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.