Diary from the 2026 Venice Biennale
By Riva Symko, Head of Collections & Exhibitions and Curator of Canadian Art, WAG-Qaumajuq
This spring, I had the incredible opportunity to attend the preview week for the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia on behalf of WAG-Qaumajuq and Michael Nesbitt. WAG-Qaumajuq participated as an institutional partner supporting Abbas Akhavan’s exhibition, Entre chien et loup, at the Canada Pavilion commissioned by the National Gallery of Canada. It was my first time both at the Biennale and in Venice itself.
Over the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing a short series of reflections on exhibitions and ideas that stayed with me throughout the Biennale. It feels fitting to begin with Canada’s presentation, which was one of the most quietly powerful and widely discussed projects encountered in Venice. Throughout the Biennale grounds, I kept overhearing visitors whispering, “the water lilies… the water lilies…” and “it’s all about the water lilies.” There was something almost mythic about the way people spoke about the project, like they had encountered something elusive and deeply affecting. Truly, the water lilies linger.
The Canada Pavilion, originally built in 1957 and situated within the historic Giardini, has long been a site where Canadian artists engage international audiences through ambitious contemporary projects. This year, Akhavan transformed the space into something contemplative and (literally) alive: a living Victorian Wardian case. A fragile, humid vessel for the movement of plants, histories, and empires. At its centre is an artificial pond, bathed in purple hydroponic light, anchoring Victoria cruziana (“water lilies”), whose broad floating leaves once captivated audiences at London’s 1851 Great Exhibition, where they became symbols of spectacle, colonial collecting, and even Queen Victoria herself. Yet the lilies predate these imperial narratives. Native to South America, they belong to an ancient family of plants that has existed for more than 100 million years, quietly outlasting the borders, nations, and myths later imposed upon them.
In collaboration with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in London, the lilies were germinated in Padua before travelling to Venice, where the Canada Pavilion now functions as a temporary satellite water garden. The project reflects on the ways plants, symbols, and stories migrate across time and geography, accumulating new meanings while carrying traces of older ones. The borrowed metaphor title, Entre chien et loup (“between dog and wolf”), refers to the uncertain hour of twilight when distinctions dissolve and the familiar can no longer be easily separated from the wild. In this liminal atmosphere, the exhibition asks us to reconsider how we relate to land, history, nature, and the fragile narratives nations tell about themselves.
Embedded within the installation was Akhavan’s earlier work Study for a Garden (2017), a sculpture composed of stacked bronze poles sharpened into points. Evoking fence posts, bundled wood, or makeshift spears, the work introduces a subtle tension into the pavilion’s lush garden environment. While the water lilies speak to cultivation, beauty, and botanical spectacle, Study for a Garden hints at the structures and violences that underpin the human shaping and control of land and nature.
Just outside the Pavilion entrance, Akhavan also installed Untitled (2018), an arrangement consisting of a large glacial boulder draped in a vintage fur, beside a green plastic bag. From a distance, the fur resembles moss clinging to stone, blurring the line between animate and inanimate. The work feels intrinsically connected to the pavilion’s interior installation. Inside functions as a site of beauty, fragility, and ecological memory; outside is contaminated, heavy, and extractive. Like the lilies themselves, the boulder is suspended between deep geological time and contemporary consumer realities, carrying traces of human intervention across its surface.
Akhavan’s project engages questions of colonization, nationalism, ecological precarity, memory, and the politics of landscape in ways that feel remarkably gentle and poetic, yet profoundly pointed. The lilies unfold slowly over time – and will ultimately bloom for only one night – but the installation impacts atmospherically and immediately, as a space thick with the humidity of fragile, haunted, interconnected histories. Curated by former Winnipegger Kim Nguyen, the exhibition was acutely attuned to the contradictions embedded within ideas of nationhood and land, particularly within the context of the Venice Biennale itself, where national pavilions inevitably carry questions of representation, borders, identity, and cultural diplomacy.
As an institutional partner, WAG-Qaumajuq was proud to support this important moment for Canadian contemporary art alongside our colleagues at Plug In ICA. Partnerships like these help ensure Canadian artists can participate meaningfully on the international stage. I would also like to express my sincere gratitude to Michael Nesbitt, whose generosity helped make WAG-Qaumajuq and Plug In ICA’s institutional sponsorship of the Canada Pavilion possible.
I left Venice inspired not only by the scale of the Biennale, but by the reminder that often the most powerful artworks are not necessarily the loudest. Sometimes they are the ones people quietly whisper: “…the water lilies.”
This is the first in a short series of reflections from my time at the 2026 Venice Biennale Preview Week on behalf of WAG-Qaumajuq. Stay tuned for more thoughts and highlights from Venice in the coming weeks.
What an amazing exhibition and an amazing explanation. Your explanation provides a deep understanding of the underpinning knowledge of history and time. I am very proud of Canada and Mr. Akhavan.