Venice Biennale 2026: Dries Verhoeven turns the Dutch pavilion into a bunker
The Dutch pavilion in Venice has long stood as a compact emblem of postwar optimism. For the 2026 Venice Biennale, however, Dutch artist Dries Verhoeven is recasting that legacy in far darker terms. He is covering the 1953 pavilion’s windows with metal shutters, transforming Gerrit Rietvald’s modernist building into a sealed, bunker-like environment.
Verhoeven, born in Oosterhout in the southern Netherlands and trained at the Maastricht Insitute of Arts, has built a practice around performance and installation works that place viewers inside uneasy social situations. His earlier projects, including “Wanna Play? (Love in the time of Grindr)” and “Guilty Landscapes,” used live presence and deceptive imagery to unsettle assumptions about what audiences think they are seeing.
At the Dutch pavilion, the effect will be more architectural than theatrical at first glance. About 100 visitors per hour will be admitted, and the work will unfold over seven months with 13 performers taking turns inside the darkened space. Verhoeven describes the piece as a raw vocal performance meant to register desperation, confusion, and the difficulty of living under what he calls the clouds hanging over the world.
The artist says the intervention responds not only to the pavilion itself, but also to the Giardini as a kind of time capsule. In his view, the site still projects an image of comfort, neutrality, and international harmony that belongs to another era. The open windows, the light, and the modernist faith in transparency all become part of the problem he wants to examine.
That critique has only sharpened as global politics have worsened. Verhoeven argues that militarisation has intensified while the Giardini continues to present itself as a safe, orderly space where the world powers of the past appear to coexist in peace. He suggests that the Biennale can function as both cultural exchange and propaganda, a place where a polished façade may obscure violence elsewhere.
In that sense, the Dutch pavilion becomes more than a national showcase. It becomes a test of whether modernist openness still means anything in a world that increasingly feels closed off.
