Isabel Nolan’s Venice Biennale pavilion turns a dream into an argument about how we inherit culture
When the Dublin-born artist Isabel Nolan (b. 1974) represents Ireland at the Venice Biennale 2026, she will do so with a project that begins in a half-waking state. Titled Dreamshook and developed with curator Georgina Jackson, the pavilion builds an imagined world around the moment after a vivid dream, when memory, sensation, and reality briefly blur.
That unstable threshold is central to Nolan’s practice. She has long worked with cosmology, religion, and humanism, often through small-scale, tactile forms such as textiles. In the pavilion, those intimate materials become a way to approach larger questions: how people make meaning, how ideas survive, and why certain images continue to linger long after they are first seen.
Dreamshook also reaches back to the late Medieval and early Renaissance periods, especially Italian art from the 1300s and 1400s, which Nolan describes as a formative influence. Rather than treating that era as a fixed historical reference point, she uses it as a living vocabulary — one that can still carry questions about secular thought, moral possibility, and the emergence of humanism.
At the center of the project is a fictionalized version of Aldo Manuzio, the Renaissance humanist and publisher who made Greek classics available as enchiridia, or portable books, in Venice. Nolan’s interest in Manuzio is not simply historical. It is tied to the idea that knowledge can be made more accessible, and that form itself can change who gets to enter a conversation.
She also frames the pavilion as a response to the present. In her view, the project’s faith in human curiosity and moral possibility feels especially pointed at a moment when expertise is often dismissed in public life. That tension gives Dreamshook its charge: it is at once an act of homage and a quiet challenge to the way cultural authority is assigned.
Nolan is equally clear-eyed about the inheritance she is working within. She acknowledges the influence of European literature and art on her own thinking, while also recognizing the need to widen the historical record and make room for voices that were excluded. The result is a pavilion shaped by admiration, doubt, and revision — a fitting combination for an artist drawn to the space where certainty begins to dissolve.
