# Venice Biennale opens with Belgium’s performance-art pavilion and wider protest backdrop
Event date: 2026-05-09
The 61st Venice Biennale has opened to the public with art from 100 countries on display and Belgium using its national pavilion to showcase performance art rather than a more traditional exhibition format.
The Brussels Times reported that Belgium’s contribution is Miet Warlop’s It never ssst, curated by Caroline Dumalin. The work turns the historic Belgian pavilion into a space where performers interact with plaster-cast words, moving them, breaking them and using them as instruments. That makes the Belgian show one of the more conceptually active entries in this year’s exhibition.
The Biennale’s main exhibition, In Minor Keys, features works by 110 artists, collectives and organisations. The scale matters because it shows how broad the event is this year: one of the world’s most important art exhibitions is presenting a huge international field while also giving individual national pavilions room to make specific statements.
Belgium’s pavilion itself carries symbolic weight. The article noted that the building, opened in 1907, was the first foreign pavilion in the Giardini and has long alternated between Flemish and French community presentations. This year, it is also tied to a larger Belgian presence across the city, with artists including Philip Aguirre y Otegui, Sammy Baloji, Otobong Nkanga and Léonard Pongo appearing in other national displays.
The Biennale is also shaped by the absence of its original curator. The Brussels Times said the edition continues with the vision of Koyo Kouoh, who died unexpectedly in May at 58 after outlining the framework and selecting the participating artists. Her role gives the exhibition a notable posthumous dimension.
Outside the art itself, the opening has been marked by protest. On Friday, Belgium’s pavilion joined 20 others in closing its doors in a demonstration against Israel’s presence at the Biennale, according to Italian news agency Ansa as reported by the Brussels Times. That means the event opened in a political climate as well as an artistic one.
The protest backdrop does not change the scale of the exhibition, but it does shape how it will be read. Venice is hosting not just a large international art fair but a moment of disagreement over representation, national pavilions and the politics of participation.
Other Belgian-linked works are spread across the city too, including a film by Aline Bouvy in Luxembourg’s pavilion and work by Belgian artists in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Vatican pavilions. The result is a Belgian footprint that extends beyond one room or one display.
The Biennale runs until 22 November, giving the event a long window in which the artistic and political reactions will continue to develop. For now, the opening is defined by scale, by Belgium’s experimental pavilion and by the protest that made clear the exhibition is not happening in a neutral space.
