Venice Biennale 2026
CIFRA's Ultimate Must-See Guide
Venice shifts into Biennale mode. The 61st International Art Exhibition opens May 9 and runs through November 22, 2026, with late curator Koyo Kouoh setting the tone under the theme In Minor Keys, turning away from grand gestures toward the quiet undercurrents that shape daily life. The key is minor, but the resonance is major. Animal-human hybrids stalk a digital jungle, blinding light floods Renaissance hospitals, and artists ask whether screens can reshape biology itself. Surveillance, reproduction, mourning, resistance — all refracted through the moving image, the immersive environment, and the charged presence of bodies in space.
CIFRA's experts in media art and digital culture have done the filtering for you. What follows is our curated selection: the video installations, immersive environments, screen-based projects, and technologically charged exhibitions that matter most this Biennale.
Whether you're heading to Venice this May or bookmarking for later — save this guide.
CIFRA's experts in media art and digital culture have done the filtering for you. What follows is our curated selection: the video installations, immersive environments, screen-based projects, and technologically charged exhibitions that matter most this Biennale.
Whether you're heading to Venice this May or bookmarking for later — save this guide.
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JOIN CIFRA CLUB NATIONAL PAVILIONS
All exhibitions in the pavilions and the collateral program will take place from May 9 to November 22
GET THE MAP HENRIKE NAUMANN & SUNG TIEU — RUIN
📍 GERMAN PAVILION, GIARDINI
Curated by Kathleen Reinhardt, the German Pavilion brings together Henrike Naumann and Sung Tieu — two artists whose large-scale installations interrogate political systems and invisible architectures of control. Naumann passed away on February 14, 2026 — her contributions will be realized as a Gemeinschaftswerk, a collaborative effort guided by her artistic vision, turning the pavilion into both exhibition and memorial.
Why it matters: Historical responsibility made spatial — where political systems are felt through objects, and an artist's vision persists beyond her life.
Why it matters: Historical responsibility made spatial — where political systems are felt through objects, and an artist's vision persists beyond her life.
JENNA SUTELA — AEOLIAN SUITE
📍 AALTO PAVILION (FINland), GIARDINI
Marking the 70th anniversary of the Finnish Pavilion, Jenna Sutela presents an immersive installation inspired by wind as both physical force and cultural metaphor. Blending sound, music, and movement, the pavilion becomes an atmospheric environment where invisible forces become tangible. Wind as technology, climate, spirituality, and communication — all at once.
Why it matters: Where natural phenomena meet experimental sound and the invisible is made present through artistic systems.
Why it matters: Where natural phenomena meet experimental sound and the invisible is made present through artistic systems.
Jenna Sutela, Aeolian Suite, 2026 (work in progress)
Pavilion of Finland at the 61st Venice Biennale
Image: Hertta Kiiski, courtesy of Frame Contemporary Art Finland
Pavilion of Finland at the 61st Venice Biennale
Image: Hertta Kiiski, courtesy of Frame Contemporary Art Finland
THE AURAL SEA
📍 UZBEKISTAN PAVILION, ARSENALE
Taking its title from the Aral Sea — a salt lake that has lost over 90% of its volume since the 1960s due to Soviet irrigation planning — the pavilion treats the disappeared body of water as a harbor of knowledge. Drawing on myths and folklore of the region, seven artists explore the environmental and cultural transformations the sea's collapse set in motion.
Why it matters: Ecological grief as collective memory — and a pavilion that listens to what a vanished sea still carries.
Why it matters: Ecological grief as collective memory — and a pavilion that listens to what a vanished sea still carries.
THE EAR IS THE EYE OF THE SOUL
📍 HOLY SEE PAVILION (VATICAN) — COMPLESSO DI SANTA MARIA AUSILIATRICE, GIARDINO MISTICO DEI CARMELITANI SCALZI
Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Ben Vickers, the exhibition takes the form of a sonic prayer inspired by Saint Hildegard of Bingen — a 12th-century Benedictine abbess, poet, and composer. Across two Venetian sites, visitors move through new commissions on headphones — works by Brian Eno, FKA Twigs, Jim Jarmusch, Patti Smith, Dev Hynes, Terry Riley, Meredith Monk, and others. Also on view: the final work by Alexander Kluge, completed before his death in March.
Why it matters: A rare convergence of generations gathered around one question — what does it mean to truly listen. The canal city becomes a space for duration, reflection, and sound as spiritual attention.
