The Venice Art Biennale 2026 arrives under the title In Minor Keys, an exhibition initiated by Koyo Kouoh that honors her vision following her passing in 2025. The project takes its cue from musical language: the “minor key” as a tonal space of ambiguity, displacement, and emotional complexity.
Across the Giardini and Arsenale, rather than organizing contemporary art into a single dominant narrative, the exhibition is structured as a field of overlapping frequencies. Works are positioned less as statements than as tonal shifts within a broader composition: fragments of knowledge, memory, ecology, cosmology, and institutional history.
The United States Pavilion offers a parallel but structurally distinct framework from the curatorial logic of the main exhibition. In 2026, it is represented by Alma Allen, whose project Call Me the Breeze centers on large-scale sculptural works that blur geological, organic, and bodily forms. His practice treats sculpture as an encounter (sensory, physical, and atmospheric) rather than a strictly conceptual object.
On the other side, the Italian Pavilion presents Con te con tutto with the work of Chiara Camoni, – Italian artist featured in our spring exhibition in 2022, Regeneration – curated by Cecilia Canziani, collaborator and Advisor of the Academy. Conceived as a large, site-specific installation that transforms the space into a shared, evolving environment where sculpture, bodies, and visitors interact; centered on female collaboration, craft, and ecological awareness, it frames art as a collective practice and an invitation to rethink how we relate to others and to the living world.
Giardini and Arsenale
Within Kouoh’s curatorial structure, several artists connected to the American Academy in Rome’s ecosystem appear across the main exhibition, particularly through practices engaging archives, institutional critique, and cosmological systems, with the outstanding presence of Laurie Anderson (2004 Resident), Wangechi Mutu (2025 Resident) and Khaled Sabsabi (2025 Affiliated Fellow).
Selected for the Applied Arts Pavilion at the Arsenale, Gala Porras-Kim (2026 Resident) develops one of the most conceptually precise articulations of the Biennale’s core themes in collaboration with the Victoria and Albert Museum. Working with drawings, sculpture, and video, she investigates how museums classify, conserve, and narrate cultural artefacts, exposing conservation not as neutrality but as an active system that determines what cultural objects mean, and even what they are allowed to remain.
Khaled Sabsabi (2025 Affiliated Fellow) – Australian National Pavilion
An Affiliated Fellow from Creative Australia and also part of the Central Pavilion, Sabsabi is the representative of the artistic team – exhibiting with Michael Dagostino as curator – of the Australian National Pavilion, following his recommissioning in July 2025.
Sabsabi is an acclaimed multidisciplinary artist with over 35 years of experience working across artistic mediums, geographical borders, and with communities both in Australia and internationally. His work explores themes of human collectivity, questions identity politics and ideology, and sparks thought and dialogue through compelling artistic expression.
Collateral Events
The collateral events of the Biennale extend the exhibition beyond the Giardini into universities, palazzi, and institutional sites across Venice. Within this expanded field, several AAR-affiliated projects articulate the Biennale’s broader conceptual concerns.
Monia Ben-Hamouda (2025 Fellow)
Location: Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana
Opening: May 6 (through November 22, 2026), 6:00–8:00 pm
Ben-Hamouda, Tunisian-Italian artist, winner of the MAXXI Bvlgari Prize and Fellow in 2025, presents the project Fragments of Fire Worship, installed in the vestibules of the library. It is the first exhibition promoted by Fondazione Bvlgari in Venice alongside a project by Lara Favaretto. Her practice engages fragmentation, memory, and material instability, aligning closely with the Biennale’s broader attention to archival disruption.
The library setting and the support of Fondazione Bvlgari reinforce a key Venice 2026 motif: institutions of knowledge as active exhibition spaces rather than neutral containers.
Francesco Urbano Ragazzi (2025 Italian Fellows)
Location: Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
Opening: May 6, 6:00–8:00 pm (through July 6, 2026)
Curated by Francesco Urbano Ragazzi (2025 Italian Fellows), the exhibition Stitched Cosmos by Jennifer West transforms Ca’ Foscari into a spatial and conceptual instrument for thinking cosmology.
The project draws on the Harvard Plate Stacks at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, reworking astronomical imaging into an immersive installation. Central to the exhibition is the recovery of the Harvard Astronomical Computers, a group of women scientists whose labor shaped early astrophysical knowledge but remained historically under-acknowledged.
In Venice, their work is reactivated as both material archive and conceptual foundation, aligning with the Biennale’s broader interrogation of scientific and institutional visibility.
Amy Revier (2025 Fellow)
Location: CASA YALI
Opening: May 7 (through July 24), 6:00–8:00 pm
Revier’s practice approaches weaving as a conceptual system rather than a traditional craft form. During her residency, she develops works that treat textile production as a method of thinking, where structure, repetition, and material accumulation become forms of analysis.
Her Venice project situates the city as a site of convergence, producing garments and textile works that function as residues of process. The resulting exhibition in May 2026 extends this logic, positioning Venice itself as a layered archive of material histories.
Ieva Lygnugarytė (2026 Visiting Artist) and Meral Karacaoğlan (2026 Visiting Scholar)
Location: Oratorio dei Crociferi
Opening: May 1 (through May 31, 2026), 6:00–8:00 pm[
Reception: May 9, 10:00 am–8:00 pm
Presenting CARMEN: Utopias of Belonging by artist and researcher Lyhnugarté and curated by Karacaoğlan, supported by the Lithuanian Culture Institute, the project revisits a 16th-century diplomatic gesture – the planned gift of a European bison from the Lithuanian Grand Duchy to Pope Leo X – as a contemporary film installation on visibility and cultural recognition in Europe.
Installed in the historical Oratorio dei Crociferi, the video engages Jacopo Palma il Giovane’s painted cycle, reactivating Venice–Rome historical ties while reframing peripheral European narratives within the Biennale context.
Developed partially in Rome and at the Academy, the project includes a collaboration with 2026 Fellow Oswald Hyùnh in the soundtrack and the participation of 2026 Fellow Paula Gaither.
Special mentions include the contribution of Jenny Lin (2025 Fellow) with a poetry reading to the program of the Su Xiaobai Foundation’s collateral exhibition Alchemical Universe, as well as the participation of Walid Raad in the main pavilion. Also notable is Lorna Simpson with Third Person, a major ongoing solo exhibition on view at Punta della Dogana through November 2026. Both Raad and Simpson served as Rome Prize jurors (in 2022 and 2018, respectively), and Simpson was previously featured in the Academy’s exhibition Nero su Bianco back in 2015.
Within this environment, the American Academy in Rome does not appear as a single institutional presence but as a distributed layer of research practice embedded across the main exhibition, national representation, and collateral events.