The Holy See Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale has announced its exhibition, and it is unlike anything the Biennale has staged before. Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Ben Vickers, and realised in collaboration with Soundwalk Collective, the show is titled The Ear is the Eye of the Soul, a phrase given to the pavilion by Alexander Kluge, the celebrated German filmmaker and author who died on 25 March 2026 at the age of 94. His final work will be presented at the exhibition.
The pavilion unfolds across two carefully chosen venues in Venice. The first is the Mystical Garden of the Discalced Carmelites in Cannaregio, a hidden monastic green space within a seventeenth-century convent, still cared for by the Carmelite community. The second is the Complex of Santa Maria Ausiliatrice in Castello, which the curators have conceived as a contemporary scriptorium. In this place, texts were once copied and illuminated, now transformed into a living archive.
Brian Eno
The animating figure throughout is Saint Hildegard of Bingen, the twelfth-century abbess, poet, healer, and composer, who was declared a Doctor of the Catholic Church by Pope Benedict XVI in 2012. Hildegard’s chants, writings and visionary imagery have inspired the twenty-four artists and musicians commissioned for the pavilion, each responding in their own way to her legacy through sound, voice, instrumentation and, in some cases, silence.
In the Carmelite garden, visitors will listen to new sound works commissioned from an extraordinary, genuinely surprising roster. Brian Eno is there, alongside Terry Riley, Meredith Monk and Suzanne Ciani, four figures whose relationship to sustained, meditative sound spans decades. FKA Twigs appears alongside Devonté Hynes, Kali Malone, Moor Mother and Precious Okoyomon. Patti Smith. Jim Jarmusch. Otobong Nkanga. Raúl Zurita. Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst. Laraaji. Kazu Makino. Caterina Barbieri. Carminho. Bhanu Kapil. Soundwalk Collective, who co-produced the commissions, have also created a site-specific instrument that listens to the garden in real time, adding another layer to what is already an unusually rich sonic environment.
The second venue in Castello operates on a different register. The Complex of Santa Maria Ausiliatrice becomes a triangulation between three elements: a living archive developed in close collaboration with Sister Maura Zátonyi of the St. Hildegard Academy, the final work of Alexander Kluge, and the twinned liturgical recordings of the Benedictine Nuns of the Abbey of St. Hildegard Eibingen. Kluge’s contribution is a twelve-station film-and-image installation unfolding across three rooms, completed before his death and presented here as both an artistic statement and a farewell. Artist books by Ilda David and new monastery architecture by Tatiana Bilbao Estudio complete the space.
Patti Smith
The pavilion was conceived in response to Koyo Kouoh’s curatorial proposition for Biennale Arte 2026, which called for slowing down and attunement to quieter registers. It is worth noting how well the Holy See’s programme answers that brief, not with quietude as retreat, but with listening as a serious and demanding act. The logic is clear and genuinely felt.
In an environment saturated with images competing for instantaneous attention, the invitation to sit in a garden and listen through headphones to Brian Eno responding to a twelfth-century abbess is, depending on your disposition, either quietly radical or simply correct.
As Pope Leo XIV observed in a different context, the logic of algorithms tends to repeat what works, but art opens up what is possible.
The Holy See Pavilion opens with the Biennale on 9 May 2026.