Why it matters: A rare convergence of generations gathered around one question — what does it mean to truly listen. The canal city becomes a space for duration, reflection, and sound as spiritual attention.
ÁSTA FANNEY SIGURÐARDÓTTIR — POCKET UNIVERSE
📍 ICELAND PAVILION, CASTELLO
A multidisciplinary exhibition that unfolds as a shifting landscape of encounters. At its center, a moving-image work follows Creature Zero on a quest to find the "original rock" — the first step in the creation of the earth. Filmed at sites associated with mystical traditions, the work explores how belief and imagination shape movement through uncertain times. Orbs, charms, and talismans recur throughout; live performances emerge unexpectedly during the Biennale.
Why it matters: Moving image as cosmogony — where the search for origin becomes a way of navigating the present, and the pavilion itself becomes an unstable, living world.
Why it matters: Moving image as cosmogony — where the search for origin becomes a way of navigating the present, and the pavilion itself becomes an unstable, living world.
Ásta Fanney Sigurõardóttir, Portrait no.2 of Creature Zero, 2026.
Photo Sandijs Ruluks
Courtesy of the artist ©Ásta Fanney Siguröardóttir
Photo Sandijs Ruluks
Courtesy of the artist ©Ásta Fanney Siguröardóttir
TAREK ATOUI & RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA — UNTITLED (A GATHERING OF REMARKABLE PEOPLE)
📍 QATAR PAVILION, GIARDINI
Rirkrit Tiravanija has designed a tent-like structure as a space for cultural exchange — hosting a film by Sophia Al-Maria, live performances organized by Tarek Atoui, a large-scale sculpture by Alia Farid, and a culinary program by Palestinian chef Fadi Kattan. The pavilion is less an exhibition than an ongoing event: a gathering that keeps happening.
Why it matters: Culture as the connective tissue between people — and a pavilion that insists on presence, exchange, and the table as a form of art.
Why it matters: Culture as the connective tissue between people — and a pavilion that insists on presence, exchange, and the table as a form of art.
GENTI KORINI — A PLACE IN THE SUN
📍 ALBANIAN PAVILION, ARSENALE
A three-channel video fuses live acting, puppetry, animation, and an original score performed in Zaum — the transrational language invented by Russian Futurist poets as a pure language beyond grammar and syntax. Albania as a "somewhere place," perpetually defined by others' projections: romanticized frontier, orientalist fantasy, stage for civilizational hierarchies. Korini links the disquiet of the present to the unsettled dreams of a century ago, when borders, languages, and identities were in flux.
Why it matters: Identity as performance, language as decomposition — a pavilion that turns colonial projection into speculative theater.
Why it matters: Identity as performance, language as decomposition — a pavilion that turns colonial projection into speculative theater.
JAKUB JANSA & SELMECI KOCKA JUSKO — THE SILENCE OF THE MOLE
📍 CZECH AND SLOVAK PAVILION, GIARDINI
One hundred years after the Czechoslovak Pavilion first opened in Venice, it presents an exhausted mascot: the Mole, a beloved cartoon character turned cultural diplomat, licensed commodity, and symbol of stolen fantasy. Film, objects, and architecture combine into a single installation — a burrow where unlocatable noise destabilizes the silence, and imagination buckles under the weight of becoming a public mask.
Why it matters: What happens to a symbol when it outlives its meaning — a centenary pavilion that turns nostalgia into a quiet, unsettling diagnosis.
Why it matters: What happens to a symbol when it outlives its meaning — a centenary pavilion that turns nostalgia into a quiet, unsettling diagnosis.
Jakub Jansa, Silence of the Mole, film, 2026
Photo: Shot by Us, Jakub Jansa
Photo: Shot by Us, Jakub Jansa
GEOGRAPHIES OF DISTANCE: REMEMBERING HOME
📍 INDIAN PAVILION, ARSENALE
Five artists explore shifting notions of home at a moment of rapid transformation in India — thinking through mobility, diaspora, and the relationship between people and place. The pavilion proposes home not as a fixed location but as an emotional space carried within the self, built from culture, personal mythology, and memory.
Why it matters: A quiet, resolute meditation on belonging — and what survives displacement.
Why it matters: A quiet, resolute meditation on belonging — and what survives displacement.
