May

Venice opens its architecture biennale, and the rest of Europe gets out of the way.

Carlo Ratti's Intelligens biennale takes over May, opening on the 10th and running until late November. Everything else this month moves around it. We flag the Arsenale, a few pavilions, and a Do Ho Suh show in London that would lead most other months.

Show of the month

Interior of the Bahrain pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, with a square hovering ceiling suspended by chains from a central column.

Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.

Carlo Ratti (curator)

10 MAY 19th International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia Venice

Ratti's AI-leaning edition, spread across the Giardini, the Arsenale and Forte Marghera, with 66 national participations. The Central Pavilion is shut for renovation, so the Arsenale does most of the curatorial work. The exhibition reads as an essay on intelligence in all its kinds, technical, biological, collective. Bahrain's Heatwave pavilion, a passive-cooling room by Andrea Faraguna, won the Golden Lion for best national participation. Diller Scofidio + Renfro's Canal Café, which filters lagoon water into espresso, took the international Golden Lion. The British Pavilion's Geology of Britannic Repair, curated by Cave_bureau with Kathryn Yusoff and Owen Hopkins, won a Special Mention.

Gallery site ↗

Also this month

10 MAY · VENICE · KINGDOM OF BAHRAIN PAVILION, ARTIGLIERIE DELL'ARSENALE

Heatwave

Andrea Faraguna (curator)

A square-shaped ceiling hangs on chains from a central column, cooled by ducted air drawn from a canal-facing window. In Bahrain the system would run off a geothermal well; in the Arsenale it runs mechanical. Traditional Gulf cooling translated into a calibrated microclimate. The jury called it a viable proposal for extreme heat and gave it the Golden Lion.

Gallery site ↗

Visitors seated in the Bahrain pavilion under a square hovering ceiling supported by chains.

10 MAY · VENICE · ARSENALE, 19TH INTERNATIONAL ARCHITECTURE EXHIBITION

Canal Café

Diller Scofidio + Renfro

Water is pulled from the lagoon, run through a mini wetland of salt-tolerant halophytes and a reverse-osmosis rig, then pulled as espresso by a Michelin-starred chef for 1.20 euro a shot. Part bar, part lab. The Golden Lion jury praised it as a proposal for how to live on water; the barristas were mostly praised for the crema.

Gallery site ↗

Venice Biennale 2025 installation view inside the Arsenale, showing a cooling pavilion with chain-suspended ceiling.

10 MAY · VENICE · BRITISH PAVILION, GIARDINI DELLA BIENNALE

GBR — Geology of Britannic Repair

Kabage Karanja, Stella Mutegi (Cave_bureau), Kathryn Yusoff, Owen Hopkins

A UK-Kenya collaboration centred on the Great Rift Valley, reframing architecture as a practice of repair rather than extraction. The installations insist on the ground, on what colonial geology took from it, and on what sits there now. Special Mention from the jury.

Gallery site ↗

Installation view of the British Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, titled Geology of Britannic Repair.

1 MAY · LONDON · TATE MODERN

The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh — Walk the House

Do Ho Suh

The Korean-born, London-based artist's first London survey in a generation. The draw is the fabric architectures, translucent 1:1 replicas of rooms Suh has lived in, threaded through the galleries. Nest/s (2024) is new and the one the wall texts won't let you forget. You walk slowly.

Gallery site ↗

Exterior view of a 2025 contemporary pavilion with translucent facade and wooden frame, daylight on the walls.

8 MAY · METZ · CENTRE POMPIDOU-METZ

Endless Sunday: Maurizio Cattelan and the Centre Pompidou Collection

Maurizio Cattelan (curator and artist)

Cattelan pulls 400 works from the Pompidou's collection and lays 30 of his own in among them. The museum's fifteenth birthday present to itself. The Grande Nef reads as a long, slow Sunday. Comedian, the duct-taped banana, is here; so is the thing that happens to it.

Gallery site ↗

29 MAR · BASEL · KUNSTMUSEUM BASEL

Medardo Rosso: Inventing Modern Sculpture

Medardo Rosso

Running through May and the early part of summer, a retrospective of nearly fifty Rossos in bronze, plaster and wax, plus hundreds of photographs and drawings. Put in conversation with sixty other artists (Brâncuși, Hesse, Hammons, Benglis, Oppenheim) by curators Heike Eipeldauer and Elena Filipovic. Wax heads, very tenderly lit.

Gallery site ↗

Footnote

— Someone ate the banana.. A visitor to Endless Sunday in Metz peeled Cattelan's Comedian off the wall and ate it. Security caught up in minutes; a new banana and a new strip of duct tape went back up. This is not the first time. It may not be the last.