Holy See's sound pavilion
The Holy See pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale will prioritize listening over looking, featuring newly commissioned compositions and installations with participants including Patti Smith and Brian Eno in a sound‑led program (wallpaper.com).
The Vatican’s pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale will be built around sound, with 24 artists making works visitors hear more than see. (wallpaper.com) The Holy See announced the lineup on April 15, with Patti Smith, Brian Eno, FKA Twigs, Devonté Hynes, Jim Jarmusch, Meredith Monk and Terry Riley among the participants. The exhibition is titled “The Ear is the Eye of the Soul.” (wallpaper.com) The show will run during Biennale Arte 2026, which opens to the public on May 9 and continues through November 22 in Venice. The Holy See pavilion will unfold across two sites: the Mystical Garden of the Discalced Carmelites in Cannaregio and the Complesso di Santa Maria Ausiliatrice in Castello. (labiennale.org, artnews.com) Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça commissioned Hans Ulrich Obrist and Ben Vickers to curate the project, with Soundwalk Collective as collaborator. In the garden, visitors will listen on headphones to new compositions while walking through vegetable plots and arbours first planted by Carmelites in the 17th century. (wallpaper.com, theartnewspaper.com) The pavilion takes Saint Hildegard of Bingen as its anchor. Hildegard, who lived from 1098 to 1179, was a Benedictine abbess, writer, healer and composer whose chants and visions shape the new commissions. (theartnewspaper.com, artsy.net) The Vatican says the project answers the Biennale’s main exhibition, “In Minor Keys,” the late curator Koyo Kouoh’s call to slow down and listen in a quieter register. La Biennale di Venezia said in February it would carry out Kouoh’s exhibition as she conceived it, with the support of her family. (artnews.com, labiennale.org) The second venue will house the final work by German filmmaker and writer Alexander Kluge, who died in March at 94, alongside Hildegard texts, artist books by Ilda David’ and a monastery architecture project by Tatiana Bilbao Estudio. (artnews.com) The Holy See’s recent Biennale presentations have drawn attention by using unusual sites as much as art objects. In 2024, its pavilion was staged at the Giudecca women’s prison with work by Maurizio Cattelan and participation from inmates. (artnews.com) This year, the Vatican is shifting that experiment toward listening: a garden, a headset and a roster of musicians, poets and filmmakers asked to treat sound as the main medium. (wallpaper.com, theartnewspaper.com)
