The 61st Venice Biennale opens to the public at the weekend. With national pavilions showing the work of artists from 100 countries, a backstory of political tension and protest, the resignation of the entire prize-giving jury, and more Irish representation than ever before, it’s not known as the Olympics of the art world for nothing.
As nations vie with varying degrees of subtlety to demonstrate the superiority of their own cultural expression, art lovers go to soak up work ranging from well-known to unfamiliar wonders.
Like the Olympics, the biennale attempts a facade of existing above politics while being, by its nature, firmly positioned in the thick of the fray. Even the architecture of many of the permanent national pavilions betrays their political pasts – neoclassical, colonial – and controversy frequently attends.
The widespread student protests of 1968 led to a reaction so heavy-handed that many artists refused to hang their works, including in the Italian, French, Canadian, Swedish, Venezuelan, German and Japanese pavilions, until the police presence inside the Giardini, one of the main biennale sites, was removed.
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Apartheid-era South Africa was banned between 1968 and 1993, and in 2022 the Russian artists Kirill Savchenkov and Alexandra Sukhareva, along with their Lithuanian curator, Raimundas Malašauskas, withdrew their work, saying that the invasion of Ukraine was “politically and emotionally unbearable”. In 2024 the Russian pavilion was lent to Bolivia for the duration.
This year Iran pulled out at the final hour, but Russia is back, and despite the compromise of their exhibition, The Tree Is Rooted in the Sky, being open only during the press previews, the EU has made good on a threat to cut its €2 million funding to the biennale, and the Italian culture minister, Alessandro Giuli, has said he will boycott the opening ceremony.
In 2024 Ruth Patir locked the doors to her exhibition in the Israeli pavilion, saying via Instagram: “I firmly object to cultural boycott, but since I feel there are no right answers, and I can only do what I can with the space I have, I prefer to raise my voice with those I stand with.”
Also this year, the South African minister for culture, Gayton McKenzie, cancelled his own country’s selection of Gabrielle Goliath’s Elegy, which pays tribute to women who have died by violence, including the Palestinian poet Hiba Abu Nada, who was killed in Gaza in 2023.
The South African pavilion will remain closed, although Goliath’s work is to be screened separately, at Venice’s Chiesa di Sant’Antonin, where it is sure to attract lines of visitors.
On March 13th, 74 artists and curators from the main exhibition signed a letter to the biennale’s director, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, objecting to the temporary relocation of the Israeli pavilion to the Arsenale (while their pavilion is closed for renovation), and calling for the exclusion of Russia, Israel and the United States, writing that “there is a threshold beyond which participation in La Biennale should not be normalised”.
The resignation of the prize jury, just nine days before the event’s opening, was in protest at Russia and Israel’s inclusion. The biennale organisers responded by announcing that the prizes would be awarded by public vote, raising the strong likelihood of a partisan Eurovision-style outcome.
Yet the show goes on. Despite five Irish artists showing at Venice this year, between national pavilions and the curated International Exhibition, the “largest ever for Ireland” description is not quite accurate. In 2005 we sent an underwhelming group show that didn’t do huge favours for the seven selected artists. Apart from the obvious benefits of being able to say they had been shown at Venice, Stephen Brandes, Mark Garry, Ronan McCrea, Isabel Nolan, Sarah Pierce and Walker and Walker lacked the space or focus to demonstrate their worth.
Now Nolan is back, just over two decades later, with Dreamshook, a well-deserved solo presentation, which as well as featuring her characteristic layers of allusion and abstraction is compellingly timely. “It’s a love story with something from the past,” she says. “There’s always a nugget, and then there’s an iceberg that evolves around the nugget. The show is the tip of it.”
We’re speaking in her studio at the Temple Bar Gallery, in Dublin, surrounded by books, papers, a swatch of silk pinned to a canvas, dried flowers, twists of metal, photographs, drawings and notes suggesting layers of thought and explorations into visual languages. There are newspaper clippings on subjects from Neanderthal artists to Dante. If an artist’s studio is an outer expression of their inner reality, an awful lot is going on in here.
