In Minor Keys: A Biennale of Quiet Catastrophes and Memory

The 61st Venice Biennale is taking place under the title In Minor Keys, a project conceived by Koyo Kouoh, one of the most influential figures in contemporary curating and Director of Zeitz MOCAA, who passed away before the exhibition opened.

This alone makes the Biennale unusual. One of the most important international art exhibitions of recent years has been realized without its curator. In the case of In Minor Keys, this changes the way the exhibition is experienced. A project centered on memory, care, vulnerability, and difficult-to-express emotions is itself marked by a sense of absence and incompletion.

That feeling goes beyond the loss of its curator. It also reflects a wider sense of instability today — the loss of clear political positions, familiar ways of living together, trust in institutions, and perhaps even confidence in the future. The death of artist Henrike Naumann before the opening of the German Pavilion only deepens this atmosphere of fragility and interruption.

The Biennale’s visual identity is inspired by the Japanese concept of komorebi — sunlight passing through tree leaves — an image connected to fragility, fleeting moments, and quiet presence.

After several days between the Giardini and the Arsenale, it becomes clear that many of the strongest projects focus on what remains after disruption: archives, traces, fading identities, and incomplete memories. Surprisingly, the central figure of this Biennale is not the hero, but the witness, someone who records what is left behind rather than the catastrophe itself.

At the same time, In Minor Keys contains a strong contradiction. A Biennale devoted to quiet emotions and subtle gestures has become one of the most politically tense editions in recent years. Arguments over the participation of countries, including Israel and Russia, along with protests, institutional conflicts, questions about national representation, and boycotts, created a political atmosphere inseparable from the exhibition experience itself.

While many pavilions spoke about memory, care, and coexistence, the space around art was filled with accusations and debates about whether art can ever remain independent from politics.

The tension reached its peak just days before the opening, when the entire international jury resigned — something that had never happened before in the history of the Venice Biennale. The official reasons were never fully explained. However, the resignation came after jury members publicly stated that they did not want to consider for awards participants representing countries whose leaders are under investigation by the International Criminal Court. Later reports also mentioned legal concerns and growing pressure surrounding the process.

After the jury stepped down, the Biennale introduced a public voting system called Visitors’ Lions. At the same time, dozens of artists and national pavilion representatives withdrew from the awards process or refused to participate in it in support of the former jury members.

Because of this, In Minor Keys may be remembered not only as an exhibition about fragility and attention, but also as a Biennale that questioned its own system.

A Story of Human Experience 

The main exhibition, conceived by Koyo Kouoh and completed by her team after her death, became a quiet and emotionally complex project focused on memory, vulnerability, and human experience. Kouoh described “minor registers” as forms of knowledge that exist outside dominant political and historical narratives.

The exhibitions at the Giardini and the Arsenale, although separate, formed one continuous narrative.The Giardini focused more on personal memory and the inner world of the individual, while the Arsenale explored memory as a shared historical experience.

At the Giardini, many works centered on silence, the body, fragility, and contemplation. The artworks often felt less like direct statements and more like reflections on what remains after history passes. The Arsenale, by contrast, felt more dynamic. Its long architectural spaces turned the exhibition into a journey through testimonies, collective trauma, and unfinished histories. Moving through it felt like passing from one voice and memory to another.

Together, the two venues created the feeling of one large exhibition divided only by the geography of Venice itself. This is where Kouoh’s curatorial vision became most visible: not in directly illustrating crises, but in showing what those crises leave behind in people, memory, and culture.

At the Venice Biennale, there is always a risk that national pavilions will eclipse the main exhibition. This year, that did not occur. Despite the volume of discussion surrounding particular countries, In Minor Keys repeatedly emerged as the space where the proposed themes found their most nuanced and compelling articulation.

It is in the individual works, however, that this curatorial approach becomes most tangible. Rather than illustrating a single thesis, the artists assembled by Kouoh and her team offer different ways of thinking about memory, absence, vulnerability, and the traces left by personal and collective experience. Some works speak through the body, others through archives, materials, sound, or acts of repetition. Together, they give In Minor Keys its particular rhythm.

Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons

Central Pavilion, Giardini

Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons’s Anatomy of the Magnolia Tree for Koyo Kouoh & Toni Morrison (2026) belongs to that rare category of works first encountered as atmosphere and only later as image.

There is no pursuit of spectacle here. Instead, another condition emerges: the sensation of presence belonging to those who are no longer physically here, yet whose influence continues to shape language, memory, and ways of seeing the world.