ENTANGLEMENTS: CONNECTIVITIES ACROSS BORDERS
📍 MONGOLIAN PAVILION, CASTELLO
Four artists draw on Mongolian zurag painting, natural materials, folklore, video game imagery, and ecological research to map histories of Eurasian diplomacy and trade — including the Mongol Empire's connection to Venice in the 13th century. The pavilion reconsiders Mongolia not as a fixed geography but as a dynamic field of exchange.
Why it matters: Deep-time connectivity in a moment of fortified borders — where interspecies relations and transnational histories propose a different kind of resilience.
Why it matters: Deep-time connectivity in a moment of fortified borders — where interspecies relations and transnational histories propose a different kind of resilience.
MAJA MALOU LYSE — THINGS TO COME
📍 DANISH PAVILION, GIARDINI
A speculative video fairytale set inside a futuristic sperm bank. Maja Malou Lyse draws on research suggesting erotic imagery can increase sperm motility — and pushes the premise further: could images influence human reproduction itself? Fusing science, speculative fiction, and pornography, the Danish Pavilion examines how digital culture shapes not only imagination but biological reality.
Why it matters: Screens don't just show bodies — they may be reshaping them. A speculative video work where image culture meets fertility science, and the digital becomes biological.
Why it matters: Screens don't just show bodies — they may be reshaping them. A speculative video work where image culture meets fertility science, and the digital becomes biological.
Maja Malou Lyse, Things to Come, behind the scenes
Photography by Zoe Chait
Photography by Zoe Chait
EGLĖ BUDVYTYTĖ — ANIMISM SINGS ANARCHY
📍 LITHUANIA PAVILION, CASTELLO
Commissioned by the Lithuanian National Museum of Art, Eglė Budvytytė presents Warmblooded and Wingless, an ongoing multichannel film with sound and spatial components. Known for performances and video art that explore embodiment and symbiotic relationships with the environment, Budvytytė opens up a worldview rooted in lost belief systems and alternative ways of coexistence.
Why it matters: Video and performance as animist practice — where the body becomes porous, belief becomes method, and coexistence with the non-human is not a concept but a lived register.
Why it matters: Video and performance as animist practice — where the body becomes porous, belief becomes method, and coexistence with the non-human is not a concept but a lived register.
MONDI PRESENTI — WORLDS OF TODAY
📍 SIERRA LEONE PAVILION, LICEO GUGGENHEIM
Sierra Leone's debut at the Biennale resists the gravitational pull of spectacle — unfolding not as a display of static objects but as a constellation of vital processes. The pavilion brings together artists from Sierra Leone, the ECOWAS region, and beyond, in a dialogue shaped by local and transnational perspectives. Among them, CIFRA artist Jacopo Di Cera presents Ciclica — a site-specific installation of a dancing figure moving across 36 upcycled screens, transforming climate data into a cosmogonic narrative of birth, life, and death.
Why it matters: A debut that listens rather than overwhelms — and a pavilion that proposes something more radical than aestheticising crisis.
Why it matters: A debut that listens rather than overwhelms — and a pavilion that proposes something more radical than aestheticising crisis.
Retreat
Jacopo Di Cera
Jacopo Di Cera
DANA AWARTANI — MAY YOUR TEARS NEVER DRY, YOU WHO WEEP OVER STONES
📍 SAUDI PAVILION, ARSENALE
Dana Awartani — born in Jeddah to Saudi and Palestinian parents, trained in Islamic geometry and illumination — recreates the region's traditional floor tiles in fragile, brittle materials that bear witness to how heritage weathers under forces of change. Her work moves between the texture of organic materials and the macro scale of shared cultural memory.
Why it matters: Heritage as vulnerability — and craft as a way of holding what is always at risk of disappearing.
Why it matters: Heritage as vulnerability — and craft as a way of holding what is always at risk of disappearing.
BOGNA BURSKA & DANIEL KOTOWSKI — LIQUID TONGUES
📍 POLISH PAVILION, GIARDINI
A choir of hearing and Deaf performers interprets whale communication codes in spoken English and international sign language. Shot partly underwater — where Deaf people communicate freely while hearing people's voices distort — the installation works across image, sound, and acoustic waves. Inspired by Roger Payne's legendary Songs of the Humpback Whale (1970), which helped save whales from extinction.
Why it matters: Communication at its limits — where sign language, whale song, and water become a single score, and the boundary between hearing and Deaf dissolves into something shared.
Why it matters: Communication at its limits — where sign language, whale song, and water become a single score, and the boundary between hearing and Deaf dissolves into something shared.
