Child dolls, whale songs and swimming in urine: The Venice Biennale’s must-see nationwide pavilions

No Venice Biennale has ever been apolitical, however international affairs have deeply marked this yr’s version already. Every week into the 61st worldwide artwork exhibition, there have been protests towards Russia and Israel’s participation, pavilions closing and threats to chop funding.

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The ambiance is strikingly at odds with the late curator’s imaginative and prescient for the occasion, encapsulated within the theme ‘In Minor Keys’. Koyo Kouoh aimed to reorient the present away from the “anxious cacophony of the present chaos raging through the world” to give attention to softer tones of emotion, connectivity and grounding.

Despite the high-profile demonstrations, the pavilions and exhibitions that chime with Kouoh’s core values of nurture, intimacy and reflection are people who quietly steal this yr’s highlight. They could also be much less splashy (apart from one that’s actually so), however they’re those more likely to maintain attracting guests all through the Biennale, no matter surrounding political stunts.

A collective act of care on the Japan Pavilion

As you method the Japan Pavilion, shaded by timber within the Giardini, you see different guests milling round, cradling child dolls of their arms. There are smiles, laughter and jokes between strangers – not all the time the sorts of feelings related to viewing modern artwork.

Grass Babies, Moon Babies by Japanese American queer artist Ei Arakawa-Nash is likely one of the most subtly profound expressions of Kouoh’s curatorial theme.

Upon coming into, guests are invited to hold one in all 57 dolls – in funky onesies and sun shades – by the Pavilion’s pilotis, gardens and inside areas. In doing so, guests take part in an act of collective care, with the choice to vary the dolls’ diapers and activate a QR code that delivers a “diaper poem” primarily based on every child’s assigned birthday.

Kouoh, who died in May 2025, wished this yr’s exhibition to give attention to the sluggish and sensory. Arakawa-Nash’s present invitations guests to bodily and emotionally have interaction in an act that’s deeply human and private – not solely does participation provoke pleasure, but in addition probably nostalgia, accountability or grief.

In doing so, it forces us to confront basic social problems with elevating kids for an unsure future. As the curators write, the pavilion asks, “how can we celebrate a new generation of babies while we, as caregivers, undertake the unfinished work of reparations and amends that shape the world they enter?”

The sound of artwork on the Polish Pavilion and Holy See Pavilion

Kouoh’s melodic theme has impressed a wealth of sound-based reveals on this yr’s pavilions. They each actually and figuratively evoke minor keys, inviting guests to have interaction with artwork utilizing an alternate sense in addition to to muse on the “lower frequencies” of society: these marginalised or ignored.

In the Polish Pavilion’s audio and video set up Liquid Tongues, Bogna Burska and Daniel Kotowski delve into disempowered methods of communication.

The ambiance is mesmerising: big screens, one mounted on the ceiling so you may lie again on a big cushioned bench to look at, taking part in a efficiency by the Choir in Motion of each listening to and Deaf singers who chant and check in International Sign Language.

The area reverberates with sounds impressed by whale songs, an “unheard voice” like that of the Deaf group. The mission highlights efforts to reclaim languages pushed apart by dominant voices, together with Hand Talk, the Plains Indian Sign Language utilized by each listening to and Deaf Indigenous folks in North America.

As the curators write, “Based on the idea of Deaf Gain, deafness isn’t seen as a disability. Most of the footage was shot in water. Deaf people can sign freely there, but hearing people can only make muffled sounds.”

The Holy See Pavilion’s The Ear is the Eye of the Soul enhances Kouoh’s “archipelago of oases” in the principle exhibition, envisioned as areas wealthy with reminiscence and emotion that have been central to main artists’ universes.

In the case of the Giardino Mistico, a convent backyard of the Discalced Carmelite order, guests are invited to attune to a quieter register. After donning open-ear headphones, you meander across the backyard in silence, encountering a collection of sound commissions by experimental musicians impressed by Twelfth-century Saint Hildegard of Bingen’s chants and visions.

In a cacophonous world that races in the direction of novelty and innovation, this retrospective, introspective act of strolling and listening feels nothing wanting radical.

A sewage seaworld on the Austrian Pavilion

If taking part in in a minor key describes something to a tee proper now, it’s town of Venice itself. Its melancholic plight is explored in what’s quick turning into the buzziest pavilion of the Biennale this yr, Austria.

Titled Seaworld Venice, it’s someplace between an underwater theme park and a sewage therapy plant – a blunt imaginative and prescient of town’s future in grim local weather change eventualities.

Austrian choreographer and efficiency artist Florentina Holzinger’s everlasting dwell set up encompasses a bare jet skier zooming in circles, in a nod to Venice’s points with extra boat site visitors, and one other nude performer in a water tank that’s topped up with guests’ filtered urine from adjoining transportable bathrooms.

The mission makes guests palpably aware of their particular person affect on Venice and the world’s ecological fragility.

As curator Nora-Swantje Almes explains, “Holzinger depicts humankind’s complicity in collapsing methods, questioning established buildings and the obvious order of issues – and revealing that order itself is inherently unstable.”