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Sound at the 61st Venice Biennale (2026)

Listening is everywhere in this edition of the Biennale: in the curatorial text that greets visitors at the entrance, in the opening sentence of the guidebook, and as a recurring theme across many of the national pavilions. I wrote about the rise of listening as a motif in curatorial texts in the 60th edition, and its acceleration into the organising principle of this 61st interests me. How is listening practised by the exhibiting artists? How does it manifest within the works? And how do we, as audiences, engage with the results of that listening?

Before writing about the Biennale itself, I want to acknowledge some of the circumstances of this edition. Koyo Kouoh, the first African woman to curate La Biennale di Venezia, was diagnosed with cancer and tragically died very shortly after. Before her passing she had established the title and theme for this year's exhibition, In Minor Keys, which in light of these events, feels all the more poignant. The jury for the Golden Lion, the Biennale's art prize, citing Kouoh's commitment to social justice, announced that it would not consider for awards pavilions representing countries whose leaders were the subject of ICC proceedings, thereby excluding Russia and Israel from eligibility. The jury later resigned, effectively cancelling this year's prize, and in its place the 'Visitors Lion' award was introduced, which many artists withdrew their participation from in solidarity with the jury. With all this in mind, if In Minor Keys asks us to listen differently, then it also raises questions about what forms of listening an institution is ultimately willing to sustain.

In his foreword to the guidebook, the President of the Biennale describes this year's exhibition as a 'listening zone', attuned especially to 'lower frequencies'. I first read this 'lowness' as proximity to the ground and therefore populous, in contrast to the typical elevation of kings, wealth and power. But I also began to think of it acoustically. Low frequencies travel further, pass through obstacles, and are felt as vibration through skin, muscle and bone. This year's Biennale brings together artists from across the world, many of whom have had to overcome significant structural barriers to be here. Perhaps, as a listening audience, our task is to be receptive not only to artworks as ideas to be interpreted, but in an embodied sense: to allow ourselves to be moved by them, and to move with them.

What follows is a selection of artworks in which sound and listening felt particularly significant. There are plenty of spoilers ahead, so if you're planning to visit the Biennale yourself, consider this your warning.

Giardini

Poland Liquid Tongues is a video work across two screens featuring Chór w Ruchu (Choir in Motion), an experimental community choir with both hearing and deaf members. Looking rather like Kate Bush in matching red capes, they sing and sign from ground before moving to a swimming pool, where red glows against pool blue. Their song is broadly concerned with communication, expressing frustration with finger spelling in International Sign Language, before looking to whales as intelligent beings with their own mode of communicating underwater. A newspaper offers the lyrics to their libretto, which contains rather a lot of ideas, from Inuit mythology to Māori legends, Deaf Gain and disability justice, to biologist Roger Payne’s activism and the codes of sperm whale calls. But I found the sound works engaging and the videos joyful.

Romania A project about the Black Sea by Anca Benera and Arnold Estefán. In their Giardini Pavillion, we enter a watery landscape as though on the bottom of the sea bed where once floating scientific sensors have become musical instruments. We are rocked by a giant subwoofer. On two screens, vocalist and violinist Diana Miron is half submerged in the sea, reading the waves as a score - listening and responding with voice and buoys as instruments. Her practice draws on Romanian Spectralism, ‘an avant-garde musical movement that treats sound as a living, mutating, and phenomenological experience’. An accompanying booklet offers three short texts about the sea as archive, as passage, military zone, and asks what it takes to decolonise a sea. This world of battered buoys is evocative - the sonic approach and witchy ecofeminist aesthetic appeals to me. A second venue in town connects sea with desert, focusing on processes of mineral extraction across three screens - though its setting in a white cube was less engaging.

Egypt Armen Egop’s ‘Silence Pavilion’ suggests a meditative space. We’re greeted with a directive to put phones away, be slow and listen. Inside are a series of smooth sculptures with an invitation to touch stone and feel vibrations. Slowness is a tough ask given the context of a giant exhibition for marathon art-viewing, but clearly an offer appreciated by exhausted and overheated guests, who seemed happy to sit in the dark and quiet for a while. Whether personal transformation is happening or not, who knows.

