving to preserve tradition while fostering innovation (which also gently echoes the 2025 biennale curator Carlo Ratti’s theme ‘Intelligens: Natural. Artificial. Collective’, underlining our connection with nature), the new Rolex Pavilion in Venice will be unveiled to the public on the biennale’s launch day on 10 May.

rolex.com

After roaming winding streets and crossing quaint Venetian bridges, Palazzo Diedo stands tall and grand on the canal-side. Following extensive restoration, the building has been returned to the community after years of neglect, and is now a space for artistic expression and cultural production. It is here that two pioneering research initiatives set up shop to present ‘The Next Earth: Computation, Crisis, Cosmology’ during 19th Venice Architecture Biennale.

‘The Next Earth: Computation, Crisis, Cosmology’

The initiatives include Antikythera’s ‘The Noocene: Computation and Cosmology from Antikythera to AI’, and MIT Architecture’s ‘Climate Work: Un/Worlding the Planet’. Opening today (9 May), Palazzo Diedo Berggruen Arts & Culture is the perfect location to host as it creates a bridge between the contemporary and forward thinking movements within the walls of the past, rich in architectural history.

The two concepts raise questions about how architecture can co-exist with the Earth, and how it can respond to environmental crises. MIT Architecture has had a particular focus on climate and sustainability within the last decade. For ‘Climate Work: Un/Worlding the Planet’ they presented thirty works-in-progress by the MIT faculty, each presenting a sample of a world – reimagining material supply chains, energy expenditure, modes of practice, and deep-time perspectives.

Some of these included reimagining timber by simply building within forestry rather than using it for material. Another was a portable kitchen, a somewhat simple concept, yet for many areas worldwide having access to kitchens or having them installed can be extremely difficult. MIT’s solution included a working stove and running water which can be easily movable and transported anywhere. Another example included 3D printing with small scale models made out of mud, with the idea to eventually create residences via this method and materiality.

These presented ideas question how architecture not only is informed by its surrounding context, but should also adapt to it by offering new narratives in how construction is currently understood in order to ‘rebuild’ our world.

Antikythera is a Berggruen research program that reorients planetary computation as a philosophical, technological and geopolitical force. It sounds complex. It means viewing computation not just as a human tool, but as a global-scale infrastructure that shapes our understanding and interaction with the world. What Antikythera presents is a development of global networks, sensors, and software, essentially treating the Earth as a vast, interconnected computational system. Antikythera takes its name from the first known computer, an ancient device designed to calculate and navigate time and space. Their exhibition looks at the evolution of planetary computation from Antikythera to AI.

Along with selected historical artefacts, the exhibition is centred around an architectural scale video monolith which presents Antikythera’s key concepts as well as select short films on AI, astronomy and artificial life.

Collectively, the juxtaposing exhibitions harnesses a conversation to rethink the scale of human action in relation to the planet and its resources, by harnessing imagination.

'The Next Earth' will be open to the public throughout the Biennale Architettura 2025 at Palazzo Diedo

The Biennale begins

Ellie Stathaki, Architecture and Environment Director

The Venice Architecture Biennale is one of the most highly-anticipated events in the global calendar in the field, and a true celebration party of architecture. Being here for the inauguration is the biggest treat. I will spend the next three days on the ground exploring and speaking to people and taking the pulse of where it’s all at. Taking in the sheer volume of the exhibitions is a mammoth task but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

A footwear foray

Tianna Williams, Staff Writer

I took a speedy trip to Venice for the latest iteration of ‘Haus’, the creative platform of footwear brand Golden Goose. Italian-Canadian director Marco Brambilla presented an otherworldly installation that explores memory, fantasy and desire, and the grand reveal, titled ‘Heaven’s Gate’, was a five minute video collage. Accompanied by booming audio, it’s hard not to physically feel the artwork as it echoes around the hangar space. You can read the full review here.

A surprise at the F1

Anna Solomon, Digital Staff Writer

Last weekend (2-4 May) was F1 weekend in Miami, and my first Grand Prix. I was part of a group brought along to see Lego’s impressive display of ten fully-drivable cars, each made of 400,000 bricks, which the drivers took for a spin during the pre-race lap. I then watched McClaren’s Oscar Piastri storm to victory (in a real F1 car), which was quite the experience. As the vehicles streak past at 233 mph, they appear as little more than blurs of colour, and you suddenly understand why the drivers have to have freakishly strong neck muscles to deal with the G-force unleashed upon them.

A powerful performance

Gabriel Annouka, Senior Designer

This week I was back at my beloved Rio Cinema for the preview of Goodnight Ladies, the new film by Alex Matraxia starring the incomparable David Hoyle. Still one of the most vital figures in queer performance and political rage, Hoyle joined the filmmaker for a post-screening Q&A, every line delivered with brutal, humorous clarity. When asked what advice he had for young artists, he simply said: ‘Remember, we live in a fascist dystopian era’. Honestly, what else is there to say?

A sunny sojourn

Charlotte Gunn, Director of Digital Content

The long weekend was spent in Malta for some much-needed sunshine. It was my first time visiting, so I checked off a lot of the hits. Highlights included strolling through the ‘silent city’ of Mdina's narrow streets, taking a gondola ride to see the Three Cities, and a lazy seafood lunch in the fishing village of Marsaxlokk.

More Biennale madness

Jonathan Bell, Transport and Technology Editor

I'm back at the familiar and frequently overwhelming world of the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. Always a pleasure, even if the sensory assault can be a bit much at times. This is the elegant Chiostro di San Antonio, part of the Archivio di Stato di Venezia, and location of the British Council's hot ticket of a party (before the guests arrived). Sponsored by The Dalmore Scotch Whisky (who also supplied the cocktails), there was also a vivid performance from poet and musician Joshua Idehen.

What comes to mind when you think of a typical American porch? White columns? Haint blue ceilings? Perhaps a pair of rocking chairs and chilled glasses of sweet tea?

But what about a public park? Or a Native American roundhouse? Or even a New York City dining shed?

These are some of the ways architects and designers are rethinking these familiar structures for the US Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025.

The exhibition, ‘PORCH: An Architecture of Generosity’, opens to the public on Saturday 10 May and was organised by an Arkansas-based team comprising the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design at the University of Arkansas alongside DesignConnects and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

Porches, according to the pavilion’s co-comissioners, provided the perfect physical and metaphorical structures to not only address the biennale’s main theme, 'Intelligens: Natural. Artificial. Collective’, but also to create a gathering place for engagement, edification, relaxation and play. It’s a place, per co-commissioner Peter MacKeith of the Fay Jones School of Architecture, ‘where we invite each other to come and sit with us for a while’.

‘It's not architecture as an object,’ he adds. ‘It's architecture as experience and as activity.’

And there’s plenty to experience at ‘PORCH’, beginning with the historic US pavilion itself. A design team consisting of Fayetteville, Arkansas-based Marlon Blackwell Architects, industrial designer Stephen Burks, and landscape firms D.I.R.T. Studio and Ten x Ten, have wrapped the 1930 Palladian-style brick building with a gigantic mass timber veranda, complete with a deck, a conversation pit, outdoor furniture and even a zig-zagging ceiling painted in an electric blue, a riff on traditional Southern verandas.

This welcoming structure will be hosting a variety of performances and events in partnership with the Crystal Bridges Museum. ‘Our team is very enthusiastic and invigorated about how you create individual moments on a porch – a moment of solitude or communal moments,’ says the museum’s executive director, Rod Bigelow.

It will also be a moment of fun and celebration within the hustle and bustle of the larger biennale, the organisers say. ‘We’re bringing Ozarks hospitality to the world stage,’ says DesignConnects’ Susan Chin.

‘This is a really timely concept, and I think that is what has been truly appreciated,’ she adds. ‘And also being focused on Arkansas, I think that there's a sensitivity to lots of different perspectives.’

Inside, visitors encounter projects from 54 different participants. The co-comissioners wanted to steer clear of esoteric jargon, speculative projects and screens, so asked that participants create ‘porch windows’ based on real-life work.

‘It’s been very clear to me for more than a decade that the primary and ultimate audience of people coming to the architecture biennale are not you and I – they're school children,’ insists MacKeith. Therefore, they asked the participants, narrowed down from nearly 400 submissions, to keep their contributions as tangible as possible.

Studio James Carpenter in collaboration with Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, for example, contributed a translucent blue model of the entryway they’ve designed for the Gateway Arch museum in St Louis, Missouri. New York firm WXY, in collaboration with the city’s department of transportation, submitted a kit of parts to transform the city’s deteriorating Covid-era dining sheds into sturdy, more accessible structures. Other ‘windows’ are like shadowboxes and are filled with photographs, models or, in one case, a forest of tiny evergreen trees.

‘It's like a box of chocolates and people will encounter 54 flavours,’ says MacKeith.

The pavilion, which relies, in part, on funding from the US Department of State, arrives at a moment of political division and uncertainty. But the co-comissioners see the timing as an opportune one.

‘I think this project works very well within the context of bringing people together,’ says Bigelow. ‘And I think more than anything, that's what we need to do now, is to get proximate to each other, listen, and discuss. I think the porch is the perfect concept to do that.’

‘PORCH: An Architecture of Generosity' is on view at Giardini della Biennale in Venice, Italy through 23 November 2025. Visit porchusavenice2025.org for visitor information and more.

The Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 opens to the public on 10 May – and there's just time to gen up on the architecture studios behind some of the national pavilions before the big reveal.

The overall theme of 'Intelligens: Natural. Artificial. Collective' promises a cross-disciplinary, collaborative and broad take for this year’s festival. Drawing on curator Carlo Ratti’s research and practice, as well as making the most of an open call for submissions (the first ever for the Biennale), displays are set to touch on sustainability, human invention and the future in an effort to reimagine the relationship between nature and technology within architectural discourse.

As the 2025 edition opens and invites us to explore who and what is important in the field today, the national pavilions – running parallel to the main festival’s show – typically create their own, distinct universe, connected in varying degrees to the overall theme but always offering their rich, hyperlocal interpretations of the architectural zeitgeist. Here, we pick three of the most exciting studios, collectives and individual practitioners to know this year.

Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 national pavilions: 3 studios to know

Cave Bureau, Kenya

Cave Bureau is a Nairobi-based group of architects and researchers whose work examines the post-colonial African condition through the lens of landscape. Founded in 2014, the studio owes its name to its geographic origins in Kenya, and more specifically, Cave Bureau’s proximity to a site known as the Cradle of Humankind in South Africa spawned an interest in the origin of the human race as a species.

For the 2025 biennale, Cave Bureau is involved in the British Pavilion – which, as always, is commissioned by the British Council, and this time led by an expert multidisciplinary team including UK-based curator and writer Owen Hopkins and academic professor Kathryn Yusoff. The curatorial team cites The Great Rift Valley as the basis for the exhibition’s geographical, geological and conceptual focus.

Lisbeth Sachs, Switzerland

Architect Lisbeth Sachs (1914–2002) may be little-known outside her home country of Switzerland, but she is about to be granted a spotlight as part of this year‘s Swiss Pavilion in Venice. Curators and architects Elena Chiavi, Kathrin Füglister, Amy Perkins and Myriam Uzor of the Annexe group, working in collaboration with artist Axelle Stiefel and graphic designer Emma Kouassi, will recreate a site-specific, temporary art installation designed by Sachs for the 1958 Swiss Exhibition for Women’s Work (SAFFA) in Zürich. Through this piece, the team asks: ‘What would have happened if it was Lisbeth Sachs, not Bruno Giacometti, who had designed the Swiss Pavilion in the Giardini della Biennale di Venice?

Sachs' rich, characterful work is aptly represented in a compact home, Summer House Strauss (pictured above), which was completed in 1976 and is located on the shores of Lake Hallwil (Hallwilersee), a popular holiday destination in Aesch, close to Lucerne. It was commissioned by Dr Frank Strauss in 1964.

Pedro y Juana, Mexico

You might expect a business called Pedro Y Juana to be named for its respective partners, but the dynamic, Mexico City-based architecture and design practice is, in fact, led by co-directors Ana Paula Ruiz Galindo and Mechy Reuss. They explain that their choice of studio name had more to do with ideas of authorship and the nature of architecture practice than any literal representation. However, their choice of name signifies their transdisciplinary make-up and 'gives us the possibility for a more collaborative future,’ the founders explain.

Their participation in the 2025 biennale’s Mexico Pavilion is a case in point. The studio formed a collective with two more architecture offices (Estudio IUAPdA and Locus), graphic design agency Estudio María Marín de Buen, plant experts Lucio Usobiaga Hegewisch and Nathalia Muguet, and Miguel Ángel Vega Ruiz, Xavier Delgado González y Shantal Gabriela Haddad Gómez of lighting consultants ILWT. Their exhibit will explore Mexico’s chinampas – an ancient agroforestry system of growing crops on small plots within wetlands.

Read our guide to the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, which runs from 10 May to 23 November 2025

labiennale.org

Architect Carlo Ratti's passion for cities and architecture is palpable – and contagious. The Italian founder of Carlo Ratti Associati is big on innovation and design that pushes the boundaries of conventional architecture, applying his experiments and research findings on every scale, from installation to buildings and the wider urban setting. He also enjoys looking to nature for inspiration.

Ratti was announced as the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 curator in December 2023. With the event kicking off in early May, he has been hard at work putting together the world's leading festival for the built environment ever since – delving into the architectural zeitgeist and introducing the biennale's first-ever open call for submissions. We met with Ratti before the launch to learn more about his work, motivations, and fascinations, and we offer you a glimpse into the mind of the man set to dominate the headlines come spring.

An introduction to architect Carlo Ratti

Wallpaper*: What fascinates you and drives your practice?

Carlo Ratti: If you look at the work of [Marc-Antoine] Laugier in 18th-century France, he talked about this concept of the 'primitive hut' to explain the origins of architecture. His idea was that architecture starts when the climate is against us. If the climate is not against us, if the weather is perfect, there's almost no need for architecture. Today, the climate is certainly becoming more extreme, and when this happens adaptation in architecture is the only hope.

This search is also about looking at different answers. There's a lot of literature that looks at the world of cities and buildings evolving in a manner that's not that different from the natural world. So we can try things, we see what works and what doesn't. It's almost this kind of evolutionary system, a trial-and-error kind of approach.

W*: What's missing from architecture today?

Carlo Ratti: Somehow this leads into the themes of the biennale ['Intelligens: Natural. Artificial. Collective.'], as I would say one of the key things to look at today is how architecture can bridge the natural and the artificial. Linking the two worlds is, I think, something that's particularly important today.

W*: Is the answer in mimicking and mirroring nature, or working with it in a symbiotic, collaborative way?

CR: It's a beautiful question. People talk a lot about biomimicry, which is when you're copying nature, but here, it's more than copying nature per se. It is about copying the logic of nature. Nature has this kind of trial-and-error system, which can be the core of the way we design.

W*: Where do you think are unexplored opportunities in today's architecture world?

CR: Opportunities lie in working more collaboratively. Traditionally, architects have always been this inspired, singular professional. I am thinking of a Fountainhead persona, this architect alone, being able to solve problems. But I think we need to work more collaboratively. I always try to have teams of different disciplines working together. I call this approach the 'choral' architect. For example, through my work at MIT [where Ratti teaches, directing the Senseable City Lab], I do research where we have people coming from design, architecture, and planning but also a lot of computer scientists, economists and so on, all working together.

W*: How do you see these elements informing your curation for the biennale?

CR: I try to do the same with my curation and the biennale projects [more will be revealed later this month]. At the office, it is a bit more focused, as you work differently when you need to deliver a building or a master plan, but certainly, we're trying to apply the same thinking in both places. Ultimately, the idea of 'disciplines' is something artificial. There's a beautiful book by Edward O Wilson, which talks about the unity of knowledge. The disciplines had to be divided and separated because of the difficulty of managing all of the growing body of human knowledge at once. But we are trying to reintegrate them and look at the whole.

W*: Which projects do you consider landmark for your practice, and why?

CR: I think these would be two projects I had at the very beginning of my practice in 2008. They both explored this mixing of the natural and the artificial. One was the digital water pavilion in Saragossa, a building completely made of water but controlled digitally so that it creates an architecture made of droplets; and the other one was a building in the centre of Milan, an extension for the Trussardi fashion house. It was the first project in Italy with Patrick Blanc, the French botanist. Both of them explored boundaries in different ways.

W*: There is a lot to be excited about. What within our environment makes you smile?

CR: I will go back to what Carlo Scarpa said, that 'between a tree and a house, choose the tree'. My answer is the amazing complexity of nature, and what an incredible designer nature is. Any tree you might look at, it's an incredible system: it gets energy from the sun, all the materials are created locally, and when everything is over, it all goes back to the environment in a circular way.

carloratti.com

The 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale will run 10 May till 23 November 2025

The Venice Art Biennale 2024 is soon to close its doors, but there's still time to catch the highlghts. The central exhibition at this edition is called ‘Foreigners Everywhere’, a theme that is intended to unify what is essentially a national competition and to highlight indigenous artists whose presence, until recently, has been lacking on the international stage. At the Luxembourg Pavilion, Every Island and Andrea Mancini , curated by Joel Valabrega, embraced this theme in their exhibition, ‘A Comparative Dialogue Act’ as they set up a stage that could be used by a roster of artists throughout the six months the biennale is open.

Brussels-based Every Island, founded in 2021, comprises Alessandro Cugola, Caterina Malavolti, Damir Draganic, Juliane Seehawer and Martina Genovesi. Here, they collaborated with artist and multidisciplinary artist Andrea Mancini to create a framework for performance artists to use during the exhibition.

‘I think what we were interested in was making the exhibition space a productive space; we reflected collectively and started to think of the biennale in a different way, more as a testing ground than as a framework to show a finished product,’ said Cugola ahead of the opening.

The silver-lined space comprises a metal-tiled stage surrounded by a padded curtain set with large, elaborate speakers on wheels which, when moved, carve their path into the surface of the stage. The retro-futuristic lab aesthetic sets the stage for a progressive presentation that counters traditional artistic and curatorial approaches to the biennale.

The intention is that international artists take on the space, adding to a sound library for the next artist to use, if they choose to do so, creating the dialogue referenced in the show’s title.