AIM INUNDATED: IMAGINING LIFE AFTER LAND
📍 NAURU PAVILION, CASTELLO
Nauru — one of the world's smallest and lowest-lying nations — faces a future in which the land itself may disappear beneath rising seas. The pavilion takes that existential condition as its starting point, gathering artists to imagine what sovereignty, identity, and culture mean when the territory that anchors them is gone. This is not speculation — it is planning for a reality already in motion.
Why it matters: The most urgent geopolitical question of our time, addressed by the country living it — with CIFRA artists Khaled Hafez, Stefano Cagol, and curator Alfredo Cramerotti among the contributors.
Why it matters: The most urgent geopolitical question of our time, addressed by the country living it — with CIFRA artists Khaled Hafez, Stefano Cagol, and curator Alfredo Cramerotti among the contributors.
Chamber of Public Secrets, Contested Ecologies, 2004-2026, multimedia archive / Courtesy of Alfredo Cramerotti, Khaled Ramadan
ANDREAS ANGELIDAKIS — ESCAPE ROOM
📍 GREEK PAVILION, GIARDINI
Andreas Angelidakis transforms the Greek Pavilion into a physical escape room — but one where the puzzles are not about logic, they are about architecture, memory, and the systems we build to contain ourselves. Soft ruins, inflatable structures, and collapsing forms invite visitors to move through space as though it were already falling apart.
Why it matters: Architecture as trap and as game — a pavilion that asks what we are trying to escape from, and whether escape is even possible.
Why it matters: Architecture as trap and as game — a pavilion that asks what we are trying to escape from, and whether escape is even possible.
COLLATERAL EVENTS
NALINI MALANI — OF WOMAN BORN
📍 MAGAZZINI DEL SALE
May 9 – November 22
Nalini Malani's site-specific installation reworks the myth of Orestes — the son who killed his mother and was pardoned — as a lens for today's wars waged in the name of self-defense. Projections, layered imagery, and shadow play dissolve mythology, literature, and philosophy into immersive experience. A fearless ethical position on violence, displacement, and the silencing of women, delivered through one of the most distinctive media-based practices in contemporary art.
Why it matters: Mythological projection meets political urgency — where ancient narrative and technological mediation converge to make visible the bodies that bear the cost of conflict.
Why it matters: Mythological projection meets political urgency — where ancient narrative and technological mediation converge to make visible the bodies that bear the cost of conflict.
Nalini Malani, Of Woman Born, 2026
9 channel iPad Animation Chamber, sound, dimensions variable
Collection - Kiran Nadar Museum of Art. © Nalini Malani
9 channel iPad Animation Chamber, sound, dimensions variable
Collection - Kiran Nadar Museum of Art. © Nalini Malani
LI YI-FAN — SCREEN MELANCHOLY
📍 PALAZZO DELLE PRIGIONI
May 9 – November 22
Taiwanese artist Li Yi-Fan examines how digital technology reshapes the relationship between images and human experience. Growing up alongside the birth of the internet, Li's work probes the melancholy embedded in our dependence on mediated images. Inside the historic prison palace, the exhibition stages an intimate confrontation between architectural confinement and digital enclosure.
Why it matters: A generation raised on screens turns the screen itself into subject — examining the emotional residue of a life lived through interfaces.
Why it matters: A generation raised on screens turns the screen itself into subject — examining the emotional residue of a life lived through interfaces.
Screen Melancholy, Li Yi-Fan, 2026 Video installation (screenshot), 60 min.
Courtesy of the artist
Courtesy of the artist
AS ABOVE, SO BELOW
📍 FABBRICA H3, EX CHURCH SANTI COSMO E DAMIANO, GIUDECCA
May 9 – June 8
Seven international artists transform a former church on the Giudecca into an immersive environment for ecological reflection — proposing the ocean not as a distant entity but as a living archive of the Earth's deep time. Marshmallow Laser Feast, Antoine Bertin, Yoko Shimizu, and CIFRA artist Almagul Menlibayeva, whose multimedia installation traces the ecological collapse of the Caspian Sea, are among the contributors.
Why it matters: Sound, light, and computational systems in a space shaped by devotion — where scientific observation and artistic imagination share the same water.
Why it matters: Sound, light, and computational systems in a space shaped by devotion — where scientific observation and artistic imagination share the same water.
