Cymru yn Fenis / Wales in Venice 2026 with Sownd

The exhibition jointly led by two Welsh galleries, Oriel Myrddin in Carmarthen and Oriel Davies in Newtown. Steffan Jones-Hughes from Oriel Davies will serve as Curator, and Catherine Spring of Oriel Myrddin as Exhibition Project Director, with both acting as Co-Creative Directors. About The presentation will be held for the first time at the Instituto Santa Maria della Pietà in Castello. La Pietà is a monumental complex built in the fourteenth century, adjacent to Riva degli Schiavoni and within accessible walking distance of the Biennale Giardini and Arsenale sites. It will run from Saturday 9 May to Sunday 22 November 2026 and will be free to visit. Manon Awst and Dylan Huw’s Sownd will be a collaborative sculptural environment that navigates the materialities of language and landscape. Conceived as one continuous installation, it will see organic materials, found objects, texts, and sonic and architectural interventions combine to respond to the historic Instituto Santa Maria della Pietà. Everything within the work will be sculptural—including language—creating a space where form and meaning are inseparable. Guided by a poetic associative logic, the work gathers and assembles fragments into a living exhibition, incorporating samples from a parallel site-responsive programme in Wales during the Biennale Arte 2026’s run. Sownd , is a Cymraeg/Welsh word meaning both “stuck” and “foundationally sound,” encapsulating the project’s exploration of tension and resilience. This duality frames an inquiry into how landscapes and languages—particularly minoritised ones—become sites of persistence and vulnerability. The artists have drawn on research in Welsh peatlands, sticky and unstable environments that both conceal and reveal vast scales of material history. These sites, layered with organic matter and cultural memory, become a terrain from which the artists navigate sedimented histories of language, culture, and ecology. The collaboration between Awst and Huw invites connections across borders, informed by Wales’ celebrated history of site-specific collective practice and its oral poetic tradition. Read more Toggle Installation Sculpture