Both The Netherlands and Lithuania have announced their artist selections for the 2026 Venice Biennale (9 May-22 November 2026), the most influential art platform in the world.
Dries Verhoeven, who has been selected to represent The Netherlands, will be the first artist to present a performance piece in the Dutch pavilion. According to his website, the artist creates installations, performances, and public interventions that “critically explore themes of spectatorship, fissures in contemporary society, collective vulnerability, and the mythopoetic dimensions of crisis”.
A project statement says: “Through this intervention, Verhoeven responds to a smouldering state of uncertainty, he currently perceives in The Netherlands and Europe. The Dutch pavilion, built in the optimistic post-war years, is not only the location of the presentation, but is itself the subject of the intervention.”
Verhoeven adds: “Geopolitical tensions are grave, and that’s putting it mildly. It has been many years since our future felt this uncertain. I want to attempt to make this unease tangible, within the ‘safe space’ of the Biennale.”
Amsterdam-based Rieke Vos is the curator of the pavilion, which is overseen by the Mondriaan Fund, a cultural body funded by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science.
In his 2021 piece Brothers, rise up to freedom, Verhoeven presented ten Bulgarian performers sitting in an automated distribution centre. The participants, all migrant workers, sang a song for eight hours about labour and work through the centuries.
Eglė Budvytytė, who will represent Lithuania, plans to show a new multi-channel film and installation at the 61st Venice Biennale. “The work for the pavilion draws upon the research and theories of the Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, [focusing on] Neolithic spirituality and the non-separability between the sacred and the everyday”, says a project statement.
The project was commissioned by the Lithuanian National Museum of Art; the pavilion curator is Louise O’Kelly, the founding director of the performance art festival, Block Universe.
Last year, Budvytytė presented her first exhibition in France at the Frac Île-de-France in Paris, which also explored the ideas of Gimbutas. Her 2020 film, Songs from the compost: mutating bodies, imploding stars, was shot in the pine forests and sand dunes of the Curonian Spit, a peninsula in the Baltic Sea; it explored themes linked to “interdependence, surrender, death, and decay”.