Security in Ruins. Review of the 61st International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia
The 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, May 9 – November 22, 2026.
This edition of the Biennale has been beset by dissent and protest, most notably worker strikes and the resignation of the jury protesting the participation of Russia and Israel. The Biennale organizers responded to these protests heavy handedly with reinforced policing throughout the city and by taking the extraordinary measure of devolving the selection of the winners of the main prize to the general Biennale public, in what can only be read as a crudely populist gesture. Artists and cultural workers have initiated a broad spectrum of critical conversations: within the curatorial frameworks of the Biennale exhibitions; by way of collateral events; and through maverick actions publicized by way of social media. In the East European context, examples include spectacular protests orchestrated by exiled members of the group Pussy Riot, and public statements of solidarity with Ukraine, delivered by key cultural figures denouncing the war outside the Russian pavilion on the opening night of the press preview. Cultural workers across the board are increasingly challenging authoritarian politics and rejecting the mechanisms of soft power at play in the cultural field, with a view to protesting war, extractivism, and environmental degradation, globally. This review discusses a selection of East European projects on view in Venice this summer though the lens of current affairs and a concern that post-Cold War assumptions now lie in ruins.
Those working for the Ukrainian pavilion at the Biennale this year sport orange hi-vis emblazoned with the phrase “Security Guarantees.” These refer to the particular set of historical agreements which paved the way for Russia’s war on Ukraine. At the time of the dissolution of the USSR, Ukraine had the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world. Between 1992 and 1996, the country signed a series of international nuclear non-proliferation agreements, resulting in the transfer of nuclear warheads to Russia in exchange for assistance with decommissioning costs and security guarantees from the USA, UK, and Russia. The 2014 annexation of Crimea and invasion of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, followed by the full-scale invasion in 2022, were in clear violation of these “guarantees.” Ukraine’s historic gesture of goodwill in the international arena has had catastrophic consequences. The Cold War logic of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) is more twisted than ever today: those with nuclear arsenals attack vulnerable non-nuclear neighbors with impunity. The Ukrainian pavilion booklet has on its cover a photograph of the decommissioning of a silo-based launch facility for intercontinental missiles, taken in 1996. The freight of this history provides the backdrop for Zhanna Kadyrova’s The Origami Deer, representing Ukraine at this edition of the Biennale. Her simple sculpture of a concrete deer was originally designed, in 2019, for a space formerly occupied by a nuclear-capable Soviet fighter aircraft, in the city park in Pokrovsk. That same deer is now prominently displayed at the entrance to the Giardini, suspended from a crane mounted on the back of a flatbed truck. The story of the object being “forced into exile” is the project’s theme: its journey from Pokrovsk to Venice is recorded in a multi-monitor video installation in the national pavilion, providing a polyphonic account of its 4,000-mile trans-European journey. This began in August 2024, when Pokrovsk was attacked by Russia, and featured stops in ten cities, including Kyiv, Lviv, Warsaw, Prague, Brussels and Amiens, each home to Ukrainians forced into exile in recent years. The Origami Deer is thus “not only a sculpture but a site of memory for people from Pokrovsk — some recreating family photographs beside it, others touching it while making a wish to return home.” The work “unfolds with notes of grief, yet in an atmosphere of joy at The Origami Deer’s rescue, at its reunion with fellow citizens in all their places of exile, and at the fact that, despite Russian aggression, Ukrainian culture continues to find ways to thrive.”(Wall text for ‘Security Guarantees,’ Ukrainian Pavilion, curated by Ksenia Malykh and Leonid Marushchak, May 9-November 22, 2026, 61st International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy.)
Zhanna Kadirova. The Origami Deer (video still). Ukrainian Pavilion, Arsenale, Venice, 2026. Photograph by Klara Kemp-Welch.
