VENICE.- Haitham Al Busafi will represent Oman at the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, running from 9 May – 22 November 2026, where he will also serve as its curator. Commissioned by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Youth, and located in the Arsenale Artiglierie, Zīnah transforms the tradition of Omani silver horse adornment (Al-zannah) into a monumental, participatory environment of sand, suspended metal, and collectively generated sound.
The installation repositions Al-zaanah from objects long categorised as craft into a form of enveloping, immersive art. In Omani culture, rider and horse are adorned equally in an act of mutual recognition. Al-zaanah is both a functional and aesthetic object that communicates through pressure and weight, enabling rider and horse to move as one. It is not separate from the rider's own adornment but its continuation, a cultural refusal to treat the horse as instrument, and an affirmation that it should be granted the same recognition of worth as the human who rides it.
Zīnah inverts the conventions of spectatorship. The visitor does not observe adornment, they enter it. Set within a sand-covered floor beneath a dense constellation of suspended silver forms, the installation transforms each visitor's movement into sound: footsteps reshape the terrain, activating the metal elements to sway and chime. The visitor becomes both recipient and author of the work, at once the body that is adorned and the force that sets the adornment in motion.
The work is shaped by collective authorship at every stage. In a community workshop in Muscat, Oman, artists, students, and members of the public have inscribed marks into the silver forms, each an expression of the bond between human and horse. Over the seven months of the exhibition, each visitor's passage will further the work: contributing to an evolving soundscape, wearing paths into the sand, and leaving a gradually accumulating palimpsest of presence. Framed by the Omani desert as a generative and regenerative space, a terrain that produced both the horses and the tradition of Al-zaanah, the installation draws on cyclical rhythms of erosion and renewal, where transformation is continuous and form is never fixed.
Zīnah proposes that adornment is an ethical act, care is a form of knowledge, and beauty belongs to all beings. It contributes to broader conversations on equity, empathy, and the distribution of value across human and nonhuman worlds.
It is also presented in honour of the memory of Koyo Kouoh (1967–2025), whose curatorial vision for the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, “In Minor Keys”, calls for art that refuses spectacle in favour of resonance, and for encounters that are "more sensory than didactic, renewing rather than exhausting." The installation answers this call, through sand, silver, and the weight of human presence.
H.E. Sayyid Saeed bin Sultan Al Busaidi, Commissioner of the Oman Pavilion, Undersecretary of the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Youth for Culture, said: "The Sultanate of Oman's participation in Biennale Arte 2026 marks a new chapter in our country's cultural engagement with the world. Since our first participation at the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia in 2022, Oman has sought to contribute to the global conversation not through volume but through the specificity and depth of our cultural knowledge. Zīnah is rooted in a tradition that has never separated beauty from function, adornment from ethics, or craft from meaning. We present it in Venice as an offering, to the memory of Koyo Kouoh, whose vision honours precisely these values, and to every visitor who enters the space."
Haitham Al Busafi, Artist and Curator, said: "The Al-zaanah taught me that adornment is not about possession or display, it is about recognition. A culture that adorns its horses is a culture that refuses to treat any companion as mere instrument, but as an extension of the self. When I began to imagine what it would mean to bring this principle into the space of an exhibition, the question became: what happens when the visitor is no longer looking at adornment, but standing inside it? When their weight, their movement, their breath becomes the thing that activates the silver above them? Zīnah does not explain this tradition. It places you within it. You walk, and the room responds. You are, for the duration of your crossing, the being deemed worthy of beauty."
