For the 61st Venice Biennale, curator Koyo Kouoh invited viewers to consider “shifting to a slower gear and tune into the frequencies of the minor keys”, and the resulting exhibition, inevitably shaped by an acute sense of mourning due to her absence, is guided by the depth of her emotional and intellectual framework, balancing its undercurrent of grief with a quiet meditative sensibility. This contemplative spirit travels across the city, permeating the ancillary exhibitions beyond the main Biennale.
In Minor Keys
The 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy
May 9 – November 22, 2026 | Photography by Studio Kukla / Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London.
Arriving at Venezia Santa Lucia Station, I’m welcomed by the familiar gloomy skies and a drizzle, much like my last Biennale visit two years ago. Stepping outside, Venice appears at once beautiful and melancholic. With only twenty-four hours and an overwhelming amount of art ahead, I head directly towards the Giardini. This year’s Biennale, bringing together 111 artists, duos, collectives, and artist-led organisations, evolves as a structured thematic exhibition and a constellation of ideas flowing between the Giardini and the Arsenale.
Entering the Giardini, the concept of the shrine is prominent. Here, the space is shaped by memory, spirituality, ritual, and reflection. Within the Sala Chini of the Central Pavilion, I encounter works by two seminal artists who shaped Kouoh’s curatorial thinking. Issa Samb’s recreation of his Dakar courtyard studio, filled with masks, found objects, hanging clothes and fragments of everyday objects, emanates the fiercely experimental and independent spirit that defined his practice and influenced facets of Kouoh’s own curatorial philosophy, championing artistic freedom beyond institutional and political constraints. Alongside Samb, the American artist Beverly Buchanan’s earthworks and meditations on landscape ask us to reflect on overlooked histories of race and absence.
Alvaro Barrington
Labor Day Parade ‘91, 2026 | Mixed media installation
61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia by Koyo Kouoh
Courtesy the artist / Photo: George Darrell
Kouoh’s fluid ideas encourage movement as the exhibition shifts into a procession that celebrates collective forms of gathering. The London-based artist Alvaro Barrington’s installation Labor Day Parade ’91 captures the energetic communal bonds shared through carnival and other ceremonies. A vibrantly decorated truck, featuring scenes depicting his Caribbean heritage alongside art-historical references, was driven by the artist on an ambitious journey across Europe to the lagoon. Now, with flat tyres, the lorry is destined to remain.
SimbiSiren, Wangechi Mutu’s new sculpture, evolves as an imagined aquatic figure drawn from African mythological traditions. Rising from the lagoon, she radiates a regal and otherworldly presence. Water cascading from her fins, she is strength, she is serenity.
Moving through the Giardini, I feel the continuous emotional shifts between the confrontation of painful histories of disenfranchisement and quieter, more poetic moments where hope and enchantment emerge. Billie Zangewa’s intimate scenes of everyday life are imbued with a sense of vulnerability. Her elegant hand-stitched compositions transform ordinary moments into deeply human reflections on tenderness and lived experience.
Exiting the main exhibition, I arrive at the imposing stone walls enclosing the Giardino Mistico dei Carmelitani Scalzi. Entering this ancient convent garden, cared for by the Discalced Carmelite community since the seventeenth century, I immediately feel the breath of the ancient city begin to slow.
The Giardino Mistico is immersed in sonic prayer, and perhaps this is the most poignant response to Koyo’s enticement to slow down, to inwardness and to a deeper reflection on how art, through its emotional and sensory resonance, can contribute to healing. The Ear is the Eye of the Soul, realised by the Soundwalk Collective in close collaboration with the renowned international curators Hans Ulrich Obrist and Ben Vickers, is a call to the contemplative act of listening, inspired by the life and legacy of Saint Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), one of the great figures of mystical thought.
For Hildegard, theology, music, medicine, and cosmology formed part of a unified way of understanding creation and humanity’s place within it. In the giardino, listening becomes the primary act and, upon entering, I’m handed headphones through which the garden gradually reveals itself as a living sonic composition.
As I move through this oasis, the soundscape subtly shifts and transforms, unfolding through newly commissioned works by contemporary composers, musicians, poets and artists responding to Hildegard’s chants and writings. Voice, instrumentation, ambient sound and moments of silence emerge and recede in dialogue with the surrounding garden, creating an experience that feels deeply personal and collectively immersive.
As I continue through this sanctuary, a soft light drifts across the orchard, guiding me onward toward the olive groves and finally the vineyard, where I pause, almost losing my breath before the beauty of the Chapel of the Madonna. Yet the lingering fragrance of rosemary and lavender subtly draws me deeper into the medicinal herb garden before I eventually arrive at the friars’ vegetable plot, bringing this deeply contemplative and sensory journey to a reflective close.
Emerging from this meditative state, it dawns on me that only two hours remain before I must catch my train back to the concrete severity of Milan. While timing may be tight, there is still just enough time to catch the vaporetto from Zattere and make my way to San Giorgio to pay tribute to a fallen titan, Georg Baselitz, the German artist who recently left us in late April at the age of 88.
Baselitz remains one of the artists who most profoundly shaped my understanding of what contemporary art could hold and communicate. There was something deeply transformative in encountering the restless versatility of his practice for the first time. The way he moved between abstraction and figuration with such force challenged my then-naïve assumptions about image-making and meaning. His works seemed to resist certainty, demanding a more emotional, splintered and uncomfortable way of seeing.
I remember being struck by the intensity with which Baselitz confronted the traumas of German history, making visible forms of guilt and psychological rupture. His paintings carried a weight that extended beyond aesthetics. They revealed how art could become a space for grasping fragility and grief.
Eroi d’Oro, curated by Luca Massimo Barbero, director of the Institute of Art History of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, presents the artist’s most recent large-scale paintings, exhibiting his figures upside down, an act that defined his practice from the 1960s.
I’m immediately confronted by the inverted portrait of Elke Kretzschmar, Baselitz’s wife. She is waking up in her bed alone, her hollow eyes frozen in grief and piercing in their intensity. As I navigate the space, the same sense of unease and emotional turbulence I felt when first encountering Baselitz’s work comes flooding back. Now, I’m staring directly into the eyes of the artist himself, upside down. His gaze holds a haunting awareness, as though he already knows what awaits him.
There is something remarkably tender in the way the artist turns towards Elke in these final works, a quiet intimacy, a testament to a lifetime shared. She emerges as his companion and the beating heart of these later and final series of paintings.
The luminous gold surfaces return me to my childhood Sundays in the Greek Orthodox church, standing mesmerised before the Byzantine icons. Although gold has long shaped Baselitz’s practice, never before has his work felt so close to the visual and spiritual language of icon painting.
Pulling myself out of the exhibition, I dash for the station, slightly panicked that I may miss the train. I make it just as it starts to move. A long exhale follows, and then an even deeper inhale as I try to gather my scattered thoughts and absorb the emotional weight of the day.
I sit contemplating devout love contrasted with the deep and unbearable pain of loss, the notions of grief and mourning that feel timeless and crippling. I’m thinking of all the voices that have been silenced, erased, or simply never heard, and the complex politics of visibility.
Yet beneath all of this, what lingers most powerfully is a profound sense of solace, hope, and faith. Somewhere within these experiences, the quiet tones, the lower frequencies, the hums, the consolations of poetry, the inner lyricism is awakened. Perhaps I now understand what Koyo meant when she suggested that the minor keys ask us not simply to listen, but to feel, and in feeling, to graciously hold and ground those emotions within ourselves.
Chapeau Madame Koyo.
Image Credits: Massimodecarlo Gallery | Lehmann Maupin Gallery.
