Swiss Pavilion Venice Biennale 2026: The Unfinished Business of Living Together

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So, the Swiss Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2026 turns a 1978 television broadcast into a lens for examining how societies negotiate coexistence, care, and conflict.

Here is what the exhibition means, who made it, and how to experience it on site.

Swiss Pavilion Venice Biennale 2026: Key Takeaways

What to know about Swiss Pavilion Venice Biennale 2026:

  • The Swiss Pavilion at the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2026 presents "The Unfinished Business of Living Together," running from May 9 to November 22, 2026, in the Giardini della Biennale.
  • The curatorial team includes Gianmaria Andreetta, Luca Beeler, and Nina Wakeford, working alongside artists Miriam Laura Leonardi, Lithic Alliance, and Yul Tomatala.
  • Historical Swiss television debates from 1978 and 1984 serve as entry points for an exhibition that examines how social norms determine belonging, visibility, and exclusion.
  • The exhibition incorporates multimedia installations that reinterpret historical archives into a living resource for contemporary audiences.

Overview of the Swiss Pavilion Venice Biennale 2026

Switzerland has its own Swiss Pavilion Biennale in the Giardini della Biennale and has participated in Biennale Arte since 1920. For this international exhibition, the project begins from a historically specific entry point-a Swiss TV broadcast-and expands outward into questions of identity, belonging, and social differences.

The main Biennale theme is In Minor Keys, curated by the late Koyo Kouoh, and the Swiss Pavilion Venice Biennale 2026 dialogue intersects with those concerns without duplicating them, offering instead a meditation on how the past belong to the present when unfinished business of living remains unresolved.

The Unfinished Business of Living Together: Concept and Themes

The Swiss Pavilion Biennale conceived by the artistic team takes a single broadcast as its historical entry point. On 12 April 1978, Swiss television aired Telearena, a live programme where homosexuality serves as the contested subject before an estimated 1.5 million viewers. Live sketches written by the TV drama department dramatised prejudice; individuals identifying as homosexual gained a mainstream public voice for the first time on national television, while moral panics erupted across the press-over 200 articles followed. A second archival touchstone, the francophone talk show Agora (1984), reached Canadian audiences and Swiss viewers alike, sharing international perspectives on sexuality and social promise.

The exhibition stages these debates reveal broader patterns: struggles of lesbian and gay communities, feminist organising, migrant activism, and the ways established norms around the nuclear family shaped state security requiring surveillance of subcultural groups. The Swiss Pavilion Venice Biennale 2026 examines historical prejudices regarding homosexuality through media infrastructures that took wildly different forms across Switzerland's different language regions.

Visitors encounter archival footage alongside spatialised video production, large-scale photography, and sound works. The project mobilises art as active dispute rather than static memorial: installations combine sculptural elements with new images and 16mm film to create a contested form of living archive. Lithic Alliance contributes a more-than-human perspective, connecting ecological relations to human political histories and showing both the possibilities and limits of cohabitation.

"Living together is a work in progress, and perhaps it must remain so," curator Gianmaria Andreetta told Swissinfo.

The exhibition focuses on coexistence and social challenges, positioning unfinished business not as failure but as both a social promise and an ongoing invitation. It ultimately experiments with what it means to live together otherwise-across different generations, language regions, and various forms of difference.

The Swiss Pavilion Venice Biennale 2026 reflects on how societies negotiate inclusion and collective memory, addressing TV talk shows as formal mechanisms through which voices featured or excluded could stimulate debate that reshaped public life. The exhibition operates as a space where the archive hold authority is questioned, where broader patterns of exclusion become visible, and where the business of living together stays deliberately open.

Curatorial and Artistic Team Behind the Swiss Pavilion 2026

The curators of the Swiss Pavilion Venice Biennale 2026 Gianmaria Andreetta and Luca Beeler lead the project alongside artist Nina Wakeford. Andreetta is a curator based in Berlin who co-directs The Wig; Beeler directed Stadtgalerie Bern for five years, rethinking how spatial installations connect with publications. Nina Wakeford is an artist and professor at Goldsmiths College whose own expertise spans visual arts, performance, and queer archives.

The artists Miriam Laura Leonardi, Lithic Alliance, and Yul Tomatala each bring distinct practices. Miriam Laura Leonardi studied photography at Gobelins, Paris, and runs the "Photography Exhibit!" project space in Zurich. Lithic Alliance is a collective initiated by Dani V. Keller in 2020 that works with stone and lithological energies; the group contributes ecological perspectives that expand "living together" beyond the human. Yul Tomatala graduated with a Master in Visual Arts from HEAD, Geneva, and creates work where installations combine sculptural elements with photography and video. The group note that their collaboration draws on each member's own expertise while inviting visitors into shared inquiry.

The pavilion's artistic direction emphasises collaboration across generations and cultures. The team works with archival and community partners across Switzerland's different language regions, and this intergenerational, multilingual composition situates the Swiss Pavilion Biennale as a node between local struggles and the international art exhibition La Biennale context.

