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Manuel Mathieu’s Venice Biennale Debut Asks How We Carry the Past

In the Arsenale and the Giardini, the Haitian-Canadian artist asks what it means to be trapped in a loop and whether art can break it.

The scent hits you before anything else. Stepping into Manuel Mathieu’s corner of the Arsenale at the 61st Venice Biennale, you enter a low-lit room and are met by a warm, earthy fragrance: vetiver, sourced from Haiti, blended into something unexpectedly comforting. It took me a moment to place it, but the aromatic tingle of it eventually landed somewhere specific—the Vicks VapoRub my mother used to rub on my chest when I had a cold as a child, that powerful, enveloping sensation of being looked after. The immersive installation unfolding around you, Pendulum (2025), though, is more haunting than comforting.

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Haitian-Canadian artist Mathieu is one of the few participants in this year’s Biennale showing in both the Arsenale and the Giardini—a feat that speaks to the breadth and ambition of a practice encompassing painting, mosaic, ceramics, film and olfactory art. Invited by late curator Koyo Kouoh, whose theme “In Minor Keys” privileges quiet forms of resistance over grand declaration, Mathieu’s debut at the world’s most prestigious art exhibition feels perfectly calibrated.

Pendulum began as a short film in 2023—winning the top prize at FIFA that year before touring to the New Orleans Film Festival, the Toronto Biennial of Art and the Pérez Art Museum Miami—before expanding into the immersive installation now presented here. In the Arsenale, it takes the form of a double-sided screen suspended in the darkened space, and combined with four life-size fabric figures lying across the floor, each emitting the vetiver fragrance.

On screen, a woman in a white dress and headdress moves through a forest, the fabric of her garment trailing behind her like a wedding train. At moments she opens the cloak wide—arms outstretched, as if she might take flight; at others she wraps it around herself like armor. When I described her to Mathieu as a bride of history, he lit up. “That’s it,” he said. “And what is she marrying?” It’s a question the work deliberately refuses to answer. The dress itself—or one almost identical to it—stands nearby on a mannequin, a cinematic relic made suddenly........

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