2026 Venice Biennale - In Minor Keys in the Giardini

I very much admired Koyo Kouoh and was excited that she was chosen to curate the Biennale main exhibition. Her death was a great disappointment. I had never met her, but knew of her work in Senegal and loved the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cape Town that she directed. It is really impossible to know exactly how much the exhibition expressed her intentions. I’m afraid like all the group Venice Biennale shows, it had many objects I found engaging and many that I passed without paying much attention. Too many, as always, but at the Giardini the display was more manageable than at the Arsenale, and perhaps at the Giardini I could understand the thesis more clearly.

 The essay in the Biennale Short Guide talks about minor keys in music – lower frequencies and quiet tones. It also suggests small islands, hidden in larger landscapes. So I thought of artists who work in unusual media and away from main art centers. A great many of the artists live in or have connections to the Global South. I had heard of very few of them. Several work in media and styles that are not usually associated with contemporary fine art and the exhibition made one wonder why they aren’t. So here are nine that I noticed, among many of interest.

The first objects we saw were a pair of Mardi Gras suits by Big Chief Demond Melancon of the Young Seminole Hunters, a master of New Orleans tribal regalia. One of the suits was worn in the opening procession of the exhibition. These are elaborately decorated, fantastical and complex regalia that at first sight seem too huge to be worn. They are gorgeous and include imagery of aspects of African American history in New Orleans, including slavery . In 2017 he began exhibiting his work in museums. It is monumental. 

Greeting us at the large opening gallery, were works by African American artist Beverly Buchanan, who died in 2015. I was particularly drawn to her shack sculptures, and to her use of a wide range of found objects to make the little houses, giving them whimsical character as well as acknowledging the poverty they manifest.

 

Also at the entrance were several sculptures by Seyni Awa Camara, who died in 2026. She was a potter who lived in Basse-Cassamance, Senegal. Her terracotta sculptures suggest spiritual beings and are strange human-like figures. Their unrealistic and somewhat abstract imagery connects them both to Africa and to contemporary sculpture. Doing some research, I found that she participated in the famous Magiciens de la Terre exhibition at the Pompidou Center in Paris in 1989.   

Still in the same gallery is a collection of wonderful clay animals in the Shipibo style of surface decoration. The artist, Celia Vasquez Yui, is a Shipibo shaman from Peru, who titles her gathering The Council of the Mother Spirits of the Animals, suggesting that the animals have autonomy. They are charming as a group and call attention to themselves through some sense of spirit. 

Mohammed Joha is from Gaza, Palestine but lives in Marseille, France. His compositions are abstract collages that evoke structures and landscapes. They look like relatively traditional abstract paintings, but the layering and fresh color juxtapositions suggest both a two-dimensional abstract composition and a deeper cityscape.

 

Leonilda Gonzalez (1923-2017) was from Uruguay. Like many artists of the 20^th century, she saw printmaking as a vehicle to effect social change. In the exhibition were three woodcuts  from a 1968 series called Novias Revolucionarias (Revolutionary Brides). The birds in and out of cages and the three brides carrying a coffin caught my attention.

 

I wasn’t going to mention Sammy Baloji because his material is complicated, but it relates to the subject of African art taken by colonizers to Europe throughout history, and to issues of the loss of identity resulting from the removal of African objects from their original context, as well as issues of repatriation. While I’ve been engaged in the issues of repatriation of Mesoamerican, ancient European, and Holocaust looted art, the huge subject of African art taken to Europe has only recently come to my attention, especially through the Benin Bronzes taken by the British and the huge amounts of material in German museums. Baloji addresses objects taken from the Kongo, making copies objects in different Italian museums and displaying them along with a long label telling the “history of Kongo objects in Italy from 1450 to 1922.” It’s also a timeline of the history of relations between the Congo and Italy. 

 
I liked both the pots and the wall art by Adebunmi Gbadebo, who lives in Philadelphia and Newark in the United States. Born in New Jersey, she discovered that her ancestors were enslaved in a place called the True Blue plantation in South Carolina. She has gathered the red soil from there to make her large hand-coiled and expressive pots, which also incorporate human hair. The materials in James Island, 2026-26, the 7 paper works behind the pots tell as much about their history as the objects are fascinating to look at. They are True Blue Plantation Cemetery soil, SC, mined kaolin clay from Aiken, SC, Stoney Bluff plantation soil, human hair collected from Harlem barbershops, indigo, mica, periwinkle, phthalo blue pigment, Persian blue pigment, Cheryl R. Riley’s hair, True Blue Plantation cotton husk, True Blue Plantation cotton seed, Moody family okra seed, Catawba Freedman okra seed, Exelle Family fisheye pea seed, Sea Island rice pea, bobby pins, stainless steel bar. 

