Our tour through the 2026 Venice Biennale revealed a quiet but persistent current of spirituality running through the work of numerous artists from around the world. For this Inspirations feature, we look beyond the Biennale’s many other themes to consider how artists engaged with the unseen through ritual, ancestral traditions, faith, ecology, grief, migration, and the possibility of transcendence. Across works rooted in Christianity, Sufi Islam, African and diasporic cosmologies, ancestral traditions, ritual, and speculative understandings of the unseen, artists repeatedly asked what it might mean to remain open to realities that cannot be fully explained or controlled.

See below for our highlights from the main exhibition, the national pavilions, and the satellite exhibitions.