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“I’ve found it reassuring to remember that to the vast majority of people it could not be less important”
\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\nManon Awst and Dylan Huw are representing Wales. The exhibition is in the Istituto Santa Maria della Pietà, located just off the Riva degli Schiavoni.
\n\n\n\nArtReview Tell ArtReview what you plan to exhibit in Venice. What has influenced or inspired you?
\n\n\n\nDylan Huw It’s called Sownd, which means ‘structurally’ or ‘foundationally sound’, and also ‘stuck’ or ‘attached’. It’s a sculptural environment composed of layers of material samples, in various media. All its materials derive from our research among the peatlands of north Wales: rich terrains which embody a certain co-existence or overlapping of disparate timescales. They’ve inspired us to play with ways through the ‘trembling’ ground from which cultural expressions from minor/itised contexts (including the Cymraeg/Welsh-language environment we inhabit) emerge. Each element in the show tests methods of generating new associations out of the precarity of our structural foundations: as artists, ancestors, co-inhabitants of an unsteady environment.
\n\n\n\nI’m influenced and inspired by all those – especially my friends and peers, especially in Wales and in Welsh – doing curious, unruly and estranging things with language in counter to the imperial and authoritarian hegemonies which dominate our cultural moment.
\n\n\n\nManon Awst The exhibition’s main architectural throughline is a wooden boardwalk structure which guides (or obstructs) the visitor’s ‘path’ through the installation’s three rooms. It echoes the boardwalks found on wet, boggy grounds, and the passarelle in Venice, pathways constructed when the city faces flooding.
\n\n\n\nWe’ve gathered the raw materials for Sownd from a method of sampling in our studio and out on peatlands. Peat forms very, very gradually, about 1mm a year: we approach this substance as a way of slowing down and compressing material narratives into sediments that propose a textural way of ‘layering’ disparate timescales. The porosity between land and water informs the way language and matter flows through the spaces, offering ways of tuning into the sticky, storied matter of our sited project.
\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\nMA There are many parallels in Sownd with the themes and approaches of In Minor Keys: slowing down, tuning into alternative frequencies through collectivity, sculpting material and poetry into spatial ensembles, embracing the in-between, seeding… to name just a few.
\n\n\n\nEach room in our exhibition is a spatial and poetic stanza, providing a fluid journey through material and sound. Sownd offers a compression of geological, botanical and cultural sediments, which chimes with Kouoh’s vision for an exhibition which resists time as convention and commercial property.
\n\n\n\nDH Sownd speaks from the ‘minor’ or minoritised language context that we live and breathe, as Cymraeg/Welsh speakers invested both in the inheritances embedded in this language and in its material, actually-living life: so culturally vibrant on the one hand, and on the other straining under the weight of political complacency, the tired imperial dominance of English and other turbo-capitalist forces. Conceiving this project for the Biennale, we knew we’d want to centre cultural forms which are embedded in our language context. This manifests most clearly in the show’s incorporation of our oral poetic tradition, and the craft of cynghanedd: an ancient strict meter defined by complex internal rhymes and mirrorings, which is still the dominant Welsh-language poetic form even as it requires an almost extreme level of intensive study.
\n\n\n\nOur foregrounding of ‘minor’ cultural forms, and their lived legacies in the present-day cultural ecosystem of this part of the world, is reflected in an anti-spectacular aesthetic, which feels true to the environments we inhabit and the conditions from which we work, with the project’s layers revealing themselves gradually and rewarding sustained immersion. And, while it isn’t something that’s necessarily at the surface of the work, our foregrounding of (the minor/itised) language as material – sculptural, textural, sonic stuff – is a small gesture toward countering the degradations of this depressing ‘large language’ moment.
\n\n\n\nAR Why is the Venice Biennale still important, if at all?
