10 Shows Around Venice Not to Miss During the Biennale

For its Biennale exhibition this time around, the Fondazione Prada has tapped Nancy Spector, who served as commissioner for the 2007 US Pavilion of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, to organize an exhibition. She chose the pairing of Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince, two artists born a decade apart who have more in common than one might initially think.

Per an exhibition description, they “share an ethos of lawlessness when it comes to the appropriation and manipulation of images siphoned” from mass media and popular culture. This sure-to-be-talked about exhibition will feature more than 50 works, from painting and sculpture to photography and video to installation, alongside a new work by each artist and a collaborative zine.

At Ca’ Corner della Regina, in Calle de Ca’ Corner, Santa Croce 2215, Venice; May 9–November 23.

Hans Ulrich Orbist’s Copson show isn’t the only project he has cooking up timed to this year’s Biennale. With the support of the Berggruen Arts & Culture, he has conceived of an exhibition, with artists and collaborators Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon, tilted “Strange Rules.” The exhibition is meant to be movement-defining, as it will introduce the concept of “Protocol Art,” or, as a press release puts it, “a practice that engages with the underlying rules that dictate how culture is produced, distributed, and perceived in a digital age. These rules frequently manifest as algorithms, artificial intelligence models, computer protocols, platforms, and various technological infrastructures. Protocol Art does not simply use these tools; it exposes, analyses, and transforms them into artistic material itself.” The artist list includes a who’s who of artists working in these modes, such as Trevor Paglen, Ayoung Kim, Agnieszka Kurant, Avery Singer, Simon Denny, Stephanie Dinkins, and Laurence Abu Hamdan, among others.  

At Palazzo Diedo Berggruen Arts & Culture, Fondamenta Diedo, Cannaregio 2386, Venezia; May 4–November 22.

For three nights only this week (May 5–7), the Amsterdam-based Hartwig Art Foundation will present Minor Music at the End of the World, a major stage performance by Saidiya Hartman and directed by Sarah Benson. Now traveling to the Teatro Goldoni in Venice after its premiere in Amsterdam, Minor Music at the End of the World features performances by André Holland and Okwui Okpokwasili, an Arthur Jafa film, and interventions by Precious Okoyomon and Cameron Rowland. Structured in three movements, the work is based on Hartman’s essay “The End of White Supremacy, An American Romance,” which itself is influenced by W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1918 short story “The Comet.” A new text by Hartman, Dead River (2025), also features in this iteration.

At San Marco 4650/b – 30124 Venice; May 5–7.

ARTnews Top 200 Collector Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo will at last officially launch the Venice outpost for her foundation on the Isola di San Giacomo, about a 30-minute boat ride from the lagoon. At the 2024 Biennale, she commissioned a performance by Eun-Me Ahn to bless the island, which was once the site of a staging of Polish avant-garde theatre director Jerzy Grotowski’s Apocalypsis cum figuris. Now, the island is officially ready for visitors. Up first is a Matt Copson solo exhibition, “Fanfare/Lament,” curated by Hans Ulrich Orbist, the artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries in London; “Don’t have hope, be hope!” which draws from the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Collection; and a slideshow by Giovanna Silva and Antonio Fortungo, documenting the four-year renovation of the island. They join a suite of outdoor art installations by Goshka Macuga, Pamela Rosenkranz, Claire Fontaine, Thomas Schütte, Hugh Hayden, and Mario García Torres.

At Isola di San Giacomo; From May 7.

As an official collateral event, the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) in New Delhi has commissioned Nalini Malani to make a new site-specific work for the Magazzini del Sale, a former salt warehouse. Curated by Roobina Karode, the KNMA’s artistic director and chief curator, Of Woman Born will look at the ancient Greek myth of Orestes, who kills his mother but is ultimately pardoned via a trial led by Athena. (The story has previously featured in Malani’s work.) “But no myth is important unless it becomes contemporary. And this one is,” Malani recently told ARTnews of the Venice project. “Today, we still see how women’s lives are devalued, how violence continues, and how rarely women’s voices are heard.”   

