Abbas Akhavan Arrives at the Venice Biennale

Venice is a capricious host. The city basks in a lagoon like a mermaid, luring you in with its enchanting, improbable beauty, but it is always on the verge of pulling you under, too.

During high tide, or acqua alta, streets can flood to hip height. Well-dressed waiters in waders serve trays of cicchetti to tourists swaddled in garish waterproofs, and rats do laps under hastily erected catwalks in St. Mark’s Square. At night, slick cobblestones catch the glow of the palazzi, doubling Venice in reflection and producing a picturesque twin of the one that, only hours earlier, seemed to be gasping for breath.

Abbas Akhavan, who is representing Canada at the 61st Venice Biennale (May 9 to November 22, 2026), is no stranger to how volatility can lurk beneath a veneer of civility. The idea threads throughout the practice of the Tehran-born artist, now based in Montreal and Berlin, whose understated, humble demeanour belies his international stature. Over the past five years, the artist, who works in installation, sculpture, video, performance, and drawing, has had critically acclaimed solo exhibitions in Vancouver, Bangkok, Copenhagen, and London. He will open a survey at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (November 12 to April 18, 2027) just as the Biennale draws to a close.

“Not all artists are ready to do Venice,” says Jean-François Bélisle, director and CEO of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, which manages the Canada Pavilion at the Venice Biennale and chooses which artists will exhibit in it. “It’s a huge, complicated, high-pressure thing.” Critically acclaimed artists who presented in past editions include Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller (2001), Rebecca Belmore (2005), Shary Boyle (2013), Geoffrey Farmer (2017), Stan Douglas (2022), and Kapwani Kiwanga (2024).

Installation view, Abbas Akhavan: Entre chien et loup, 2026, Canada Pavilion, 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Commissioned by the National Gallery of Canada and presented in partnership with the National Gallery of Canada Foundation and the Canada Council for the Arts. © Abbas Akhavan. Photo: Francesco Barasciutti

Bélisle was president of the selection committee for this year’s Biennale, and when it came to Akhavan, he says, “The jury was unanimous.” They were seeking an artist whose work could resonate beyond a specifically Canadian context, and ultimately selected Akhavan for his sustained engagement with environmental and ecological concerns, as well as for his ability to address urgent issues in a nuanced, constructive manner.

One work in particular convinced Bélisle of Akhavan’s readiness: Variations on a Folly (2021–), which formed half of the exhibition Curtain Call at Copenhagen Contemporary. The large-scale installation featured a colonnade of 19 five-metre-tall columns made of cob, an earthen material, arranged on a synthetic green-screen landscape. The work referenced the ruins of the ancient Palmyra arch in Syria that was destroyed by ISIS in 2015, as well as a 2016 replica that was temporarily installed in London’s Trafalgar Square. “All of the other works that I’ve seen of his convinced me of his rigour, research, thoughtfulness, depth,” Bélisle says, “but Venice requires more than that. It has that little spectacle aspect that is needed as well.” Variations on a Folly simultaneously evokes monumentality and fragility, which demonstrated to Bélisle that Akhavan “understands how to impress without losing depth.”

The specific details of Akhavan’s Venice project were kept a tight-lipped secret until the art fair opened, but certain themes recur so consistently in his practice that they were likely to surface here as well. His works always display stark self-awareness, often adopt theatrical modes of      presentation, frequently implicate the audience, sometimes resist overt authorship, and remain playful without ever becoming flippant. Most are ephemeral and site-specific. Akhavan’s “work is shaped by the unique characteristics of the sites he works on, including the architectures, surrounding economies, and individuals who frequent them,” Bélisle says.

In Venice, Akhavan has been directly inspired by the unusual architecture of the Canada Pavilion, which is shaped like a nautilus shell with a dramatically sloping roof supported by exposed beams. Its design has been called modest and humanist, and it is certainly a wallflower compared to its neoclassical neighbours, Germany and Great Britain.

