La Biennale di Venezia - The 61st International Art Exhibition
In Minor Keys - Koyo Kouoh
Highlights - Arsenale
At La Biennale di Venezia - In Minor Keys - curated by the late Koyo Kouoh and realised by the team she selected—Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Hélène Pereira, Rasha Salti, Siddhartha Mitter and Rory Tsapayi - the exhibition - until November 22 - at the Arsenale - Below - and Giardini. The 110 invited participants are artists - duos, collectives - and - artist-led organisations—come from diverse regions, brought together for affinities and convergences across their practices. The title reflects Kouoh’s belief that art need not be loud to be powerful, inviting attention, sensitivity and time through recurring motifs of shrines, processions, schools and spaces of rest.
Philip Aguirre Yotegui y Otegui - Gaalgui Shelter in Arsenale - 2025
Social and political themes, particularly migration and refugees, are central to Philip Aguirre y Otegui’s humanistic practice. At the Arsenale, Gaalgui Shelter - above - draws on traditional Senegalese fishing boats - gaalgui - historically used for clandestine crossings to the Canary Islands, and reimagines them as a space of migration and protection. Painted in a sky blue that evokes desire and hope for the future, the work brings together motifs of shelter, lookout, and lighthouse in a poetic reflection on displacement and resilience.
Daniel Lind-Ramos
Daniel Lind-Ramos’s - Guardaverde - 2024–25 - above - and related assemblages at the Biennale draw on found objects to evoke histories of maroonage, Black life, and environmental stewardship in Puerto Rico. His sculptures bring together discarded and gifted materials to create sentinel-like figures, reflecting on those who have protected both people and land. Together, the works connect environmental preservation with the preservation of Black life, confronting the enduring legacy of the plantation.
Berni Searle
Berni Searle uses performance, installation, and film to explore history, identity, and colonial memory. In Interlaced - 2011 - she appears as a gold-shrouded figure inside Bruges’ city hall, gradually exchanging the cloth for a delicate lace veil. The veil and her gold-covered hands evoke Belgium’s colonial history and its brutality in the Congo. A score by South African musician Neo Muyanga, based on the Muslim call to prayer, accompanies the work through the city’s belfry carillon. Searle transforms her body into an image through which histories of beauty, violence, and memory become intertwined.
Kaloki Nyamai
Kaloki Nyamai’s practice brings together personal memory, intergenerational knowledge, and the socio-political tensions of contemporary East Africa, particularly his home region of Kitui, Kenya. Influenced by his grandmother’s storytelling and his mother’s textile practice, he incorporates rope, sisal, fabric, newspaper, photographic transfers, and yarn into tactile, layered compositions. Nyamai’s compositions do not document events per se; they register after-effects, with partially formed figures hovering between representation and abstraction. This instability evokes unresolved grief, renewed hope, and constantly shifting notions of belonging. His work increasingly engages with Kenya’s cycles of state violence through allegory, using stitching as a metaphor for repair, contradiction, and resilience.
Guadalupe Maravilla
At the centre of Guadalupe Maravilla’s installation are four - Disease Throwers - combining handmade elements with found objects collected along his migration route through Central America. The sculptures function as shrines and healing instruments, reflecting the artist’s own experience with cancer, which he connects to the trauma and stress of his childhood migration. The sculptures can also be played during sound-healing ceremonies, transforming illness and suffering into acts of collective care. In the face of state violence and xenophobia, Maravilla offers sound as a vehicle for introspection, healing, and solidarity.
Nick Cave
Nick Cave’s work explores the entanglement of beauty and pain, using sculpture, installation, performance, and his iconic - Soundsuits. In Two Points in Time – At Once, he creates a processional path through the Arsenale, combining monumental bronzes with domestic objects, flowers, and needlepoint self-portraits. The seven stages allude to the stages of grief, exploring the tension between the monumental and the intimate, life and death. The figures appear to wait, perish, or be rescued, creating a space for contemplation and reflection. Despite its themes of loss, the work also evokes remembering, joy, and the possibility of tranquility.
"Cave transforms grief into a space where beauty,
memory, and hope can coexist."
Nick Cave - Amalgam - Plot - 2025 - detail
Kader Attia
Kader Attia’s Whisper of Traces - above - explores the relationship between technology, spirituality, and ancestral forces, inspired by a Vietnamese shaman’s idea that computer viruses are “spiritual entities.” Visitors move through a labyrinth of African ritual objects, dried herbs, and ropes covered with fragments of mirrors that create a forest-like environment. The mirrors reflect and distort our perception, suggesting a space where the visible and invisible worlds overlap. Attia questions whether technology truly controls its environment or whether ancient spiritual forces might influence it. The work ultimately reconnects the digital world with spirituality, memory, and the unseen.
