UAE Pavilion Explores How Rumors Transform Through Human Networks at Venice Biennale

Taus Makhacheva’s And What Did You Say? occupies the UAE Pavilion at the Venice Biennale through November 22, giving tangible form to something ordinarily invisible: the way information mutates as it moves between bodies and minds. The work sits within Washwasha, the pavilion exhibition curated by Bana Kattan with assistant curator Tala Nassar. The Arabic title translates to whispering, and the broader exhibition examines forms of communication that exist outside official language and institutional records.

Gossip, Makhacheva argues, operates as an unofficial language that reshapes itself with every transmission, absorbing the fears, desires and suspicions of those who carry it forward. Her contribution explores this through three performance characters, a bench, an audio installation and a collection of objects she calls instruments rather than props.

Makhacheva began her investigation by considering gossip as both an unofficial language of society and of the art world itself. Her initial creative impulse, though, stemmed from studying the body’s response to fear. Working with researcher Ksenia Skorytchenko, she examined the fight, flight and freeze responses, particularly the paralysis that trauma or threat can trigger. Gossip produces its own bodily reactions: it may release dopamine, linked to excitement and sudden comprehension, or trigger cortisol, generating fear and stress when the rumour concerns the listener or someone close to them.

The performance unfolds through three characters that trace gossip’s journey. Source considers where gossip originates and what responsibility attaches to those who receive it. The performer wears a suit covered in zipped pockets, removing empty envelopes and distributing them to audience members. These envelopes contain nothing. Makhacheva explains that they function as what she calls invisible mirrors, prompting visitors to examine their own relationship to gossip and how they engage with it. The Source character also unfolds an “un-mirror” from within a bench, its opaque surface offering no reflection. Makhacheva connects this object to the effect of false accusations, which can leave a person questioning their own integrity until they can no longer see themselves clearly.

Spread represents what occurs once gossip departs its origin point. The performer’s costume features multiple sleeves and necklines that are continuously rearranged during the performance, refusing to settle into any stable identity. This instability reflects Makhacheva’s core observation: every person changes gossip, whether consciously or unconsciously. At one moment, Spread becomes nearly motionless while imagining gossip entering through the ear, moving into the amygdala deep within the brain, passing through the chest, travelling into the feet and finally leaving the body. Makhacheva describes this as “micro choreography,” where the dancer imagines the audience as her internal organs rather than performing outward.

Spread carries a cabinet containing three vessels: two of blown glass and one that resembles porcelain but is edible. During the performance, the performer bites into and swallows the edible vessel, making literal the work’s central metaphor. Gossip changes as it moves through a person, just as the vessel changes when ingested. The glass objects appear uneven, as though attempting to recover an earlier form. Their design grew from Makhacheva’s reflection on jewellery collected from Soviet republics, including Dagestan, during the Second World War. While exceptional pieces entered museums, many others were melted down for silver. She began imagining what those objects might look like if they could remember their former selves. “For me, that is also what gossip does,” she says. “It changes shape every time it passes through another mouth.”

The final character, Core, has learned to metabolise gossip. She moves through anger, shame, fear and judgment but is no longer controlled by them. During the performance, she gradually removes costume layers until only a simple shirt remains. These layers represent everything that accumulates around a person; what remains is a state Makhacheva describes as “post-rage, post-anger, post-judgment, post-shame, post-everything.”

Core carries several objects referencing historical and mythological sources. One is a crooked pipe with a tongue-like surface, based on architectural devices known as the Lord’s Ear, built into Scottish castle walls to secretly overhear conversations. Another is a bracelet resembling melted scissors, inspired by a 16th-century depiction of Evil Rumour as a figure covered in eyes, tongues, arrows and cutting tools. Here the scissors have lost their capacity to wound. A chain made from brass adzuki beans refers to the Japanese mythological figure Azuki Arai, whose bean-washing sounds lure people toward water. The whispering sound remains, but its purpose has shifted from destructive to generative.

The choreography was developed collaboratively with performers Rei Kassandra Co, Salvatore De Simone and Anna Abalikhina, who came from different generations, locations and choreographic traditions. Makhacheva describes the performers as co-creators who contributed movements, prompts and structural decisions. Gestures began migrating between bodies: Salvatore’s anxious leg movement appeared in Rei’s section; Anna’s face-pinching gesture later surfaced in Salvatore’s work. The performers jokingly called this process theft. Makhacheva saw something else entirely. Migration. “Gestures travelled between bodies in exactly the same way gossip travels between people, changing slightly every time,” she says.

Meanwhile, this principle extends to how audiences experience the piece. There is no fixed theatrical beginning or end. Visitors can enter midway through, leave, return or overhear only fragments. “In a way, the choreography too behaved like gossip,” Makhacheva says.

When performances are not occurring, the work transforms into an audio installation. Visitors can sit on the Gossip Bench and listen through headphones to three overlapping voices: an overheard conversation that seems to move through the pavilion, an inner monologue, and a narrator moving between history, biology and culture. The bench is painted almost the same colour as the gallery walls but one shade different. Its fabric carries the pattern of the cochlea, the spiral structure of the inner ear, while small metal legs make it resemble an insect that has crawled into the pavilion and disguised itself as furniture. At certain moments, people seated at opposite ends are asked to look at each other and open parts of the bench together, transforming listening into a shared act.

Makhacheva describes her practice as “changing the volume on things” and making certain conversations more audible. In this work, gossip is never presented as simply harmful or harmless. It protects and wounds, connects and isolates, clarifies and distorts. Its force lies in its ability to preserve multiple versions of events, along with the fears and desires surrounding them. “History often wants to be singular,” Makhacheva says. “Gossip allows the multiple.” Whether audiences arriving at the pavilion in the weeks remaining before November 22 encounter the live performances or only the bench and its layered voices, the question the work leaves open is the same: what version of what you heard will you carry out with you?