Hala Schoukair is from Beirut, Lebanon.  Her mother took her on long walks on Mount Lebanon and she became interested in the world of nature. Her abstract paintings suggest her experiences of nature. At first I skipped them, but I had the chance to look at them for a while and became engaged in the shapes and colors and mood. The painting series is Untitled (from The Affirmative Happiness of a Green Dot), 2019-23.

 Of the 110 artists and collaboratives represented in the exhibition, this small selection of my choices does give a sense of its themes. Many of the subjects refer with some subtlety to personal and cultural histories, migration, race, poverty, spirituality, nature. They are evocative rather than theatrical, works in minor keys.

 

 

Venice Biennale 2026 - Serbia and Egypt

It was hot in Venice, and there is always a lot to see. There are about 28 pavilions in the Giardini, each one offering a fully curated exhibition, plus the curated exhibition in the large central gallery building. After a while it’s hard to keep your patience and even to pay attention. In addition to what I think of as the main gardens, an additional space across a small bridge over a canal houses eight pavilions. Among them - Brazil, Austria, Greece, an eccentric Venice display, Poland, Romania – this is just about Serbia and Egypt. The Serbian pavilion featured an installation by artist Predrag Djakovic titled “Through Golgotha to Resurrection.” It is described, accurately, as “photographs, personal archives, maps, and administrative documents in a constellation of fragments that interrogates 20^th century memory.” Another source says the installation includes14,600 pieces of archival material and “interrogates European history, identity, and ideology.”  Many suitcases and all kinds of images covered the walls in an overwhelming mess that to my mind could have stood for many things.

 It was late in the day and I had read dozens of labels, most of them, like this one, talking pretentiously about the global meaning and philosophical significance of the artist’s work. I stormed out of the pavilion and did not look past the entrance. In fact, the video in this link is the fullest view of the installation I have seen, and it reminds me of the postcards in the Spanish pavilion, although with a very different organization. The images do conjure European history of the twentieth century, and the installation is compelling. 

Could it have been planned that in the next pavilion Egypt presented “Silence Pavilion: Between the Tangible and the Intangible?” The pavilions are always next to each other, but we have no idea if they collaborate, and in this case it’s unlikely. The Silence Pavilion label tells visitors to slow down, “attune themselves to the imperceptible.” Three dark rooms each displayed a single simple, beautifully finished sculpture, one of which we were encouraged to touch carefully. The artist is Armen Agop. In the midst of the furious activity and heat of the gardens was this island of calm and beauty, art that encourages peaceful contemplation. Beautiful and calming as it was, it did not inspire me to pay much attention to the remaining displays of art. It was time for an Aperol spritz.

Venice Biennale 2026 - The United States and Canada

Some people refused to visit the American Pavilion at Venice, I believe because the government had specified that the artist could not have any relationship to DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), thereby excluding work that includes or refers to races other than white, to women’s issues, to LGBTQ people, and to a variety of lifestyles, which resulted in most curators and artists declining to participate. The artist exhibited was the relatively unknown sculptor, Alma Allen.

I was unfamiliar with Alma Allen’s work and had read several reviews. What struck me in the reviews was the tendency to anthropomorphize sculptures that seemed to me to be essentially abstract. One apparently suggested a cat, one a seated person, another looked like a pair of pants. Such interpretations, similar to seeing figures in clouds, a rather amateur approach to essentially abstract art. The works are untitled. Except for the pair of pants, I did not see things represented. Allen carves various stones and also creates bronzes, using traditional methods, but also robotic sculpting. The large bronzes often appear to be squeezed from a mold like toothpaste or frozen yogurt. The carved stone objects are very simple shapes. Tom and I did not find them particularly engaging, but they were professionally constructed. Perhaps if they had been lauded by many curators and featured in major museums, I would have received them differently. Tom would not.

I did rather like this one, but I'm a sucker for glitter:

Like a great many museum labels, the curator's text alleges in evocative and somewhat arcane language that the work has complex, theoretical, philosophical, and spiritual content, manifested by the artist’s amazing ability. The curator, Jeffrey Uslip, uses words in his descriptions that I had to look up and really couldn’t connect with the objects. Here are his last sentences:  "Allen’s sculpture, like all allocentric art, is decidedly present and a cipher for the future. The artist’s signature visual vocabulary provides the ground for the “Allocene” – a proposal for art that embodies a state of alterity, weightlessness, and freedom of thought: matter, time and landscape are coauthors of meaning."

