IMMERSIVITY AT THE VENICE ART BIENNALE 2026
A multitude of spaces, languages and meanings
Media art:
Immersivity is our daily working ground: we design spaces and experiences that engage people through light, sound, image, and body. This is why, when we visit an exhibition or a biennale, the gaze we bring is both that of the maker and that of the observer, we are less interested in the most spectacular effect than in the choices behind it, in the way a space constructs meaning.
It is with this gaze that we visited some of the national pavilions and collateral events of the Venice Art Biennale 2026, away from the well-trodden paths of the Giardini and the Arsenale. And what we found confirms something we believe in: immersivity is not a neutral technique, nor a simple scenographic effect. It is, above all, an artistic choice — a set of tools, analogue and digital, sensory and spatial, capable of generating sensations, evoking emotions, and building spaces for deep reflection. The difference between an immersive experience that stays with you and one that dissolves in the moment of the selfie lies not in the technology used, but in the intention behind it.
The four installations we describe here demonstrate this with particular clarity and, with some surprise, because they do so in completely different directions.
Laundry Nocturne by Kingsley Ng, Venice Art Biennale 2026
Technology as hidden medium: Fermata
The first approach is that of Fermata: Hong Kong in Venice, the collateral event curated by the Hong Kong Museum of Art, presenting works by Kingsley Ng and Angel Hui. The title borrows a musical term: a fermata is the moment in which a note, or a rest, is held beyond its written duration at the performer’s discretion. A perfect image to describe the tone of the entire exhibition, in which both artists explore the ephemeral and the immaterial through light, sound and space, working at the intersections of social interaction, cultural memory and technology.
In the site-specific installations that make up the show, technology is present but does not show itself. It is a silent, almost invisible tool, placed entirely at the service of the message: giving form to the intangible, making perceptible what normally slips by unnoticed: a reflection in a puddle, the rhythm of laundry drying in the wind, a patch of sky framed by a courtyard.
The result is a series of contemplative, delicate and dreamlike environments, built to invite the visitor to pause and connect with the hic et nunc, the here and now. Even though the technological apparatus remains in the background, it still enters into the construction of meaning: it is precisely its discretion that allows the atmosphere to take over, transforming technology into a kind of invisible frame around the immersive experience.
Screen Melancholy by Li Yi-Fan, Venice Art Biennale 2026
Technology as subject of discourse: Screen Melancholy
A short distance away, inside the rooms of Palazzo delle Prigioni, Taiwanese artist Li Yi-Fan proposes the exact opposite. Screen Melancholy, a collateral event produced by the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, does not use technology to carry some other message: it makes technology the message itself. It is a digital meta-discourse, digital media thinking critically about itself.
The central digital video of the work, one hour long, is set in a digital reconstruction of the very Palazzo delle Prigioni that houses it. At certain moments, the screen reflects exactly the environment in which the visitor is physically standing, generating an unsettling sensation: for an instant it is no longer clear whether the screen has disappeared, or whether the visitor has stepped inside it, into a digital space that increasingly resembles a black mirror. The installation also reproduces corporeal elements of the video’s protagonist on which visitors can sit, further deepening the fusion between the real and the digital, between architecture and staging. It is as if the protagonist had merged with the prison, and the visitor with him.
The character in the video, a 3D Artist who directs marionettes as if they were actors, reflects on the technique the animated image, from traditional animation to 3D to artificial intelligence, and on the excess of possibilities, ideas, intersections and doubts that technology offers us today: windows opening onto fragments of everything, from which the melancholia of the title is born. No moralistic answers, but an infinity of spaces for reflection opened to the viewer, in which each of us can find something of the puppeteer, something of the puppet, and something of the prisoner.
Pocket Universe by Ásta Fanney Sigur∂ardóttir, Venice Art Biennale 2026
An enveloping blue: the Iceland Pavilion
Moving towards the Docks Cantieri Cucchini, the atmosphere changes completely. Pocket Universe, the project with which Ásta Fanney Sigurðardóttir represents Iceland, builds a welcoming, calm, almost rarefied space. Here immersivity does not pass through an encounter with the digital, but through a delicate and immediate sensoriality.
Everything in the space is blue: the walls, the ceiling, the carpet covering the floor. Visitors are asked to remove their shoes, and the contact of bare feet with the softness of the carpet becomes an integral part of the immersive experience, another way of entering into connection with the environment. The result is a total immersion, almost a chromatic and material embrace, creating an intimate, personal and moving bond between the audience and the artist’s emotions, suspended between the vastness of the universe and the fragility of the smallest, most delicate things in nature.
The Phantom Combatants by Natasha Tontey, Venice Art Biennale 2026
The estrangement of the reflection: The Phantom Combatants
At the opposite extreme, in the rooms of the Ateneo Veneto, The Phantom Combatants by Indonesian artist Natasha Tontey, commissioned by LAS Art Foundation and Amos Rex, builds a harsh, aggressive, deliberately estranging atmosphere. The multimedia installation leaves exposed the steel structures supporting screens and partition walls, while a bright red light illuminates the space and the Baroque frescoes that decorate it.
At the centre of the room, a large screen is reflected on a mirrored floor that visitors can walk across, seeing themselves reflected in turn within the space and within the video work. It is an effect that acts on proprioception, generating a sense of discomfort and disorientation, anything but comfortable. The environment enters into a taut dialogue with the work: the characters of the video, bearers of a violence narrated through the language of the grotesque, seem to call upon the figures of the Baroque frescoes depicting purgatory, until they merge with them and with the visitors themselves moving through the reflected space.
What emerges is almost a choral narrative, in which it becomes difficult to distinguish who is watching from who is being watched, who is inside the work from who inhabits it.
One technique, many faces
Four installations, four completely different intentions, and yet all capable of leaving something that does not dissolve upon leaving the room. This, in the end, is the criterion by which we look: not how technologically sophisticated a space is, but how deeply it constructs a discourse, generates a question, opens a connection. These works do exactly that, each in its own way… and for us, that is every time both a confirmation and a source of inspiration.
Giulia Lazzaretto
Creative Designer DrawLight
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