Finland Five human sized columns covered in the grey fluff of a microphone cover emit wind sounds of various intensities. Each reverse-microphone broadcasts a different wind. For the artist Jenna Sutela, they act as ‘guides to deep listening’ and ask ecological questions. Unlike windshields, each has a comedic hairstyle. For me, there’s something unresolved here - a diagram with ‘wind’ on one side and ‘mind’ on the other positions the windshield sculptures as mythological characters - though it’s unclear which mythology they are drawn from. What do we learn from listening to wind? What are the questions this installation asks?

Britain Amongst Lubaina Himid’s vibrant paintings, Magda Stawarska creates a soundscape for the pavilion, that appears ‘sporadically, randomly, suddenly or seldom’. The veranda contains an abandoned beehouse. As we enter the pavilion we hear cows, field recordings that evoke green and pleasant lands gradually overtaken by increasingly frantic insects. A painting on the wall asks ‘Can flies settle here?’. In another room, the paintings are on oars rather than canvas, accompanied by gentle waves. Himid’s works are resolutely two dimensional in this show, and I’m missing some of the theatricality of her ‘Naming the Money’ life sized characters on stands. The sound goes some way to filling the space that I’d like the work to occupy. The exhibition publication closes with a poem by Himid, titled Listening and Hearing, asking us to remember people left behind.

Netherlands A short line assembles and we are ushered inside for a half hour performance. Children under 12 are not invited. The shutters on all sides of the pavilion slowly lower, trapping us inside with little light. A woman, innocuously leaning against the wall among us, with a tote bag as disguise, suddenly lets out a bellow. For the next half hour, she continues to bellow, never wavering from a deep growl that any metal singer would be envious of. ‘Engage!' she roars, 'Enrage!'. On the floor are archival editions of the Biennale guide, some looking very old - perhaps even from 1895, though flattened in perspex. She throws some of these around as she growls and removes her clothes. 'Enjoy!' she finishes. 'Ennnnn Joooooooooy!' To be honest, my experience in such performances is to be so concerned for the wellbeing of the performer engaged in an act that appears physically painful to sustain, that I can barely concentrate on anything else. Austria A naked woman replaces the clapper of a large bell, hoisted in front of the Austrian pavilion by a crane. Biennial visitors rush towards the sound and gather to watch as she swings upside down from its inside, her sides striking the bell to ring. For the artist, this performance signifies the exhaustion of living in patriarchal structures, as the bell represents the passing of time, authority of religion and a warning. Though my instinct is to be dubious of engaging naked women in acts of violence in order to challenge patriarchy, the performers in question look like Tank Girl - patriarchy is small fry to them, they are ready to face the apocalypse

Arsenale

Exhibition:

Himali Singh Soin + David Soin Tappeser A voice from hanging metal cones announces a manifesto for 'South Asian Futurism'. The voice, compellingly performed, draws us in with talk of ‘inhabiting the architecture of loopholes’. Soin’s words are joined by Tappeser’s percussion - a small cacerolazo. Field recordings connect the Indian subcontinent with the Antarctic - Delhi birds chirp, ice cracks and groans.

Pauline Oliveros Scores, images and ephemera populate the Deep Listening station: sonic meditations, archive photos of The ♀ Ensemble, performance posters, headphones playing the 1989 Deep Listening album. I watched a child of around seven wearing headphones absolutely transfixed, perhaps hearing improvised experimental music for the first time. Wonderful to have this here for new audiences to experience. The station is accompanied by a text from Bodies of Sound editors Irene Revell and Sarah Shin.

Michael Joo A giant hanging mobile of fossilised slabs, amplifying their own resonant frequency. A low drone, each of a different tone, but strangely creaky. You really have to put your ear to them in the busy exhibition hall. From close up, you can feel their vibrations. One of them speaks - the echoes of past visitors fed back into the slab. The suspension is presumably necessary to allow the slabs to resonate, but these heavy objects hang from iron bars too thick and rigid to drift. I wonder whether the work might sound more fully if the slabs were allowed a little more movement.

Yo-e Ryou Drawn towards a sudden chorus of gasps for breath, we drop what we were viewing and rush towards a work by Yo-E Ryou. A two screen film records the extraordinary free diving of haenyeo Jeju island women who collect food from 10m below the water’s surface without aid. Ryou, who moved to the island after the pandemic, documents their breathing practices - preparing, gathering energy, recovering - into a composition and series of scores. The artist has also produced Unlearning Space Radio, ‘exploring hydrofeminist approaches to listening’ (listen here). Apparently streaming continuously throughout the Biennale, I can only find clickable tracks - sorry to be pernickety, but not really radio.

