Venice 2026: between bodies, politics and unforgettable scents

The 2026 Venice Biennale opened under a sign of apparent calm, but in the first days it became clear that art here would once again be just an excuse for a much broader and more tense story. Behind the white glow of the pavilion, political tensions, protests and symbolic gestures took over the stage almost as strongly as the works themselves.

The Biennale, which every two years turns into a global overview of contemporary art and a kind of competition of national pavilions, has long ceased to be just an aesthetic event. It is a space in which tastes, ideologies and cultural strategies collide as loudly as the installations themselves. As he once wrote Lorens Alovej, it is about an “orgy of contact and communication”, a definition that still sounds precise, perhaps even mild, today.

This year, 99 countries are participating in Venice, including Somalia and Qatar, for the first time in the event's history. However, the entire event is hanging in the shadow of the curator's death. Koben Kuo, whose vision for the “In Minor Keys” exhibition was to be quieter, more introspective, and geared toward “improvement” rather than spectacle. That quietness, however, never fully came to life.

The body as a political battlefield

One of the most striking motifs of this year's biennial was nudity. The female body, exposed, performative or provocative, appears almost everywhere: from Austrian performers on speedboats to Danish works dealing with male sexuality and fertility anxiety. There are also reinterpretations of female characters in works Richard Prince, taken from the biker aesthetic of older magazines.

But what might once have seemed like subversion often feels like saturation here. Part of the audience, especially women, reacts with fatigue or irony: where have the male bodies disappeared to in this balance of gaze? Feminist interventions by groups such as Femen and Pussy Riot further shift the boundary between art and protest, transforming exhibition spaces into political scenes without a clear demarcation.

Russia, protest and awkward diplomacy

Russia's return to the Biennale after the war in Ukraine became one of the most sensitive points of the event. On the first day, the pavilion was pulsating with loud music and a party atmosphere, while protests escalated on the second day, when Pussy Riot performed in front of the entrance, after which the police temporarily closed the space.

Unlike the direct performances, the British response remained in the realm of diplomatic distance - with the absence of a ministerial presence and a formal statement of "opposition to Russia's participation." The Biennale thus once again proved to be a space in which art and geopolitics cannot be separated, no matter how much the organizers may wish.

Art without “attitudes” or without life?

The American Pavilion opened up an old debate about what happens when art tries to purge itself of ideology. While the work Jeffrey Gibson from 2024 was noisy, colorful and politically open, a new approach Alma Allen It seems almost sterile - sculptures that do not provoke, but do not communicate either, leaving the impression of an aesthetic void.

In this silence of "neutrality" lies perhaps the greatest risk of contemporary national pavilions: fear of position often produces works that have neither risk nor life.

The sea as a stage, the body as a spectacle

Austrian Pavilion Florentine Holzinger he transformed the gardens into a hybrid between theater, aquarium, and extreme performance. The performers' bodies, immersed in water, lifted on weather vanes, or subjected to physical endurance, become part of a choreography that balances between fascination and discomfort.

The sea and water, by the way, are also becoming dominant symbols in the works of Israel, Canada and Uzbekistan - as if contemporary art is returning to an element that is simultaneously a border and a space of freedom.

Smells as a new aesthetic of discomfort

One of the most unusual trends of this year's biennale is the use of scent as an artistic medium. In the church of San Giovanni Evangelista in Venice, the Belarusian pavilion recreates the smell of a "freshly dug grave" - ​​heavy, organically unpleasant notes that do not leave the audience indifferent.

In other spaces, from the Syrian reconstruction of Palmyra to Egyptian and German installations, smell becomes an extension of the narrative—a physical layer of memory and violence. Even when humor is employed, as in the Luxembourg work “La Merde,” the line between concept and literal physical experience remains intentionally blurred.

The strongest works - outside the center

Although the main exhibition “In Minor Keys” is intended to be quiet and reflective, the strongest works this year paradoxically lie outside its framework. Video works Lawrence Abu Hamdan i Gabriel Goliath they bring political weight and emotional clarity that the central premise lacks.

The Prada Foundation, Arthur Jafa reaffirms the power of his work “Love is the Message, the Message is Death”, a work that, even after ten years, retains the ability to stop viewers and force them into an uneasy confrontation.

An exhibition without its author

The death of Kojo Kou remains a silent but constant frame throughout the Biennale. Her idea of ​​a subtler, “softer” exhibition runs through the works, but never fully comes to life as a coherent whole. Instead of a clearly defined vision, there remains a sense of fragmentaryness, as if the art is constantly returning to a starting point from which someone important has been absent.

Venice 2026 thus remains between two worlds: between politics and aesthetics, body and idea, presence and absence. And perhaps it is precisely in this tension, and not in the works themselves, that its real content lies.