Venice Biennale 2023

The Biennale Art and Architecture 2023.

The Venice Biennale Art and Architecture 2023.

The most important Italian Architecture Exhibition will be held in Venice from 20 May to 26 November 2023 at the Giardini della Biennale and the Arsenale exhibition spaces. A world-class event curated by architect, architecture lecturer and writer Lesley Lokko.

Until recently, the exhibition was experienced as the representation of the new, the beautiful and the technological development in the science of construction. Today, the expectations and responsibilities placed on those involved in architecture are very high. The profession of the architect is therefore increasingly complex and focused on highly concrete themes that address the reality that surrounds us.

This edition will be the first to experiment in the field with a path towards achieving carbon neutrality, to the point of having declined the Exhibition itself on the themes of decolonisation and decarbonisation.

What does it mean to be ‘an agent of change’? This is the question that accompanied the gestation period of The Laboratory of the Future and acted as counterpoint and life-force to the Exhibition as it unfolded in the mind’s eye, where it still stands, poised on the verge of birth.

An architecture exhibition is both a moment and a process. It borrows structure and format from art exhibitions, but differs from them in critical aspects that often go unnoticed.

At the heart of the exhibition, in the Central Pavilion, are the works of some of the most representative African and African diaspora practitioners working today.

To further explore the idea of an expansion of the definition of architecture, in the Dangerous Liaisons section in the Arsenale complex, the 37 selected participants all work in hybrid ways, crossing disciplinary and geographical boundaries and experimenting with new forms of partnership and collaboration