The Irish Pavilion at the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia announces Dreamshook
La Biennale di Venezia 2026, Venice, Italy
May 09 – November 22, 2026

The word Dreamshook describes the feeling of waking from a dream, when reality is destabilised and realms of possibility linger and dissipate. In the Irish Pavilion at the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Nolan’s installation of hand-tufted tapestry, drawing, and sculpture, represents thresholds, dream states and narratives that strain the distinctions between the immaterial and the actual.

The work develops from her sustained fascination with the frameworks that shape any understanding of the world and the widespread human desire to make order within chaos. Nolan looks to the Middle Ages and early Renaissance as an era mirroring our own time. It was a profoundly turbulent period marked by religious and political upheaval, a time transformed by plague, wars and famine. It was also a time when cultural and technological developments in Europe reshaped what it is to be human, challenged the nature of authority, and both witnessed and cultivated profound ideological change.

The work draws on key cultural events from these times that have shaped the present-day. She uses these moments of discovery and invention to signal how architectures of belief and knowledge are constructed and, in so doing, celebrates how we encounter the world in all its messiness and debatable beauty. Dreamshook invites speculation on how the complex dynamics of wonder, belief and power shape expectations and human experience.

Isabel Nolan said: “Even if there is much to be appreciated about it, it can be tricky to love a European heritage. It’s a place that wielded privilege as a weapon and progressively built wealth and culture through extraction and subjugation; a lesson quickly learnt growing up in Ireland. But there is much within the cultural history of post-medieval Europe, albeit produced and shaped almost exclusively by and for a wealthy, white, Christian patriarchal society, that I still love and learn from. Dreamshook might be a show about ambivalence, about the literature and art of western Judaeo-Christian, classically inflected, enlightened society, that I both hate and love. What it means and what it entails to be human, or even humane, is being tested. It feels timely to look at a period when some of what we have taken for granted about being ‘modern’ humans for 600 plus years is subject to new pressures and potentially revolutionary change”.

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