The Icelandic Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale will feature Pocket Universe, a new multidisciplinary project by the artist, poet, composer, and filmmaker Ásta Fanney Sigurðardóttir.
Curated by Margrét Áskelsdóttir with Unnar Örn, the exhibition will be on view from May 9 through November 22, 2026, at Docks Cantieri Cucchini in Venice’s San Pietro di Castello district, a former shipyard located between the Biennale’s Giardini and Arsenale sites.
The presentation will span a series of indoor and outdoor spaces and combine performance, sound, moving image, sculpture, and installation. Sigurðardóttir’s work often moves between these mediums, bringing together different stories and timelines rather than following a single narrative.
At the center of the exhibition is a moving-image work that follows a character called Creature Zero as it sets out to find the “original rock,” imagined as the first step in the creation of the earth. Filmed at sites associated with mystical or spiritual traditions, the work draws on myths and stories from different cultures and explores how belief and imagination shape how people move forward during uncertain times.
Throughout the pavilion, recurring elements such as orbs, charms, and talismans appear alongside live actions and performances that will take place at different moments during the Biennale.
Sigurðardóttir said the project grew partly from her reflections on the idea of hope. “Hope is such a peculiar word,” she said. “It only exists when you need it and even then you are not sure if you have it or not.”
The artist said the title of the exhibition also comes from a linguistic coincidence: in Icelandic, the word for a vase—the object associated with the myth of Pandora—is the same as the word for a pocket. The idea led her to imagine what she describes as “an endless invisible pocket with hope that never ever runs out.”
“I think the exhibition is a place free from expectations,” she said. “Wherever the exhibition takes the viewer is the way it should go.”
For curator Margrét Áskelsdóttir, organizing the pavilion meant creating the right conditions for the artist’s open-ended process. “With Ásta, everything feels possible,” Áskelsdóttir said. “There is a constant balancing act: how do we hold space for boundless creativity without letting it dissolve into chaos?”
She described the curatorial role as supporting the work while navigating the institutional framework of the Biennale.
“Imagine a stairway to heaven made of porcelain dishes,” she said. “The artist needs to be able to walk all the way into the sky and our responsibility is to make sure the dishes do not break beneath her.”
The pavilion is commissioned by the Icelandic Art Center, which has overseen Iceland’s participation in the Venice Biennale since 2007. Iceland has presented a national pavilion at the exhibition since 1984, with recent presentations including projects by Hildigunnur Birgisdóttir in 2024, Sigurður Guðjónsson in 2022, and Shoplifter in 2019.