At Magazzini del Sale n. 5, Fondamenta Zattere ai Saloni, Dorsoduro 262; May 9–November 22.

The Pier Luigi Nervi Foundation was established in 2008 to preserve the legacy of its namesake architect and engineer who was best known for his use of reinforced concrete. Now, the foundation is launching “Building Dialogue,” a new curatorial program that will bring together artists to interpret Nervi’s architecture through a contemporary lens. The first of these is “If All Time Is Eternally Present,” which will present projections on the façade of Palazzo Nervi Scattolin every evening for the next month. Curated by Chiara Carrera and Marta Barina, the exhibition “delineates a geography in which Venice is an allegory of both local and global conditions, where historical memories and present-day frictions intersect in relation to New York, Rabat, London, Berlin, and Baltimore,” according to a description. It features Kandis Williams’s A Travel Guide: Black Gothic in South Korean Horror (2025), Meriem Bennani & Orian Barki’s 2 Lizards (2020), and Tai Shani’s My Bodily Remains, Your Bodily Remains and All the Bodily Remains that Ever Were and Ever Will Be (2023–25).

At Palazzo Nervi Scattolin, Campo Manin, Venice; May 6–June 7, beginning at 8:30 p.m.

Born in the Dominican Republic in 1942, Iván Tovar first began embracing the Surrealistic tendencies his art would become famous for when he arrived in Paris in the 1960s. His work last showed in Venice in 1972, as part of the 31st Biennale. Now, more than 50 years later, his foundation, established in 2022, two years after his death, is staging “Le Retour” (The Return) at the Ex Istituto Idrografico, as an official collateral event to the 2026 Biennale. Curated by Christian Viveros-Fauné and accompanied by a monograph, the exhibition aims to position “ the artist’s transatlantic trajectory—formative years in the Dominican Republic, two decades working in Paris, and an eventual return home—as central to the global history of Surrealism,” according to a release.

At Castello 2148, 30122 Venezia; May 9–November 22.

The Pinault Collection’s two venues, the Palazzo Grassi and the Punta della Dogana, sit on opposite sides of the Grand Canal from each other. If you time the Vaporetto correctly, Google Maps says it’s only a 15-minute journey from one to the other. This year, each venue will play host to two exhibitions a piece: Michael Armitage and Amar Kanwar at Palazzo Grassi and Paulo Nazareth and Lorna Simpson at Punta della Dogana. If you’re short on time, the Nazareth exhibition will likely be the most intriguing, as it will display a number of previously unseen works that belong to the Pinault Collection. Curated by Fernanda Brenner, the exhibition’s title, “Algebra,” refers to the meaning of its Arabic root word, al-jabr, “the setting of broken bones, evoking algebra’s essence as the art of solving for unknowns and mending what has been fractured,” which Nazareth sees as a way to attend “to history’s unhealed fractures,” per a description.

At Punta della Dogana, Dorsoduro 2, Venice; through November 22.

After first appearing at the Modern Art Museum Shanghai, Marina Abramović’s survey, “Transforming Energy” will travel to Venice’s Gallerie dell’Accademia, where the artist will be the first living woman to have a major exhibition at the storied museum. The exhibition brings together some of Abramović’s most well-known works like Imponderabilia (1977), Rhythm 0 (1974), Light/Dark (1977), and Carrying the Skeleton (2008), alongside earlier performances and new work. This presentation will also have special resonance as the 1983 work Pietà (with Ulay)—in which Abramović takes on the role of the Virgin Mary holding Ulay, her former, longtime collaborator, as Jesus—will be hung near Titian’s Pietà (ca. 1575–76), the Renaissance master’s final, unfinished piece, which is marking its 450th anniversary this year.

At Campo della Carità, Dorsoduro 1050, 30123 Venice; May 6–October 19.