Inside the UAE Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, voices drift through the space before their meaning fully settles. Glass sculptures hold the shape of a mouth before speech. Faces stare back in the dark as mechanical noise, water and robotic voices build around them.
Wedding rituals return through memory, gossip becomes performance, and the everyday sounds of the UAE arrive in Venice through recordings from barbershops, farms, mountains and domestic spaces.
The exhibition is Washwasha, the UAE’s national presentation at the 61st Venice Biennale of art. Curated by Bana Kattan, with assistant curator Tala Nassar, it begins with a word that means whispering in Arabic, then follows the forms a whisper can take: oral history, language, intrusive thought, rumour and the noise of daily life.
On view until November 22, the show brings together Mays Albaik, Jawad Al Malhi, Farah Al Qasimi, Alaa Edris, Lamya Gargash and Taus Makhacheva. Some works are new commissions, while others return from earlier moments in the artists’ careers. Together, they move visitors from close listening into overlap, interference and constant communication.
The idea began in Abu Dhabi, after Kattan saw Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s sound-based fountain sculpture Wsh, Wsh on the Corniche during the Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial last year. The word stayed with her because it already carried sound and meaning inside it.
“The thing that attracted me most to washwasha was that it’s an Arabic word, but it’s also an onomatopoeia, which means even non-Arabic speakers can immediately understand it,” Kattan tells The National. “It’s a one-word title that has the meaning inside the word. It was this really nice, uncomplicated curatorial premise that allowed all six artists to approach it in completely different ways.”
Kattan had followed many of the artists’ practices for years. Palestinian artist Al Malhi’s Naiman was first made in 2008 as a site-specific installation in East Jerusalem. Other works were made for Venice, but came out of questions already present in the artist's practices. The commissions did not require a hard thematic mould.
“The key is to let the artists be artists,” Kattan says. “You put an idea out there, but then you also back up. You give them support, but you have to give them autonomy. That makes for a much more interesting exhibition, where each work is coming at it from a different angle.”
That freedom sent the show inward in a way Kattan had not planned. She noticed it not only in the artworks, but in the publication that accompanies the exhibition, which avoided the academic distance that usually accompanies these types of projects.
“What was really interesting is that all the artists ended up producing or showing works that are extremely personal, and I wasn’t expecting that,” she says. “In recent contemporary art, it was uncool to lean into your biography. None of these artists cared. They leaned right in.”
In Naiman, Al Malhi opens the pavilion with voices from a world already passed into memory. The work presents recordings of men recalling the celebratory rituals performed on the eve of their weddings.
The original installation was made for Hammam Al-Ayn in East Jerusalem, a site whose own history became inseparable from the work. For Al Malhi, images alone could not carry that atmosphere. Sound could pass through walls, stay close to the body and bring a place back without pretending to restore it.
In Venice, the work has been rebuilt as a room within a room. A domed structure evokes the hammam, creating an enclosed chamber that visitors enter to hear the voices inside. Al Malhi says rebuilding that atmosphere was difficult because the work depends on architecture as much as sound.
That effort, he believes, has paid off, accentuating that memory in a new context. And as violence against Palestinians continues to ramp up, that feels more vital than ever.
“To present this project in the UAE Pavilion is very meaningful to me,” Al Malhi says. “It gives me a platform to speak about my story – to speak about my home.”
The show, Kattan says, is “all about leaning into what can easily be unheard”. In Naiman, that means oral history and the remnants of a social ritual. In Abu Dhabi-born artist Mays Albaik’s Kuni Kai Akuna Kama Aqul! (Be, so that I may be as I say!), the unheard is held inside the body.
Albaik’s glass sculptures are casts of the inside of her mouth as she prepares to make specific sounds. The work comes from a long-running interest in how bodies grow against the spaces they occupy: rooms, homes, language, even the hard palate of the mouth.
“I started to think particularly about what you hold back from vocalising, and what that looks like in the body,” Albaik says.
