61st Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte – La Biennale di Venezia opens under the title In Minor Keys, honoring and carrying forward the vision of Koyo Kouoh, Artistic Director of the Visual Arts Department of La Biennale, who passed in 2025. Across the Giardini and Arsenale, the exhibition unfolds as a field of overlapping frequencies, where works operate less as singular statements than as tonal shifts, bringing into resonance fragments of knowledge, memory, ecology, cosmology and history.
Through the lens of the American Academy in Rome, what emerges is not a single narrative but a constellation of practices connected through a shared experience and context of U.S., Italian and international artists and scholars in Italy –sometimes simultaneous, sometimes across different moments in time. This common ground has, in various ways, enabled exchanges, cultivated collaborations, and in some cases given origin to projects now presented in Venice. Rather than a unified story, it is a network of intersecting trajectories that continue to reverberate across La Biennale’s main exhibition, national pavilions, and collateral events and that the Academy continues to cover and support.
The United States Pavilion presents sculptor Alma Allen, whose project Call Me the Breeze features large-scale works that blur geological, organic, and bodily forms. The pavilion embodies Allen's conviction that sculpture is above all an encounter –sensory, physical, and atmospheric– rather than a strictly conceptual object.
The Italian Pavilion, meanwhile, presents Con te con tutto, a large-scale site-specific installation by Chiara Camoni, Italian artist featured in the Academy's spring 2022 exhibition Regeneration, curated by Cecilia Canziani, long-standing collaborator and AAR Advisor, transforming the space into a living environment shaped by collaboration, craft, and ecological awareness.
La Biennale Arte opens to the public on May 9 through November 22, 2026, with preview days 6, 7 and 8 of May.
Main Exhibition
Location: Giardini and Arsenale
Within Kouoh's curatorial structure, several artists connected to the American Academy in Rome's ecosystem appear across the main exhibition, their practices engaging archives, institutional critique, and cosmological systems.
Laurie Anderson, 2006 Resident and 2026 Visting Artist, brings to the exhibition the boundary-dissolving language she has refined over five decades, weaving together music, storytelling, technology, and visual art into works that map the interior landscape of memory, loss, and human perception. Her presence in In Minor Keys speaks directly to Kouoh's investment in artists whose practices resist easy categorization and insist on the primacy of emotional experience.
Wangechi Mutu, 2019 Resident, whose piece Shavasana I was exhibited at the Academy last year as part of her solo exhibition at the Galleria Borghese, contributes a practice rooted in the body, myth, and the natural world. Working across sculpture, collage, film, and performance, she builds hybrid figures and environments that draw on African cosmology, colonial history, and feminist thought, conjuring forms that are simultaneously beautiful and unsettling, ancient and urgently contemporary.
Gala Porras-Kim, 2026 Resident, was personally selected by Kouoh to represent the Applied Arts Pavilion at the Arsenale, a special project in collaboration with the Victoria and Albert Museum, presented outside of competition. Working across drawing, sculpture, and video, she investigates the institutional frameworks through which museums classify, conserve, and narrate cultural artifacts, exposing conservation not as a neutral act but as an active system that determines what objects are permitted to mean, and even what they are permitted to remain.
Khaled Sabsabi, 2025 Affiliated Fellow, appears in the main exhibition as well as in the Australian National Pavilion, a dual presence that marks a historic first for any Australian representative at the Biennale. His work explores human collectivity, the politics of identity, and the possibilities of spiritual and cultural encounter, drawing on over 35 years of practice across mediums, geographies, and communities.
National Pavilions
Location: Giardini
French Pavilion
Yto Barrada, 2017 Resident, whose exhibition The Dye Garden opened at the Academy the following spring, represents France with Comme Saturne, an immersive installation curated by Myriam Ben Salah. Drawing on textiles, film, and archival gesture, the work enlists material process as a language through which histories and cosmologies are reimagined and transformed. The presentation also marks the French Pavilion's return to its newly renovated historic home in the Giardini.
Australian Pavilion
Among the most celebrated stories of this Biennale is that of Khaled Sabsabi, whose path to Venice has been as turbulent as it has been triumphant. Originally appointed to represent Australia in early 2025, he was dropped amid political controversy before being reinstated in July of that year following an outpouring of support from the international arts community. His pavilion work, conference of one's self, draws on the 12th-century Sufi allegory The Conference of the Birds to create an immersive, multisensory encounter exploring spirituality, migration, and shared humanity, exhibited with curator Michael Dagostino.
Collateral Events
Programs Around Venice
The collateral program extends the Biennale beyond the Giardini into universities, palazzi, hidden spaces and institutional sites across the city. Within this expanded field, several AAR-affiliated projects articulate the exhibition's broader conceptual concerns with particular depth and ambition.
