![\"\"](\"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Ayan-Farah_Portrait_Photo-by-Christofer-Wallentin-1230x692.png\")
“From a country with the history that Somalia has, where a lot of film prints, visual and cultural material have been destroyed, it can feel hard to feel like you’ve got an artistic lineage”
\n\n\n\nArtReview sent a questionnaire to artists and curators exhibiting in and curating the various national pavilions of the 2026 Venice Biennale, the responses to which will be published daily in the leadup to and during the Venice Biennale, which runs from 9 May through 22 November.
\n\n\n\nAyan Farah, Asmaa Jama and Warsan Shire are representing Somalia; the pavilion is in the Palazzo Caboto.
\n\n\n\nCelebrating Visions. Versace partners with ArtReview to share stories from the 2026 Venice Biennale.
\n\n\n\nArtReview Tell ArtReview what you plan to exhibit in Venice. What has influenced or inspired you?
\n\n\n\nAyan Farah I’m planning to show an installation of two largescale, embroidered landscape paintings, wrapping around the walls of the room. The dye pigment is clay sourced in Somalia and porcelainlike pigment from sea shells collected while working in Scotland. These works will show alongside silk paintings depicting the light traveling through the windows in my home and studio. I wanted to reflect on the passing of time and the way time is recorded in nature and the environment.
\n\n\n\nAsmaa Jama The Somalia Pavillion will focus on saddexleey, a poetry form of threes, and will think about ‘poetry as a living cultural form’ creating a sensorial experience. I plan to exhibit moving image work, installation and visual artworks. My practice is fairly broad. I work across moving image, text, performance and painting. So I plan to show works that represent the scope of my practice. I’m influenced and inspired by a lot of things: art, literature, cinema, music, archival histories and stories; myths and legends and things that might not be true, but are a good tale. I think my work as an artist is often about trying to work in that place where things are almost true. The tradition of magical realism, for example, really resonates with me. And there’s also a big cinematic surrealist tradition that I’m inspired by, like the work of Wendell B. Harris Jr.
\n\n\n\nAR In what ways, if at all, does your work relate to the theme of the Biennale exhibition, In Minor Keys?
\n\n\n\nAF I’m interested in those ‘lower frequencies’, the residual, material traces that remain after movement or loss and erasure. The pigments I make from shells, the attention to the body’s passage through environments that’s not always loudly proclaimed. The work is grounded in storytelling and information passed on by generations. It’s a collective effort, from the sourcing of the material to works titles.
\n\n\n\nAJ I especially resonated with this idea of poetry, and this really beautiful image of islands, eddies, Glissant’s garden. I’m a poet, or I was a poet first. I think my work always comes from that place. In Minor Keys also makes me think of what’s hidden but not yet been revealed, what’s in the underneath, what’s stirring and I think, my work is often speaking from the shadows or the margins.
\n\n\n\nAR Why is the Venice Biennale still important, if at all?
\n\n\n\nAF I think it’s important as a place for encounters and visibility. It brings together geographies and practices that don’t often meet in the same space. The attention the biennial brings can be used critically and shift narratives.
\n\n\n\nAJ I think, for any artist, it’s a dream to be able to present your work on an international stage like that. I feel like my work and the work that I’m interested in is international and works across borders and regions. It’s important to hold that meeting place and to be good custodians of it, and to think also about who’s not there, who’s not present, and to find a way to lift those voices.
\n\n\n\nAR What role does a national pavilion play at a time of increasing confrontational nationalisms? Is it about expressing difference or commonality?
\n\n\n\nAF It can appear that a national pavilion is reinforcing ideas of separation. But it’s more of an open frame, particularly for Somalia. Histories and materials are already entangled across borders so it can also be a place where the idea of the “nation” can be made unstable.
\n\n\n\nAJ It’s about expressing commonality. I was born in Denmark and raised in Britain, and I have worked with people all across the world, and I’m from Somalia, so I think my understanding of the nation is an expanded one. Many people in the diasporas have an expanded understanding of what it means to belong to a place. Growing up in Europe and traveling revealed more to me about the places where I do feel that commonality and connection. And for me, that’s always been, you know, in the diasporas, with the global Black diaspora, with the African continent as a whole. I try to imagine further than borders. I think as artists and people our duty is to find ways to dissolve that and to express the commonalities.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Ayan-Farah_Mehdya_2024_Courtesy-The-Artist-and-Galerie-Nordenhake-Berlin_Stockholm_Mexico-City_Photo-by-Carl-Henrik-Tillberg-1230x914.jpg\")
AR Who for you is the most important artist in any discipline that your country has produced?
\n\n\n\nAF In the Somali poetic tradition, figures like Hadraawi have been very influential. They emerge from a culture where language, performance and memory are shared and constantly reshaped. Somalia doesn’t have a long history of visual art so I’m happy to see many new and up-and-coming artists finding a platform.
\n\n\n\nAJ I think the person that moved me the most certainly was the poet Hadraawi. His work really helped me connect with my parents in a different way, and it gave us a common language. And that common language was then the thing that I continued to chase and I then saw art and poetry as the common language to speak to people with, and I think that was very important for me as a young person.
\n\n\n\nI would be remiss to not mention Abdulkadir Said who made some very beautiful, poignant films. And I think sometimes, as someone in the African diaspora, I mean, especially from a country with the history that Somalia has, where a lot of film prints, visual and cultural material have been destroyed, it can feel hard to feel like you’ve got an artistic lineage. The dream is to go back to an archive, and to reach back and see what came before. I think coming across his work and discovering his work was very powerful for me. I’ve also had the chance to speak to him, and I think he’s very generous with his time.
