Every two years, Venice becomes the loudest room in the art world. The Giardini fills, the vaporetti slow under the weight of collectors and critics, and the pavilions compete for the attention of a crowd that has already seen too much. Against this backdrop, the National Pavilion UAE has chosen, for its 2026 edition at La Biennale di Venezia, to whisper. Washwasha, the Arabic word for whispering, is not an obvious choice for an exhibition title, and that is precisely what makes it interesting.
The National Pavilion UAE’s forthcoming exhibition at the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia is curated by Bana Kattan, Curator and Associate Head of Exhibitions at the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Project, alongside assistant curator Tala Nassar, a researcher and curator whose practice is rooted in modern and contemporary Arab art. Together, they have assembled six artists — Mays Albaik, Jawad Al Malhi, Farah Al Qasimi, Alaa Edris, Lamya Gargash, and Taus Makhacheva, whose work is a definitive chorus: distinct voices that, in proximity, create something denser and more resonant than any single note.
The exhibition is interested in soundscapes, not in the literal sense, but as a way of thinking about how communities in the UAE have made themselves heard across generations, across technologies, across the particular conditions of migration and transience that shape life there. From oral storytelling to poetry circles, from radio to the algorithmically curated feeds that now govern what we hear and how, the exhibition maps a long arc of transmission. What changes, it seems to ask, when the infrastructure of listening changes?
The artists approach this question from strikingly different positions. Mays Albaik, whose practice spans video, performance, and text, examines how bodies negotiate place and language under displacement — work that feels especially urgent after her recent presentation at the Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger and Louvre Abu Dhabi. Lamya Gargash, one of the UAE’s most quietly significant photographers, has spent years documenting the architectural residues of rapid change: abandoned homes, budget hotels, the social geometries of the majlis. Her presence in the pavilion feels like an act of institutional memory. Farah Al Qasimi, a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow whose work is held in MoMA’s permanent collection, arrives from a very different angle, drawn to the internet’s hierarchies of image and emotion, to the way digital platforms have reorganised what we pay attention to and why.
There is also Jawad Al Malhi, a Palestinian artist with a practice spanning decades and institutions — Documenta 13, the Centre Pompidou, the British Museum’s collection, whose work brings a historical weight to the conversation. Alaa Edris, who approaches photography and performance like a cartographer navigating contested cultural terrain, adds another layer of rigour. And Taus Makhacheva, perhaps the most internationally exhibited artist in the group, brings her characteristic method of working with monuments and materials to expose the fictions underneath claims of cultural authenticity.
Venice in May is, of course, an event unto itself: the Giardini thick with the particular electricity of the opening days, the vaporetti heaving with curators and collectors and critics. But this pavilion promises something rarer — a moment of ingenuity in all the noise.
The 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia runs from 9 May to 22 November 2026, with pre-opening days on 6, 7 and 8 May. The National Pavilion UAE is located at the Arsenale.
