Pavel Brăila is a Moldovan visual artist whose practice moves across film, photography, installation and performance. Born in 1971 in Chișinău and working between Chișinău and Berlin, he examines how political systems enter everyday life through borders, timetables, rituals and shared images. His work often begins with a precise observation of post-Soviet society, then opens onto wider questions of identity, mobility and historical memory. Brăila took part in documenta 11 in 2002 and documenta 14 in 2017, as well as Manifesta 10, and his projects have been presented by institutions including Tate Modern, Neue Nationalgalerie, Moderna Museet and Kiasma.
In 2026, Brăila represents the Republic of Moldova at the 61st Venice Biennale with On the Thousand and Second Night, presented at Santa Veneranda from 9 May to 22 November. The installation suspends traditional carpets with drones, bringing an object associated with domestic life, craft and inherited memory into contact with a technology linked to surveillance and war. By recasting the drone as a carrier rather than a weapon, the work turns the folk image of the flying carpet into a contemporary reflection on displacement, borders and liberation. The project also marks Moldova’s first official national pavilion at the Biennale, giving Brăila’s long-standing investigation of Eastern European histories a new public scale.