A critical companion to the world's biennales.

Letter from the Editorial Team

The year contemporary art continues its institutional accounting.

By the Biennale Editorial Team

The 2026 cycle is one of the most consequential the international biennial circuit has produced in some decades. Koyo Kouoh's 61st Venice Biennale, In Minor Keys, opens posthumously in May after her death in May 2025 — programmed at the institutional weight that her continuing position as Director of Zeitz MOCAA Cape Town had earned, but now read as her final curatorial argument. The 36th Bienal de São Paulo, under Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, will continue through January 2027 — the first Bienal chief curator from continental Africa and one of the most explicit decolonial programmes the institution has set out. Sydney's 25th, Where Memory Meets the Future, opens at the southern hemisphere autumn. Carlo Ratti's 19th Architecture Biennale, Intelligens, has just closed in Venice as the institution's largest exhibition to date.

Across the wider field, the year reads as one continuous editorial argument about what the biennial format still can and cannot do. Manifesta 16 opens its Ruhr-metropolitan edition. Bucharest, Florence, Bahia and Lisbon Architecture extend the European programme. The 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale's Séance: Technology of the Spirit closed in November 2025 under the open-call Artistic Director model that SeMA has continued to demonstrate is structurally workable. The 15th Shanghai Biennale, under Kitty Scott, runs through March. Phuket hosts the 4th Thailand Biennale.

The argument this publication has continued to make — across 106 pages of editorial writing on the world's biennales — is that the biennial format is the principal continuing institutional venue at which contemporary art rehearses its working questions at international scale. The Venice institutional inheritance is 130 years. São Paulo's is 75. Sydney's 53. Sharjah's 30. Even the founded-after-2010 institutions — Diriyah, Toronto, Dhaka, Lahore, Kyiv — have begun to operate at the institutional weight the format demands. Critical reading of what they programme, who curates them, where they sit in the international cultural-political moment, and what their editorial register continues to demonstrate, is the work this publication exists to do.

What follows is the 2026 reading list, the year's editorial calendar, and the publication's continuing critical record. Use it as a working companion.