This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
Artistically, the 2026 Venice Biennale might be kindly described as a jumble sale. Politically it’s been a binfire. Strikes, Pussy Riots and resignations aside, the mood of much of the work selected for this edition is meek and folksy, craft heavy, ideology lite, cowering beneath layers of terracotta and wool to no particular end beyond press releases and PR junkets.
It might be the most honest show I’ve seen in years. Even if a sad majority of pieces wouldn’t stand up at a church bazaar, at least most curators have stopped congratulating themselves that art can save the world.
As a whole, In Minor Keys might support Freud’s maxim that, whilst art cannot be rated too highly as a source of pleasure and consolation, it is not strong enough to make us forget real misery. Its late curator, Koyo Kouoh, proposed that her event might prove a site of “collective resistance and healing” and, overall, the shows strike an elegiac note, as though reluctant to abandon the fantasy that this was ever a viable possibility. Nonetheless, there are some absolute zingers amongst the knitting and amateur ceramics at the two main sites, Giardini and Arsenale.
This year’s sensation is obviously Florentina Holzinger’s Seaworld Venice for the Austrian Pavilion at Giardini, which you have probably heard quite enough about. The naked women! The jetski! The portaloos whose processed contents — supplied by visitors — feed into a tank containing a scuba’d-up performer! Sophisticates were sneering at the dated daring of staged transgression before the first press day was over, but perhaps there’s a wry message hidden in Holzinger’s rumbustious underwater amusement park-cum-sewage-refinery.
The artist’s practice is consciously staged within the legacy of Viennese Actionism, one of the key events of which was Otto Mühl’s 1968 proclamation Kunst und Revolution, which observed that “the consumer state drives a wave of ‘art’ before itself”. Hotzinger’s jetskiing performer, aggressively circling the confined space of the flooded pavilion, becomes a comment on the futility of art as a driver of current social change.
Just as the ’68 “revolutions” collapsed into prosperous complacency, so the absorption of radical works into the vast economy of the art industry has continued to ensure that gestures towards social justice remain in a self-referential loop.
If there’s one message to be extracted from In Minor Keys it’s that art activism never was going anywhere. Virtue-signalling was just one more fashion, and now the buyers are getting bored. In a collision of aesthetics with real-life ethics, Hotzinger’s roaring engine suggests, the aesthetics are deservedly mincemeat.
Equally exuberant and affecting is Japan’s Grass Babies, Moon Babies by Ei Arakawa-Nash, which produced one of the most truly surprising sights of the Biennale — earnest art raptors in Antwerp trousers who had obviously never touched an actual child struggling with inept delight to change the nappies of hyper-realistic doll babies.
Cooing and squeaking, they winched the babies up in Moses baskets, proudly reading aloud the “birthday” poems of their temporary progeny. It’s a fresh, clever show, successfully tapping into one of the simplest, most primal human drives and conjuring that rarest of contemporary-art emotions, sheer happiness.
Unlike the solemn chaos of the central pavilion, which Pierre d’Alancaisez has deftly analysed for this magazine, the standout nationals, like Austria and Japan, are those pavilions which are bold enough to stick to one big idea.
Tactility and contemplation emerge as strong themes this year, epitomised by Armen Agop for Egypt’s Silence Pavilion. In a total reversal of mood from Wael Shawky’s monumental opera film of 2024, Agop offers Tocca, a black granite saucer which visitors are invited to caress. The haptic element is truly compelling, the sensory experience enhanced by a pulsing heartbeat soundtrack. Attempting serenity amongst thousands of hacks drenched by the traditional Biennale cloudburst was challenging, but, on a quiet day, obeying the “Please Touch” notices will be rewarding.
Spain is another instance of the success of the single concept approach, with Oriol Vilanova’s giant collage of postcards, assembled over 20 years, emphasising the myriad imbrications of objects and human consciousness. Their colour-coded arrangement, which feels immediately comfortable, gradually reveals itself as a reminder of how pixellated our vision has become, in a return to analogue seeing which quietly prods at how we have come to look in the digital era.
“Tension” is a multipurpose word in the contemporary art field. Stick it between any pair of antonyms — “the work explores the tension between presence and absence” — and you’ve got yourself a label. For the British Pavilion, Turner Prize-winner Lubaina Himid has produced a series of vivid canvases whose working subjects of cooks, tailors and architects seem arrested in moments of tension, exchanging covert glances of uneasy complicity.
The paintings are fine, but Himid had been let down by both her curator and her concept. No attempt has been made to valorise the pavilion’s vast, neoclassical space, in which the pictures appear to have been lazily slung on the walls, whilst Himid undermines the subtlety of her own message with a list of 26 rather uninteresting questions on belonging which accompany the pieces. A series of painted oars, egregious in Venice, feels a mere afterthought. Recycling tired hopes and exhausted tropes may not be the pavilion’s intended theme but it certainly looks that way.
Over at Arsenale, India’s curator Amin Jaffer shows how it should be done in the country’s first pavilion for seven years. Pieces by five artists working in contrasting mediums are combined in a rigorous, refined and graceful choreography, whose apparent spareness nonetheless somehow encompasses the diversity of the country itself.
Alwar Balasubramaniam’s panel diptych, Drift and Not Just for Us, executed in resin, paddy grains and earth from the artist’s home in Tamil Nadu is expertly contrasted with Ranjani Shettar’s exquisite suspended garden, Under the Same Sky, with a continent’s history pulsing between the two. Jaffer’s selection eschews the obvious, presenting polished works from a civilisation confident in its own modernity yet sensitively aware of its past. Unafraid of technical accomplishment and serious about beauty, India this year is a reminder that sincerity in art does not have to be uncouth.
Kennedy Yanko’s trio of sculptures, The Bond Between Matter and Heaven, also at Arsenale, similarly combine elegance and power. Created from the metal of a crushed shipping container and swooping layers of acrylic paint skin, they torque jaggedly upwards, harsh, violent, yet paradoxically soft to a sneaky touch.
The billowing paint draperies recall Old Master oils, associating these apparently ultra-modern works with a tradition which frequently combined gory subject matter with serene backgrounds, a Caravaggesque allusion enhanced by Arsenale’s otherwise gloomy lighting. This is art to tumble into, all the more so because of its initial refusal of anything that could be described as pretty.
Chiara Camoni’s expansive installation is Italy’s best pavilion for years: vaguely classical votive figures with a spooky full-fathom-five atmosphere. Like Yanko’s sculptures, it riffs on the unnerving gap between the canonical and the strange.
Overall though, Arsenale is feebly familiar, as if somewhere on the mainland there might be a warehouse filled with the detritus of Biennales past, available for recycling when there’s space to fill. Black pools, skeins of tatty red wool and pointless dangling ropes were some of the many, many props which have ridden back into town yet again. A cleaner vision would serve Venice’s next curator very well.
