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فير زملر غاليري Sfeir-Semler Gallery

WALID RAAD
In Minor Keys, International Pavilion

The 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, In Minor Keys by Koyo Kouoh, will run from Saturday 9 May to Sunday 22 November 2026 at the Giardini, the Arsenale and in various locations around Venice.

After the premature passing of Koyo Kouoh in May 2025, with the full support of her family, La Biennale di Venezia decided to carry out her Exhibition, with the purpose of preserving, enhancing and widely disseminating her ideas and the work she pursued with such dedication to the very end. Koyo Kouoh, nominated as the Artistic Director of the Visual Arts Department in November 2024, already developed the curatorial project, defining its theoretical framework, selecting the artists and the artworks, designating the authors of the catalogue, determining the graphic identity of the Exhibition and the architecture of the exhibition spaces, and establishing a dialogue with the artists invited to participate.

Postscript to the Arabic Edition, 1983 / 2025

The “Lebanese Civil War” ended in October 1990.
Most militias were given six months to disarm and two options: sell their weapons cheaply to the Lebanese army or sell them freely on the open market. Most chose the market, sending their arms to Serb, Bosnian, Croat, and Slovene forces preparing for a new war that began barely a month after the Lebanese militias laid down their guns. Thus, the wars in Yugoslavia were fought, in part, with weapons from Lebanon. One war ends, another begins. The weapons moved easily from one battlefield to the next. This time, however, something else traveled with them.

The Lebanese weapons were shipped to Yugoslavia on wooden pallets. When the shipment was unloaded, someone noticed that beneath the weapons, painted onto the surface of the pallets, were images —beautiful copies of canonical Arab paintings. Oddly, the originals of these works have not been seen in decades; their owners long ago reported them missing or stolen. Who made these copies? Why paint them on pallets? Why hide them beneath weapons shipped to Ljubljana? And where are the originals? We still don’t know.

Fortunately, the Slovene army preserved the pallets and following protocol, handed them to the Moderna Galerija for study. The museum stored them in a warehouse just outside Ljubljana, where they remain today, and where I first saw them years ago.

This installation replicates that warehouse arrangement.

Far from quieting, 1969 / 2026

Yasser Arafat, the PLO leader, is said to have never slept in the same bed two nights in a row. Having survived more than 40 assassination attempts, the Palestinian leader could not a afford to throw caution to the wind, and so he lived—and slept—on the move.

I have spent the last 30 years searching for the houses and beds where Arafat is said to have slept. This research has yielded a series of bedrooms that I have been painting and drawing —drafts that I cannot seem to finish.

Here, I display 11 such drawings and paintings.

YTO BARRADA
Comme Saturne, French Pavilion

During the Renaissance, artists were said to be born under the influence of Saturn: planet of melancholy, withdrawal, contemplation, and slow thought. Saturn governed serious temperaments, studious minds, and forms of creation nourished by solitude, patience, and doubt. With Comme Saturne, Yto Barrada reactivates this ancient figure as a tool for reading the present. She extends this cosmological imaginary to ritual, myth, labor, agriculture, matter, and language.

The title also refers to the sentence pronounced in 1793 by Pierre-Victurnien Vergniaud: “The Revolution, like Saturn, devours its children.” This political image meets here the dévoré, a textile technique that emerged in the eighteenth century in which the surface pile of a fabric is chemically dissolved so that a pattern appears through subtraction. A form is born through disappearance, and beauty emerges through an attack on matter. This double movement— destruction and generation—structures the project as a whole.

Conceived as a suite for Saturn, the pavilion unfolds through sequences, repetitions, and returns. Visitors move through spaces draped in wool and populated by sculptures, films, typographic prints, mechanical devices, and transformed objects. Daylight acts here as a material in its own right: it slowly fades the hanging curtains, alters their surfaces, and inscribes time into the exhibition itself.

Barrada has long been interested in the history of textiles as a site where global economy, domestic gestures, industry, labor, and empire intersect. Before industrialization, textile production was one of the great engines of world trade; it later moved from the household to the factory, from hand-spinning to mechanization, and from wool and silk toward cotton. The routes of color, competition over dye plants, access to raw materials, labor hierarchies, and forms of knowledge made invisible all run through the exhibition.

