Doubt, and the act of doubting well, may be one of the few forms of resistance left to us.

This is the proposition that Malta’s Pavilion, No Need to Sparkle: Experiments in Love and Revolution, brings to the 61st Venice Biennale, an edition marked by protest, spectacle and the pressure to take position.

Abela’s composition is staged across three temporal zones: to the left, eight coins spin on a table, representing the future; to the right, a drawing gestures towards the past; and at the centre, glimpsed through an opening in the curtain, the personification of Malta exists within a game engine.

The spinning coin becomes a way of thinking about uncertainty as something relational.

As David Spiegelhalter writes in The Art of Uncertainty, uncertainty should not be understood as a fixed property of the world, but as part of our relationship with it. Two people can look at the same coin, the same country, the same history, and feel very different degrees of uncertainty, because they arrive with different knowledge, fears and perspectives.

Charlie Cauchi puts this contemporary condition plainly: “We’re living in a time where you don’t know what is real and what is not.” This is not a new anxiety, of course. Every generation believes it is living through the most unstable moment, and history is full of periods in which the future felt impossible to read.

What feels different now is not uncertainty itself, but the speed and volume of information through which we are asked to make sense of it: images, headlines, captions, leaks, screenshots, AI-generated faces, edited statements, reposted outrage. We are told to know, to react, to position ourselves immediately.

Doubt, in this context, becomes almost rude. It interrupts the

speed of opinion.

That seems to me to be one of the most productive ways to think about the national pavilions of this year’s Biennale, especially through the late Koyo Kouoh’s proposed theme, In Minor Keys. Her curatorial text begins with a sequence of meditative instructions:

“[Take a deep breath] [Exhale] [Drop your shoulders] [Close your eyes].”

His pavilion in the Giardini takes Plato’s Allegory of the Cave as its point of departure, turning the national pavilion into an immersive installation about perception, belief and escape.

His pavilion in the Giardini takes Plato’s Allegory of the Cave as its point of departure, turning the national pavilion into an immersive installation about perception, belief and escape.

In the allegory, prisoners mistake shadows on a cave wall for reality because they have never known anything else;

truth begins only when one turns around, painfully, and sees the mechanism that produced the image.

Angelidakis filters Greek history through modernity, internet culture and the format of the escape room. If Plato’s cave was a machine for confusing shadow with truth, then the escape room is its contemporary cousin: theatrical, gamified, anxious, full of clues and false exits.

When I visited, I was there for about ten minutes and saw three people trip. I am not sure if that is a sign, but it felt like one.

More importantly, many visitors sat on the soft columns to look at their phones rather than at the work around them.

In a pavilion explicitly referencing the cave, this felt almost too perfect.

This is not just about phones as objects. It is about the structure of opening week itself. The FOMO, the schedule, the dinners, the previews, the photos proving we were there. How much longer would we spend with works if we could not show that we had seen them? How busy would the opening week even be without social media? Doubt, again, requires time. Questioning identity, belief, nationalism, history, even the architecture you are standing in, cannot happen if everything is only passed through.

Its title comes from the Portuguese name for the plant known in English as dumb cane or leopard lily, widely placed outside homes in Brazil as a symbol of spiritual protection. The phrase can be read as “Nobody can defeat me,” “Nobody can handle me,” or more directly, “Don’t mess with me.” The plant protects because it is poisonous.

Not doubting can sometimes feel like the ultimate protection.

Certainty is armour. National certainty, historical certainty, even personal certainty can protect us from the wound of complexity.

But it can also poison.

Lima speaks of the exhibition as a rewriting of history, one that gives new meanings to colonial ruins and wounds through magical, celestial and fantastic beings. Brazil, she suggests, might see itself as both reflection and shadow, a self-portrait made through flesh, nature and faith.

I was drawn to Adriana Varejão’s Une petite mort (2005), from the same series as a work exhibited at the Istanbul Bienniale in 2011. The work belongs to Varejão’s wider investigation into colonial history, baroque aesthetics and the visceral nature of the body. Responding to Lucio Fontana’s famous slashed canvases, Varejão shifts the cut away from transcendence and toward the wound. The surface appears opened, almost surgically. It reminds us that surfaces are never neutral: they can be architectural, bodily, historical.

The work is also intensely sensory. People became unbearably hot inside the pavilion. They reacted physically. Kouoh wanted In Minor Keys to be sensory, and here that desire is not abstract. You feel the humidity, the theatricality, the strange living presence of the plants. Akhavan also builds in a reason to return: the flowers will bloom later.

In a Biennale culture obsessed with being first, it feels almost rude, in the best way, to make a work that rewards delayed attention, though the ability to return, or to come outside opening week at all, is of course an immense privilege.

The work refuses to give itself all at once.

Do we now question the things we should simply look at? Or do we doubt the wrong things because we have lost the patience to doubt properly?

Across these pavilions, doubt appears not as weakness, but as method. Malta gives it language. Singapore gives it time. Greece turns it into a cave, but also exposes our inability to stay inside one without checking our screens. Brazil asks what happens when protection becomes poison. Canada makes uncertainty visceral.

The spectacle of Venice, of course, thrived again. It always does. Protests, parties, openings, queues, outfits, captions, the global choreography of being seen looking. I was, naturally, devastated to have missed Björk’s DJ set for the Icelandic Pavilion party, mainly because I was not invited, which is also to say: access remains one of the Biennale’s most enduring mediums. Who gets invited, who gets in, who gets photographed there, and who watches it unfold from Instagram are not side details. They are part of the work of spectacle itself. Against this machinery of access and visibility, the works that made me put pen to paper were not the ones that sparkled most, but the ones that made looking feel slower, stranger, and less available to immediate circulation.

Beneath all that, there were quieter works asking for something harder

than attention. They asked for introspection.

There is a reason, after all, that James Baldwin wrote in No Name in the Street, in a line Koyo Kouoh quotes in her introduction:

“Some people wish to colonize the moon, and others dance before it as an ancient friend.”

Perhaps that reason lives inside doubt itself: between possession and relation, conquest and attention, certainty and care.

 © perediza 2026