A monument from wartime is also the subject of the Slovene pavilion, occupied by the group Nonument’s installation Soundtrack for an Invisible House, curated by Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez. The work imagines the ruins of a first world war-era wooden mosque called Log 
pod Mangartom, erected by the Austro-Hungarians in 1917 and designed to “strengthen the loyalty and integration of the Bosnian regiment into the otherwise predominantly Catholic army.”(Wall text for ‘Soundtrack for an Invisible House’, Slovene pavilion, curated by Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez. May 9-November 22, 2026, 61st International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy.) The original mosque is now buried beneath a meadow, evoked in the poetic soundscape played in the space. The project’s relevance to the stake of the world today was stressed in the curatorial text, which argued that “the Western democratic project is being transformed into a ruin, and genocide turned into a spectacle” calling the work “a metaphor of incessant searching for human dignity in times of civilizational ruin and intensifying wars, at a time when art is more than ever expected to take a position.”(Ibid.) Taking a position, in this case, included closing the pavilion for one of the preview days, when I was visiting, replacing the soundtrack with Radio Alhara, and displaying a selection of no-Genocide pavilion posters. These read: “We stand with Palestine because we know now that the destruction of Palestine is the destruction of the world” and “Free Palestine. Abolish Zionism.” Similar posters populated many of the other Arsenale installations as part of a coordinated protest action organised by the Art Not Genocide Alliance (ANGA). While a strong gesture of solidarity with Gaza, the proliferation of posters in the Arsenale narrowed the political field for interpretation, short-circuiting other, often related, questions that might have been raised by the original projects.
Predrag Djaković. From Golgotha to Resurrection. Serbian Pavilion, Giardini, Venice, 2026. Photograph by Klara Kemp-Welch.
Mladen Bundalo. Domus Diasporica (detail). Pavilion of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Palazzo Malipiero, San Marco, Venice, 2026. Photograph by Klara Kemp-Welch.
Continuing a broader conversation with the idea of Southeastern Europe as “a space of symbolic overload” (Ivan Čolović), Predrag Djaković’s Serbian pavilion, entitled “From Golgotha to Resurrection” houses panels of over 17,000 photographs, postcards, newspapers and other documents from 40 countries, which present an overwhelming archive of 20th century history. Beside them, another wall is piled high with a troubling assemblage of stacked leather suitcases. The installation purportedly aims to “function as a vast field of memory” where “traces of past lives do not form a linear historical narrative; instead, they open a space in which the destinies of nations, individuals, and families intersect in a shared experience of suffering, displacement, and hope.” The collection of vintage suitcases, for their part, are described by the curator as “symbols of departure, forced migration, and lives reduced to what can be carried. They evoke the moment when a person leaves home with only documents, family photographs, and fragments of life, setting out into the unknown in search of safety and a new beginning.”(Wall text for ‘From Golgotha to Resurrection’, Serbian pavilion, curated by Tomaš Koudela. May 9-November 22, 2026, 61stInternational Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy.) The artists’ intentions notwithstanding, these same suitcases inevitably invoke the permanent installation of confiscated belongings at Auschwitz as much as those on display in the baggage room at Ellis Island, leading the installation to a sort of critical atrophy; in seeking to be universal, and not referring to the Holocaust, these suitcases raise the specter of Holocaust-denial, by insisting instead on migration rather than genocide as the main event of the 20th century. The plethora of contextual visual and textual material dominating the room is so overwhelming that the freight of history is in danger of being lost altogether, the documents melting into a uniform sepia wallpaper. The dense wall text citing Jacques Derrida’s archive fever, Walter Benjamin’s observations on testimony, Adorno on music, and other sources, further complicates, rather than resolves, the troubling insistence that the stack of suitcase referred to the ‘universal human experience’ of the twentieth century. Most disappointingly, the final wall shows the artist’s hands playing a Jazz improvisation and bore a sentimental citation about “the mother’s embrace, in which another gaze opens, not as pathos but as a quiet refuge for the human capacity to shed a tear.” While very drawn to the extraordinary documents gathered in the space, I left none the wiser about what sorts of values the 20th century may have left to be resurrected in its wake and a reminder that too much information can be as dangerous as too little. As the pavilion is commissioned by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Serbia, it cannot be independent of the right-wing populist government of Aleksandar Vučić. This may be why it focuses so resolutely on history and offers no obvious reflection on contemporary democratic backsliding in Serbia.
