UAE’s Venice plan: Washwasha

The UAE’s plan for the 2026 Venice Biennale is called *Washwasha*, and the title tells you almost everything. The word means “whispering” in Arabic. The National Pavilion UAE says the show will open on May 9 and run through November 22 at its permanent space in Venice’s Arsenale. It is being framed not as a single grand statement, but as a group exhibition about sound, memory, movement, and the way people in the UAE carry culture across distance and change (nationalpavilionuae.org, labiennale.org). That matters because Venice rewards spectacle. National pavilions often arrive with one artist and one crisp thesis, built to cut through the noise of the art world’s biggest international stage. The UAE is doing the opposite. *Washwasha* brings together six artists — Mays Albaik, Jawad Al Malhi, Farah Al Qasimi, Alaa Edris, Lamya Gargash, and Taus Makhacheva — in a deliberately collective presentation curated by Bana Kattan with assistant curator Tala Nassar (canvasonline.com, en.aletihad.ae). The exhibition’s subject is also a quiet rebuke to the usual way Gulf culture gets packaged abroad. Instead of selling the UAE as a skyline, a brand, or a polished future, the pavilion is focusing on soundscapes shaped by migration, transience, oral history, and long ties to the land. The official project description points to storytelling, poetry circles, and local broadcasting as part of the show’s conceptual ground. That is a different picture of the country. It is less about objects than about circulation: voices, accents, echoes, and the social life that forms between them (nationalpavilionuae.org, canvasonline.com). Kattan is a fitting choice for that shift. She is the curator and associate head of exhibitions at the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi project, and before that worked at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery. Her earlier work in the UAE paid close attention to artistic communities, displacement, and undertraced histories. The pavilion’s own announcement of her appointment last September stressed exactly that: her interest in dialogue across generations, disciplines, and media (e-flux.com, nationalpavilionuae.org). The venue sharpens the point. The UAE has had a permanent pavilion in the Arsenale’s Sale d’Armi since a 2013 agreement, which gave it something many countries still lack in Venice: a stable physical foothold in the Biennale’s core geography. Since then, the country has used the pavilion to build continuity, not just visibility. The 2026 edition will be its ninth participation in the International Art Exhibition, and it will again be commissioned by the Salama bint Hamdan Al Nahyan Foundation with support from the UAE Ministry of Culture (shf.ae, universes.art). That continuity lands in a Biennale with its own altered tone. The 61st edition, titled *In Minor Keys*, is proceeding with the curatorial vision of Koyo Kouoh after her death in 2025. La Biennale says the main exhibition will include 111 invited participants, including collectives and artist-led organizations. In that context, the UAE’s decision to foreground a many-voiced show about listening does not look incidental. It looks tuned to the frequency of Venice 2026 itself, right down to an exhibition design by Büro Koray Duman that will move visitors from intimate listening zones into areas of sonic overlap and noise (labiennale.org, canvasonline.com).