For his installation, “I am looking at the history of glass houses,” Akhavan disclosed in an email sent two weeks before the Biennale opened. Glass features prominently in the pavilion, with a living tree encased in a column at its centre and a façade that forms a porous boundary with the surrounding forest outside. It is likely that he is also invoking the proverb about people in glass houses not throwing stones, often used to admonish hypocrisy.

Akhavan’s own moral integrity initially presented a potential impediment to his project’s success. His work is often developed over prolonged residencies and responds directly to the spatial and material conditions of its intended exhibition space, but prior to his selection o get on a plane just to go see art,” Bélisle explains of the eco-conscious artist. “When I learned that, it freaked me out.” Because the pavilion is so different from the typical white-cube gallery space, a degree of familiarity with it is essential—especially when planning the biggest exhibition of your career. The National Gallery acted quickly to arrange a visit for Akhavan during the final weekend of the previous Biennale so he could see the venue (and city) fully activated by art.

Fortunately, the pavilion’s forested location couldn’t have been more suitable for Akhavan’s work, which frequently incorporates cultivated landscapes. It is located in the Giardini, an expansive green space built in 1807 on the instructions of Napoleon Bonaparte, 10 years after his army occupied the Venetian republic. The French emperor ordered a wide swath of marshland to be drained for the construction of elaborate gardens, with rubble from demolished ancient monasteries used to stabilize the soil. Trees and plants imported from faraway lands now grow here in abundance, as if the wooden stilts that anchor Venice into the mud below were poking out of the soil.

For his Venice project, Akhavan revealed, “I am looking at the transportation and display of plant life.” At a talk about his most recent exhibition, One Hundred Years at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia, he said that he is less interested in horticulture as a means for enhancing people’s sense of well-being and more in the “open idea of what a garden could be as a kind of claimed space, where the gardener, or the author, distinguishes between what dies and lives in relation to the domestic.” One of his most widely exhibited works (not included in the Belkin show) is Study for a Monument (2013–16), for which he created bronze casts of plant species devastated by Saddam Hussein’s draining of Mesopotamian salt marshland after the Gulf War.

The Biennale exhibition “is a kind of a reenactment of historical events,” Akhavan said over email, adding that he is hoping to “provide a space with a timeline that is beyond the recent past.” From the very beginnings of Venice’s existence,  people have sought to manipulate and dominate its natural environment. “Venice symbolizes the people’s victorious struggle against the elements as they managed to master a hostile nature,” reads the sixth criterion for what led to the designation of the city and its lagoon as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987—an undeniably colonial use of metaphor that positions humanity as heroic for imposing civilization on a wild ecosystem that didn’t kowtow to foreign invasion.

In Akhavan’s project for the Biennale, “That connection to marshes and waters is something that permeates through,” Bélisle reveals, “but not in a literal fashion.” Given how much water has appeared in Akhavan’s work, coupled with the site-responsive nature of his practice, it’s hardly surprising that the substance will also trickle in here.

As with his interest in gardens, Akhavan’s interest in water is largely regarding how it is controlled by humans. “I’ve always been trying to pull apart the logic of the fountain,” he said at the Belkin talk. Artificial water systems are a recurring element across his practice, from a pump concealed in stacks of pots and pans in Variations on Ghosts and Guests: Well (2011) through to frozen pipes symbolizing suspended time in Spring (2021/25).

Behind Akhavan’s fascinations with the disciplined landscapes of fountains and gardens is a deep concern with the overlap between civility and violence. He sees structures and objects meant to symbolize care, comfort, and celebration—homes, zoos, greenhouses, museums, cakes, fireworks, curtains, bedsheets—as also carrying connotations of control, exclusion, and displacement. He  often returns to an etymological curiosity he first encountered in Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain (1985): from the Proto-Indo-European root ghos-ti-, meaning “stranger,” “guest,” or “host,” emerge the Latin hostis and hospes, which in turn yielded host and hospitality, but also hostage and hostility.

The artist has an intimate knowledge of how this forked tongue speaks. His family moved to Canada to escape the violence of the Iran-Iraq War, when Saddam Hussein notoriously referred to foreign captives as “guests.”