Bosnia & Herzegovina showed Mladen Bundalo’s project Domus Diasporica, which offered quite the opposite approach: a highly personal installation of works around migration and questions of home, including a delightful series of photographs of the artist’s grandmother, Baba Rada, spilling water after him by way of blessing and to ward off bad luck outside every time he left the family home on a journey. At the heart of the installation is a long table with chairs where one can sit and leaf through albums of photographic portraits of migrants in their destination living rooms, focusing on the now of the new home they have made for themselves, rather than on the stories that led to their move. Another room displays DIY materials and books about the idea of homes, as well as a letter to the viewer explaining the stories behind some of the exhibits. These include a plan for a large family house that his “grandfather brought from Germany in the 70s, while working there as a guest worker” and had once hung in their “small family home, where eleven of us lived together.” The construction eventually began in Prijedor, but remained unfinished to date, a “home that never existed.”(Label in ‘Domus Diasporica’, pavilion of Bosnia and Herzegovina, curated by Isidora Živković. May 9-November 22, 2026, 61stInternational Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy.)
Henrike Nauman. The Mechanisation of Farming (2025). German Pavilion, Giardini, Venice, 2026. Photograph by Klara Kemp-Welch.
Intergenerational reflections on home were also explored in the German pavilion, whose theme was RUIN, and brought together Vietnamese artist Sung Tieu and Henrike Naumann, who sadly passed away earlier this year. Tieu transforms the outside of the 1938 building by way of mosaic effect into a graffitied echo of her childhood home in Berlin, a prefab socialist bloc once occupied by Vietnamese migrant workers. Invoking, too, the tiled façade of the “Sunflower House” the traumatic site of a neo-Nazi pogrom in 1993, Tieu’s work “exposes the German pavilion as a site of unresolved violence and invites new forms of critical remembrance, while questioning national narratives.”(Wall text in ‘Ruin ‘, German pavilion, curated by Kathleen Reinhardt. May 9-November 22, 2026, 61st International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy.) Inside, Naumann’s installation, titled The Home Front (2026), sees the pavilion walls painted mint green as in former East German Soviet Army barracks, a large-scale mural recreated a 1960-61 Socialist realist work devoted to The Mechanization of Farming, originally painted in Karl-Marx Stadt by the artist’s grandfather, Karl Heinz Jakob. Naumann’s reworking lends it kitschy overtones by way of semi-relief PVC elements. Another wall is covered with threatening domestic objects, such as rake and pitchfork heads and an old iron, an eerie category of can-do relic, echoing the hoarding impulses invoked by Ilya Kabakov’s canonical installation The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away (1988). Naumann’s work points to a troubling past that remains obdurately in the present, failing to disappear or to decompose after 1989. The artist was clear that “at every juncture… there is no such thing as comfortable here.”(Ibid.) Her insistence on the 1990s era of Reunification reflects the extent to which the process was mishandled; German political lines are still drawn according to the old map, although now the former eastern regions vote overwhelmingly for the AFD.
The politics of transition also surface in uncanny ways in the shared Czech and Slovak pavilion. Visitors enter by way of a black tunnel, emerging in a show dominated by a video installation by Jakub Jansa called The Silence of the Mole (2026), invoking Kafka’s figure Mr. M from the unfinished story The Burrow, written shortly before his death. Jansa’s film concerns a “subject dispossessed of agency” and turns the cartoon character of the mole, Krtek, into a hirsute, creepy actor emerging from below ground in St Marks’ Square.(Wall text for ‘The Silence of the Mole’, Czech pavilion, curated by Peter Sit. May 9-November 22, 2026, 61st International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy.) Theatrical and weird, the work raised questions about the vanishing of past comforts and certainties, and ambivalence towards current realities and the art world. A similar above vs. below the surface dichotomy also structured the Polish pavilion, though in this case the site was water not earth. Liquid Tongues, by Bogna Burska and Daniel Kotowski, is a two-channel video installation showing members of a Community Choir bringing together deaf and hearing members to perform in phonetic English and International Sign Language in ways that seek to learn from the sonic communications of whales. Dressed in red, they sign at the camera under water, holding their heads just above its surface, in mesmerising unity, inspired by the landmark 1970 recording Songs of the Humpback Whale that helped to outlaw whaling. Interspecies and ecological at heart, this interesting project grows on you and works with the principle of Deaf Gain, where “deafness is understood as a separate culture and identity offering new perspectives and forms of expression.”
