10 Must-See Off-Site Venice Biennale Exhibitions

Marina Abramovic’s “Transforming Energy”

• Galleria Dell’Accademia
• May 16 – October 19, 2026

World-acclaimed performance art pioneer and contemporary shaman Marina Abramović transformed her artistic practice into a ritual that confronts, tests, challenges and heals the body and psyche, reestablishing connections between the individual and the collective. Her “Transforming Energy” is the first exhibition by a female artist ever staged at the Gallerie dell’Accademia. In it, she establishes a profound dialogue between her pioneering performance art and the Renaissance masterpieces that have shaped Venice’s cultural identity, turning the museum into a site of meditation and reparation in an experience that lies between energetic channeling and spiritual transformation. In this “encounter between past and present, material and immaterial, body and spirit,” visitors are invited to engage with a series of interactive Transitory Objects—stone beds and structures embedded with crystals—activating what Abramović calls “energy transmission.” Iconic works such as Imponderabilia (1977), Rhythm 0 (1974), Light/Dark (1977), Balkan Baroque (1997) and Carrying the Skeleton (2008) appear alongside projections of early performances, while new works created for the occasion bring her decades-long exploration of endurance, vulnerability and transformation into sharp relief.

Natasha Tontey’s “The Phantom Combatants”

• Ateneo Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti
• May 6 – November 22, 2026

There are now many organizations operating at the increasingly fertile intersection of art, technology and science, but LAS Art Foundation was among the earliest to define this space and remains one of the most impactful. Over the past few years, it has commissioned some of the most ambitious and forward-looking projects at this crossroads, collaborating with artists such as Pierre Huyghe, Laure Prouvost and Refik Anadol on works that now circulate through leading institutions. Notably, the foundation’s collaboration with Huyghe, developed as part of LAS’s “Sensing Quantum Programme,” was awarded the S+T+ARTS Grand Prize for Innovation Collaboration by the European Commission and will be featured in the artist’s major survey at the Fondation Beyeler. Laure Prouvost’s multisensory installation “WE FELT A STAR DYING,” created in collaboration with Tobias Rees and Hartmut Neven, founder of Google Quantum AI, will be presented at the Grand Palais this June, following its premiere in Berlin.)

During the Biennale, the foundation is presenting a co-commission with Helsinki-based Amos Rex by Minahasan artist and researcher Natasha Tontey. “The Phantom Combatants” brings together Indigenous rituals, playful B-movie aesthetics and experimental storytelling in an expansive, multisensory installation unfolding across the façade and grand interiors of the Ateneo Veneto. Her video adopts the campy language of B-movies, blending DIY and CGI effects with advanced imaging technologies—including quantum ghost imaging, which uses photons to produce images, as well as LiDAR, photogrammetry and thermal cameras—foregrounding the ways in which territories and bodies are measured, mapped and militarized. Featuring highly stylized costumes and props, the work deploys these pioneering technologies to revisit the past and reactivate ancestral heritage from alternative future perspectives. Through multi-channel video, custom spatial sound, lighting and scenography, the project reimagines the overlooked story of Len Karamoy, a female insurgent from Cold War-era Indonesia, as a shapeshifting trickster. “Through this project, I try to listen to the quieter tones of history… At the same time, this minor knowledge also opens up the possibility of developing a technological future rooted in other perspectives,” the artist explains.

Michael Armitage’s “The Promise of Change”

• Palazzo Grassi
• April 29 – January 10, 2027

Exhibitions staged inside Palazzo Grassi—particularly those centered on painting—benefit from an architectural chamber that amplifies scale and presence. Since French luxury magnate and collector François Pinault brought the space under his foundation’s umbrella, it has hosted shows by a succession of artists who have come to define the trajectory of contemporary art. During the Biennale, Kenyan-British painter Michael Armitage is staging a major exhibition unfolding across two levels of the palazzo. Bringing together 45 paintings, including new works, alongside more than 100 studies, the exhibition reveals the density and vibrancy of Armitage’s pictorial language. His kaleidoscopic, often hallucinatory scenes inhabit the elegant interiors, entering into a subtle dialogue with the building’s surfaces and decorated ceilings. At the crossroads of multiple aesthetic traditions, his compositions put figures within richly layered environments marked by striking chromatic intensity.

Based in Kenya and the U.K., Armitage draws from a wide range of sources—news imagery, political demonstrations, literature, cinema, local rituals and global art history—while grounding his iconography in East Africa, particularly Kenya. Some works are anchored in specific events, such as the violent repression surrounding the 2017 Kenyan elections and the social conditions of the 2020-21 lockdown, while others remain deliberately ambiguous. Addressing urgent issues of our time—sociopolitical tensions, violence, seductive ideologies, migration and abuses of power—Armitage’s paintings refuse to turn away from reality, yet their dreamlike, subconscious dimension allows them to transcend a fixed time or place. As the exhibition progresses, the scenes grow denser and more elusive, leaving space for interpretation as figures and landscapes expand into archetypal narratives that speak to the enduring human drive toward change and transformation.