\n\n\n\nMA Apart from the survey of international contemporary art it offers, the Biennale gives visibility to minority cultures. After an upbringing in rural north Wales, I studied Architecture in Cambridge then lived in Berlin for a decade. I was struck by how little people knew about our language and culture – even in England. It always felt as though I had to justify or defend my Welshness. I moved back here in 2016 – my practice was becoming increasingly site-specific, and I wanted my children to be embedded in the Welsh community. I was often challenged on how I expected to sustain an art career in north Wales, and there was a part of me that wanted to prove that it is possible outside the typical art centres. I hope our participation in the Biennale inspires early career artists to feel the freedom to work where they are rooted.
\n\n\n\nDH The Biennale is a machine for producing and exploding discourse and contentions, which I think the contemporary artworld probably needs. In presenting work at Venice you automatically enter into a dialogue much bigger than the work itself, that spans everything else that’s happening at and around that edition, but also previous editions and all the intersecting, paradoxical legacies they encompass. We’re committed to using the site of art to place things alongside each other and seeing what happens, and in our ideas becoming activated by people encountering them, so to make work for this context is a gift. At the same time, I’ve found it reassuring to remember that to the vast majority of people it could not be less important; several times in the last year I’ve been grateful to be brought down to earth by people asking me about “…Vienna?”
\n\n\n\nThere isn’t a hugely robust infrastructure here to support artists to show their work in these kinds of contexts, so the Biennale has quite an unique status in Wales’s visual art ecosystem. I spent a month in Venice early in my career as an invigilator in the Wales exhibition and it was completely transformative – as it has been for generations of practitioners who’ve benefitted from that programme – in enabling me to view my immediate networks as intrinsically connected to broader, ‘international’ ones.
\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\nDH The thing about art is that difference and commonality need not be in opposition: I might encounter a work deeply rooted in a context that is entirely foreign to me, or that uses a language that isn’t legible to me, or that approaches its form in a way I’m not equipped to grasp immediately, and still have a transcendent experience. This seems to be the most generative way of approaching the Biennale’s curiously retro format. If it’s always tempting to frame national pavilions as expressions of soft power, it only shines a light on how extreme a disparity there is in the meaning of the words ‘national’ or ‘nationalist’ depending on their context: what does an ethnonationalist superpower have to do with an anticolonial expression of a stateless nation, for example, which might both be categorised as ‘national’ pavilions? If approached critically, the extreme political and geographical hierarchies embedded into the Venice Biennale as a structure might actually be useful in this sense, in making the datedness of these equivalences hypervisible.
\n\n\n\nAR Who, for you, is the most important artist (in any discipline) that your country has produced?
\n\n\n\nDH I’m going to say Dafydd ap Gwilym, the fourteenth-century Welsh-language poet, whose linguistic virtuosity and impact on the movement of ideas across Europe during the medieval period are still being researched and debated. One of his poems figures prominently in a sound installation that’s part of Sownd. Two other options, whose practices are also closely tied to sonic forms: John Cale and James Richards, both former Wales-in-Venice artists.
\n\n\n\nMA If I have to pick one – sticking to the realm of medieval poetry! – it’s Gwerful Mechain, a feminist poet writing in the late fifteenth century. In her thirties, she broke through an established community of male bards with her strict meter poems, including ‘Cywydd y Gont’: an ode to the vulva. It is through such distinct, subversive voices that the tradition of cynghanedd remains so lively within contemporary poetic circles.
\n\n\n\nAR What is something you want people to know about your nation that they might not know already?
\n\n\n\nMA In 2015, Llywodraeth Cymru (Welsh Government) passed the Well-being of Future Generations Act. Wales is one of the first countries to introduce a law like this, committed to sustainable long-term development in the interests of its people, including the not-yet-born. Acknowledging the significant cultural and environmental shifts this requires has provided supportive frameworks for artists too, with opportunities such as the Future Wales Fellowship awarded by Arts Council Wales and Natural Resources Wales. It is through these fellowships that Dylan and I started collaborating, which grew into the ideas that ground Sownd.
\n\n\n\nDH The day of our exhibition opening in Venice is the day of our national election: one which is widely seen as representing a certain coming-of-age for Wales’s still relatively young democracy.
