Nauru National Pavilion

With “AIM Inundated, Imagining Life After Land”, the Republic of Nauru, the world’s smallest island nation, participates in the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia for the first time, presenting ecological precarity not as a distant horizon, but as an ongoing condition. The Pavilion acknowledges Nauru, a microstate in the South Pacific Ocean, as a site where the long-term consequences of global economic and political decisions have been materially lived, and thresholds have already been crossed, and so reframes it from being a remote or marginal territory to become both a universal warning and a crucial guide for a shared future.
Situated at the convergence of rising sea levels, environmental exhaustion, and the enduring legacies of colonial extractivism, Nauru stands as one of the most impacted sites. The present moment of Nauru cannot be divorced from its extractive history. Decades of intensive phosphate mining transformed the island’s landscape and economy, leaving behind a terrain marked by ecological depletion, erosion, compromised sovereignty, and geopolitical marginalization. A century of extraction in Nauru demonstrates how resource demand can dismantle both ecological and socio-cultural systems, leading to long-term instability, and how environmental loss is systematically produced through global systems of extraction, governance, and uneven responsibility.
The Pavilion positions Nauru as both a specific territory and an emblematic site of planetary transformation. It is a conceptual study of disappearance resisting spectacle and catastrophe imagery, and understanding it not only in terms of physical land loss but also as the erosion of cultural continuity, ecological knowledge, systems of meaning, and political agency. Through this lens, inundation becomes a framework for examining how environmental change reconfigures identity, memory, nationhood, and sovereignty, while also reshaping the parameters through which futures are imagined.
Structured through archipelagic thinking, the Pavilion assembles a constellation of visions. The ten invited artists belong to as many nations and different generations, and their works range from installation, video, painting, photography, sound, text, documentary, research, and the use of artificial intelligence.
Commissioning Authority: Ministry of National Heritage, Culture, and Tourism, Republic of Nauru
Chief curator: Khaled Ramadan Associate curators: Camilla Boemio, Stefano Cagol
Artists:
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