Somali Cultural Organizations Unhappy With Somalia Pavilion at the Venice Biennale
5May 13, 2026
The controversies beleaguering this year’s edition of theVenice Biennalecontinue to pile up: of late,Somali artists and cultural organizations are voicing concern that the Somalia pavilion does not adequately showcase artists and art organizations based in the country, and that the involvement of an Italian cocurator is overtly colonial. Somalia is one of four nations this year that are presenting a pavilion at the Biennale for the first time, the others being Guinea, Equatorial Guinea, and Sierra Leone.
In April, the Somali Arts Foundation (SAF) issued apublic statementthat condemned “this pavilion, which should have been a meaningful act of national cultural representation, [but] has instead been led and organized by Somali diaspora figures in collaboration with their European colleagues…artists and art organizations based in Somalia were neither meaningfully consulted nor included.”
Among the diasporic participants in the pavilion are Somali Swedish painter Ayan Farah, Somali Danish poet and filmmaker Asmaa Jama, and Somali British poet Warsan Shire. Materials for the Somalia pavilion, entitled “SADDEXLEEY,” promise “a nuanced view of Somali creativity within a global context,” and “a sensorial field where memory breathes, sound lingers, and matter itself becomes verse.”
The Somali queer arts collective Warbixinta Cidda also posted a statement lamenting the appointment of an Italian cocurator—Fabio Scrivanti—for the pavilion. “This is an insult to our ancestors who fought against Italian colonizers,” read the statement on Instagram, “and those involved in this exhibition who approved this cadaan [white] colonizer to be a curator need to remember the anti-colonial history of our ancestors and start the process of decolonizing their mind.”
Somali American poet and filmmaker Ladan Osman, who chose not to visit the Somalia pavilion in protest, told Hyperallergic that “the Somalia national pavilion is anti-indigenous, and the Venice Biennale as a whole is too, given its flagrant erasure of Palestine.”