The 61st Venice Art Biennale, curated posthumously by Koyo Kouoh under the theme In Minor Keys, unfolds as a dense, politically charged panorama across the Giardini and Arsenale. With a strong presence of African and diasporic artists, the exhibition confronts war, colonial memory, racial identity, ecology, labour, and resilience, while national pavilions deliver provocative performances and immersive reflections on home, migration, and global crises.
If you thought the last edition of the Venice Art Biennale in 2024 (Adriano Pedrosa’s Foreigners Everywhere) was a beautiful, confusing mess, wait till you lay eyes on the overstuffed sprawl in Koyo Kouoh’s In Minor Keys. Foreigners are still everywhere at the 61st edition of the Venice Art Biennale, as envisioned by the late Swiss-Cameroonian curator, but so are all the weighty motifs of our times — war, social justice, anti-colonial politics, memory, dignity, racial identity, and not to mention, Kouoh’s own curatorial anxieties that anchor the biennale and serve as its moral centre.
Executed by a team chosen by her before her untimely death last year, the biennale’s overarching theme intends to hold a mirror to the fraught world we inhabit, while at the same time, it hopes to provide an antidote to the global uncertainties and amplify the politics of resilience.
Kouoh acts almost like a conductor here — cutting through the cacophony to help audiences, in her own words, "tune in to the frequencies of the minor keys.”
The opening of the Venice Art Biennale is always a big affair — or ‘un grande affare,’ as the Italians might cheerfully put it. On May 9, the art world’s “Olympics” opened to the public with much fanfare as well as a bout of protests, strikes, and controversies.
Between the Napoleon-era Giardini and Arsenale, Kouoh and her cohort have packed enough cabinets of curiosities that should leave even the most enthusiastic art-hungry audiences exhausted. Out of the 110 artists and collectives invited to participate in this year’s prestigious main group exhibition, many hail from the African continent and its diaspora from different corners of the world.
Entering the Giardini, the first thing one sees is Otobong Nkanga’s earthy work that wraps the four columns of the central pavilion’s newly renovated building. In her brilliant creation, the Nigerian artist has used locally sourced bricks, promptly transporting West Africa’s indigenous knowledge into the Venetian context. Moving between the different objects in this segment, I am reminded of a quote by James Baldwin that Kouoh invoked in her curatorial note — “There is a reason, after all, that some people wish to colonise the moon, and others dance before it as an ancient friend.”
The line lingers in my mind as I approach Sammy Baloji’s otherworldly artefacts that embody the power of Congolese art and culture, further reclaiming and reframing African aesthetics — Pablo Picasso would have loved them. The Senegalese Seyni Awa Camara works magic with clay, and her mythical hybrid creatures are proof that art, which is simple and rooted in its natural habitat, is often the most powerful.
Annalee Davis' Let This Be My Cathedral (2025-2026), made especially for the biennale, confronts colonial past, slavery, and racial divide in the Caribbean. The artist draws from the vernacular Caribbean gardening traditions, giving us a multimedia jamboree that spotlights historical trauma and violence, acknowledging that both nature and humans suffer under darkened skies.
From the heavy themes of migration, ecology, labour, and colonial memory, imagine bumping into some figurative art — this time, it is María Magdalena Campos-Pons' striking Anatomy of the Magnolia Tree for Koyo Kouoh and Toni Morrison (2026). It is worth noting that in her curatorial statement, Kouoh has cited Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude as the literary touchstones that have guided her in her creative journey.
The Cuba-born Campos-Pons' monumental and emotional work consists of eight tall panels that depict Morrison and Kouoh as Siamese twins against a lush floral backdrop.
Some more whimsical figures raise their heads in New Delhi-based Sohrab Hura’s soft pastel paintings, which curious visitors couldn’t get enough of. Primarily a photographer who started experimenting with painting during the Covid-19 pandemic, Hura’s childlike scrawls and observations of daily life almost feel like turning the pages of someone’s personal diary.
The British-Bangladeshi artist Mohammed Z. Rahman's immersive installation Rolling Heart turns its gaze towards a working-class life, tracing unusual connections between his upbringing in East London and the layered social histories of Sylhet and rural Bangladesh. The installation’s open-framed architecture allows audiences to admire the paintings from both sides, evoking the rituals of movement and migration.