On view concurrently on Palazzo Grassi’s second floor are two multimedia installations by Indian artist Amar Kanwar that explore the politics of power, violence and resistance in the history of South Asia.

Wallace Chan’s “Vessels of Other Worlds”

• Chapel of Santa Maria della Pietà
• May 8 – October 18, 2026

A monumental two-chapter show by Wallace Chan is unfolding this season across two cities historically connected by many threads of exchange, Venice and Shanghai. Supported by the Long Museum, is the most ambitious project to date for the world-renowned Chinese artist and sculptor, who has redefined contemporary jewelry. Working with the geological and alchemical memory of crystals and gems, Chan creates his own mythology of time, cyclical transformation and the perpetual possibility of renewal. Inside the Chapel of Santa Maria della Pietà, three titanium sculptures inspired by the three sacred oils—the Olea Sancta—are surrounded by a constellation of suspended titanium sculptures suggesting oil drops in motion, representing the flow of matter and energy. The entire installation is intended to symbolize the three stages of life—birth, growth and rebirth—while drawing further inspiration from the mysticism of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. The exhibition’s imaginative dimension expands further with three video screens positioned as a triptych on the altar, serving as a secret portal to the monumental counterparts on view at the Long Museum and a dialogue between cultural heritages. The entire installation invites contemplation of the relationship between the tangible and the otherworldly, as these sculptures fluidly transcend space and time. Note: Chan has also placed a site-specific intervention at the Bovolo Tower, a 15th-century cylindrical landmark that is itself a must-see in Venice.

Paulo Nazareth’s “Algebra”

• Punta della Dogana
• April 29 – November 22, 2026

Turning his artistic practice into a lifelong nomadic performance, Brazilian artist Paulo Nazareth has spent more than 15 years methodically traveling across continents, walking barefoot from the Americas to Africa. This act of endurance and survival is both a personal and collective ritual, retracing ancestral routes and honoring enslaved forebears who were stripped of footwear as a sign of subjugation. In this ongoing performance, Nazareth exposes how colonial cartography and systemic racism have shaped the landscapes of modernity; his slow, deliberate journeys become a form of storytelling that inscribes history into bodies, languages and borders. Although much of his practice resists categorization and the art world’s dynamics of objectification and commodification, Nazareth’s works often crystallize from precise and decisive actions that confront urgent questions of migration, racialization, globalization and colonialism, and their impact on the production and circulation of art across Brazil and the Global South.
Unfolding on the upper level of Punta della Dogana, the exhibition—curated by Fernanda Brenner and titled “Algebra,” from the Arabic al-jabr, or “the setting of broken bones”—brings together more than 20 years of practice, including previously unseen works drawn from the Pinault Collection. Here, Nazareth’s methodology emerges as a form of repair, attending to the unhealed fractures of history through movement, relation and embodied knowledge.

A continuous line of salt runs through the galleries, marking a threshold between the visible and the submerged, gradually revealing the ghostly geometry of a tumbeiro—the slave ships that crossed the Atlantic—whose architecture of violence underlies the entire installation. Neither chronological nor thematic, the exhibition unfolds as a series of stations within an ongoing art-life performance. Central among them is Notícias de América, which condenses Nazareth’s 10-month walk from Brazil to New York through photographs, texts and worn Havaianas, tracing the collision between identity and borders and positioning migration as both lived experience and constructed narrative.

The result is a powerful, immersive environment that transforms the former customs house into a space of memory, repair and resistance, while reactivating its history as a site of global exchange and connection. In parallel, Punta della Dogana is staging an extensive solo exhibition by American painter Lorna Simpson—the most significant presentation of her work in Europe in more than a decade.

Nalini Malani’s
“Of Woman Born”

• Magazzini del Sale
• May 9- November 22, 2026

Nalini Malani is one of those artists who demonstrates the enduring power of storytelling through images capable of expanding, evolving and generating worlds. Commissioned by the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) and curated by Roobina Karode, Malani’s site-specific multichannel installation transforms the historic Magazzini del Sale into both a “thought chamber” and an “echo chamber”—a continuously shifting environment reverberating with sounds, texts and images. Grounded in the distinctively resourceful mythopoetic practice that made her India’s first pioneering video artist, Malani weaves together narratives of women, myth and global conflict, tracing connections and resonances across time and space, and across recurring behavioral and archetypal characters. Featuring 67 animations derived from more than 30,000 iPad drawings and a visceral 20-minute soundscape, the work revisits the myth of Orestes to confront the persistence of patriarchal violence—a masculine force devoid of any ethic of harmony and care that underpins contemporary global conflict to this day.

