Venice Biennale Pavilions Turn to Touch, Water, and Memory
At the 61st Venice Biennale, several national pavilions are using material experience to sharpen political and historical questions. From Bosnia and Herzegovina to Canada, the presentations gathered in Venice this year move between diaspora, colonial trauma, ecological unease, and performance, often asking visitors not just to look, but to enter the work physically.
Bosnia and Herzegovina’s national pavilion, titled Domus Diasporica, is installed at Palazzo Malipiero and centers on the experience of displacement. Mladen Bundalo examines diaspora, migration, and identity through an installation that invites visitors to sit at a modest arrangement of tables and chairs, leaf through four photo books, and handle imagined refugee passports. The books document the living rooms of Bosnian émigrés, including families who relocated as far away as Hawaii and Thailand. Nearby, home videos, archival footage, drawings, photographs, moving boxes, and letters to absent loved ones build a quiet but affecting portrait of home as something repeatedly remade by war, politics, and distance.
The Bosnian presentation carries particular weight in light of the Bosnian War of the early 1990s, which displaced more than half the country’s population. Rather than treating migration as an abstract theme, Bundalo grounds it in domestic detail: furniture, paper, boxes, and the fragile evidence of lives carried elsewhere.
If Bosnia’s pavilion is intimate, Austria’s is deliberately overwhelming. Florentina Holzinger’s Seaworld Venice has become one of the most talked-about presentations of the Biennale, staging nude performers amid pools of water, aquatic tanks, and damp industrial-looking containers. The pavilion reads as part underwater theme park, part sewage treatment plant, part sacred architecture, with Venice imagined as a flooded metropolis. Nude women climb a vast metallic shaft, while another performer rides a jet ski through the space as attendants warn visitors away from splashing sewage. The result is a dystopian vision in which purity and pollution collapse into one another.
Belgium’s IT NEVER SSST, by Miet Warlop, takes a different route to release. In performance, dancers interact with plaster slabs stamped with simple words in several languages, including “hey,” “dai,” “sans,” and “salut.” Warlop has said the words were chosen partly for their double meanings when spoken aloud, and the pavilion frames performance as a way to register raw feeling without smoothing it over.
Canada’s Entre chien et loup (Between dog and wolf), by Abbas Akhavan, slows the pace again. The pavilion has been transformed into a greenhouse, with mist on the windows and a reflective pond holding giant Victoria waterlilies. Akhavan points to the plants’ deep botanical history — their genus dates back some 200 million years — while also linking them to the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London. The installation asks what it means to encounter such a long ecological timeline inside another world fair.
Taken together, these pavilions suggest a Biennale less interested in spectacle alone than in embodied experience: touch, performance, water, and memory become tools for thinking about history in the present tense.