Over at the Arsenale, another exciting slice of Koyo Kouoh’s main exhibition is ready for its close-up. Nearby, you will find several national pavilions, including India’s hotly discussed representation after a seven-year hiatus. The Arsenale is bursting with a vibrant mix of themes. There’s almost every material, texture, and configuration that you can imagine. This segment features artists like Éric Baudelaire, Nick Cave, Pio Abad, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Kader Attia, and dozens of others, who offer plenty of food for thought.
Wangechi Mutu's cosmological installation, for example, reinterprets the biblical myth of the Garden of Eden. The Kenyan artist dethrones the Genesis story from its Western fetish and summons it back to the cradle of the African continent, where, as all anthropologists and scientists agree, life on earth began.
The South African-Zambian artist Nolan Oswald Dennis has contributed an impressive installation celebrating land as a living, breathing entity. Through seismic acoustics recorded on the African continent, including one from his own studio, Dennis adds yet another dimension to an ongoing research that he has memorably called “a black consciousness of space.”
Kader Attia, who was appointed the curator of the upcoming 7th edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in a separate event in Venice, is showing a shamanic-influenced installation that captures the tension between technology, AI, and tactility and spirituality.
For The End of the World, Alfredo Jaar builds a luminous red cube space that meditates on the uneasy contradiction between the beauty and tragedy of rare metals. Look beneath and you will how these materials are extracted to fuel militarisation and violence.
With 100 countries in contention this year, a few lucky ones have already found themselves stealing the limelight, thanks to their sardonic gestures, outlandish performances, and incisive commentary on the world’s collective follies. By far one of the most popular and provocative pavilions this year, Austria’s Seaworld Venice literally took the piss out of everyone by turning a portable toilet into a prem katha (a Bollywood title).
As part of its presentation, a bare-bodied Florentina Holzinger dangled upside down from a giant bell and rang it using the force of her own body. Her visceral performance was meant as a “call to action” against climate catastrophe.
“Venice Biennale pavilions have historically been spaces for ambitious performances and unconventional artistic gestures, so this work fits within that long tradition. Spectacles like the Austrian pavilion often work because it creates an immediate emotional and visual impact on audiences coming from very different cultural backgrounds. Powerful images travel quickly today through social media and global press coverage, allowing a performance to reach audiences far beyond Venice itself,” explains Durjoy Rahman, a South Asian arts patron and founder of Dhaka-based Durjoy Bangladesh Foundation, which has lent an important work from its collection by artist Mohammed Z. Rahman to the Giardini exhibition.
Another standout pavilion, Japan’s Grass Babies, Moon Babies by Ei Arakawa-Nash, encouraged visitors to pick up one of the over 200 sunglasses-donning, 6-kg doll babies, gently nurse them, or help change their diapers. The work champions a fake baby boom that confronts contemporary Japanese realities — from queer parenting and dying traditional family structures to declining fertility rates and a rapidly ageing population.
Curated by Dr Amin Jaffer, the pavilion of India is an immersive fever dream by five different artists, who bring their own unique touch to riff on home, roots, and belonging. Weighing in on the much-hyped ‘India moment’ in Venice, Los Angeles-based gallerist and founder of Rajiv Menon Contemporary, Rajiv Menon has a slightly different take: “I keep catching myself saying that, 'Oh this is a big moment for India,' but I want to take a step back and affirm that it's not a moment, it's a historical correction. South Asian art has always been great, and finally, we are getting the recognition we deserve.”
A similar theme of home and migration engulfs the UK pavilion at the leafy Giardini, which showcases the colourful world of Turner prize-winning British artist Lubaina Himid. Tiny Qatar, with outsized cultural ambitions, invited what it calls "a gathering of remarkable people" into its tent-like surroundings in the Giardini for an interactive experience over Arabic food, hospitality, conversation, and music.
Across the Giardini, Arsenale and beyond, there's plenty of artistic offerings in store for visitors who shall arrive in huge numbers by vaporetto in Venice this spring-summer season.
Venice is currently the oyster of all the luminaries and visionaries from the art world. There is enough drama — both minor and major — at the biennale this year to keep you hooked.