Tadeusz Kantor. Set for The Dead Class (1975). Procuratie Vecchie, San Marco, Venice, 2026. Photograph by Klara Kemp-Welch.
Poland is also well represented in parallel exhibitions across Venice, including, “Tadeusz Kantor (1915-1990). Emballage, Cricotage and Madame Jarema” for the Starak Foundation which brings together a remarkable body of work by these two key 20th century Polish artists and highlights their long-standing collaboration. Maria Jarema had been a co-founder of the original pre-war Teatr Cricot, before going on to co-found Cricot 2 with Kantor. The show includes props and puppets from Kantor’s Cricot 2 plays, including the Dead Class puppets, a puppet in a free-standing bath in the middle of the main room, and a life-sized melancholic figure hauling a suitcase and large package crossing (and blocking) the threshold between two rooms. The side room with a selection of Kantor’s Informel paintings was stunning, as are the rarely seen works by Jarema in the show, including the fantastic Expressions series from the 1950s. A solo show by Czech artist David Černý, “Artocalypsa,” at Il Teatro dell’Arte (NuoveFondamenta) is also worth seeing. The exhibition includes hard-hitting works concerned with weapons and warfare, most notably an abject kinetic chair made of simulated burnt skin, titled Nuke Chair (2025), as well as half-finished life-sized figures of Putin and Trump.
Vyacheslav Akhunov. Bolbol (Bird in Jar, detail, 1977). Palazzo Franchetti, San Marco, Venice, 2026. Photograph by Klara Kemp-Welch.
Other notable collateral events are on view at Palazzo Franchetti. “Vyacheslav Akhunov: Instruments of the Mind” was remarkable. The leading Uzbek conceptualist shows a rich and varied body of work, spanning five decades, since the 1970s. Much of the work is concerned with the obsolescence of ideology: Akhunov combines a concern with spirituality and mantras with a Central Asian slant on Marxist-Leninist iconography and Moscow Conceptualism. One enters the exhibition via a passage full of open scissors embedded in the partition wall, setting the scene for the melancholic projects that follow. These include a display of jars containing an archive of drawings for past projects, 60 pages of names and signatures of deceased artists, 41 drawings of nightingales trapped in jars, a model of a skeleton surrounded by television monitors, and a carefully penned mantra on white paper ripped neatly in two, meticulous assemblages of Soviet-designed matchboxes, and walls papered with American lottery tickets. The inventiveness, wit and volume of work gathered here make the show unmissable. The same space is home to the exhibition “Turandot – Daughters of the East” which surveys the work of women artists from the length and breadth of the old silk road route that connected China, Delhi, Central Asia, Tehran, and Bagdad to Cairo and Constantinople. The exhibition opens with an eerie animation by Tala Madani entitled The Womb (2019), where we see the horrors of the world outside witnessed though the eyes of an unborn child who tries to turn off the invading images with a remote control but cannot. Other core works in the exhibition include Tajikistani artist Nazira Karimi’s gloomy bridal dresses dipped in cement slurry called Return Policy (2019), suspended like silent witnesses to a tradition allowing brides of “failed” marriages to be returned to their families.
Tala Madani. The Womb (video still, 2019). Palazzo Franchetti, San Marco, Venice, 2026. Photograph by Klara Kemp-Welch.
Nazira Karimi. Return Policy (2019). Palazzo Franchetti, San Marco, Venice, 2026. Photograph by Klara Kemp-Welch.
Alevtina Kakhidze, Joy, 2026. Palazzo Contarini Polignac, Dorsoduro, Venice, 2026.