A scale model of Ireland’s exhibition space sits on a table beside coffee cups and biscuits. Nolan’s hand-tufted wall hangings, sculptures, drawings and watercolours have been shipped, and she has been experimenting with moving miniature facsimiles around inside the model, exploring how things change with different relationships.
“I never know exactly what a show is or what it will be doing until it’s installed and I see everything together,” she says. “There has to be a part of the work that is escaping you while you’re making it, or you wouldn’t make it.”
In this instance, the love story that is on the verge of taking flight is with Aldo Manuzio, also known as Aldus Manutius, the 15th-century Italian who is widely credited as being the inventor of books as we know them today. He also came up with italics and the semicolon.
That’s the legacy of humanism. Entitled, patriarchal. Egotistical white men thinking they are the be-all and end-all in determining what is good in our culture
These are the sort of details that delight Nolan, who happily describes herself as a nerd. Born in Dublin in 1974, she has a CV that shows an ascendancy through group and solo shows in galleries and spaces, from the quirky and cool to the more mainstream. Galway’s Ard Bia features, and Project is there, as well as a solo show at Imma, and at Paddy McKillen’s Château La Coste, in France.
Her work has hints of the early-20th-century “visionary” artist Hilma af Klint (who is due to be the subject of a big exhibition at the National Gallery of Ireland in October) and of the Irish modernist Mainie Jellett.
Nolan herself is clever, eclectic and reserved yet surprisingly warm. There’s a certain fey quality to her work, with its rainbow aspects, suns, animals and whispers of text, but this is belied by a core of steel, and not just in the metal that appears in her outline sculptures. Dreamshook includes a pink frame though which a steel skeleton of a curtain billows in an imaginary wind, carrying with it hints of a sudden awakening, or perhaps a moment of insight.
“He makes books that are portable,” Nolan says, speaking of Manuzio as if he exists in a continuous present. “He popularises this octavo small format, so people no longer have to read at a desk, never mind a lectern.” In an era before gaslight and electricity, you could bring your book with you to find better light; you could also hide a seditious text. “And he wants them to be beautiful.”
Manuzio’s books enabled the dissemination of humanist thought, and here is where Dreamshook, while rooted in the past, is also significant today. Nolan describes a time of wars, crises of civil and religious authority, famine and plague. “And then you have these people who are pinning their hopes on the idea that if we could read more books, we could make the world a better place. It felt,” she says, “like a moment to be drawn to.”
If books are an answer, we have to be careful with what we think we know. The truths of civilisation, reason, knowledge and culture that guide also lead astray. “Even if there is much to be appreciated about it, it can be tricky to love a European heritage,” Nolan writes in her exhibition text. “It’s a place that wielded privilege as a weapon and progressively built wealth and culture through extraction and subjugation.”
It also prioritised one way of thinking over another, and established perspectives on nature and on progress that are potentially pushing us to a precipice of global collapse. “That’s the legacy of humanism,” Nolan says. “Entitled, patriarchal. Egotistical white men thinking they are the be-all and end-all in determining what is good in our culture.”
The traffic outside hums along Dublin’s quays, and the storms of controversy in Venice have yet to break. We talk about the optimism in art, symbolism in ecclesiastical architecture, the stained glass at Chartres, dream visions, the Book of Kells and whether archetypal shapes and imagery exist within the human psyche.
In Venice, Nolan’s three large wool hangings range from the abstract and symbolic to a more figurative scene of an imagined Manuzio dream. “I’ve always liked that within an exhibition; you have these different tensions,” she says. There are a pair of wooden benches, a large abstract floor piece in wood and steel, and a set of drawings, the weightier pieces anchoring the sometimes almost disembodied drawings with their handwritten notes.
The Venice Biennale is a hard stage to show on, not least because of the sheer volume and noise (frequently both aural and visual) of the work around you. Nolan’s depth of concept, coupled with her lightness of touch, should find a strong balance. “Artwork,” she says, “is about an emotional and physical experience, as well as an intellectual experience.”
