Moving away from rigid frameworks, Kattan embraces a process shaped by the artists themselves, allowing the project to emerge through dialogue, intuition, and shared experience. Bringing together voices connected to the UAE in different ways, the exhibition resists a singular narrative and instead opens a space for what is often overlooked or unheard.
The title Washwasha translates as “whispering.” What did this word open up for you conceptually when you began working on the pavilion?
Instead of layered exhibition titles and interpretive frameworks, Washwasha insists on simplicity. As a single, onomatopoeic word, its meaning resides in the sound itself: quiet, suggestive, and open. This simplicity, however, is not shallow. While the initial invitation to the artists was open-ended, the responses that emerged were deeply personal, shaped by individual sensibility, yet grounded in shared forms of experience. What unfolded was not a thematic directive imposed from above, but an accumulation of intuitive gestures in which the personal became a point of entry into the collective. Taken together, these contributions resist a singular narrative or definition of washwasha. Rather than representing the term, the works activate it, exploring what washwasha can be or do.
The exhibition includes artists such as Farah Al Qasimi, Lamya Gargash, and Taus Makhacheva. Their practices differ significantly. What kind of conversation did you want to emerge between them?
While the artists in Washwasha work across different media and concerns, certain affinities begin to surface, often not in explicit themes, but in the spaces between them: in attention to sound, to circulation, and to what is sensed or implied rather than fully articulated. This resonates deeply with the themes of the exhibition. Washwasha refers not only to hushed speech, but also to subtle forms of communication, to murmurs, background noise, and intangible traces that risk going unnoticed.
Ideas of movement, migration, and long-term belonging seem to overlap throughout the pavilion. How do you think these temporal layers shape the cultural reality you’re presenting?
Artists in the UAE are shaped by migration, movement, arrival, and transience. Some pass through briefly; others remain for years, forming long-term relationships with place, while a few others have lengthy ties to the land. What brings them together is not a shared origin, but a shared moment of presence. They are here, producing work and exchanging ideas within overlapping temporalities, and collectively reflecting the rhythms and dissonances of life in the UAE today.
You’ve mentioned that the project is, in many ways, led by the artists. How does that shift your role as a curator in practice?
I believe when the curator steps away from an authoritative position, it creates space for artists to develop work on their own terms, with both freedom and support. In practice, that means the exhibition takes shape through an ongoing dialogue between the artists and the curatorial team, rather than being fully prescribed from the outset. My role becomes less about defining a singular framework and more about listening closely: to how each artist is thinking, what their work requires, and how those different ideas can exist alongside one another. I often think about Koyo Kouoh’s reflection on In Minor Keys, where she said, “Artists are channels to and between the minor keys and listening to, rather than speaking for them, is at the core of the curatorial conceit.” This idea really resonates with me. Curatorial practice supports, rather than directs, the conditions in which the work can emerge.
The UAE Pavilion often highlights narratives that are less visible. What kinds of voices or experiences did you feel were still missing and needed to be foregrounded here?
By foregrounding intangible histories, such as oral traditions, storytelling, language, and music, Washwasha highlights modes of knowledge that sustain collective memory beyond formal archives. These narratives are inherently less visible, in both their form and transmission. In bringing these ideas forward, the exhibition invites audiences to reconsider their listening practices.
The Venice Biennale is still structured around national representation. How do you navigate that framework while working with artists whose practices are not confined to a single identity?
All six artists have strong ties to the UAE, whether through birth, long-term residence, education, or sustained professional engagement. Their practices have developed within, alongside, or in dialogue with the UAE’s evolving cultural ecosystem. In fact, this connection extends to the curatorial team and publication contributors as well. Many artists practicing today engage with layered, transnational experiences that resist being contained within a single identity or geography. Rather than trying to resolve that tension, I see it as something to highlight. The pavilion becomes a site where the UAE’s diverse and interconnected artist community can be brought to the global stage.
To what extent were you thinking about global audiences as you developed the project? And where did you deliberately choose to remain locally specific?
The project moves away from trying to define a clear audience. It approaches knowledge through personal experiences that are inherently shared, allowing the work to resonate across different contexts while remaining grounded in specific lived realities.
About Bana Kattan
(b.1986, Abu Dhabi, UAE; lives and works in New York, US)
Bana Kattan is Curator and Associate Head of Exhibitions at the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Project and has been appointed curator of the National Pavilion UAE at the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia in 2026. Previously, she served as Associate Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and Curator at the NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery. Her recent projects include solo exhibitions with Wafaa Bilal (2025), Maryam Taghavi (2024), and Mona Hatoum (2023). Kattan holds an MA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a recipient of the Barjeel Global Fellowship and Getty-CAA International Program Grants.