At the heart of the pavilion, Barrada proposes a new theory of color applied to textiles. Major Western chromatic theories were largely conceived for painting, paper, or optics, rarely for cloth. Barrada begins instead with wool, natural dyes, baths, mordants, and chemical modifications to imagine another system: more empirical and more alive, but also more unstable. Developed with dyers, conservators, artisans, and gardeners, this work centers orally transmitted knowledge. It also questions the universalism inherited from the Enlightenment by challenging the classifications and historical codifications that long determined legitimate forms of knowledge. This is one of the project’s central stakes.

This research enters into dialogue with The Mothership, the dye garden and residency space founded by the artist in Tangier. There, color depends on climate, water, season, soil, errors, and accidents. It is never abstract: it is relational.

Language occupies a central place in Comme Saturne. Barrada works through homophones, shifts in meaning, and technical vocabularies in which words exceed their original use: mordant, fugitive, exhaustion, fixer. The chains of association that run through the exhibition evoke both scholarly inquiry and anxious thought: seeing signs, links, and rebounds everywhere.

Another tutelary presence is OuLiPo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle), the French collective that made constraint into a motor of creation. A wheel of rules and constraints pays homage to it. For Barrada, the rule is not a limit but a ruse for extending time, producing new forms, and surviving the dead ends of the present.

Throughout the exhibition, Saturn returns in multiple guises: god of time and the seasons, figure of melancholy, force of destruction, but also promise of renewal. Ancient narratives—the goat Amalthea, the cornucopia, the child saved from the devouring father— intersect here with contemporary myths: infinite abundance, technological salvation, limitless extraction, and the future colonization of other worlds.

Between cosmology and politics, agriculture and abstraction, dark humor and historical gravity, Comme Saturne offers less an escape than a tool for poetic survival: a lucid way of inhabiting the instability of the world without surrendering to melancholy.

Photos © Jacopo La Forgia - Institut français

SUNG TIEU
Ruin, German Pavilion

The German Pavilion at the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia presents Ruin, an exhibition by Henrike Naumann and Sung Tieu, curated by Kathleen Reinhardt.

Ruin is a space in which the polychronic traces of physical and social structures, German ideologies, and lives once lived remain materially present. With formal vocabularies spanning minimalist clarity and maximalist opulence, Henrike Naumann and Sung Tieu actively grapple with the Pavilion’s architecture, using it as an ambiguous mirror for contemporary social dynamics. The title “ruin” not only describes the decay of physical structures, but also gestures toward bankruptcy— whether financial, political, or moral. Spaces of East German history—the vanished GDR Pavilion, the demolished Palace of the Republic, the burning Sunflower House at Rostock-Lichtenhagen, where a 1992 pogrom targeted asylum seekers, former Vietnamese contract workers of East Germany, and other migrant communities without any government intervention— serve as curatorial blueprints for addressing how historical absences create zones of broken time that can be reconfigured through artistic imagination. The works presented here address not a past that has passed, but one that is perhaps even more present and tangible today.

Sung Tieu envelops the pavilion’s monumental façade, shaped by its National Socialist reconstruction in 1938, in a trompe-l’œil mosaic. The mosaic renders the skeletal remains of a prefabricated apartment block on Gehrenseestrasse in East Berlin—once the artist’s childhood home and one of the largest dormitory complexes for Vietnamese contract workers in the GDR, later inhabited by successive migrant communities, and subsequently caught up in the speculative frenzy of the real estate market, while currently being torn down. More than three million marble tesserae simulate the surface and fractures of a structure originally conceived as a paradigmatic form of socialist egalitarian housing. Oscillating between illusion and index, Tieu intertwines personal memory with architectural representation, thereby subverting dominant historical narratives. Moreover, the work reveals historical continuities in administrative discipline, surveillance, and marginalization that have outlived various political systems. The title Human Dignity Shall Be Inviolable refers to Article 1 of the German Constitution and translates its principle into an architectural realm of tension. Transposed onto the overdetermined architecture of the German Pavilion, the façade produces a dissonant overlay in which two incompatible systems of representation are held in tension. At the same time, the work embodies a beauty and a longing that undermine the intertwining of architecture with structures of power. Within the pavilion’s inner wings, Sung Tieu extends this inquiry through a group of works dedicated to her mother, foregrounding her experience of life and labor as both materially specific and structurally embedded within these same regimes that shape, regulate, and measure the body.

