THE 10 EXHIBITIONS NOT TO BE MISSED IN VENICE DURING THE 2026 ART BIENNALE
A guide to the most interesting events in Venice, including museums, foundations, historic buildings and new exhibition projects.
Some say that contemporary art no longer reflects the present. That those in the art world are detached from reality, trapped in a self-referential universe. Yet, looking at this year’s Venice Biennale, these claims are quickly disproved. Geopolitics has burst onto the cultural scene at the world’s most popular art festival. But it is delusional to think that art and politics have not always been linked.
To think that the Biennale is, or should be, a neutral space is naive: it could never be so. Ever since the late nineteenth century, when this event was founded, it has been conceived as an arena for the international representation of states, governed by a logic of national self-promotion, in which the states themselves are active players in the selection of artists. Suffice it to say that every pavilion within it does not belong to the Foundation, but to the individual state. It is high time we recognised that the Biennale is a critical geopolitical space: 42,000 square metres house ‘29 national embassies’, making it a veritable map of power.
From the 19th century to the present day, international exhibitions based on state representation have always been instruments of cultural diplomacy, spaces for soft power. It is therefore inevitable that certain contemporary geopolitical dynamics are also reflected within the Art Biennale.
But whilst we may find military personnel within the exhibition, armoured pavilions, and absences that smack of protest or the enforcement of European sanctions, from this week onwards the lagoon city will also be filled with exhibitions. Every calle — the typical Venetian street — will host openings large and small, and the risk of visiting an uninteresting exhibition, or ending up in a completely avoidable exhibition project, will be very high.
For this reason, we have prepared a list of ten exhibitions not to be missed in Venice during the Art Biennale: projects that are not only among the most interesting on paper, but capable of reading the present and interpreting it in an innovative way.
Marina Abramović, ©Marco Anelli, 2025
At the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice, Marina Abramović engages with the heart of Venice’s heritage, bringing her exploration of the body, endurance and spiritual transformation into the galleries of the permanent collection. With Transforming Energy, the first major exhibition dedicated to a living female artist in the Institute’s history, Abramović invites the public to move beyond the notion of passive observation: amidst iconic works, historic performances, new pieces and interactive Transitory Objects, visitors become active participants in an experience where past and present, the material and the immaterial, body and spirit converge.
Until 19 October 2026
Janis Rafa, Sacrificial Transgressions (working title), 2026. Production still. Courtesy of the artist and the In Between Art Film Foundation
At the Ospedaletto Complex, the In Between Art Film Foundation presents Canicula, the third and final instalment of the “Trilogy of Uncertainties”, following Penumbra and Nebula. The exhibition brings together eight new site-specific video installations, commissioned and produced especially for the occasion, transforming the historic architecture of the Ospedaletto into a cinematic device composed of light, heat, vision and disorientation. Curated by Alessandro Rabottini and Leonardo Bigazzi, Canicula takes as its starting point the idea of excessive, blinding brightness to reflect on the overload of images, the distortion of information and the pressure exerted on bodies, society and the environment. An immersive journey in which the scorching heat becomes a metaphor for the present and its instability.
Until 22 November 2026
Arthur Jafa, Mickey Mouse was a Scorpio, 2017 (detail). Private collection © Arthur Jafa / Midnight Robber © Photo: Ian Watts.TV. Richard Prince, Graduation, 2008. Collection of Larry Gagosian © Richard Prince
At Ca’ Corner della Regina, Fondazione Prada presents Helter Skelter: Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince, a dual solo exhibition curated by Nancy Spector that brings together two of the most radical figures in contemporary American art. Through over fifty works — including photographs, videos, installations, sculptures and paintings — the exhibition juxtaposes the practices of Jafa and Prince, united by their use of appropriation and the manipulation of images drawn from popular culture, the media, cinema, music, advertising and social media. What emerges is a disturbing and multi-layered portrait of the United States: a country riven by violence, myths, race, masculinity, subcultures and unresolved contradictions. An intense, explicit and deliberately unsettling exhibition, in which images become ready-mades capable of challenging established narratives of the American imagination.
Until 23 November 2026
(floor) Lorna Simpson, Vibrating cycles, 2026, Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth (wall, from left to right) Lorna Simpson, Night Fall, 2023, Private Collection; Thin Bands, 2019, Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth; Time, 2021, Private Colle
At Punta della Dogana, the Pinault Collection presents two major solo exhibitions that examine memory, identity and history through diverse artistic languages and geographical contexts. On the ground floor, Lorna Simpson creates a journey through painting, collage, installations and film, exploring the gaps in representation, the erosion of memory and the ambiguity of images. On the upper floor, Paulo Nazareth transforms the space of the former customs house with an exhibition spanning over twenty years of his practice, where walking becomes a way to reinterpret the racial and colonial fractures of history. Two complementary exhibitions, in which matter, archive, body and journey become tools for bringing to light what often remains hidden.
