Venice Biennale 2026: The 6 Rising Artists to Watch at the Fair

No Venice Biennale has felt more roiled in controversy than the current edition. But despite the headlines, the artists are still here, putting in the effort to make some of their most ambitious work to date. Here are six who delivered.

Sung Tieu

When you are invited to the Venice Biennale, you should endeavor to go all out. By this measure, Sung Tieu has met her moment. “It’s been a learning curve,” Tieu tells W, underselling the mammoth effort behind her most ambitious work to date. Tieu has transformed the German Pavilion, which she shares with the late artist Henrike Naumann, by cloaking its entire silhouette with a new one. The shell, made of thousands of tiles, is a trompe l’œil tessellated marble recreation of Objekt Gehrenseestraße, the Plattenbau housing complex in Berlin-Lichtenberg where Tieu spent part of her childhood and the past decade leading bus tours as part of a radical and ongoing artwork about the personally and socially loaded history of the site. Tieu’s Potemkin housing project takes care to recreate the decay and graffiti that colored the building’s final years since its decommissioning in 2003. In its original incarnation, it was little more than nine slab-construction towers that housed over 6,000 Vietnamese contract workers, each allotted roughly five square meters of living space. The title of the work is Ruin: in many ways, it feels like all the years of Tieu’s bus tours through Marzahn and Lichtenberg—the neighborhoods surrounding the former GDR dormitory complex—were building to this moment of erasure, whereby the German Pavilion, a symbol of fascist nationalism, is eclipsed by the true history of its legacy.

Inside the pavilion, Tieu takes the opportunity of a national stage to take pride in a homeland that is much more personal: her mother. Chocolate ladybugs, which have become a visual shorthand for childhood in Tieu’s work, are scattered throughout the space. “I liked the idea of being invited to show in a space, and arriving as a kind of infestation,” Tieu says of her insect hordes. “They feel like they are occupying.”

Gala Porras-Kim

It feels almost too fitting that the halls assigned to Gala Porras-Kim at the Arsenale were originally the rooms in which the tools of the shipyard were put on display—built, from the start, for exhibiting objects. Porras-Kim has established a name for herself in recent years as an interventionist in art’s most prestigious institutions; she embeds herself in them through visual research, and then uses that material to surface questions those institutions are asking themselves, but are not always forthright in sharing.

For her Venice Biennale presentation, Porras-Kim delves into a subject that feels entirely apropos to the environs of a sinking city: decay. More specifically, she is looking at what she calls “institutionally defined damage”—instances where moisture, sunlight, and time have taken their toll on an object now under the care of conservators. Porras-Kim is especially interested in the moments when an object considered irreversibly damaged by the institution that holds it is, through that very same deterioration, finding its way back into alignment. “Everything is getting destroyed anyway,” says the artist, who was born in Bogotá to a Colombian-Korean family, and now lives between London and Los Angeles. “Just how slow and perceivable can we recognize that damage.”

The show includes new and existing work. As part of her longstanding interest in systems of distribution, Porras-Kim takes a deliberate approach to exhibition-making, traveling a core set of works she owns across presentations to ensure continuity with her past. Visitors familiar with her practice will recognize some of what’s on view, but the exhibition also introduces new works that emerged from her collaboration with the Victoria and Albert Museum, which partnered with Porras-Kim for the Biennale’s Applied Arts Pavilion.

Lubaina Himid

“So many artists tend to only work in specific parts of the pavilion, or cover it all up,” says Lubaina Himid, this year’s British Pavilion occupant. “I wanted to reveal it.” For Himid, this meant forgoing her usual sculptural moves, her iconic painted cutout figures that she used to fill the halls of the Tate back in 2021. Instead, Himid opted to let her paintings be paintings—ones that hang alone on otherwise bare walls above empty floors.

The space feels full anyway, thanks to a soundtrack pumping overhead—created with Polish-born, U.K.-based artist Magda Stawarska-Beavan, who has been collaborating with Himid for over two decades. The composition greets visitors at the door like a prelude and trickles and pours through the building, ushering them from the entrance to the back, where one can glimpse and hear the lap of the lagoon just beyond. There is an intentional bleed between the world outside and the composed world within.

Himid’s paintings echo this uncanny recognizability. They are familiar but ever-so-slightly wrong—images of boatyards. Images of tailors, of kitchens. They flicker with the initial light of recognition and then get darker the longer we stare. Each carries text, labels that quietly undermine the painting and the room itself. “These are paintings that ask questions,” Himid says. “They ask if flies can ever settle. If water is always useful. If poison can taste delicious.”

Water is a recurring force flowing through more than forty years of Himid’s work. But it takes Venice, a city that was built on water and is now being taken back by it, to reveal just how many things she has been weaving together at once. Trade, colonization, globalization, climate collapse: the water carries all of it, and standing with these new paintings, you finally feel the weight of that accumulation.

Those looking to parse where the satire starts and ends with Himid should spend particular time examining figures’ clothing. Like Venice, steeped in fashion history through Fortuny and the competing fortunes of Pinault and Prada, Himid is deeply interested in the way how one dresses communicates. When in doubt, the clothes are the clues. And you are part of the show.

