Each edition of the Venice Biennale grows a little bigger as countries join the event’s national pavilion line-up. That will be the case again this year with the debut of El Salvador’s first national pavilion at the 2026 Biennale.
The inaugural artist will be J. Oscar Molina, a Salvadoran American artist who was born in the country in 1971, was raised along the Gulf of Fonseca in the south of El Salvador, and fled the country in 1989 when he was 16 at the height of the country’s civil war.
“For me, not only is it an honor to represent El Salvador, I grew up here, but unfortunately, again, we are in another cycle of migration at this moment,” Molina told ARTnews in a recent interview. “For El Salvador, this is the first time we will host our own pavilion—I am filled with joy and happiness. As an artist, I feel very blessed.”
Molina’s pavilion will be titled “Cartographies of the Displaced” and will be curated by Alejandra Cabezas, a poet and art historian from El Salvador. The pavilion’s commissioner is Astrid Bahamond, the national director for museums and exhibition spaces of the Ministry of Culture of El Salvador. The exhibition will be staged at the Palazzo Mora in Venice’s Cannaregio district. (The palazzo hosted the Kiribati Pavilion in 2019.) For the upcoming pavilion, Molina will install at least 15 of his “Children of the World” sculptures, with some being installed in the palazzo’s entrance garden.
Molina had exhibited his “Children of the World” series in El Salvador previously, in 2024 at the Sala Nacional de Exposiciones Salarrué in San Salvador. “That exhibition went very well and was very well accepted by the theme, by the whole message behind it,” he said. That show led Bahamond to reach out to Molina earlier this year about taking on the country’s inaugural pavilion at the Biennale.
“Children of the World” first began as a series of semi-abstract paintings in which lines of variously colored paint rise up against various landscapes, showing the sky at different times of day.
“To replicate the memories of all these migrants that had worked with me from different parts of the world was complicated,” Molina said, “but I wanted to use just a simple format of giving these figures somehow a way to see themselves, to lift themselves up as they’re searching for something greater, or something beyond just our actual moment.”
Molina soon began translating these tendril-like figures into three-dimensional sculptures, drawing on his 25 years of experience working in construction. In the past three years, the sculptures have been exhibited in the US, Mexico, and El Salvador.
“I was trying to remember my passage through the Arizona desert,” Molinsa said of the series. “It’s one of those things where I try to bring back those memories through art as a therapy. After a while, I started seeing the paintings and the sculptures not with fear, but more with hope. That’s when my art started transformed, and I started seeing a whole different message behind the composition of ‘Children of the World.’”
He added, “I was very surprised to find myself creating this composition that was so familiar to me, in a way, but that speaks the universal language of displacement.”
Each “Children of the World” sculpture in Venice will be accompanied by a QR code that will lead to interactive messages from different displaced communities around the world. One of these messages will include Molina’s own migration story. “How and why did I leave El Salvador? I was forced by war as a 15-year-old boy,” he said. “I talk about that type of migration, how I arrived in the United States, and how my life has completely changed due to this process of migration—how this country gave me the tools and the opportunities to evolve to become a much better human being in all aspects.”
Because the Venice Biennale is the world’s most important international art event, the exhibition and national pavilions often deal with their country’s own politics or that other countries, like the US or those in Europe, whose policies have impacted their home country. Though some try to make the Biennale an apolitical affair, world politics is never far from mind when taking in the exhibition and pavilions in their totality.
El Salvador has been a major topic of geopolitics within the US since President Trump’s return to the White House in January. In March, the Trump Administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act and began deporting migrants, which the administration claimed were suspected gang members, to El Salvador, which agreed to house them at the notorious mega-prison Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT). In September, court documents revealed that the administration paid El Salvador $4.67 million to house supposed gang members.
El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, has been a favorite of conservatives for his harsh policies against crime, which has put over 80,000 people behind bars for suspected gang activity, and for his brash political persona, which many have described as modeled after Trump. He has dubbed himself “the world’s coolest dictator.”
When asked about the political situation, Molina said, “I know very little about politics. I don’t have much to say, but what I can say though, is that it’s amazing to come to a place [El Salvador] that used to be in a whole different realm. I remember coming here to see my parents, and it was a situation where I was scared. Now, after say seven years, I can go anywhere, at any hour. I feel completely safe.”
Molina said he hopes his pavilion will have a strong resonance during the Biennale, at a time when forced migration is a global issue. “We are living in a very difficult moment as far as global displacement is concerned,” he said. “Migration is a word that is being used more often throughout the globe, and we are living it. We are feeling it. There has always been migration. The message with ‘Children of the World’ is to make conscious that we all belong—for us to be more compassionate for others, especially the ones who have no place to be.”
