British Council: Venice Biennale Art 2026 – designing in translation

For the fourth year running, we collaborated with the British Council to create the visual identity and global campaign for the British Pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia, this year presenting Turner Prize-winning artist Lubaina Himid CBE RA and her commission, Predicting History: Testing Translation.

Context 

Himid’s exhibition explores what it means to belong and how we learn to make a home in places beyond our roots. Across five monumental multi-panel paintings, found objects and sound, figures build, cook, sew, garden and navigate unfamiliar surroundings; negotiating whether to settle, adapt or begin again.

The title captures the uncertainty at the heart of the work. History cannot be predicted and translation can never be exact. Meaning changes as it moves between people, places, languages and cultures.

Approach 

Inspired by translation as an active process and the visual language of kangas often featured in Himid’s work, we built an identity that takes the exhibition title and pulls it apart. Words shift position, change orientation and travel around the edges of each composition, creating a typographic framework that is never entirely fixed. From posters and publications to signage, merchandise and motion, the system continually reconfigures itself in response to the space it inhabits.

At the centre sits Himid’s work. Rather than competing with the extraordinary colour, scale and theatricality of her paintings, the identity creates a frame around them allowing artworks, objects and voices from the exhibition to become the visual protagonists. A deliberately vivid palette, taken from the paintings themselves, amplifies this relationship.

An identity that gets lost and found in translation.