It also has a political message, and although this is not overt in the individual elements of the exhibition, she concludes in her introduction to the installation that Dreamshook “might be a show about ambivalence, about the literature and art of western Judeo-Christian, classically inflected, enlightened society that I both hate and love. What it means and what it entails to be human, or even humane, is being tested.”
Revolutionary change through subtle yet strong gestures is at the heart of this year’s international curated exhibition, which has a poignancy to it, as Koyo Kouoh, its Cameroon-born curator, died, following a cancer diagnosis, before having a chance to see her plans come to fruition.
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She did, however, leave behind a list of artists and a clear vision, writing in 2025 that “in refusing the spectacle of horror, the time has come to listen to the minor keys, to tune in sotto voce to the whispers, to the lower frequencies; to find the oases, the islands, where the dignity of all living beings is safeguarded”.
Her team stayed true to both, and as a result her exhibition, In Minor Keys, has fewer individual artists than in previous years, but their work is shown in greater depth.
Kouoh had connected strongly with the Irish art world when she curated the 38th EVA International, in Limerick, in 2016. That exhibition, Still (the) Barbarians, included the work of Alan Phelan and Alice Maher, both of whom feature in her exhibition for this year’s biennale. “I got a text from her,” Phelan says. “It said, ‘Coming to see you dear Alan! Still feeding on your work since EVA. I want you in Venice.’”
Phelan’s work draws on the Joly process, an early colour photography method developed in 1894 by the Dublin physicist John Joly. The artist uses it, he says, to “challenge how we see and understand images”. He describes wanting to “uninvent photography, recovering lost histories, constructing new, alternative visual narratives”. Phelan will also be showing five site-specific pieces within the exhibition.
“The show is complicated,” he says. “It has a huge global reach, and [contains] the global narratives about colonialism and conflict, but it’s also celebratory. It’s like the good side of the bad that’s happening. How people don’t just persevere but have created their own ways of responding. Culture continues.”
Alice Maher will be showing three bodies of work, including The Map, made with her fellow artist Rachel Fallon, a huge textile piece based on the life and legacy of Mary Magdalene. “We began collaborating in 2017,” says Fallon, who worked with Maher on the Artists’ Campaign to Repeal the Eighth Amendment. “We’ve shown the work in Budapest and in New York, and it’s a really interesting time to understand how other people read these histories.”
Maher, one of Ireland’s most significant artists working today, describes the visit of Kouoh to her Mayo studio back in 2016. “It was testimony to her belief in human contact as a way of understanding the world,” she says. “She looked for the undercurrent in what’s going on.” She had also insisted that the EVA catalogue that year be translated into Irish, something more unusual a decade ago. “It’s as if she was able to mine that thing that was bubbling up.”
When Kouoh’s curators made a follow-up visit for Venice, they also selected Maher’s The Sibyls, an installation of four huge drawings and four sculptures and, almost as an afterthought, Les Filles d’Ouranos, first made in 1996.
“We were talking on the way out to the car. Barbara Dawson” – director of the Hugh Lane Gallery – “had driven them from Dublin. And they saw these orange heads over by the garden, which we were using as a barrier for Dermot’s vegetables,” she says, referring to her husband, the artist Dermot Seymour. “They asked, ‘What about these?’ They had weeds coming out of their noses and snails living in them. And they said, ‘Would you consider remaking them for Venice?’”
Not only will Maher’s fabulous Filles be emerging from the waters at the end of the Arsenale; Illy Coffee, one of the Biennale’s sponsors, has selected them, alongside the work of three other artists, to inspire a series of limited-edition cups, which will be in use, and available to purchase, at Venice.
And that fifth Irish artist this year? Eschewing rigid nationalisms, Mark Francis, who was born in Belfast, is representing San Marino with Sea of Sound, a film and a series of paintings. The show does, indeed, go on.
The 61st Venice Biennale runs from Saturday, May 9th, until Saturday, November 21st