 

In contrast was the Canada Pavilion. It’s a smaller facility with a tree growing through the center and quite a lot of glass on the front. This year the artist Abbas Akhavan built a pool inside, designed as a Wardian case, a facility invented by a 19^th century English botanist, Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward (1791-1868) to transport plants around the British Empire. The pool is planted with Victoria cruziania waterlilies, named after Queen Victoria and featured at the 1851 Crystal Palace exhibition. Native to South America, these were grown from seeds from the Royal Botanical Garden, Kew that had been germinated at the Orto Botanico in Padua and planted in the pavilion while the Waterlily House at Kew is closed for renovation.

  

Abbas Akhavan was born in Tehran in 1977 and has lived in Canada for thirty years. The label says this makes “a meditative space in which to revisit a pivotal moment in world history and to consider how we position ourselves today in relation to our natural and built environments.” I thought the huge lily pads were stunning, a relief from the heat, and that building the water tank in the pavilion was impressive if somehow inappropriate for an art venue. So while the lilies are cool to look at, the display suggests the absurdity of exhibiting things away from their natural environments and maybe evokes larger issues of displacement.

 

Venice Biennale 2026 - Ukraine

Perhaps the most effective, engaging, and moving offerings at the Venice Biennale, at least for me, were two displays from Ukraine, one the Ukraine Pavilion the small building that is part of the Arsenale, and the other, much a larger exhibition in the Dorsoduro area of Venice. Each of them captured my attention far longer than most of the other displays.

The first, the Ukraine Pavilion, features a concrete origami sculpture titled Deer by the artist Zhanna Kadyrova. It’s hard to believe concrete could make something that resembles origami, but Deer does it. Kadyrova made Deer for the pedestal that had previously displayed a Soviet jet aircraft in the city of Pokrovsk, Donetsk Oblast, but the jet had been removed. The sculpture had become part of the cityscape. As the Russian army approached Pokrovsk, a team dismantled the sculpture to move it to safety. In 2025 Deer traveled more than 6000 kilometers across Europe to arrive in Venice for the Biennale. We saw Deer at the Giardini entrance, suspended from a boom on a truck, and I remembered the story that it had been transported from Ukraine.

In the center of a space in a small building in the Arsenale was a pillar with several videos around it, each depicting parts of Deer’s journey. Watching the videos, I began to see Deer as a living creature, exploring all the cities on the circuitous route it proudly took to Venice. It also reminds me of Little Amal, the 12-foot high puppet of a Syrian refugee child searching the world for her mother, which traveled across Europe and the United States in 2021 and 2022.

 

(Please forgive the crazy spacing in this section. Blogger seems to have its own ideas about design.)

A much larger, and even more evocative experience was the “collateral” exhibition, titled “Still Joy: From Ukraine into the World,” presented by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation in the Palazzo Contarini Polignac in the Dorsoduro area of Venice, near the Peggy Guggenheim Museum and the church of Santa Maria della Salute. Multiple artists, from Ukraine and elsewhere show works expressing joy, alternating with statements from Ukrainians of their experiences and the importance of maintaining joy in life. This was a powerful expression of joy in the midst of horror and suggests the resilience of the Ukrainian people. I have chosen just six of the artists who impressed me and whose work I understood. One, British artist Ryan Gander, I keep thinking about, but I couldn’t make personal sense of his work in the context of the exhibition. A link to the exhibition with photographs of the objects does not replicate or even evoke the experience of a nation promoting joy in the midst of an endless-seeming war, but one can at least search information online about each artist.

 Zhanna Kadyrova, the artist who made the origami deer, in 2023 created Refugees, in which she found plants that had survived attacks and bombings, rescued them from schools, libraries and clinics, kept them in a safe location and lent them to exhibitions, along with photographs of living plants in the original locations. Emblematic of human refugees, the plants do not have permanent homes and it is not known where they will be next.

 Bangladeshi artist Ashfika Rahman created Than Paru – No Land Without Us, a huge installation of 4849 brass temple bells, each with a red mark on it. The label refers to the Chittigang Hill Tracts on the Bangladesh border, where the non-Bengali inhabitants had their lands appropriated by the state for commercial development. The artist invited each refugee to put a red fingerprint on a bell, making the installation a golden monument to displaced people.

Canadian artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller photographed reflections of the sky in water, lovely impressionistic videos that I couldn’t capture in photographs. British Tacita Dean made photochemically modified images of an ancient Sakura tree with multiple supports to keep its branches from breaking.  The huge image is delicate and touching. 

Pavlo Kovach, a Ukrainian artist and serviceman, partially covered individual laurel leaves with brass and inscribed the case number of a missing serviceman on each. The work is titled Laurel Leaf in the Mouth, You Will Receive a Message, referring to a folk belief that a bay leaf in your soup is good luck. While the fate of the missing soldiers is undetermined, the leaves suggest both life and memory.

