India Pavilion at Venice Art Biennale 2026 – Photo by Luca Zambelli Bais.
Art, Architecture. When the late curator Koyo Kouoh invited participants of the 2026 Biennale di Venezia to step back from spectacle and embrace a more sensorial encounter with art, she couldn’t have imagined how turbulent the opening would become. Geopolitics and protests largely overshadowed art itself — yet Kouoh’s vision held. Across the Giardini and Arsenale, craftsmanship quietly carried the weight of her In Minor Keys theme. These national pavilions don’t shout. Through the hands of artisans, they reflect on war, displacement, and cybersecurity — and they’re well worth seeking out.
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India — Geography of Distance
Photo by Luca Zambelli Bais.
Of all the pavilions at this year’s 2026 Biennale di Venezia, India‘s is perhaps the most poetic. Geography of Distance asks a deceptively simple question: where is home? Not the address on your passport, but the place you grew up in, the house where someone you loved still lives, the neighbourhood that no longer exists as you remember it. In a country where cities expand at staggering speed, five artists rooted in India’s material cultures give form to this layered condition.
Photo by Luca Zambelli Bais.
Ranjani Shettar suspends organic materials into a weightless garden; Sumakshi Singh reconstructs a demolished family house entirely in thread; Skarma Sonam Tashi shapes papier-mâché dwellings that nod to vernacular architecture quietly disappearing under development. Delicate materials, considerable emotional reach.
Saudi Arabia — Mosaic Under Threat
Photo by Matteo Zorzanello.
From the intimacy of personal memory, we move to collective loss. At the Saudi Pavilion, Dana Awartani invites you to walk across a mosaic floor composed of thousands of handmade tiles — each pressed from natural muds and clays by master craftspeople from across the Arab world, Afghanistan, and South Asia.
Photo by Matteo Zorzanello.
The patterns reference heritage sites in Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon: the floors of mosques, churches, synagogues, and secular spaces of deep historical significance — all under threat from ongoing conflict. The space evokes an archaeological site, with a craftwork both precise and achingly fragile. It is a pavilion that makes the destruction of place feel immediate and irreversible.
Ukraine – Security Guarantees
Photo by Andrea Avezzù.
In 1994, Ukraine signed the Budapest Memorandum, giving up its nuclear weapons in exchange for security guarantees from the US, the UK, and Russia. That promise didn’t hold. The Ukrainian Pavilion narrates the story, the making of and the journey of the Origami Deer sculpture by Zhanna Kadyrova. Originally installed in a public park in Pokrovsk, Donetsk Oblast in 2019, the piece now stands silent and proud not far from the Russian Pavilion at Giardini.
Photo by Andrea Avezzù.
Cast in concrete yet coaxed into the delicate folds of origami, it sits at the intersection of craft and contradiction: massive yet weightless-looking, permanent yet precarious. When the front line neared Pokrovsk in August 2024, the work was dismantled and evacuated. In 2025, it travelled over 3,000 km to Venice. It arrives suspended — much like Ukraine itself.
Morocco — Asǝṭṭa
Photo by Luca Zambelli Bais.
The Moroccan Pavilion presents Asǝṭṭa, an installation by Amina Agueznay — an Amazigh term for ritual weaving, a sacred feminine practice in which the woven form is understood as a living being, shaped by prayer and memory as much as by technique.
Photo by Luca Zambelli Bais.
Agueznay unfolds this into a suspended membrane, a second skin that spreads across the space and peels back to reveal layers of time beneath. The work opens onto a reflection on threshold — a zone of passage between private and public, visible and invisible — where memory, ritual, and gesture meet. The loom, here, is not a tool but a way of thinking.
Azerbaijan — The Attention
Courtesy of Faig Ahmed Studio and Sapar Contemporary.
From weaving as a living practice, Faig Ahmed takes the textile somewhere altogether different. The Attention, spread across seven interconnected rooms near the Arsenale, runs a continuous carpet through the historic Campo della Tana rope-making complex — spilling, knotting, climbing the walls. Ahmed reimagines the traditional Azerbaijani carpet as a coded surface where craft, metaphysics, and computational logic converge.
Courtesy of Faig Ahmed Studio and Sapar Contemporary.
The centrepiece, Entropy Altar (2026), uses a quantum random number generator — a technology standard in cybersecurity — to translate subatomic randomness into evolving language, shaped in part by those moving through the room. A carpet that responds to your presence: it is one of the more quietly radical ideas on show at the 2026 Biennale di Venezia this year.
Photos are courtesy of the 2026 Biennale di Venezia and the pavilions.
India Pavilion at Venice Art Biennale 2026 – Photo by Jacopo Salvi.
