There is something programmatically anachronistic about the very idea of the national pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Buildings conceived to embody the identity of a State, erected in a garden that has remained — despite everything — a miniature ideological arena, where representation is never innocent and architectural form always carries the weight of whoever desired it. In Minor Keys, the project conceived by the late Koyo Kouoh and realised according to her vision after her untimely death in May 2025, chooses the minor key not as a fallback but as an epistemic posture: listening rather than proclaiming, resonating rather than imposing. Five pavilions, this year, seem to have understood that directive in the most radical way possible.
In Minor Keys, Major Wounds
Five Pavilions at the 61st Venice Biennale Arte That Hurt the Way They Should
Nordic Countries · How Many Angels Can Dance on the Head of a Pin?
Klara Kristalova, Benjamin Orlow, Tori Wrånes · Giardini
The medieval scholastic question that titles this pavilion — how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? — is not an exercise in theological futility. It is a question about coexistence: how many bodies, how many entities, how many natures can simultaneously occupy the same space without cancelling each other out? The three Nordic artists — Czech-Swedish Klara Kristalova, Finnish-Londoner Benjamin Orlow, Norwegian Tori Wrånes — inhabit the pavilion designed by Sverre Fehn as though they were growing inside it rather than installing a show, transforming the porous 1962 architecture into a mythic and restless ecosystem, curated by Anna Mustonen of Helsinki's Kiasma.
At the centre, Kristalova's work: a twelve-metre tree trunk lying on the floor like a fallen giant, wrapped in hand-dyed Swedish carpets, inhabited by eleven ceramic figures. A fat mouse pressing down with its weight, an apple-child, a warrior woman breaking free of leaves. The bodies disperse and recompose themselves within that topology of uncertainty that is Nordic mythology — the Kalevala as a grammar of instability, the myth of the Sampo destroyed and scattered into the sea as an image of every collapsing order. The artist has said she wants visitors to feel weight and humour simultaneously: "the world is threatening, you're frightened every day, and at the same time there is hope and desire and laughter." This coexistence of terror and comedy — unresolved, unplacated — is perhaps the most honest aesthetic response to the present moment.
Wrånes sets her headless figures interlacing interior and exterior space, while a foghorn sounds every hour — a danger signal, an instrument for navigating in low visibility. The metaphor is almost excessively precise for this historical moment. Orlow introduces temporality and endurance through repeated movement, persistence as poetics. The Nordic pavilion resolves nothing: it is an environment one inhabits the way one inhabits a recurring dream, knowing that meaning lies in the structure of repetition, not in its content.
Belgium · IT NEVER SSST
Miet Warlop · Giardini
If the Nordic pavilion is a dream, the Belgian one is a collapse in real time. Brussels-based artist Miet Warlop, curated by Caroline Dumalin, transforms the pavilion into something without precise precedent in the history of national representations at the Biennale: a living musical sculpture, rebuilt every day, in which language undergoes systematic liquefaction while the performers' bodies immerse themselves in it and drown.
Words cast in plaster — solidified linguistic gestures, thoughts that have taken on physical weight — circulate through the space, carried, passed along, dragged, broken. Performers interpret them, sing them, abandon them. The resulting environment has something of an apocalyptic karaoke in which the machine has forgotten the songs and the singers have forgotten why they were singing: the words sit there on the stands, inert, waiting for a breath to set them back in motion. The title IT NEVER SSST already contains its own diagnosis: the world never stops, and it is precisely in this impossibility of silence that contemporary vertigo resides.
There is in this work a phenomenology of human connection in the era of permanent connectivity: we are always on, always transmitting, always receiving, and yet meaning disperses, words lose their grip, language converts itself into noise. Warlop does not merely represent this condition: she produces it, turning visitors into witnesses of a system unravelling before their eyes in real time, daily, with no possibility of archiving. The desperation here is overwhelming but never surrenders to resignation: in the chaos of linguistic and sonic performance there survives — as happens in genuine poetry — something irreducible to definitive silence.
Germany · Ruin
Henrike Naumann & Sung Tieu · Giardini
The German pavilion is this year a place of layered mourning, and layering — historical, personal, architectural — is precisely its subject. Henrike Naumann, who was to have presented her most ambitious work here, died on 14 February 2026 at the age of forty-one, shortly after completing the project. Her installation The Home Front exists: Naumann arranged its objects until the very end, chose the mint green of Soviet army barracks as her background colour, conceived every detail. The pavilion is therefore, inevitably, also a testament.
The word Ruin plays on the semantic distance between English and German: in English it is the architectural remnant, the relic; in German it is collapse — economic, moral, social. Curated by Kathleen Reinhardt on behalf of ifa, the exhibition overlays two interventions that answer each other like the two faces of the same unresolved problem: outside, Sung Tieu has clad the 1938 fascist facade with more than three million mosaic tiles reproducing the Gehrenseestrasse housing complex in East Berlin — the block where she lived as a child after arriving in Germany from Vietnam, today in the process of speculative demolition. A childhood transfigured into mosaic, laid over the architecture of the Third Reich: not to erase but to add, to layer another history over the official one.
