In Minor Keys: Sketching as Curating

What characterises the Venice Biennale is that it offers a lens through which to examine the key concerns of art.⁰¹ Sociologist Avery Gordon has written that the key concern of life, more generally is that it’s complicated. Not an offhand statement, complexity means acknowledging the ‘power relations’ that produce genocide, climate catastrophe, femicide, poverty, war.⁰² While I believe that the 61st edition of the biennale did attempt to deal with these complexities, to rise to such tasks can lead to exhaustion. In the main exhibition, ceramics, works on paper, installations and paintings presented nature and humanity as spaces for communities of gathering and repair. In the first rooms of the Central Pavilion at the Giardini there was a pastoral and pictorial approach: Annalee Davis’s rich textile works touched on gardening and the extinction of a Barbadian bird, María Magdalena Campos-Pons’s large ceramic flowers bloomed in front of her panelled tribute to ‘In Minor Keys’ Artistic Director Koyo Kouoh, who as the text on the work notes is the first African woman to direct the biennale and Toni Morrison, who in 1993 became the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. This installation could be seen through a glorious camaraderie or parliament of animal sculptures by Peruvian Shipibo artist Celia Vásquez Yui. Nevertheless, a sense of monotony accompanied the wander through this garden within a garden that spoke up for sovereignty of nations amid extinctions of our own making.⁰³ The lead-up to this biennale, as is well known, was carpeted with petitions against the inclusion of Russia and Israel. Just days before the opening, the jury stepped down from Golden Lions nominations – a process uninterrupted since its introduction under that name in 1988 – where artists and pavilions are awarded for their work. For the first time this juried prize was supplanted by ‘Visitor Lions’, which allowed for the inclusion of Israel and Russia, and relied on popular vote without the burden of accountability.⁰⁴

We are well after the end of history – political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s term for the moment in 1989 when, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, Western liberal democracies presumably put an end to the need for ideological change. But in contrast, in recent years, scholar Saidiya Hartman has advocated for ‘writing a history of the present’,⁰⁵ acknowledging that the future is the afterlife of slavery. Amid this exhibition, where themes of extraction and ecology permeate often joyous images, nation-states continue to skip like stones past postcolonialism en route to neocolonialism, a perilous route Okwui Enwezor already flagged in 2001 in advance of the opening of The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994 at MoMA PS1 in New York. The last of these diagnoses delivered by the director of the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015 comes to the fore again in the 2026 edition. Countries actively committing genocide and war crimes have been invited to platform their artistic visions of worldmaking, which the biennale president might say has been done in the name of ‘care’.⁰⁶ As words continue to be co-opted by the far right, listening closer, or paying attention to frequencies, following director Koyo Kouoh’s minor keys, becomes a tool to engage with the complexity of it all. But what kind of responsibility will be taken for repair, at what scale? Is there any patience for the necessary failure Kouoh acknowledged as part of this process, marked by her tragic passing in May of 2025?⁰⁷

My minor route through the curatorial team’s collaborative vision was cut short due to a strike in solidarity with Palestine. Many took part, in the shared knowledge that Palestine is the centre of the world right now, namely the centre within a network of global solidarity that includes anticolonial struggles in Sudan, the Congo, Namibia, Ukraine. The strike activated what it means to listen out ‘for the abolition of settler colonialism everywhere’ from Palestine as geopolitical intersection within the SWANA region and as a bridge to Europe.⁰⁸ On the 8th of May, approximately thirty national pavilions shut down. As the accompanying protest march that started on Via Giuseppe Garibaldi wound itself into a narrow canal, I saw Akinbode Akinbiyi documenting the events with his Rolleiflex twin-lens camera. The photographer’s work is shown in the biennale, including, prominently, in a small vestibule off the main exhibition’s first central room – a wry take on Western Surrealism showing a trash heap crowned with a toilet that has ‘Fuck Duchamp’ graffitied across it. The Berlin-based photographer who regularly photographs his adopted hometown along with Dakar and Bamako, has always attended to the quotidian of poverty and beauty. Indeed, that deathly intersection was present throughout the biennale. Or perhaps it was my own global depression talking. I moved through it aware of, but not watching, jet skis jockey for attention (Austria), alongside triumphant performative stances taken by artists (the Netherlands) in the name of someone else’s unfreedom.

