By Sarah Johnson
On 2 September 2026 the 83rd International Film Festival opened on the Lido, and on 12 September a jury chaired by Maggie Gyllenhaal will award a Golden Lion to one of 21 films. Across the lagoon, in the Giardini and the Arsenale, the 61st International Art Exhibition has been open since 9 May and will close on 22 November.
These are not two festivals that happen to share a city. They are two departments of the same organisation, La Biennale di Venezia, which also runs the architecture, dance, music and theatre programmes, and which gives the same animal to all of them. The lion is the emblem of Venice, and the Biennale has spent a century lending it to whichever art form is in season.
This year the two lions are behaving very differently, and the difference says something about what a prize is actually for.
In Minor Keys
The 61st International Art Exhibition is titled “In Minor Keys”. Its curator, Koyo Kouoh, was nominated Artistic Director of the Visual Arts Department in November 2024 and died in May 2025, before the exhibition opened.
What happened next is unusual in an art world that treats curatorial authorship as personal and non-transferable. The Biennale decided, in its own words, to carry out her exhibition “with the purpose of preserving, enhancing and widely disseminating her ideas and the work she pursued”. It could do so because Kouoh had already finished the part that cannot be delegated: she had developed the curatorial project, defined its theoretical framework, selected the artists and the artworks, designated the authors of the catalogue, determined the graphic identity of the exhibition and the architecture of the exhibition spaces.
Her team, Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Hélène Pereira, Rasha Salti, Siddhartha Mitter and Rory Tsapayi, completed the exhibition with the institution’s support.
There is a version of this story that is only sad. There is another version, more interesting and more accurate, in which a curator’s work turns out to be robust enough to be executed after her death because she had made it explicit rather than intuitive. A framework, a list, a graphic identity and a spatial plan are all instructions. Kouoh left instructions, and the exhibition stands.
The jury that is not there
The awards are a different matter. The international jury Kouoh had appointed for the 61st Exhibition resigned, and the Biennale postponed the awards ceremony from 9 May to 22 November, citing “the exceptional nature of the current international geopolitical situation”.
In place of the jury prizes that would have been given in May, the Biennale established two Visitors’ Lions: one for the Best Participant in the 61st Exhibition and one for the Best National Participation, voted by ticket holders who have visited both venues. Its statement affirmed that all national participations remain eligible, and framed the decision in terms of “openness, dialogue, and the rejection of any form of closure or censorship”.
It is worth being precise about what changed, because the substitution is easy to read as a technicality and it is not one.
A jury prize is a claim about judgment. A small number of named people, chosen for what they know, look at everything, argue in private and put their reputations behind a sentence. It can be wrong, and its wrongness is attributable. That attributability is the whole value: a jury prize tells you not only what won but who thought so, which is why art history can argue with a Biennale jury forty years later and get somewhere.
A visitors’ prize is a claim about attendance. It measures how many people came, how they were routed through the Giardini and the Arsenale, which pavilions had queues and which had air conditioning in August. It is a real measurement of something. It is not a measurement of the same thing, and it cannot be argued with, because there is no one to argue with.
Replacing the first with the second, in a year when the Biennale itself tied the postponement to the international geopolitical situation, does something specific: it moves the responsibility for judgment from people who can be named to a crowd that cannot. The institution keeps its ceremony and loses its verdict.
The other jury, four months later
Then, on the Lido, the film festival’s jury sat down in front of the press. The festival had cancelled that press conference and, after a backlash, reinstated it.
Gyllenhaal was asked whether cinema should be political, and answered that films are “fundamentally, unavoidably political”, adding that “the answer has something to do with empathy”. She was asked why only two of the 21 competition films have a woman director, called it “a systemic problem”, and said “it’s much harder for women to get their films financed”.
Whatever one makes of the answers, the jury was there, in a room, answering. Four months earlier, in the same institution, the equivalent body had gone and been replaced by a ballot. That contrast is the most revealing thing about Venice in 2026, and it is not really about Gaza or about parity, both of which will be argued out elsewhere. It is about whether a cultural institution under pressure keeps the people who are willing to say “this one, and here is why”.
Two Golden Lions for Lifetime Achievement
The cinema department, meanwhile, is giving out two Golden Lions for Lifetime Achievement, to George Clooney and Ellen Burstyn. Clooney walked the opening carpet with Amal Clooney, and Laura Dern gave the tribute.
There is an irony in the timing that nobody planned. The film department is honouring long careers with the confidence of an institution that knows exactly what it values, in the same season that the art department is not able to say what it values at all until November.
What to watch
The Golden Lion for cinema is announced on 12 September. The Visitors’ Lions and the postponed awards for “In Minor Keys” come on 22 November, the closing day, ten weeks later.
Two dates, one lion, one institution. The film prize will be reported within the hour and argued about for a season. The art prize, when it finally arrives, will be reported as a footnote, which is a pity, because the more consequential decision Venice made this year was not which film wins. It was what to do when the people appointed to judge walk away.