The first work at the 61st Venice Biennale is outside the building, and it is not finished. It will not be finished until November, and by then it will have swallowed the front of the Central Pavilion.
Otobong Nkanga has clad the four columns of the Central Pavilion’s façade in locally made brick and hung them with ceramic pots, glass terraria and small wooden insect houses. Creeping plants grow out of the pots. Over the six months of the exhibition, they extend, climb and thicken, and the intention is that they eventually obscure the columns entirely.
Which means the work you see in August is not the work anyone saw in May, and neither is the work that will be there in November. Very little at a Biennale can say that.
Soft Offerings to Silenced Voices and to All Who Have Turned to Dust
The title is doing a great deal, and it is worth reading twice before going in. An offering, softly made, to two audiences: those silenced, and those already reduced to dust. It frames the whole thing as a rite rather than a display.
The gesture is a rewilding. The Central Pavilion is a white building with a formal façade of considerable institutional confidence, and Nkanga has dressed its columns in brick of a kind immediately legible as Venetian — the fabric of the city imported onto the fabric of the institution. Onto that she has attached the living components.
The material list reads like an inventory of a small ecosystem: local bricks, earth and clay, ceramic pots, creeping plants, wooden sculpted insect houses, Murano handblown glass, water, an engraved rock, and twelve high-temperature-fired ceramic tablets imprinted with poems and drawings.
Two of those deserve attention. The insect houses — bee hotels, in effect — mean the work is provisioned for occupants other than the visitor. And the Murano glass was blown to forms taken from a pumpkin that grows in West Africa, then lit so that the pieces pulse like the beating heart of a translucent organism. Venetian glassmaking, West African botany, one object. Nkanga does this kind of thing without announcing it.
The twelve ceramic tablets carry poems and drawings, fired at high temperature — the most durable element in an installation otherwise given over to growth and decay. What survives is what was written down.
The Second Work: And Still, Here We Are
Most coverage stops at the façade, and misses that Nkanga has a second installation at the Biennale — in Carlo Scarpa’s Sculpture Garden, the modernist courtyard Scarpa designed for the Giardini in the 1950s.
And Still, Here We Are (2026) is made of terracotta, Italian marble, wood and plants. Rocks of various sizes, quarried from regions near Venice, are placed directly on the floor rather than raised on plinths, their strata legible as spans of time no human scale accommodates. She has turned Scarpa’s garden into somewhere to stop.
Given that rest is one of the motifs Kouoh built into the exhibition deliberately, an artist converting a courtyard into a place that asks you to pause is not decorating the margins. It is doing the show’s work.
Why Nkanga Opens the Exhibition
The garden and the oasis were among Kouoh’s organising motifs, and not as pastoral decoration. She meant them as spaces of defiance — the creole gardens cultivated by enslaved people being the sharpest example, plots where food, medicine and a measure of autonomy were grown in the gaps left by a system designed to prevent exactly that.
Putting Nkanga on the façade sets that terms before anyone is through the door, and reviewers have noted that plants then germinate and proliferate throughout the exhibition behind her. She is the opening statement of a motif rather than an entrance decoration.
It fits her practice exactly. Nkanga was born in Kano, Nigeria, in 1974, studied at Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife and then at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and has worked from Antwerp for two decades. Her subject throughout has been land: what is extracted from it, what value is assigned to it, what remains once the extraction is finished. Carved to Flow, shown at documenta 14, traced a soap made from ingredients sourced across a supply chain that was itself the work. She has had solo exhibitions at Tate Modern, M HKA, Nottingham Contemporary and BAMPFA.
An artist who has spent a career on extraction, cladding an institution’s columns in local material and then letting plants take them, is making an argument she has been making all along — only this time the institution has handed her the front of its own building.
How to See It
You will walk past it. That is the risk with work installed on a façade: visitors arrive at the Central Pavilion with a queue in front of them and a building to get into, and the columns register as architecture rather than as art.
Stop before you join the queue. Look at what is in the pots, find the insect houses, and locate the glass. Then, on the way out, walk round to the Scarpa garden, which almost nobody does. On our three-day route both fall on the Giardini day.
And if you have any flexibility about when you travel, the late-season visit is the better one for this work specifically. The autumn hours from 29 September also open an hour earlier, which is the quietest the façade ever gets.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Otobong Nkanga showing at the Venice Biennale 2026?
Two works: Soft Offerings to Silenced Voices and to All Who Have Turned to Dust (2026) on the façade of the Central Pavilion, and And Still, Here We Are (2026) in Carlo Scarpa’s Sculpture Garden.
What is the Central Pavilion installation made of?
Local bricks, earth and clay, ceramic pots, creeping plants, wooden insect houses, Murano handblown glass, water, an engraved rock, and twelve high-temperature-fired ceramic tablets carrying poems and drawings.
Does the work change during the Biennale?
Yes. The plants grow through the run and are intended to obscure the columns by the close in November, so the installation differs substantially between May and the end of the exhibition.
Who is Otobong Nkanga?
A Nigerian artist born in Kano in 1974, based in Antwerp, working across drawing, installation, performance and video on land, extraction and value. She has shown at Tate Modern, documenta 14 and M HKA, and is represented by Lisson Gallery.
Where is the Scarpa Sculpture Garden?
In the Giardini, beside the Central Pavilion. It is frequently overlooked and worth the short detour.
Further reading: Wangechi Mutu at Venice 2026, Godfried Donkor in the main exhibition, and the full guide to In Minor Keys.
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