The first performance, by Turkish Selin Davasse, encompassed a series of satirical monologues, taking on the identities of different animals we tend to see as pests. ‘Davasse works a lot with irony and produces spoken-word performances, and she uses different animals as metaphors for human dynamics, mostly linked to exclusion and a lack of acceptance,’ explained Genovesi. ‘Usually the animals that she picks are the ones that we do not love or do not feel closeness with, like pigeons, silkworms, mice, and she sort of impersonates these animals in a very seductive and ironic way; there are many layers that you can read into [the work]. Her work is usually very linked to feminism, but also to political conditions around the world.’

Samples from Davasse’s performance were made available for the next artist, Célin Jiang, who was followed by Stina Fors. This approach is intended to question the model of national pavilions, proposing an ethos of sharing platforms and resources between different parts of the world.

‘We decided to work with sound because it's the best way to open a dialogue,’ Mancini explained. ‘It's also a way to share knowledge and that's why we also use the medium. There will be different phases, most of them are pretty chaotic, made using a patching technique, layering over layer by layer. There is chaos all the time but we try to have moments of chirality and clarity – so there’s always one of the two happening.’

Mixing technologies, the collective offers a work that is intentionally unresolved, a work in progress with a definite end but many possibilities en route. One wonders what this work will be when it comes to an end later in November, but not even the artists know, and there is something wonderfully liberating about that.

The 60th Venice Biennale runs throughout the city until 24 November 2024

labiennale.org

Icelandic artist Hildigunnur Birgisdóttir is drawn to detail. In her hands, a concern with the bigger picture is translated into a fascination with minutiae: the small, throwaway accessories of consumerism, for example, from signs to price tags and packing materials.

It is a fascination she has explored for the Icelandic Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2024, in an exhibition titled ‘That’s a Very Large Number - A Commerzbau’, which also draws inspiration from ‘Merzbau’, German Dada artist Kurt Schwitters’ method of creating immersive collages from found materials. In works crafted from plastic toys and objects, and an installation made from a recycled floor panel from the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023, Birgisdóttir uncovers capitalism in all its forms. Here, she reveals the process behind her work.

Hildigunnur Birgisdottir at the Venice Biennale 2024

Wallpaper*: Your work is an interesting juxtaposition of innocent, childlike symbols and technical process. What has drawn you to such symbols as a means to express your thoughts on commercialisation?

Hildigunnur Birgisdottir: Everything human-made is of interest to me; I am trying to make sense of the world we humans have built. Sometimes, my only conclusion is to see the beauty in it. I enjoy when my findings bring me joy and humour, which you can also find in my work. So, I deep dive into these technical processes via factories and manufacturers that already exist, to go through the body of commercialism, while the symbols and logos are something more external – they represent the exterior of the system. We are all brought up as avid readers of these symbols, and that fascinates me. That we have developed a cognitive brain for millennia resulting in excellent logo reading abilities! Quelle surprise!

With the mass-produced children’s toys I represent in the exhibition, I found them to be telling of our human existence – it is a mini world we make for our children to learn to exist in this world. It’s simplified so that they can better understand and practice thriving in it. We have cash registers, dentist offices, car mechanics and all sorts of products, even nature has been reproduced in plastic for children to play with. This I find fascinating and I believe we can learn a lot about ourselves and the global system of commerce through the things we produce for children and also how we produce them.

W*: How have you translated a history of rethinking found objects, demonstrated by those including Kurt Schwitters, into the materials you have chosen to work with here?

HB: The force of repurposing is strong with me. Everything human-made is my preferred subject and interests me. I often find truth and beauty in the things that we produce millions of copies of – objects that do not exist for themselves, but rather serve as the presenters or holders for the items that are actually for sale. These objects are then tossed away after purchase, such as hangers for clothing in stores, plastic hooks to secure a product in its wrapping, etc.

I am, of course, building on the premise that nothing is excluded from being material for an artwork. This was a fundamental game changer. The fact that one could take a mass-produced item (a news clipping) and recontextualise it was a brilliant idea and perhaps made artists better equipped to reflect on the fast-changing world around them.

The subtitle of my exhibition, ‘A Commerzbau’, was inspired by my memory of being taught in school that this nonsensical word ‘Merz’, which Schwitters used for all his collages and then later ‘Merzbau’ for his installations, actually comprises the latter part of the word ‘Kommerz’ in German. Kurt had simply cut up that word and used ‘Merz’ in one of his works and decided that this would be the title of this type of art. After I had been working on my exhibition, it dawned on me that I had made an installation of found objects, a ‘Merzbau’ of sorts, made from the debris of commerce. Thus, I could say I reintroduce the ‘com’ to the ‘merz’ resulting in a ‘commerzbau’.

W*: Holograms, playing with our perception, can offer multiple interpretations. Why were you keen to work with them here?

HB: The holograms came from a wrapping I acquired that fascinated me. The wrapping was colourful and packed with information. (I believe it was from a light bulb: 40W / eco-friendly / 100 per cent guarantee/ 78,000 hours…) Each bit of information seemed to be competing for attention. On top, there was a holographic pattern that made the whole thing decorative. When I looked closely at the hologram, I saw that it was the logo of the company repeated like a pattern. This was the most decorated piece of paper I had seen for ages, and yet it was purely information, without any real decorative elements. Then I started looking into the hologram business and the fact that it is used in the marketing world to show that something is authentic, to increase value or to make something official and harder to copy (money and passports) fascinated me even more!

W*: You mention your experience, while growing up, of capitalism appearing so suddenly. How else had your heritage really defined your work for this piece?

HB: The way one’s heritage really makes a person and informs their belief-systems must be fundamental in my way of thinking.

I guess the fact that we [Iceland] are a small nation with a somewhat blown-up ego makes it seem reasonable to a person that they actually might have something to say, if that makes sense (we all might be suffering from an Island mentality). The ‘art scene’, as we know it elsewhere in the world, is also fairly young in Iceland, which maybe frees me from some of the burdens of art history. But since we are the nation of ‘The Sagas’, the written word is above all. I think that might have resulted in the strong roots of conceptual art in Iceland; you can definitely see that influence in my work.

‘That’s a Very Large Number - A Commerzbau’, by Hildigunnur Birgisdóttir at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2024, until 24 November 2024

labiennale.org

For the Venice Biennale 2024, Korean beauty brand Nonfiction and visual artist Koo Jeong A created an olfactory portrait of the entire Korean peninsula. To do so, they put out an open call for responses to the question: ‘What is your scent memory of Korea?’ to people from the country or with close links to it.

Koo and Nonfiction founder Haeyoung Cha received more than 600 written responses, each detailing unique memories from people based in cities or the countryside, with smells they encountered in public places or during private moments. Despite the difference between the submissions, certain themes kept reappearing, and from these overlapping responses, Koo selected a range of keywords they found particularly important and poignant. These keywords ranged from the beautiful to the grubby; from the natural world to the industrial city. The scent of sunlight and fallen leaves made the list, as did the scent of rice, lacquered wood, public bathhouses and a ‘metallic metro smell’.

Nonfiction has bottled the scent of Korea at the 2024 Venice Biennale

From that list, Nonfiction’s team of perfumers took on the task of interpreting and merging the different stories into a range of scents. The final result is 17 fragrances, each of which occupies a different section of the pavilion, that work together to offer visitors the sensation of travelling through different locations and time periods in Korea’s history.

Speaking about the project over email, Haeyoung acknowledges that crafting these various memories into unified scents was no easy task. ‘The significance of the project made it an exciting challenge. We gathered raw, heartfelt memories from individuals through an open call and captured keywords with Koo’s artistic inspiration,’ she writes ‘Our challenge was to faithfully communicate these with the perfumers while preserving the artist’s vision.’

‘I vividly remember our first meeting with the perfumers in Paris,’ she continues. ‘Since the French perfumers couldn’t directly experience the nostalgic Korean scents, we brought various foods and products mentioned in the open call to help them understand. We sourced items like mugwort soap used in Korean baths, and ssanghwacha [herbal tea] to evoke the scent of herbal medicine, allowing the perfumers to experience these aromas firsthand. Even for me, a Korean, these were long-forgotten scents, offering a brief journey back in time.’

Perhaps the most significant perfumer the team met in Paris was the iconic French nose Dominique Ropion, who consulted on all the fragrances in the pavilion and was the only perfumer for the project to create two scents: ‘Old Electronics’, which contains key notes of black pepper, steel accord and olibanum resinoid; and ‘Odorama Cities’, the only perfume in the pavilion that is sold commercially.

Odorama Cities is a complex and arresting fragrance that seeks to distil all the scent memories from the project into one bottle. It does so by focusing on four moments in Korea’s history: the 1960s or ‘forces of nature’ period, characterised by scents of pine resin and a salty wind; the 1970s-80s or ‘industrialisation’ period, represented by civets, ambrette seeds, and other unique spices; the 1990s-2000s or ‘ordinary moments’ period, when city life became punctuated by moments of warmth denoting by scents of public baths, rice cooking, the hint herbal medicine in an alleyway; and finally 2010s-2020s or ‘urban nostalgia’ period, which uses accords of ambergris, aldehyde, and asphalt to conjure visions of asphalt surfaces dotted with puddles and cold air filling the subway.

According to Haeyoung, Odorama Cities is more than a perfume. Rather, ‘it’s a piece of art that encapsulates Korea’s evolution. It’s a reinterpretation of modern and contemporary Korean history, captured through a scent pyramid representing different eras.’

Ropion describes the fragrance as ‘an intense portrait that captures the memories of epochs unfolding across the exceptionally beautiful nature of the Korean peninsula. I hope this creation evokes comforting memories for those who have experienced its land and inspires others who have yet to discover its captivating story.’

The Odorama Cities scent can be purchased, from $186, at Nonfiction’s online store or its shops in Hannam, Samcheong, and Sinsa. The 2024 Venice Biennale exhibition is on view in the Giardini until 24 November, labiennale.org

nonfiction-beauty.com

The Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 is open; the festival's official launch to the public marks the culmination of months of excitement in the industry's global circles. This year's appointed curator, architect Carlo Ratti, and the team behind the world's largest architecture festival have been working non-stop towards this moment, having allowed only hints till now as to what to expect.

'The role of the biennale is to look at different challenges. Lesley's was a very important one,' said Ratti at the first global press conference around the event, acknowledging the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale's influential theme by 2024 RIBA Gold Medal winner Lesley Lokko – and hinting at the future and the next steps in the grand exhibition's global explorations.

Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 overall theme: ‘Intelligens’

La Biennale di Venezia 2025 focuses on the topic of 'Intelligens: Natural. Artificial. Collective.' Ratti said of his theme: 'The title of the International Architecture Exhibition is usually announced both in English and in Italian. In 2025, it will be condensed into a single word for both languages via the common Latin precedent: intelligens. The title “Intelligens” is linked to the modern term “intelligence”, but it also evokes a wider set of associated meanings. In fact, the final syllable “gens” is Latin for “people”. A new, fictional root emerges, suggesting a future of intelligence that is inclusive, multiple, and imaginative beyond today’s limiting focus on AI.'

Exploring his topic through four sections, Ratti looks at four respective sub-themes: Transdisciplinarity, Living Lab, Space For Ideas, and Circularity Protocol. They are the key pillars in the way the main show is conceived. Speaking to us in an interview earlier in the year, he revealed that the natural world, its wisdom and engineering are key influences in his work - and bridging natural and artificial is an important element that is missing in architecture today. 'People talk a lot about biomimicry, which is when you're copying nature, but here, it's more than copying nature per se. It is about copying the logic of nature,' he said.

Collaboration across disciplines and fields of human knowledge is also highly important and an area Ratti has tapped into in his show. He explained: 'I think we need to work more collaboratively. I always try to have teams of different disciplines working together. I call this approach the 'choral' architect.'

Venice Architecture Biennale 2025: main show

'We would like the biennale to be a dynamic lab,' said Ratti at the biennale press conference, outlining his key goals, themes and participants of the main show. Bringing together diverse teams and pairing seemingly disparate disciplines help inspire unexpected and useful results, according to the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 curator. 'Adaptation depends on inclusivity and collaboration and this is what I am experimenting with here,' he continued.

Case studies exhibited and project teams span the globe - even reaching one examining outer space. Climate change and sustainable architecture action will feature prominently in the various narrative threads. AI also makes an appearance, as part of the main show is a dialogue between creatives and artificial intelligence. The show is packed with displays - almost too many to navigate in one go, so a second visit might be in order. There is a whopping 750 participants and over 300 projects in the Arsenale’s vast halls, spilling out to its surrounding grounds and gardens. The Giardini’s Central Pavilion, which, until now, also played host to a good part of the main show, is closed this year for restoration.

Circularity and openness

Last year, Ratti also launched a circular economy manifesto for this Venice Architecture Biennale - inviting participants to tackle core challenges in exhibition design, in order to produce a truly circular festival. This goal is outlined in the manifesto, which was developed with guidance from Arup and input from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. The team wrote at the time: 'Our goal is to demonstrate that architecture and the built environment can coexist harmoniously with our planet, by eliminating waste, circulating materials and regenerating natural systems. We commit to creating pavilions and spaces that are not just temporary showcases but offer examples of bold circular thinking and create lasting legacies.'

With all this in mind, the curator put an open call for proposals, for the first time ever in the festival's long history, 'no matter how audacious,' from both architects and non-architects. In fact, trans-disciplinarity seems to be the name of the game, with Ratti inviting the global community of practitioners, scientists, scholars, activists, and others to help him create a diverse, creative biennale. 'It was both thrilling and daunting. We got flooded with thousands of emails but at the same time, we were able to find voices in parts of the planet who we would have never discovered without this open call,' Ratti says.

Main show participants: Arsenale and beyond

The Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 showcases contributions that cast a net far and wide. There are architects and engineers, mathematicians and climate scientists, philosophers and artists, chefs and coders, writers and woodcarvers, farmers and fashion designers, and many more.

The exhibitors include names such as Lina Ghotmeh Architecture, Liam Young, Tosin Oshinowo, Bjarke Ingels Group, Winy Maas, Aaron Betsky, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, MAD Architects, Philip Youan, Foster + Partners (who collaborated with Porsche), Boonserm Premthada, Olalekan Jeyifous, Matteo Thun & Partners, Alejandro Aravena, EcoLogicStudio, Counterspace/Sumayya Vally, Studio Zhu Pei, Marina Tabassum Architects, Architectural Association/Ingrid Schroeder, 3XN GXN and CITA, Material Cultures, Studio Gang, Transsolar, Patricia Urquiola, and Mass Design Group.

Occupying sites outside the traditional grounds, the show aims to engage creatively with the entire city. 'With the venue of the Central Pavilion under renovation in 2025, Venice will not just host the Biennale Architettura—it will become a living laboratory. The city itself – one of the most imperilled on Earth in the face of a changing climate—will serve as the backdrop for a new kind of Exhibition, where installations, prototypes, and experiments are scattered across the Giardini, the Arsenale and other neighbourhoods,' Ratti explains.

Special Projects at the Biennale

Two main special projects accompany the main show and national participations. One is titled Margherissima and is exhibited inside the Austrian armoury (Polveriera austriaca), Forte Marghera in Mestre. It is a scheme focusing on its wider area and contributors include The Architectural Association (AA) and Nigel Coates, along with Michael Kevern, Guan Lee, John Maybury and Jan Bunge. The collaborative project, which was realised by AA students, imagines the transformation of this part of Venice's industrial hinterland into a city of the future, taking into account concerns around sustainability. It is set to be presented through a walk-through model. 'Could Marghera be a beacon for cities around the world, especially those in danger of being consumed by their own success?' asks Coates.

The second is the Biennale's ninth collaboration with the Victoria and Albert Museum in London on the Applied Arts Pavilion Special Project. This year it will be titled 'On Storage' - hinting at the opening of the V&A East Storehouse, which opens in London later this month. Curated by Brendan Cormier in collaboration with Diller, Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R), it explores the global architecture of storage.

Golden Lions for Lifetime Achievement

This year, the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement was jointly awarded to Italian architect Italo Rota (who recently died, on 6 April 2024) and American philosopher Donna Haraway. An honour awarded upon the recommendation of curator Carlo Ratti, the accolade was given to its recipients this year for their forward thinking and influence - in their field and beyond. Haraway was described by Ratti as a seminal voice 'in contemporary thought, straddling the social sciences, anthropology, feminist criticism, and the philosophy of technology,' while Rota 'a man of boundless culture, a passionate collector and researcher of both Wunderkammer objects and technological devices, and a generous teacher.'

Venice Architecture Biennale 2025: National Participations

Situated at their namesake pavilion across the Giardini park, as well as the Arsenale and further, selected sites across Venice, the national participations for the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 are as rich and far-reaching as ever.

Announced on the opening day, the Golden Lion for Best National Participation went to the Kingdom of Bahrain and its exhibit, 'Heatwave', which clearly and concisely explored notions of climate change and local tradition in a display that was inviting, accessible and thoughtful. The Holy See pavilion 'Opera aperta' and the 2025 British pavilion 'GBR: Geology of Britannic Repair' received a special mention each. Meanwhile, more awards announced on the day included a Golden Lion for Participation to the 'Canal Café' by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Natural Systems Utilities, SODAI, Aaron Betsky and Davide Oldani; a Silver Lion for a promising participation 'Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500' by Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler; and two special mentions to 'Alternative Urbanism: The Self-Organized Markets of Lagos' by Tosin Oshinowo, Oshinowo Studio, and 'Elephant Chapel' by Boonserm Premthada.

First-time exhibitors include the Republic of Azerbaijan, the Sultanate of Oman, Qatar, and Togo. Scroll down for more.

Bahrain pavilion

Winning the top gong for this year's best national contribution, the Bahrain pavilion focuses on climate change and a dialogue of old and new, the natural and the artificial - very much on the overall biennale theme. The festival's jury highlighted the country's participation in their citation: 'Golden Lion for best National Participation to the Kingdom of Bahrain: The Pavilion offers viable proposal for extreme heat conditions. As the designers explain, “Architecture must address the dual challenges of environmental resilience and sustainability. The ingenious solution can be deployed in public spaces and in locations where people must live and work outdoors in conditions of extreme heat. The pavilion uses traditional methods of passive cooling typical of the region and reminiscence of wind towers and shaded courtyards.' The pavilion was curated and designed by Andrea Faraguna, with engineering contributions by Mario Monotti and Alexander Puzrin.

