Vietnam and Somalia at Venice

When the 61st Venice Biennale opens next spring, two firsts will quietly rewire what the show says about national presence. (labiennale.org) Vietnam will arrive with its own national project for the first time, and at the heart of that project is a single-artist installation called Tằm by Lê Hữu Hiếu. (vietnamnet.vn) Tằm — the Vietnamese word for “silkworm” — is a room-spanning installation that uses materials and practices drawn from Vietnamese craft: lacquer, teak wood, gold leaf, and, crucially, living silkworms that spin silk in the exhibition space. (nld.com.vn) The effect is both material and time-based. Silk appears not as a preformed object but as a process: white threads accumulate, coat surfaces, and change the look of a sculpture over days and weeks. (nld.com.vn) Lê Hữu Hiếu has built careers around monumental, craft-inflected work, and here the artist stages cultural memory as a slow accretion — the audience watches an artisan species alter an artwork in real time. (finestresullarte.info) Vietnam’s pavilion will be installed in Ca’ Faccanon (also referenced as Ca’ Giustinian Faccanon), and the national project gathers ten artists under the title Vietnam: Art in the Global Stream. (finestresullarte.info) At the same Biennale, the Federal Republic of Somalia will make its debut with a project called SADDEXLEEY — pronounced sa‑DEH‑ley — which translates from the Somali root for “three.” (somaliapavilion.so) SADDEXLEEY organizes itself like a poem: three artists, three movements, and a triadic logic drawn from Somali oral tradition. (artrabbit.com) The pavilion brings together the poet Warsan Shire and artists Ayan Farah and Asmaa Jama. Their work layers language, scent, sound, and textiles into a single, sensory field meant to make memory legible as matter. (somaliapavilion.so) Curators Mohamed Mire and Fabio Scrivanti set the show across three floors of Palazzo Caboto, arranging the space so that lines of verse and fragments of object recombine as visitors move. (nevermorepoem.com) Both projects sit inside a larger Biennale framed by the title In Minor Keys, the curatorial text conceived by Koyo Kouoh and carried forward by the team she selected. (labiennale.org) That context helps explain why these two entries look inward rather than toward spectacle. The Biennale’s rubric for 2026 favors pauses, low-volume narratives, and forms that demand attentive time — the silkworm’s slow weaving and the poet’s repeated triads fit that logic. (labiennale.org) Both debuts also signal institutional shifts. National pavilions are traditionally a way countries stake cultural visibility, and adding Vietnam and Somalia expands the map of which governments choose to speak at Venice. (labiennale.org) Visitors will see these projects when the Biennale runs from May 9 through November 22, 2026, with preview days in early May. (labiennale.org) Tằm will sit inside Vietnam’s new national presentation; SADDEXLEEY will occupy Palazzo Caboto as Somalia’s first national pavilion — together, a quiet convergence of craft, voice, and the slow work of making memory visible. (vietnamnet.vn)