The Venice Biennale has revealed the members of the five-person jury that will decide the Golden Lions for the 2026 edition. The president of the jury is Solange Oliveira Farkas, who will be joined by Zoe Butt, Elvira Dyangani Ose, Marta Kuzma, and Giovanna Zapperi.
Farkas founded the Videobrasil Biennial in São Paulo in 1983, serving as its artistic director until 2004. Farkas is currently the founder and artistic director of Associação Cultural Videobrasil, which supports the biennial. From 2007 to 2010, she was the director and chief curator of the Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia. She has organized solo shows for artists like Isaac Julien, Joseph Beuys, and Sophie Calle, as well as the 2024–25 exhibition “Videobrasil. Needs no Translation” at the GES-2 in Moscow.
Dyangani Ose is the former director of MACBA, Barcelona, who resigned in February after the museum ruled that her role as artistic director of the 2027 Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial was a conflict of interest. She previously served as director and chief curator of the Showroom in London, senior curator at Creative Time in New York, and curator of international art at Tate Modern. She is a co-curator of the traveling exhibition “Project a Black Planet – The Art and Culture of Panafrica,” which is currently on view at MACBA.
Kuzma is a professor of art at the Yale School of Art and served as its dean from 2016 to 2021. As the director of Office for Contemporary Art (OCA) Norway, she served as a curator of Norway’s 2011 and 2013 pavilions and commissioner for its 2009 pavilion. She was a member of the curatorial team for Documenta 13 in 2012, and she was the founding director of the Soros Center for Contemporary Art in Kyiv. More recently, for the NGO Ribbon International, she curated “Faktura 10,” which focused on “artist practices evolving within the immediacies of the war and its aftermath” and was staged in the Ukraine and internationally in 2025.
Butt is an independent curator and writer who is the founder of in-tangible institute, the curatorial platform focused on Southeast Asian art. Zapperi is a full professor of contemporary art history at the University of Geneva; she is a co-curator of the 2019–20 exhibition “Defiant Muses. Delphine Seyrig and Feminist Video Collectives in France, 1970s–1980s,” which opened at the Reina Sofía in Madrid.
For each edition of the Art Biennale, the jury votes on the winners for two Golden Lions: best pavilion (officially called the “Golden Lion for Best National Participation”) and for best artist in the main exhibition (officially “Golden Lion for Best Participant in the International Exhibition”). The jury also awards a Silver Lion to a “promising young participant” in the main exhibition. They can also award one special mention to a second national pavilion and up to two special mentions to two artists in the main exhibition, though they are not required to.
Typically, the jury is selected by the Biennale’s curator, which for 2026 is Koyo Kouoh. However, Kouoh passed away in May 2025, weeks before the title and curatorial theme for her exhibition, “In Minor Keys,” was to be announced. The Biennale decided to move forward with the realization of Kouoh’s exhibition, with a team of five curatorial advisers executing it on her behalf.
Because Kouoh also did not select a jury for the Biennale, the appointment was instead done by Biennale’s board of directors, which is led by the Biennale’s president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, who is appointed by Italy’s culture minister. The board’s other three members include Luigi Brugnaro, the mayor of Venice and the board’s vice president; Tamara Gregoretti, an Italian journalist who serves at the culture ministry’s representative; and Luca Zaia, the former president of Italy’s Veneto region, of which Venice is the capital.
In addition to the in-competition Golden Lions, the Biennale’s curator often selects a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, which historically has been announced ahead of the artist list being revealed. Because Kouoh died before selecting the lifetime achievement awards, this edition of the Biennale will not have any.
Outside of Kouoh’s exhibition, the Biennale has also faced controversy and scrutiny by both the art world and European and Italian politicians in the past month since the national pavilions were confirmed, due to the inclusion of Israel and Russia. Alleging that Russia’s participation could be a violation of European sanctions over the country’s ongoing war in Ukraine, the EU has threatened that it would cut its €2 million grant to the 2028 Biennale,. It confirmed that it would do so during a press conference this week.
Gregoretti reportedly did not inform the culture ministry that Russia, who has not participated since 2019, would be included in the official line-up. Last month, Italian culture minister Alessandro Giuli called for her resignation.
