Canada’s pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale has turned a living botanical display into a meditation on empire, ecology and belonging, placing Abbas Akhavan’s Entre chien et loup among the quieter but more politically charged national presentations at this year’s exhibition.
The work, unveiled at the Giardini as Biennale Arte 2026 opened to the public on 9 May, centres on giant waterlilies of the genus Victoria, cultivated through an international chain linking Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, the Botanical Garden of the University of Padua and the Canada Pavilion. The installation runs until 22 November as part of In Minor Keys, the main exhibition conceived by the late Koyo Kouoh and carried forward by her team after her death in May 2025.
Akhavan, born in Tehran in 1977 and based between Montreal and Berlin, has replaced parts of the pavilion façade with glass, allowing visitors to see the plants from outside before entering a structure transformed into a kind of greenhouse. A custom pool and grow lights support the lilies as they mature over the course of the Biennale, making the work less a fixed exhibition than a living system dependent on care, climate and institutional maintenance.
The choice of plant is central to the work’s unease. The Victoria waterlily, native to South America, became a prized specimen in Victorian Britain and was named for Queen Victoria. Its nineteenth-century display culture was tied to botanical collecting, imperial science, spectacle and control over living matter. By placing it inside the pavilion of a Commonwealth country, Akhavan asks viewers to consider how nature has been classified, transported and admired through structures of power.
The title Entre chien et loup, a French phrase meaning “between dog and wolf”, refers to twilight, when distinctions become uncertain. That ambiguity runs through the pavilion. The lilies are beautiful, but their beauty carries the history of extraction. The glass architecture suggests openness, yet also recalls the enclosure of plants, territories and people. The garden appears calm, but it depends on a network of human intervention that mirrors the systems it quietly questions.
Canada’s presentation arrives at a Biennale shaped by geopolitical strain. The 2026 edition opened against the backdrop of wars in Ukraine and Gaza, argument over national representation, protests against Israel’s inclusion and the return of Russia under restrictions. Several pavilions closed for parts of the opening week in acts of protest, while the international jury resigned before the public opening, prompting the Biennale to shift attention to visitor-voted awards.
Against that atmosphere, Akhavan’s project avoids direct slogans. Its politics sit in the material facts of the work: seeds moved across borders, a pavilion altered to sustain non-human life, and a flower whose global symbolism cannot be separated from colonial history. The result is a national entry that asks who is allowed to inhabit landscapes, who is asked to preserve them, and who has historically been displaced in the name of cultivation, protection or progress.
Curator Kim Nguyen has framed the installation as a transformation of the pavilion into a vessel for plant life, but the work also reads as a study of vulnerability. Unlike many Biennale installations, this one can change visibly during the exhibition’s run. Leaves may expand, flowers may emerge, and the ecology of the pavilion may shift with light, humidity and care. That instability gives the work a tension suited to an age of climate pressure, migration controls and contested borders.
Akhavan’s wider practice has long examined gardens, domestic landscapes, cultural heritage and sites marked by conflict. His works often use fragile materials and temporary gestures to probe the boundary between the cultivated and the wild, the protected and the exposed. At Venice, those concerns are amplified by the pavilion’s own architecture and by the symbolic weight of the Biennale, where nations compete to project identity through art.
Canada’s official participation is commissioned by the National Gallery of Canada, with support from the Canada Council for the Arts and several institutional partners. The pavilion itself, built in the late 1950s, has frequently been used to test how national representation can move beyond straightforward cultural branding. Akhavan’s contribution continues that line by presenting Canada not as a stable image, but as a site where histories of land, migration, science and empire remain unsettled.
The work, unveiled at the Giardini as Biennale Arte 2026 opened to the public on 9 May, centres on giant waterlilies of the genus Victoria, cultivated through an international chain linking Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, the Botanical Garden of the University of Padua and the Canada Pavilion. The installation runs until 22 November as part of In Minor Keys, the main exhibition conceived by the late Koyo Kouoh and carried forward by her team after her death in May 2025.
Akhavan, born in Tehran in 1977 and based between Montreal and Berlin, has replaced parts of the pavilion façade with glass, allowing visitors to see the plants from outside before entering a structure transformed into a kind of greenhouse. A custom pool and grow lights support the lilies as they mature over the course of the Biennale, making the work less a fixed exhibition than a living system dependent on care, climate and institutional maintenance.
The choice of plant is central to the work’s unease. The Victoria waterlily, native to South America, became a prized specimen in Victorian Britain and was named for Queen Victoria. Its nineteenth-century display culture was tied to botanical collecting, imperial science, spectacle and control over living matter. By placing it inside the pavilion of a Commonwealth country, Akhavan asks viewers to consider how nature has been classified, transported and admired through structures of power.
The title Entre chien et loup, a French phrase meaning “between dog and wolf”, refers to twilight, when distinctions become uncertain. That ambiguity runs through the pavilion. The lilies are beautiful, but their beauty carries the history of extraction. The glass architecture suggests openness, yet also recalls the enclosure of plants, territories and people. The garden appears calm, but it depends on a network of human intervention that mirrors the systems it quietly questions.
Canada’s presentation arrives at a Biennale shaped by geopolitical strain. The 2026 edition opened against the backdrop of wars in Ukraine and Gaza, argument over national representation, protests against Israel’s inclusion and the return of Russia under restrictions. Several pavilions closed for parts of the opening week in acts of protest, while the international jury resigned before the public opening, prompting the Biennale to shift attention to visitor-voted awards.
Against that atmosphere, Akhavan’s project avoids direct slogans. Its politics sit in the material facts of the work: seeds moved across borders, a pavilion altered to sustain non-human life, and a flower whose global symbolism cannot be separated from colonial history. The result is a national entry that asks who is allowed to inhabit landscapes, who is asked to preserve them, and who has historically been displaced in the name of cultivation, protection or progress.
Curator Kim Nguyen has framed the installation as a transformation of the pavilion into a vessel for plant life, but the work also reads as a study of vulnerability. Unlike many Biennale installations, this one can change visibly during the exhibition’s run. Leaves may expand, flowers may emerge, and the ecology of the pavilion may shift with light, humidity and care. That instability gives the work a tension suited to an age of climate pressure, migration controls and contested borders.
Akhavan’s wider practice has long examined gardens, domestic landscapes, cultural heritage and sites marked by conflict. His works often use fragile materials and temporary gestures to probe the boundary between the cultivated and the wild, the protected and the exposed. At Venice, those concerns are amplified by the pavilion’s own architecture and by the symbolic weight of the Biennale, where nations compete to project identity through art.
Canada’s official participation is commissioned by the National Gallery of Canada, with support from the Canada Council for the Arts and several institutional partners. The pavilion itself, built in the late 1950s, has frequently been used to test how national representation can move beyond straightforward cultural branding. Akhavan’s contribution continues that line by presenting Canada not as a stable image, but as a site where histories of land, migration, science and empire remain unsettled.
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