Screenshot from asabovesobelow.space
MORE EXHIBITIONS & EVENTS
MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ — TRANSFORMING ENERGY
📍 GALLERIE DELL'ACCADEMIA
May 6 – October 19
Marina Abramović becomes the first living woman artist to receive a major exhibition at the Gallerie dell'Accademia. Marking her 80th birthday, the show unfolds across both the permanent collection and temporary exhibition spaces — a first in the institution's history. Abramović's pioneering performance practice enters into direct dialogue with Renaissance masterpieces, embedding durational art within the very heart of Venetian patrimony.
Why it matters: Performance meets the Renaissance canon — the body as medium placed among the masters, rewriting the history of the institution from within.
Why it matters: Performance meets the Renaissance canon — the body as medium placed among the masters, rewriting the history of the institution from within.
HELTER SKELTER — ARTHUR JAFA & RICHARD PRINCE
📍 FONDAZIONE PRADA VENEZIA
May 9 – November 22
Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince take over two floors of the Venetian palazzo — not with separate shows, but through thematic collisions. Over fifty works stage an unexpected kinship: Jafa's charged video assemblages and Prince's appropriation strategies both dig into the same American soil — Black musical traditions, subcultures, violence, unresolved history. New works by each artist sit alongside a collaboratively conceived zine, built from images the two exchanged while making the show.
Why it matters: Video as cultural archaeology — two of America's most restless image-makers lay bare a nation's visual unconscious, where protest and celebrity blur into the same frame.
Why it matters: Video as cultural archaeology — two of America's most restless image-makers lay bare a nation's visual unconscious, where protest and celebrity blur into the same frame.
Helter Skelter: Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince, 2026.
Fondazione Prada, Ca' Corner della Regina, Venice.
Image courtesy of the artist & Fondazione Prada
Fondazione Prada, Ca' Corner della Regina, Venice.
Image courtesy of the artist & Fondazione Prada
CIFRA CURATOR
WHO'S A GOOD BOY??
📍 CONTEMPORARY FORCES, GIUDECCA
May 7 – September 27
Curated by CIFRA's Dr. Anastasia Stravinsky and Mario von Kelterborn, this group exhibition takes the Biennale's In Minor Keys theme not as metaphor but as method. Artists from the collection Kelterborn Collection — including CIFRA artist Mariana Vassileva, Gary Hill, and Joseph Beuys — form a score in which gestures of command resonate alongside quieter counter-melodies. In an era of wars, surveillance, and propaganda, minor tonalities become essential tools: subdued registers that deeply shape perception.
Why it matters: Power tuned to a quieter frequency — video, installation, and conceptual art as instruments for hearing what usually stays in the background.
Why it matters: Power tuned to a quieter frequency — video, installation, and conceptual art as instruments for hearing what usually stays in the background.
Gary Hill
Why Do Things Get in a Muddle? (Come on Petunia)
Video still
1984
Why Do Things Get in a Muddle? (Come on Petunia)
Video still
1984
CANICULA
📍 COMPLESSO DELL'OSPEDALETTO
May 6 – November 22
Eight newly commissioned site-specific video installations, produced by Fondazione In Between Art Film. Canicula — Latin for "little dog," now shorthand for the hottest days of summer — concludes a trilogy that began with Penumbra (2022) and continued with Nebula (2024), tracing a path from dim light through fog to blinding excess. This final chapter confronts sensory overload: when light burns too bright, sight itself becomes unreliable.
Why it matters: The most focused platform for moving-image art at this Biennale — eight commissions asking what happens when visibility itself becomes a form of violence.
Why it matters: The most focused platform for moving-image art at this Biennale — eight commissions asking what happens when visibility itself becomes a form of violence.
NATASHA TONTEY — THE PHANTOM COMBATANTS AND THE METABOLISM OF DISOBEDIENT ORGANS
📍 ATENEO VENETO
May 6 – October 25
Natasha Tontey takes over the historic Ateneo Veneto with her most ambitious work yet — an immersive installation weaving video, sound, light, and sculpture into a single charged environment. At its core is the story of Indonesian resistance fighter Len Karamoy, retold through camp B-movie aesthetics and military imaging technologies. Bodily transformation, Minahasan symbolism, ancestral ritual, and contemporary surveillance fold into one another — blurring the line between biological enhancement and acts of subversion.
Why it matters: Resistance retold through the body — where indigenous symbolism, camp cinema, and military-grade imaging collide to ask who gets to be visible and who survives by disappearing.