\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\nDH All good art goes beyond its boundaries; no good art is made from pretending it somehow exists outside its particular context.
\n\n\n\nAttempts to forge narratives of Welsh art in a grand art-historical style tend to not be very convincing. So much of the cultural production that has been important to people in Wales is extra-institutional and informally organised, by necessity: ‘collective’ and ‘hyperlocal’ and ‘interdisciplinary’ not as buzzwords but as simple facts of an aggressively invisibilised culture, which has a historically neglected infrastructure for the circulation of ideas. The spectacle and resource-intensity of something like the Venice Biennale is a curious setting in which to ask this question (what is Welsh art?), and I think the most successful projects we’ve sent have embraced this tension. As such a self-consciously (sometimes awkwardly, always fascinatingly) multilingual nation, I think a reflexive use of language, and of writing as a strand of artistic practice, is a central characteristic. An ambivalence, often verging on antagonism, toward the institutional also predominates, as does a reverence for dark humour, DIY and site-responsive sensibilities. A few months ago, as part of a curatorial project I organise in an attempt to foster the art-critical and discursive sphere here, I invited a few dozen Wales-based peers and practitioners to share their reflections on 2025 in art, and it was very striking (though not surprising) how few named straightforward gallery exhibitions, or even clearly defined ‘works’ in any medium.
\n\n\n\nMA There’s a strong tradition of site-responsive, interdisciplinary practice in Wales. The projects which inspired me the most as a young artist were conglomerates of live art, theatre, archaeology and sculpture. It seemed the most natural way of working within rural spaces carved by geology, agriculture and cultural tradition. The architectures providing orientation in our immediate landscape include neolithic tombs, Roman forts, medieval castles (Norman, Welsh and English) and the vast slate quarries of the industrial age, many of which are now World Heritage sites and testament to a nation continually subject to change/transformation and extraction.
\n\n\n\nI was still an architecture student when I visited the first Cymru yn Fenis in 2003 and those artworks by Bethan Huws and Cerith Wyn Evans pushed me to think beyond disciplinary boundaries and gave me the confidence to see myself both as a Welsh and international artist.
\n\n\n\nAR What, other than art, are you looking forward to seeing – or doing – while you are in Venice?
\n\n\n\nMA Reconnecting with existing friends and collaborators, and making new ones. My good friend Sara Muzio has established a design studio called OCI Venezia making the most beautiful woven leather shoes echoing the patterns of Venetian architecture. I have a pair inspired by the façade of Palazzo Ducale. She will have a pop-up store again this year so look out for that! And hopefully I will have time to explore more of the lagoon.
\n\n\n\nDH Food and drink aside: it seems to me a rare opportunity to be in community with artists who are working in vastly different contexts to ours but from conditions informed, perhaps, by some similar tensions and contradictions.
\n\n\n\nAR Could you give us a brief overview of your average working day while creating your presentation for Venice?
\n\n\n\nDH We share a studio in the middle of Caernarfon with two other artists. Manon’s corner is a sprawl of sculptural and material experiments, mine of scraps of paper, old exhibition handouts and notebooks. A few times a week we’ll congregate on the big table in the middle of the studio, usually with a specific plan which ends up taking us somewhere unexpected.
\n\n\n\nMA Sometimes we’ll bring in collaborators, or friends to bounce ideas with, or catch up with the project’s curator, Steffan Jones-Hughes of Oriel Davies, and project manager, Catherine Spring of Oriel Myrddin. The Venice exhibition is just one strand of the project: we’re also organising a series of site-responsive live events with a network of collaborators we’re very excited about.
\n\n\n\nAR Can art really change the world?
\n\n\n\nMA I’ve always believed art can plant seeds for new ways of thinking, seeing and doing. Once flourished, this has huge potential to change the dominant narratives and norms which impact our world.
\n\n\n\nDH The world is changing in countless trillions of small ways every second. So yes, art can change the world as much as anything else can.
\n\n\n\nThe 61st Venice Biennale runs 9 May through 22 November 2026
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Manon Awst and Dylan Huw are representing Wales. 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