The Venice Biennale is where nation-states cosplay themselves. Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, and artist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson distinguishes ‘nation-state’ from nation, the latter being about treaty where the former is about opposition. Nations bequeath another form of internationalism that moves away from power and towards ‘sintering’, a term she derives from how snowflakes join to make stronger bonds. In other words, migration adds insight to what an already formed ‘nation’ protects.⁰⁹ In the context of this biennale, perhaps the idea of nation – rather than nation-state – is something that resides not in time but the tense one applies to it: say, a feminist, queer one, a not yet.¹⁰ Minor keys might be part of that future tense, listening out for what Kouoh didn’t have a chance to finish. Coupled with acknowledging what must have been a difficult position for the curatorial team, I chose to adhere to Kouoh’s curatorial impulse realised by others as something that was not yet tuned. Listening to something out-of-tune, when the entire world is out-of-sync, struck me as a method to get through this time.

Giardini Futures

Film historian Mary Ann Doane has written that the sketch is perhaps what best captures how one perceives movement, because both hesitation and blur are present within it. In breaking each moment down into a still, the viewer can also fulfil the movement themselves.¹¹ A month following the frenzied opening of the biennale, in a talk they gave in Amsterdam, member of Art Not Genocide Alliance (ANGA) and Venice’s activist art space S.a.L.E. Docks Marco Baravale stressed the need for the 8 May strike in Venice to involve unions as well as cultural workers lower down the production chain, assistant curators, exhibition builders.¹² In Venice, there were times when politics of representation and their performance felt confusing; as an island settled temporarily by artists and their teams every two years for the art biennale, these politics can feel disconnected from what is happening locally. At the time, Prime Minister of Italy Giorgia Meloni’s far-right coalition was put at risk by the newly forged National Future party, for which Meloni’s harsh anti-migration stance was too soft. Matching the pitch of this move right, grand theatrical endeavours – Austria’s water park, the Dutch fortress – verged on melodrama. In the main pavilion, that melodrama was broken down into a sketch. Within the presentation of the artworks, I felt that in place of reproducing structures, the artists were reflecting on melodrama as a tool, as a reality to break down, build from, and render habitable.

I started in the main exhibition at the Giardini, something I often leave to the last days. Knowing a strike was coming, I spent a good one-and-a-half hours of valuable temporal real estate in the second gallery and into the third. Turns out that was nowhere near enough time for works whose liner notes were often written by heavyweight theorists – e.g. In the Wake (2016) author Christina Sharpe and curator Elena Filipovic. The second gallery centred otherworldly more-than-human sculptures, surrounded by the rich, dreamlike paintings of Cameroonian artist and scholar Werewere Liking. Liking’s figures on rough surfaces along a curved wall embraced and extended through one another in variously familiar and unfamiliar environments where in muted organic tones, human figures toppled, conjoined. Her work coursed through the exhibition as an almost biochemical substrate, growing through the cracks of the exhibition. In the following room, figures are seen drowning in Lampedusa (2019), a reflection on the strife experienced by people who embark on so-called illegal transits across the Mediterranean Sea. The sheer glut of Liking’s work here, and in the Arsenale, made it seem that the intention was to saturate the viewer. Liking’s motifs, colours and ideas practically engendered a minor key of their own, transforming the mood.

This initial section also introduced what the catalogue designates as artistic ‘shrines’ at left and right, respectively: the painting, sculpture, drawing and earthwork practice of Beverly Buchanan (1940–2015), and the film, sculpture and social practice of Issa Samb (1945–2017). Buchanan received her master’s degree in parasitology and public health from Columbia University in New York; her work drew on this knowledge, and her own experience growing up Black in the South. The exhibition showed a beautiful selection of pastels on paper that depict shacks Black people built due to a lack of state support, inflected with Buchanan’s playful sense of material (seashells, tabby, doll parts, pastels, foamcore) and rife humour. The extension to her counterpart Issa Samb across the hall is in part this attention to land, and the material strategies used among communities, in Buchanan’s case, along the coast in Georgia, to preserve Black cultural history.

