Venice Art Biennale 2026: FOMO, fun and frolic.
Theresa Simon’s take on this year’s Venice Biennale:
Venice: shall I compare thee to an art fair?
Thou art far more lovely and far more unknowable.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May
And lo, the hapless art visitor is often drenched in a devastating rainstorm;
Yet still does he or she stand for hours in queues,
With only prosecco and small squares of cream cheese on white bread as sustenance,
Pilgrimaging from every corner of the globe
To worship the mother of all art events that is the Venice Biennale.
This, as you may already be able to tell, is not going to be a proper critique of the Venice Art Biennale 2026. For that, you could do worse than listen to The Art Newspaper Venice Biennale Special podcast.
Inspired by my recent trip with Kate and Culture Connect to the Cape Town Art Fair, I decided to book for the Venice vernissage, very last minute, having not been for 7 years. The art visits had fired me up in SA, and I wanted to see more! Plus, this Biennale was going to be a big shout-out for SA, given the late Koyo Kouoh’s relationship with Zeitz MOCA and an uproar around the curation of the South African pavilion, leading to its dramatic closure.
Here is a list of what I did, and how good it was.
- Networking
Before I had even boarded my plane to Venice, I had done the lion’s share of my networking in the departures lounge. Curators, museum directors, institutional bigwigs were all there, as easy to chat to, suddenly, as they are impossible to reach on the phone under ‘normal’ circumstances. Venice gives everyone license to just network like hell. I talked to people in queues, people in loos, people on vaporettos, people trying to get onto vaporettos – anything is fair game.
Maybe it’s partly because Venice is, by dint of its geography and crazy urban layout, the best place ever for meeting and making connections: negotiating the intriguing maze of alleys and piazzas, bridges and canals, leads one to unexpected places and ultimately, discoveries.
- Discoveries
And in fact, the best things I saw did come about that way, as I followed the red Biennale signs to collateral events, woven throughout the city, diving off down little alleys when I had time to kill. One such was an incredible Gagosian installation at Palazzo Grimani. Here, amongst the 15th century splendour of one of the richest families of that time, is a permanent installation of works by Baselitz; but not the usual upside-down figures, which have never really spoken to me. Instead, these are glorious, airy, abstract colour compositions that absolutely sing out on the Piano Nobile, as uplifting and joyful as the astonishing antique sculpture collection for which the Palazzo is renowned in an adjacent room.
(images at https://gagosian.com/news/2022/04/14/georg-baselitz-archinto-museo-di-palazzo-grimani-venice-installation-video/ https://venetosecrets.com/en/art-style/palazzo-grimani-venezia/)
On the next floor is the superb new Biennale show of Amoako Boafo’s new paintings. He uses his fingers to paint strong portraits of friends and models. He cites Schiele as an influence, which makes a lot of sense: the flesh is almost meaty in his portrayal (actually, there’s a lot of this I noticed going around the Biennale generally – very in-your-face flesh, blood and guts). But Boafo’s subjects are poised or playful, not tortured like Schiele’s. I sat next to one of his models on a vaporetto ride. She was statuesque, from Guinea, swathed in gorgeous robes, about 6’3 in heels and herself an artist. Another Venice chance meeting special.
By mistake, I wandered into the Taiwan Pavilion, showing artist Li Yi-Fan (not to be confused with the far soberer Lee Ufan nearby on San Marco; I did confuse them, momentarily. Visitors sat all over his giant hand sculptures, rapt by his humorous video work featuring a robot questioning its AI-ness.
But for me, the most astonishing find was the Pinchuk Centre’s ‘Still Joy: from Ukraine to the World’. I saw the banners from a vaporetto and jumped off impulsively at Accademia to see it. This show moved me in a way that no reporting on the Ukraine atrocities to date ever has. ‘This is what art is for; this is the power of art,’ I thought. I think it also encapsulated Koyo Kouoh’s theme, summarised in her manifesto here: “‘In refusing the spectacle of horror, the time has come to listen to the minor keys, to tune in sotto voce to the whispers, to the lower frequencies; to find the oases, the islands, where the dignity of all living beings is safeguarded.” The title itself was so magnificent that, somehow, amidst the abject horror, there is still joy.
- Deliberate visits
I had booked to visit part of Hans UIrich’s the Pavilion of the Holy See, set in the fragrant Giardino Mistico, the garden of a Carmelite monastery. A sublime aural experience, with sound pieces by artistes that flowed into one another as you moved around the garden, wearing a state-of-the-art headset, I timed my visit brilliantly to coincide with an apocalyptic thunderstorm, so that the trippy sounds of Brian Eno and incantations of Soundwalk Collective were underscored by rolls of thunder. When the rain became too much, I retreated with a handful of others into the garden chapel, where a whispered Patti Smith recording on the Holy Virgin blissed us into a catatonic state.
I had determined to see the alternative South African Pavilion, as there was great expectation around the installation of Gabrielle Goliath’s work elsewhere, since it had been banned from the official South Africa pavilion. The church installation seemed a far more appropriate idea to me and the crowd gathered outside for readings was immense – an incredible feeling of solidarity for freedom of expression.
- Giardini and Arsenale
I also did the whole of the Giardini and Arsenale, except for the Austrian Pavilion, which involved queuing for about 2 hours to see naked women riding jet skis, clambering up poles, being dangled from a bell and some sort of immersion in visitors’ urine. It all seemed sensational and vulgar in ways that didn’t speak to me. Bits that worked for me: The British Pavilion and the American. Just good straightforward art, the former about growing up in a place where you don’t belong, the latter about art that just hits you in the right places, taking you deeper within yourself. This is very uncool of me, but it is where art does its magic for me.
