For the first time in its history, the Republic of Moldova takes part in the 61st International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, marking a significant cultural milestone on the global stage. Presented at Santa Veneranda in Venice, the Moldovan Pavilion unveils On the Thousand and Second Night, an evocative installation by artist Pavel Brăila, curated by Adelina Luft.
Set within the 2026 Biennale theme In Minor Keys, the project invites viewers into a quiet yet powerful sensory experience, where hovering carpets – suspended by drones – reframe narratives of technology, tradition, and human connection. Blending ancestral craft with contemporary tensions, Moldova’s debut pavilion offers a contemplative vision of solidarity and imagination in an increasingly uncertain world.
The Republic of Moldova’s inaugural Venice Biennale presentation marks an inaugural moment for the Republic of Moldova and affirms its commitment to contemporary international cultural dialogue.
Responding to the theme of Biennale Arte 2026, In Minor Keys, the installation unfolds within a register of low frequencies: murmur, attention, and proximity. Rather than amplifying the noise of the present, On the Thousand and Second Night opens a space for reflection in which imagination and material culture operate as forms of continuity within a world undergoing transformation.
Inside the church, an ensemble of carpets hovers between floor and vault, suspended by drones. The carpet – an object rooted in the domestic sphere, associated with care and continuity – is supported by a technology commonly linked to surveillance, control, and, increasingly, to armed conflict. The installation symbolically reverses roles: the drone no longer restricts or pursues, but supports. For a moment, a technology tied to domination becomes an act of protection, and domestic memory gains the power to keep a shared space suspended in the air.
On the Thousand and Second Night continues a line of inquiry initiated by Pavel Brăila with Magic Carpet (2018), in which a woven rug was lifted by drones. What once appeared as a poetic image now resonates differently in a world where technology and airspace have become terrains of redefinition.
Drawing both on the tradition of carpets woven in homes and villages across Moldova — passed down as dowry and preserved as family memory — and on the Middle Eastern motif of bisat al-rih(the flying carpet) from the tales of One Thousand and One Nights, the project reclaims storytelling as a gesture that keeps the possibility of the future open, imagining alternative exits from a world in which borders may shift and security remains fragile. Rather than offering escape, Brăila proposes flight as a metaphor for solidarity and collective imagination. Each suspended carpet evokes protection, well-being, and the continuity of life, reconstructing, thread by thread, a cosmology of care.
“I am pleased that the Republic of Moldova’s participation in the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia takes place through this project, which arose from the realities of the present and carries a message that is both subtle and powerful.
The carpet is a universal symbol of home and care, yet the sky no longer signifies only freedom, but also fear. By imagining another chapter — the thousand and second night — the drones in the installation do not threaten, but support: they transform an instrument of control into a gesture of protection. It is a work about fragility, but also about our capacity to come together and to imagine a safer world,”
Artist Pavel Brăila
In response to the theme of the Biennale Arte 2026, In Minor Keys, we chose to work within a register of low frequencies. Not to illustrate conflict, but to construct a space in which attention and imagination can coexist.”
Curator Adelina Luft
In an era marked by fragmentation and the weaponisation of technology, On the Thousand and Second Night suggests a reversal of function: from domination to support, from delimitation to interdependence — towards the possibility of a form of coexistence yet to be imagined.
The Pavilion of the Republic of Moldova at the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia is at Spazio Santa Veneranda, Chiesa dei Santi Geremia e Lucia (Sestiere Cannaregio 252, 30121) from 9th May until 22nd November, 2026.