Samb’s studio and garden in Dakar served as a nexus for culture and politics and the site where he repurposed existing objects as art. The founder of Laboratoire Agit’Art collective, which espoused grassroots initiatives and gathering, inspired members of the city’s Raw Material Company. The cultural centre founded in 2008 by Kouoh participated in the biennale within the Book Pavilion, where moving-image and text-based resources informed the ‘fertile ground’ from which Kouoh’s project emerged. The curators – including long-term Raw Material Company member Marie Hélène Pereira – placed Samb in dialogue with Duchamp’s Boîte-en-Valise (1935–41), intoning the surrealisms that circulate across time and place. Samb and Buchanan faced each other in this room with its quietly caustic surrealist sidebar. The next gallery gave way to yet more playfully political works by Buchanan – including The Artist – A Visual Journey (c. 1997), a series of nine drawings in which the artist considers how uncomfortable it is to be an artist in the art world, especially the physical, spiritual hunger. One image reads: ‘artists don’t like galleries (they are usually too weak to stand in line to be rejected).’ After climbing the secret stairwell between the many galleries, further melancholy and humour awaited with Indian photographer turned painter Sohrab Hura’s pastel paintings on paper Things Felt But Not Quite Expressed (2022–ongoing); for instance, a massive dog seated nonchalantly on a small woman’s lap, with ‘guest’ scrawled in pencil on the wall next to it.

Downstairs in Carlo Scarpa’s garden, always offering a place of respite during the biennale, Otobong Nkanga’s locally quarried stones created additional seating. Nkanga also had bricks made to partially scale the columns of the façade, where plants could creep up as the weeks and months passed by. This slow growth that tied into the more interwoven and ecological tenor of the building’s leftmost galleries had a different speed and intensity than the historical digression elsewhere, especially in the right gallery behind the bookshop. There, Lebanese artist Raed Yassin’s Warhol of Arabia (2016–18) presented Andy Warhol’s visit to Kuwait to stage an exhibition in 1977. Collaged into the media images, Yassin imagines what might have taken place if Warhol’s exhibition had happened, obscuring fiction and fact towards another future for Pop art; it too, perhaps, covered one day in vines.

Outside the main exhibition, I appreciated the broad, sweeping remarks on this biennale being a theatrical endeavour that some laud while others deride – the festival environments situated around Japan’s weighted babies or Greece’s queer Platonic cave-club. The sonic presence throughout the pavilions I made it to was overall more background than attuned: drumming amid the plaster tablets in the Belgium pavilion, or the sound of bird song around Lubaina Himid’s Black vernacular paintings in the UK pavilion. Yet a rich performance programme took place in the red tent designed by Rirkrit Tiravanija, as the Qatar pavilion awaits its final form and where Alia Farid’s jerrycan reflected the nation’s dual imbrication in oil and water with a larger-than-life-scale sculpture of the vessel that doubles as water jug on long desert journeys.

Sovereignty came back throughout pavilions, as is historically the case in Venice, yet there was distinct nuance as borders become increasingly inhospitable places. In the Korean pavilion, ‘Liberation Space’ focussed on the period after Japanese rule from 1945 to 1948, when North Korea was established, and pointed to the pavilion’s own discomfiting position behind Japan, next to Germany. This attention to sovereignty and the struggles of nations having gained their independence but yet in formation, is considered in a reader available on site. The book takes the more recent inciting of Martial law on 3 December 2024 in Korea as a starting point. The need to find other forms of self-governance came through Goen Choi’s Meridian, copper pipes mounted floor to ceiling, and Hyeree Ro’s hallways of intricately crafted waxed organza circles that resemble capiz shells, titled Bearing. The pavilion involves many fellows who come and reflect on the space across eight stations or sites as part of Ro’s work.

I found myself there more than once, including for a music performance at the outset, sound again being something that came as a flash, here a song sung by Lang Lee, who is also an author engaged in queer rights. The pavilion bore a striking contrast to the festival environment of Japan, with performance artist Ei Arakawa-Nash’s toy babies gleefully sported by visitors, given birth dates associated with historical atrocities. The work reflected at once on the struggles of queer families, the toll of Japanese colonisation, and a declining birthrate. This was a generative dialogue between Korea and another era – of Japan, and of Germany. In the latter pavilion, Henrike Naumann’s intervention similarly reflected on the responsibilities to the GDR period through quotidian objects bolted to its verdant walls, asking: what can furniture predict for the future? These soft, fragile spaces of nation-building accessed the crippling heart of things, which for me dwelled above the Korean pavilion: a rooftop installation of clay sculptures emitting soothing melodies with a view to the lagoon, a trade route, direction southwest.