Monia Ben Hamouda (2025 Affiliated Fellow)
Location: Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana
Opening: May 6, 6:00–8:00 pm (by invitation) and open to the public from May 9 through November 22, 2026
The 2025 Bvlgari MAXXI American Academy in Rome Affiliated Artist, installs Fragments of Fire Worship in the vestibules of the historical library in Piazza San Marco as one of the 31 official collateral events of this year's Biennale. The first exhibition promoted by Fondazione Bvlgari in Venice, it is presented alongside a project by Lara Favaretto. Engaging fragmentation, memory, and material instability, Ben Hamouda's work aligns closely with the Biennale's broader interrogation of archival disruption, while the library setting itself and the renewed support of the Fondazione Bvlgari embody one of Venice 2026's most resonant motifs: that institutions of knowledge are not neutral containers but active and contested spaces of meaning and connection.
Amy Revier (2025 Fellow)
Location: CASA YALI
Opening: May 7, 6:00–8:00 pm (through July 24, 2026)
The 2025 Rome Prize in Design Fellow presents THE BLUE OF DISTANCE, curated by Marina Marques, showing a new body of work developed residency in Venice at the glass studio Yali, behind Palazzo Grassi, following her time at the Academy. Rooted in research into textile histories and trade routes, the residency foregrounds process as a means of articulating the city’s stratified memory. Handweaving functions as an apparatus through which material and concept converge as a structured surface shaped by tension, rhythm, and deliberate compositional choices. Each work retains the traces of its making, embedding within its form the temporal, material, and intellectual conditions that informed its production.
Francesco Urbano Ragazzi (2025 Italian Fellows)
Location: Ca' Foscari University of Venice
Opening: May 6, 6:00–8:00 pm (through July 6, 2026)
The inaugural 2025 Italian Fellows for Curatorial Research curate Stitched Cosmos by artist Jennifer West, a project developed during her Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, drawing on the Harvard Plate Stacks at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Informing from over 500,000 astronomical glass plates, the work revisits a key archive of cosmic imaging and the overlooked labor of the Harvard Astronomical Computers –women whose annotations shaped modern astrophysics. Through film, re-photography, and installation, West reactivates damaged scientific images into new visual and sonic forms. Presented in the campus of Ca' Foscari University of Venice, in the Dorsoduro district, the exhibition connects astronomy, archival material, and feminist histories of invisible labor.
Ieva Lygnugarytė and Meral Karacaoğlan (2026 Visiting Artist and Scholar)
Location: Oratorio dei Crociferi
Opening: May 9, 10:00 am–8:00 pm (through May 31, 2026)
Carmen is a video installation by Ieva Lygnugarytė that revisits a forgotten 16th-century diplomatic gesture: the Grand Duchy of Lithuania's failed attempt to gift a stuffed European bison to Pope Leo X. Blending archival research and moving image, the work reflects on visibility, marginality, and cultural recognition in Europe, its images unfolding in dialogue with Jacopo Palma il Giovane's painted cycle inside the hidden church in Cannareggio, as part of Carmen: Utopias of Belonging, curated by Meral Karacaoğlan. Developed in collaboration with the Academy and supported by the Lithuanian Culture Institute, the project draws on a contribution by Oswald Huỳnh (2026 Fellow) on musical score and features the participation of Paula Gaither (2026 Fellow).
Special Mentions
Jenny Lin (2025 Fellow), public programs curator for the Su Xiaobai Foundation’s collateral exhibition Alchemical Universe, will contribute a poetry reading on May 7 at Palazzo Soranzo Van Axel. Claire Dillon (2025 Fellow), who met Australian Pavilion representative Khaled Sabsabi during their 2025 residency at the Academy, has contributed a text to the exhibition catalogue and will participate in a conversation with the pavilion’s artistic team on May 8 at Fondazione Querini Stampalia, exploring themes of spirituality and Islamic visual culture.
Walid Raad is featured in the main exhibition, while Lorna Simpson presents Third Person, a major solo exhibition on view through November 2026 at Punta della Dogana. Both artists have longstanding ties to the Academy, having served as Rome Prize jurors (in 2022 and 2018, respectively), and Simpson’s work was featured in the Academy’s exhibition Nero su Bianco in 2015.
Also of note, Joseph Kosuth and Michelangelo Pistoletto –who worked together on the exhibition and publication Joseph Kosuth/Michelangelo Pistoletto presented at the American Academy in Rome in 1992, curated by Pier Luigi Tazzi– return to Venice with major solo presentations. Kosuth presents The-exchange-value-of-language-has-fallen-to-zero, featuring seminal conceptual works alongside a new commission at Casa dei Tre Oci, while Pistoletto solo exhibition Color & Light will be held at Palazzo Widmann, opening by appointment on May 6.
Make sure to follow the Academy's social media channels, as we will be present during the preview week, covering many of the featured projects through our Instagram and Facebook stories.