Belgian Pavilion

Titled 'Building Biospheres', this year's Belgian contribution is curated by he team of Bas Smets and Stefano Mancuso. Commissioned by the Flanders Architecture Institute, the display is set to focus on the natural world and what it can offer us through its 'plant intelligence.' 'For too long, landscape has served as a backdrop for architecture. If we are to build a future that is truly sustainable, then natural intelligence must become the agent, shaping the way we live together. We must design with our biosphere, not against it, says Dennis Pohl, director of the institute.

Brazilian Pavilion

With their pavilion titled (RE)INVENTION, the Brazilians are zooming in on the communities and populations of the Amazon. Curated by the architects Luciana Saboia, Matheus Seco, and Eder Alencar, of the Plano Coletivo group, the exhibit looks at ancestral infrastructure in the region. 'Today, we know that the ancestral peoples of the Amazon were organized in much larger populations than previously thought. The region’s forests are largely the direct result of human action, the fruit of a balanced occupation and careful management of the vegetation, in contrast to the model that prevails in the Amazon today, which often reduces the landscape to a scenario of devastation.' says Seco.

Canada Pavilion

Canada is orchestrating a living installation, focusing on carbon-capturing cyanobacteria, 3D printed especially for the show. Working with the labs of ETH Zurich, the organisers aim to produce large scale, architecture pieces which will naturally evolve, grow and decay. The display, created by a group of artists and researchers is indeed a world premiere of an innovative type of technology developed by the Living Room Collective.

Danish Pavilion

Curated by architect Søren Pihlmann, the Danish pavilion addresses its offering as a construction site. Collaborating with experts from the Royal Danish Academy, the University of Copenhagen, the Technical University of Denmark, and ETH Zurich, the architect intends to create 1:1 builds discussing and displaying hyper local construction methods and materials. 'We've already created everything we need. That's why we must be better at understanding and finding value in what already exists,' he says.

Austrian Pavilion

Set in the green environs of the Giardini, the Austrian Pavilion this year is titled AGENCY FOR BETTER LIVING and it is looked after this year by a trio of curators: Sabine Pollak, Michael Obrist, and Lorenzo Romito. The display looks at the cities of Vienna and Rome as case studies, comparing them and discussing finds in terms of their social housing models - from official strategies to informal activist approaches. The idea is to share knowledge so everyone can benefit.

Japanese Pavilion

Curated by Jun Aoki, the Japanese Pavilion exhibition this year centres on the old Japanese language, this is expressed as ma, or the 'In-Between,' as the show is titled. The premise looks at humans in relation to the environment, rethinking it - instead of an us-and-it mentality of juxtaposition, to embracing a co-existence and interweaving which means a third realm emerges, where humans and nature form a single ecosystem. The organisers explain: 'This project takes the Japan Pavilion as the experimental grounds for pursuing this new kind of intelligence. The elements that make up the pavilion––the Hole, Wall Columns, Outer Walls, Brick Terrace, Pensilina, Tilted Loop Path, and Yew Tree–– with the human team of curators and two artist-architect pairs, engage in a dialogue, both fictionally and actually. Together, we imagine a future of the Japan Pavilion–– a near future, where things are just a little different.'

Kosovo Pavilion

The Republic of Kosovo is launching a display curated by architect Erzë Dinarama. Titled 'Lulebora nuk çel më. Emerging Assemblages', the show 'materializes these ecological tensions through sensory-material elements that resist capture by predictive models: the soils and smells of this uncertain landscape,' the team explains.

Oman Pavilion

Floral patterns and motifs provide inspiration for the inaugural Omani Pavilion. The country's very first official presence at the biennale is curated by Omani architect Majeda Alhinai. The exhibit will aim to weave age-old craft traditions with modernity. Alhinai says: 'As an architect and curator, I believe meaningful architectural solutions emerge when we truly understand the deep connections between place, people, and collective memory. Traces highlights the importance of social cohesion, dialogue, and communal spaces in shaping the built environment. Architecture is not just about structure, but about creating spaces that foster connection and shared experience. I wanted to create a space that could be redefined and reshaped over time, much like the conversations, meetings, and encounters that naturally unfold within a traditional Sablah.'

Dutch Pavilion

'How can architecture resist exclusionary social norms to create spaces that nurture different ways of coexisting in everyday life?' ask the Dutch. Their answer is SIDELINED, curated by Amanda Pinatih, Curator of Design & Contemporary Art at the Stedelijk Museum, and social designer Gabriel Fontana. The pavilion proposes an alternative sports bar that continues Fontana’s 'investigation of social dynamics through the lens of sport.'

Irish Pavilion

Appointing Cotter & Naessens Architects as the curators of the Irish Pavilion, the country presents in its 2025 showcase a an interdisciplinary collaboration between the architecture team, sound artist David Stalling, poet Michelle Delea, and curator Luke Naessens. The resulting multisensory installation was inspired 'by the innovative political model of the Citizens’ Assembly, introduced by the Irish government in 2016,' the team writes.

Luxembourg Pavilion

Luxembourg's Sonic Investigation aims to shift the focus from the visual to the aural. The pavilion nods to John Cage’s silent song 4’33’’ and is curated by a team composed by Valentin Bansac, Mike Fritsch and Alice Loumeau, who together celebrate through their displays the multisensorial aspects of architecture.

Finnish Pavilion

Curators Ella Kaira and Matti Jänkälä have joined forces to curate the Finnish pavilion. The space, in a building by modernist architecture master Alvar Aalto and Elissa Aalto, celebrates the Architecture of Stewardship - all the different workers and collaborators that are involved in making a building happen. 'From design contributions by architectural workers and engineers to the efforts of construction workers, restoration architects, maintenance staff and cleaners,' they all play a vital role in the life of a building, the team says.

Qatar Pavilion

While traditionally Qatar has not had a dedicated space in the Giardini, this year the country has announced its plans to build one on-site. Its display in the 2025 festival is a two-pronged action offering a taste of what's to come and set on two different sites - one of which is the grounds of where the future pavilion will lie. The site will be 'activated' with an installation, Community Centre, by Pakistani architect Yasmeen Lari and offers a look into her humanitarian models through a temporary, immersive bamboo structure. Meanwhile, titled Beyti Beytak. My Home is Your Home. La mia casa è la tua casa a second exhibition at ACP-Palazzo Franchetti, focuses on notions of hospitality in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia regions and how this is reflected in traditional and contemporary architecture through the work of some 30 studios. Meanwhile, architect Lina Ghotmeh has been revealed as the architect to design the permanent pavilion within the Giardini in the future.

Saudi Arabia Pavilion

For its fourth-ever participation at the biennale of architecture, Saudi Arabia presents work by Riyadh-based practice Syn Architects, led by Sara Alissa and Nojoud Alsudairi. Reflecting contemporary practice in the country, the installation will be titled The Um Slaim School: An Architecture of Connection, and is curated by Beatrice Leanza, assisted by Sara Almutlaq.

Swiss Pavilion

Co-curators Elena Chiavi, Kathrin Füglister, Amy Perkins, Axelle Stiefel and Myriam Uzor of collaborative group Annex ask for their 2025 contribution: 'What if Lisbeth Sachs had designed the Swiss Pavilion in the Giardini della Biennale di Venezia instead of Bruno Giacometti?' The display revisits an old, temporary work by Sachs (1914-2002), who was one of the country's first female architects.

Singapore Pavilion

Singapore takes the opportunity to celebrate its 60 years of independence with its pavilion at the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale. Titled ‘RASA-TABULA-SINGAPURA’, the exhibit 'reimagines the city as a communal dining table,' creating an immersive experience that highlights the country's 'superdiversity.'

UAE pavilion

The UAE's participation is titled 'Pressure Cooker.' The installation is curated by Emirati architect and Assistant Professor at the College of Arts and Creative Enterprises at Zayed University and Co-founder of Holesum Studio Azza Aboualam, who looks at the country's food growing infrastructure. Looking at local communities and lots of archival research, the contribution explores challenges arising from issues of food security.

USA Pavilion

The 2025 US Pavilion's exhibition, PORCH: An Architecture of Generosity, draws on and celebrates the ubiquitous in the country and beloved architecture feature: the humble porch. 'The exhibitor contributions to the U.S. Pavilion, achieved through the Open Call, lie at the heart of the collective PORCH project,” said Peter MacKeith, Dean of the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design, University of Arkansas, who is one of the commissioning bodies. 'Framed by the constructions and installations of our design team, the exhibitor contributions will animate an understanding of contemporary architecture and design in the United States as a source of civic engagement and community building, a resource for social and environmental resiliency and as fundamentally committed to the greater good of society.'

Nordic Pavilion

The Nordic countries join forces once more contributing to the biennale this year with Industry Muscle - a body of work that 'examines architecture using the trans body as a lens, establishing a dialogue with Sverre Fehn’s Nordic Countries Pavilion.' Main exhibitor Teo Ala-Ruona, whose work combines performance art, theatre, and choreography, leads the way, bringing along a variety of different collaborators.

UK Pavilion

Co-curated by Nairobi based architecture studio Cave Bureau co-founders Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi with writer and curator Owen Hopkins and Queen Mary University professor Kathryn Yusoff, the 2025 British Pavilion (sponsored in part by The Dalmore, which launched The Dalmore Luminary Series sculpture No.3 by Ben Dobbin of Foster + Partners, co-curated by V&A Dundee during the opening) is this year a collaboration between Britain and Kenya. Part of the British Council's 2025 UK-Kenya Season of Culture, the contribution will focus on 'architecture of repair.'

Latvia Pavilion

In their national pavilion, the Latvians are exploring what it means to live on 'NATO's external border in times of geopolitical conflict.' Curated by Liene Jākobsone and Ilka Ruby, and designed by Sampling and Nomad architects, the installation looks at both spatial and social aspects of this context - and what it signifies for the country and its neighbours.

German Pavilion

Germany looks at its pavilion as a call to urgent action. The installation, curated by Nicola Borgmann, Elisabeth Endres, Gabriele G. Kiefer and Daniele Santucci, is an examination of what climate change does to urban life and a city's ecosystems. Titled 'Stresstest', the display zooms in on the rising heat levels in our urban spaces. 'This endangers not only the social life and productivity of the city, but also the health and survival of its residents. Currently, the urban population is already exposed to higher risks of dehydration and cardiovascular diseases; the number of heat deaths is growing,' writes the team.

Uzbekistan Pavilion

Architecture studio GRACE coordinates this year's pavilion of Uzbekistan and reflects on the country's, and Tashkent's, modernist legacy. A focus on the The Sun Institute of Material Science, which is also known as the Sun Heliocomplex and was built in 1987 near Tashkent, makes a case study for an installation that looks at narratives of sustainability, heritage and preservation, and the duality of old and new.

Iceland Pavilion

Iceland is entering a new eruptive era. Since 2021, heightened volcanic activity around the Reykjanes Peninsula, just 22 miles from Reykjavík, has captured global attention. For local architect Arnhildur Pálmadóttir, it represents untapped potential - and a fresh take on making the most of hyper local, natural materials that can be used in novel and exciting ways in construction. This year, Pálmadóttir’s Lavaforming project will take centre stage at Iceland’s national pavilion during the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale. Set in a former fire station building owned by pioneering glass makers Berengo Studio, the pavilion will transport visitors to the year 2150, when Icelanders have harnessed the power of lava—just as they did geothermal energy 200 years earlier—to construct cities without harmful mining or reliance on non-renewable energy.

Romanian Pavilion

The Romanian participation is titled Human Scale. The exhibition curated by Cosmina Goagea is connected to a research project by artist Vlad Nancă and Bucharest-based architecture studio Muromuro, and is conceived to highlight notions of 'intelligence' in all its forms - natural and artificial, human and not. Nancă said on the subject of the installation: 'Humans are the unifying element in architectural drawings, transcending time. By looking at how people are drawn throughout the 20th century, we hope to underline their relevance and centrality to architecture in the 21st century, challenging visitors to look at our built environment in a different way and think about how architecture works for the people.'

Togo Pavilion

This year marks the very first participation of the Republic of Togo at the Venice Architecture Biennale. The display, titled Considering Togo’s Architectural Heritage, is commissioned by Sonia Lawson, Founding Director of Palais de Lomé and curated by Studio NEiDA (the studio is headed by architect Jeanne Autran-Edorh and curator Fabiola Büchele). Traditional construction techniques and external influences of all kinds collide in the country's rich architectural tapestry, which the pavilion hopes to explore. NEiDA's founders say: 'Togo’s architectural heritage, which spans ancient clay structures to complex histories and outlandish modernist experiments, is an incredible source of inspiration for our work. This built legacy—at times ingenious, at times eccentric—is a powerful guide for future architectural approaches that are contextual and climate compatible.'

Ukraine Pavilion

Designed by architect Bogdana Kosmina together with curators Michał Murawski, and Kateryna Rusetska, the Ukrainian pavilion is titled DAKH (ДАХ): Vernacular Hardcore, and zooms in on the concept of DAKH, which means “roof” in Ukrainian - symbolising a shelter, symbol of care, but also the first point of contact during an airstrike.

Albanian Pavilion

Portuguese firm OODA is particularly active in Albania - a country currently undergoing huge transformation - with eight current projects in development. There and more will be featured in the Albanian Pavilion this year. 'This is architecture as cultural diplomacy,' explains Blendi Gonxhja, Albania’s Minister of Economy, Culture and Innovation, who commissioned the pavilion. 'Our buildings aren’t just structures - they’re negotiations between individualism and collective memory, between rapid development and our stunning natural landscapes.'

Chilean Pavilion

Titled Reflexive Intelligences and curated by architects Serena Dambrosio, Nicolás Díaz Bejarano, and Linda Schilling Cuellar, the Chilean Pavilion puts the spotlight on what is often overlooked. The installation, a large, open 'working table,' looks at materials and territorial practices, as well as ecological impact and the use of AI, especially within Latin American contexts.

Holy See Pavilion

'Opera Aperta' is the title of the Holy See Pavilion, which received a special mention at the 19th biennale awards. The judges praised it in their citation: 'Recalling a book by Umberto Eco 1962, the pavilion Opera aperta invites the visitor to participate in the production of meaning. This special mention recognizes the creation of a space for exchange, negotiation, restoration. Opera aperta will revitalize an existing deconsecrated church with repair occurring at different levels involving a big range of skills of labour. As the team calls it, “a living practice of good care and collective care”. Opera aperta creates space for cultural exchange.'

Mexico Pavilion

Architecture studio Pedro y Juana's work exists not only in architecture’s arguably most traditional form – building design – but also in everything this touches: the spaces in-between scales and the dynamics between all its aspects. Their participation in Venice Architecture Biennale 2025’s Mexico Pavilion, which will be shown in the Corderia del Arsenale, is a case in point. Forming a collective with two more architecture offices (Estudio IUAPdA and Locus), graphic design agency Estudio María Marín de Buen, plant experts Lucio Usobiaga Hegewisch and Nathalia Muguet, and Miguel Ángel Vega Ruiz, Xavier Delgado González y Shantal Gabriela Haddad Gómez of lighting consultants ILWT, the exhibit will explore Mexico’s chinampas – an ancient agroforestry system of growing crops on small plots within wetlands. It was first developed by the Nahua people, in particular the Xochimilicas (probably 900-1200 bc). Examples still operate today, even within the urban fabric of Mexico City.

Lebanese Pavilion

The Lebanese participation is curated by Collective for Architecture Lebanon (CAL), a non-profit organisation co-founded in 2019 by Shereen Doummar, Edouard Souhaid, Elias Tamer and Lynn Chamoun. Titled 'The Land Remembers', the display is more than an exhibition, but also a call to action: 'how can we heal the land to build for future generations?' the team asks.

Turkiye Pavilion

The Turkish exhibition, Grounded, is curated by Ceren Erdem and Bilge Kalfa. Looking at our ground - literally the soil around us - the team seeks to explore how the matter serves as a 'carrier of ecological and cultural memory, presenting it as an ecosystem that embodies natural intelligence and serves as a living archive and supportive model. The exhibition emphasises how this often- overlooked element provides crucial insights into past civilisations and ecological systems, and highlights the potential for coexistence with nature.'

Serbian Pavilion

The Serbian Pavilion in Venice presents 'Unravelling', an installation made of pure wool. 'Unravelling weaves common threads between the delicate Serbian knitting tradition and the discipline of architecture in a contemporary expression. Hanging from the roof in catenary curves, the knitted segments—1.2 x 5 meters each—are suspended in a textile landscape without a fixed shape or state,' the organisers explain. Ephemeral and unexpected, the fabric of this display is a multidisciplinary effort aimed at offering a poetic note.

Estonian Pavilion

'Let me warm you,' the pavilion of Estonia at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 is curated by architects Keiti Lige, Elina Liiva, and Helena Männa - and tackles the seemingly mundane topic of building insulation. To highlight the question of whether the current drive for insulating buildings to make them more energy efficient is a valid tool in fighting climate change, the Estonian Pavilion has covered the facade of a Venetian building with insulation panels. 'With this project, we question whether insulation is just a bureaucratic checkbox for meeting EU targets or a real chance to tackle social and spatial challenges. It exposes the clash between bold global ambitions and the everyday realities of people navigating collective decisions,' say the curators.

Australian Pavilion

The Australian Pavilion zooms in on the theme of 'Home.' A hands-on, sensory display created by First Nations designers explores themes of belonging and home. 'HOME is a generous and timely offering to the Venice Architecture Biennale that will welcome visitors as active contributors and participants,' says Emily McDaniel, co-creative director. The display, made of earth and plaster, offers a serene and tactile experience.

Uruguay Pavilion

Uruguay and its contribution, '53.86% Uruguay, país agua', looks at water and its role in the country's territory, culture and history. Maru Vidal, national director of Culture said: 'Uruguay has a maritime sovereignty that exceeds its land area and an extensive water network, which places it at the forefront of today's global challenges. Extreme weather events, tensions in water management and profound transformations in urban and rural ecosystems require new approaches. Urbanisation has traditionally relegated water to a secondary role, but in the face of climate change it is necessary to rethink these paradigms and recognise water as a central element for our future.'