Carrie Schneider
Carrie Schneider uses analogue photography to examine media formats and the often gendered representations they create and preserve. Working with a room-size camera she built herself, she explores how images from cinema, social media, surveillance, and personal archives shape memory and perception. Her work often returns to moments of cinematic rupture, revisiting them frame by frame and giving them renewed attention. In First Living Woman - 2026 - above - she focuses on an eight-second sequence from Chris Marker’s La Jetée, transforming it into a one-kilometre-long photographic continuum. By slowing down and expanding these fleeting images, Schneider creates a powerful act of chromogenic recall, bringing the women and memories of cinema into the present.
Ranti Bam
Ranti Bam’s five sculptures, titled - Ifa Ile Oja – Black Ifa - stand in the Arsenale as powerful, totemic guardians. Made from black clay, they function as devotional objects, embodying spirits and creating a sense of quiet authority within the space. Their hollow, womb-like interiors suggest protected spaces where new life or ecosystems might emerge. The sculptures’ dark clay also enters into dialogue with the Arsenale’s pre-industrial brick walls, both shaped by human hands and labour. This encounter connects ancestral ways of making with the history of labour and production.
Tiona Nekkia McClodden
Tiona Nekkia McClodden’s work explores Black queer interiority, embodiment, desire, and the tension between pleasure and pain. Her practice draws together historical, metaphysical, and psychological questions, creating spaces where vulnerability and transformation meet. Presented alongside the film - below - are a vintage épée, a mask, and three leather panels marked with cuts resembling gestural wounds - above - from which a beauty emerges through their own undoing.
At the centre of Tiona Nekkia McClodden’s Biennale presentation is the two-channel film - Ruinous - 2026 - above - loosely based on Percival Everett’s So Much Blue and on herself. The film moves between her studio and underground worlds of BDSM and academic fencing, exploring jouissance—pleasure pushed towards pain.
Sawangwongse Yawnghwe
Sawangwongse Yawnghwe’s paintings and sculptures offer an unflinching study of genocidal economies and what brings them into being. People’s Desire - 2018 - detail - above - is a six-metre-long installation of 2,500 crudely modelled clay figurines – families among them – that walk or float in boats in a mass exodus. The artist called the Rohingya massacres genocidal as early as 2014, connecting them to the Karen, Kachin and Shan peoples stripped of their land and resources under military rule in the longest civil war in contemporary history.
Werewere Liking
Werewere Liking is an artist and scholar from Cameroon who has lived in Côte d’Ivoire for over forty years. Working across writing, painting, sculpture, drawing, and performance, she creates a form of “total art.” Her Genealogies of Lights sculptures transform discarded materials into bodies carrying memory, myth, and political meaning. Her paintings explore dreams, spirituality, feminine power, and healing, often using mended tree bark as a canvas. In Lampedusa - 2019 - she depicts migrants drowning in the Mediterranean, denouncing the inequalities and violence surrounding migration and turning the sea into a cemetery for those seeking hope and a better life.
Nina Katchadourian
Nina Katchadourian’s Biennale installation recreates a childhood world of toy families she invented with her brother on the Finnish island of Pörtö. The Sjöbloms and Båtsmans developed their own lives and stories, becoming almost real to the children. When two figures were caught in a fictional riptide, the siblings created a ritual—the - Recarcassing Ceremony - 2016 - above - to bring them back to life. Thirty-five years later, Katchadourian re-enacts this childhood ceremony using an original cassette recording made by her parents. The work explores memory, imagination, play, and the strange ways childhood worlds can continue into adulthood.
Alfredo Jaar
In The End of the World - 2023–2024 - above - Alfredo Jaar - compresses ten critical minerals—including cobalt, lithium, copper, and nickel—into a tiny four-centimetre cube. Essential to green technologies and warfare, these materials carry histories of mining, environmental destruction, and geopolitical conflict. Placed at the centre of the vast Arsenale - in a red room - the small, glistening cube creates a powerful contrast between its size and the enormous global consequences it represents. We desire it, we need it, and yet its extraction comes at a devastating human and environmental cost.
Senzeni Marasela
Senzeni Marasela explores the emotional and political impact of mining on African women and the lasting damage caused by apartheid’s forced migration and labour systems. In the Biennale, she presents seven large-scale suspended textile works made from ceremonial blankets, with cascading red wool stitched into patterns tracing collapsed mine slopes. Their titles refer to notorious South African mining disasters, including their locations, dates, and human tolls. The works connect the womb, mineshaft, underground, and city, evoking both danger below and the waiting experienced by those left above. Each stitch becomes a map of loss, longing, and lives shaped by mining.
Éric Baudelaire
Éric Baudelaire’s five-channel video installation - Death Passed My Way and Stuck This Flower in My Mouth - above - takes its starting point from Pirandello’s play The Man with a Flower in His Mouth, which reflects on mortality and the fleeting nature of life. The work is filmed in the vast flower warehouse in Aalsmeer, where flowers from Africa and South America are processed and distributed worldwide. Baudelaire’s camera moves through flowers, workers, and machines, revealing a highly automated and globalised system. Yet beneath this impersonal process, the film highlights the human presence and quiet concentration of the workers, suggesting a persistent longing for something real and human.
