Biennale Arte 2026
61st International Art Exhibition
La Biennale di Venezia
Change of Protocol | Digital Art at the Venice Biennale
Right Click Save looks at a selection of shows that spotlight the relation of art and technology, from calming engagements with sound at the pavilion of the Holy See, to Eva and Franco Mattes’s examination of online “Rage Bait”. It is telling that three of the exhibitions have been curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director of Serpentine Galleries, London. Obrist is one of the defining contemporary art curators of his generation and a long-standing champion of Arts Technologies.
The Ear is the Eye of the Soul
The Pavilion of the Holy See returns to the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia 2026 with a deeply contemplative project titled The Ear is the Eye of the Soul. Presented by the Dicastery for Culture and Education, this ambitious exhibition brings together 24 artists in a multisensory exploration inspired by the life and legacy of Hildegard of Bingen.
Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Ben Vickers in collaboration with Soundwalk Collective, the Pavilion unfolds across two historic Venetian sites, transforming them into spaces of listening, reflection, and spiritual resonance.
Set within the secluded Giardino Mistico in Cannaregio, the Pavilion’s first venue invites visitors into an immersive “sonic prayer.” Hidden within a 17th-century convent maintained by the Discalced Carmelite community, the garden becomes a living instrument.
Here, artists including Brian Eno, FKA Twigs, Patti Smith, Meredith Monk, and Terry Riley present newly commissioned sound works. Each responds to Hildegard’s chants, visions, and writings through voice, instrumentation, and silence.
Through headphones, visitors experience a continuously evolving composition orchestrated by Soundwalk Collective, incorporating real-time environmental data—from plant bioelectrical activity to the micro-acoustics of wind, water, and soil. The result is a meditative encounter that aligns with curator Koyo Kouoh’s Biennale vision of slowing down and attuning to quieter registers of perception.
Helter Skelter: Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince
The exhibition features more than fifty works, including photographs, videos, installations, sculptures, and paintings. It will also showcase new work by each artist and a collaboratively conceived zine, which incorporates images exchanged between the artists during the process of making this exhibition.
“Helter Skelter” unfolds across the ground and first floor of the Venetian palazzo through a series of thematic and conceptual juxtapositions, combining works by both artists to illuminate each of their practices and tease out shared subject matter and mutual obsessions. Underlying the elective affinities between their artistic projects, “Helter Skelter” reveals a certain vernacular edge in the U.S., where both artists live and work: “A country forever tarnished by its history of slavery; a country defined by its remarkable musical traditions rooted in Black culture; a country of doing without, but making good; a country of spirit and prayer and freedom of expression; a country of protest and subcultures and humor and celebrity,” according to Nancy Spector.
Creative Australia announces title and first details for Khaled Sabsabi’s presentation at the 61st International Art Exhange
Creative Australia has announced the first details of Khaled Sabsabi’s presentation in the Australia Pavilion for the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Michael Dagostino.
In a historic first for an Australian representative, as announced by La Biennale di Venezia, Sabsabi will also present a work in the Biennale Arte 2026’s main exhibition, In Minor Keys, curated by the late Koyo Kouoh. The selection of artists for participation in the main exhibition is made through a curatorial process managed by La Biennale di Venezia.
The presentation at the Australia Pavilion will be titled conference of one’s self and will be on exhibition from May 9 to November 22, 2026. The artwork explores spirituality, migration, and the vastness of shared humanity.
Australian artist Khaled Sabsabi brings over 35 years of practice engaged with experiences of spirituality, migration, displacement, and social justice. Sabsabi has worked with Dagostino on numerous projects over many years and their collaboration arises from shared migrant experiences in Western Sydney, one of Australia’s most culturally diverse areas.
‘It looks like a gay disco at six in the morning’: at home with artist Andreas Angelidakis
Andreas Angelidakis’s apartment is in flux as the Athens-based artist explores, through his home environment, his next international show. Maquettes are being considered, juxtapositions judged and details fixed. The place is a whirlpool of ideas and experimentation, prototypes and aftermaths: somewhere between Scylla and Charybdis in the provocations that spin out, informed by keepsakes, memories and losses, the personal and political. The chaos is ruled over by an elderly Pomeranian called Lupo, little tongue lolling.
Angelidakis is representing Greece at this year’s Venice Biennale, which opens next month. Frustrated, he’s just sacked his production team (one suspects this is part of the architect-turned-artist’s charmingly madcap process and they will be back on board within hours). There’s a treadmill topped with a pink-feathered shop-dummy head he’s considering fashioning into a camp police car alongside glitzy police riot shields and glass-sided display fridges holding multi-limbed torsos rather than the usual energy drinks. His show, Escape Room, will be an intensely layered exploration of the digital and the real.
BARRY X BALL – THE SHAPE OF TIME – Abbazia di San Giorgio Maggiore
dvanced digital technologies meet traditional craftsmanship at the Basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore Barry X Ball reinvents historic masterpieces using new materials and forms from May 9 to November 22, 2026 Curated by Bob Nickas The Basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore presents The Shape of Time, a major retrospective dedicated to the sculptural practice
barryxball.com
arry X Ball was born in 1955 in Pasadena, CA and lives and works in New York.
He has reinvigorated the age-old tradition of figurative sculpture through the use of unconventional materials and methods. Ball employs a complex array of equipment and procedures to realize his sculptures, ranging from the cutting edge to the traditional, from 3D digital scanning, virtual modeling, 3D printing, and computer-controlled milling to hyper-detailed hand carving and polishing. Although paying reverent homage to their historical antecedents, they are completely new. With their simultaneous fever-pitch intensity and surreal stillness, Barry X Ball’s bravura works make an expansive case for the reconsideration of contemporary sculptural practice.
