Writer
@sofia_hallstrom_ shares their
@labiennale highlights so far:
1. Lydia Ourahmane’s 5 Works at the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation. A Dorsoduro palazzo curated by Polly Staple, the show follows a residency during which Ourahmane worked with Venetian craftspeople and local activist organisations, among them ‘Poveglia per tutti’, a group reclaiming the haunted, largely inaccessible plague island of Poveglia as a public park.
2. Fondazione In Between Art Film’s Canicula staged eight new site-specific video installations at the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, including
@lawrenceabuhamdan forensic investigation into the sonic weapon deployed against a silent vigil in Belgrade in 2025. At Ocean Space inside the former Church of San Lorenzo, the Repatriates Collective’s Tide of Returns: a ceremonial act of reclamation exploring cultural repatriation as a living, relational process, its west wing flooded with reddish sand from Anindilyakwa Country, populated with thousands of tiny shell-and-grass figures which are Indigenous Australian dolls recently returned from European museums, finally arriving somewhere they belong.
3. In the Giardini:
@habitual_body_monitoring2 makes history as the youngest artist ever to represent Denmark, with Things to Come. Ei Arakawa-Nash’s Grass Babies, Moon Babies marks the Japanese Pavilion’s 70th anniversary. At the newly renovated French Pavilion,
@ytobarrada has filled the space with enormous stitched drapes of wool, and UK’s
@lubainapics presents ‘Predicting History: Testing Translation’, her richly layered painterly enquiry into identity, memory, and what gets lost.
4. At the Arsenale, The Latvian Pavilion presents Untamed Fashion Assemblies , an annual carnivalesque festival that took place in Riga between 1990 and 1999 which fused alternative fashion, drag, and visual art. Isabel Nolan represents Ireland with Dreamshook, named for the sensation of waking from a dream and featuring hand-tufted tapestry, sculpture, and drawing centred on Aldo Manuzio, the 15th-century Venice-based printer who urged people to choose words over weapons. #venicebiennale2026