Swiss Pavilion Venice Biennale 2026: review

From the very beginning, as soon as you enter, you can immediately notice the colors of the four-color print, in fact the Swiss Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale is unique and inimitable. Inside, you can see gunshot objects on the white walls with an incredible atmosphere, such as a shark eating a person, with its legs half out.

What La Biennale said on Swiss Pavilion Venice Biennale 2026:

"The Unfinished Business of Living Together offers coexistence as a social promise and a contested form. Beginning with Telearena and the equivalent 1984 francophone talk show Agora, the project revisits how Swiss television staged debates through live sketches provoking studio audiences. Homosexuality serves as a historical entry point to the unresolved challenges of living together, exposing broader forces from state surveillance to moral panics around the family. Each member of the six-person artistic team asked themselves how memory is anchored in place, which historical materials might be reactivated as a living resource, and which need to be invented. At the project’s core, a spatialised video production mixes archival footage with new images; voices, spaces, and perspectives are found and shared."

Swiss Pavilion Venice Biennale 2026: information

This is the information about Swiss Pavilion Venice Biennale 2026:

  • Title: The Unfinished Business of Living Together
  • Commissioner: Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia (Katharina Brandl, Sandi Paucic, Rachele Giudici Legittimo)
  • Curators: Gianmaria Andreetta, Luca Beeler, Nina Wakeford
  • Exhibitors: Miriam Laura Leonardi, Lithic Alliance, Yul Tomatala, Nina Wakeford
  • Location: Giardini
  • Date and Hours: TUE - SUN: 09/05 > 27/09 - 11 AM - 7 PM / 29/09 > 22/11 - 10 AM - 6 PM
  • Tickets: €30

Swiss Pavilion Venice Biennale 2026: Selection Process and Visitor Experience in 2026

Pro Helvetia launched an open call for the Swiss Pavilion at the 61st international art exhibition La Biennale di Venezia, receiving around 140 proposals. The broadcast marked a shift: this is the first Swiss Pavilion Biennale art exhibition fully chosen through open call. The pavilion's presentation runs from May 9 to November 22, 2026. Access is included with a standard Biennale Arte ticket. Expect artist talks, screenings, and performative readings that extend the collaborative artistic inquiry beyond the pavilion walls.

The Swiss Pavilion Venice Biennale 2026 addresses contemporary issues of identity, belonging, and social differences-and invites visitors to sit with the discomfort of questions that remain open.

Architecture and History of the Swiss Pavilion in the Giardini

The Swiss Pavilion Biennale was designed by Bruno Giacometti and built between 1951 and 1952. Its L-shaped volumes, courtyard, and zenithal light create a sequence of thresholds between interior and exterior that the 2026 team uses for film projections, quiet reading zones, and the pavilion's garden as a space for conversation. Pro Helvetia has managed the Swiss Pavilion Biennale since 2012, overseeing both artistic selection and building conservation for the international exhibition.

FAQ

Below are answers to common questions about the Swiss Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2026.

What is the exact title of the Swiss Pavilion project at Venice Biennale 2026?

The exhibition is titled The Unfinished Business of Living Together. Press materials may shorten it to "Unfinished Business" or "Unfinished Business of Living."

Where exactly is the Swiss Pavilion 2026 located within the Biennale grounds?

The Swiss Pavilion 2026 sits in the Giardini della Biennale, in the modernist building designed by Bruno Giacometti, near other European national pavilions and close to the Central Pavilion of the Biennale di Venezia 2026.

How can I visit the Swiss Pavilion during Biennale di Venezia 2026?

You need a valid ticket for the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Access to the Swiss Pavilion 2026 is included with Giardini admission. The exhibition La Biennale di Venezia runs 9 May – 22 November 2026.

Who organises and funds the Swiss Pavilion Biennale 2026?

Pro Helvetia – Swiss Arts Council is responsible for organising, funding, and communicating the Swiss Pavilion 2026 contributions, including commissioning the 2026 project via open call.

Does the exhibition relate only to Swiss history, or to broader international issues?

While the project anchors itself in Swiss archives and television histories, homosexuality serves as a historically specific entry point into global concerns. The exhibition connects local queer, feminist, and migrant struggles to international perspectives on living together across difference, making it relevant to any visitor at La Biennale di Venezia 2026.

Conclusion: Swiss Pavilion Biennale 2026

In conclusion, we have an review about Swiss Pavilion Venice Biennale 2026: is so beautiful! For summary:

  • The Swiss Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2026 will be a real showstopper with "The Unfinished Business of Living Together" as its main draw - on from May 9 to November 22, 2026, in the beautiful Giardini della Biennale.
  • The team behind the exhibition are curators Gianmaria Andreetta, Luca Beeler, and Nina Wakeford, but they're also getting a big boost from artists Miriam Laura Leonardi, the Lithic Alliance, and Yul Tomatala.
  • Swiss TV debates from 78 and 84 will be the springboard for this whole thing - it's all about how our social norms affect who we let in, who gets to be seen and who gets left out.
  • The show will feature a range of multimedia installations that take the old archives and breathe new life into them so that in the end they're a resource that's really relevant to the world today.

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