Until 22 November 2026
(from left to right) Michael Armitage, Nyayo, 2017, Private Collection; Witness, 2022, Courtesy of the artist and White Cube, Strange Fruit, 2016, Private Collection. Installation views, Michael Armitage. The Promise of Change, 2026, Palazzo Grassi, Venez
At Palazzo Grassi, the Pinault Collection presents two solo exhibitions dedicated to Michael Armitage and Amar Kanwar, two artists capable of transforming painting and the image into tools for a critical interpretation of the present. Armitage brings together paintings, new works and over a hundred studies, constructing a pictorial universe suspended between current events, vision, memory and socio-political tensions, where East Africa becomes the starting point for reflecting on violence, migration, identity and power. On the second floor, Amar Kanwar brings together two multimedia installations created twenty years apart, interweaving documentation, poetry and activism in a meditation on justice, resistance and the fragility of human nature. Two intense journeys, in which the images not only depict the world, but reveal its wounds, ambiguities and most unstable truths.
Until 10 January 2027
Joseph Kosuth ph. Peter Lindbergh, 2028
At the Casa dei Tre Oci, the Berggruen Institute Europe pays tribute to Joseph Kosuth, a central figure in conceptual art, with an exhibition bringing together historic works and a new neon installation created especially for the occasion. With The-exchange-value-of-language-has-fallen-to-zero, Kosuth reflects on the diminishing significance of language in today’s cultural climate, saturated with media and images, challenging the notion that words possess fixed and definitive meanings. Through installations, texts, objects and conceptual interventions, the exhibition invites visitors to actively engage in the process of interpretation, demonstrating how meaning always arises from the relationship between word, space, image and context.
Until 22 November 2026
Repatriates Collective, “From My Mother’s Country”, 2026. Exhibition view of “Tide of Returns”, Ocean Space, Venice. Commissioned and produced by TBA21–Academy. Photo: Jacopo Salvi
At Ocean Space, TBA21–Academy opens its 2026 exhibition season with Tide of Returns, an exhibition born out of the artistic research of the Repatriates Collective and informed by practices of care, ecological memory and indigenous knowledge. Through works that engage with the land, the ocean and the bodies that hold their stories, the exhibition reflects on the possibility of overcoming forms of cultural, social and environmental violence. Materials returned by the sea, rituals, family memories and cultural artefacts become tools for imagining new relationships between human communities and the ocean, in a present marked by colonial legacies and extractive economies.
Until 11 October 2026
Jenny Saville, Portrait © Jenny Saville. All rights reserved, DACS 2026 Photo: Tyler Mitchell Courtesy Gagosian
At Ca’ Pesaro, the International Gallery of Modern Art is dedicating the first major Venetian exhibition of Jenny Saville’s work to the artist, tracing her career from its beginnings in the 1990s to the present day. Through more than thirty paintings and drawings, the exhibition places her monumental canvases in dialogue with the city’s great pictorial tradition, in particular with the Venetian school and the Italian masters of the past. The result is a powerful exploration of the relationship between the body, matter, history and painting, culminating in a new cycle of works created specifically for Ca’ Pesaro: an intense tribute to the lagoon city and to the inexhaustible power of painting.
Until 22 November 2026
Mostra fotografica “Horst P. Horst. La Geometria della Grazia”
At the Stanze della Fotografia, on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, Horst P. Horst: The Geometry of Grace pays tribute to one of the great masters of 20th-century photography, going beyond the famous fashion work that made him an icon in the pages of *Vogue*. Through over three hundred works, including photographs, vintage prints, drawings and previously unseen documents, the exhibition captures the complexity of an artist capable of transforming the image into an architecture of light, proportion and beauty. Straddling modernism and classicism, rigour and sensuality, the exhibition explores a photographic style founded on the balance of forms and the grace of composition.
Until 5 July 2026
Vasily Kandinsky (1866-1944) Curva dominante (Courbe dominante), aprile 1936 Olio su tela, 129,2 x 194,3 cm Museo Solomon R. Guggenheim, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection
At the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Peggy Guggenheim in London: The Making of a Collector traces Peggy Guggenheim’s London adventure and that of her first gallery, Guggenheim Jeune, which operated between 1938 and 1939. In just eighteen months, that space became a hub for the European avant-garde, spanning abstraction and Surrealism, helping to establish Peggy as a collector, patron and central figure of the twentieth century. Through works, archival materials and artists such as Kandinsky, Mondrian, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, the exhibition recounts a period of radical experimentation, emerging on the eve of the Second World War, in which one of the most influential collecting visions of the century took shape.
Until 19 October 2026
Alessio Vigni, born in 1994. He designs, edits, writes and deals with contemporary art and culture.
He collaborates with important museums, art fairs and artistic organisations. As an independent curator, he works mainly with emerging artists. He recently curated “Warm waters” (Rome, 2025), “SNITCH Vol.2” (Verona, 2024) and the exhibition “Empathic Dialogues” (Milan, 2024). His curatorial practice explores the relationship between the human body and the social relationships of contemporary man.
He writes for several specialised magazines and is author of art catalogues and podcasts. For Psicografici Editore he is co-author of SNITCH. Dentro la trappola (Rome, 2023). Since 2024 he has been a member of the Advisory Board of (un)fair.
