Belgian artist Koen Vanmechelen has taken over three floors of a historic Venetian palazzo for a solo exhibition staged alongside the 61st Venice Biennale. Titled We Thought We Were Alone, the show brings together more than 40 new pieces and is curated by British independent curator James Putnam. It opened on 9 May and continues until 22 November 2026.

Vanmechelen, born in Sint-Truiden in 1965, has spent decades working at the meeting point of art, biology and philosophy. His best-known long-term project, the Cosmopolitan Chicken Project, launched in 1999 and uses crossbreeding to explore genetic diversity. Since 2017 his practice has also been closely tied to LABIOMISTA, a 24-hectare park in Genk that mixes art, science, nature and community life. In 2013 he received the Golden Nica for Hybrid Art at Prix Ars Electronica.

The Venice exhibition pushes back against the idea that people sit at the centre of the natural world. Animal sculptures that seem to return the visitor's gaze anchor the display, while the egg recurs as a motif for life, change and uncertainty. Working in bronze, marble, glass, photography and video, Vanmechelen treats living and nonliving things as one connected system, in which forms and meanings shift through their relationships with each other.

One dedicated space is given to Wild Gene Festival, a video and installation collaboration with Senegalese singer and composer Youssou N'Dour that blends collective expression, gesture and music. The show's themes of coexistence and reciprocity echo the Biennale's 2026 theme, In Minor Keys. Its setting, Palazzo Rota Ivancich on Calle del Remedio in the Castello district near Piazza San Marco, is itself part of the experience: centuries of repair and remodelling have left layered spaces that shape how visitors encounter the work.