Venice Biennale Opens With Protest, Fertility, and a Rejection of the Camera
The 2026 Venice Biennale opened to the public last weekend with politics already pressing against the art. Protesters gathered in the Giardini and the Arsenale to call for Russia and Israel to be excluded from the national pavilions, while the Golden Lion jury resigned during opening week. The result was an opening scene defined as much by institutional strain as by artistic ambition.
At the center of the exhibition is In Minor Keys, the main show conceived by Koyo Kouoh, who died in May 2025. Kouoh, the first African woman appointed to lead the Biennale, shaped an edition that keeps returning to questions of care, embodiment, and collective vulnerability. Her curatorial framework gives the exhibition a quiet gravity, even as the surrounding atmosphere remains unsettled.
One of the clearest visual patterns across the Biennale is birth and fertility. Wangechi Mutu’s monumental sculpture of a pregnant belly rose from the floor of the Giardini, accompanied nearby by a video exploring a matriarchal creation myth. Buhlebezwe Siwani, a rising artist, presented naturalistic sculptures of contemplative pregnant women made with green Sunlight soap, a material choice that folds purity and gender into the same gesture.
Japan’s pavilion offered a more literal take on child rearing. Visitors were handed a baby doll and asked to care for it; if they changed its diaper, they received a QR code leading to a poem. The work, by queer artist Ei Arakawa-Nash, who became a parent of twins in 2024, turns the labor of care into something both comic and revealing. The 11-pound babies are a pointed stand-in for the burden and joy of new life.
Maja Malou Lyse’s Stars in My Pocket (2026) extends the fertility theme into a more speculative register. At the Danish pavilion, tombstone-like cryogenic sperm containers are embedded with tiny video screens showing “sperm races.” On the other side of the pavilion, a multichannel video work stages a kind of musical in which porn performers play sexed-up sperm bank employees. The piece draws on research suggesting that watching sex on screens can increase sperm motility, and it imagines a future in which reproductive science, desire, and spectacle become increasingly difficult to separate.
If fertility and reproduction are one major thread, the other is refusal: refusal of the photograph, refusal of speed, refusal of easy consumption. Florentina Holzinger’s Austrian pavilion asked visitors to put away their camera phones during performances. At Egypt’s pavilion, Armen Agop requested silence as well as no photos, explicitly pushing back against “speed and spectacle.” Dries Verhoeven’s Dutch pavilion similarly prohibited photography and asked visitors to turn off their phones, intensifying a performance in which a single figure entered like an ordinary visitor before the space darkened around her.
That resistance extends to the Holy See pavilion, where Patti Smith, FKA twigs, and Brian Eno created a soundwalk through a monastery garden. Visitors wear special headphones and move through an interactive sequence in which the artists’ sounds blend into one another. In the main exhibition, too, sound is everywhere: Kamaal Malak’s synth-heavy soundtrack accompanies Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons’s magnolia-inflected display, while scent appears in works that ask visitors to notice natural aromas and fragrances rather than images.
Taken together, the Biennale feels less like a parade of objects than a study in bodily attention. It asks what art can do when it is not optimized for the phone screen, and what kinds of meaning emerge when viewers are asked to listen, wait, or care.