Korea Pavilion

The Korean Pavilion is calm and spacious, furnished with cushions, stool and information to help the visitor explore the wildlife - and non-human creatures in the space of the Giardini. Curated by Curating Architecture Collective - Kim Hee-jung, Jung Sung-kyu and Chung Da-hyoung - this display is all about gracefully embracing and respecting our surroundings.

Spanish Pavilion

Rich is photographic material as well as ideas, the Spanish Pavilion feels full with a layered display - yet manages to also be clear and accessible. The concept explores themes of decarbonising and strategies that projects, clients and architects in Spain followed in order to bring them one step closer to a sustainable architecture approach. It was curated by Manuel Bouzas and Roi Salgueiro, and is titled 'Internalities: Architectures for Territorial Equilibrium.'

Greek Pavilion

Looking at the reuse, exploration, meaning and new life of historical, Venetian shipyards of Chania and Heraklion in Crete under the theme 'IntelligensHistorica,' the Greek pavilion is curated by Nikos Skoutelis, Elisabetta Molteni, Klimis Aslanidis, Antonis Karamitrou, and Anna Tsitonaki.

Polish Pavilion

Poland is exploring notions of security with its contribution - 'Lares and Penates: On Building a Sense of Security in Architecture.' The show looks at our anxieties and what it might take to have us feel safe in our homes and society. The display was created by an interdisciplinary team, involving architect Maciej Siuda and artists Krzysztof Maniak and Katarzyna Przezwańska.

Rolex Pavilion

Although not a national contribution, the Rolex Pavilion is also located within Giardini. Rolex, a long-term supporter of the Biennale, has also launched a new structure this year, designed using sustainable materials and local craft by architect Mariam Issoufou.

Collateral events

As always a rich programme of collateral and affiliated events will also be launched throughout Venice and the surrounding islands of the archipelago during the biennale. This year, they include from sustainable architecture-driven exhibitions and discussions, to previews of some of the field's most anticipated openings from later this year. The below list is comprehensive as is it rich; there's something from everyone.

• Catalonia in Venice_Water Parliaments: Projective Ecosocial Architectures, organised by the Institut Ramon Llull
• Deep Surfaces. Architecture to enhance the visitor experience of UNESCO sites organised by UNESCO
• Intelligens. Talent: EUmies Awards. Young Talent 2025, organised by Fundació Mies van der Rohe
• NON-Belief: Taiwan Intelligens of Precarity, organised by the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts
• Parallel Worlds, Exhibition from Macao, China, organised by The Macao Museum of Art, under The Cultural Affairs Bureau of the Macao SAR Government
• Projecting Future Heritage: A Hong Kong Archive, organised by The Hong Kong Institute of Architects Biennale Foundation and Hong Kong Arts Development Council
• Rooted Transience: AlMusalla Prize 2025, organised by Diriyah Biennale Foundation
• The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain by Jean Nouvel, organised by Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain
• The Next Earth: Computation, Crisis, Cosmology, organised by Palazzo Diedo - Berggruen Arts & Culture
• The SKYWALK by Platform Earth, organised by PLATFORM EARTH
• unEarthed / Second Nature / PolliNATION, organised by The Virginia Tech Honors College

The places, dates and tickets

The Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 will be open to the public between 10 May and 23 November 2025, including two vernissage days on the 8 and 9 May. The shows will be, as always, split between Venice's famed Arsenale and Giardini locations, with the former focused on Ratti's main showcase and the latter containing the always-rich and layered national participations in their respective, dedicated pavilions. Tickets for the main sites are available at the entrance and opening hours are 11 am - 7 pm (last admission 6:45 pm), with the venue closed on Mondays (except 12 May and 17 November).

As always more events are spread across Venice - including both independent programmes and collateral events, and national participations who may not be accommodated in the Giardini site.

The Biennale College Architettura, which launched in 2023, is also returning in 2025 for its second iteration as part of the festival's education arm. Ratti has invited students, graduate students and emerging practitioners under the age of 30 to take part and 'submit projects that employ natural, artificial, and collective intelligence to combat the climate crisis'.

Beyond the Biennale: More to see while in Venice

While not officially part of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025, several other events and institutions launch and flaunt their offering during the big built environment festival's acclaimed vernissage. With the city abuzz with architecture enthusiasts and specialist visitors, it's a great time to open discussions, make connections and unveil news. Here's a taste of what is available around town in early May.

SMAC San Marco Art Centre

A brand new cultural space also opened this May in Venice. SMAC San Marco Art Centre is located at Venice Procuratie (recently renovated by David Chipperfield) from 9 May 2025, focusing on a rich programme blending visual arts, architecture, fashion, technology, and film. The centre's launch saw the opening of two exhibitions - both on field pioneers. Australian modern architect Harry Seidler is the subject of 'Migrating Modernism. The Architecture of Harry Seidler', and Korean landscape designer Jung Youngsun is celebrated in 'For all that Breathes on Earth: Jung Youngsun and Collaborators'.

'Diagrams' at Fondazione Prada

The ‘Diagrams’ show explores the wide cultural history of the diagram, beginning in the early Renaissance and coming up to the present day, an expression of OMA’s affinity for the diagram rather than examples of the firm's use of it.

'The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain by Jean Nouvel' at Fondazione Giorgio Cini

A new home for Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain by Jean Nouvel will open later this year in Paris. iThe Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 offered the perfect platform for a sneak preview of what's to come, allowing a sneak peek into the building at the 19th-century Place du Palais-Royal.

Holcim and Alejandro Aravena reveal sustainable housing unit 

Exhibited at at Palazzo Mora in Venice, the Basic Services Unit, made wholly from biochar mixed with regular cement and recycled aggregates, is a net-zero structure that is as strong, durable and fire-resistant as a regular concrete building. It's a collaboration between construction company Holcim and the Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena.

Ocean Literacy Centre

Part of curator Carlo Ratti's busy schedule this year was the launch of this new space for the Ocean Literacy Centre on San Servolo Island in Venice. Titled the 'Sea Beyond', the exhibit is a collaboration with UNESCO Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) and Prada Group inspired by Charles and Ray Eames' 1977 film 'Power of 10'. Here, Carlo Ratti Associatti explores data-driven displays and science to raise awareness on ocean health, preservation and sustainability.

The 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale will run 10 May till 23 November 2025

labiennale.org

Two years ago, ‘Penumbra’ was a surprise hit at the Venice Biennale. Who would have thought a group show of film would be so popular at an event where people are known to ‘power walk’ through exhibitions that have been months or even years in the making?

For the Venice Biennale 2024, the Fondazione In Between Art Film – which commissions art films and stages exhibitions – returns with ‘Nebula’, a different staging in the same space, a disused hospital, by the same curators, Alessandro Rabottini and Leonardo Bigazzi. The building, Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, constructed over 400 years, is an enigmatic maze of rooms looking onto a courtyard that is both impossible to ignore and adaptable to staging. Working with the same designers, 2050+, the team took a more immersive approach than with ‘Penumbra’, letting the films guide the installation while keeping the sense of noir they adopted in 2022.

‘We wanted to use the same space, and clearly we were working with the same medium, so we started thinking of how to give a different experience to viewers,’ says Rabottini. ‘The dynamic was slightly different. We were aware of the space, and we made [the viewers] aware of the space.’

Each of the eight films has its own unique setting – variously defined, for example, by foil-lined walls, padded white medical fabric, or a ringing bell – which overflows out of its location into the rest of the building. There is a sense of dissonance and miasma as you negotiate the exhibition before landing on a work in its particular space.

‘Nebula’, by Fondazione In Between Art Film in Venice

On entering the venue’s 18th-century chapel, you are greeted by the towering triptych of Basir Mahmood’s Brown Bodies in an Open Landscape are Often Migrating (2024). A multi-channel work playing on three huge screens, designed to mimic the shape of a phone, dominates the space. A call and response is taking place; men beckon each other or signal with flags and we see shots of a rocky landscape mirroring the hand gestures of the frescoes that decorate the walls, barely visible in the near darkness. The film tells the story of those who migrate, walking through rural areas of Pakistan and how they communicate. Using social media and other methods, people share information on how to travel, their journeys sometimes taking years.

‘If you see from a Central European point, mostly people realise that these migrants exist when they are at their borders or at their shores,’ the artist says. ‘But these journeys take place, sometimes, over five or eight years, and they start travelling when as young as 12 years old. So imagine you start as a young boy, you end up as a teenager or a man when you arrive, and most of the time you don't end up there. For me, it was important to speak about the density, the vastness of the space and also the time that it takes to reach any destination.’

Chrisitan Nyampeta’s film When Rain Clouds Gather (2024), which follows three friends in New York trying to plan a night out, looks at the difficulties of different roles and positions in the art world. Through the lives of these friends, Nyampeta explores how politics, ideals and realities transfer from discussion into real life.

‘For this film, I wanted to experiment with conventions alongside friends and collaborators, in search of forms that move at the rhythm of life,’ he reveals. ‘I wanted to find a way to commemorate and to imagine and to inspire into action, but never to manipulate.’

In the work, the friends discuss high and low culture, why one international crisis captures the public’s imagination and not another, and the dilemma of making art and maintaining a steady life and income.

‘If this film raises dichotomies, it is only because life itself is painfully contradictory’ continues Nyampeta. ‘The principal role of this film is to support ongoing and preceding conversations about what to do and how to do it in the face of the brutality from those who are supposed to look after us. The film does this playfully and with a lot of creativity and openness. Perhaps the resulting tension between the global histories bearing upon the world today paired with life's little annoyances create what can be described as dichotomies.’

Installed in the most recently built part of the hospital is Until we became fire and fire us (2023-ongoing) by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme. Installed across five rooms, this work uses poetry, installation, music, performance and drawing, with several interlinked films to explore states of being related to their Palestinian heritage.

Another standout work is Ari Benjamin Meyers’ Marshall Allen, 99, Astronaut (2024) – a loving portrait of a 99-year-old flautist who is the last living member of the Sun Ra Arkestra jazz group – rounding out a stunning ensemble of works that make ‘Nebula’ a highlight of the biennale.

‘Nebula’, until 24 November 2024 at Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, Venice, inbetweenartfilm.com

For more must-sees, read our guide to the Venice Biennale 2024

Pierre Huyghe is famous for his explorations of slippages in reality, alternate worlds and end-of-days scenarios. His work in film, sculpture and installation is instantly recognisable in its darkness and its evasiveness. A featureless child searches for food in an abandoned landscape, a face glitches in a digital schism and shrinks away on a towering screen in near pitch blackness.

‘Liminal’, which opened in April, coinciding with the Venice Biennale 2024, at Palazzo Grassi’s Punta della Dogana, one of the Pinault Collection’s two locations in the city, explores Huyghe’s vision on a massive scale. Pitched into blackness on entering the exhibition, we are stumbling around – the floor has varying textures and the doorways are not fully visible. Something is flickering in the dim light, a small translucent creature emerges and there is a towering, huge screen with an AI video of a face, human or animal, slipping in and out of recognition.

Harnessing cutting-edge technology, ‘Liminal’ offers a de-centred experience of being, as you enter a world where everything is out of kilter. Laced with the motifs that evoke fear, we are liberated somehow. The dream space of ‘Liminal’ is out of body, but it also taps into some elements that transcend time, such as ritual. Some works are endless and beginningless, rejecting convention.

‘An exhibition is the formation of an idea: its constitution here and now,’ Huyghe says. ‘An idea appears and manifests itself, sometimes implicitly. It can also constitute other ideas and specific subjectivities. As an image, it’s situated somewhere between the sensible and the intelligible. There’s a specific relationship to space and time that comes into play in its formation – the space is no longer that of the place of exhibition, but rather the transfer of another space and another time, which superimpose themselves onto this one.’

As you pass through the cavernous galleries of the Punta della Dogana, you are never sure how to get from one gallery to another. Crossing an open walkway a barely visible film of a still body plays; on descending the stairs, another film is playing in a larger space: negotiating this exhibition makes you feel liminal and displaced.

‘You can choose to submit to a set of conditions without knowing in advance all the ins and outs, or to multiply these conditions,’ Huyghe states in the exhibition catalogue. ‘Then, you begin to create possibilities and forms of coexistence or recreated worlds: worlds made up of worlds. You can set up loopholes, uncertainties, zones of unknowing. In order to build these resistant traps, you have to invent tools that are outside of “yourself”, sensitive tools that will allow thought to always be beginning, always emerging.‘

Passing through yet more darkened corridors, the exhibition opens out into a room containing two hovering sets of spotlights, suspended about a metre off the floor. In Offspring, 2018, masked performers occasionally appear and move between the audience and around these hovering, glowing cubes. Next, we see huge fish tanks filled with suspended rocks, broken sculpture and sea anemones.

‘Fictions are vehicles that give us access to other possible and impossible worlds, to a counterfactual imagination. Such fictions – separated from the known, unconstrained by the here and now – are open to speculation, to other roads not taken. They make it possible to experience the impossible, to see ourselves from the outside.’

In one room a faceless Lynchian being sits, white against a black background, a vision of horror reminiscent of The Ring or Beowulf, a monumental human emergent, not fully manifest; they shift positions to a faint soundtrack.

The exhibition reaches its peak with a huge single-channel work showing a post-apocalyptic landscape. Slipping in and out of time, the scene changes, sometimes as though moments have passed, and at other times, centuries.

‘“Liminal” is a transitory state, from which something unthought-of can emerge. It’s an inexistent being, with neither self nor world, outside of any outside,‘ says Huyghe.

Pierre Huyghe, ‘Liminal’, until 24 November 2024 at Punta della Dogana, Venice

pinaultcollection.com

As Salone del Mobile wrapped up in Milan, eyes turned eastwards to the floating city of Venice, where this past weekend the 60th Venice Biennale was inaugurated with a typically packed roster of events and openings to cater to the thronging crowds from the art world and beyond. At its centre was the 60th International Art Exhibition, titled ’Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere’ – the Adriano Pedrosa-curated group exhibition paying ode to ’foreigners, immigrants, expatriates, diasporic, émigrés, exiled, [and] refugees’ – which was supported by Parisian fashion house Dior, a continuing nod to house founder Christian Dior’s roots as a gallerist in the 1920s and 30s.

Dior was not the only fashion house present, though. As ever, fashion brands and designers seized the opportunity to forge their cultural links to the arts – with Venice providing a typically seductive backdrop. These included Burberry’s sponsorship of the British Pavillion (to celebrate, a party at the city’s legendary watering hole Harry’s Bar), Golden Goose opening the doors to ’Haus’, a new multidisciplinary cultural space (their celebration comprised a vast candlelit dinner in the hangar-like main hall), and Tod’s celebration of Italian craftsmanship which coincided with their own sponsorship of the Italian Pavillion. Here, as the 60th Venice Biennale opens to the public, the best moments where fashion met art.

The best fashion moments at the 60th Venice Biennale

Setchu collaborate with Savile Row tailors Davies & Son at Palazzo Venier

Sometimes it is illuminating to take the familiar out of context; such was the ambition behind Japanese label Setchu’s latest project, a collaboration with storied Savile Row tailor Davies & Son. Choosing to present the collaboration on neutral ground, the Palazzo Venier in Venice on the opening days of the Biennale, the presentation captured the uniqueness of the project, which traverses time and space. Central to the collaboration, which is led by Setchu designer Satoshi Kuwata – who originally trained on Savile Row – is an attempt to conceive a collection of truly contemporary tailoring, which melds Davies & Son’s time-honed techniques (it is the street’s oldest operating tailor shop) with Setchu’s unique take on the medium, which combines Western and Japanese approaches (Kuwata now lives and works in Milan). The result is three black-and-white outfits, for men or women, comprising sleek single-breasted overcoats and trousers, complete with Setchu’s signature sliced seams and darts which are edged with buttons. Completing the lineup is a pair of laceless shoes by cobbler George Cleverley, made from a single piece of leather. At the chic Venice installation – featuring Japanese objects, from paper lanterns died with sumi ink to ceramic stools and cerami mats – guests could set up appointments to be measured for the bespoke pieces. Further fittings will follow in Milan with Kuwata, in London at Davies & Son, or in New York City when the Davies & Son team travels stateside.

Burberry sponsors the British Pavillion, John Akomfrah’s ‘Listening All Night to The Rain’

Since the beginning of his tenure, Yorkshire-born Burberry creative director Daniel Lee has been keen to celebrate Britain’s diverse cultural output. ‘[I want] to show a positive side of Britain to the world,’ he said after his debut in February 2023. ‘There is great music here, great theatre, great art. That’s something I missed in recent years and that’s what I’m trying to celebrate.’ Just over a year on – and two collections later – Lee is true to his word as Burberry becomes the headline sponsor of the British Pavilion for the second consecutive year. This year’s Pavilion comprises a commission by artist and filmmaker John Akomfrah titled ‘Listening All Night to The Rain’, a multi-layered, multi-media piece which looks towards the sea to explore issues from environmental decline to migration. I’d got to a point where I thought a lot of what I want to say involves trying to pull people into positions of listening,’ he told Wallpaper’s Hannah Silver. ’[The work] is both looking ahead to the things that we are definitely interested in the present, but a lot of it is also to do with the immediate past and the things we haven’t really paid attention to, [and] sometimes they are related. There’s much to hear.’ Read more.

The British Pavillion runs from Saturday 20 April to Sunday 24 November 2024.

Golden Goose continues its Haus of Dreamers project

Coinciding with the Biennale, Golden Goose opened the doors to ’Haus’, a multidisciplinary space in Marghera, an industrial suburb of Venice where the brand was founded in 2000. Comprising an academy, where over the Biennale’s opening weekend locals could attend a number of workshops and talks, an extensive archive of rare Golden Goose sneakers and clothing, an auditorium, and a vast hangar-like room where guests enjoyed a candlelit dinner on Friday evening, it will continue to evolve as the months go on. Earlier in the night, guests were taken on an immersive tour of the space, which included an opportunity to customise a pair of the brand’s new Marathon sneakers, inspired by 1970s and 1980s running shoes, alongside installations and performances by Argentinian visual artist Andrés Reisinger, Italian sculptor Fabio Viale, French-Italian painter Maïa Régis, and Puerto Rican singer Mia Lailani. Viale’s was perhaps the most striking of the evening: a vast burning pyre erected in the rectangular pool in the Haus’ forecourt. It follows last year’s Haus of Dreamers event, which introduced the project with a series of events across the floating city – including a spoken-word performance by Quannah Chasinghorse on the Rialto Bridge.

