Venice Biennale Offsite Highlights: Fleshy Films And Vegetarian Videos

Venice's most memorable offsite presentations this year are not competing for grandeur so much as for psychic afterimage. At the Taiwan Pavilion, Li Yi-Fan's Screen Melancholy (2026) turns a CGI figure, ChatGPT, and a stream of deadpan one-liners into a work that is at once ridiculous, eerie, and unexpectedly invigorating. The piece is shown as a collateral event organized by the Taipei Fine Arts Museum rather than an official pavilion, but it has become one of the Biennale's most talked-about stops.

The work's power lies in its tonal instability. A painted digital body asks how to say“bad luck” professionally, then morphs through a series of uncanny forms, including an eye, a prostate, a heart, and an appendix. The result is not simply satire of AI culture or internet overload. It is stranger than that: a comic, queasy meditation on image fatigue and the emotional residue of living among screens.

James McAnally of CounterPublic described the piece as“a real test for who finds it funny or just creepy.” That split seems central to Li's appeal. Raphael Fonseca will bring the artist to CounterPublic in St. Louis this September, and Li is also included in the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, extending the work's reach beyond Venice.

The strength of the offsite circuit does not end there. Janis Rafa's Baby I'm Yours, Forever (2026), installed at Fondazione In Between Art Film in the Complesso dell'Ospedaletto, uses the atmosphere of an industrial meat refrigeration plant to produce a haunting, surreal sequence of bodies and surfaces. Lu Yang's installation at Espace Louis Vuitton folds mirrored space and Buddhist themes into a similarly immersive register. Iván Tovar's paintings, meanwhile, are being singled out as the final unmissable offsite show - and, for some viewers, the revelation of the season.

Taken together, these exhibitions suggest that surrealism and video-based work are not merely surviving the age of short-form content. In Venice, they are answering it with scale, wit, and a renewed sense of visual unease.

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