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The main exhibition In ‘Minor Keys’, curated by Koyo Kouoh, will bring together 110 invited participants, alongside the 100 national pavilion presentations and 31 Collateral Events. Seven countries are taking part in the Biennale Arte for the first time: Guinea, Equatorial Guinea, Nauru, Qatar, Sierra Leone, Somalia and Vietnam, while El Salvador is participating for the first time with its own pavilion.

To help navigate the art scene, we have selected a shortlist of must-see highlights by artists represented in the Collection, beginning with the main exhibition, moving through the national pavilions and continuing into the wider constellation of shows that make the city such a compelling place to explore.

Kouoh conceived ‘In Minor Keys’ as an exhibition shaped by an openness to the unexpected. After the curator’s premature passing in May 2025, the exhibition has been realized by the team she had assembled and carries forward a vision grounded in resilience, memory and the quieter forms of intensity that often leave the deepest impression. Kouoh’s title suggests an exhibition attuned to mood, repetition and resonance, offering a clear point of departure for the Biennale as a whole.

Among our highlights are installations by �鶹�� Art Collection artists Nick Cave�����Ի���Ebony G. Patterson, two artists who explore how emotion can be vibrantly carried through material and form. Cave’s work often moves between sculpture, installation, sound and performance, turning visual exuberance into something communal and deeply felt. Patterson, in turn, draws viewers in through beauty only to complicate the act of looking, building richly layered worlds in which ornament, mourning and memory remain closely entwined.

After visiting the main exhibition, stroll through the national pavilions for more concentrated presentations, distinct curatorial voices and artists working at a different scale.

At the British Pavilion, Lubaina Himid RA, CBE, presents ‘Predicting History: Testing Translation’, a major solo exhibition of new work. Himid has long reworked the language of history painting to ask who is visible, who is heard and how belonging is shaped. In Venice, a new series of multi-panel paintings and a soundscape made with Magda Stawarska considers home, legacy and reinvention.

Qatar, participating in the Giardini for the first time, introduces a strong new presence with ‘Untitled (a gathering of remarkable people)’, a group show led by the relational practice of Rirkrit Tiravanija. Conceived as a gathering space rather than a conventional display, the collective project features a tent-like structure and brings together a film by Sophia Al-Maria, performances organized by Tarek Atoui, a sculpture by Alia Fari and a culinary program by Fadi Kattan. It is a pavilion shaped by exchange, hospitality and the idea of culture as a shared social space.

At the UAE Pavilion in the Arsenale, Farah Al Qasimi appears in ‘Washwasha’, a group exhibition exploring contemporary soundscapes in the Emirates. Framed around oral histories, migration, language and transmission, the exhibition looks at how sound structures lived experience. Al Qasimi’s work, with its close attention to everyday settings, coded interiors and social detail, sits naturally within that conversation.

The Biennale does not end at its official venues. One of the pleasures of Venice during these months is the way the city becomes an extension of the exhibition itself, with palazzi, museums and foundations offering parallel passages through the season.

At Palazzo Manfrin, Anish Kapoor presents an ambitious survey of architectural models, large-scale installations and stainless steel works. The exhibition makes a strong case for sculpture as something that does not simply occupy space but also alters it.

At Museo di Palazzo Grimani, Amoako Boafo’s first solo exhibition in Italy places new and recent paintings in dialogue with the Renaissance architecture of the palazzo. His portraits, with their tactile surfaces and precise sense of presence, bring a contemporary language of Black identity into contact with Venice’s longer pictorial traditions.

Lee Ufan’s exhibition at SMAC Venice, presented by Dia Art Foundation, offers another kind of encounter altogether, designed in close partnership with the artist himself. Spanning more than seven decades and including a new site-specific commission, it reflects a practice built on restraint, interval and heightened awareness.

There is much more to seek out across the city. The exhibition ‘Eroi d’oro’ at Fondazione Giorgio Cini brings together Georg Baselitz’s most recent large-scale paintings. In Erwin Wurm’s monographic exhibition at Museo Fortuny, the artist transforms sculpture into a vehicle for humor, distortion and critique, while Julian Charrière’s ‘Spiral Economy’ at Museo Correr places his work in dialogue with Antonio Canova, opening a conversation around marble, geology and material memory. Nalini Malani’s ‘Of Woman Born’ at Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, presented as an official Collateral Event, extends her immersive visual language into a powerful spatial environment. At Punta della Dogana, Lorna Simpson’s ‘Third Person’ marks the most significant European presentation of her work in more than a decade.

These highlights exemplify the �鶹�� Art Collection’s continued mission to support and collect works by the most significant artists of our time. In that sense, they are particularly fitting for an edition that asks visitors to look closely. Following the late resignation of the Biennale Arte 2026 jury, two Visitors’ Lions will this year be awarded by public vote – all the more reason to see this year’s Biennale with fresh attention.