Tod’s celebrate the art of Venetian craftsmanship

Tod’s’ involvement with the Venice Biennale this year was twofold. First, they were the sponsor of this year’s Italian Pavillion, which was titled ’Due qui / To Hear’ and created by artist Massimo Bartolini alongside curator Luca Cerizza at the Biennale’s Arsenale venue (the installation comprised a vast scaffolding maze, alongside a sound installation featuring music by Caterina Barbieri and Kali Malone, and British composer Gavin Bryars). Secondly, the Italian brand used the event to celebrate its own deep-rooted history of creation and craft by uniting with Venetian artisans to reinterpret the Tod‘s famed Gommino driving shoe. Cue a dramatic array of original works inspired by the perennial style, created by craftspeople working across mediums, from glassblower Roberto Beltrami and goldbeater Marino Menegazzo to traditional Venetian mask maker Sergio Boldrin. Meanwhile, a limited-edition collection of pieces, inspired by Venice, will be available for purchase.

The Italian Pavillion runs from Saturday 20 April to Sunday 24 November 2024.

Dior supports happenings across the city, including the Beinnale’s International Art Exhibition

Christian Dior began his career not as a couturier, but as a gallerist, co-founding Paris’ Galerie Jacques Bonjean in 1928, before going on to be linked with Galerie Pierre Colle, which hosted works from artists including Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró and Salvador Dalí. As such, art has long permeated the Dior universe, something celebrated this year in a wide-ranging sponsorship from the Parisian house which stretched across locations and events. First, Dior supported the Biennale’s main group exhibition (the International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia), which this year was curated by the artistic director of the São Paulo Museum of Art, Adriano Pedrosa. Titled ’Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere’, Pedrosa said the exhibition paid ode to ’foreigners, immigrants, expatriates, diasporic, émigrés, exiled, [and] refugees—particularly those who have moved between the Global South and the Global North. Migration and decolonisation are key themes here.’

Elsewhere, the ’Cosmic Garden’ exhibition – which includes works by Madhvi Parekh and Manu Parekh created alongside the Chanakya School of Craft, with whom Dior creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri has collaborated extensively – is supported by Dior at Salone Verde – Art & Social Club. Meanwhile, at Museo Fortuny, guests can discover Eva Jospin’s Selva exhibition, a Parisian artist whose layered cardboard grottos provided the backdrop to Dior’s S/S 2023 womenswear show. Finally, Dior also collaborated with the Venetian Heritage Foundation to partner on the extravagant Naumachia Ball on April 20, 2024 at the Arsenale Vecchio of Venice, with funds largely supporting the renovation of the Arsenale’s Porta Magna and the ’House of Gold’ Ca’d’Oro museum.

’Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere’ ,the International Art Exhibition of the 60th Venice Biennale runs from Saturday 20 April to Sunday 24 November 2024.

Balenciaga spotlights the Rodeo bag with theatrical installation

For the Biennale, Balenciaga transformed its Venice store into a red-curtained installation to celebrate the arrival of the brand‘s summer collection (the S/S 2024 show itself had featured a similarly theatrical set). In particular, the Rodeo bag, a roomy, vintage-inspired handbag which can be customised with a multitude of playful charms in creative director Demna’s typically idiosyncratic style. 14 unique iterations were available to Venice shoppers, while the installation was celebrated with a cocktail on April 18.

Louis Vuitton brings French artist Ernest Pignon-Ernest to Venice

Fondation Louis Vuitton, the LVMH Group’s vast cultural outpost in Paris, brought French artist Ernest Pignon-Ernest to Venice for this year’s Biennale, staging an exhibition of his work at the Espace Louis Vuitton Venezia (the foundation’s Venice oupost, close to the famed Piazza San Marco). Titled ’Je Est Un Autre’, the exhibition – conceived by Pignon-Ernest for the space – continues his exploration of ’the foreigner’, a perennial theme which has run throughout his oeuvre since he began his career in the 1960s. An early proponent of street art – with works appearing in places across the world, including Naples, Rome, Soweto, Haiti, Paris and Algiers – his pieces often feature portraits of figures who operated on the margins, from Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, who travelled across the country to escape persecution from the Soviet regime, to Arthur Rimbaud, Antonin Artaud, Jean Genet, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. The new exhibition is curated by Suzanne Pagé and Hans Ulrich Obrist, in dialogue with Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster.

Ernest Pignon-Ernest ’Je Est Un Autre’ runs at Espace Louis Vuitton Venezia from Saturday 20 April to Sunday 24 November 2024.

For Josèfa Ntjam, a utopian world becomes a surreal lens through which to consider themes of domination woven throughout history. It is a concept she has returned to for ‘swell of spæc(i)es’, a collateral event with LAS Art Foundation at the Venice Biennale 2024. 

Ntjam, who recently showed a series of mythical sculptures following her LVMH Métiers d’Art residency, works across a mix of medias to bring her other world to life. In Venice, curving screens across the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia unite 3D animation, AI and footage from aquariums, as well as animations of the life of Amma, a Dogon deity created by the stars, who lives among the Nommos, the first creatures to live underwater. 

Here, Ntjam tells us how she brings her surreal worlds to life.

Josèfa Ntjam at the Venice Biennale 2024

Wallpaper*: In your work, science fiction has often been a lens through which to consider issues of gender, race and territory. What draws you to this often dystopian worldview? 

Josèfa Ntjam: I consider science fiction to be a process that can help heal us in a way, and I think it’s important to use it as a tool to project ourselves, to link important histories that have been lost. It has always been present in my work, but also my life. My parents told me a lot of tales, and I watched a lot of movies. I really have the sense that in science fiction, you can blur and limit the categories that society imposes upon us. 

Science fiction has been used by minorities – in the African diaspora, for example, it’s used by many artists. [Musician and composer] Sun Ra is one of the main references in my work – he used science fiction and Afrofuturism as a tool of freedom, of liberation. It gives you the strength to project yourself in another temporality, and for him, it was a kind of obligation to say that maybe as an African American community, we are not able to live in this world. We’re just surviving on Earth. So this is why we’ve needed to place or propose ourselves in outer space. And I love this analogy, and how it’s used or seen in this huge historical moment of Ancient Egypt. And while this link to science fiction and mythology brings us a lot of hope, it’s also a place of displacement. And everything with mythology is not that straightforward in terms of social structures; this is a super important part of this work.

W*: A strong narrative runs throughout your work – here, Amma’s story becomes all-encompassing. Tell us about how the story leads the work. 

JN: For this project, and all of my projects, I work with a base narrative. I write a lot for my videos, but also for my performances. Poetry is, for me, a way of working, and through it, I create the landscapes and all of the interspecies characters. And then we arrive in another level of the work – it’s how I can integrate everything together. And for this project, I made a lot of crazy mind maps, because I had so many different landscapes and characters that I wanted to include, but at one point, I realised I had one missing element. And then I discovered this scientific fact about this limestone planet, and I thought maybe this is the missing link. At the end, the purpose was to have a kind of continuum, and the links are meant to be endless. Here the narrative is the base, but this is the first time in my life that I produced a motion-picture movie, and I didn’t write anything in terms of a script as I normally would. In this case, I designed the characters and the landscape first, and thought about the sensation that I wanted to produce. Everything started with plankton because I was fascinated by them – especially the way plankton sediment over time. 

W*: Why does a multidisciplinary approach here feel like the natural one? 

JN: I’ve always worked in this way, ever since my first year studying fine art. I also studied music and was in the conservatory since I was six years old, and I did theatre, so the multidisciplinary approach is part of my background. 

I also love that when you enter a space, all your senses become totally aware. And [to create] a kind of journey through an exhibition – I try to build worlds. It’s like a video game – when you enter, you need to unlock so many different levels and layers. I think this immersive approach also applies to other art forms, such as writing, like the author Octavia E Butler, or paintings, even super-layered paintings like those by Hieronymus Bosch, where you have so many different immersive elements. 

So here in my exhibition, you’re looking at these characters, these weird interspecies beings, and you’re like, what is that? But also, I love sound and music; it’s a big part of my work and collaboration with other artists. The sensation of sound and vibration and how it goes through our bodies is super important for my work. 

W*: By juxtaposing footage with AI, myth, legend and history, reality is a blurred, perhaps irrelevant concept. How do you hold up this celebration of interspecies as a reflection of the domination that reigns in our own society? 

JN: In the same way that I work with so many different materials, I also have a research practice. This is how I conceptualise Afrofuturism: as a practice of research, but also as a practice of collage. Collage has so many different elements, and putting them together brings a new kind of energy. I love that, because it’s also part of how I think about history, especially in terms of the stories and moments that are missing, which we need to dig for and find. So this is where mythology and science fiction arrive in the process of creation. My practice also involves photomontage to help create links between everything.  

The interspecies characters have a precise role in my work. At the beginning, it was not about them at all, it was more about inter-landscapes and inter-spaces. This is why there is a sort of weird continuum in my work, where you’re in outer space, but also in the deep ocean – you never really know where you are. The interspecies characters are also important because they negate categorisation, you can’t put them in a specific box. It’s all about fluidity and finding ways of working against structures of domination and oppression. The more fluid everything is, the more it can escape the structures of domination, and everything can infiltrate everything else. The concept of infiltration is important to my work – like the way water can infiltrate different materials and cause decomposition, creating a new story from that process. 

W*: The sonic sculptures are gorgeously ethereal beings. What did the practicalities involve of working with materials such as biosourced resin, and what appealed to you with these materials? 

JN: Experimenting with these materials was important for me. Bioresin is really interesting because it’s all made up of vegetable and plant-based elements. I love this sense that the work, even down to the base materials, is connected to the concept and also to the narrative. As an artist, I’m trying to bring it all alive – its important to link the material to what we’re producing, and to push the boundaries of the research itself. I think this is priceless. 

'Josèfa Ntjam: swell of spæc(i)es' will take place in the courtyard of the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia from 20 April - 24 November 2024

las-art.foundation

Les Lalanne’s surreal take on naturalism is coming to the Venice Biennale 2024, with one of the largest exhibitions to date of works by the late artist couple Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne, uniting more than 150 photographs, rare artworks and objects at the historic Palazzo Rota Ivancich.

‘Planète Lalanne’ sees Les Lalanne’s magical menagerie flock to Venice

‘Planète Lalanne’, presented by Ben Brown Fine Arts, will include highlights such as the Sauterelle bar – one of three created by the artist duo, another of which belongs to King Charles – as well as the unique Lit Hibou et 2 Tables de Chevet bed from Ben Brown’s personal collection. Here, also, is Claude’s beloved Choupatte, the veined cabbage perched on chickens’ feet, a playful tribute to the natural themes running throughout (and also evident in a collection of ‘lost’ Les Lalanne classics that we reviewed ahead of their sale by Sotheby’s in 2023).

Works are placed around the palace in accordance with Les Lalanne’s desire to create fantastical works to live with, with otherworldly tables and chairs in the living rooms and the Hippopotame I bath coming to rest in the bathroom, in a staging that brings a mythical magic to the traditionally decorative.

A version of this article appears in the May 2024 issue of Wallpaper*, available in print from 11 April, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today.

‘Planète Lalanne’ from Ben Brown Fine Arts is at Palazzo Rota Ivancich, Venice

benbrownfinearts.com

The Venice Art Biennale 2024 will be open to the public from 20 April to 24 November

Aindrea Emelife is the British-Nigerian curator spearheading a new wave of contemporary artists, and presently also the curator behind the second-ever Nigerian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2024. When we get on a call ahead of the event’s opening (on 20 April), she’s in Venice, working with a team on the installation. As she speaks, I can sense the excitement in her voice: ‘We are working towards the installation’s completion and it's been going really well. I'm looking forward to the reveal.’

Emelife’s career has been prolific. From her early days as an art writer to becoming a Financial Times columnist at only 20, while studying for an art history degree at The Courtauld Institute of Art, and later becoming one of London's interesting art curators. Among a pool of her curated works, ‘Black Venus’, her 2022 exhibition featuring 19 artists who analysed the legacy of Black women in visual art, set the pace. And now, she is the curator of modern and contemporary art at the Museum of West African Art (MOWAA) a position that is instrumental to her vision of Nigeria and African art.

Here, Wallpaper* chats with the curator about getting started in her career, curating the Nigerian Pavilion, and African arts.

Aindrea Emelife on the Nigeria Pavillion at the Venice Biennale 2024

Wallpaper: How do you feel about curating the Nigerian Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale?

Aindrea Emelife: It's an honour, but [also] a real undertaking because it's [only] the second time that Nigeria has participated in Venice, which is obviously a great shame. [We] need the representation of African pavilions in Venice. I think the idea of ‘Nigeria Imaginary’, [the pavilion exhibition’s theme], is [centred on the] potential of Nigeria, and it fits in with current topics and debate. It […] allows for the wider audience to dream with us. It almost becomes a manifesto for a new nation, a nation that could have been, but a nation that still can be. I wanted to create an exhibition that can be inspiring, not just for the world, but for the country it's about, so that it can inspire new artists, [and] they can inspire all of us to imagine a new Nigeria and then try to put that into actuality. So it's very much thinking about what could be, which is an interesting way to articulate and talk about a country.

W: Did you have specific criteria while selecting the artists for the pavilion?

AE: I was thinking about artists that would work well with the theme. But also I wanted to create a little bit of a balance, thinking about representation from different parts of Nigeria. I wanted to make sure that it wasn't just one point of view. And then I also wanted it to be intergenerational, so different ages. I wanted to think about artists that have lived in Nigeria their entire lives or some that have left and come back. So they have different points of entry and different ways of viewing the nation. And I wanted artists that work in different mediums, because I think a lot of people still consider African art to be very reliant on [the] figurative and painting. But artists are working in different mediums, from film to sound to installation. It's really pushing the idea that Nigerian art or African art is more than two-dimensional figuration.

W: Where did your career as a curator, writer and historian begin?

AE: It's an interesting story. A lot of people in the art world come from parents that are into art or a family that are really embedded in that. But I didn't have that start. My parents weren't dragging me to museums. I just, for whatever reason, fell in love with art, with museums, with exhibitions from a really early age. And so it became a strong passion of mine. Originally, I was more interested purely in writing [about art]. As a teenager and a young adult, I would write about different exhibitions for magazines and newspapers, because I was fascinated about what art has to say about the world. And then as things developed, I was interested in how to tell stories visually. And I started to think about an exhibition as almost like a visual essay. How do you tell a story or an idea through artworks, through the minds of the artists? I became very interested in how art can be relevant to people in a different way.

When I started to think about what I'd like to introduce into the world through my love of art, I felt that making exhibitions and tackling stories that have not been told often enough or at all was a rewarding mission point because there's so much art and art history that hasn't been focused on. As a Nigerian, as an African, [I think] about how narrow or how shallow the storytelling of our great, great legacies has been globally. And so I'm now focused predominantly on uplifting African art stories, and in general, trying to create exhibitions that expand the way that we see the world and see ourselves.

W: How did your parents respond to your career path initially?

AE: I have Nigerian parents. They were like, ‘What is this?’ A lot of people I know in the art space that have African parents will say a similar thing, that you're destined to be a teacher or a doctor. I knew very early on that the things I wanted to do were creative and maybe not the most obvious vocational [paths], but I was passionate about them. I applied for university. I went to The Courtauld Institute in London, which is dedicated to art history. I will be honest and say that it took a lot of arm-twisting to convince my parents. I told them that I would eventually transition into art law, but that didn't happen, and nor did I have the intention of that happening. But it was a good way to soft-launch the concept [of my career]. Luckily, all of these stories come from a good place. My parents grew up in Nigeria. They came here, they made a life here. I think that it comes from a sentiment of [their wanting] security, and the art world cannot always provide that.

Many creative professions don't. But I've always been committed, and I'm committed to doing things that can help people in interesting ways. [Art] is such a valuable profession to think about how you can inspire people, provide hope, or provide new ways of understanding themselves and the world. So it's better now. My parents are really proud. It was not a simple conversation. But what's also lucky is that with more and more Africans being in the art space, future generations will benefit, because you can see that this is viable. With greater diversity in different ways, not just in race, but in terms of gender and different perspectives, [art] seems like a much more agreeable and viable choice and not so much of trying to enter a space that doesn't want you to be there.

W: What do you think the world needs to learn and unlearn about African art?

AE: I think the world needs to understand that Africa is so varied. And then even when you take the individual nations, they're so varied. If you think about Nigeria, there are so many different tribes, so many different languages, so many different legacies. [For example], the architectural history is so vast and so long. And then it's completely different in other areas of Nigeria. And then it's diverse from other parts of Africa. Understanding how expansive Nigeria and Africa are is really important, but also, trying to think about [them] not as a monolith.

The Venice Art Biennale 2024 is open to the public from 20 April to 24 November

labiennale.org

Belgian artist Berlinde De Bruyckere has visited Venice numerous times in the past and exhibited her work during different editions of the biennale. She also represented Belgium in 2013, with an installation of a gargantuan fallen cripple wood tree (a species known and named for its twisted branches).

An architectural characteristic the artist has long found interesting about the city is hidden in the details. ‘During my walks around Venice, I have always been intrigued by how the walls are full of water and show the wounds caused by this containment,’ De Bruyckere tells Wallpaper*. For her Belgian Pavilion installation, she had marked those wall wounds inside the space by scratching them onto the canvas.

Now De Bruyckere is back in Venice with a solo exhibition, ‘City of Refuge III’, at Abbazia di San Giorgio Maggiore, in which she turns her eye to light, a phenomenon that perhaps has a certain rhyme in Venice, unlike in any other city. After observing the 16th-century, Renaissance-style church, designed by Andrea Palladio, from day to night, she was fascinated by the building’s construction, which allows the sunlight’s travel throughout the day.

‘Berlinde De Bruyckere. City of Refuge III’ in Venice

De Bruyckere’s response is an installation of recent sculptures – most prominently her newest Arcangeli – which speak to the church’s interior characteristic that puts forward notions of devotion, transcendence, and mortality. Given the artist’s long-term interest in incorporeality in sculpture, the installation blends her contemporary exploration of spirituality with the venue’s Benedictine embodiment.