Why it matters: Resistance retold through the body — where indigenous symbolism, camp cinema, and military-grade imaging collide to ask who gets to be visible and who survives by disappearing.
Natasha Tontey,
The Phantom Combatants and the Metabolism of Disobedient Organs, 2026 Video still (detail). Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation and Amos Rex
© 2026 Natasha Tontey. Courtesy the artist
The Phantom Combatants and the Metabolism of Disobedient Organs, 2026 Video still (detail). Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation and Amos Rex
© 2026 Natasha Tontey. Courtesy the artist
CYFEST 17 — NATURA NATURANS: HUMAN BEINGS, NATURE, LANDSCAPE
📍 CREA CANTIERI DEL CONTEMPORANEO, GIUDECCA
May 8 – August 31
One of the longest-running international media art festivals arrives in Venice with an exhibition invoking Natura Naturans — nature as generative force, as process rather than product. Works from the Frants Family Collection enter dialogue with over 20 contemporary media artists, tracing a trajectory from the early 20th-century avant-garde through postwar experimentalism to today's time-based installations, sound art, and algorithmic composition.
Why it matters: A deep-time genealogy of media art — connecting the generative impulse of the avant-garde to contemporary algorithmic practice, all under the sign of nature as ongoing creation.
Why it matters: A deep-time genealogy of media art — connecting the generative impulse of the avant-garde to contemporary algorithmic practice, all under the sign of nature as ongoing creation.
IEVA LYGNUGARYTĖ — CARMEN: UTOPIAS OF BELONGING
📍 ORATORIO DEI CROCIFERI, CAMPO DEI GESUITI
May 1 — 31
A 30-minute video installation departing from a 1521 Neo-Latin poem written to accompany the gift of a stuffed bison from Lithuania to Pope Leo X — a gesture that failed with the pope's sudden death and remained outside canonical histories. The video imagines the poet's gradual transformation into the animal he once hoped would secure him recognition, collapsing Renaissance ambition and contemporary cinematic language into a meditation on desire, failure, and unresolved belonging.
Why it matters: A footnote of history becomes a speculative body — set within a space shaped by care, passage, and a story that never came to be.
Why it matters: A footnote of history becomes a speculative body — set within a space shaped by care, passage, and a story that never came to be.
Carmen: Utopias of Belonging
Ieva Lygnugarytė / Courtesy of the artist
Ieva Lygnugarytė / Courtesy of the artist
STRANGE RULES
📍 PALAZZO DIEDO
May 4 — November 22
Curated by Mat Dryhurst, Holly Herndon, and Hans Ulrich Obrist with Adriana Rispoli, the exhibition introduces Protocol Art — practice that engages with the underlying rules dictating how culture is produced and perceived in a digital age: algorithms, AI models, platforms, and technological infrastructures treated as artistic material. A new collaborative commission by Dryhurst and Herndon anchors the ground floor; the upper floors present site-specific installations and video works probing the invisible protocols shaping contemporary society.
Why it matters: The system as the artwork — and a palazzo transformed into a laboratory where the rules of culture are exposed, analyzed, and remade.
Why it matters: The system as the artwork — and a palazzo transformed into a laboratory where the rules of culture are exposed, analyzed, and remade.
SHIRIN NESHAT — DO U DARE!
📍 PALAZZO MARIN
May 8 — September 6
A new film trilogy inspired by the story of Nasim Aghdam — an Iranian-born media personality who built her own imaginative world online through stylized performances, until YouTube shut down her channel. Shot across three socioeconomic landscapes in New York, the films investigate the paradox between women's inner and outer worlds, reality and illusion, and the Iranian female perspective within American society.
Why it matters: One artist's gaze upon another — where censorship, self-expression, and the image as survival converge in Neshat's most personal work to date.
Why it matters: One artist's gaze upon another — where censorship, self-expression, and the image as survival converge in Neshat's most personal work to date.
Shirin Neshat, Do U Dare!, 2025
Courtesy of the artist, Gladstone, and Lia Rumma Gallery, Milan/Naples
Courtesy of the artist, Gladstone, and Lia Rumma Gallery, Milan/Naples
YALDA AFSAH — STILL IN THE DARK
📍 CA' BUCCARI
May 7 — June 28
Two films and an installation facing a public park — bodies caught in collective rituals that resist easy categorization. Afsah explores how violence can shape forms of community and how contemporary anxieties materialize in forms the present claims to have outgrown. In a city shaped by recurring rhythms — tides, processions, masquerades — her work treats space as though it has arranged itself for its own image.