Ancient Technology at the Arsenale

Technology appeared more often at the Arsenale than at the Giardini. Eerily, mostly. South African artist Nolan Oswald Dennis’s work provided needed space for rest. You could lie down, and sense the seismic vibrations that flow through the Earth, registered at scientific stations in Uganda and Indonesia, among others. Seismic sensors are also used to detect mineral deposits for extraction. Gazing up at a projection of the night sky above, I watched co-ordinates shift. Not really understanding what I was looking at without an astrophysics background, but feeling the frequencies. Something was shifting, something was wrong. Comfort nestled closely to the sensation of being watched. In the Chinese pavilion, the most elegant robot, a ‘she’, as part of a calligraphy project by Wang Dongling, connected tradition to technology by writing ‘dream stream’ for a long queue of visitors. The use of technology at times seemed to connect to how humans position themselves with respect to change, and that which can outlive us. It all held a sense of ancientness, as though an archaeology of the present excavated ancestral technologies. The Slovenian pavilion attended more directly to archaeology. Soundtrack for an Invisible House by the Nonument Group is an installation with dirt literally underfoot, a replica of a forgotten archaeological site with no visible artefacts, and as such, implying the need to dig for it. The group recounts how in 1917 the Catholic army in Slovenia (Austro-Hungarian Empire) raised a mosque during battles with the Italian Army in the Alps to gain Bosnian Islamic community fighters. This ‘Log pod Mangartom’ was uncovered in 2022 and 2024 during digs commissioned by the Islamic community of Slovenia. In connection to the local environment, curator Nataša Petrišin-Bachelez remarked that there has never been a mosque in Venice.¹³ Off-site, Li Yi-Fan’s ‘Screen Melancholy’ for Taiwan provided some welcome laughs. The video and sculptural installation grapples with an animated figure’s own ever-deeper layers of algorithmic thinking. The figure questions the viewer’s relationship to animation, while marvelling at their own capacity to perform a trick in which a cigarette enters one orifice and emerges from their anus. Later, captivated by their own facial likeness that speaks up to them from the floor, the figure enters their body, whereupon a self-same figure, their ‘appendix’, informs them that the eye was not always the most dominant organ.

Poetry and Politics

Bodily displacement was also central to Zhanna Kadyrova’s The Origami Deer (2019) as part of Ukraine’s presentation, which shows the journey of a deer sculpture from Pokrovsk in Ukraine, where it had taken the place of a Soviet aircraft fighter. Relocated due to the war, it has travelled to Venice, with the 1994 Budapest Memorandum that promised peace in exchange for nuclear weapons now in tatters. The truck on which it stands operates as a kind of moving plinth, announcing its dependency on us, however, to move it, and that the deer itself was not made to travel.

South African artist Gabrielle Goliath’s ‘Elegy’ conveyed the horrors of gender-based violence through opera. Across eight screens or ‘monoliths’, in one of the many romantically decrepit sites in Venice that threaten to eclipse works – here, a deconsecrated church on a site occupied for religious purposes since the seventh century – operatically trained women hold a note for an hour. The work began in 2015 as an eponymous performance, following the murder and rape of nineteen-year-old journalism student Ipeleng Christine Moholane in Cape Town. This installation, which extends the stories of femicide to Namibia, also mourns Palestinian poet Heba Abu Nada, who, with her young son, was killed by an Israeli air strike in Gaza in October 2023. The artist has spent the last decade building these relationships and connections extending the work far outside what any art venue could support. Indeed, it is not a surprise that poetry accompanied the exhibition.¹⁴ The work conjures Cecilia Vicuña’s famous film What is Poetry to You (1980), in which sex workers, artists, political activists and more respond to that deceptively simple question. The last answer is from a police officer – at the edge of a forest on the fringes of Bogotá, where murder was rampant at the time – who replies that for him poetry is a salve for the monotony and loneliness of his work.¹⁵ Elegy took place off-site due to a decision made by South Africa’s Minister of Sports, Arts and Culture, Gayton McKenzie, not to include it for its focus on the genocide in Gaza, something he is widely quoted as denying.¹⁶

The concern of art right now is where politics and poetry meet, amid personal loss and geopolitical desperation. It is a long right now. Vicuña’s 1980 film traces people’s shared need for respite, and to believe that their chosen path is a just one. Art exhibitions often claim to give voice to the just path, which can feel like a platitude, or worse, an excuse not to do the actual work of justice. As a sketch, however, the main exhibition shows the steps by which an image – or idea – can become an action, including the breaks required for movement to be possible. This biennale may not have healed itself, or gone into the breaks as far as it might have, how could it?¹⁷ To end on a term developed by Vicuña, who won the 2022 Golden Lion: ‘seehearing’ expresses an interrelation of the senses that allows political and artistic failures to better one’s understanding, including of what’s to come. What this biennale shows is how to better receive the signals for ‘seehearing’, within the ruin of daily life between editions.¹⁸