Abbas Akhavan has been announced as the artist that will represent Canada at the 2026 Venice Biennale. Akhavan makes site-specific ephemeral installations, drawings, videos, sculptures and performance works.
“Born in Tehran and based between Montreal and Berlin, Abbas Akhavan’s multidisciplinary practice reflects on the relationships between place and history, attending to the geopolitical forces which define spaces,” says a statement.
A 2021 exhibition of works by Akhavan at the Chisenhale Gallery in London included an installation based on the colonnade that once approached the monumental Arch of Palmyra, a 2,000-year-old heritage site in Syria. The Arch was destroyed by Islamic State militants in 2015.
Akhavan said in an online interview in 2021: “While I am interested in ruins, the objective is not nostalgia for the Iraq Museum or Palmyra Arch, but rather the ways these sites become charged and disturbed as images in the collective imagination. How do these artefacts circulate through other economies and narratives about re-mapping history, nation-building and museum collecting?”
The National Gallery of Canada is the commissioner of the pavilion; the biennale artist selection committee included Léuli Eshrāghi, the curator of Indigenous Practices at the Montreal Museum of Fine Art, and Crystal Mowry, the director of programmes at MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina.
The artist currently showing in the Canadian pavilion is Kapwani Kiwanga who appeared on The Art Newspaper’s A Brush With… podcast earlier this year. She works primarily in sculpture and installation but also with performance, sound and video.
Meanwhile, Merike Estna, a painter based in Tallinn and Mexico City, has been selected to represent Estonia in 2026. “Regarding Merike Estna’s work, the jury [comprising judges such as the art historian Chus Martínez and Hendrik Folkerts of Moderna Museet in Stockholm] was impressed by her ability to use the medium of painting as a space for politically and socially relevant questions, as well as the grounds for activating questions of artist labour,” says a statement.
The curator for the next Venice Biennale is yet to be announced; this year’s curator is Adriano Pedrosa, the artistic director of Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, who organised the exhibition Stranieri Ovunque-Foreigners Everywhere (until 24 November).