The show’s protagonists are angels without faces: they are shrouded by massive cloths that cover almost their entire bodies, including their wings. Believed to be the servants and messengers of God, the archangel figure (also featured in De Bruyckere’s 2023 show at Hauser & Wirth Zurich) entered the artist’s repertoire during the early days of the pandemic, when she was in search of a mythical figure. She came across Giorgione’s painting Cristo morto sorretto da due angeli (1502-1510), which shows an angel wrapping his arms around a tormented Christ, reminding the artist of the solidarity she witnessed among patients and caregivers.

In De Bruyckere’s interpretation, the archangels are devoid of the freedom to fully spread their wings, buried under the heavy cloth. A pair of lanky legs are their only visible human-like traits, holding a posture of a landing or an ascent, with their toes just touching the pedestals they stand on.

They defy gravity while radiating a marble heft inherent to classical Italian sculptures – they tower over the viewer, similar to interpretations of the crucifix. De Bruyckere’s material palette, however, veers her away from any depiction of David on the pedestal or Jesus on a cross. Wax, instead, gives the archangels a humanlike thickened softness, as well as a spectral transparency – they convey a sheen with the light beaming through the windows.

At her Ghent studio, the artist works with a live model to cast the body, which she later enlarges by around ten per cent to maximise the figure’s otherworldly grandiosity. She uses a cow-skin mould for the shroud, which holds the possibility of translating the animal hair into the final work. The grainy sepia hues are a result of what she calls ‘a big surprise when I take out the mould and see the colours underneath’.

De Bruyckere’s collaboration with light continues with a configuration of mirrors that echo the archangels with broken reflections. The mirrors, which she uses for the first time in her career, are hung on antique curtains that backdrop the sculptures. Draped similarly to mammoth theatre curtains, the mirrored fabric ‘adds a sense of multitude of reality’, according to the artist, who also had to adapt a new form of domination in space. ‘I usually study a space before exhibiting there and make it mine with my installation,’ she says. ‘I had to find my place in the space without overwhelming it,’ she adds about operating in a consecrated church where people still come for worship in the company of numerous paintings, including five by Tintoretto.

At the sacristy, De Bruyckere salutes one of her fundamental subjects, the fallen cripple wood tree, in this case, cast from a tree she found split by lightning near her studio. Between a glorious defeat and an eerie stillness, the monstrous trees with crippling branches in wax rest on welding tables that in the artist’s words, ‘reference the heavy construction materials I came across at Venice harbours – they are rusty and brutal’. By pairing the wax’s lingering tactility with metal coldness, she monumentalises the catastrophic moment of a fall with a potential for new life: ‘There is a sense of resurrection, an element of mortality that is already a part of the environment.’

‘Berlinde De Bruyckere. City of Refuge III’ is at Abbazia di San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, 20 April – 24 November 2024 and is a Collateral Event of the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. More about the artist at hauserandwirth.com

For more to see in the city, read our Venice Biennale 2024 guide

At a glance, Elias Sime’s visually appealing large-scale wall works look like painted art pieces.

The work involves repurposing electronic parts, including electrical wires, keyboards, and motherboards. The materials are mainly sourced from Mercato, the biggest open-air market in Africa, in the Ethiopian artist’s hometown of Addis Ababa. (The market is one of the places where the West dumps its technological waste on the continent.)

In his new, expansive solo show Elias Sime: Dichotomy ፊት አና ጀርባ showing at this year’s Venice Biennale, the artist spotlights technology's destructive nature for humans and the environment. In an interview, he noted that he isn’t against using technology but calls for restraint. 

“Technology has become an addiction to people from the time they are born,” Sime tells Wallpaper*. By way of example, he points to how technology has changed the relationship between humans. “When we [fell] in love in the past, we used to see eye to eye. We touched each other. We hugged each other. Today, you can sit [at] the same table and exchange ‘I love you’ through [a gadget] but not through seeing each other.”

Elias Sime in Venice, highlighting the flip side of technology

That sentiment, the extraction of materials from nature, and the devastation that follows in its wake are explored in the show, an official collateral event of the 60th edition of the Biennale. It opens on April 17th and will be on view through November 24 at Tanarte, Castello, close to Arsenale, one of the main venues of the event referred to as the ‘Olympics of the art world.'

Co-curated by his longtime collaborator, Anthropologist Meskerem Assegued, and Felicity Korn, curator at The Kunstpalast, the show features new art pieces, including six wall works (made of electrical components and wires on wooden panel) and a large-scale braided wire sculpture. It also builds on the artist’s Tightrope series, which he started developing in 2009, which examines the extraction of materials used to create technology gadgets.

The work reveals what is “behind the scenes,” says Sime. “There are two sides to everything. There’s a flip side of us that’s not visible to the public.” Assegued adds: “One of the things that [was] constantly on my mind [co-curating this exhibition was] how do I tell the story? How do I allow the audience to walk in and feel the power of the work?”

Some of the work in the Elias Sime: Dichotomy ፊት አና ጀርባ exhibition will be included in the artist’s retrospective, which will be staged at the organizing institution, the Kunstpalast in Germany from March to June 2025.

Sime was born and raised in Addis Ababa, where he still lives and works. His work has been shown locally in his home country since the 1990s. It has also been seen around the world, including at the 2022 Venice Biennale, Dak’Art Biennale of Contemporary African Art in Dakar, Senegal, Arnolfini in Bristol, United Kingdom, Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, both in the United States. His work is also in the permanent collections of more than 40 institutions, including the Norval Foundation in South Africa, the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Japan, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the United States.

The 2020 Hugo Boss Prize nominee is quick to credit his work and success to his collaboration with curator Assegued, whom he’s been working with for over two decades: “I want you to know that the work that you see here is a collaboration of the two of us,” says Sime. “And what I do, where I am now, is due to that collaboration.”

The two individuals founded and designed Zoma Museum, the sprawling, environmentally conscious international art center in Addis Ababa. It houses a gallery, library, museum shop, art and vernacular school, elementary school, children’s center, museum shop, and an amphitheater. They also recently founded and designed a new cultural hub with facilities including a library, café, culinary school, gardens, and a waterfall. 

What’s next for Sime and Assegued in their collaborative efforts and projects?

“The next stage, which was a thought from the beginning, is how do we pass it on because we're not young anymore, and who's going to take over?” says Assegued. “So now one of the main things we're spending our time on is building institutions so we can become advisors and be on the side so it could be run by young people.” 

‘Elias Sime: Dichotomy ፊትአናጀርባ’ is a Collateral Event of the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Presented by the Kunstpalast Düsseldorf at Spazio Tana, Castello

jamescohan.com

Paris-based, Canadian artist Kapwani Kiwanga draws on her anthropological training for pieces that criss-cross a multitude of mediums at the Venice Biennale 2024. From performance and embroidery to sculpture and installation, her work considers the political implications of material, from the impact of the agricultural revolution to the consequences of alien species crossing continents.

‘I think the starting point is just being curious,’ says Kiwanga on what unites her diverse body of work. ‘I happen to have had the privilege of being in institutions where they teach you different skills, how to understand and interact with the archive in different discourses. But then, at the same time, I wouldn’t want [my work] to be so exclusive that you would need to have that background to be able to access it. And so very early on, when I was studying, I knew that academia was probably not going to be the place where I would end up putting all of my energy, because I did want to have that broad reach.’

Kiwanga has drawn on this multitude of references for her sculpture installation for the Canadian Pavilion, which was commissioned by the National Gallery of Canada. The work considers questions of inherent value through the lens of the history of commerce, an issue she has considered in the past, observing first-hand how fracking transformed sand from a valueless raw material to a highly prized commodity.

‘There’s always this question of value in a more philosophical sense,’ she says, ‘Which is really the crux of the question. When one thinks about how a plant or an elephant can have an economic value in one context, but has a much more integrated, social, cultural, spiritual role in another context, then those questions of regimes of value are of interest.’

A version of this article appears in the May 2024 issue of Wallpaper*, available in print from 11 April, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today.

goodman-gallery.com/artists/kapwani-kiwanga

The Venice Art Biennale 2024 will be open to the public from 20 April to 24 November

At the Venice Art Biennale, countries from all over the world gather to showcase contemporary artists. In the main show, the world’s best curators give their take on the most prescient art being made today. The drama is high, the events are many: this is a chance to see some of the best, most relevant art around in an incomparable setting.

This year the biennale’s 60th edition is guided by the main exhibition’s title is ‘Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere’ inspired by the Palermo collective Claire Fontaine. At the world’s most famous national art exhibition we are being asked questions about internationality, belonging, identity, nationalism and acceptance. No small remit in today’s world.

“Artists have always travelled and moved about, under various circumstances, through cities, countries and continents, something that has only accelerated since the late 20th century—ironically a period marked by increasing restrictions regarding the dislocation or displacement of people,” read curator Adriano Pedrosa. “The Biennale Arte 2024’s primary focus is thus artists who are themselves foreigners, immigrants, expatriates, diasporic, émigrés, exiled, or refugees—particularly those who have moved between the Global South and the Global North. Migration and decolonization are key themes here.”

The Venice Biennale 2024: the pavilions

Pedrosa’s main show will include art by 332 living and late artists, most of whom are from Africa, Latin America, Asia and the Middle East. He is the artistic director of Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP) and has staged a number of exhibitions focusing on art made by indigenous artists, both historic and contemporary.

If you are heading over to The Floating City then national pavilions vying for the coveted Golden Lion are John Akomfrah who works mainly in film installation ‘Listening All Night To The Rain’ for Britain which is one of the most hotly anticipated exhibitions as is Kapwani Kiwanga: TRINKET representing Canada and Wael Shawky known for his considered film work is presenting the musical film Drama 1882 for Egypt. Veteran artist Gülsün Karamustafa will represent Turkey, France is being represented by sculptor French-Jamaican Julien Creuzet, emerging painting star Tesfaye Urgessa will be showing for Ethiopia and Eimear Walshe is representing Ireland with ‘Romantic Ireland’.

There is a high number of artists from indigenous communities being showcased in this edition, namely Jeffrey Gibson representing the United States, Greenlandian artist Inuuteq Storch will be exhibiting for Denmark, Archie Moore for Australia and Glicéria Tupinambá will be exhibiting for Brazil.

There are also a number of collectives and group pavilion exhibitions this edition with Renzo Martens working with Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC) for the Netherlands, musician Andrea Mancini and Brussels-based design collective Every Island presenting for Luxembourg, Aindrea Emelife curating the Nigerian pavilion in a group show include Yinka Shonibare. Precious Okoyomon and Toyin Ojih Odutola, the Ukrainian artist’s collective, will be staging a collective portrait of witnesses of the war in Ukraine be curated by Marta Czyż, and Azu Nwagbogu curates artists Chloé Quenum, Moufouli Bello, Ishola Akpo, and Romuald Hazoumè for the Republic of Benin. See all the artists exhibiting at the pavilions.

The Venice Biennale: collateral events around the city

In addition to the biennale and the exhibitions opening around Venice next week there are a number of collateral events, and these can often be some of the most exciting and surprising shows at the biennale. Rebecca Ackroyd is showing Mirror Stage at Fondaco Marcello, British Pakistani artist Osman Yousefzada is putting on Welcome! A Palazzo for Immigrants at Palazzo Cavalli-Franchetti, Fondation Louis Vuitton is exhibiting Ernest Pignon-Ernest, the Chanakya Foundation is staging Cosmic Garden a show of textile works made in India, the feminist show Breasts is opening at APC Palazzo Franchetti and Ewa Juszkiewicz’s solo show is at Palazzo Cavanis. Peter Hujar: Portraits in Life and Death is at Istituto Santa Maria della Pietà, and Artists and Allies x Hebron is exhibiting South West Bank: Landworks, Collective Action and Sound, a group show of work made in the region at Magazzino Gallery.

Outside the biennale, exhibitions in Venice’s stunning institutions never fail to impress with the hotly anticipated Willem De Kooning E L'italia at the Accademia, Julie Mehretu: Ensemble, a film installation by Edith Dekyndt and Liminal by Pierre Huyghe presented by the Pinault Collection at Palazzo Grassi, Fondazione In Between Art Film in its second edition, Nebula at Complesso dell’Ospedaletto and Re-Stor(y)ing Oceania at TBA21: OCEAN SPACE, Martha Jungwirth: Herz der Finsternis at Galleria Palazzo Cini Alex Katz’s ‘Claire, Grass and Water’ at Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore and the Guggenheim is showing an exhibition of work by Jean Cocteau.

Criticisms have often been levelled at the biennale for its inherently nationalistic set up, but this time many countries have taken an interesting tack on national representation, foregrounding indigenous artists and collectives. The main exhibition’s tilt towards the oft called Global South will also mean that here in the Europe we are being introduced to artists and ideas we know little about. All this promises an interesting show for our troubled times.

The 60th Venice Biennale runs throughout the city until November 2024

Venice Biennale 2024 in depth: Wallpaper* must-sees

Alternate worlds and end of days: Pierre Huyghe's vision

Pierre Huyghe is famous for his explorations of slippages in reality, alternate worlds and end-of-days scenarios. His work in film, sculpture and installation is instantly recognisable in its darkness and its evasiveness. A featureless child searches for food in an abandoned landscape, a face glitches in a digital schism and shrinks away on a towering screen in near pitch blackness.

‘Liminal’, which opened in April at Palazzo Grassi’s Punta della Dogana, one of the Pinault Collection’s two locations in the city, explores Huyghe’s vision on a massive scale. Pitched into blackness on entering the exhibition, we are stumbling around – the floor has varying textures and the doorways are not fully visible. Something is flickering in the dim light, a small translucent creature emerges and there is a towering, huge screen with an AI video of a face, human or animal, slipping in and out of recognition.

Writer: Amah-Rose Abrams

Indigenous voices hit a powerful note in awe-inspiring Venice space

Chiesa di San Lorenzo, the home of Ocean Space, TBA21’s Venetian space for exploring issues of the ocean through culture, is not small. It is the kind of vertigo-inducing space that an artist such as Hirst, Kapoor or Gormley may be tempted to fill with an enormous, expensive art object to match the awe of the space with the sublime of sculpture.

Latai Taumoepeau and Elisapeta Hinemoa Heta did not get drawn into such presumptuous and clichéd art games, instead creating two delicate and poetic interventions either side of the 9th century deconsecrated church’s central altar. Many visitors who climb the six shallow steps from Campo San Lorenzo, through a modest door, and into the vaulted space may be forgiven for not even noticing the art installations – both only fully coming to live when activated through ritual performance and conversation taking place over coming months.

Writer: Will Jennings

Josèfa Ntjam on her surreal utopias in Venice

For Josèfa Ntjam, a utopian world becomes a surreal lens through which to consider themes of domination woven throughout history. It is a concept she has returned to for ‘swell of spæc(i)es’, a collateral event with LAS Art Foundation at the Venice Biennale 2024.

Writer: Hannah Silver

Read more here

Les Lalanne’s world takes over Venice

Les Lalanne’s surreal take on naturalism is coming to the Venice Biennale 2024, with one of the largest exhibitions to date of works by the late artist couple Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne, uniting more than 150 photographs, rare artworks and objects at the historic Palazzo Rota Ivancich.

Writer: Hannah Silver

Read more here

Aindrea Emelife on bringing the Nigerian Pavilion to life at the Venice Biennale 2024

Aindrea Emelife is the British-Nigerian curator spearheading a new wave of contemporary artists, and presently also the curator behind the second-ever Nigerian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2024. When we get on a call ahead of the event’s opening (on 20 April), she’s in Venice, working with a team on the installation. As she speaks, I can sense the excitement in her voice: ‘We are working towards the installation’s completion and it's been going really well. I'm looking forward to the reveal.’

Writer: Ugonna-Ora Owoh

Read more here

Berlinde De Bruyckere’s angels without faces touch down in Venice church

Belgian artist Berlinde De Bruyckere has visited Venice numerous times in the past and exhibited her work during different editions of the biennale. She also represented Belgium in 2013, with an installation of a gargantuan fallen cripple wood tree (a species known and named for its twisted branches).

An architectural characteristic the artist has long found interesting about the city is hidden in the details. ‘During my walks around Venice, I have always been intrigued by how the walls are full of water and show the wounds caused by this containment,’ De Bruyckere tells Wallpaper*. For her Belgian Pavilion installation, she had marked those wall wounds inside the space by scratching them onto the canvas.

Writer: Osman Can Yerebakan

Read more here

Elias Sime reflects on the destructive nature of technology in Venice

At a glance, Elias Sime's visually appealing large-scale wall works look like painted art pieces.

The work is made from repurposing electronic parts, including electrical wires, keyboards, and motherboards. The materials are mainly sourced from Mercato, the biggest open-air market in Africa, in the Ethiopian artist’s hometown of Addis Ababa. (The market is one of the places where the West dumps its technological waste on the continent.)

Writer: Gameli Hamelo

Read more here

Kapwani Kiwanga considers value and commerce for the Canada Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2024

Paris-based, Canadian artist Kapwani Kiwanga draws on her anthropological training for pieces that criss-cross a multitude of mediums at the Venice Biennale 2024. From performance and embroidery to sculpture and installation, her work considers the political implications of material, from the impact of the agricultural revolution to the consequences of alien species crossing continents.

Writer: Hannah Silver

Read more here

Lap-See Lam’s giant dragon head and tail takes over the Nordic Pavilion at the Venice Biennale

This year, artist Lap-See Lam is leading an especially bold exhibition for Norway, placing a huge bronze dragon’s head and tail outside and filling the interior space with a floor-to-ceiling grid of bamboo poles. This commanding installation plays host to her hour-long ‘The Altersea Opera’, created with composer Tze Yeung Ho, with LED screens showing pre-recorded performances and multiple speakers throughout the space.

Writer: Emily Steer

Read more here

Guglielmo Castelli considers fragility and violence with painting series in Venice

Guglielmo Castelli’s exhibition ‘Improving Songs for Anxious Children’ at Palazzetto Tito, Venice, explores childhood as the genesis of discovery. Bringing together a series of paintings, maquettes, textiles and knitted sculptures, the show explores the body, relationships, death and the dance between success and failure. Inside Castelli’s canvases, figures bend and contort in ways that defy anatomy, and are set against familiar domestic backdrops. The works portray a metaphysical realm, one that explores ideas of fragility and violence, carelessness and attentiveness, and morality and corruption.

