Currently, the art world is following the Venice Biennale. The ambience of the 61st Venice Biennale is more subdued than normal. The speciality of this year’s Biennale is that many of the national pavilions shift away from spectacle toward intimacy, recollection, and slow attention, under the theme In Minor Keys, conceived by the late curator Koyo Kouoh. Artists throughout Venice are urging tourists to pay close attention to lost history, delicate materials, inherited crafts, and intimate tales.
Here are ten national pavilions that stand out this year.
1) India Pavilion
At this year’s Venice Biennale, after seven years away, India returns with one of the most thoughtful pavilions, featuring a material world that is both relevant and poetic. Titled Geographies of Distance: remembering home, the exhibition is curated by Amin Jaffer and features works by Sumakshi Singh, Asim Waqif, Alwar Balasubramaniam, Ranjani Shettar, and Skarma Sonam Tashi.
As indicated in the headline, it is poetic and inspiring, where history and the future come together. There are no oversized gestures here. Instead, the pavilion is built through memory and material. Sumakshi Singh reconstructs a demolished Delhi home entirely from embroidered thread, and its transparent views show the houses of another world and their certainties. Skarma Sonam Tashi creates a fragile papier-mâché Ladakhi township, with its standing walls and the people of houses in the mountain ranges. Asim Waqif’s bamboo structures feel both architectural and alive. Together, the works explore migration, distance, and the emotional idea of home. It is a quiet pavilion, but one that stays with you long after leaving.
2) Bahamas Pavilion
Like India, after a 13-year absence, The Bahamas returns to the Biennale with one of its most emotional presentations. Titled In Another Man’s Yard, the pavilion brings together works by the late John Beadle and contemporary artist Lavar Munroe. Curated by Krista Thompson, the exhibition draws from Junkanoo traditions, discarded carnival materials, and memories of collaboration, and through these, it presents the country’s rich past and hopes for the future. There is a strong sense of unfinished conversation running through the pavilion, especially because Beadle had once planned to represent the country in Venice in 2015 before funding was withdrawn.
The works are built from found objects, costume fragments, and reused materials, but they never feel merely recycled; through them, they speak about resilience, migration, and overlooked communities. The pavilion becomes a tribute not only to Bahamian culture but also to artistic continuity across generations.
3) Austria Pavilion
Another notable pavilion is Australia’s. The Austria pavilion is impossible to experience passively. Artist Florentina Holzinger transforms the space into a living environment called Seaworld Venice, which, as the name suggests, evokes a watery world. Part underwater fantasy, part sewage system, part performance stage, the installation imagines Venice after climate collapse. In this exhibition, visitors become participants inside the work, not just viewers. Their movements—and even bodily presence—affect the changing environment of the pavilion. Curated by Nora-Swantje Almes, the project blurs boundaries between infrastructure, ecology, and the human body. At the same time, it is strange, uncomfortable, and deeply connected to Venice itself, a city already threatened by rising water and overtourism.
4) Brazil Pavilion
As wild as its name, the artworks in the Brazil pavilion. The Brazil pavilion, titled Comigo ninguém pode, takes its name from the Dieffenbachia plant and a popular Portuguese expression meaning ‘nobody can handle me.’ Curated by Diane Lima, the exhibition is structured to create a powerful dialogue between artists Rosana Paulino and Adriana Varejão. They examine colonial violence, erased histories, and the role of women in shaping Brazilian art, and propose a futuristic gaze through the art. The layered and intense artworks in it, paintings, installations, and historical references, overlap to show how colonial wounds continue to shape the present. Yet the exhibition is not trapped in the past. It constantly searches for transformation, survival, and new ways of imagining collective identity.
5) Saudi Arabia Pavilion
Saudi Arabia, a notable presence at this year’s Biennale, presents the work of artist Dana Awartani in a pavilion curated by Antonia Carver. Awartani’s practice is deeply connected to Islamic and Arab craft traditions – she is taking it towards the possibilities of contemporary art. Her work often involves artisans and master craftspeople whose knowledge has been passed down through generations. In Venice, she continues this exploration through a new large-scale installation that reflects on preservation, destruction, and cultural memory, interweaving Saudi Arabia’s ancient past and the present. The pavilion feels careful and meditative. Rather than treating heritage as something frozen in time, Awartani sees it as a living process that must be constantly protected and renewed.
6) Argentina Pavilion
In this Biennale, the Argentina pavilion transforms drawing into landscape. Artist Matías Duville covers the pavilion floor with white salt and black charcoal in a work titled Monitor Yin Yang. Through this artist evoking ancient seas and their memories, while charcoal carries traces of burnt organic matter, the artist says. Curated by Josefina Barcia, the installation changes as visitors walk across it. Footsteps disturb the materials, slowly altering the image over time. Duville describes the work as a territory rather than a drawing. The result is both minimal and monumental, turning movement itself into part of the artwork.
7) Morocco Pavilion
Morocco is the source of one of this year’s Biennale’s subtle revelations, curated by Meriem Berrada, and presented by artist Amina Agueznay. The Moroccan concept of the threshold—a zone between inside and outside, memory and transformation—and ritual weaving customs served as inspiration for the exhibit. The room is filled with incredibly sensitive fibres, woven forms, and handcrafted structures. The pavilion’s partnership with Moroccan craft groups is what gives it such potency. The work is done by artisans, weavers, and embroiderers. The pavilion puts these gestures at the centre of contemporary art rather than presenting craft as ornamentation.
8) Germany Pavilion
Ruin, the German pavilion, examines collapse in a variety of contexts, including political, emotional, and architectural. Henrike Naumann and Sung Tieu are among the artists at the exhibition, which was curated by Kathleen Reinhardt. They examine East Germany’s afterlife and the turbulent period following reunification in 1990. They filled the pavilion with a greater emotional significance because Naumann completed her work before her untimely death. Historical artefacts, furniture, and buildings serve as tools for examining how political structures shape daily life.
9) Chile Pavilion
This year, the Chilean pavilion presents an Inter-Reality, by artist Norton Maza, curated by Dermis León and Marisa Cachiolo. The installation alludes to environmental crises and geopolitics from the outside, and inside, guests see handcrafted dioramas that combine themes such as murder, migration, fake news, and ecological catastrophe with traditional European imagery. For this project, sound is crucial; an immersive environment that links individual recollections with broader political realities is created by helicopters, ancestral chants, aeroplanes, and nature recordings. Inquiring about the creation and manipulation of modern narratives, the pavilion alternates between illusion and reality.
10) Democratic Republic of Congo Pavilion
The Democratic Republic of the Congo’s first-ever pavilion in Venice is one of the biggest debuts this year. Simba Moto, Grab the Fire!, is the title! The symbolism of fire—as creation, destruction, change, and power—is the central theme of the pavilion. The show links antiquated concepts with pressing modern problems by drawing on Congolese cosmologies and spiritual traditions. Above all, the pavilion marks a long-overdue arrival at the Biennale. It is vibrant, ambitious, and significant historically.
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