Maja Malou Lyse’s Things To Come at La Biennale di Venezia
“Things to Come” takes its title from the 1936 science-fiction film of the same name, based on H. G. Wells’ “The Shape of Things to Come”, a visionary work speculating on future technologies, social structures, and the fate of humanity. Drawing this speculative impulse into the present, Lyse’s exhibition engages with recent scientific research suggesting that exposure to virtual sexual stimuli can measurably increase sperm motility. The finding offers a striking perspective on how image consumption does not merely influence imagination or ideology, but enters the biological realm.
Set against a widely documented global decline in male fertility, “Things to Come” considers the paradoxical role of contemporary media technologies as both toxin and antidote. Science, fiction, and pornography intersect as entangled image systems shaping how futures are imagined, governed, and lived.
Artist Maja Malou Lyse
1_Maja-Malou_Lyse_MM_overgaden_photo-by_ Maja Malou Lyse (b. 1993, Denmark) is a multidisciplinary artist whose bold and provocative work dissects the entanglements of desire, power, and mass media. At the core of her practice lies a critical examination of the body’s relationship to the image—a dynamic rendered increasingly complex in the digital age. Lyse interrogates how images, both ubiquitous and unrelenting, shape sexuality, self-perception, and the commodification of identity, while tracing how media, the pornographic image, and cultural history construct and preserve these ideas over time.
Her work situates itself within the very platforms that dominate our visual environment—television, magazines, tabloids, billboards, and social media. By appropriating and reconfiguring these familiar spaces, she performs incisive interventions that unravel the symbiotic relationship between art and media reality. In doing so, she exposes the spectacle that defines contemporary culture: one that seduces as much as it subjugates, embedding itself deep within our collective consciousness.
Biennale Arte 2026 | Homepage 2026
The 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia – In Minor Keys by Koyo Kouoh – will run from Saturday 9 May to Sunday 22 November 2026 (preview 6, 7, 8 May) at the Giardini and the Arsenale venues, and in various locations around Venice.
With the full support of Koyo Kouoh’s family, La Biennale di Venezia decided to carry out her Exhibition. It will do so by following the project just as she conceived and defined it, with the purpose of preserving, enhancing and disseminating her ideas and the work she pursued.
Matthew Wong’s rhapsodies in blue claim their place in art history
The solo show Matthew Wong: Interiors at Palazzo Tiepolo Passi will bring the story full circle back to Venice. The works highlight his impressive range beyond landscape — interiors here encompass very diverse compositions — and the exhibition will set him in context in a Biennale rich this year in painting shows. Depictions of a door ajar in darkness, allowing piercing slices of brightness — “Inside”, “Sliver of Light”, “The Source” (all 2019) — are almost minimalist. Oval or slit shapes open into enigmatic pictures within pictures: the abstract “Teardrop” (2015), the distant house buried in “Origin” (2019), painted in ink on rice paper. All-over blue phantasmagorical scenes include a staircase spiralling up from choppy waves in “The Stairway” (2019), a translucent reflection of a barred window, giving on to winter trees, lighting up the monochrome “The Waiting Room” (2019), and the patchwork of decorative fragments around a window whose view brings further cobalt-violet eFects swarming into “Night Moods” (2018).
Strange Rules Featuring works by Trevor Paglen
Strange Rules introduces the concept of Protocol Art, a practice that engages with the underlying rules that dictate how culture is produced, distributed, and perceived in a digital age. These rules frequently manifest as algorithms, artificial intelligence models, computer protocols, platforms, and various technological infrastructures. Protocol Art does not simply use these tools; it exposes, analyses, and transforms them into artistic material itself.
Consequently, the artwork is not merely a final product, it is a process governed by instructions, representing the invisible architecture that enables the aesthetic experience. This shift in perspective – moving from the object to the system, and from the singular author to collaboration and ultimately human-machine co-creation – defines one of the most urgent territories in contemporary research.
The launch of Strange Rules inaugurates Palazzo Diedo, Venice, as the first space in Italy to foster a curatorial and theoretical reflection on Protocol Art, positioning itself at the forefront of the debate regarding the relationship between art and technology.
SEAWORLD VENICE
“Venice is in water, but has no water.”*
Water, levels rising; water, which we drink and excrete in countless cycles every day; water, a vital, life-sustaining natural resource and highly managed commodity; water, to plunge in, dive in, and emerge from, perhaps transformed. Blending dance, theatre, and performance, the Austrian artist Florentina Holzinger uses her long-standing research into the element of water—as both subject and symbol—as a point of departure for an exploration of the human body in a radically changing landscape, in which nature and technology collide.
The Austrian Pavilion becomes a machinic organism, in which action and its consequence on the body are negotiated. Underwater theme park, sewage treatment plant, and sacred building, all in one, SEAWORLD VENICE complicates the dualisms of purity and pollution, sin and expiation; and renders visible the rubbish that is kept out of sight yet remains constantly present.
SEAWORLD VENICE expands across the city through site-specific performances in water, air, and land. The series of experimental formats that Holzinger has been developing since 2020, titled Études, consists of site-specific choreographic exercises and performative actions in public space. Rising from the depths of the lagoon, where turbo-tourism’s rubbish lays to rest, and ascending into the city’s skies, Holzinger’s performers—human and otherwise—reveal the vulnerability and resilience of bodies and the world alike.
