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    Venice Biennale 2026 Will Realize Koyo Kouoh’s Vision After Her Death

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    Koyo Kouoh had spent nearly seven months preparing the art event’s main exhibition before she died this month. Her team will complete the work and open the show in May 2026.The organizers of the Venice Biennale announced on Tuesday that next year’s edition would go ahead as planned, despite the sudden death this month of Koyo Kouoh, the curator who was overseeing its main exhibition.Kouoh died of cancer on May 10, just days before she was scheduled to reveal the title and theme of the event.Cristiana Costanzo, a Biennale spokeswoman, told reporters at a news conference in Venice that next year’s edition would run from May 9 through Nov. 22, and that a team of curators, art historians and editors who had been working with Kouoh would deliver her exhibition “as she conceived and defined it.”Kouoh had been preparing the exhibition for almost seven months, Costanzo said: Working with a five-member team, she had selected some of the participating artists and artworks, and given it a title, “In Minor Keys.”During Tuesday’s news conference, members of the team used Kouoh’s words to present her plan.Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, an art historian from the team, said that Kouoh had wanted her Biennale to be “neither a litany of commentary on world events, nor an inattention or escape from compounding and continuously intersecting crises.” Instead, Beckhurst Feijoo said, Kouoh had wanted to present “a radical reconnection with art’s natural habitat and role in society — that is the emotional, the visual, the sensory, the affective, the subjective.”The central pavilion of the Venice Biennale, which usually hosts part of the main exhibition.Matteo de Mayda for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Battling ‘Eat and Flee’ Tourists, Venice Brings Its Entrance Fee Back

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      A measure to limit day tourism on peak days began for the second year on Friday, charging day trippers five euros (or 10 for the spontaneous traveler).Early Venetians battled the waves of seawater around them by building sea walls of stone and adapting their lagoon to fit their needs.Now Venetians are battling waves of what officials call “eat and flee” tourists, who throng to the city’s landmarks with packed lunches, dump their garbage and leave without spending much money in Venice.Day trippers will have to start paying an entrance fee to visit the city starting Friday, a controversial levy meant to dissuade people from going during peak periods.This year, city officials have nearly doubled the number of days in which the fee will be enforced, up to 54 days. (It was enforced for 30 days last year.) And a new wrinkle will punish the unorganized: Visitors who wait until the last minute to get their entry permits will pay 10 euros instead of five.The entrance fee was introduced last year with the aim of reducing what city officials call “mordi e fuggi” tourism, or “eat and flee,” referring to visitors who crowd places like the Rialto Bridge and St. Mark’s Square for brief visits that do not benefit the local economy much, if at all.The fee has been a good tool to “explain to the world that Venice is unique and fragile and that tourism to Venice must be more respectful,” Simone Venturini, Venice’s municipal councilor in charge of tourism, said in an interview.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Luca Guadagnino Has a Film at the Venice Film Festival and Curates Homo Faber

