At the Venice Biennale, Canada Sent an Artist Who Would Rather Talk about Plants

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Published 6:30, MAY 15, 2026 Artist Abbas Akhavan. Photo: Alex de Brabant.

The Wardian case was a Victorian-era glass and wood terrarium that enabled the transport of delicate flora and fauna on long voyages across the British Empire. The plants were often smuggled—20,000 tea plants covertly shipped from Shanghai to Assam; the rubber tree transplanted from Brazil to London to Ceylon. The object today inevitably evokes ideas of colonial expansion, trade, and nationhood. Abbas Akhavan, Canada’s representative at this year’s Venice Biennale, doesn’t entirely reject those themes. He just finds the plants more compelling. “Humans are not that interesting,” he says.

Entre chien et loup, Akhavan’s Biennale entry, resurrects the Wardian case as an unnatural shrine to nature. The French phrase describes twilight, the in-between when it is difficult for human eyes to tell whether a creature is a dog or wolf. Time is this exhibition’s primary medium. With his moist greenhouse of contemplation, Akhavan is more “custodian” than artist; more than half of the pavilion’s spatially awkward floor plan is consumed by a deep pool, where a few lone, large lily pads float under pink grow lights and are routinely misted.

Foggy mirrored edges around the room compound the trompe l’oeil effect; a bundle of sharp sticks are not wood but unpatinated bronze. The lilies, germinated from the seeds of the tens-of-millions-of-years-old Victoria amazonica genus, found in the actual Kew Gardens, are only in their infancy. Their growth period is between March and November, the timeline of the Biennale—a fertile coincidence. In the courtyard, a brown fur pelt, damp from an unseen water source, is thrown over a mossy boulder. Another coincidence: just outside the pavilion, a visitor loiters, typing on her phone, with a fur stole over her arm. Installation view, Abbas Akhavan: Entre chien et loup, 2026, Canada Pavilion, 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Commissioned by the National Gallery of Canada and presented in partnership with the National Gallery of Canada Foundation and the Canada Council for the Arts. © Abbas Akhavan. Photo: Francesco Barasciutti.

Far from hitting people over the head with predetermined messaging, Akhavan is reluctant to ascribe meaning to his work. Yes, the European demand for beaver fur determined the trajectory of the colonization of Canada. Yes, the lilies are officially named for Queen Victoria, who expanded the sprawl of the British Empire in Canada, India, Australia, and Africa, covering nearly a fifth of the globe. But do they have to carry the entire weight as symbols of a violent past, their presence a box to check on the list of pre-approved thematics? Are they not also individual creatures, dead and alive, who have distinct textures, their own personal histories? The fur on the boulder is a thirty Euro coat sourced in Italy—what is her story?

Born in Tehran in 1977, the year before the Iranian Revolution was in full force, Akhavan moved to Montreal in 1992. He spent the next thirty-five years in different provinces of Canada and is now primarily based in Berlin. He has nothing to say about the fact that, two days before, the Biennale announced that the Islamic Republic of Iran would not be participating (news that a representative from Iran’s ministry of culture pushed back on). He doesn’t know the details. He does not feel representative of that nation and is not sure if he is one for Canada either. Installation view, Abbas Akhavan: Entre chien et loup, 2026, Canada Pavilion, 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Commissioned by the National Gallery of Canada and presented in partnership with the National Gallery of Canada Foundation and the Canada Council for the Arts. © Abbas Akhavan. Photo: Francesco Barasciutti.

Audiences tend to conflate artists’ biography with their practice. Did you not do it too, reading Akhavan’s name, seeing his face? We’ve become conditioned to expect that a person with a marginalized identity will make their art about it, without considering that they might want to engage with concepts bigger than themselves. Despite the fact that Akhavan’s chosen subject matter is usually not about a much-mythologized Middle Eastern homeland, preferring to explore what it means to be human—any human—transforming a planet we did not always exist on, “this is something that he has had to deal with his entire career, as a racialized subject,” says Kim Nguyen, the exhibition’s curator. “There’s a lot of assumption, or projection, that people make.”

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What might be most productive to contemplate in this pavilion is what we want from our artists. They aren’t politicians, and that allows for an engagement with the crises of the world that is less immediate, more musing. “[The Biennale] can create moments where the deformities we project onto each other might loosen a little bit,” Akhavan believes. “I think art has a role of potential diplomacy. I think its soft power is very effective,” he says. “If we’re not bombing each other here, then we should all be here.” Then again, Akhavan isn’t necessarily satisfied by showing at art biennales. These days, he says, his life’s dream is to work in wildlife conservation.