Venice Biennale 2026 Pavilions Put Memory, Labor, and Ecological Breakdown on View
Venice’s national pavilions are offering sharply different visions this year, but two presentations stand out for the force of their ideas and the precision of their execution. At the 61st International Art Exhibition — La Biennale di Venezia, which opened under the late Koyo Kouoh’s theme “In Minor Keys,” more than 80 countries are staging national pavilions across the city. Among the most affecting are The Bahamas and Austria.
The Bahamian Pavilion, “In Another Man’s Yard,” is curated by Dr. Krista Thompson and brings together the work of Bahamian artist John Beadle and Lavar Munroe, who is based in Baltimore. The exhibition is rooted in Junkanoo, The Bahamas’s centuries-old processional festival, where costume-making, performance, and collective labor are inseparable. That framework gives the pavilion its emotional and material logic.
Beadle, who was originally slated to represent The Bahamas at the Biennale in 2015, never received that platform during his lifetime. After his death last year, The Bahamas’s arts community helped ensure that his work would finally reach Venice. The result is a presentation shaped by communal commitment as much as by artistic authorship. Cardboard, salvaged objects, remnants of Junkanoo costumes, and sailcloth carry the exhibition’s themes of migration, labor, and survival. Beadle’s recurring forms — including mobile houses and oars — suggest lives lived in motion, and often at the margins.
The exhibition’s central sculptural installation channels Junkanoo’s “rush out,” a procession honoring the deceased. Munroe created it on-site in Venice in about a month, with extensive community support. Conceived as a posthumous collaboration with Beadle, it incorporates salvaged Junkanoo costumes and materials from Beadle’s studio, including small cardboard bird sculptures. Upstairs, Munroe’s monumental 11-panel painting imagines a Junkanoo procession for Beadle, extending the tribute into a larger act of remembrance.
If the Bahamian Pavilion is built around care and continuity, the Austrian Pavilion moves in a more abrasive register. Florentina Holzinger’s “SEAWORLD VENICE,” curated by Nora-Swantje Almes, is not interested in comfort. The performance-turned-installation turns the pavilion into a closed-loop system powered by the bodily waste of visitors. In the central courtyard, portable toilets feed a filtration system connected to an aquarium-like tank inhabited by a live performer wearing only a scuba mask. The work makes ecological strain, bodily discomfort, and institutional failure impossible to ignore.
Together, the two pavilions show how Venice can still function as a site for urgent artistic thinking: one through communal remembrance, the other through confrontation. In both cases, the national pavilion remains one of the Biennale’s most revealing formats, capable of turning local histories into international arguments.