Using the word in its more familiar sense, Akhavan remarked in a 2019 interview with Antennae, “I have somehow managed to be a perpetual guest,” noting that he had taken part in 17 residencies over nine years. Speaking to Gabrielle Moser in Canadian Art (winter 2016), he described residencies as “one way to elude models of expertise,” in which artists are often less familiar with a place than their audience. Precisely because residencies are “more precarious and open to failure,” he sees them as “radical acts of hospitality.”

When not being hosted in faraway lands, Akhavan has spent significant time living in Montreal, Vancouver, and Toronto, and each city is eager to claim him. “We have three provinces that think they’ve got their homegrown talent picked,” Bélisle says. While Akhavan’s connection to Canada is strong, his personal identity does not figure directly in his practice, and his work does not fit easily within the framework of national representation.

“That’s probably the only part that he felt uncomfortable about, in supposedly representing a nation,” Bélisle says. Recounting a conversation he had with Akhavan, Bélisle says, “He’s like, ‘That’s not what I’m about. Some Canadians are not going to find themselves in what I do, and that’s fine. I’m just trying to bring a meaningful and important discussion to the international stage, and my channel to get there is the Canadian pavilion, but it’s a channel, it’s not a subject.’”

“I think he’s less interested in representing a nation and more in what his work can do in particular conditions,” says Melanie O’Brian, the curator who worked with Akhavan most recently on One Hundred Years

Pressure to be patriotic or political is not likely to affect his plans. “I’m not an artist who’s capable of being didactic about my message through my work,” Akhavan said during the Belkin talk. He has long been politically engaged, but he keeps his personal views separate from his practice. “The exhibition is a kind of a reenactment of historical events,” Akhavan says, adding that he is “[h]oping to provide a space with a timeline that is beyond the recent past.” He bemoans the increasingly common view that “art has to provide solutions and has to be burdened with a level of responsibility, about funding, about content, about position, about who you’re hanging out with.”

Akhavan questions the limits, and fairness, of that expectation. “We work in a symbolic field of soft power, but we’re being pushed as the front people to guard against a moral position for the rest of society to follow,” he says. He is vulnerable about his feelings of helplessness in the face of ongoing global crises and about the difficulty of translating political loyalties into artistic form. While he engages with issues such as environmental destruction and cultural loss, he does not present his work as a direct statement or solution. Taking a more measured stance, he is “attacking the deeper issues instead of the symptoms,” Bélisle says.

“At best, I think an artwork has an obligation to practise hope as a discipline,” Akhavan says. He believes that art contains the potential to mend painful divides, and describes his favourite artworks as “akin to vessels that carry materials as conduits that deliver a message or an intention or an atmosphere.” He often titles his works “studies” or “variations,” emphasizing their provisional and open-ended nature, and his installations create environments that expose tensions within familiar spaces.

“Doing Venice is kind of like, you’re just pushed into a pool, and you learn to swim. There’s just not enough time to get a lesson. And I don’t mean that as an act of neglect. It’s just a circumstance,” Akhavan says. “In the past, I knew I was shortlisted, but I said no because I wasn’t ready for it,” he discloses. “That came at a price of uncertainty and a lot of self-doubt.”

As Akhavan’s work demonstrates, though, one’s goal in life shouldn’t be to shrink away from feelings of uncertainty but rather to embrace them. This is radical hospitality. In his artworks, he sets up encounters that cannot be fully controlled or explained, and he ensures that viewers become aware of their own position within systems of looking, movement, and interpretation. As Kim Nguyen, the curator for his Biennale exhibition, says, Akhavan “encourages us to think, to feel, to acknowledge what we do not know, but to consider caring for it anyway.”

As Akhavan approaches Venice and whatever may follow in its wake, he does so with the composure of a seasoned sailor, his eyes on the horizon but alert to what moves beneath the city’s shimmering surface. He has spent his whole life preparing for encounters like these. He knows that a city built on mud and sustained by myth must be met on its own terms, with the understanding that even on unstable ground, strangers can still find their footing together.

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