Why it matters: Ritual at the edge of legibility — where collective behavior and architectural space conspire to make visible what holds a community together, and what doesn't.
Why it matters: Ritual at the edge of legibility — where collective behavior and architectural space conspire to make visible what holds a community together, and what doesn't.
PERSONAL STRUCTURES
📍 PALAZZO BEMBO / PALAZZO MORA / MARINARESSA GARDENS
May 9 — November 22
The biennial group exhibition organized by the European Cultural Centre brings together over 150 artists and multidisciplinary creatives from 40 countries across three historic venues. This edition includes CIFRA artists Tamiko Thiel and ORLAN.
Why it matters: Three palazzos open to the public free of charge — and two CIFRA artists among the voices shaping this year's conversation.
Why it matters: Three palazzos open to the public free of charge — and two CIFRA artists among the voices shaping this year's conversation.
ORLAN, Cries against a genealogy of increasing violence
Courtesy ORLAN
Courtesy ORLAN
A NECESSARY FICTION: MAPS, ART AND THE MODELS OF OUR WORLD
📍 ABBAZIA DI SAN GREGORIO, DORSODURO
May 6 — November 22
Curated by Sara Almutlaq and Aurora Fonda for the Saudi Ministry of Culture, the exhibition brings historical maps dating from the 13th century into dialogue with contemporary art — tracing our enduring need to construct models of the world. Works by Shilpa Gupta, Yoko Ono, Trevor Paglen, Monira Al Qadiri, and others examine cartography as poetry, as colonial fiction, and as a digital condition that has severed us from physical geography.
Why it matters: Maps as ideology — and a historic abbey as the right space to ask who draws the world and who gets left off the page.
Why it matters: Maps as ideology — and a historic abbey as the right space to ask who draws the world and who gets left off the page.
AURA
📍 AMA VENEZIA, CANNAREGIO
May 5 – November 22
A group exhibition from the AMA Collection, unfolding as a dialogue between materiality and immateriality. At its center: a monumental canvas by Jenny Saville at architectural scale, a new piece by Ed Ruscha, and a work by Tino Sehgal experienced in darkness — composed of movement and presence alone. AURA invites vision to become physical, emotional, and mental experience.
Why it matters: Where painting, language, and live presence share the same charged space — and the invisible becomes the most powerful medium in the room.
Why it matters: Where painting, language, and live presence share the same charged space — and the invisible becomes the most powerful medium in the room.
Charles Ray / Everyone takes off their pants at least once a day,
2024 ©Charles Ray, Courtesy of the artist and AMA Collection Installation view by Sebastiano Pellion di Persano
2024 ©Charles Ray, Courtesy of the artist and AMA Collection Installation view by Sebastiano Pellion di Persano
CIFRA CURATOR
COSMOTECHNICS: DING YI AS A PLANETARY CODE
📍 FONDAZIONE QUERINI STAMPALIA
May 9 – November 22
Curated by CIFRA curators Alfredo Cramerotti and Auronda Scalera, this exhibition presents twelve black-and-white paintings by Ding Yi — one of China's most prominent abstractionists — arranged as a constellation alongside carved stone steles bearing his signature "Appearance of Crosses" motif. Titled after philosopher Yuk Hui's concept of Cosmotechnics, the show transforms the Area Scarpa into a contemplative forest of images recalling traditional Chinese gardens, situating abstraction within deep registers of memory and cosmic orientation.
Why it matters: Abstraction as planetary code — where the cross becomes stele, the gallery becomes garden, and painting reconnects to the cosmological time of stone.
Why it matters: Abstraction as planetary code — where the cross becomes stele, the gallery becomes garden, and painting reconnects to the cosmological time of stone.
guide on the map
All selections in this guide are editorial choices made by CIFRA's team. We have no commercial relationships or endorsement agreements with any of the exhibitions, institutions, or events featured here.
Featured artwork on the cover image: Laure Prouvost, No More Front Tears, video still, 2022 / Who’s a Good Boy?? exhibition / Courtesy of the artist
Featured artwork on the cover image: Laure Prouvost, No More Front Tears, video still, 2022 / Who’s a Good Boy?? exhibition / Courtesy of the artist
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privacy@cifra.com
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
privacy@cifra.com