Five Standout Exhibitions To See In Venice During The Architecture Biennale
With the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale in full swing, the city is alive with cultural dialogue, cross-disciplinary experiments, and bold new visions for the future of space and society. Amid the vast constellation of exhibitions and events I selected six of my highlights—spanning radical architecture, diasporic storytelling, and post-digital cosmology—all unfolding across Venice's iconic venues and secret locations.
Here are five compelling exhibitions to experience in Venice during La Biennale di Architecture: Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation – To love and devour , curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist in Dorsoduro; Beyti Beytak. My Home is Your Home at ACP–Palazzo Franchetti and in the Giardini; Berggruen Arts & Culture – The Next Earth: Computation, Crisis, Cosmology At Palazzo Diedo; Gallery 193 – Bricks and Grids ; Maria Helena Vieira da Silva – Anatomy of Space at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and the launch of Casa Sanlorenzo.
Together, these six offerings interweave architectural discourse with landscape, ecology, culture, and personal space—demonstrating how Venice's Biennale extends far beyond its official pavilions, into living, breathing creative ecosystems across the city.
Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation — Tolia Astakhishvili: To love and devour . Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist
Tolia Astakhishvili, my emptiness, 2025 Tolia Astakhishvili
A standout of this year's Architecture Biennale is Tolia Astakhishvili: To love and devour at the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation. Curator Hans Ulrich Obrist presents a compelling, idea-rich exhibition and Georgian artist Tolia Astakhishvili transforms the historic interiors of a historic Venetian edifice previously belonging to painter Ettore Tito during the 1920s into a living dialogue with site-specific artwork.
Astakhishvili invited eight other artists to take part in the exhibition; Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili, Zurab Astakhishvili, Thea Djordjadze, Heike Gallmeier, Rafik Greiss, Dylan Peirce, James Richards, and Maka Sanadze. The resulting show probes the boundaries between art, ecology, and architecture, inviting architects, artists, and thinkers to reimagine spatial futures in an era of ecological urgency. As ever, Obrist brings his signature blend of intellectual rigor and curatorial curiosity to this deeply interdisciplinary project.
Astakhishvili lived and worked at the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation during the first few months of 2025, engaging with the space and transforming the building through structural modifications to the walls and spaces, Astakhishvili incorporates text, painting and drawing to create a temporary spatial intervention with a profound sense of destruction, distortion and fragmentation. Astakhishvili's delicate drawings, featured in the installation, further connects to the significance of drawing in Nicoletta Fiorucci's art collection.
Tolia Astakhishvili: To love and devour is at the NICOLETTA FIORUCCI FOUNDATION, Dorsoduro 2829, Venice until 23rd November, 2025.
Qatar Museums — Beyti Beytak. My Home is Your Home. La mia casa è la tua casa
Yasmeen Lari - Heritage Foundation of Pakistan, Community Centre, 2024. Installation view. 19th International Architecture Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia. Photo_ Giuseppe Miotto - Marco Cappelletti Studio
Qatar Museums presentation of Beyti Beytak marks Qatar's first official participation at the Venice Architecture Biennale with a resonant exploration of the architecture of belonging. Staged across two prestigious venues, Beyti Beytak —Arabic for 'My home is your home'—invites visitors to reflect on domestic space as both sanctuary and symbol. The two-part exhibition showcases MENASA-region architects and weaves together architecture, vernacular traditions, design and storytelling by linking traditional Middle Eastern values with global themes of displacement.
By exploring hospitality in architecture and urban landscapes across the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia, the exhibition examines how modern and contemporary architecture responds to community needs. In the Giardini, Pakistani architect Yasmeen Lari's bamboo Community Centre showcases humanitarian architectural techniques developed through relief efforts by the Heritage Foundation of Pakistan. The structure features a veranda and dome topped with a waterproof palm frond roof.
At ACP-Palazzo Franchetti, works from over 30 architects spanning three generations are displayed through drawings, photographs, models, and archival materials. The exhibition explores themes of community and belonging through sections on oasis reinvention, city housing, community centres, mosques, museums, and gardens, with a special focus on Doha's architecture and urbanism.