Fondazione In Between Art Film’s “Canicula”

• Complesso Dell’ Ospedaletto
• May 9 – November 22, 2026

Since its founding by Beatrice Bulgari in 2019, Fondazione In Between Art Film has been relentlessly advancing the culture of the moving image, supporting international artists, institutions and research centers that explore the dialogue between disciplines and the shifting boundaries between film, video, performance and installation. One of its defining programming highlights is its annual large-scale exhibition in Venice during the Biennale, which transforms the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto into an immersive cinematic environment where video works expand into worlds to inhabit and explore. Now, the foundation’s “Trilogy of Uncertainties” reaches its final chapter with “Canicula,” premiering eight new site-specific video installations commissioned from an international group of artists redefining the possibilities of moving-image narratives, including Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Massimo D’Anolfi and Martina Parenti, Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk, Janis Rafa, P. Staff, Wang Tuo, Yuyan Wang and Maya Watanabe.

The exhibition takes its title from the Latin ‘canicula,’ meaning “dog days,” now used to describe the hottest period of summer—a time that, in ancient Mediterranean cultures, was associated with both abundance and ruin. Following “Penumbra” (2022) and “Nebula” (2024), this final chapter completes a trilogy that has traced, through the poetic language of moving images, a progression from darkness to excess light. Curated by Alessandro Rabottini and Lorenzo Bigazzi, it culminates in a blinding intensity—heat and brightness that distort perception, calling into question the reliability of vision and the fragile interpretations of reality it produces.

Erwin Wurm’s “Dreamers”

• Palazzo Fortuny
• May 6 – November 22, 2026

Over the last four decades, Erwin Wurm has established himself in the international art world with his playfully whimsical, world-building practice that transforms everyday objects into caricature-like figures that are sometimes uncanny, sometimes magical. His experimental, non-canonical approach to sculpture—pushing against any traditional notion of fixed form—began with his One Minute Sculptures, in which Wurm provides viewers with instructions for actions or poses to be performed with ordinary objects. Ephemeral by nature, these works function as living performances, allowing him to challenge the formal boundaries of visual languages and blur distinctions between art and everyday life, viewer and participant, performance and monument. Humor has always been a central tool in his practice, shaping not only his visual imagination but also the philosophical, psychological and social questions it raises. His whimsical sculptures operate as a critique of contemporary society and the performative logic of capitalism, revealing how systems of value and power shape our desires, behaviors and identities—turning our own bodies into passive sculptural forms, molded by the social pressures to which our lives are subjugated.

Lee Ufan and Alighiero Boetti in San Marco

• San Marco Art Center (SMAC)
• May 9 – November 22, 2026

An intriguing pairing brings together two pillars of Postwar art from different cultural latitudes, united in Venice by a shared exhibition venue beside the city’s most iconic landmark, the Piazza San Marco. 

The San Marco Art Centre (SMAC) is presenting a solo exhibition of works by Lee Ufan, curated by Jessica Morgan and coinciding with both the artist’s 90th birthday and the opening of a major new presentation at Dia Beacon. The exhibition in Venice traces not only the evolution of Lee Ufan’s distinctive visual lexicon but also a broader philosophical practice that connects art-making to ritual and meditation, rooted in Eastern aesthetics. Painting and breathing, breathing and painting, he transforms a single brushstroke into an atmosphere, a few stones into an energetic field, a spiritual space that invites reflection and heightened sensory awareness. Combining historical and recent works with large-scale installations, including a new site-specific commission, the exhibition occupies eight galleries of the Procuratie Vecchie in Piazza San Marco, spanning more than seven decades of practice.

The remaining galleries are hosting a constellation of approximately 80 works by Italian artist Alighiero Boetti, in an expansive survey that highlights the conceptual and imaginative range of his multilayered practice. Spanning more than 25 years, from the late 1960s to the early 1990s, the exhibition traces the full arc of Boetti’s trajectory and his persistent exploration of the creative tension between idea and form, order and disorder. Recurring themes—duality, systems and process—emerge from his early Arte Povera works, grounded in simple materials and elementary structures, through to later collaborative and conceptually layered projects, including the iconic embroidered tapestries produced with Afghan women. Together, they reveal the internal coherence of a practice that continuously tested its own premises while embracing chance, repetition and shared authorship as generative forces.

“Su Xiobai’s Alchemical Universe”

• Palazzo Soranzo Axel
• May 9 – November 22, 2026

It may be the liquid nature of Venice—the way the city itself makes visible the cyclical rhythm of all things, suspended as it is between decay and regeneration—but alchemy seems to permeate this year’s Biennale and its collateral exhibitions. This exhibition showcases the work of Chinese artist Su Xiaobai, whose meditative practice transforms the ancient medium of lacquer into a radiant, sculptural language. The resulting layered surfaces are animated by a subtle interplay of light and shadow, as luminescences emerge from within the material itself, inviting the eye into a kind of geological excavation that mirrors the alchemical transformations he enacts. Trained at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing and the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Su bridges Chinese literati traditions and postwar European painting, having shifted away from oil paints and Socialist Realist figuration toward a material practice that moves between painting and object. Layering lacquer not as a coating but as a medium, he creates layered works with complex chromatic depths. An official collateral event of Biennale Arte 2026, “Alchemical Universe” is presented by the Su Xiaobai Foundation in collaboration with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.