The Venice Biennale opens this week after one of the most turbulent build-ups in the exhibition’s recent history.
The 61st staging of the event, titled In Minor Keys, arrives with its traditional awards scrapped, its international jury resigned and several national presentations affected by political disputes, legal battles and withdrawals.
The controversy around the awards began last month, when the five-member international jury said it would not consider national pavilions from countries whose leaders face charges at the International Criminal Court. The decision would have affected Russia and Israel.
The jury later resigned and organisers replaced the Golden Lion awards for this year with two visitor-voted prizes, to be announced on November 22, the closing day of the exhibition.
That sequence has changed the tenor of the opening week. Instead of the usual speculation over which pavilion might win the Golden Lion, the conversation has shifted to the purpose and limits of national representation at a global art event.
Iran pulled out days before the opening, with organisers giving no reason. South Africa is absent after a legal dispute over a Gaza-focused work by Gabrielle Goliath. Israel’s participation, two years after its pavilion was closed to the public in protest over the Gaza war, has also drawn criticism from artists and activists.
That criticism has continued into preview week. About 60 artists and other Biennale participants gathered on Tuesday to protest against Israel’s participation, adding to earlier calls for the pavilion to be excluded.
The Biennale has always been more than a gathering of exhibitions. Across the Giardini, the Arsenale and venues throughout Venice, countries use it to present artists, ideas and cultural identities to an international audience.
Bana Kattan, curator of the National Pavilion UAE, believes the turbulence around the event is inseparable from the moment in which it is taking place.
“This is a reflection of the world we live in today,” she tells The National.
Kattan’s exhibition, Washwasha, offers one of the quieter responses to that atmosphere. Taking its title from the Arabic onomatopoeic word for whispering, the UAE pavilion brings together Mays Albaik, Jawad Al Malhi, Farah Al Qasimi, Alaa Edris, Lamya Gargash and Taus Makhacheva in an exhibition of sound, memory, movement and the changing rhythms of life in the Emirates.
That focus is rooted in the UAE’s own social fabric: a country shaped by movement, migration, many languages and communities living alongside one another. In Washwasha, listening becomes a way of understanding a place continually remade by those who pass through it, settle and call it home.
For creatives, Venice remains a singular platform.
“This is still the strongest exhibition in the world, both historically and in the present,” says Italian artist Ugne Gelgotaite Marini, who is exhibiting as an emerging artist. “There is a bureaucracy behind it and that is part of the shadow it carries from the past. But it is also one of the only exhibitions that is not orientated towards sales.”
The Biennale continues to carry a symbolic force that few other platforms can match. “I would not imagine having a career as an artist without exhibiting here,” she says. “For an artist, exhibiting in Venice is one of the highest things you can do. It is the strongest brand in the art world.”
For Laila Binbrek, director of the National Pavilion UAE, each Venice presentation adds another layer to the Emirates' cultural story.
“Every year gives us an opportunity to continue building on the stories we are telling about the UAE, and to show the diversity of practice and voices here,” she tells The National. “This year, with Washwasha, there is also this element of sound and listening, which feels especially needed at this moment.”
The point, she says, is not only to place the UAE in front of an international audience, but to connect its artists to the wider conversations taking place across the Biennale.
“To be in Venice and to be part of this larger dialogue is important for us as a nation, but also for our artists and our community,” Binbrek says. “It places them in conversation with artists who are working through similar practices and questions, and it also keeps us open to listening to what others are saying.”
That emphasis on listening and cultural memory also appears across several Arab presentations this year.
Egypt’s pavilion, Silence Pavilion: Between the Intangible and the Tangible, by Armen Agop, is framed around stillness, listening and material presence. Palestine’s official collateral event, Gaza – No Words – See the Exhibit, brings together 100 works of tatreez created by Palestinian women in refugee camps and villages in Lebanon, Jordan and the occupied West Bank. Syria’s Sara Shamma presents a multisensory installation inspired by the funerary towers of Palmyra. Qatar’s presentation draws on gathering spaces, performance, film, sculpture and food.
The projects are very different from one another. But together, they show another side of a Biennale otherwise dominated by arguments over countries, prizes and legitimacy. Through sound, silence, embroidery, ruins, gathering and memory, they ask visitors to spend time with history and experience beyond their own.
That is still the promise of Venice, even in a year as fraught as 2026. Countries arrive here carrying conflicts that cannot be settled in an exhibition hall. But art can still create the conditions for dialogue – bringing people from various places into contact with one another’s stories, leaving open the possibility for greater understanding.
