Yiddishland Pavilion is a conceptual, independent, non-national pavilion initiated and curated by artist Yevgeniy Fiks and curator Maria Veits since 2022, presented alongside La Biennale di Venezia. Shaped by historic and contemporary Yiddish experiences, it advances Yiddishland as a shared platform for artists across geographies. For its third iteration, the pavilion explores Yiddishland as an imagined territory constituted through language, translation, and the politics of voice.

The 2026 program, titled The Words That Fit My Mouth, addresses linguistic, spatial, and bodily practices of living between languages. Across exhibition, performances, installation, and an artist residency, participating artists engage in interpretation, translation, and re-reading, tracing the tension between language and its utterance — what can be spoken, what resists articulation, and what remains unfitting.

At its core, the group exhibition The Words That Fit My Mouth brings together works by Arndt Beck, Laila Abd Elrazaq, Liliana Farber, and Masha Shprayzer. The exhibition reflects on what it means to inhabit words that are inherited, imposed, or partially lost. It opens on May 7th (18:00–20:00) and remains on view through May 31st at Ghetto Vecchio in Cannaregio.

Performative interventions by Eliana Pliskin Jacobs, presented at the opening and as an impromptu action within the public spaces of Venice, will activate the instability of language, testing how speech, gesture, and presence can exceed or resist translation within the highly codified Biennale’s environment.

Yiddishland Pavilion residency program continues in partnership with Venezia Contemporanea. In collaboration with Jewish Renaissance and Montreal Jewish Museum, it brings artists from the UK and Canada to Venice to develop research informed by working within the historic Jewish Ghetto during the Biennale.

The program culminates in Nabatele, a large-scale public installation by Anna Kamyshan, floating above the Venetian Lagoon. Presented with the Montreal Jewish Museum, the work extends the pavilion’s investigation into material and spatial translation of one’s identity and collective feeling in the time of uncertainty. Nabatele is an official collateral event of the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, on view from July 16th  to September 16th  at Arsenale Nord in the Castello district.