What not to miss at the 2026 Venice Biennale

Barenaked bell ringers, banned opera singers and mind-boggling dog-owner relationships … the art at this year’s biennale has people calling the cops

She’s famous for her extreme performances and Florentina Holzinger upped the ante yet again in Venice with a postapocalyptic pavilion that opened with her suspended upside down from the clappers of a large bell. Inside, there was a woman riding a speedboat in circles, two others suspended at the top of a pole and another sitting entirely submerged in a tank. Oh, and no one was wearing any clothes. Viewers were invited to use two toilets so that their urine could be purified and pumped into the tank – but what looked like a sewage disaster in another section of the pavilion suggested that this project threatened to go dangerously awry. The whole thing was so transgressive that four cops turned up when I was watching to ask what the hell was going on. It was immediately the talk of the town. AN
• Austrian pavilion, Giardini della Biennale