The United Arab Emirates Pavilion at the Venice Biennale: Washwasha
The Architecture of Listening Against the Noise of the Present
At Biennale Arte 2026, the United Arab Emirates Pavilion, curated by Bana Kattan, deliberately moves away from geopolitical and visual spectacle in order to construct an experience grounded in sound, perception, and listening. For Artribune, we interviewed architect Koray Duman, the author of the spatial design behind one of the most subtly political pavilions of this Biennale.
Link to the Italian version on Artribune
There is something profoundly unexpected about entering the United Arab Emirates Pavilion at the Arsenale of the Venice Biennale. In an edition marked by protests, geopolitical tensions, slogans, demonstrations in front of national pavilions, and constant demands for political positioning, Washwasha seems almost to perform the opposite gesture: lowering the volume of the world.
The very title of the project, Washwasha, evokes the idea of whispering, murmuring, a form of communication that does not impose itself through the authority of declaration, but through proximity, interference, and listening. Curated by Bana Kattan, the pavilion brings together the artists Mays Albaik, Jawad Al Malhi, Farah Al Qasimi, Alaa Edris, Lamya Gargash, and Taus Makhacheva in a reflection on sound as an invisible infrastructure capable of moving across cultures, memories, and identities.
A Pavilion to Listen To
The exhibition is not constructed as a sequence of artworks to be looked at, but rather as a system of perceptions to be navigated. Visitors move from intimate environments to spaces saturated with noise, from whispered narratives to overlapping soundscapes that continuously destabilize meaning. In this sense, architecture becomes an integral part of the work itself.
And for precisely this reason, the interview with architect Koray Duman does not feel secondary, but almost inevitable. In Washwasha, space does not simply contain the artworks: it organizes the way the audience listens, slows down, becomes disoriented, and reconstructs its relationship with the present.
During the conversation with Artribune, Duman explained how the project emerged from the desire to create a structure capable of resisting the contemporary culture of permanent hyperstimulation.
“We live in a historical moment in which our attention is being monetized,” he explains. “We once believed the Internet would produce a horizontal democracy, but today we live inside echo chambers designed to continuously capture our attention.”
Interview with Koray Duman
Many national pavilions at this Biennale rely on visual shock, political declaration, or monumentality. Washwasha, instead, works through dispersion, interference, and listening. Was it also conceived as a critique of the contemporary obsession with visibility?
I think so. When Bana Kattan began working on the project and on the theme of In Minor Keys, she was deeply interested in the idea that creativity crosses borders in a quiet, almost invisible way. Sound has no borders. It never fully belongs to a single national identity. It flows. And I believe this idea profoundly shaped the pavilion.
The United Arab Emirates are often represented through images of hyperdevelopment, control, and architectural spectacle. Here, however, everything feels fragile, unstable, almost anti-monumental.
Absolutely. The image of the Emirates that is often projected outward is very different from the actual complexity of the region. The artists involved in the project reveal something more nuanced, more ambiguous, more human. We were interested in understanding what exists beneath the noise of propaganda, beneath the surface of control.
In Washwasha, architecture no longer seems to function as a container for artworks, but as a system that organizes perception, proximity, and emotional tension. When does architecture become political?
“I believe physical spaces have become fundamental precisely because we increasingly live inside digital environments that fragment attention and create echo chambers. Real public spaces, instead, are places where we are forced to confront difference. Architecture becomes political when it creates conditions for listening, empathy, and shared presence.”
The pavilion also seems to reflect a contemporary crisis of listening.
Even before a crisis of interpretation, I think today we are experiencing a crisis of listening. People speak constantly, but they listen less and less. We are immersed in noise.
From an architectural perspective, how did you construct a space dedicated to sound, something that by nature escapes boundaries?
We didn’t want doors or rigid separations. We built sound chambers connected by sound-absorbing corridors. Sound never moves directly from one space to another: it slowly dissolves. This creates a kind of perceptual journey, almost a mental transition between the works.
This Biennale is marked by wars, protests, and strong geopolitical tensions. In this context, can listening become a political condition?
I think so. Sometimes listening can be even more radical than shouting. Today we are so accustomed to speaking only with people who think like us that we have almost forgotten what it means to truly listen to someone different from ourselves.
Many contemporary exhibitions continue to privilege vision as the dominant instrument of knowledge. Washwasha seems instead to destabilize the primacy of the eye.
I hope contemporary art is entering a more post-visual condition. Our eyes are exhausted. We use them for everything: social media, advertising, screens, endless information. Perhaps we need to reactivate other senses.
In an era dominated by algorithmic acceleration, AI, and information overload, Washwasha seems almost to propose slowness, hesitation, and ambiguity as forms of resistance.
I don’t think technology itself is the problem. The problem is how it is used. But I do think we are less naive today than we were in the 1990s. We have understood that many technologies are primarily designed to monetize attention and behavior. Perhaps for this very reason we must learn to use them more consciously.
The United Arab Emirates Pavilion and the Centrality of Listening
Leaving the United Arab Emirates Pavilion, one has the feeling that Washwasha does not seek to offer definitive answers. It does not construct a stable narrative. It does not seek immediate consensus. Instead, it functions as a field of emotional, cultural, and political frequencies that continue to resonate long after the visit.
And perhaps this is precisely where the project becomes one of the most intelligent works of this Biennale: in its attempt to restore value to attention, ambiguity, and above all listening, at a historical moment that seems instead to reward only noise.
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