Nauru (Republic of) 2026

Title: AIM Inundated: Imagining Life After Land
Commissioner: Isabella Dageago, M.P Deputy Minister in the Government of Nauru
Curator: Khaled Ramadan; Associate curators: Camilla Boemi, Stefano Cagol
Exhibitors: Kauw Tsitsi, CPS (Khaled Ramadan, Alfredo Cramerotti), Patricia Jacomella Bonola, Tedo Rekhviashvili, Sylvia Grace Borda, Ron Laboray, Dorian Batycka, Khaled Hafez, Iv Toshain, Stefano Cagol

“AIM Inundated, Imagining Life After Land” marks Nauru’s first participation at the International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, presenting the world’s smallest island nation as both a specific territory and an emblematic site of planetary transformation. The exhibition traces how Nauru’s present condition cannot be separated from its extractive past: decades of intensive phosphate mining left behind ecological depletion, compromised sovereignty, and geopolitical marginalisation — a concentrated demonstration of how global systems of extraction and uneven governance dismantle both landscapes and societies.

The pavilion approaches disappearance not as spectacle but as a framework for examining how environmental change reconfigures identity, memory, nationhood, and political agency. Inundation here extends beyond physical land loss to encompass the erosion of cultural continuity, ecological knowledge, and systems of meaning. Ten artists from ten countries work across installation, video, painting, photography, sound, text, documentary, and AI to assemble what the exhibition terms “archipelagic thinking” — a constellation of perspectives on loss, adaptation, and resilience. The Venetian setting reinforces the dialogue: a city historically shaped by water and increasingly defined by environmental vulnerability, it becomes a geographic counterpart to Nauru’s condition of shared risk.