Inside, Naumann continues her exploration of the way ideology sediments itself into domestic objects, furniture, everyday taste. East Germany has not passed: it is simply hidden in the furniture we have inherited, in the shape of windows, in the colour of walls. "We are not looking at the ruins of something that is over," says Reinhardt, "we are looking at the remnants of something that is perhaps even more present today." Ruin as a verb: not the state of an architecture, but the ongoing process by which power erases what does not belong to it — migrant lives, queer bodies, marginal cultures — pretending they never existed. The ghost of the GDR hovers over the pavilion not as nostalgia but as warning: ideologies do not end, they change their container.
Czech and Slovak Republics · The Silence of the Mole
Jakub Jansa, Selmeci Kocka Jusko · Giardini
On the hundredth anniversary of the Czechoslovak pavilion at the Giardini — inaugurated in 1926 within the modernist architecture of Otakar Novotný — the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic choose to celebrate by returning to childhood. Or rather: by returning to what childhood has become over time, to what is done to it when it ceases to be a private place and becomes public property, diplomatic brand, nostalgic commodity.
At the centre of the project curated by Peter Sit is Mr. M. — an exhausted actor who has embodied the Mole for decades; the animated character by Zdeněk Miler, celebrated the world over precisely because it does not speak, because its narrative universe is built on gesture, image, silence. The Mole as a utopia of pre-linguistic communication — a creature that communicates without words and therefore, theoretically, without borders. But this creature has been progressively colonised by cultural diplomacy: dispatched on a mission to represent the two countries as a "politically neutral" figure, it has become the mascot of an identity that no longer belongs to anyone in particular.
There is something profoundly Beckettian in this construction: the character who has lost its relationship with its original meaning, condemned to repeat a role emptied of content, prisoner of an identity that others have decided for it. The public mask as a form of gentle violence: the innocent face that covers the impossibility of speaking for oneself, the fantasy privatised and returned to the collective as product. The Silence of the Mole asks what remains of imagination when it is institutionalised, what survives of a dream when the dream becomes a logo. The pavilion's answer is entrusted to the medium of film, objects, and architecture as total installation: an environment that, like the mole's burrow, reveals its meaning only by descending beneath the surface.
Greece · Escape Room
Andreas Angelidakis · Giardini
The most radically self-reflexive operation of the 2026 Biennale is perhaps this one: an artist who transforms his own pavilion into a critical analysis of the pavilion itself. Athens-based architect and artist Andreas Angelidakis, curated by George Bekirakis, does not bring to Venice a work about the world: he brings a work about the place he occupies, about the institution hosting him, about the ideological history of the buildings that make up the Giardini.
The starting point is 1934 — Year Zero for fascist Greece and for a Europe in which fascism seizes the centre: the year Hitler and Mussolini meet for the first time in Venice, the year the Nazis begin the persecution of homosexuals, the year the Greek and Austrian pavilions are officially inaugurated. The Giardini are architectures frozen at that moment: buildings conceived to communicate the political beliefs of the governments that erected them, today still standing as ideological fossils asked to host the critique of the very values that generated them. Angelidakis calls them "frozen fascist and colonial caves" — and he is right.
The Platonic cave as an escape room: the metaphor is geometrically exact. Plato described prisoners who mistook shadows for reality; the contemporary escape room is a space in which reality is structured like a game, where the rules are opaque and the exit code is never what it appears to be. Angelidakis installs this superimposition within the pavilion's own architecture, physically dividing it into two rooms — a reference to the Greek National Schism of 1915, when the country was split between rival governments — and filling the space with constructed truths, projections, replicas presenting themselves as originals. Post-truth is not a recent phenomenon: it is the grammar with which power has always operated, from the myth shaped by regimes to the algorithmic feed that shapes democracies. "Replace the Cave with the Screen," writes Angelidakis, "and what remains is every variant of MAGA as a staging of contemporary fascism."
A black textile intervention at the pavilion's entrance evokes Vaso Katraki, a Greek artist who won an award at the 1966 Biennale and was subsequently imprisoned for her political beliefs. The gesture is small, almost invisible. It is the most eloquent thing in the pavilion.
In Minor Keys as Method
What these five pavilions share is not a declared theme but a common disposition toward the past as an unresolved problem. Germany carries its architectural and moral ruins. Greece carries the weight of its own institutional philosophy and history. The Czech and Slovak Republics carry childhood corrupted into diplomacy. Belgium carries language coming apart under the pressure of the real. The Nordic Countries carry the myths that remain when systems of order collapse.
The minor key that Koyo Kouoh had chosen as the register of this Biennale is not — as it might appear — a key of resignation. It is the key in which one says the things that find no place in the major key: the ambiguities, the unprocessed defeats, the questions without answers. Art that does not resolve but that holds — that holds the weight of the unresolved without pretending that a simple way out exists. Like those angels on the head of a pin: their dance is only possible once one stops insisting that they have a single place to stand.
61st International Art Exhibition · La Biennale di Venezia · In Minor Keys · Giardini and Arsenale · 9 May – 22 November 2026