Nolan Oswald Dennis A series of subwoofers with earth moving on top, transmit open source recordings from seismic sensing across the African continent. These devices are designed to listen for tectonic shifts and seismic activity, but instead they pick up the vibrations of military destruction. For Dennis ‘the polyphonic hum of the earth orientates us towards a polyvalent conception of plural worlds’.

Hagar Ophir A beautifully crafted table is arranged as a Ouija board. Voices in English, Arabic and Yiddish relay the results of a séance we have already missed. Around it, a series of objects sit on plinths, each paired with headphones through which a voice attempts to interpret the object before us. These descriptions, delivered in poor-quality recordings and overlaid with atmospheric song and binaural recordings - perhaps from an animal - don’t bring these different worlds convincingly together.

Uriel Orlow Stepping onto a raised platform, the floor vibrates. Leaning screens each show a tree with roots in focus and words overlaid, such as ‘speaking in tongues, mineralised translations’. The text invites us to listen to the more-than-human. There’s an occasional howl, which reminds me how little of the more-than-human world I know how to hear.

Torkwase Dyson Winds and waves wash around us as we traverse large geometric sculptures. For Dyson, according to Christina Sharpe, ‘a line, a wave, a sound/ing are acts of holding and practices towards liberation’. I wish the sound did a little more towards this end - a reverby female voice sings casually and indistinctly.

Laurie Anderson We step inside a notebook. White-painted political quotes, questions and drawings spread across the black walls and floors, turning the space into a three-dimensional chalkboard. Little is said about the sonic component, which functions more as theatrical texture than as a critical layer: a repeated pulsing synth pad lends atmosphere but contributes little to the work's ideas.

National participation:

Argentina Salt is heaped on the floor. We traverse narrow paths around it to the tune of an eerie orchestral composition, apparently responsive to visitor movement, but indiscernibly so. Against the white salt, drawings in powdered charcoal show sketches of forests and seas - references to the origins of the materials around us. What the orchestra signifies, I can’t make out.

UAE A series of oral histories with men in their seventies describing their weddings. A performance and audio play about gossip. A documentary on the first radio station (1961) in the Emirate of Ajman (unfortunately mainly talking heads). Fifty hanging speakers read apologies for the delay since the last email, speaking to a culture in which we are expected to communicate constantly, and inevitably fail to keep up. What brings these works together? Voice, bodies and technology seem to be recurring themes, each work using a different mode of transmission. Whilst the pavilion proposes to contemplate contemporary soundscapes of the UAE, the overarching theme of washawasha - an Arabic word relating to whispering - doesn’t help to bring these works into dialogue.

Slovenia Rocks pile up on the floor, waste from the previous Biennale Architettura. Soundtrack for the Invisible House by Nonument Group proposes a song for the buried ruin of a mosque, constructed in a Slovenian village to aid recruitment of Bosnians into the Austro-Hungarian army. Field recordings, a libretto and long drones are fragmented - somehow effective in evoking erasure and the resonance left behind. Timor-Leste Three artists, one with sound, one with tapestry, one with visuals - all working together but separately - consider Timor-Leste’s ‘polyphony of languages and forms of communication’ - visual, written and oral. It’s nice to see sound and film separate but operating as one environment. Etson Caminha’s sonic work uses traditional music and church bells from a colonial past, voices sing imaginary words.

Oman Haitham Al Busafi, both artist and curator, asks us to listen as we step on Omani sand and handmade silver clanks above us. The sound will ‘adorn’ us, he writes, as our ‘presence creates music’. A sweet proposal, which I found hard to make space for - I failed to be a listener in a listening-zone and became a basic-biennial-er in my sixth hour of exhibition viewing.