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      The film director and designer did double duty in Venice, Italy, debuting a film at the Venice Film Festival along with his curation of Homo Faber, the craftsmanship exhibition.Luca Guadagnino has added creative director to his list of jobs.As a filmmaker, his credits include “Challengers,” the Oscar-nominated movie “Call Me by Your Name” and the upcoming “Queer,” an adaptation of William S. Burroughs’s semi-autobiographical novella starring Daniel Craig, which recently premiered at the Venice Film Festival. He is also the founder of Studio Luca Guadagnino, an award-winning interiors firm in Milan that has designed several homes, boutiques and, most recently, the Palazzo Talia hotel in Rome.Now, Mr. Guadagnino has marshaled the staging and curation of Homo Faber, a monthlong, biennial craftsmanship exhibition that opened on Sunday at the Giorgio Cini Foundation, a cultural center on San Giorgio Maggiore island in Venice. Homo Faber, which means “man the maker” in Latin, is put on by the Michelangelo Foundation for Creativity and Craftsmanship, a Geneva-based non-profit established by Italian author Franco Cologni and luxury industry billionaire Johann Rupert, chairman of Richemont, which owns the brands Cartier, Van Cleef & Arpels and Alaïa. Mr. Guadagnino partnered with his design studio project manager, Nicolò Rosmarini, to conceive this third edition as a “holistic experience — like a narrative,” he said.To achieve this, Mr. Guadagnino and Mr. Rosmarini created an immersive journey throughout the island’s 16th-century Palladio-designed monastery and assorted buildings that carries visitors through 10 multisensory set pieces, each dedicated to an aspect of the human experience like Childhood, Courtship and Dreams. They designed everything (“the lighting system, the uniforms, the tote bag, the tables, the cover of the cable on the floor,” Mr. Guadagnino said) then filled the rooms with 800 objects by 400 artisans from 70 countries.Reef by Josh Gluckstein, a piece in the exhibition.Matteo de Mayda for The New York TimesJust My Cup of Tea(r)s by Irene Cattaneo.Matteo de Mayda for The New York TimesTanagra’s Metamorphosis 2 by Claire Lindner.Matteo de Mayda for The New York Timesribbon imagined by Studio Luca Guadagnino.Matteo de Mayda for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      This Enormous Artwork Turns a Palace Into a Pawnshop

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      Christoph Büchel’s vast installation in Venice is compelling, obsessive and sometimes hilarious. Ascending the grand marble staircase in the center of the Venetian palazzo, you encounter a selection of fake Gucci, Hermes and other luxury handbags laid out on a blanket. A street hawker seems to have been disturbed, leaving their knockoff wares behind.Then, turning right on the mezzanine level, you climb another staircase into a control room. A bank of live CCTV monitors flicker above an empty office chair and espresso-stained plastic coffee cup.Next, a room for cryptocurrency traders with whirring servers, and a fridge, quarter-filled with tins of Red Bull; followed by the recording studio of a grandmother-aged TikTok influencer; a washroom with a print of Leonardo’s $450.3 million “Salvator Mundi” pasted to the wall; a 1950s-style cocktail bar; a pole dancing den; a kitchen filled with untouched trash. Room after room looks recently abandoned.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Can Adriano Pedrosa Save the Venice Biennale? No Pressure.

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      Only workaholics and delusional optimists should organize a Venice Biennale, as the Brazilian curator Adriano Pedrosa discovered during the countless flights and midnight meetings that have crammed his calendar for the past two years.“This would probably have taken five years and a team of intense researchers,” Pedrosa said in a video interview, if he hadn’t spent more than a decade mulling the possibilities, most recently as the influential artistic director of the São Paulo Museum of Art.On April 16, when the press previews begin for the 60th international exposition, others will judge whether the 58-year-old curator has captured the zeitgeist of contemporary art with his two-pronged show, “Foreigners Everywhere,” in the sprawling spaces of the Giardini and the Arsenale.The title is a provocation, weighted by the anti-immigrant agendas of Italy, Hungary and other countries in the last few years. Pedrosa, however, speaks about celebrating the foreigner and the historic waves of migration across the planet, offering a catalog of synonyms — “Immigrant, émigré, expatriate” — even as he expands the concept. “I take this image of the foreigner and unfold it into the queer, the outsider, the Indigenous,” he said.Those themes are embodied by 331 artists, most of whom will be unfamiliar to even seasoned art snobs. They are divided here between two major sections, one focusing on contemporary art and another dedicated to work made in the 20th century. Most have arrived from the Global South without major gallery representation or a foothold in the museum circuit. For many visitors, it will be the first time experiencing the splintered abstractions of Zubeida Agha (1922-1997) from Pakistan, the expressive portraiture of Hatem El Mekki (1918-2003) from Tunisia and the colorful fantasies of Emiliano di Cavalcanti (1897-1976) from Brazil, among others.From the beginning, critics noticed that “Foreigners Everywhere” would serve as a somber — some say morose — tipping point: It’s the first Venice Biennale in recent years to showcase more dead artists than living ones.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More