El Salvador to Debut Inaugural Pavilion at 2026 Venice Biennale
50Dec. 5, 2025
El Salvadorwill make its inaugural appearance at the Sixty-FirstVenice Biennale, to take place May 9–November 22, 2026. The country will be represented by Salvadoran American artistJ. Oscar Molina, whose exhibition will be staged at the Palazzo Mora in Venice’s Cannaregio district. El Salvador–born poet and art historian Alejandra Cabezas is curating the pavilion, while Astrid Bahamond, the national director for museums and exhibition spaces of the Ministry of Culture of El Salvador, will serve as its commissioner.
Molina was born in El Salvador in 1971 and fled the country at the age of sixteen with his family amid the nation’s civil war, eventually settling in Southampton, New York, where he worked as a landscaper and stonemason before turning to making art full-time in his thirties. He is best known for his “Children of the World” sculptures, made of wire, concrete, and mesh. His pavillion, titled “Cartographies of the Displaced,” will feature at least fifteen of these sculptures, some of which will appear in the palazzo’s entrance garden. The works grew out of a series of semiabstract paintings and are intended to make visible the struggles of immigrants to the US.
“I was trying to remember my passage through the Arizona desert,” Molina told Artnews, describing the series’ origin. “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.’”
Molina 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.”