At the 61st Venice Biennale, national pavilions continue to act as both cultural statements and spatial experiments, each one distilling how countries choose to present themselves on one of art’s most scrutinised global stages.
This year, three presentations stand out not only for their artistic ambition, but for what they signal about presence, return, and reinvention: Japan’s participatory installation, Morocco’s debut at the Arsenale, and India’s reappearance after a seven-year hiatus.
Japan: play, care, and participation
At the Japanese Pavilion, queer artist, Ei Arakawa-Nash, who has renounced his Japanese citizenship, transforms the exhibition space into something closer to a living system of care than a conventional display. In Grass Babies, Moon Babies (2026), visitors encounter more than 100 baby dolls, ready to be adopted, inspired by his personal fathering of twins, whose identities, and gender are undisclosed, as a controversial, politically loaded statement, against the conservative backdrop of Japan’s LGBT laws, where same-sex marriages are disallowed.
Each, are with distinct personalities, birthdays, and even poems generated through interaction.
Some dolls sit expectantly on tables, others rest in landscaped corners of the pavilion or hang from sculptural structures. Visitors are invited to pick them up, carry them through the space, and engage in acts of caretaking before completing a final ritual: changing a diaper and scanning a QR code to receive a short poem.
Inspired in part by Arakawa-Nash’s experience as a parent to twins, the work reframes the pavilion as a temporary community of shared responsibility—part performance, part social experiment, part game.
Morocco: weaving as architecture and memory
Morocco’s first pavilion at the Arsenale marks a significant moment of institutional presence, led by artist Amina Agueznay with the large-scale installation Asǝṭṭa (2026).
Rooted in Amazigh weaving traditions, the work brings together 166 artisans from across Morocco, whose collective labour spans weaving, embroidery, basketry, and jewellery-making. Over six months, their techniques are translated into an immersive environment of suspended textiles and layered surfaces.
Rather than presenting craft as static heritage, Agueznay positions it as a living system of exchange. The installation’s woven forms wrap the gallery and spill from the ceiling, blending Moroccan geometric traditions with subtle Venetian references—Murano glass, water-like reflections, and cartographic abstractions of the lagoon city.
Personal and generational memory is embedded throughout, including protective “eye” motifs dedicated to the artist’s mother, the Moroccan artist Malika Agueznay. The result is both architectural and intimate: a space where textile becomes structure, and tradition becomes process.
India: a return to the Biennale
India’s reappearance after seven years signals another kind of shift: not only in artistic direction, but in cultural visibility within the Biennale framework. While details of the pavilion programme continue to draw attention, its return itself is being read as part of a broader recalibration of India’s presence on the international art stage.
Across these three pavilions, a shared thread emerges: participation. Whether through care, collaboration, or re-engagement after absence, each presentation reframes what it means to inhabit a national pavilion today—not as a fixed statement, but as a space of negotiation, labour, and lived experience.
Featured Image: India Pavilion for Venice Biennale 2026
