It’s the moments of discovery that often make a visit to the Venice Biennale most memorable. Many of these happen beyond the frenzy of the Giardini and Arsenale, where most of the national pavilions are located. It’s usually while exploring the warren of calli, those narrow streets that make up the maze-like city, that you stumble across something unexpected and affecting. Seeking out these collateral shows will also lead biennale-goers to some of the most remarkable architectural treasures Venice has to offer – not all of which are always open to a curious public. From frilly Renaissance palazzos to ornate Baroque residences and stark brick warehouses that stand as testimony to the city’s great trading history and mercantile wealth, these venues regularly end up inspiring or poignantly counterpointing the works within.

Hernan Bas: The Visitors
Ca’ Pesaro International Gallery of Modern Art
Presented in collaboration with Victoria Miro, Lehmann Maupin, and Perrotin
May 7 to August 30

It’s impossible to come to Venice without pondering the contradictory relationship that this place has with tourism, something that is both its greatest resource and most pernicious threat. It makes sense that an artist like Hernan Bas should produce a body of work dedicated to this theme after a residency in the island city. Having spent much of his life in Miami, the painter is particularly attuned to the double-edged, sometimes superficial veneer of beauty and the perils and fun of tourism. As with many of his expressive, hyper-saturated portraits, Bas walks the ambiguous line between empathy and mockery of his subjects – many of whom in this exhibition are his usual gaunt-looking, young white males. This time, they’re visiting the Louvre, an Icelandic lagoon, Thailand, and Alcatraz – posing in the world’s most famous tourist traps in a display of personal betterment. But there’s also irony in the fact that these 30-plus canvases and the specially commissioned installation are hung inside one of the standout buildings on the Grand Canal: Here, aren’t onlookers part of ‘The Visitors’ too?

Turandot: To the Daughters of the East
ACP Palazzo Franchetti
Presented by Parasol Unit
May 9 to October 31

Before becoming the basis of Giacomo Puccini’s famous opera Turandot, the story of its protagonist – a wise, aloof, and seemingly ruthless princess – was told in 12th-century Persian literature, where the figure was known as Nasrin Nush. It wasn’t until 1710, when that tale was reinterpreted for a Western audience, that she was renamed to suit its new readers’ exotic projections. In reality, Turandokht is a common Persian name that in Farsi means ‘daughter of Turan,’ a historical region that encompasses today’s Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, as well as northern parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan. That’s where most of the 11 artists in this group show hail from – though, beyond geography, this exhibition is also a chance to celebrate singularly determined women, with pieces spanning video work by the Afghan artist Lida Abdul, installations by the Uzbek filmmaker Saodat Ismailova, and sculpture by the Karachi-born Huma Bhabha. Curated by Parasol Unit’s founder, Dr Ziba Ardalan, the show also marks the foundation’s return to its itinerant international programming after a two-year break.

Amoako Boafo
Museo di Palazzo Grimani
Presented by Gagosian with the Musei archeologici nazionali di Venezia e della Laguna
May 6 to November 22

Amoako Boafo’s first solo exhibition in Italy is another major step in the Ghanaian artist’s remarkable rise over the past few years. Organized in collaboration with his gallery Gagosian, it is being staged inside the Renaissance Palazzo Grimani and is enriched in its meaning because of it. While Boafo’s recent exhibition at Vienna’s Belvedere Museum put his work in dialogue with Austrian artists such as Egon Schiele (who has frequently been mentioned as a reference point for Boafo’s textural paintings), Palazzo Grimani’s collection of ancient marble and works by Venetian masters form a poignant counterpoint to Boafo’s self-possessed portraits celebrating Black identities. Some of the canvases on display are brand new, having been created in response to the palazzo’s architecture. Others explore and reference craft techniques the lagoon is renowned for, such as lace-making, bringing an even more tactile dimension to their surface.