Sara Flores

Artist Sara Flores has spent the past two years as the subject of a feature documentary, The Hummingbird Paints Fragrant Songs, directed by Èlia Gasull Balada and Matteo Norzi, set to debut later this year. The on-set experience opened a new door into filmmaking, the first fruits of which Flores is debuting in Venice alongside the largest kené painting of her career. Flores has not demurred from the responsibility as the first Indigenous woman ever to represent Peru—she has embraced the specialness of the occasion by pushing herself and her medium to do things she’s never done before.

The film, Non Nete (A Flag for the Shipibo Nation), depicts a sustained image of kené moving in the wind. Kené is the visual and cosmological language of the Shipibo-Konibo people of the Peruvian Amazon. It is not decoration, and it is not pattern in the way we typically use the word. It is a living system—geometric, intricate, endlessly recursive—transmitted through generations of women. Flores learned it at fourteen, from her mother. She has painted every day since.

The pavilion sees that expertise in action via the largest work of Flores’s life, a canvas that took more than four months to complete. The artist worked through it daily, resting only on Saturdays; its scale demanded that kind of commitment, but the process stayed the same as always: listening to the designs, following where they led.

The film’s soundtrack, a whistled melody blown into an ayahuasca bottle at the opening of a ceremony, fills the space with a shaman’s invitation. “What gives the work its strength is that it remains faithful to where it comes from,” Flores says of her pavilion. “If it can stand in that space without changing its nature, then it already carries what it needs to carry. In this critical moment for the planet, in which people fight against one another, its message is as powerful and as simple as ever: we are all interconnected.”

Kandis Williams

If you pass Palazzo Nervi Scattolin at night, make a stop. One of the few examples of Venetian modernism, the iconic building has been given over for the Biennale to the Pier Luigi Nervi Foundation, which is projecting new moving-image work across its facade after dark as part of the exhibition If All Time Is Eternally Present, curated by Chiara Carrera and Marta Barina and supported by Bottega Veneta.

Several artists are featured in this open-air theater, but look out especially for Los Angeles-based artist Kandis Williams, whose contribution, A Travel Guide: Black Gothic in South Korean Horror (2025), feels especially prescient for the city and this moment. It is a tourist ghost story that follows Williams as a foreigner in South Korea. “The barriers to building a cohesive narrative out of a first travel to a different country,” she says, “are how I’m looking to undermine the notion of straightforward documentary films that engage an objectively expert or neutral tone.” The result is something more honest and more unsettling than expertise could produce.

The film tracks the deep entanglement between Black American music and K-pop, and the more uncomfortable questions about image, and who gets to own a culture’s sound. For Williams, the Black traveler is always negotiating more than geography. “The Black traveler has to pass borders and thresholds of meaning from monster to fetish idol,” she adds. “These thresholds are often invisible and veiled in some sense, and hyper visceral in others.” K-pop, with its absorption of Black American music and what Williams calls the role of “images of Black women, especially Black femme pop stars” in “imperialist hyper-sexualities,” is another threshold to examine.

When asked about her inspirations for the work, Williams cites Renée Green’s Free Agent Media and the Negro Motorist Green Book as touchstones. These are works that track, in her words, “subjectivities that have to live and perform on the limits of perception of being human or recognizable as humans.” In Venice, a place so full of specters, it is hard to find a more pitch-perfect, drive-by score.

It is also a kind of teaser. Williams has big things ahead. She is fresh off a show at the Walker Art Center, and gearing up for solo exhibitions at the Rockbund Museum and the Serpentine Galleries. Get used to seeing her name.

Yto Barrada

The French Pavilion’s architecture unfolds like a gift box, a central room with four wings extending outward. The shape inspired Yto Barrada to pursue a subject that could be unfolded in as many directions. She found her seed in a line from the French Revolutionary orator Pierre-Victurnien Vergniaud, spoken in 1793 shortly before he was guillotined: “The Revolution, like Saturn, devours its children.” From there, the associations cascaded. Each room of Comme Saturne, curated by Myriam Ben Salah, takes the theme somewhere new through color theory, labor history, melancholy, the Luddite revolts. To pull it off, Barrada not only had to build up a library of puns and associations, but also put together a team of experts.

She started by moving back to France. Born in Paris and raised between there and Tangier, Barrada has long lived experienced both Moroccan and New York City life. But for this project she relocated the family for the year. “I wanted to work with local makers and collaborators,” she says. She began educating herself in a material she had never worked with before: wool. She found a master dyer specializing in wool, Charlotte Marembert, and an anthropologist of color history, Arnaud Dubois, and brought them together at her dye garden and residency space in Tangier, where the project began to take shape.

What makes Comme Saturne surprising is that Barrada didn’t arrive at the French Pavilion coasting. She is an artist with a long-established, international practice. Her work is held at MoMA, The Met, Tate Modern, and the Centre Pompidou; she could have made something consolidating what is already known about her. Instead, the artist went in the opposite direction. “I’m bored with my own works very quickly,” she says. The pavilion became a laboratory: for a material she had never worked with, for a color theory she had to learn from scratch. The artist burns away the familiar until something unexpected comes through.