During the opening week of the Venice Biennale, the city swallows the art world whole. Galleries overflow, gondolas glide through canals heavy with collectors, and press releases pile up like driftwood. Yet, within this grand noise lies a truth easily overlooked: the Biennale is rarely the most interesting thing in Venice during that week. In fact, it often never has been. In every corner of the floating city—within centuries-old palazzos, former hospital corridors, historic university halls, and buildings perched over the water—something else is always happening: works that are quieter, riskier, and often far sharper.
This year, that list of “other things” is nothing short of extraordinary.
1. Shirin Neshat — Do U Dare!
Palazzo Marin · May 8 – September 6, 2026 In 2018, Nasim Aghdam, an Iranian woman, stormed the YouTube headquarters in California, wounding three people before taking her own life at the age of 38. Aghdam had constructed her own imaginary universe through videos that garnered millions of views—a bizarre world that mocked the power mechanisms of the content industry. Now, Shirin Neshat makes Aghdam the protagonist of her new film.
Do U Dare! begins with black-and-white footage of her arrival in the US, gradually shifting into full-color sequences as it follows Aghdam’s fragile inner world, blurring the lines between fiction and reality. Neshat asks a single, staggering question: What is the link between the female body being commodified, surveilled, and consumed in American contemporary media versus under Iran’s authoritarian regime? What does freedom actually mean today? Two different systems, two different mechanisms of oppression—but the result remains the same.
2. Hernan Bas — The Visitors
Ca’ Pesaro · May 7 – August 30, 2026 Living in Miami’s Little Havana, Cuban-American painter Hernan Bas knows the concept of a “tourist” all too well. Following his residency in Venice, he has produced over thirty new paintings placing tourists in both realistic and absurd scenarios. His characters are mostly young white men: in the crowded Mona Lisa room at the Louvre, in the steaming geothermal waters of Iceland, or in the kitchen of the infamous Alcatraz Prison in San Francisco Bay. With these types—ranging from indifferent, bored youths to angry, resentful figures—Bas depicts both the perpetrators and the victims of mass tourism’s superficial gaze. Dark irony has never been handled quite so masterfully by Bas.
3. Outta Love
Palazzo Vendramin ai Carmini · May 7 – June 30, 2026 Regardless of the form it takes, what remains after a breakup—a prolonged, unyielding ache rather than a sudden collision—is the core theme of this exhibition. Outta Love asks what happens after intimacy shatters: What do we do with the wreckage, and what new forms sprout from this fracture?
Francesca Woodman’s timeless and unsettling self-portraits, Jenny Saville’s staggering paintings of the body in its rawest state, and Wolfgang Tillmans’ poetic, intimate worlds are spread across the layered interiors of Palazzo Vendramin alongside textiles and text installations. This layering is intentional: loss itself is at least as multi-layered as this space.
4. Parasol unit — TURANDOT: To the Daughters of the East
Palazzo Cavalli-Franchetti · May 9 – October 31, 2026 In Puccini’s famous opera, a Chinese princess somehow bears a Turkish name and solves Greek riddles. The tension in the West’s orientalist construction has remained invisible for centuries. This exhibition returns the name Turāndokht (“Daughter of Turan”) to its ancient origins, spanning modern-day Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.
Bringing together 11 women artists from Central Asia and beyond, the selection places established names like Huma Bhabha and Mona Hatoum alongside young, dynamic voices like Tala Madani and Nazira Karimi. The works trace intertwined histories and mythologies, shouting that the “East” is not a flat, uniform “exoticism” created by the West, but a place of polyphonic and situated narratives.
5. Peggy Guggenheim — The Making of a Collector
Peggy Guggenheim Collection · Until October 2026 In the 1930s, London had no museum of modern art; institutional acquisitions and exhibitions remained profoundly conservative. In 1938, American collector Peggy Guggenheim arrived in the city. Inspired in part by her lover Samuel Beckett’s passion for modernism, she opened a small but influential gallery: Guggenheim Jeune.
In eighteen months, she organized over 20 exhibitions, gave Kandinsky his first solo show in England, and organized an exhibition of children’s art that included works by a young Lucian Freud. This exhibition reconstructs that intense avant-garde period: Mondrian’s abstractions, Cedric Morris’s portraits, and more. A rare, documented portrait of how a collector with a flawless vision is formed.
6. Helter Skelter — Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince
Fondazione Prada · May 9 – November 23, 2026 Nancy Spector is in the curatorial seat, which is a manifesto in itself. Spector brings together Richard Prince, the most provocative name in appropriation art, and Arthur Jafa, the creator of one of the most staggering collage films in cinema history regarding racism in the US. Spector describes this encounter as “a love letter to the complex country we live in, and simultaneously a searing indictment.”
A visual diary compiled from images the two artists sent to each other over a long period is being opened to the public for the first time. Unquestionably, this will be Venice’s most difficult, yet unmissable, confrontation.
7. Jennifer West — Stitched Cosmos
Ca’ Foscari University · May 6 – July 6, 2026 At the heart of this installation, placed within Venice’s oldest university, lies a massive, translucent flooring created by stitching together analog film strips. Natural light filtering through large glass windows softly illuminates this cosmic ground.
The source of West’s research lies in an archive of over 500,000 glass plates kept at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. These photographic negatives, bearing handwritten notes, were produced by a group of “invisible” female scientists hired to classify and calculate astronomical observations over the last century. West transforms the immense, overshadowed labor of these women who mapped the stars into an artwork as miraculous as the universe itself.
8. Gaza — No Words — See the Exhibit
Palazzo Mora · May 9 – November 22, 2026 According to UN data, between October 2023 and December 2025, an average of 47 women and girls were killed every day in Gaza.
This poignant exhibition highlights women who witnessed the war but managed to survive, focusing on their craft as a form of resistance. The exhibition features 100 pieces of Palestinian tatreez (traditional embroidery), a 3,000-year-old tradition. Each of these works, produced in refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan, and the West Bank, consists of approximately 55,000 stitches. A total of 5.5 million tiny stitches… each one a silent representative of a life lost.
9. Lorna Simpson — Third Person
Punta della Dogana · Until November 22, 2026 A continuation of the Source Notes exhibition opened last spring at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this presentation expands the artist’s 20-year practice with over 20 additional works. The selection includes Simpson’s unforgettable, massive paintings in striking blue tones.
The artist’s first painting, Three Figures (2014), sits at the heart of the show: it reconstructs the horrific moment of the 1963 Birmingham Children’s Crusade over twelve panels—the shameful scene where children marching for their civil rights were attacked with high-pressure water cannons.
10. Lawrence Abu Hamdan — Fondazione In Between Art Film
Complesso dell’Ospedaletto · May 6 – November 22, 2026 The long-awaited finale of the Trilogy of Uncertainties: first a dim light, then a dense fog, and now a scorching heat. Eight new video installations meet the audience in a haunting, former hospital building.
While Wang Tuo and Yuyan Wang read long-term environmental change through automation and algorithmic governance, Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk stage fictional deathbed statements of Russian soldiers played by Ukrainian actors. Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s work, 450XL: The Story of a Fugitive Sound, reconstructs an acoustic attack during a protest in Belgrade, presenting “silence” as both absolute evidence and a form of resistance in itself.
This year, Venice functions less like a glittering art fair and more like a heavy ground for reckoning. The main buildings of the Biennale may greet you with their familiar splendor, but the real dialogue continues here—in the dark corners of the palazzos and along the banks of the canals.