For me, though, the most important collateral event of the Biennale was the PinchukArtCentre and Viktor Pinchuk Art Foundation-funded exhibition “Still Joy— from Ukraine into the World,” in the Palazzo Contarini Polignac in Dorsoduro, designed to show that “even in the darkest moments there is always—joy. / The joy of enduring. / The joy of holding one another. / A responsibility to care that lingers, insists, remains.” Eerie testimonies of happy moments in the grimmest circumstances, gathered from soldiers, veterans and prisoners of war by marine and veteran Hlib Stryzko punctuate the show. Iryna Prots’ Helmet of Remembrance (2026), commissioned by Skeleton racer Vladyslav Heraskevych to commemorate the 22 Ukrainian athletes killed since Russian’s full-scale invasion is displayed prominently near the entrance, a poignant reminder that Heraskevych was disqualified from the Winter Olympics by the International Olympic Committee in February for wearing the helmet. Khimei and Malashchuk’s videos Dedicated to the Youth of the Whole World I (2019) and II (2023) document the lived realities of rave culture in these two moments, with close-ups of the toll the war has taken on a generation of Ukrainians drained by a war which, for many, has lasted half their lifetime. Piotr Armanovski’s film Me and Mariupol (2017) is an equally melancholic ode to this devastated seaside town, in which the artist speaks about his childhood, about how he first saw the sea in Mariupol. He says that he does not know how to “speak about the war truthfully” and imagines what the city of Mariupol itself might dream of, for instance, having a mammoth for one of its museums, like that in Donetsk, where the artist grew up. The walls are filled with quotes from historian Niall Ferguson praising the extraordinary nature of Ukrainian resilience. Among these is the observation that “The joy that I encounter in Ukraine is based on a very clear understanding of the fear and loathing that are the alternative in Russian-occupied territory. Because people have a very clear idea of what defeat would mean, they are intensively aware of the joy of a free society.” Alevtina Kakhidze’s installation Joy (2026) embodies this spirit in the form of a tattoo studio, offering limited edition tattoos of a selection of drawings by the artist relating to Ukrainian resilience. The artist’s trademark thick black writings and sketches include one reading: “I am alive in Ukraine BUT it is by accident.” One tattoo was of a microscopic bug called a tardigrade, found to be thriving in the most dangerous part of the failed Chernobyl reactor, a creature, by all accounts, “capable of surviving in any conditions.” The exhibition ends in a dark blue lit room with a large-format charcoal orgy scene by Nikita Kadan, entitled After All, in which pale moonlit celestial bodies writhe in what may be agony or ecstasy above a partially ruined series of residential tower-blocks in a barren landscape.
Nikita Kadan, Afterall, 2026. Palazzo Contarini Polignac, Dorsoduro, Venice, 2026.
The 61st Biennale de Venezia, like the 60th, is dominated by reminders of the ongoing wars in Ukraine and Palestine. A series of subtle interventions in public spaces across Venice are worth looking out for. Less overt than the omnipresent posters of the “No Genocide Pavilion,” posters for an “Invisible Pavilion” are also posted around the city, advertising a series of book launches and readings by Ukrainian cultural figures, including novelist Victoria Amelina, artist Nika Kozhushko, children’s author Volodymir Vakulenko, and an event with filmmaker Ihor Mykhailov. Every poster is crossed out with a banner reading ‘Cancelled because the artists were killed by Russia’ and has a QR code to a list of cultural figures that have been casualties of the war to date. Another commemorative intervention sees Ukrainian military uniforms suspended between the houses in the streets between the Arsenale and the Giardini, like washing hung out to dry. This subtle action “brings the war home,” serving as a reminder of the hundreds of thousands of servicemen on the front-line and the human toll of the war.
Authoritarian regimes remain in a serious muddle about how to respond to this overwhelming tide of oppositional voices: their cultural agendas lie in humiliating ruins. The Russian Minister of Culture’s claim that culture is somehow “above” politics was sheer hypocrisy. Oligarchs’ daughters’ attempts to resume business as usual at the Russian pavilion were a spectacular failure, completely overshadowed by well-coordinated creative attacks on artwashing in all its forms. Kazakhstan merited a special prize, perhaps, for stooping to censoring their own pavilion, post-opening, and dismantling the wonderful installation Machine (2013) by Asel Kadyrkhanova, consisting in a typewriter linked by lines of red thread to the files of Kazakh citizens murdered in the Stalinist purges. Open Letters of support and protest swiftly circulate and build consensus across the artworld via e-flux, prompting support and condemnation as required. If ruins are a shared preoccupation of so many of the works and shows on view in Venice, these are not sublime ruminations on the history of the ruin but an urgent engagement with the chain reaction linking warfare and ecological shortsightedness which threaten us all, today. In the end, it was censorship and artwashing that lay most clearly in ruins at this edition of this biennale.