In Town

Holy See Arriving at Giardino Mistico, we are given some headphones and a map, and told we have an hour to complete the soundwalk. The garden is neatly divided into zones, and the map shows which artist’s work is activated in which quadrant. Melancholic choral music from Holly Hendon & Mat Dryhurst crossfades into an ambient swirl from Brian Eno. While the crossfade keeps me immersed in this sonic field, I can’t tell when I’ve entered Moor Mother. Maybe I expected something different, or maybe there's a glitch and I’m stuck between Eno and Kali Malone. Terry Riley is my favourite - an exciting mix of instruments, spacey synths, glockenspiels, guitar slides and a chorus of alien voices. Soundwalk Collective name plants in Italian. The Virgin Mary whispers to us in Patti Smith’s voice. Whilst this is a stellar line up of 16 newly commissioned sound works, the ratio of choral music to critical sound practice is off. Perhaps I’m grumpy after spending an hour with sweaty ears from giant headphones in a garden with little shade and no wind. But I wonder if the Holy See’s 2024 offering, a guided tour of Venice’s women’s prison by the inmates, was a more poignant type of listening to be championed by the Vatican than the solitary listening experience proposed in this garden. I was glad to see one of the gardeners, presumably one of the Friars (though wearing a fluro green tank top), had assistance in keeping the garden pristine from a robot lawnmower.

San Marino Mark Francis' Sea of Sound is a series of paintings of vertical lines in many colours, which bear some resemblance to sound waves and have titles such as 'acoustic memory'. There's a film titled Listening Field which animates the same aesthetic. A text describes the need to connect with the 'continuous flow of the world's languages and noise' - I’d prefer something more concrete.

Radio GAMeC I walked past the entrance to this radio station every day but never found it open. Coinciding with the Biennale, this season's programme is titled Pedagogy of Hope and describes a 'desire to restore dialogue and listening as central practices of learning'. Every time I tuned in, I heard an interesting dialogue taking place, but wished for more liveness. As the title invokes Paulo Freire, some more participatory models would be fitting. Listen here. Hong Kong Two artists present quite different work. Angel Hui puts embroidered goldfish in plastic bags, hoisted vertically on strings and reflecting onto the walls amidst a rainy soundscape. Rain continues in Kingsley Ng's work, an invitation to sit on beanbags around a solitary radio and listen to an ambient piece on Hong Kong's sounds through the radio crackle. Whilst I love the grain of radio texture, as the piece isn’t conceptually linked to transmission, or nostalgic memories of collective listening, I wonder if this was a good choice for sharing a detailed soundscape.

Collateral and other events

Canicula A show with eight moving image works, takes place in a layered building - part grand church, part creepy ex-care home. In a former concert space, Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s latest work 450XL: The Story of a Fugitive Sound flickers over screens on stalks. Transcripts in fragments reveal an Earshot investigation into the use of a sonic weapon at a student vigil in Serbia earlier this year, a weapon that forces bodies to move and leaves debilitating tinnitus behind. Let’s hope this investigation becomes a prosecution.

Strange Rules I knew the show wasn’t for me when the exhibition invigilator recommended I head to Room 10 to experience a guided meditation led by AI. I was further discouraged from this when, again invited to participate, I was asked to sign a waiver before entering the room. I declined and left - maybe I’m a technophobe? AI seemed to be responsible for many of the artworks in this show, apparently in order to critique itself, but with a serpent-eating-its-own-tail ending. However, there was another Lawence Abu Hamdan work in the show, which I was glad to have seen. Abu Hamdan tells us about new software designed to turn any accent into British or American RP in real time, designed for use in call centres - another example of technology with prejudice unashamedly baked in. Still Joy—From Ukraine Into the World Ashfika Rahman displays a giant sphere of Hindu temple bells, each bearing the red thumbprint of a member of an Indigenous community in Bangladesh who has lost their home. Whilst Rahman shows displacement, Janet Cardiff’s work is about connection. She invites us to pick up an old landline receiver and eavesdrop on intimate conversations she had with her mother.

Though not sound related, I have a few more Venice recommendations: Gaza - no words, see the show A collateral event of the Biennale, and the title says it all. Works woven by women in refugee camps showing life in Gaza since the genocide began.

TURANDOT: To the Daughters of the East An excellent show of film and installation work by women from central and west Asia. Lisa Simpson Huge and wondrous paintings at Pinault Collection. Marina Abramovich Beds inviting visitors to lie underneath crystals at Galleria dell’ Academia, perfect for the Biennale-exhausted traveller.

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