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Venice Biennale 2026: Why Everyone Still Starts with the Italian Pavilion

May 21, 2026

Venice Biennale 2026: Why Everyone Still Starts with the Italian Pavilion

At the world’s most important art event, Padiglione Italia remains the place where the country tries to explain itself

Every two years, Venice becomes temporarily impossible (yet all the more alluring because of it). Impossible to walk through, impossible to book, impossible to leave once you’re there. Why, you ask? Because of the Biennale di Venezia, of course.

The mammoth art event has always operated somewhere between pilgrimage, social marathon and architectural fever dream, with collectors, curators, students and extremely well-dressed people speed-walking through the Giardini clutching oat milk cappuccinos and overstimulated opinions.

Amid the noise, however, there’s always one stop that carries a particular weight for Italians: the Padiglione Italia.

There’s an obvious reason for it. The Italian Pavilion tends to avoid spectacle for spectacle’s sake, functioning instead as something far more interesting: a snapshot of how Italy sees itself culturally at a specific moment in time.

This year, that feels especially aligned with the mood of the Venice Biennale 2026 itself.

A Softer Italy

For the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, curator Cecilia Canziani has selected artist Chiara Camoni for the Italian Pavilion with a project titled Con te con tutto (“With you, with everything”).

The title alone sets the tone. Con te con tutto is less a curatorial statement than an open hand.

Installation view, CON TE CON TUTTO, Chiara Camoni e Cecilia Canziani. Ph Camilla Maria Santini

Camoni, who lives and works in Tuscany, has built much of her practice around collaboration, ritual and collective making. Her work often incorporates ceramics, natural materials, drawing and sculpture, but what matters most is the process behind it. Families, friends, children, neighbours and artisans regularly become part of the work itself.

That sense of community appears central to this year’s pavilion. According to the Italian Ministry of Culture, the exhibition is conceived as “a call to gather,” exploring different ways of inhabiting the world through encounter, contemplation and shared experience.

After years in which the art world seemed dominated by maximalism, hyper-production and increasingly theatrical installations, Biennale 2026 appears to be shifting toward something quieter. 

The general exhibition carries a particular weight this year. Called In Minor Keys, it was conceived by Koyo Kouoh, the Cameroonian curator who passed away in May 2025 before seeing it realised, and completed posthumously by her team, with her family's support, exactly as she had designed it. Rather than the contemplative restraint the title might suggest, it proposes something more expansive: a radical reconnection with art's emotional and sensory life, conceived as a collective score in the spirit of jazz – improvisational and deliberately resistant to the accelerated pace of contemporary life. 

Camoni's work fits naturally within that spirit. There’s very little about it that screams for Instagram. Which, in Venice, almost feels radical.
 

A Key Pavilion

Installation view, CON TE CON TUTTO, Chiara Camoni e Cecilia Canziani. Ph Camilla Maria Santini

The Italian Pavilion occupies a curious position within the Biennale ecosystem.

Unlike smaller national pavilions, which often benefit from a tightly defined identity, Italy has the slightly harder task of representing a country that already dominates much of the Biennale’s visual language. Italian architecture, design, cinema and craftsmanship are effectively embedded into Venice itself.

So the question becomes: what version of Italy does the pavilion choose to present?

Past pavilions have produced moments that linger well beyond the exhibition cycle itself. In 2013, Bartolomeo Pietromarchi's Vice Versa structured the show around seven conceptual pairings – body/history, sound/silence, familiar/strange – drawn from philosopher Giorgio Agamben's thinking on Italian cultural identity. 

In 2015, Okwui Enwezor's broader international exhibition All the World's Futures transformed the atmosphere of the entire Biennale with a politically charged, historically expansive vision that still shapes contemporary exhibitions today, while the Italian Pavilion, curated separately by Vincenzo Trione, took a different register entirely. 

More recently, Gian Maria Tosatti's Storia della Notte e Destino delle Comete in 2022, curated by Eugenio Viola and the first time a solo artist had ever represented Italy, turned the Padiglione Italia into a haunting meditation on industry, labour and collapse. Visitors moved through darkened industrial spaces that felt less like an exhibition and more like entering the subconscious of the country itself.

That’s partly why expectations around the Italian Pavilion remain unusually high. It isn’t simply another stop on the Biennale map. It’s often treated as a wider temperature check for contemporary Italian culture.

The Biennale Beyond the Giardini

Of course, the real trick to Venice during Biennale week is understanding that the best things rarely happen only inside the official exhibition.

The Venice Biennale is ultimately a citywide condition.

You spend the morning discussing contemporary sculpture in the Arsenale, then accidentally end up at a sixteenth-century palazzo drinking natural wine while someone explains sound installations to you with alarming intensity.

That’s the strange magic of the Biennale. Even at its most overwhelming, it still leaves room for small moments: afternoon light hitting the lagoon outside the Arsenale, a perfect espresso between exhibitions, the silence of a nearly empty church hosting a video installation nobody has found yet.

Which perhaps explains why the Italian Pavilion feels particularly relevant this year.

Camoni’s project appears less interested in dominating attention than in recalibrating it. Less about grand statements than about proximity and shared space. In a Biennale environment increasingly defined by noise, that softer approach may end up being the thing people remember most.

And honestly, that feels very Italian.

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