Writer: Sofia Hallstrom

Read more here

Tesfaye Urgessa is the artist behind the first-ever Ethiopian Pavilion at the Venice Art Biennale

As the selected artist for the first-ever Ethiopian Pavilion at a Venice Art Biennale, Tesfaye Urgessa’s commission comes with more than the average amount of pressure. Urgessa, however, is taking it in his stride, appreciating the timing of the project, which coincides with a personal and professional full circle. After beginning his career in Ethiopia, studying under painter Tadesse Mesfin, he enrolled in the Staatlichen Akademie in Stuttgart, a move that saw him hone a style that juxtaposes Western and African references.

Writer: Hannah Silver

Read more here

What’s the big deal with breasts, ask artists at the Venice Biennale

Breasts have endlessly captivated artists – from the Old Masters to Cindy Sherman, Richard Dupont to Marcel Duchamp. Across the centuries, and through the mediums of sculpture, photography, film and painting, they have been a lens through which to dissect sexuality, illness, motherhood and politics, as well as igniting discussions on identity, class and race. They have also been fascinating, funny and fantastic, simply in their own right.

Now, a major new group exhibition in Venice asks why. Bringing together 30 established and emerging artists, curator Carolina Pasti is considering the issue at ACP Palazzo Franchetti. But where to begin?

Writer: Hannah Silver

Read more here

John Akomfrah explores the sonic for the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2024

John Akomfrah’s immersive and visual works consider migration and diasporic communities through the media of film. Now, in new work for the Venice Biennale, commissioned and managed by the British Council, Akomfrah is dissecting a historical narrative through an auditory lens, putting sound at the centre of his new piece, Listening All Night To The Rain.

Writer: Hannah Silver

Read more here

'I approach the canvas as if it were a stage, or a scene,' artist Guglielmo Castelli explains during our Zoom conversation from his studio in Turin. Speaking at the beginning of March 2024, he tells me that he has just finished the paintings for his Venice exhibition ‘Improving Songs for Anxious Children’, curated by Milovan Farronato at the Palazzetto Tito, and opening to coincide with the Venice Biennale 2024. 

Bringing together a series of paintings, maquettes, textiles and knitted sculptures, the show explores childhood as the genesis of discovery – of the body, of relationships, of death and of the dance between success and failure. Inside Castelli’s canvases, figures bend and contort in ways that defy anatomy, and are set against familiar domestic backdrops. The works portray a metaphysical realm, one that explores ideas of fragility and violence, carelessness and attentiveness, and morality and corruption.

Guglielmo Castelli’s 'Improving Songs for Anxious Children'

'The idea of fragility, in terms of the other side of violence, is like a knife that you cut and open within yourself…' Evoking a sense of inner turmoil and fragmentation, Castelli’s works are as much inhabited as they are inhabiting: some works incorporate collaged items of clothing, hinting at a past presence. In Of aggression and possession, a paper cut-out house is collaged to cover the crotch of an empty pair of shorts, with figures climbing inside and up the legs. The clothing, while contingent, evokes a sense of a hollowed corporeality. Marcel Duchamp's term infra-mince (defined as traces of previous existence) is useful here, prompting viewers to contemplate beyond its surface, beyond fragile boundaries.

In the studio, Castell is interested in ‘recalculating the route’ in his artistic process. At the age of 15, he began illustrating children's books and later turned to fashion illustration for Vogue Italia, but he remained consistent in contemplating the ‘relationship between the world that can create the image and the world that can create the imaginary’. The title for the show, Improving Songs for Anxious Children, is as much a cry for help as it is a call for optimism, aiming to counter today's rapid online consumption culture, redirecting attention towards the nurturing and development of the younger generation.

The act of painting itself is almost a performance, whereby Castelli choreographs the scenes inside the framed canvas: ‘Every time I try to paint onto a canvas on the wall, it produces terrible results. I need to have everything fixed inside the frame before I paint…’ The distorted perspectives and warped spatial relationships further contribute to a feeling of dislocation, as if the viewer has entered into a dreamlike realm where logic and reason are suspended. In The minimum labyrinth, a figure with a sharp gaze casts a white frame, of the perspective sort, enshrining the canvas space; within the painting a smaller painting is depicted, of figures laying on the ground. In this realm of suspension, Castelli orchestrates vivid yet minute psychodramas, imbuing his paintings with our unfiltered internal worlds.

Castelli allows the viewer into his intimate scenes, beyond the frayed and indeterminate edges, involving us in the very fabric of his past. The viewer goes beyond a dialogue with the artwork: an introspective dialogue has begun.

Guglielmo Castelli’s ‘Improving Songs for Anxious Children’ is at Palazzetto Tito, Venice, 15 April – 7 Jul 2024, labiennale.org

John Akomfrah’s immersive and visual works consider migration and diasporic communities through the media of film. Now, in new work for the Venice Biennale, commissioned and managed by the British Council, Akomfrah is dissecting a historical narrative through an auditory lens, putting sound at the centre of his new piece, Listening All Night To The Rain. 

‘I’d got to a point where I thought a lot of what I want to say involves trying to pull people into positions of listening,’ he says. ‘It’s about acknowledging connections with other species, and each other. We’re cautioned to listen to rising water levels, CO2 emissions – there are a lot of voices begging to be listened to. It felt like a good moment to just bring up some of the past. [The work] is both looking ahead to the things that we are definitely interested in the present, but a lot of it is also to do with the immediate past and the things we haven’t really paid attention to, [and] sometimes they are related. There’s much to hear.’

Akomfrah will be revisiting his distinctive multi-layered style in the new work, with an installation composed of eight intersecting and overlapping screens emphasising the power in sound and listening, both as a tool for activism and for their ability to prompt an emotional connection. ‘The sense of recall that the sonic affords you feels much more connected to the past in some way,’ he adds. ‘Images can feel slightly disembodied, unconnected to the moment of origination, whereas the sonic somehow feels as if it’s still attached in some weird way to that moment.’ 

The vast proportions of Akomfrah’s intersecting multi-screen installation had to be reconsidered to work with the spatial requirements of the British Pavilion’s 19th-century neoclassical building. ‘Every time you venture into a new space, you’re deciding on the form it will take. You become aware that you’re going to have to renegotiate. I think the forms we come up with for the Pavilion, with its emphasis on repetition and doublings, miniaturising the screens, all of that will make a difference. No space [in Venice] is that big, but that’s cool.’ 

A version of this article appears in the May 2024 issue of Wallpaper*, available in print from 11 April, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today.

lissongallery.com/artists/john-akomfrah

The Venice Art Biennale 2024 will be open to the public from 20 April to 24 November

Breasts have endlessly captivated artists – from the Old Masters to Cindy Sherman, Richard Dupont to Marcel Duchamp. Across the centuries, and through the mediums of sculpture, photography, film and painting, they have been a lens through which to dissect sexuality, illness, motherhood and politics, as well as igniting discussions on identity, class and race. They have also been fascinating, funny and fantastic, simply in their own right.

Now, a major new group exhibition in Venice asks why. Bringing together 30 established and emerging artists, curator Carolina Pasti is considering the issue at ACP Palazzo Franchetti. But where to begin?

Venice group show grapples with breasts in art

‘Starting from a Cycladic fragment [and extending] to a Madonna lactans, my portrayal of breasts focuses mainly on post-war and contemporary artists and their approach to extremely topical issues such as feminism, breast cancer, breastfeeding, motherhood, sexuality, and the changes that have taken place over the decades throughout the world,’ says Pasti, who aims to both celebrate the iconography of breasts and raise awareness of breast cancer.

Divided into five rooms, the exhibition considers the representation of breasts through time, beginning with the Old Masters, including Madonna del Latte (Madonna Breastfeeding the Child), a work that influenced Cindy Sherman as well as prompting Teniqua Crawford and Sherrie Levine to review Renaissance elements throughout their work. The exhibition moves on to the sculptural translation of breasts, with works including Marcel Duchamp’s mixed media Prière de toucher (Please Touch) and Claude Lalanne’s wearable breastplate. 

Robert Mapplethorpe and Irving Penn are two of the photographers imbuing a surreal narrative on breasts in the third room, alongside fashion photographers’ subversion of traditional realities, while the fourth room looks at those who deconstruct breasts. Here, Louise Bourgeois, amongst others, bring a sense of humour to the conversation around women’s bodies. In the fifth room, Laure Prouvost’s moving film, Four For See Beauties, plays out, recalling the crucial role of breasts in human life.

‘Considering breasts, as a universal theme that goes back to prehistoric times, it was a challenge to decide which periods to cover in the exhibition,’ Pasti adds. ‘But from my curatorial perspective, I predominantly examined works from modern times creating an intimate exchange between different media such as painting, sculpture, photography and video.’ 

‘Breasts’ is at the ACP Palazzo from 18 April - 24 November 2024

The Venice Art Biennale 2024 will be open to the public from 20 April to 24 November

acp-palazzofranchetti.com

As the selected artist for the first-ever Ethiopian Pavilion at a Venice Art Biennale, Tesfaye Urgessa’s commission comes with more than the average amount of pressure. Urgessa, however, is taking it in his stride, appreciating the timing of the project, which coincides with a personal and professional full circle. After beginning his career in Ethiopia, studying under painter Tadesse Mesfin, he enrolled in the Staatlichen Akademie in Stuttgart, a move that saw him hone a style that juxtaposes Western and African references. He has since returned to his hometown, Addis Ababa.

‘It was when I went to Germany that I decided to become an artist,’ says Urgessa. ‘I was influenced by the situation and what was happening around me, but also by the art and the artists. I felt free to take [from this].’

Ethiopian Pavilion artist Tesfaye Urgessa on ritual, race and identity

It marked the beginning of his distinctive aesthetic, marrying Ethiopian symbols and motifs with vivid outlines inspired by German neo-expressionism, in work which imbues the domestic routines of the quotidian with a spirituality. ‘My influence is the day-to-day life, there is always that aspect,’ he adds. ‘You see a kind of ritual, but you’re not exactly sure what kind. It’s one of the core parts of my painting right now, to give that majesty, [with subjects] sitting very straight.’ 

Urgessa borrows from traditional figurative paintings to consider identity politics and race, although, he says, ‘I don’t have any patience to give it some kind of direction. I wouldn’t say, this painting is going to be about race, but it’s just that those things affect me, especially when I was in Germany. I would have conversations about this stuff with my friends, it happened to them, it happens to me. And that takes some part in the painting process, because I collect images in my head throughout the day. Those images that affected me the most tend to come out on the surface of my painting. The race and identity question isn’t something to deny. It just naturally comes out.’ 

A version of this article appears in the May 2024 issue of Wallpaper*, available in print from 11 April, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today.

saatchiyates.com/artists/tesfaye-urgessa

The Venice Art Biennale 2024 will be open to the public from 20 April to 24 November

A Buccellati exhibition is set to celebrate the jewellery house’s history, rich with craftsmanship and creativity. The major new retrospective, ‘The Prince of Goldsmiths, Rediscovering the Classics’, will take place in Venice, created and produced by Balich Wonder Studio, and opening to coincide with the Venice Biennale 2024.

Oficine 800 on Giudecca Canal will be the backdrop for Buccellati’s jewellery and silverware pieces, with a curation by Alba Cappellieri uniting designs spanning the decades.

‘The title of the exhibition, “The Prince of Goldsmiths”, comes from the words of the Italian poet Gabriele D'Annunzio, whose friendship with Mario Buccellati testifies to the [maison’s] connection with Italian history since the [latter founded it] in 1919,’ says Balich Wonder Studio creative director, Claudio Sbragion. ‘The exhibition concept is "Buccellati rediscovering the classics", a natural mission of its goldsmithing art that, for over a century, designed jewels with everlasting beauty, untouched by the trends and guided by the classical proportions of all the Italian arts. Classical Italian architecture, painting and sculpture have inspired the goldsmithing creations and dialogue with the precious jewels in the exhibition, [which are enhanced] with video installations that [immerse] the visitor into the Buccellati world.’

The exhibition is divided into four parts, taking a closer look at the generations of the Buccellati family, the silver and gold accessories, the most famous silver designs and, finally, the jewellery. For Buccellati, Venice was the natural home for the retrospective. ‘Venice is widely recognised as a masterpiece of art, besides being my hometown,’ adds Marco Balich, Balich Wonder Studio chairman and concept developer. ‘Similarly, Buccellati symbolises timeless beauty and a goldsmith's art that lives daily in the contemporary world.’

The distinctive long and narrow shape of Oficine 800 prompted a unique exhibition design, composed of two parallel sections. ‘Shapes draw an ideal perspective line, which becomes the route for the visitor,’ says Sbragion. ‘Sometimes, it is an imaginative path suggested by the video storytelling on evanescent screens; other [times], the perspective is infinitely multiplied, thanks to the oldest theatrical mechanism of mirrors. As the exhibition's concept suggests, the privilege and the limits of working in [a historic place] can become the creative inspiration for the present design.’

‘The exhibition we are presenting in Venice is a tribute to our family and to the designers who, inspired by classical art, architecture and sculpture, have created magnificent masterpieces,’ the Buccellati family say. ‘The exhibition retraces the distinctive themes of Buccellati creations, highlighting the craftsmanship and preciousness of the “classic” all-important pieces of our history. We loved the idea of presenting contemporary pieces, as well as archive and vintage pieces in a modern unconventional way, through interactive presentations which are visual, tactile and involve all senses.’

'The Prince of Goldsmiths, Rediscovering the Classics' takes place from 18 April – 18 June 2024 in Venice

buccellati.com

Carlo Ratti has been revealed as Director of the Architecture Department at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025. The Italian architect will spearhead the next global festival of architecture at the lagoon city, leading the curation of the 19th International Architecture Exhibition in 2025. The appointment was recommended by current biennale president Roberto Cicutto, in agreement with Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, who is set to begin his own four-year term as president of La Biennale di Venezia in 2024, succeeding Cicutto.  

Carlo Ratti said: 'We architects like to think we are smart, but real intelligence is everywhere. The disembodied ingenuity of evolution, the growing power of computers, and the collective wisdom of the crowd. To face a burning world, architecture must harness all the intelligence around us. I am honoured and humbled to have the opportunity to curate the Biennale Architettura 2025.'

Carlo Ratti: architect and curator of Venice Architecture Biennale 2025

Ratti is an architect and engineer based in Turin, also teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Politecnico di Milano. He is the director of the Senseable City Lab and a founding partner of the architecture and innovation office CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati (Torino, New York City, and London). 

Urban planning and sustainable architecture are key interests for the architect, who has worked on projects of all scales and typologies, globally – including his popular The Greenary, which he co-designed with Italo Rota in Parma, Italy. The house was also nominated for Wallpaper* Design Award: Best Private House in 2022. 

The dates of the 19th International Architecture Exhibition have also been announced today. The event will be held from Saturday 24 May to Sunday 23 November 2025. It will be next architecture biennale to launch, following Lesley Lokko's Venice Architecture Biennale 2023.

labiennale.org

carloratti.com

A new interactive exhibition has been developed by The Human Safety Net Foundation, part of the Generali Group, in Procuratie Vecchie, its 500-year-old heritage building headquarters in St Mark’s Square, Venice. Launching during the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023, 16 installations and the surrounding spaces have been designed by architecture studio Migliore+Servetto. The considered interiors reflect the foundation’s aims of collaboration, supporting vulnerable families with young children and providing assistance to refugees.

Inside the interactive exhibition at Procuratie Vecchie

Spanning approximately 3,000 sq m, the spaces ‘focus on inclusion and accessibility in equal measure – central themes in the development of the project’, say the studio’s Ico Migliore and Mara Servetto. Migliore+Servetto worked to establish an interior scheme and family-friendly exhibition that doesn’t dominate or interfere, but works with the existing structure, which has been recently restored by David Chipperfield Architects Milan. 

A continuous run of arches flows naturally from the exhibition through to the library/café and beyond. Furnishing such as the bespoke suspended shelving system highlights the brickwork detail rather than distracts from it. Lighting, too, has been designed not to obscure the fabric of the building by employing a combination of treatments, which include floor-mounted fittings, track lighting and suspended linear units. 

The company’s private co-working space known as ‘The Hub’ hosts furniture designed to encourage collaboration and then there’s ‘The Hall’, Generali Group’s state-of-the-art auditorium designed for international symposiums, congresses and events.

‘Art and culture allow us to get to know ourselves better, so the new home of The Human Safety Net and its interactive exhibition space are based on this fundamental concept,’ say Migliore and Servetto. ‘The result is a space designed to welcome the viewer in an empathetic way, with different rhythms and times, reinterpreting key symbols while making a constant reference to materials, design and environments. Within this, the richness of Venetian culture and territory remains a wide-ranging heritage to draw from and echo within the Procuratie.’ 

Visitors can go back in history with a ‘Time Telescope’ installation that encourages them to explore famous Venetian landmarks such as Giudecca, Rialto Bridge, Arsenale, Burano and Murano in 3D as they would have been in the 16th century.

The chosen materials and the shapes employed celebrate the Generali Group’s Venetian heritage and the Procuratie Vecchie’s enviable position. The wave-like form of the reclaimed timber benches in the café reflect the ubiquitous waterways, while glass is used in the accompanying tables – softened by an orange hue. The tables can be raised and lowered so visitors can come together in the spirit of collaboration. Low-level porthole windows offer glimpses out to the famous square establishing a continuous reconnection to the heart of Venice.

architettimiglioreservetto.it 

'A World of Potential Interactive Exhibition' at Procuratie Vecchie, Piazza San Marco, 107, 30124 Venezia VE, Italy

Open daily from 10am to 7pm from 1 April to 31 October 

10am to 6pm from 1 November to 31 March

Closed Tuesdays

As the doors of the 18th International Architecture Biennale opened to the public last week (20 May 2023), so too did the halls of the Giovanni Nicelli Private Airport. For the second year, renowned tastemaker Nina Yashar is curating an exhibition of scenographies via her gallery, Nilufar, at the elegant 1920s building situated on the Lido, a barrier island a short water taxi from Venice. 