The work draws on Arabic poetry, the Thuraya (or Pleiades) constellation, and the phrase kun fayakun (meaning "be, and it is"). Albaik was interested in the constellation as both a poetic image and a tool of navigation, especially in pre-Islamic nomadic traditions. Language, in the work, is also a kind of compass: inherited, embodied and changed by the people who use it.
Her process makes that idea physical. Albaik pours alginate, a body-casting material used by dentists, into her mouth, holds the shape of a sound, then turns that negative space into a sculpture before having it translated again into hand-blown glass. She thinks of the process as “material translation”, moving from body to mould to glass, with breath entering again as the glass is blown.
“It’s not the sound. I’m holding the shape,” she says. “When you make the sound, air needs to run through it. I’m holding the mouth in that position for eight minutes, so there’s actually no production of sound. There is the moment before sound. It’s the gesture of speaking, not the action of speaking.”
What remains is no longer language in any direct sense – instead, capturing biological liminality to focus on how much of our language exists physically.
“When you freeze the words, they’re immortalised,” Albaik says. “When I’m casting them out, they’re also indecipherable. That doesn’t mean they’re valueless, but they become something else.”
Emirati artist Lamya Gargash’s Majlis moves the exhibition into the social life of listening. The 2009 photographic series presents the majlis as a room shaped by hosting, celebration, grief and problem solving – a space where speech matters, but so does the act of receiving others. Gargash also brings the UAE Pavilion’s own history into the exhibition, having represented the country at its first national pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2009.
Abu Dhabi-born artist Farah Al Qasimi’s The Curse gives the pavilion one of its clearest narratives. The multimedia installation follows a young person who believes their scream has placed a curse on an entire village, before coming to accept the voice they had feared. The work brings together childhood guilt, communication barriers and the strange power a sound can gather once it leaves the body.
Emirati artist Alaa Edris’s Wiswas pushes the whisper into interference. The work is built from faces, ears, water, mechanical sound and robotic voices. Edris uses her own face, a recurring material in her practice, but the self-portrait becomes detached from her – and is here used to haunting effect.
In Emirati colloquial speech, wiswas suggests intrusive or obsessive thoughts, while tashwish brings in noise and confusion. Edris uses that overlap to connect the work’s inner voice to the constant information, notifications and surveillance that shape contemporary life.
“The interference is not just mental. It’s emotional, it’s environmental,” Edris says. “The world we live in today – information, opinions, notifications – it’s overwhelming.”
The room mixes natural materials with technology. The faces are made from wood, while their electronic eyes bring in something intentionally colder. Edris wanted the work to be uncomfortable, and to leave the viewer unsure whether the faces are listening, watching or doing nothing at all.
Her use of her own face began long before Venice. As a student, Edris used self-portraiture because it gave her control. Over time, the face became both familiar and distant, something personal that she could also treat as material.
“It’s my face. I can do whatever I want,” she says. “It gave me more control. I come from a conservative family, so maybe this was my way of putting myself out there in my own space. But only initially, as since then it's grown into something else."
Her family was supportive, but the choice still required explanation. Edris remembers her parents giving her a digital camera as a teenager and driving her around so she could take pictures. They encouraged her creative interests, but turning art into a profession was another matter.
“Being an artist is something relatively new in the UAE,” she says. “You have the typical timeline. You go to school, you go to college, and then you get a regular job. They were surprised that I wanted to do this for a living. Maybe it was a lack of awareness of what was possible. Now, with all the museums and cultural institutions, there are options.”
Russian artist Taus Makhacheva, who lives and works between Dubai and Moscow, appears twice in the pavilion. In Dear R., R., K., S., M., A., C., S., K., I., G., L., A., A., L., P., G., E., J., D., M., C., B., O., F., F., R., D., M., E., L., I., F., L., A., M., T., K., K., L., P., F., V., A., L., L., visitors enter a room of hanging speakers. From above, voices offer variations on delayed reply, apology and social obligation, turning the familiar language of “sorry it took so long” into a chorus of exhaustion. The work belongs to the pavilion’s larger world of missed messages and failed communication, where staying connected has become its own form of pressure.
Kattan says the work also carries traces of the present moment, including the regional conflict still unfolding as the exhibition opens. Makhacheva often builds works through her networks, and here those voices bring in the world beyond the pavilion.
