Ca' Giustinian - Press Presentation - 61st International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia - In Minor Keys - by Koyo Kouoh

   Press Presentation 

The 61st International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia  

In Minor Keys -  by Koyo Kouoh

The press presentation of - The 61st International Art Exhibition -  La Biennale di Venezia - In Minor Keys - by Koyo Kouoh - May 9-November 22 - begins quietly, like a story told in a low voice shaped by the vision of the late curator Koyo Kouoh who passed away in 2025, her presence will be deeply felt throughout the exhibition. She had already imagined its structure, selected the artists, and set its tone — one grounded in care, listening, and human connection. With the support of her family, the Biennale chose to carry her project forward, honoring the work she pursued until the very end.

"We mapped practices and projects, we identified resonances, affinities, synchronicities and conversations, we extracted motifs to structure the exhibition and pillars on which to draw it. Notions like enchantment, seeding, commoning, and generative practices that invite collectivities, emerged organically."

Koyo Kouoh 

in April 2025, with her team under the shades of a mango tree at the - RAW Material Company - the cultural center founded by her.

Team Kouoh

In Minor Keys - is the title chosen by the late Koyo Kouoh for the - Biennale Arte 2026 - as specified in the curatorial text, that vision has been carefully realised by the team Kouoh assembled and trusted: Marie Hélène Pereira, Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, and Rasha Salti - advisors - Siddhartha Mitter - editor-in-chief -  and Rory Tsapayi - research assistant.  Working across continents, they continued Kouoh’s method of curating as a shared, relational practice. The pivotal meeting in Dakar, held beneath a mango tree, became the emotional and conceptual anchor of the exhibition — a moment where ideas aligned, resonances emerged, and the “music” of the project could finally be heard.

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. Literary influences helped shape this rhythm, including Beloved by Toni Morrison and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, novels that move between memory, history, and imagination. Poetry also takes center stage, with live performances inspired by Kouoh’s own Poetry Caravan, affirming storytelling as a form of healing and transmission.

"Visitors are invited to slow down, to rest, and to listen — to each other, to the earth, and to themselves..."

Bringing together 111 artists from across the world, In Minor Keys celebrates connection over spectacle. Tributes to artists such as Issa Samb and Beverly Buchanan highlight art as something lived, shared, and deeply human. Visitors are invited to slow down, to rest, and to listen — to each other, to the earth, and to themselves. In doing so, the exhibition carries forward Kouoh’s lasting message: that the most meaningful transformations often happen quietly, in the minor keys of our shared humanity.

Issa Samb - 1945-2017

Beverly Buchanan

Annalee Davis

Torkwase Dyson

Pauline Oliveros

Fabrice Aragno

 Laurie Anderson

"The joy of authentic art, which so faithfully resembles real life..”

Pietrangelo Buttafuoco

 President - La Biennale di Venezia

“The joy of authentic art, which so faithfully resembles real life,” reflects Pietrangelo Buttafuoco - In Minor Keys - conceived by Koyo Kouoh, invites visitors to rediscover the human at the heart of everything — the small gestures, the connection to the earth, and the sense of proportion in life. Through her vision, art becomes a gentle guide, encouraging humility, presence, and the joy of creating with one’s own hands, reminding us that meaning and happiness often reside in the simple, tangible, and shared experiences of our daily lives."

Pietrangelo Buttafuoco and Maria Cristiana Costanzo

Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons - Kamaal Malak

Seen at Ca' Giustinian

Pietrangelo Buttafuoco and Roberto Cicutto

Debora Rossi

  the late Koyo Kouoh's husband - Philippe Mall and Cristiana Costanzo - 

La Biennale Head of Press Office

Matteo Morbidi

Amerigo Restucci

Giulio Manieri Elia

Barbara and Tonci Foscari

Luca Massimo Barbero

Stefano Zecchi and Giorgia Pea

Cristina Beltrami

Lorenzo Cinotti and Laura Scarpa

Gianni De Luigi

Petra Schaefer, Anais Nyffeler and Kathleen Reinhardt

 

Elisabetta Barisoni

Ziva Kraus

Annamaria Redolfi

Flavia Fossa Margutti

Rasha Salti, Siddhartha Mitter, Joern Brandmeyer, Marie Hélène Pereira, Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo and Rory Tsapayi 

Please Note

The artwork photos published here are screenshots from the press presentation.

 

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Museo Fortuny - Antonio Scaccabarozzi - Diafanes

"Scaccabarozzi developed a novel visual language expressed in translucent and transparent membranes—sheets of acetate or polyethylene—capable of creating spaces of exploration."

