The 2026 Venice Biennale opened on Saturday without an awards jury for the first time in memory, after the panel resigned to protest the inclusion of Israeli and Russian national pavilions while both countries face International Criminal Court investigations for human rights abuses. The jury’s departure forced Biennale organizers to scrap the Golden Lion prizes and replace them with an anonymous, Eurovision-style public vote for the best national pavilion and the best participant in the main curated show, “In Minor Keys.” Winners will be announced on closing day, November 22.
The upheaval turned the Biennale’s opening days into the most chaotic and politically charged edition the 130-year-old exhibition has seen. On Friday, protesters objecting to Israel’s presence clashed with police outside the Israeli Pavilion in the Giardini, the Biennale’s historic garden venue. Earlier in the week, Ukrainian and Russian feminist groups converged on the Russian Pavilion, and Palestinian demonstrators held a memorial for artists killed in Gaza. British artist Anish Kapoor, attending the preview, told reporters the atmosphere reflected “the politics of hate and war and all that that’s been going on now for too long.”
The jury limited its boycott only to countries under active ICC investigation, but critics noted the omission of the United States, whose actions in several conflicts have drawn condemnation from international human rights organizations, as an inconsistency in the protest’s logic.
‘In Minor Keys’ centers overlooked voices
The main curated exhibition, organized by the late Cameroonian-born curator Koyo Kouoh before her death a year ago, brings together 110 artists and artistic groups under a title that signals its focus on minority perspectives. Five co-curators carried the project to completion, preserving Kouoh’s vision of an exhibition that, in the words of co-curator Marie Helene Pereira, “made spaces for everyone to shine.”
A towering red feathered sculpture with beaded embroidery, rooted in New Orleans Black Masking culture and the traditions brought by enslaved Africans, greets visitors at the exhibition’s entrance — an immediate declaration of the show’s investment in art born from marginalized communities.
National pavilions: from newcomer dilemmas to effluent
The national pavilions sprawl across the Giardini and the Arsenale, and this year’s offerings range from the meditative to the confrontational.
Britain’s Lubaina Himid, a Turner Prize winner born in Zanzibar who has lived in Great Britain for more than 70 years, fills the British Pavilion with brightly hued paintings of couples grappling with the dilemmas of making a home in a new place. In one work, two architects debate whether to build a monument to their cultural contribution or a structure they can escape from tomorrow — a tension Himid links directly to the experience of being a longtime newcomer.
Austria’s Florentina Holzinger delivers one of the Biennale’s most talked-about presentations with “Seaworld Venice.” Outside the pavilion, a naked woman hangs from a bell as a human clapper. Inside, a nude rider circles a tank on a Jet Ski, while another naked performer breathes through a scuba mouthpiece submerged in water flushed from nearby toilets and filtered multiple times. The work is an unsubtle critique of Venice’s relegation to an over-touristed amusement park.
The Vatican Pavilion takes the opposite approach, offering spiritual respite in the Mystic Gardens of the Discalced Carmelite order next to Venice’s main train station. Visitors walk among vineyards and pomegranate trees wearing headphones that play music by the 12th-century abbess and composer St. Hildegard of Bingen, reinterpreted by artists including Brian Eno and Patti Smith. “Music helps us delve into ourselves and understand, to use a phrase by Hildegard, the symphony that God has placed in our lives,” said Rev. Ermanno Barucco, prior of the Carmelite order.
Israel: a meditation on dialogue
Inside the Israeli Pavilion, Romanian-born artist Belu-Simion Fainaru’s installation fills the space with water dripping from suspended tubes into a pool, stopping in cycles of exactly 42 seconds — a reference to divine creative power in Jewish mysticism. Locks engraved with the commandment “Love thy neighbor as thyself” in Hebrew hang throughout the pavilion, alongside the hopeful exhortation “This too shall pass.”
Fainaru was explicit about the political statement embedded in his participation. “I am against boycott, I’m for dialogue, and that’s a political statement,” he said, calling the jury’s exclusion of Israel a form of discrimination. His pavilion stood in direct counterpoint to the protests outside its walls, insisting that art’s role is to keep channels open even when geopolitics demands they be closed.
Estonia: daily practice as art
Estonian artist Merike Estna will spend the entire Biennale working on a massive wall painting inside a community center gymnasium that was once a church — the layered history of the space echoing her practice of spilling paint to build deeply textured surfaces over time. Curator Natalia Sielewicz described the daily act of painting as “the everyday feminism of sustaining life, of sustaining our planet,” a deliberate elevation of the repetitive, undervalued work women perform.
The Biennale runs through November 22, giving visitors months to cast their votes and witness Estna’s painting grow, Fainaru’s water continue its 42-second cycles, and Holzinger’s performers repeat their daily critique. The absence of a jury has forced the institution into an experiment in audience-driven judgment — one whose results will not be known until the final day.