\n\n\n\nThere’s also Ladan Osman, the poet and filmmaker based in the US. I think her work is truly ethereal and otherworldly, and it feels like it’s creating another language.
\n\n\n\nAR What is something you want people to know about your nation that they might not know already?
\n\n\n\nAF Somalia is often called ‘a nation of poets’. We have a long history of intellectual, artistic, and poetic production that rarely gets international attention.
\n\n\n\nAJ Perhaps that it has the longest coastline in Africa? I think Somalia has an incredibly interesting history. You have five Somali territories, four periods of colonization. And also we had a very rich cultural scene, with Pan African exchanges of musical troupes touring Africa and beyond, and film festivals under the socialist government. Though it’s, as you say Ayan, seen as a nation of poets, there’s a rich history of other art forms too.
\n\n\n\nIt is also a country with a strong sense of shared identity, alongside meaningful regional differences expressed through culture, dialects, and lived experiences. This is something earlier generations understood well, and that younger people are now rediscovering.
\n\n\n\nAnd, to me, that coastline is a very interesting place. Lots of interesting ceremonies, lots of interesting rituals. I think the image of Somalia is often sort of focused on the nomadic camel herders, which is, of course, one story, but there’s a really incredible history in the South.
\n\n\n\nAR Given that you are exhibiting in a national pavilion, is there something, a quality or an issue or attitude, that distinguishes the art of that nation from that of others, that makes it particular? Are there specific contexts that it responds to, or do you think that art is a universal language that goes beyond social, political, or geographic boundaries?
\n\n\n\nAF Art responds to specific landscapes and ways of living, still I’m not sure that generated ideas can be simplified into identity markers. What interests me more is how artists work within and across contexts, how they carry multiple histories and geographies at once. Especially for a country such as Somalia with one language and one religion but diverse environments and lived experiences.
\n\n\n\nAJ I do think that one of those contexts is the rupture of the Civil War. It’s something that both artists, in Somalia and across the diaspora, are still living through the ramifications of. I’m not saying that everyone’s work responds to that, but I do think that when an event like that happens in a place, it alters everything. It’s why I lean on speculative work and spirits and memory and myth and things that can’t be known for sure. As well as the loss of life, there’s something incredibly tragic about the loss of cultural memory, the loss of material culture. It causes a fracture. And I think, everything that comes after, whether it addresses it or not, is a response anyhow.
\n\n\n\nAR What, other than art are you looking forward to seeing or doing while you’re in Venice?
\n\n\n\nAF I’m looking forward to walking a lot. Venice is the perfect city for that.
\n\n\n\nAJ I really want to get a masquerade mask. I find them fascinating, and I think the history of them, the fact that rich people would want to go into the town and not be seen, is very interesting. They also seem very ornate and detailed. And then, you know, in a dream world, I would love to see the island of Murano, because I think it’s where the glass blowers used to be kept on the island. So people wouldn’t steal their secrets about glass. I would love to see a foggy Venice, too. And I also want to see it at night, all the things I want to see are kind of eerie. In films there’s always these beautiful shadows at night.
\n\n\n\nAR Could you give us a brief overview of your average working day while creating your presentation in Venice?
\n\n\n\nAF I’m in and out of the studio all days of the week as dyes need to mature and the material needs to dry. Four days a week, I get up at 6:30am to take a contemporary dance class. It helps me clear my mind and figure out that day’s schedule. Afterwards I spend about 6 hours in the studio. grinding pigments, dying, painting, washing, sewing and sometimes embroidering.
\n\n\n\nAJ I usually wake up at noon. And I will eat some soft boiled eggs. I’ll go for a little walk around my neighbourhood. I’ll check my emails, see if I have anything I need to respond to, and then I’ll have, like, a couple of sketchbooks. So I’ll sit down and sketch ideas. I find it easier to like work in a cafe, which is sort of boring, but I think I just need like other people being there to hold me accountable. I might sketch installation ideas. I might do some research. I might read some papers or something that’s interesting. I might watch a film, and I’ll walk to my studio at Spike Island. I’ll get a tea, and then I’ll usually stay there for, like, four hours, five hours, just working. I tend to work when it’s dark, so it’s quite quiet. I tend to have a main focus of a medium, and all my ideas that I’m having are channeled through that. At the moment, it’s just been a lot of painting, some digital work. I might teach myself something from a tutorial, or make something in clay, prime a board, mix paint etc. And I listen to a lot of rap! If it’s daytime I’ll walk around the harbor. I like spotting all the new boats that have come in. I keep all my notes in my phone. I keep my to-do list there as well. I’ll send voice notes to myself. Take pictures, sketch. I like to walk around with a small book that I’ll never read. Then I’ll go home, feeling a bit dissatisfied, but that’s what gets me to come back.
\n\n\n\nAR Can art really change the world?
\n\n\n\nAF Art can create a platform for reflection and dialogue and this can create a ripple that can lead to change.
\n\n\n\nAJ I think art can be used as a tool and has the power to change the world for sure. As an artist, it’s about trying to speak the truth. Good art is able to inspire and move people and change their hearts. It’s there to motivate, it’s there to dream and imagine new worlds, it’s there to grieve. So I think it can move people, who then can go on and change the world.
\n\n\n\nThe 61st Venice Biennale runs 9 May through 22 November 2026
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