UAE’s Venice plan: ‘Washwasha’
The UAE pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale will present Washwasha, a six‑artist exhibition curated by Bana Kattan with assistant curator Tala Nassar, opening to the public on May 9 — a clear, concrete national entry to watch when the Biennale kicks off. The project frames regional voices across multiple practices, signaling how Gulf states are using the Biennale to stage contemporary cultural narratives on an international platform. That matters because pavilion programming will shape political and cultural conversations in Venice this year. (thenationalnews.com)
The UAE has now made its 2026 Venice Biennale pitch explicit. Its national pavilion will present *Washwasha*, a six-artist exhibition curated by Bana Kattan, with Tala Nassar as assistant curator, opening to the public on May 9 and running through November 22 at the Arsenale in Venice (nationalpavilionuae.org, labiennale.org). The title matters. “Washwasha” is an Arabic word for whispering, and the show uses that idea to think about sound as a carrier of memory, movement, and social change in the UAE rather than as background texture (nationalpavilionuae.org). That focus on sound gives the pavilion a sharper frame than the usual national-branding exercise. The exhibition brings together Mays Albaik, Jawad Al Malhi, Farah Al Qasimi, Alaa Edris, Lamya Gargash, and Taus Makhacheva, artists whose practices span film, photography, installation, and other forms but are being pulled here into a shared argument about listening, migration, transience, and long ties to place (nationalpavilionuae.org, canvasonline.com). The claim is not that the UAE has one coherent voice. It is that the country’s cultural life has been built through overlap: oral storytelling, poetry circles, broadcasting, movement across land and sea, and newer forms of technologically mediated listening (nationalpavilionuae.org). That makes Bana Kattan a logical choice, not a decorative one. She was appointed curator in September 2025, when the pavilion described her as a curator shaped by years of work in and around the UAE art scene, including at NYU Abu Dhabi and later at the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi project (e-flux.com, universes.art). Her earlier exhibitions dealt with displacement, refugeeness, and underexplored local histories, so *Washwasha* looks less like a sudden thematic swerve than a continuation of her long interest in how communities leave traces that institutions often miss (e-flux.com). The broader Venice context makes that choice more consequential. The 61st International Art Exhibition will unfold under the title *In Minor Keys*, a show conceived by the late curator Koyo Kouoh and still being carried out by La Biennale with her family’s support (labiennale.org, labiennale.org). A pavilion built around whispers, acoustic memory, and indirect forms of transmission fits that atmosphere almost too neatly. It is not trying to dominate the room. It is trying to tune the room. That is also how Gulf cultural policy increasingly works in Venice. The UAE is not arriving as a newcomer testing the waters. 2026 marks its ninth participation in the International Art Exhibition, and the pavilion now operates from a permanent site at the Arsenale, one of the Biennale’s central stages (nationalpavilionuae.org, canvasonline.com). The spatial design for *Washwasha* will be handled by Büro Koray Duman, with an installation plan that responds to the building’s acoustics and moves visitors from intimate listening zones into noisier overlaps (canvasonline.com). That is a concrete detail, but it also says what this pavilion wants to do: not just show art about sound, but make sound the thing that organizes the encounter.