Museo Fortuny

Antonio Scaccabarazzo - Diafanes

At Museo Fortuny - the exhibition Antonio Scaccabarozzi. Diafanés - until April 6 - curated by Ilaria Bignotti and Camilla Remondina, in collaboration with Galleria Clivio and Archivio Antonio Scaccabarozzi, presents one of the most rigorous and singular research paths in Italian art of the second half of the twentieth century.  The site-specific exhibition connects Antonio Scaccabarozzi -1936–2008- with the figure and legacy of Mariano Fortuny through structural affinities rather than formal analogies, exploring a shared conception of the artwork as a space of passage and experience.  Central to Scaccabarozzi’s practice is a visual language of translucent and transparent membranes—acetate and polyethylene sheets—that generate spaces of exploration. Developed from his 1970s investigations into color, scale, and calculation, these works redefine the relationship between architecture, viewer, and artistic practice.

Quantita blu oltremare con bianco - 1989

"Fascinated by its lightness, transparency and versatility, Scaccabarozzi saw polyethylene as the site enabling him to take on the problem of vision and its limits, consideration of the double, the front and back of the painting and its relationship and extension in space on a new level, to the point of making it autonomous and independent from every other artistic technique."

Ambrogio - 2001

Curators

Camilla Remondina and Illaria Bignotti

Consisting of light, translucent, colourful and transparent works, the exhibition interweaves visual arts and the semiotics and phenomenology of the image, the exhibition focuses on the works realized between the 1980s and the early two thousands, when Saccabarozzi began to use first acetates and then polyethylene as his preferred fields for the creation of events in the painted space and as sites of exploration of the relationships between architecture, the observer and the work.

Quantita di Verdechiaro - 1984

“It's the same feeling I get when visiting the Temple of Hephaestus. When I walk around it, the columns allow a glimpse of the internal wall, and from certain angles they completely close it, thus creating a magical mixture of circulating air and further protection for what is kept within.” 

Antonio Scaccabarozzi -1999 

recalling what he had perceived five years earlier in Athens

Furthermore, the two artists - Antonio Saccabarozzi and Mariano Fortuny - have in common the inspiration provided by the statuary and architecture of Ancient Greece and the study of colour hues in their calibrated potential and their assonances with the ancient. Both seem to be attentive and cultured weavers of diaphanous works, placed in the hands and eyes of the public with the request to scrutinize them and go beyond them, to see through their stratifications in the name of a contemplation filled with poetry.

Senza titolo - 1999

photo credit - Irene Fanizza - courtesy Museo Fortuny

The cycles of Free Quantities, works in which colour is released onto the transparent surface, Polyethylenes, sheets of this material cut and shaped in forms of architectural descent, and Ice-Fields, overlapping coloured plastic membranes intended to create unprecedented chromatic tones, are in an ideal dialogue with the extraordinary insights of Mariano Fortuny: from the pleat, capable of radically changing the idea and features of clothing, to the search for the iconographic alphabets of the past, to the attention devoted to the new technologies of his time.

Ice-Fields 41 - 2004

Anastasia Rouchota

Patrizia Marras and Silvia Casagrande

“limit zone of contrasting forces”

This is an exhibition that presents itself, therefore, as a plastic fresco marked by the rhythm of the degrees of the visible, in which the work becomes the diaphragm of a chromatic and seductive breath, interrogating the user as a “limit zone of contrasting forces”, as Scaccabarozzi has declared.

Provenienza sconosciuta - 2001

Chiara Squarcina

Chiara Vedovetto and Elisabetta Barisoni

Museo Fortuny  

Antonio Scaccabarazzo - Diafanes

Polietilene tagliato doppio - 2000

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Ca' Pesaro Galleria Internazionale di Arte Moderna - Gianni Fabbri - Sguardi sulla Vita, sull'Arte e sul Mondo

photograph courtesy Gianni Fabbri

"His gaze spans the history of art and architecture, embracing subjects that blend high and low, current events and memory, the passing of life and the memories it leaves behind."

Elisabetta Barisoni

curator

Ca' Pesaro Galleria Internazionale di Arte Moderna

Gianni Fabbri - Sguardi sulla Vita, sull'Arte e sul Mondo

At Ca’ Pesaro – Galleria Internazionale di Arte Moderna, the exhibition Gianni Fabbri. Sguardi sulla Vita, sull’Arte e sul Mondo - curated by Elisabetta Barisoni - until January 25. - the drawings also presented an opportunity to renew the museum’s Project Room, now adapted to host Fabbri’s drawings and future exhibitions. 

Ultima Cena di Silvio Berlusconi

free interpretation of the scenic impact of Tintoretto's Last Supper

The drawings on display were largely created in recent years but originate from Fabbri’s long experience as an architect and professor of Architectural and Urban Design at IUAV. In that academic and professional context, freehand drawing served as a crucial tool for both the interpretation of past and present architecture and the development of new design ideas. Over time, this practice evolved to include the use of collage, incorporating figures borrowed from painting and sculpture to function simultaneously as symbolic elements and spatial references.

