“He who knows he has enough is rich."
Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Chapter 33.
Personal Structures is a collateral event now in its eighth edition that runs alongside the official Venice Biennale and is independently curated by European Cultural Centre Italy. The theme Confluences for the 2026 exhibition is explicitly framed around meeting points, intersecting currents, and difference held in proximity rather than resolved. Among the 175 artists showing across Palazzo Bembo, Palazzo Mora, and the Marinaressa Gardens in Venice, is Dubai and London-based artist Mukesh Shah, whose neon text work Million Billion is on view at Palazzo Bembo until 22 November 2026.
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Shah’s line I would give a million not to have a billion has the compressed, sign-like quality familiar from his earlier text-based series, which have drawn on protest slogans and street language to distil the pressing issues of our times such as inequality, migration and identity into single, arresting phrases. Here, the medium does much of the work: neon, so often the language of advertising and desire, is turned against itself to articulate a wish to have less, not more.
Shown in the 15th-century Palazzo Bembo, birthplace of Pietro Bembo, a Renaissance cardinal, scholar, and one of the great codifiers of literary Italian, the former Bembo residence itself reflects generations of inherited Venetian wealth. Shah's neon text takes on an added meaning from its setting: the "million vs billion" tension sits inside walls that represent old, consolidated, generational wealth. He also draws attention to a league of tech billionaires attempting to control the world, a new aristocracy whose fortunes were amassed not over generations, but within a single lifetime, sometimes within a single decade. Where the Bembo family's wealth was slow, consolidated, and legitimised by centuries of Venetian mercantile and ecclesiastical power, this new wealth is instant, borderless, and increasingly indifferent to the nation-state altogether. The billionaires Shah gestures toward do not merely inherit influence, they design the platforms, infrastructures, and algorithms through which influence itself is now exercised. In this sense, the luminous sign stages a confrontation between two eras of concentrated power: one built brick by brick over half a millennium, the other assembled in server farms and Initial Public Offerings. Displayed inside the very walls that once housed old European wealth, Shah’s light installation asks whether today's billionaire class represents a break from that history, or simply its latest, faster iteration.
Mukesh Shah was born in Aden (Yemen), when it was the colony of Aden a Protectorate of the United Kingdom. In 1967, he and his family emigrated to Bombay (Mumbai). From 1976 he was educated in the UK and has an MA in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge. Shah is a multi-disciplinary visual artist based in Dubai and London and started his studio practice in 2009, having previously worked in finance, perhaps unusual for an aspiring artist, but it provided a useful perspective when trying to make sense of what is happening. Reaching for clarity as he developed his visual language is a search for subliminal reconciliation between what he sees, thinks, and feels.
Shah's solo and group exhibitions include: Palabras, Palabras, Palabras (TK Gallery, Madrid, 2023), Personal Structures (Palazzo Mora, Venice Biennale, 2022), Sign Systems (Unit London, London, 2022), XVA Gallery (Dubai, 2021), The Print Show (Alserkal Avenue, Dubai, 2019), XVA Gallery (Dubai, 2019), Wetpaint Gallery (Stroud, UK, 2018), Sikka Art & Design Festival (Dubai, 2018), ArtBAB (Bahrain, 2017), Gallery Elena Shchukina (London, 2017), XVA Gallery (Dubai, 2016).
His book C?N U FEEL IT was published by Akkadia Press, Edinburgh, in 2021.
Million Billion is part of the Utopai series UTOPAI | Mukesh Shah
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Newsletter:
Courtesy and Mukesh Shah, European Cultural Centre Italy and Renée Pfister Art & Gallery Consultancy 2026.
Video:
Courtesy and ©Mukesh Shah, European Cultural Centre Italy, music by: Bensound.com/free-music-for-videos Artist: Benjamin Tissot, Summer, License code: GEEAPPVGS8S4WKWU and Renée Pfister Art & Gallery Consultancy, with the assistance of Gözde Altun, 2026. All rights reserved.