Venice Biennale’s wildest moments – in pictures
Naked jetskiers, human bells and a celebrity seagull! Venice Biennale’s wildest moments – in pictures
This 61st Venice Biennale, which opened to the public last weekend, sees participants from 99 different countries staging public exhibitions across the city, the majority of which are held within two official Biennale venues: Arsenale and Giardini, with many other collateral exhibitions, events and performances taking place in sites across the islands of this historic city. I’ve journeyed here to cover both art and architecture Biennales for over 20 years, and I know the city intimately. And yet, whilst one may have a sense of a curatorial vision, or an inkling of what some artists might be up to, you can never know quite what to expect before arriving.. With expert guidance and insight from some of the world’s finest arts writers, critics, correspondents and editors, I spent 8 days gradually trying to unpack what the art world has to offer us this year…
A visitor examines Silence Pavilion: Between the Tangible and the Intangible, inside the Egyptian space at the Giardini della Biennale. Visitors are encouraged to experience the installation, featuring works created and curated by the artist Armen Agop, using touch and smell, as well as sight
Two huge screens inside the Polish pavilion screening Liquid Tongues, a collaboration by Bogna Burska and deaf artist Daniel Kotowski. The films features a choir of hearing and deaf singers performing inside a Warsaw swimming pool
A seagull nests outside the Polish pavilion in the Giardini. The bird laid two eggs before work began on installing the artwork, with a third egg arriving later. The pavilion’s producer, Anna Kowalska, decided that a little fence should be built to protect the seagull from disturbances but the bird became a minor celebrity as soon as the biennale opened, with visitors flocking to take pictures of her
The magical Giardino Mistico, which sits on the edge of Venice next to the Venezia Santa Lucia railway station, is the site of this year’s Holy See pavilion, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Ben Vickers, who worked alongside Soundwalk Collective to create an immersive sound installation. The experience incorporates works from composers, musicians, poets and artists including Patti Smith, Jim Jarmusch, Brian Eno and FKA twigs, which blend into one another as visitors slowly advance through the gardens while wearing headphones provided to them
Grass Babies, Moon Babies by Ei Arakawa-Nash at the Japanese pavilion. Visitors are invited to pick up and carry a baby doll through the spaces, eventually arriving at a changing table where they can change the baby’s nappy and expose a QR code generating a short ‘diaper poem’
Florentina Holzinger’s installation at the Austrian pavilion was the talk of the biennale. Featuring a host of naked performers, Seaworld Venice begins with a huge Venetian bell rung on the hour, every hour, by the force of a human performer dangling upside down within it.
Visitors who progress through the Austrian pavilion then see a performer climb on to a jetski and travel around a tank of water, gradually gathering speed until waves start crashing over the sides and drenching front-row audience members.
The whole installation draws on Holzinger’s longstanding research into water and presents a dystopian vision of ‘flooding caused by mankind’ and a ‘civilisation dissolved in piss’. Before exiting, visitors come face-to-face with a performer living ‘within a tank sustained by body fluids contributed by the audience’
Strange Rules, curated by Mat Dryhurst, Holly Herndon, and Hans Ulrich Obrist Holly Herndon, is a collateral exhibition run by the Berggruen Arts & Culture organisation, on show at the Palazzo Diedo. In one of the spaces Herndon (pictured) and Dyrhurst present a work alongside biology professor Michael Levin, who uses bio-electricity to create worms with two heads.
Another off-site venue, Palazzo Manfrin, is owned by the British artist Anish Kapoor. He uses it to exhibit his own work during the biennale, and this year’s centrepiece features a giant bell-like form that barely fits into its space. Entitled At the Edge of the World, the sculpture’s interior is painted with a deep, deadening black, from where virtually no light escapes or rebounds, causing disorientation if you stare up into it for longer than a few seconds
Lubaina Himid and her wife, Magda Stawarska, pose for a portrait inside Great Britain’s pavilion on the day of its opening. Himid and Stawarska collaborated on the project, with Stawarska providing the soundscape to accompany Himid’s large paintings
Lydia Ourahmane, the Algeria-born artist working between London, Barcelona and Algiers, poses with her work Rock Soup, inside her collateral exhibition 5 Works at the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation. Ourahmane describes the work (which comprises a gas bottle, a gas ring, a pot, broth and the sounds and smells of boiling) as ‘sculptural soup’. Also shown here is Lydia’s sculpture, comprising 1.3 tonnes of decommissioned Venetian hotel bed linen.
Elegy by Gabrielle Goliath inside the Chiesa di Sant’Antonin in Castello, an offsite show hastily arranged after the artist was prevented from representing South Africa by the country’s culture minister
Performers sing, dance and beat drums as part of IT NEVER SSST by Miet Warlop, representing Belgium inside the country’s pavilion at the Giardini
Visitors take in Escape Room by Andreas Angelidakis at the Greek pavilion, which he describes ‘as emerging directly from the instability of contemporary reality’
Inside the Spanish pavilion, Oriol Vilanova’s Los Restos (The Remains) is ‘a large-scale intervention that transforms the interior into a pseudo-museum born from accumulation and reiteration’. Thousands upon thousands of carefully placed and grouped postcards adorn the walls
I Don’t Care About Your Past, I Just Want Our Love to Last by Arthur Jafa, the US video artist and cinematographer, at the Fondazione Prada
Not Yet Titled by Alma Allen and curated by Jeffrey Uslip, inside the US pavilion
Large-scale installation works by artists Kaloki Nyamai, Alice Maher, and Alfredo Jaar inside the central exhibition venue at the Arsenale
Ukrainian artist Daria Koltsova’s work was displayed around the vicinity of the Arsenale for four days from 5-9 May. She used the everyday Venetian motif of hanging laundry as inspiration for her work, which features military uniforms donated by Ukrainian artists currently serving in the war, female soldiers and members of the Azov Brigade. Also shown here is Marea, by Melissa McGill, with a silhouetted cameo by Willem Dafoe (director of the upcoming Biennale Teatro 2026) walking off into the distance, as well as a view of the stupendous queues that routinely formed outside the main Biennale sites.
’Security Guarantees’ by Ukrainian artist Zhanna Kadyrova, greets people as they enter the Venice Biennale’s Giardini site. The ‘Origami Deer’ is a concrete sculpture evacuated from Pokrovsk, in Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast, in 2024 before Russian forces took control of the city as part of the continuing conflict. After being removed from its plinth in a large park in Pokrovsk, the sculpture was loaded onto a flat-bed truck and began its epic journey across Europe, through Warsaw, Prague, Vienna, Brussels and the UNESCO HQ in Paris, before arriving to it’s new temporary home at the Venice Biennale.
Members of Pussy Riot engage in action outside the Russia pavilion in protest at the country’s inclusion in the biennale. All text and photography by David Levene. With special thanks to Flora Luna, photographic assistant accompanying David in Venice