Exhibition View

photograph courtesy Gianni Fabbri

"His personal and intimate reflections on the dimensions and events of life, delivered with energy and imagination, and at times a healthy dose of irony, underscore how fundamental the utopian and visionary dimension is to architectural practice."

Elisabetta Barisoni

After concluding his academic and professional career, Fabbri’s drawings acquired a fully autonomous expressive role, becoming a means to reflect on the passing of time, personal and emotional states, the history of art - particularly the representation of the female body—and contemporary issues such as politics, religion, and environmental crises. These works form a series of - glimpses - onto life, art, and the world, often filtered through a gently ironic gaze.

Donne di Rubens sotto un Cavalcavia

inspired by the poem Le Donne di Rubens - Wislawa Szymborska

"Freehand drawing has always been my key tool, and over time 

I began adding collage elements from 

painting and sculpture."

Gianni Fabbri

photograph courtesy Gianni Fabbri

The exhibition catalogue includes a section titled - Testimonianze -  in which six figures from different cultural and professional backgrounds offer brief personal interpretations of the drawings. The contributors are Alberto Ferlenga, Domenico Luciani, Giandomenico Romanelli, Giovanni Soccol, Manuel Orazi, and Renato Bocchi -  together with an introduction by Elisabetta Barisoni - they underscore the multidisciplinary nature and interpretive richness of Fabbri’s work.

 

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Venezia - Ca' Pesaro - Galleria Internazionale d'Arte Moderna - Terry Atkinson - The Artist as a Semantic Engine

"The exhibition explores the tension between 

thought and vision, between concept and image"

  Ca' Pesaro - Galleria Internazionale d'Arte Moderna   

Terry Atkinson - The Artist as a Semantic Engine

The exhibition at Ca' Pesaro - Terry Atkinson - The Artist as a Semantic Engine - curated by -  Elisabetta Barisoni and Elena Forin - until March 1 -  presents some crucial phases of the work of Terry Atkinson, one of the most important English artists of recent decades. Recently added to the collections of the Tate Gallery in London, his work belongs to the strand of International Conceptual Research. It's uniqueness, however, consists in having interpreted profound theoretical contents in a vocabulary with a very strong visual value.

Terry Actor - Enola Gay - 1992

...from "We" to "I"

In 1968, Terry Atkinson co-founded Art & Language with David Bainbridge, Michael Baldwin and Harold Hurrell to question entrenched artistic practices and representations. Their critical stance attracted nearly fifty artists between 1968 and 1982. Over time, Atkinson distanced himself from the group’s evolving ideology, feeling that conceptualism had become “calcified", and in 1974 he abandoned the group's approach to return to that of a solo artist - from "We" to "I".

The Russell Series -1995

Curators - Elena Forin and Elisabetta Barisoni

"A profound reflection on the central theme of war and on role as a means of awareness and engagement."

When he left Art & Language he was thirty-five years old and already had a solid and fully aware artistic career behind him. The field he explores is that of the present in which he lives and whose dynamics he questions. Wars, which he considers forms of political action conducted by other means, are one of his fields of research, but the urge to examine the language of art itself has always been at the centre of his interest.

Goya Work - Letter from the Artist - Series 2 No. 6

Family-map modernist surface tourer. Foreground/background Xeroxes.

Ruby and Amber in front of the incinerators at the preserved

Natzwiller-Struthof Memorial Camp - August 1985.

Background/foreground surface mutant. Dear Modernism - 1986

"A study of the value of time and of humanity’s aptitudes 

as engaged with time itself."

For over sixty years, Atkinson has linked the dynamics of human history to those of aesthetics, intertwining acts of composition with human actions. His work forms a map of images, symbols and texts, none of them neutral, each exposing the power structures embedded in messages. It is a sustained inquiry into time, its value, and humanity’s ways of engaging with it.

Draped Head - 1986  

Easter Lily Booby trap connected to iradiating inscriptions of the names of some votaries x-rayed into the wall of the bunker... - 1986

"A study of the value of time and of humanity’s aptitudes as engaged with time itself."

A large painting on paper dedicated to the Vietnam War opens the narrative concerning Atkinson's use of painting as a form of political and moral analysis.

In rock n'roll consumership "working class" is a null class ... 

Private Caprichos no.73-Face, Vietcong, South Vietnamese Ranger, 

Private Buddy Holly-Face, Vietcong, South Vietnamese Rangers, 

The Plain Reeds -1976

The exhibition presents some of his best-known series: Enola Gay - Grease Works Goya Series - American Civil War - the very powerful papers of the - Russell Series - and a large body of drawings from the 1960s.

This - 1996

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