"Take a deep breath - Exhale
Drop your shoulders - Close your eyes"
Drop your shoulders - Close your eyes"
La Biennale di Venezia - The 61st International Art Exhibition
In Minor Keys - Koyo Kouoh
Artists and Highlights - Giardini - Central Pavilion
At La Biennale di Venezia - entitled - In Minor Keys - curated by the late - Koyo Kouoh - realised by the team selected by her - Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Hélène Pereira and Rasha Salti - Siddhartha Mitter - Rory Tsapayi - until - November 22 - at the Giardini, and at the Arsenale. The title In Minor Keys reflects Kouoh’s belief that art does not need to be loud to be powerful. Like music played softly, it asks for attention, sensitivity, and time. Rather than fixed sections, the exhibition moves through recurring motifs — shrines, processions, schools, and spaces of rest — allowing visitors to drift between works and meanings.
Alvaro Barrington
Barrington’s installation - above -
Labor Day Parade ’91
references memories of the - West Indian Day Parade in Brooklyn.
"The path is one that reappraises human relationships, the little things, which are also great ones. The human dimension, the benchmark of everything, which a part of the world, yet the most opulent and over developed world – identified in the name “West” – has long since lost sight of, misplaced."
Pietangelo Buttafuoco
In Minor Keys was the title chosen for La Biennale by the late Koyo Kouoh that vision has been carefully realised by her assembled and trusted team: Marie Hélène Pereira, Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo and Rasha Salti - advisors - Siddhartha Mitter - editor-in-chief - Rory Tsapayi - research assistant - above with - President La Biennale di Venezia - Pietrangelo Buttafuoco and Koyo's husband, Philippe Mall.
Big Chief Demond Melancon
Melancon - above - Big Chief of the Young Seminole Hunter tribe, creates intricately beaded ceremonial suits central to New Orleans' Black Masking culture. Since 2017, he has exhibited these works internationally, bringing the tradition to museums and galleries. For the Biennale he created - above - Amistad Takeover.
The Artists
The 110 invited participants – among them - individual artists - collaborative duos - collectives - artist-led organisations – hail from many geographies and regions selected by Koyo with particular attention to resonances, affinity, and and possible convergences between practices, even when far apart.
Seyni Awa Camara
Seyni Awa Camara - above - was a Senegalese ceramic artist who transformed inherited pottery traditions into visionary clay sculptures inspired by dreams, memory, and nature. Her enigmatic hybrid figures blur the boundaries between human and animal, reflecting a deeply personal spiritual world. Her work has become an important contribution to contemporary African art and ceramic practice.
Beverly Buchanan
White Shacks - 1987
Marcel Duchamp
Campos-Pons - Anatomy of the Magnolia Tree for Koyo Kouoh and Toni Morrison - 2026 - above - is a monument in floral form. Eight tall panels hold portraits of Morrison, the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature, and Kouoh, the first African woman to curate the Biennale Arte, while seven sculptures in resin and glass express forms of the magnolia, the iconic flower of the American South. Anchored in Black women’s solidarity, the work holds its subjects in relation across disciplines, generations and geographies.
Sohrab Hura
Sohrab Hura is an Indian artist whose paintings and films explore the tension between everyday life, memory, and the instability of images. His intimate pastel works - above - Timelines - 2024 - often layered with hidden images and handwritten notes, evoke the feeling of personal diaries. Blending documentary observation with fiction, his practice reflects on perception, politics, and contemporary life.
Daniel Lind-Ramos
Daniel Lind-Ramos - Above with a collaborator - is a Puerto Rican artist who creates large-scale assemblages from found and salvaged objects, many gathered after hurricanes or donated by his community. His sculptures transform everyday materials into powerful reflections on memory, resilience, and collective history. Through these works, he explores the deep connections between people, place, and survival.
Edouard Duval-Carrié
Edouard Duval-Carrié is a Haitian artist whose work explores the history, spirituality, and cultural identity of Haiti. Drawing on the lwa of Haitian Vodou, he creates richly layered works that connect migration, memory, and the legacy of the Haitian Revolution. His practice reimagines history through myth, resilience, and collective imagination.
Manuel Mathieu
Manuel Mathieu, art begins where time fractures, opening an infinite field. His work is informed by the liberatory legacy of Haiti’s art, literature, music and spirituality, as well as by Haiti’s contemporary challenges. While painting anchors his practice, ceramics, mosaic, film and scent extend the inquiry and material vocabulary. In his mixed-media works on canvas, marked boxes become metonyms for corporeality, interrogating the body’s perimeter and its relational field.
Leonilda González
Leonilda González was born in rural Uruguay in the 1920s. There, she developed her drive to affect social change through printmaking as her main medium – xylography - woodcuts - in particular – believing that its replicable and accessible qualities would help her communicate with larger audiences. At the height of the independent culture movement, González created Novias Revolucionarias - Revolutionary Brides - above - a series that combined irony, anger, and striking graphic contrast. She portrays the brides as defiant figures protesting a system that seeks to "imprison" them. Following the 1973–1985 military dictatorship, the prints came to be seen as powerful symbols of political resistance in Uruguay.
