Abbas Akhavan will represent Canada at the 2026 edition of the Venice Biennale, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the pavilion’s commissioner, announced on Thursday.
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Canada is one of the few countries to announce its representative for the next Biennale, often considered the Olympics of the country art world. At this year’s Biennale, Canada is represented by Kapwani Kiwanga, the first Black woman to represent the country. Other artists who have taken on the pavilion include Stan Douglas, Isuma, Geoffrey Farmer, David Altmejd, Rebecca Belmore, and Rodney Graham.
With a multidisciplinary practice that spans installation, sculpture, performance and video, Akhavan creates work that looks at the histories of specific spaces and the differences between the architecture of public and private spaces. In his work, time appears to collapse as he often investigates historical cultural sites that are under threat, like the National Museum of Iraq or Palmyra, and their looting or destruction, often with an eye to how images of these places circulate online.
“The National Gallery of Canada is uniquely positioned to bring together artists, art institutions, and cultural organizations from across the country to celebrate Canadian talent on the global stage and facilitate connections in the art world,” Jean-François Bélisle, the National Gallery’s director and CEO, said in a statement. “Abbas’ work is shaped by the unique characteristics of the sites he works on, including the architectures, surrounding economies, and individuals who frequent them.”
Akhavan, who was born in Tehran and now splits his time between Montreal and Berlin, is a frequent presence on the international biennial circuit. His work has featured in the 2014 and 2023 editions of the Gwangju Biennale, the 2014 Montreal Biennale, the 2017 Sharjah Biennial, New Orleans’s Prospect.4 triennial in 2017, the 2018 Liverpool Biennial, and the 2019 Toronto Biennial of Art. He has also appeared in important museum exhibitions such as “But a Storm Is Blowing from Paradise,” a survey of contemporary art from the Middle East and North Africa that was held at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2016.
He has also been the subject of number of institutional solo exhibitions, including at Copenhagen Contemporary (in 2023), Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2022), Chisenhale Gallery in London (2021), CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San San Francisco (2019), and the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto (2018). Toward the end of the Biennale’s run, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis will open a mid-career survey of Akhavan’s work in November 2026.
Akhavan was chosen by a six-person committee with expertise on the contemporary art scene in Canada. Its members were Julie Crooks, curator of arts of global Africa and the diaspora at the Art Gallery of Ontario; Léuli Eshrāghi, curator of Indigenous practices at the Montreal Museum of Fine Art; Crystal Mowry, director of programs at the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina; Daina Warren, executive director of Indigenous Initiatives at Emily Carr University in Vancouver; Pan Wendt, curator of Confederation Centre of the Arts on Prince Edward Island; and Bélisle, who served as chairperson.
In a statement, the selection committee wrote, “The committee was drawn to the interdisciplinary practice of Abbas Akhavan, a meticulous artist and thinker for whom the site of an exhibition becomes both a proposal and provocation involving the staging of relations between materials, memory, and place. Whether invoking the ruins of ancient statues destroyed during geopolitical conflicts or exploring the stated idealism of gardens and other domesticated spaces, Akhavan’s sculptural environments set the natural world in uneasy balance with the valorization, exploitations, or indeed indifferences of contexts, systems, and projections all too human in origin.”