Qatar Bought its Way to the Venice Biennale. Does it Matter?

It seems on-the-nose that the first thing to be seen when entering Qatar’s flashy new pavilion at the Venice Biennale is a gigantic model of a jerrycan. The artwork was originally meant to serve as a water fountain, a symbolic representation of holy water offerings in the desert, but following infrastructural difficulties, this never materialised. What is left feels like a suitable visual metaphor for how the Qatari Pavilion was financed.

The pavilion, which opened two weeks ago, is currently a temporary structure designed by the Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, and stands on the ground of what will become Qatar’s fixed site at the Biennale. It will be the first new permanent pavilion in the Giardini, the Biennale’s most prestigious venue, since the addition of South Korea in 1995. That was then billed to be the Giardini’s final pavilion, and was celebrated as recently as 2024 with the publication of the book The Last Pavilion by the Korean arts council. Yet the erection of the Qatari Pavilion was one of the first proposals approved by Biennale president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco following his appointment in 2024. Officially, it was the Comune di Venezia that approved the permanent pavilion on the Giardini’s site. It did so within the same municipal council session in which it was announced that it had accepted a $50 million donation from Qatar.

The pavilion forms part of Qatar’s general cultural strategy. Major spending on acquisitions of sporting teams like Paris Saint-German, on hosting the 2022 Football World Cup and on building its national art collection with budgets of up to $1 billion a year outlasts that of its Gulf neighbours. Representing Qatar, artist and filmmaker Sophia Al-Maria warns against criticising the country for buying its way into the Biennale. “Space in the Giardini isn’t just arbitrarily offered up: whoever it was going to be was going to have to pay. So I just think it’s a bit rich when people grab on to the idea of [Qatar] buying the World Cup, or buying this, buying that. It’s better than just taking it, which is what England did.”

Alia Farid, Jerrican, 2026 (installation view, within untitled 2026 [a gathering of remarkable people]) . Photo: Giuseppe Miotto / Marco Cappelletti Studio. Courtesy National Pavilion of Qatar and La Biennale di Venezia

It’s understandable that Qatar would want a pavilion in the Giardini. They are now the only Gulf nation to have one. And as Al-Maria says, “It’s nothing new that any particular group of people need to buy their seat at the table.” At the same time, there is a sense that while Qatar may finally be playing the same game as other nations at the Biennale, it is doing so under a different set of rules. Al-Maria maintains that she has had her works quietly pulled from museums and galleries in the US and UK for “talking about the wrong thing”, but never in Qatar. Still, she also mentions in passing that her father was exiled from Qatar for part of her childhood, something she puts down to a “bureaucratic snafu”. She implies that a degree of self-censorship is required to work with the state, as a measure of common sense: “I’m not making anything overtly salacious. If I went in hard and said I was going to make it all singing and dancing, nude dolphin show or whatever… In Doha, sure, maybe I would experience this [censorship].”

The current pavilion has no walls and its roof is held up by strong minimalist pilotis. Sound from ambient live musical performances held in the pavilion carries around the Giardini. Visually, the site breathes transparency and interconnectivity, elements repeatedly stressed during the inauguration ceremony by the pavilion’s commissioner, the chairperson of Qatar Museums and the sister of Tamin bin Hamad Al Thani, Qatar’s ruling emir. Her Excellency Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, as she is referred to in the press release, may have celebrated “Qatar’s tradition of openness and hospitality” in the exhibition’s opening speech, but this openness was not reflected when it came to acknowledging the unique situation of being the first new pavilion in the Giardini in over three decades.

A press representative of the Qatari Pavilion, who did not wish to be named or quoted, told The Art Journal that he had no comments on why or how a Qatari Pavilion had been established in the Giardini, but stressed nonetheless its prestige as a venue and Qatar’s joy at being there. The Biennale’s press office and the Comune di Venezia did not reply to a request to comment on the extent to which Qatar’s donation and new pavilion were connected, if at all.

The Qatari Pavilion is certainly not entirely apolitical. Pro-Palestinian sentiment is vocal inside, from the ‘Free Palestine’ sticker inscribed on the amp of one of the musical performers, to the Sheikha’s speech, which stressed “the power of culture” in “this time of conflicts and challenges”. Two out of five artists displaying in the pavilion, Alia Farid and Sophia Al-Maria, were signatories of the Art Not Genocide Alliance (ANGA) open letter calling for the exclusion of Israel in the Biennale. They took part in protests and the 24-hour art workers’ strike that disrupted and closed certain national pavilions, although Qatar’s stayed open for the entire day.

For Farid, who created the aforementioned enlarged jerrycan, this political statement is echoed by the pavilion as an entity rather than the sole expression of the artists. “I think [anti-Israel sentiment] is very apparent in all of our practices. It’s important to speak the truth,” she told The Art Journal in Venice.

untitled 2026 (a gathering of remarkable people), 2026. Photo: Giuseppe Miotto / Marco Cappelletti Studio. Courtesy the National Pavilion of Qatar and La Biennale di Venezie

However, Farid is far more restrained when it comes to accusations against Qatar. Asked whether she feels it is controversial to represent Qatar at the Biennale given its history of discrimination against women and the queer community, and the mistreatment of migrant workers, a noticeably nervous Farid initially says, “I haven’t heard anything about that.” As the pavilion’s PR officer steps between us, effectively terminating the interview, however, she corrects herself: “Of course I heard about Qatar Museums and this in the Gulf, but I was separated from it. I created this art in a vacuum in the desert.”

At the other end of the spectrum, Lebanese musician Tarek Atoui exudes confidence when asked if he feels worried about representing Qatar on the international stage. “No, not at all. On the contrary, I believe in the Qatari project of culture, and I believe the message of the government of making things better for artists in the region. Nothing is totally white or black. I also come from a country that has issues like this, Europe has issues like this.”

The idea of playing under a different set of rules applies more widely to Qatar Museums. During Art Basel Qatar, which was held for the first time in February, works were unusually presented to the state before they could be put on display. On opening night, a large portion of works could not be bought by corporate and private collectors as is tradition, because they had been put on hold by Qatar Museums.

In Venice, the fear of negative coverage in the pavilion was palpable, and Qatar’s press representative consistently ignored attempts to contact artists: the interviews of Atoui and Al-Maria were secured only by reaching out to them directly. This lack of transparency clashes with the pavilion’s curatorial emphasis on interconnectivity. This has a final victim: the exhibition itself. Certainly, the pavilion is buzzing during the Biennale’s preopening, with Middle Eastern-inspired small plates and mocktails distributed freely among visitors while cello, electronic noise and percussion echo far beyond the pavilion’s open walls.

But come the end of opening weekend, the space is barren. Performances and culinary programming are only scheduled once a month until the Biennale’s closing ceremony in November. The only physical artwork left in the space is the jerrycan, whose lacquered fibreglass exterior stands solitary and hollow under the light of the morning sun. On the far wall, Al-Maria’s film, displayed on a giant screen, undergoes technical difficulties as both audio and video repeatedly cut out, rendering it temporarily incomprehensible. To the side, the pavilion’s attendants attempt to fix the problem on their own.