 

Finally, the Dutch Simone Post, who uses candy as a medium, filled a room with chandeliers and other objects, copied in sugar from those in the Palazzo. Materials listed are marshmallow, sour satellite wafer, and candy chain. The work is titled She Knew She/It/They Would Melt. The pastel-colored copies of precious objects spark a childlike delight, at least in me.

Statements from Ukrainians that were displayed in conjunction with the art objects:

Venice Biennale 2026, Japan Pavilion

One of the most popular displays in the Giardini, popular with both critics and the public, is an exhibition titled “Grass Babies, Moon Babies” at the Japan pavilion. We did not participate in this interactive activity, but I watched it with delight. At the entrance, visitors are offered a life-size artificial baby, apparently weighing about as much as a baby would. They are directed to carry the baby throughout the pavilion, and they are encouraged to change its diaper at a changing station in the building. If they change the diaper, they receive a QR code with a poem based on the baby’s birthdate and related to the twentieth-century histories of Japan, the United States, and Asia. Inside the pavilion is a large jungle gym with more artificial babies climbing all over it, often in perilous positions. Babies also climb up and down ropes and watch tv screens showing film scenes related to Japanese identity.

 The exhibition label addresses the decline in global birth rates, which has been particularly apparent in Japan. Apparently, the artist, Ei Arakawa-Nash, who lives in the United States, recently had a twin babies and has been inspired to encourage more people to have them, a possible mission of this installation.  The babies, recklessly climbing around the pavilion, were so joyous that they made it an amusing and uplifting place to be. One of them was even crouched under a bench outside the pavilion.

 

The Danish pavilion, “Things To Come,” by Maja Malou Lyse, also expressed concern about population decline, but their solution derives from a scientific project that concluded that “immersive pornography could increase male fertility” (exhibition brochure). The video on display was derived from this research; the small part I viewed depicted a series of well-endowed women (evidently porn actors) running topless very bouncily through a forest.. Sorry, I didn't take a photo. Interestingly, my casual impression was that men seemed to spend more time in that gallery than women. Another section of the Danish pavilion displayed containers used to transport sperm, somehow related to “an internet subculture that stages competitive sperm races,” something beyond my ken.

 

Venice Biennale 2026 Spanish Pavilion

There have been several articles about the ‘best’ pavilions at the Venice Biennale, and we agree with some of them. When we were there, on a Tuesday in July, two performance pavilions – The Netherlands and Austria - were closed, so we did not see the much-talked-about Austrian pavilion performance, only the bell hanging outside it. Three other venues were closed: Russia, Israel (although there was a separate Israel pavilion in the Arsenal), and Venezuela (said to be renovating, but it’s hard to know for sure).

The Spanish Pavilion, the first one along the left pathway, has walls covered with postcards, an exhibition titled “Los Restos” (The Remains) by Oriol Vilanova, whose practice involves acquiring a range of “devalued” objects at flea markets, He has collected postcards for the past twenty years. The booklet accompanying the exhibition by Carles Guerra, says “His use of postcards serves none of the archival or documentary purposes that are so common nowadays, but instead entails the recognition that even decrepitude and waste constitute areas not necessarily associated with melancholic stasis, or even with the recovery of that inevitable past so essential to photography” Whatever…

I was taken first just by the number of postcards, arranged in orderly blocks by subject, color, or format (i.e. buildings all oriented in the same direction). All those cats and flamingos, next to rows of classical statues, monumental buildings, the Twin Towers, snowscapes, then bands featuring a single color, sometimes making a vertical stripe in the room. One image shows yellow flowers, two rows of flying squirrels, and buildings with American flags.  Another juxtaposes multiple views of the Twin Towers and various birds. So on the one hand it’s a vast abstract design. But looking at the individual cards and the groups of cards evokes various emotional responses.

Wandering through the rooms, you’re reminded of places you’ve seen or read about, struck with the varieties of familiar animals and plants, engaged with the diverse objects in some sections. It’s a panoply of the world in rectangular cards, all the same size. The list of topics includes 161 items in alphabetical order, for example, Pagoda, Painter, Parasol, Parrot, Pink, Playground, Pool, Pope, Pulpit, Pyramid. There seem to be endless things to discover and multiple ways to look at the project.

These cards are probably all unused, but I wasn’t sure if there aren’t messages on some of them, and that calls up the way postcards are a means of communication, the short form of a letter, keeping in touch with a note and a picture.

I often read mention of people collecting postcards. Decades ago, I used to collect them for my work as an art historian. The color postcards in museums and churches were better than the black and white slides we had for teaching and I planned to use them to make color slides. They also were reminders of works of art I saw in obscure locations.  Computers, the internet, and PowerPoint have eliminated any use for the postcards, but they’re still stored somewhere, and I have to resist buying them still. Vilanova’s display calls attention to the things in the world people value enough to want a picture to keep or share.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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