Dayanita Singh: ARCHIVIO
Archivio di Stato
Presented in collaboration with the Università Iuav (Istituto Universitario Architettura di Venezia) and Università degli Studi di Venezia Ca’ Foscari
April 17 to July 31

Venice’s Archivio di Stato, the city’s state archive, is opening its doors to a wider public than researchers and academics for the first time this spring, and it seems apt that Dayanita Singh should be inaugurating its new chapter as an exhibition venue. Not only has the Indian artist been photographing archives around Italy for the past decade (her visit to the Archivio Corsini in Florence in 2001 is what kick-started this passion), but much of her work, from her portable museums to her publishing projects, concerns how culture is preserved, transmitted, and shared. The show also gathers 25 years’ worth of photographs of interiors, people, and details that Singh has captured around Italy – her own archive of sorts, calling into question the role of image-making as a way of indexing the present and shaping our future memory of it.

Lee Ufan
San Marco Art Centre (SMAC Venice)
Presented by Dia Art Foundation
May 9 to November 22

The minimalist South Korean artist Lee Ufan turns 90 this June and this expansive retrospective, tracing seven decades of his output and developed in close collaboration with him, is a worthy way to mark that moment. From his involvement in the Mono-ha and Dansaekhwa (Korean monochrome painting) movements all the way to the present, including a brand new, site-specific installation, the works reflect his enduring interest in our perception of time and space, as it’s affected by the presence of natural and man-made elements. Right on St Mark’s Square, the Procuratie Vecchie is an interesting spot to stage a show with a stripped-back, architectural sensibility. It opened to the public for the first time in 500 years in 2022, following a sleek refit by David Chipperfield, and is a masterclass in bringing a spare approach to a historical shell. The exhibition, organized by the Dia Art Foundation, also extends concurrently at Dia Beacon, the institution’s outpost in upstate New York.

Matthew Wong: Interiors
Palazzo Tiepolo Passi
Presented by the Matthew Wong Foundation
May 6 to November 1

The Chinese-Canadian artist Matthew Wong’s career may have been short – a self-taught painter, he worked for about seven years, before dying by suicide aged 35 in 2019 – but he quickly became beloved by the art world. Now, the Matthew Wong Foundation is determined to keep adding context to his practice. In addition to opening a headquarters and exhibition space in Edmonton, Canada, last year, it is staging shows that frame his oeuvre in a new light. This is the first to focus on Wong’s interiors and is curated by Cheim & Read’s John Cheim, an early mentor of Wong’s, and promises a closer look at his complex inner life. Compared to the artist’s vivid, dreamlike landscapes, Cheim’s selection of 35 rarely seen and never-shown-before paintings and drawings have a melancholy, haunting intimacy. In one work a pair of outstretched hands reaches for a window; in another, a figure hovers on the threshold of an open door, looking onto the pitch black beyond.

Nalini Malani: Of Woman Born
Magazzini del Sale
Presented by Kiran Nadar Museum of Art
May 9 to November 22

The struggle of women who have suffered the consequences of violence and war in a patriarchal society, but whose voices have been silenced, is made not only audible but deafening in the Indian artist Nalini Malani’s multi-channel site-specific installation. Sixty-seven animations, accompanied by a layered soundscape of female voices, will fill the brick halls of the Magazzini del Sale, the site of the city’s former salt warehouses. The installation is inspired by the Greek myth of Orestes, who killed his mother Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus in revenge for their murder of his father, Agamemnon, in turn responsible for sacrificing his daughter Iphigenia. Malani takes it as a jumping-off point to question the idea of responsibility in the modern world – and who ends up being persecuted (or taking responsibility) for their actions today.

Emilia Kabakov: Venetian Diary
Ca’ Tron
Presented in collaboration with Thaddaeus Ropac, BAM, and the Municipality of Venice
May 9 to June 28

It’s well-known that, in spite of its huge number of visitors, Venice’s actual population has been dwindling for decades. And yet there are people who decide to continue living in this complicated place, fighting for its survival as a socially functioning city. In homage to these resilient residents, Emilia Kabakov is staging an exhibition inside the 16th-century palace Ca’ Tron, home to Iuav University, one of Italy’s first architecture schools. Originally conceived with her husband, the artist Ilya Kabakov, who died in 2023, it echoes a project they first brought to the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst in Ghent back in 1993; here, citizens were asked to contribute their stories and memories of Venice alongside a symbolic object (submissions range from a tin of Baicoli biscuits to toy models of motorboats). It’s a tribute to people who shouldn’t be relegated to the margins of their own hometown, and everyone from children to elders, long-time residents to new arrivals, has been involved. With 500 items and corresponding diary pages, the result is a collective self-portrait.