National Pavilions We Loved at the Venice Biennale

 What Three Nations Carried to Venice


On a flatbed truck rolling into the Giardini in the spring of 2026, a life-sized deer made of poured concrete sat folded into sharp, origami angles, as if someone had tried to wrap a soldier's grief in the shape of a child's paper toy. It had traveled roughly 3,000 kilometers, most of that distance inside a country at war, evacuated from the town of Pokrovsk in Donetsk Oblast before Russian forces could reach it. By the time it was lowered onto its plinth at the entrance to Ukraine's pavilion, the sculpture had already outlived at least one version of the peace it was built to commemorate.


Ukraine calls the work "Security Guarantees," a title that doubles as a joke and an accusation: it references the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia promised to respect Ukraine's borders in exchange for its Soviet-era nuclear arsenal. Artist Zhanna Kadyrova first installed the deer in a Pokrovsk park in 2019, replacing a Soviet military aircraft monument with something soft-edged and civic. This year's Biennale, running through November 22, 2026, is full of objects doing similar work — pavilions that no longer sell a national "look" so much as carry a nation's unfinished business into a foreign courtyard.


The tree-lined avenue of the Giardini della Biennale, home to national pavilions since the exhibition's founding in 1895
The tree-lined avenue of the Giardini della Biennale, home to national pavilions since the exhibition's founding in 1895


That courtyard has its own inconvenient history. The Giardini were laid out under Napoleonic rule in 1807 and turned into an exhibition ground when the Biennale began in 1895; the pavilions that filled it over the following century were built almost entirely by wealthy or colonial-era powers who could afford real estate in a foreign city. Nations that arrived later, or arrived poor, don't get a plot inside the gate — they rent whatever room the city will let them have, often for a single exhibition.


The Democratic Republic of Congo learned that arithmetic firsthand this year, mounting its first-ever national pavilion not in the Giardini but in the Antico Refettorio of the Scuola Grande di San Marco, a former confraternity hall across the city. Nine Congolese and diaspora artists filled it under the title "Simba Moto! Seize the Fire! Saisis le Feu!," curated by philosopher Nadia Yala Kisukidi with the MOKO collective. Sammy Baloji's tapestry "Seeing Katharina" pulls colonial extraction into the same room as Aimé Mpané's matchstick figures sprawled across an air mattress — bodies made of the material that once lit fires and burned villages, now merely resting.


Berit Wallenberg / Swedish National Heritage Board, No known copyright restrictions
Berit Wallenberg / Swedish National Heritage Board, No known copyright restrictions


Kadyrova has said she never expected the deer's meaning to keep shifting on her. "Generally, when I worked on the sculpture, I couldn't imagine that its meaning would shift so much," she said. "It was conceived as a permanent object." Co-curator Leonid Marushchak, who led the sculpture's evacuation, described it differently: the deer had been "part of the peaceful landscape of Pokrovsk," and moving it gave "new meaning both to the work itself and to all the processes connected to its history" — a permanent object that turned out to be exactly as movable, and as vulnerable, as the people living beside it.


Timor-Leste's pavilion, "Across Words," curated by Loredana Pazzini Paracciani in the Arsenale, holds a quieter kind of permanence. At its center is Verónica Pereira Maia's "Tais Don," a length of hand-woven Timorese cloth inscribed with the names of people killed in the Santa Cruz massacre — the November 12, 1991 killing of more than 271 pro-independence demonstrators by Indonesian forces at a cemetery in Dili. Maia herself fled the country in 1975, at the start of the Indonesian occupation, and later took part in the street protests that followed the massacre; the textile functions less as an artwork to be viewed than as a document to be read, one name at a time.


The Grande Darsena of the Arsenale, the historic naval shipyard complex where the Timor-Leste pavilion is sited this year.

The Grande Darsena of the Arsenale, the historic naval shipyard complex where the Timor-Leste pavilion is sited this year.


There is something uncomfortable about ranking these works against each other in a "best of" list at all. A deer that fled a war and a cloth naming the dead are not competing for the same prize as a granite sculpture about silence or a greenhouse of imported water lilies; squeezing wildly different stakes into one aesthetic marketplace flattens all of them. The national-pavilion format performs a stranger trade of its own — it asks nations still absorbing catastrophe to package that catastrophe into a viewable, judgeable object, then hands back exactly the visibility their suffering has struggled to find anywhere else.


That bargain cuts in more than one direction. The Giardini's oldest pavilions belong to nations that never had to audition for a room — Britain, France, and Germany built theirs a century ago and have occupied them ever since, regardless of what their governments do in a given year. A first-time nation like the Democratic Republic of Congo, or a nation whose sovereignty is barely three decades old like Timor-Leste, has to earn its space exhibition by exhibition, with no guarantee the invitation renews.


The 2026 Biennale closes on November 22; after that, the Antico Refettorio reverts to the Scuola Grande di San Marco's ordinary business as a hospital annex, and nothing obligates Venice to set aside a room for the Democratic Republic of Congo again in 2028. Kadyrova's deer will need somewhere to go next, too — there is no plinth waiting for it back in Pokrovsk. Which nations make it back to the Giardini and the Arsenale in two years, and which don't, will have less to do with the quality of the art on view than with something else entirely — so what, exactly, decides who gets remembered with a permanent address? [SOURCES] : hyperallergic

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  For most of the twentieth century, a Jesuit residence in Dublin had a dark, dramatic painting of a betrayal hanging quietly in its dining hall. The priests who ate beneath it believed it was the work of a minor Dutch follower of a more famous Italian master. It hung there through decades of dinners, unremarkable, misattributed, until a restorer finally looked closely enough in 1990 to recognize what it actually was: a lost original by Caravaggio himself, "The Taking of Christ," painted around 1602 and missing from the historical record for nearly two hundred years. That kind of disappearance was not unusual for him. Caravaggio was, by multiple accounts, the most electrifying Italian painter to work since Michelangelo — whom he was not related to, though he shared the name — and he was almost completely forgotten within years of his own death. Paintings were quietly reassigned to other artists' catalogues. His name barely survived the century he died in, and it would tak...
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The Silence and the Sales Curve: Lee Bae's Charcoal Enters a Cistercian Abbey

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