“You hear commentary on what's going on in the world in there now as well, if you listen closely enough," says Kattan.
Her second work, And What Did You Say? (2026), gives gossip a physical life. It is built around a bench, a 30-minute audio piece and a performance structure with three characters: Source, Spread and Core. The audio moves between inner monologue, narration and overheard gossip, while the objects around it turn rumour into something handled, worn and carried.
Core, one of the characters, is built around the idea of metabolising gossip. The costume is layered, so that meanings, judgments and assumptions can be stripped away during the performance. Other objects borrow from folklore and histories of overhearing: a mirror that does not reflect, deformed glasses, pipes that recall architectural devices once used to listen through walls, as well as scissors worn on the hand, drawn from a 16th-century image of a gossip figure, but stripped of their threat.
“These are scissors that no longer cut,” Makhacheva says.
Makhacheva treats gossip as both material and force.
“What does gossip do? Sometimes it builds a solid narrative. Sometimes it’s false accusations,” she says. “What a perfect place to do it, if not in Venice?”
The work is sharpest when it treats gossip as something that happens first in the body.
“Sometimes it’s cortisol, sometimes it’s dopamine,” she says. “Sometimes it brings you up. Sometimes it creates more fear. I’m interested in what happens in your head, in your body, when I say the gossip, when I say the actual information, and what happens afterwards.”
Near the entrance, the exhibition also turns to an early chapter in the UAE’s sonic history. A programme activation honours veteran broadcaster Salem Obaid Alaleeli and the founding of Ajman Radio in 1961. One of its segments, Voice of the Country, used a live microphone to broadcast everyday sounds. If a programme fell through, the microphone might be placed in the city to capture people arguing, boat makers at work or the natural sound of daily life.
The pavilion has commissioned Moza Almatrooshi, Roudhah AlMazrouei and Spencer Shea to respond with sounds drawn from daily life across the country. The activation links these works to earlier forms of listening and transmission in the UAE, while giving the exhibition a source outside the gallery: a mouth trying to speak, a wedding ritual, a room where people gather, the sound of gossip, the hum of technology, a microphone placed somewhere in the country and left open to the world.
The artist list also changes what a national pavilion is expected to show. Some artists are Emirati, some were born elsewhere. All are part of the UAE art scene that Kattan wanted the pavilion to reflect.
“I think, to me, that’s really important,” Kattan says. “We have an extremely rich art scene in the UAE, and every artist in this show is part of that art scene. One of the things that the interns say first when people walk in is that this exhibition is made up of artists in the UAE art scene, not only Emirati artists. If we want to reflect our art scene correctly, it’s a show like this that really shows what we have going on there.”
The exhibition was made with international audiences in mind, but Kattan is comfortable with some layers being more legible to visitors from the UAE and those who know its cultural life closely.
“I think the idea of Washwasha is one that the general public can understand and immediately relate to,” she says. “But the truth is, when I created this exhibition, I created it a little bit more leaning for us. While different people can understand the show at different levels, I think people in the UAE and of the UAE will understand it the deepest. And I’m actually quite happy about that.”
The National Pavilion UAE’s Venice Internship programme is now in its 15th year, with more than 300 interns having taken part. Four alumnae are involved in this year’s presentation: Edris and Albaik as participating artists, and Almatrooshi and AlMazrouei in the Voice of the Country activation.
Their involvement reflects one of the exhibition’s quieter points: the UAE’s cultural scene is already being shaped from within. Six artists cannot contain that cultural life, and the pavilion does not try to. Instead, it opens onto stories still waiting beneath the surface, waiting for someone to listen.
Kattan is wary of treating the pavilion as a rebuttal to outside assumptions. Still, she knows what the exhibition shows.
“If there was ever this old argument that we’re buying culture or that we don’t already have artists, I hope that this continues the conversation on how that is false,” she says. “The artists that are already living and working and are connecting with the UAE are doing amazing work.”
Washwasha is on display at the National Pavilion UAE’s permanent space at Venice Biennale until November 22