Billie Zangewa
Billie Zangewa - above - creates hand-stitched collages from fragments of raw Dupion silk, transforming discarded fabrics into intimate scenes from everyday life. The silk's shifting texture and sheen give each work a distinctive luminosity. This suite of seven collages depicts moments of cooking, resting, caring for family, and quiet reflection. Through these scenes, Zangewa explores motherhood, identity, and what she calls "daily feminism"—finding strength, beauty, and agency in the routines of ordinary life.
Walid Raad
Raad's imagines artworks as beings in need of rescue. Through shifting narratives, fictional archives, and elusive documents, he traces the journeys of lost, damaged, or displaced works, creating labyrinthine stories that blur fact and fiction. Raad suggests that war transforms artworks beyond physical destruction, altering their colours, forms, and meanings. These elements, he proposes, survive by hiding in unexpected places, where they quietly endure until they can reappear.
Adebunmi Gbadebo
Adebunmi Gbadebo uses materials drawn from the land to honour the lives of people enslaved in the American South. She makes clay from red soil collected at the True Blue plantation in South Carolina, where her ancestors were forced to labour, combining African American ceramic traditions with coil-building techniques rooted in Nigeria and Cameroon. Incorporating rice and human hair into her vessels, Gbadebo creates memorial objects that commemorate her family and reclaim the land. Screenprints and works on paper made with handmade inks and pigments extend these themes, evoking the landscape surrounding the plantation.
Kaloki Nyamai
Kaloki Nyamai - above - draws on personal memory, Kamba heritage, and the social and political realities of Kenya. Using rope, sisal, fabric, newspaper, photographic transfers, and yarn, he builds richly layered canvases that evoke intimate domestic scenes.His works explore memory, belonging, and resilience through fragmented figures and stitched surfaces. More recently, Nyamai has engaged allegorically with cycles of political violence in Kenya, using the stitch as a metaphor for both rupture and repair.
Marcia Kure
Marcia Kure works across drawing, collage, pigment, and assemblage to explore the relationships between materials, history, and systems of value. Using substances such as indigo, charcoal, gold, and synthetic hair, she reveals the entanglement of natural resources, industry, and everyday life. Her Hair Jackets - above - combine carved wood and synthetic hair to examine labour, extraction, and identity. Across her practice, Kure uses line and material to trace the ecological, economic, and technological forces that shape contemporary experience.
Godfried Donkor
Of Asante descent, Godfried Donkor - above - explores the histories and legacies of the African diaspora through collage, painting, embroidery, and archival research. His work traces connections between West Africa and the Americas, with a particular focus on the transatlantic slave trade. Drawing on comic books, historical imagery, and archival materials, Donkor reimagines Black historical figures and questions inherited ideas of masculinity, memory, and identity. His works propose new narratives of Black resilience grounded in vulnerability and emotional strength.
Annalee Davis
Annalee Davis lives and works on a former plantation in Barbados, where she explores the legacies of colonialism, plantation economies, and possibilities for healing through art, agriculture, and ecology. Created for - Biennale Arte 2026 - Let This Be My Cathedral - above - combines a herbarium of plants from her garden, hand embroidery, palm drawings, and a life-sized reproduction of the extinct Eskimo curlew. Together, these elements invite reflection on loss, restoration, and our relationship with the natural world.
Nina Katchadourian
Nina Katchadourian transforms everyday life into playful acts of imagination. For La Biennale, she recreates the elaborate fictional world she and her brother invented as children on the Finnish island of Pörtö, complete with named toy families and invented rituals. Also featured is her celebrated - Seat Assignment - series - above - 2010–2021- in which the ordinary objects of air travel become the raw material for witty photographic illusions that reveal the extraordinary within the everyday.
Vera Tamari
Over four decades, Palestinian artist Vera Tamari has developed a distinctive process for creating monumental clay reliefs. Made through intensive research, experimentation, and collective labour, her sculptures are fired in sections before being reassembled. Tale of a Tree - above - 2002 - is composed of hundreds of individually made clay elements that evoke memory, resilience, and the natural world. Working across ceramics, painting, photography, and installation, Tamari continues to expand the expressive possibilities of clay.
arms ache avid aeon
arms ache avid aeon is a collaborative project by Jo-ey Tang and founding members of the collective fierce pussy—Nancy Brooks Brody - Joy Episalla - Zoe Leonard - Carrie Yamaoka. Bringing together works from 1991–2026, it reflects on queer activism, collective practice, and resistance in a time of climate crisis and rising authoritarianism.On view are Joy Episalla's - above - chemically altered photographic works - above - alongside sculptures, photographs, and installations by the other artists that transform found materials through processes of repair, decay, and renewal. Two new fierce pussy public projects across Venice extend the collective's long-standing commitment to visibility and inclusion.
A Tribute to the late Koyo Kouoh
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