For many years, Campos-Pons’s practice has engaged with migration, the African diaspora, familial memory, loss, and cultural inheritance. Within the context of the current Biennale, however, the work situated in the Central Pavilion of the Giardini acquires an additional dimension. Its dedication to Toni Morrison and Koyo Kouoh transforms the piece into something approaching a ritual of preservation: an act of keeping voices alive.

Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons. Anatomy of the Magnolia Tree for Koyo Kouoh & Toni Morrison

Ebony G. Patterson

Central Pavilion, Giardini

One of the most visually intense contributions to the central exhibition belongs to Ebony G. Patterson. Her large-scale installations initially appear almost as environments of excess: dense crimson forms, ornamental details, textiles, shimmer, vegetal structures, and organic accumulations create a space that is at once seductive and unsettling.

The first impression is one of beauty of saturation, abundance, and near-Baroque ornamentation. Yet this luxury reveals itself as something assembled from fragments of consumption, remnants of production, and materials circulating within postcolonial economies.

Patterson’s installations do not depict catastrophe directly; rather, they generate an almost physical sensation of the world after catastrophe, a space in which memory continues to accumulate in layers, much like organic matter. The red mass occupying the environment can be read simultaneously as landscape, body, coral formation, internal organ, or trace of collective presence. The installation remains open, its meaning shifting according to the viewer’s own histories, anxieties, and forms of remembrance.

Ebony G. Patterson

Ebony G. Patterson

Buhlebezwe Siwani

Central Pavilion, Giardini

Buhlebezwe Siwani’s works belong to those practices that resist being considered exclusively within the field of art. Siwani is not only an artist, but also an iSangoma and iNyanga—a holder of South African healing and spiritual traditions.

Within the Biennale’s central exhibition, the artist turns toward the image of Black femininity, placing it in a complex dialogue with colonial histories, the legacy of apartheid, and European artistic traditions. Nude female figures surrounded by proteas and strelitzias evoke Renaissance painting. Yet this familiar visual language is mobilized not to reaffirm the canon, but to destabilize and rewrite it. The Black female body here ceases to be an object of observation; instead, it becomes a carrier of memory. Equally important is the presence of materials associated with healing practices, including imphepho, a plant traditionally used in rituals of purification and communication with ancestors.

The sculptures Zanenkosi and Ilifa Lakhe, produced from inexpensive green soap familiar to many low-income South African households, address another nearly invisible subject: pregnancy and motherhood. Siwani employs a material associated with everyday life and economic inequality to speak about conditions often understood as forms of ordinary survival.

Buhlebezwe Siwani. Zanenkosi and Ilifa Lakhe

Kaloki Nyamai

Arsenale

Kaloki Nyamai’s monumental canvases in the Arsenale belong to those works that first impose themselves physically through scale and only gradually unfold as complex systems of traces, sedimentations, and repetitions. His paintings resist being read as singular images. Their surfaces continuously fragment into elements resembling archives, maps, textiles, and damaged memory.

Nyamai’s practice is deeply informed by the history of Kenya, the collective heritage of the Kamba people, and the consequences of colonial experience. Yet within the context of In Minor Keys, these works extend far beyond any specific geography. They begin to speak to memory itself. The viewer encounters not so much representations of the past as its residues—what remains after repeated reinterpretations, losses, and attempts at preservation.

Kaloki Nyamai. New Dawn Series: Imwana sya vika

Sawangwongse Yawnghwe

Arsenale

From a distance, Sawangwongse Yawnghwe’s  installation People’s Desire (2018)resembles an archaeological terrain or a map of unknown territory. Up close thousands of individual figures become visible: people, families, bodies frozen in states of movement, waiting, displacement.

The work consists of countless small clay sculptures arranged in an extended collective procession. This near-monotonous repetition produces a powerful effect: individuality dissolves, giving way to experiences of mass existence, exile, and forced migration. There is no heroic narrative here, only the accumulation of human presence.

Although the artist draws upon memories of political violence, military regimes, and ethnic conflict, People’s Desire exceeds specific geopolitical contexts. The work becomes a visual archive of the contemporary condition, one in which millions live in transition between countries, and identities. The choice of clay is significant, as it is one of humanity’s oldest materials of memory. These figures appear simultaneously as witnesses to the past and remnants awaiting future excavation.

Sawangwongse Yawnghwe