‘The ever-present future of design’: Nilufar at Giovanni Nicelli airport

The goal for Yashar’s exhibition, named 'The Ever-Present Future of Design', is to highlight the connections and exchanges between notable historic and contemporary pieces from different countries and disciplines, in the context of collectible design today.

'The important thing for me was to push the boundaries on a meaningful dialogue between design with disparate provenance, bridging cultures and overcoming borders,' explains Yashar. 'And what better place to do this if not an airport?'

Set across the arrivals and departures hall, the journey begins with a varied showcase of pieces from design luminaries, including several editions by Italian sculptor Pietro Consagra, a pair of armchairs designed by Paolo Buffa (1950), Carlo Scarpa’s ‘Cornaro’ sofa and armchair models (1973), alongside wall lamps from Gio Ponti. Other highlights include a Brazilian rosewood cabinet with woven straw door fronts by Martin Eisler and Carlo Hauner (1960), sofas from Joaquim Tenreiro (1958) and Edward J Wormley (1950), and an ‘LB10’ modular bookcase by Franco Albini (1958).

The strength of the exhibit is not just in Yashar’s control of form and material to create a coherent yet impactful setting, but in her mixing of unexpected combinations, which work well in the unique context of the airport.

Alongside vintage Gio Ponti sit upholstered pieces by Lebanese multidisciplinary designer Khaled El Mays, atop rugs designed by Martino Gamper. With organic forms and narrative flourishes, three pieces from El Mays’ ‘Flora’ seating series (2019) take a central position in the hall, together with his ‘Nomad’ bench and a brass and wicker low table from the designer’s ‘Palmea’ collection (2018).

Closest to the hall’s light-filled entrance, Yashar has included two sets of ‘Libra’ tables and benches by Atelier Lavit (2023). Originally conceived as outdoor furniture pieces, their profiled steel tops are reminiscent of wings, balancing on sculptural hoop bases.

The jewel-toned colour palette is continued with clusters of Draga & Aurel’s ‘Jade’ coffee tables (2022) in brass and resin, together with hand-blown glass vases by Domitilla Harding (2018). A curious and sculptural ‘Guise’ table lamp (2020) by Dutch studio Odd Matter, is placed on a structuralist table (2020) by Berlin-based designer Lukas Wegwerth.

The new exhibition reinforces the airport’s role as a hub in promoting culture and arts on the Lido of Venice. Nilufar collaborated closely with the venue’s director and its head of cultural and artistic direction, Laura Alfieri on the project.

‘Giovanni Nicelli Private Airport is permeated by magic: it reminds us of all the richness travelling offers and of the beauty that crossing borders can bring,' explains Yashar. 'You almost lose the dimension of time when entering the space. My desire was to showcase pieces that have and still define today the future of collectible design.'

'The ever-present future of design' by Nilufar at Giovanni Nicelli airport is on view until late 2023

Giovanni Nicelli Private Airport
Via R. Morandi, 9
30126 Venice 

nilufar.com

The Grand Canal laps at the steps of Fondazione Prada’s 18th-century palazzo, leaving strata tidemarks charting the rising lagoon. This waterside entrance was once used not only to deliver dignitaries and guests who then climbed the grand staircase to the richly decorated Piano Nobile, but also materials and goods which were then stored in the somewhat less-grand ground floor spaces. ‘Everybody Talks About the Weather’, the venue’s new exhibition curated by Dieter Roelstraete and coinciding with the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023, spreads across both floors, filling it with aesthetically beautiful if potentially cataclysmic images.

A ground-floor, low-ceilinged store is transformed through the blue hue of a sub-aqua video from Raqs Media Collective. Deep Breath (1999/2002) follows three divers in the Aegean Sea on a situationist quest to find distributed letters to spell out ‘the forgetting of air’ – a fragment of ancient Greek aphorism which references a study of Martin Heidegger, but perhaps now also speaks to our taking-for-granted of elemental forces and a collective lack of care for them. The work was filmed the summer before Covid, though the divers’ heavy breathing through back-strapped air tanks acts as a haunting premonition of the sounds of breathlessness and intubation which followed.

The ground floor stores of palazzos such as Fondazione Prada’s Ca’ Corner della Regina are designed to survive Venice’s annual flooding, allowing high waters to pass under, while architecture and artworks of greater value are safe on higher floors. However, half of Venice’s intense high-water events since 1872 have occurred within the past three decades, so Raqs’ footage of divers floating through the palazzo could be read as another foretelling.

‘The scientific community is largely agreed that in 75 years Venice will exist no more, it will have been drowned … so this building will be lost,’ Roelstraete tells me. This risk of flooding can be read in his curation: the floodable ground floor predominantly presents video and quickly-demountable wall works – including Plastic Horizons (2014), a series in which Dan Peterman layers strips of recycled plastic as if documenting anthropogenic chronology – alongside ten high-resolution but relatively low-value printed reproductions of famous historical paintings.

At first, it seems odd for the curation to so heavily rely on these reproductions. The originals could obviously not be presented in such an at-risk, non-climate-controlled space, but their inclusion invites us to question what (and who) else is at such risk from environmental changes, or indeed to imagine what if culture we cherish now might only exist in the future through mechanical reproduction.

The function of the reproductions – including Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow, Turner’s Rain, Steam, and Speed, and Monet’s Impression, Sunrise – is not to add historic gravitas, but invite reconsideration of masterpieces through the lens of climate breakdown, reinterpreting them as documents of a changing ecosystem. ‘Venice is a very dramatic backdrop for this argument, because it's kind of a celebrity victim,’ Roelstraete suggests.

Information panels present contextual scientific data and research. Monet’s coalsmoke yellowness, blue morning light, and red rising sun are explained as a record of early industrial environmental impact, while diagrams illustrate the social and health impacts of the Little Ice Age Breugel painted through. The visitor can dive into this analysis as much or little as they wish, supported by a wide library of further reading.

Upstairs, the ornate portego is dominated by Vivian Suter canvases draped from a framework, playing against the colours and Renaissance clothing in surrounding frescoes. When Suter’s work overlooked the Acropolis at Documenta 14 her canvases flitted in open breezes, here their sway is more subtle as visitors walk by and Nick Raffel’s balsa wood Fan (2022) lightly circulates air from above.

Rooms on each side of the portego consider thematic climactic conditions including rain, clouds, and melting, using a variety of historic and contemporary works: Venetian Giorgio Andreotta Calò’s 2014 core samples of Lagoon mud provide more strata, utilising a process used by both environmental and extractive industries; an anonymous naïve 1709 painting captures Venetians comedically slipping across the frozen lagoon; a photograph by Hans Haacke documents the freezing, melting, and evaporation of snow on his studio roof; while diptychs from Chantal Peñalosa photograph a cloud from each side of the Mexico-US border as it innocently crosses the hard division. ‘The cloud is kind of like the archetypal figure here because it's the sublime object of detached aesthetic contemplation,’ Roelstraete suggests, before adding ‘but it can also be a portal of disaster.’

The dialectic between beauty and fear, as illustrated by the cloud, is present throughout ‘Everybody Talks About the Weather’, but might aestheticisation and beautifying unimaginably horrific outcomes soften fear, feeling, and potential action? ‘Yes, to a certain extent, but to a certain extent, aestheticising might also help mobilise,’ the curator says, before adding ‘though most of the people who will come see this are, of course, already aware.’

'Everybody Talks About the Weather', until 26 November 2023. fondazioneprada.org

When 'The Laboratory of the Future' was announced as the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale’s main theme, it brought with it enthusiasm and anticipation. No other biennale had tackled creativity and Africa in this way, and many of the participants had never exhibited at the renowned global showcase before. The result, born of curator Lesley Lokko's vision to put the continent of Africa in the spotlight does not disappoint. Opened in the Italian city on 20 May (and running till 26 November, so plan your Venice trip now), the 18th edition of La Biennale di Venezia's architecture exhibition delivers amply on its expectations, offering a mix of imagination, deep research and a sense of discovery, doing exactly what every international festival of its kind should – instigating conversation, widening the profession's horizons, and inviting more ideas, people and territories into its fold.

Venice Architecture Biennale 2023: ‘The Laboratory of the Future’

'The Laboratory of the Future' is, as per the biennale's usual arrangement for its main show, spread across two sites – the Arsenale's vast halls and exterior grounds, and the Giardini's generous Central Pavilion. Lokko's curation plays carefully on each location’s strengths, offering site-appropriate displays, as well as a curatorial rhythm that takes the visitor on a journey that blends intensity and respite; looks towards past, present and future; and includes 'traditional' architectural elements (models, drawings, maps) and pieces that appear more abstract, yet are no less powerful or informative. 

The curatorial team smartly calculated a pace that caters to the visitor's need for occasional pause and addresses the biennale exhibition's large scale and nature, while working with 89 contributors this year (a healthy number – for context, the 2018 Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara-curated biennale had 71 entries, and the 2016 one by Alejandro Aravena had 88). True to its bid to offer a platform to under-represented groups and in particular populations related to the continent, over half of the participants are from Africa or the African Diaspora; the overall gender balance is 50/50; and most of the studios taking part are small ones – no big starchitecture or corporate practices here.

Underscoring that something well begun is half done, the entry and initial sequences to both the Arsenale and Giardini sites feel impactful, engaging and set the scene well for what's to come. The former launches with a captivating video piece by artist and poet Rhael 'LionHeart' Cape greeting visitors, followed by striking drawings and sculpture by Germane Barnes, of Studio Barnes, that examine Western notions of classical antiquity and the idea of a column. Similarly, the Central Pavilion also kicks off with film, this time by David Adjaye – while a room off it, full of large-scale, impressively detailed and immaculately executed architectural models of various new and ongoing projects by the practice, complements the moving image (more models and a life-size pavilion by Adjaye and his team can be found at the Arsenale). 

Lokko's show comprises six sections, all of which have impressively obtained a sustainability credential, flagging the importance of rethinking the festival model towards a more environmentally friendly future. In Giardini, there's 'Force Majeure', which looks at 16 key practices of African or Diasporic identity – alongside Adjaye, it includes Cote D'Ivoire's Koffi & Diabaté, Berlin-based Burkinabé Kéré Architecture, and South Africa's Sumayya Vally's Counterspace. Most of these are well-known names that have graced the pages of global publications for years and have lots of completed work under their belt. Here, they flex their creative muscle to Lokko's theme – some putting a spotlight on their ongoing work, and some crafting new pieces inspired by the biennale. 

Artist Olalekan Jeyifous' installation, a room set up as the model 'All-Africa Protoport (AAP)', offers a glimpse into a potential future: a travel complex built on and pioneering Indigenous African renewable energy and green technologies. It won the Silver Lion for a promising young participant in the 18th biennale. RCA tutor, architectural designer and researcher Thandi Loewenson's 'The Uhuru Catalogues', a series of large-scale drawings etched into graphite blocks, is also here, examining geopolitical context and powers on Earth alongside ways of seeing the universe. It was awarded a special mention (alongside two more displays, by Twenty Nine Studio and Sammy Baloji, and Wolff Architects respectively). 

At the Arsenale, 'Dangerous Liaisons' looks at works that blur the boundaries between architecture and other disciplines. These span from Flores & Pratts' roomful of models and Neri & Hu's explorations on liminality (a couple of the more conventional biennale rooms, where building projects take centre stage), to Gbolade Design Studio's deep dive into the game of dominoes and its role in the South London Windrush generation communities. 

Meanwhile, the 'Curator’s Special Projects' span topics including sustainability, gender and memory, as well as emerging practitioners. 'Guests from the Future' represents younger practitioners breaking into the scene with strong theses and captivating visuals. The work is rich and extremely varied, from London-based community Black Females in Architecture, to the mesmerising tapestries of architecture student Arinjoy Sen (created in collaboration with Indian craftspeople), Juergen Strohmayer and Glenn DeRoché's Surf Ghana Collective building, and the sculptures of artist Ibiye Camp. It underlines once more Lokko's intent on flagging new points of view and offering a platform to those who often don't have one at the biennale. 

While the opening celebrations are now behind us, there is more to come, keeping up the pace and interest around the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale's themes. Launching for the first time, the Biennale College Architettura will run from 25 June to 22 July 2023, and throughout its duration, 15 renowned international tutors – such as Marina Otero, Nana Biamah-Ofosu, Sarah de Villiers and Manijeh Verghese – will work with 50 students, early-career practitioners and academics from around the world during a four-week teaching programme.

Meanwhile, a new Venice Architecture Biennale feature titled 'Carnival', including lectures, discussions, film and performances, will accompany the displays, seen by the curatorial team as crucial in drawing in the public and enhancing the dialogue between architecture and the world. 

Lokko described the biennale as 'an agent of change', saying that in architecture, the dominant voice has historically been from one perspective only, and ‘the “story” of architecture is therefore incomplete. Not wrong, but incomplete. It is in this context particularly that exhibitions matter.’ 

Through its uncovering of fresh perspective, challenge to existing systems and acceptance of multiple viewpoints, 'The Laboratory of the Future' is here to herald a much-needed shift in the architecture realm. It is a show that will no doubt be remembered for its talent and energy, as well as its thought-provoking content, a biennale that spearheads optimism and, hopefully, evolution. 

labiennale.org 

At the newly opened Venice Architecture Biennale, the 2023 British Pavilion’s exhibition, 'Dancing Before the Moon,' stood out for the clarity and directness of its message. 

Under the curatorship of Lesley Lokko, the 18th international architecture exhibition pushed hard against the prevailing orthodoxy of architecture culture, eschewing rosters of starchitects and glossily rendered megaprojects in favour of a more considered examination of the systems and structures, both physical and societal, that underpin the modern world. 

Within this context, the pavilion's exhibition, 'Dancing Before the Moon,' stood out for the clarity and directness of its message, exploring the way in which the overlooked rituals and practices of a multicultural island nation have become deeply embedded in the fabric of day-to-day life in the UK. 

2023 British Pavilion: 'Dancing Before The Moon'

Curated by Meneesha Kellay, Joseph Henry, Jayden Ali, and Sumitra Upham, the project was commissioned by a British Council team led by Sevra Davis. ‘I was quite unequivocal about challenging what we think about architecture,’ Davis recalls, explaining how many of the responses to the brief made this shift. The chosen curation team, however, went one step further, promising to engage with the physical fabric and form of the building. 

‘Dancing Before the Moon’ comes from a quote from the American writer James Baldwin: ‘There is a reason, after all, that some people wish to colonize the moon, and others dance before it as an ancient friend.’ The curators assembled a group of practitioners to explore the way in which imported cultural practices adapt and evolve into integral components of British life, even as they sometimes occupied unfriendly and hostile spaces. 

The neo-classical British Pavilion was completed in 1909 to designs by Edwin Alfred Rickards of Lanchester, Stewart and Rickards, a practice that designed several buildings in British colonies. The various artistic interventions are laden with multiple meanings; not only are they very literally occupying the corridors of power, but they are deliberately large and imposing to make an impact on the space.

‘Scale was really important from the beginning,’ says Jayden Ali. As well as his curatorial role, the London-based artist and architect is responsible for the vast giant steel pan-inspired sculpture, 'Thunder and Şimşek,' that hangs inside the entrance portico. Ali describes how these objects ‘challenge’ the building, while at the same time they are held up by a clever system of steel braces that in turn uses the columns for support; a metaphor of the support and intersection that his own Trinidadian and Cypriot heritage has with British culture.

The main entrance hall hosts the specially commissioned film, a travelogue around the UK, exploring the various rituals that have become part of British life, from dance to car culture, religion to carnival. The soundtrack permeates through the galleries, starting on the left with Shawanda Corbett’s ‘A Healing is Coming’, eight ceramic vessels that celebrate the variety, imperfections and beauty of the female form and rituals around healing. Symbolising eight imagined women embarking on different spiritual healing journeys, the vessels imbued with character and magic. 

Mac Collins’s ‘Runout’ greets the visitor in the next room. This vast wooden assemblage is essentially a giant domino, perched atop an upholstered plinth that evokes the social clubs and pubs where this ever-popular Jamaican game is played. ‘Runout’ is one of many domino games, especially popular in the Midlands, near where the Nottingham-born designer grew up. The sculpture itself is character, part imp, part friendly alien, beamed down into this austere environment and impossible to ignore. 

Although none of the installations encroach on one another, the tall doors and openings ensure they all have a visual connection. Sandra Poulson’s Sabão Azul e Água’, a striking blue assemblage of objects, is simultaneously diaphanous and weighty. Poulson has used fabric and textile waste to build her installation, fashioning a parade of stone balustrades, a cascade of lace, a concrete washing tank and a traditional Angolan costume. All are coated in blue soap, Sabão Azul, a symbol of cleanliness but also frequently used to smuggle embedded diamonds out of the country.

‘Bardo’, by Madhav Kidao takes the architect’s ‘Between Forests and Skies’ pavilion, installed at the V&A in 2021, melts its down and creates another form altogether. Inspired by his own heritage of Hindu and Buddhist philosophies, Kidao has transformed the molten aluminium into a pock-marked surface, scoured and shaped by the sand it was cast in. Bardos are transitional states that exist between birth, life and death in Buddhist philosophy, and this piece represents a moment of change, as opposed to the finality of traditional Western perceptions of death. 

Yussef Agbo-Ola’s ‘Muluku: 6 Bone Temple’, dominates the final room in the sequence. Agbo-Ola, founder of Olaniyi Studio, divides his time between London and the Amazon rainforest in French Guiana. An inverted tent of stretched organic cotton, tethered to a frame and the building itself, this ‘temple’ of woven fabric evokes the nomadic animal skin structures of the Cherokee culture, and traditional Yoruba architecture.

Dancing Before the Moon represents ‘layers and layers of history,’ according to Ali, ‘it’s not about erasure, it’s about depth,’ he adds. ‘My work is about occupation. It’s a reflection of Britain – all of these people who live and work here. All of these rituals and customs are a part of British life.’ One of Lokko’s guiding principles for the Biennale is that ‘dominant voices [have] ignored huge swathes of humanity.’ 'Dancing Before the Moon' successfully occupies, transforms and engages with space, mirroring society’s ongoing transformation and its effect on art, design and architecture.

Dancing Before the Moon is at the British Pavilion, La Biennale Architettura 2023 is open in Venice until Sunday 26 November 2023, LaBiennale.org