Picked by PhDs: Venice Biennale 2026

Perhaps the most effective, engaging, and moving offerings at the Venice Biennale, at least for me, were two displays from Ukraine, one the Ukraine Pavilion the small building that is part of the Arsenale, and the other, much a larger exhibition in the Dorsoduro area of Venice. Each of them captured my attention far longer than most of the other displays.

The first, the Ukraine Pavilion, features a concrete origami sculpture titled Deer by the artist Zhanna Kadyrova. It’s hard to believe concrete could make something that resembles origami, but Deer does it. Kadyrova made Deer for the pedestal that had previously displayed a Soviet jet aircraft in the city of Pokrovsk, Donetsk Oblast, but the jet had been removed. The sculpture had become part of the cityscape. As the Russian army approached Pokrovsk, a team dismantled the sculpture to move it to safety. In 2025 Deer traveled more than 6000 kilometers across Europe to arrive in Venice for the Biennale. We saw Deer at the Giardini entrance, suspended from a boom on a truck, and I remembered the story that it had been transported from Ukraine.

In the center of a space in a small building in the Arsenale was a pillar with several videos around it, each depicting parts of Deer’s journey. Watching the videos, I began to see Deer as a living creature, exploring all the cities on the circuitous route it proudly took to Venice. It also reminds me of Little Amal, the 12-foot high puppet of a Syrian refugee child searching the world for her mother, which traveled across Europe and the United States in 2021 and 2022.

(Please forgive the crazy spacing in this section. Blogger seems to have its own ideas about design.)

A much larger, and even more evocative experience was the “collateral” exhibition, titled “Still Joy: From Ukraine into the World,” presented by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation in the Palazzo Contarini Polignac in the Dorsoduro area of Venice, near the Peggy Guggenheim Museum and the church of Santa Maria della Salute. Multiple artists, from Ukraine and elsewhere show works expressing joy, alternating with statements from Ukrainians of their experiences and the importance of maintaining joy in life. This was a powerful expression of joy in the midst of horror and suggests the resilience of the Ukrainian people. I have chosen just six of the artists who impressed me and whose work I understood. One, British artist Ryan Gander, I keep thinking about, but I couldn’t make personal sense of his work in the context of the exhibition. A link to the exhibition with photographs of the objects does not replicate or even evoke the experience of a nation promoting joy in the midst of an endless-seeming war, but one can at least search information online about each artist.

Zhanna Kadyrova, the artist who made the origami deer, in 2023 created Refugees, in which she found plants that had survived attacks and bombings, rescued them from schools, libraries and clinics, kept them in a safe location and lent them to exhibitions, along with photographs of living plants in the original locations. Emblematic of human refugees, the plants do not have permanent homes and it is not known where they will be next.

Bangladeshi artist Ashfika Rahman created Than Paru – No Land Without Us, a huge installation of 4849 brass temple bells, each with a red mark on it. The label refers to the Chittigang Hill Tracts on the Bangladesh border, where the non-Bengali inhabitants had their lands appropriated by the state for commercial development. The artist invited each refugee to put a red fingerprint on a bell, making the installation a golden monument to displaced people.

Canadian artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller photographed reflections of the sky in water, lovely impressionistic videos that I couldn’t capture in photographs. British Tacita Dean made photochemically modified images of an ancient Sakura tree with multiple supports to keep its branches from breaking. The huge image is delicate and touching.

Pavlo Kovach, a Ukrainian artist and serviceman, partially covered individual laurel leaves with brass and inscribed the case number of a missing serviceman on each. The work is titled Laurel Leaf in the Mouth, You Will Receive a Message, referring to a folk belief that a bay leaf in your soup is good luck. While the fate of the missing soldiers is undetermined, the leaves suggest both life and memory.

Finally, the Dutch Simone Post, who uses candy as a medium, filled a room with chandeliers and other objects, copied in sugar from those in the Palazzo. Materials listed are marshmallow, sour satellite wafer, and candy chain. The work is titled She Knew She/It/They Would Melt. The pastel-colored copies of precious objects spark a childlike delight, at least in me.