Reflections on the Venice Biennale 2026
Every two years, the city of Venice becomes the temporary centre of the international art world. The Venice Biennale — founded in 1895 and now spanning more than a hundred national pavilions across the city's palazzos, shipyards, and gardens — is the exhibition that collectors, curators, critics, and institutions use to take the temperature of contemporary art globally.
Each participating country organises its own independently curated pavilion, while a separately appointed artistic director conceives a central thematic exhibition that attracts artists from across the globe. The central exhibition for the 61st edition, Venice Biennale 2026, titled In Minor Keys, includes more than two hundred artists across two vast venues — the Giardini and the Arsenale — under a single curatorial vision. One hundred countries sent national pavilions. Seven participated for the first time. Where the Biennale directs its attention matters, commercially and culturally, for years afterwards.
The Venice Biennale 2026 opened on 9 May under the title In Minor Keys. This title was conceived by the Cameroonian-Swiss curator Koyo Kouoh, who was announced as artistic director in late 2024 and died in May 2025 before she could see it realised. Her vision was for the exhibition to attend to subdued registers, ecological fragility, non-dominant voices.
What she could not have anticipated was the institutional chaos that would nearly drown that vision before it reached the public. The entire prize jury resigned on 30 April, citing its refusal to consider pavilions from countries whose leaders face International Criminal Court charges. The historic Golden Lion awards were scrapped. This has been described by many as the most politically charged atmosphere in the event's history before the doors even opened.
The curatorial text of In Minor Keys was a statement about whose voices the international art world has consistently failed to amplify. The exhibition includes artists working from the Amazon, from West Africa, from communities that have operated for decades outside the attention economy of major institutions.
The Peru pavilion presents Sara Flores — the first Indigenous artist ever to represent her country in Venice — working in kené, the visual language of the Shipibo-Konibo people of the Peruvian Amazon, as a living system of knowledge. I first encountered her work during my time at White Cube in London, her representative gallery. Her presence at the Venice Biennale 2026 therefore does not surprise me; that it took this long to get her there is a different question.
El Salvador is participating in Venice for the first time this year with its own pavilion — a meaningful institutional step for a country whose contemporary art scene has long operated without this kind of international platform. The pavilion features J. Oscar Molina, a Salvadoran-born artist who fled the country in 1989 and has spent his adult life in the United States, with a show titled Cartographies of the Displaced.
Separately, in the main exhibition, Guadalupe Maravilla — also Salvadoran-born, also formed entirely by the US art world — assembles found objects that retrace his own childhood migration into sculptural works he describes as "both shrines and healing instruments." Two artists and one country of origin, with both pathways running through New York. The milestone is there, but it also illustrates the bind: the path to Venice still runs, more often than not, through New York, London, or Berlin. Presence at the Biennale and regional visibility are not always the same thing.
Miguel Hernández Bastos
Costa Rica does not have a dedicated pavilion this year, although it has been represented in Venice in the past, most notably when Miguel Hernández Bastos, one of our MÍRAME artists, represented the country at the 47th Biennale in 1997. Rossella Matamoros, another of our artists, was selected to participate in 2015, only for Costa Rica to withdraw its pavilion entirely after it emerged that the Italian curator organising the space had been charging artists fees to show — a consequence, as Artnet News reported at the time, of the country having no official sponsor and no means of covering the €200,000 required to rent the venue. Costa Rica pulled out before the doors opened. Matamoros returned to Venice two years later on her own terms, participating in the 57th Biennale through group performances alongside Jelili Atiku and Anna Halprin.
It is not a new problem, and it is not an isolated one: the funding gap that now has major galleries openly selling work during Biennale week is the same gap that, a decade ago, left a small Central American country with no viable path to participation at all.
Many of the artists we work with at MÍRAME are making work that is in direct conversation with the themes Kouoh identified: ecology, cosmology, the relationship between land and mark-making, the transmission of knowledge across generations. That conversation is happening now, in studios across San José, Guanacaste, and the Central Valley. The infrastructure to carry it further is what we are actively building.
In Minor Keys made an argument — however noisily, however imperfectly — that the art world is not always looking in the right places. Galleries, collectors, and curators working outside the traditional centres have reason to take that seriously, even as the institution making it continues to strain under the weight of its own contradictions. Art Review called the exhibition "visually seductive, responsibly researched, culturally portable and diplomatic" — a formulation that says, in effect, that the curatorial conscience was impeccable and the courage uncertain.
That tension also has a financial dimension. The Art Newspaper reported this week that sales at the Venice Biennale 2026 were more overt than at any previous edition — prices listed on press releases, auction houses hosting invitation-only selling exhibitions, dealers openly pricing work to crowds of collectors. As public arts funding has contracted, galleries and private collectors have increasingly stepped in to cover the costs of pavilions and collateral events.
Pace Gallery's chief executive Marc Glimcher was direct about the logic when talking to The Art Newspaper: "There isn't a good system for funding these things anymore, so dealers are increasingly stepping in. That means they must cover their costs, primarily by selling the art." The Biennale's founding status as a government-subsidised, non-commercial institution is, at this point, largely notional. Which raises a question with particular relevance from here: if market infrastructure is now what gets an artist to Venice, what does that mean for regions where that infrastructure is still being built?
Julio Sequeira, Atardecer Hurbano
From Costa Rica, that noise of the Venice Biennale 2026 feels very far away. The jury resignation, the legal threats, the pavilion strikes — these are the crises of an institution discovering, belatedly, that neutrality is its own political position. The more pressing question is underneath: what would it take for the art being made in Costa Rica and wider Latin American contemporary art to reach the rooms where those conversations happen? Some of the answer is institutional, some economic, and some a matter of sustained effort over time. At MÍRAME, we are working on all three.
We watch the Venice Biennale 2026 because it tells us something about where the international conversation is heading. We work in Costa Rica because we think this region is part of that conversation, whether or not the institution has caught up. If you would like to know more about what we are doing at MÍRAME, we would love to hear from you — [email protected]
You can also learn more on the MÍRAME website.
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Belinda Seppings
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