For more than twenty years, Raed Yassin has explored the boundaries between fact, fiction, history, and identity through archives of Egyptian cinema, Lebanese radio, and popular culture. Yassin Haute Couture - 2018 - above - draws on the story of his father, a fashion designer who worked in Saudi Arabia before being murdered during the Lebanese Civil War. Using family photographs and Playboy magazine, Yassin imagines embroidery patterns his father might have created. Beneath the humour and fantasy lies a poignant sense of loss and absence.
Akinbode Akinbiyi
Johannes Phokela
Johannes Phokela is a South African history painter who explores how the past continues to shape the present. Born in Soweto in 1966, he reworks European art-historical images to challenge the ways African people have been represented. His chosen blue-and-white palette refers to Chinese and Japanese porcelain imported by the Dutch East India Company, which shaped European ideas of non-Western cultures. Phokela uses this visual language to expose and subvert the colonial histories embedded in Western art. In Original Sin - Inner Circle - 2021 - above - inspired by Rubens, the Last Judgment is radically transformed, leaving only a pregnant Black woman. The work questions Western Christian ideals while reclaiming the narrative from an African perspective.
Sandra Knecht
For Sandra Knecht - Heimat - or home - is a mutable space shaped by animals, nature, and the rhythms of everyday life. Her installation brings together sculptures, found objects, and photography, reflecting the traditions and landscapes of Swiss fruit orchards. Works such as the restored bee house and a bronze cast of her fallen pear tree highlight the intelligence and resilience of animal life. Through photography and performance, Knecht also explores the relationship between the physical and immaterial worlds, drawing on Swiss folk stories and personal experience. Her work questions who is allowed to feel at home and how much diversity society is willing to accept. Ultimately, she presents home as a space of coexistence, difference, and belonging.
Kennedy Yanko
Kennedy Yanko creates sculptures that invite transformation by exploring the connection between matter and consciousness. Working with metal, she moves beyond its industrial associations towards something more elemental and philosophical. Her practice is influenced by sculpture, painting, and Qigong, particularly the idea of using intention to guide energy. In her monumental works, Yanko crushes and reshapes metal, painting it with brushes, brooms, rags, and water. She adds layers of dried acrylic “paint skin,” creating a striking paradox in which heavy metal appears soft, fluid, and almost weightless.
“the invisible remains of cities buried beneath our contemporary towns.”
Joana Hadjithomas + Khalil Joreige
Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige have spent three decades exploring how images, fiction, and poetry can reveal hidden histories and forgotten stories. Their Biennale project - Unconformities: What Lies Beneath Our Feet - shown above -Blow Up - 2015 - focuses on traces buried beneath contemporary cities. Working with rescue archaeologists, they collected residues from sites in France, Greece, Lebanon, and Venice. The works explore shifts in time and scale, revealing how human activity, violence, and climate change leave traces beneath the surface. As the artists describe it, the project uncovers and reworks “the invisible remains of cities buried beneath our contemporary towns.” Their installation invites us to reflect on what lies beneath our feet and what might otherwise be forgotten.
Dawn DeDeaux
Dawn DeDeaux, a New Orleans-based artist, has spent decades confronting the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, a catastrophe that exposed deep inequalities and climate injustice. Her practice explores environmental destruction while imagining possible futures, both dystopian and hopeful. She connects climate change with histories of ecological catastrophe and humanity’s impact on the planet. Through natural materials and geological traces, she makes the consequences of environmental destruction visible. At the same time, DeDeaux focuses on the possibilities and abundance that remain, encouraging us to reconsider our relationship with the Earth.
Torkwase Dyson
Torkwase Dyson’s practice explores Black life, freedom, ecology, and the ways space is shaped by Black presence. Her method - Black Compositional Thought - uses abstract - hypershapes - to consider how enslaved people understood space and imagined freedom. Tougaloo - above - draws on Dyson’s experience at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, a former plantation transformed into a space of education, protest, liberation, and care. The installation combines large-scale painting, architectural sculpture, and sound to ask what kind of geography can sustain life. Through curves, lines, waves, and sound, Dyson creates spaces that suggest possibility, resilience, and liberation.
An important aspect of Koyo Kouoh’s - In Minor Keys - is the role of literature and poetry, which she considered essential to her curatorial practice. Rather than simply illustrating the exhibition’s ideas, literary texts became sources of inspiration and ways of thinking about memory, time, imagination, and emotional experience. Toni Morrison’s Beloved was a key reference, alongside Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, particularly for their blending of different worlds and temporalities. Kouoh also drew on the power of poetry to encourage slower, more attentive forms of listening. This literary dimension gives In Minor Keys a quieter, more intimate character, allowing artworks to resonate through stories, memory, and imagination.
La Biennale di Venezia - The 61st International Art Exhibition
In Minor Keys by Koyo Kouogh
Giardini + Arsenale + Around Venice
Until 22nd November
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