Beyti Beytak. My Home is Your Home. La mia casa è la tua casa is at the Giardini della Biennale and ACP-Palazzo Franchetti, San Marco 2847 until 23rd November, 2025.
Berggruen Arts & Culture — The Next Earth: Computation, Crisis, Cosmology
Installation view, The Next Earth. Computation, Crisis, Cosmology at Palazzo Diedo, Berggruen Arts & Culture. Photo © Joan Porcel
At once speculative and urgent, The Next Earth: Computation, Crisis, Cosmology– a collateral event of the 19th International Architecture Exhibition–considers how computational technologies and cosmological thinking might inform planetary futures. Presented by Berggruen Arts & Culture, the exhibition gathers artists, technologists, and architects to examine the interlocking systems—ecological, digital, and existential—that shape life on Earth. It's a heady, expansive vision of architecture that moves far beyond buildings. this collision of Antikythera's planetary intelligence and MIT Architecture's climate work sparks a visionary dialogue on planetary computation, ecological crisis, and architectural futures.
The Next Earth unites two leading research initiatives–Antikythera's Planetary Sapience and MIT Architecture's Climate Work: Un/Worlding the Planet–and examines urgent questions about the future of our planet and the role of architecture within that future. The Next Earth utilises Antikythera's research in order to examine the Earth as a constantly evolving megastructure through historical artefacts and immersive installations. Forty visionary MIT Architecture faculty projects that reimagine sustainable design practices are showcased in the exhibition, which invites visitors to reconsider the impact of humans on the environment.
The Next Earth: Computation, Crisis, Cosmology is at Palazzo Diedo – Berggruen Arts & Culture, Venice, Italy Cannaregio 2386, 30121 Venezia until 23rd November, 2025.
Gallery 193 — Bricks and Grids , curated by Miriam Bettin
'Bricks and Grids' at Gallery 193 Venice/ Gabriele Bortoluzzi Gallery 193 Venice/ Gabriele Bortoluzzi
Gallery 193 is presenting Bricks and Grids within the context of the Architecture Biennale. Curator Miriam Bettin brings together Zoila Andrea Coc-Chang and Modou Dieng Yacine—two rising international artists whose practices delve into identity, memory, and diasporic belonging. Their new works, spanning sculpture, installation, and mixed media, use architectural motifs as both metaphor and material, interrogating how personal and political histories are built—and unbuilt. By exploring material systems and urban form, the exhibition rethinks modular construction and foregrounds the tactile and symbolic languages of structure.
Bricks and Grids is at Gallery 193, Dorsoduro 993/994, 30123 Venezia until 27th July, 2025.
Maria Helena Vieira da Silva: Anatomy of Space at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection
Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, The Hallway or Interior (Le Couloir ou intérieur), 1948, oil and graphite on canvas, 46 x 55 cm. Private collection © Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, by SIAE 2025
A quiet triumph at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Anatomy of Space – curated by Flavia Frigeri of London's National Portrait Gallery–offers a rare look at the work of Portuguese-French painter Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (1908–1992). Featuring around 70 works spanning the 1930s–1980s, the exhibition showcases Vieira da Silva's mastery of spatial abstraction where cubism meets futurism.
Known for her intricate, architectural canvases, Vieira da Silva's work mirrors the gridlike, almost map-like language of cityscapes and interiors. Curator Flavia Frigeri brings a thoughtful perspective to this modernist master's spatial poetics, making the exhibition both historically significant and hauntingly contemporary. The architectural nature of Vieira da Silva's paintings makes this exhibition a perfect choice to show during the Venice Biennale di Architettura.
While you're there, don't miss the permanent collection, for no trip to Venice is complete without revisiting the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. Nestled on the Grand Canal, this iconic space is home to seminal works by Jackson Pollock, Max Ernst, and Agnes Martin, among others. The permanent collection remains a cornerstone of 20th-century art history and continues to resonate alongside the Biennale's more ephemeral offerings—a timeless reminder that innovation often begins with visionaries who dared to break the grid.
Maria Helena Vieira da Silva: Anatomy of Space is at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection until 15th September, 2025.
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