While Henrike Naumann reinterprets our immediate future through her use of historical traces and materials, Sung Tieu approaches figurative forms and conceptual abstraction as reflective rather than opposing media to create narratives about visibility and invisibility, desire, and rejection.

Together, Naumann and Tieu’s interventions transform the German Pavilion’s architecture and historical resonances into sites of reflection and resistance—mobilizing ruin not as a noun, but as a verb, referring to the ongoing processes of ruination triggered by current political endeavors to silence how history is told from the margins.

The Giardini, and particularly the German Pavilion, may be read as a political topography in which the presentation and interpretation of art reveal the historical and contemporary intersections of history, politics, and social values. With their overlapping formal, political, social, and historical implications, the works by Sung Tieu and Henrike Naumann join the chorus of Minor Keys of this year’s Biennale exhibition and encourage us to understand pasts, presents, and futures as polyphonic and multiperspectival, to make room for opposites, and to act in resistance within them.

Photos © Andrea Rossetti

DANA AWARTANI
May your tears never dry, you who weep over stones, Saudi Pavilion

Composed of 29,221 clay earth bricks, this floor installation draws on mosaic motifs found in sites of social and cultural significance across the Arab world. With histories spanning three millennia, these sites are now under threat: damaged or destroyed through situations of conflict and war.

An exploration of craft’s relationship with contemporary art, every aspect of May your tears never dry, you who weep over stones is created through an understanding of the care and repair made possible by “many hands.”

The work is the result of a complex process that included deep research, detailed drawing and coding, and long-term collaborations with Saudi-based artisans; each brick was handmade using intricately shaped wooden molds and naturally hued clay earths, sourced from across the Kingdom and baked in the Riyadh sun. Eschewing binding agents, the process allows the bricks to crack over time, underscoring the fragility of material heritage in today’s world and the collective risk of cultural loss. Awartani and her artisan collaborators work against this precarity, raising awareness, taking time to mourn what is lost, and sustaining crucial knowledge through multigenerational co-authorship.

You are invited to enter and traverse the composite mosaic via earthen pathways – akin to an imagined archaeological site – pausing to view or to gather on the seating.

Just as tears are never tears, stones are never stones, especially when in ruins. This work, in title, creation and exhibition, keeps the past alive in the present and is an urgent act of resistance against forgetting, against erasure. It is presented in solidarity with those who tend these intangible and tangible material heritages – living with familiarity and with care, as custodians, and through steadfast scholarship, preservation, and restoration.

ALIA FARID
Untitled (a gathering of remarkable people), Qatari Pavilion

The National Pavilion of Qatar today unveiled its presentation for the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, commissioned by Her Excellency Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, Chairperson, Qatar Museums. The exhibition, Untitled (a gathering of remarkable people); Rirkrit Tiravanija, Sophia Al-Maria, Tarek Atoui, Alia Farid, Fadi Kattan builds on artist Tiravanija’s decades-long practice of inviting collaborators to activate his architectural and spatial scenarios and highlights the work of artists from Qatar and the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia (MENASA) region.

Presented on the site of the future permanent Qatar Pavilion, a gathering of remarkable people features a tent-like structure designed by Rirkrit Tiravanija to serve as a place for cultural exchange, supporting different forms of participation and artistic intervention. Among these are screenings of an experimental narrative film by Qatari-American artist Sophia Al-Maria, entitled DAMAR TV (2026), and Jerrican (2026), a large-scale sculpture by Kuwaiti-Puerto Rican artist Alia Farid.

Jerrican (2026) is from Alia Farid's series of larger-than-life vessels used to store and carry water in the Gulf. Farid’s versions are enormous but hollow and light, molded in lacquered fiberglass and fabricated using the same method as the decorative casings for public drinking fountains that have become a distinctive feature of the urban landscape across the Arabian Gulf.