In Minor Keys, Major Resonances

“The minor key, in music, alludes both to the structure of a song and to its emotional effects. It is a rich idea, so rich that it quickly overflows its technical definition and spills with metaphor. It summons moods, the blues, the call-and-response, the morna, the second line, the lament, the allegory, the whisper.” — Koyo Kouoh, 2025
 

All Biennales have a polyphonic quality. Whether this results in diffusion, tussle, dialogue, or a combination of all three is down to context and curation. Before her tragic passing in May 2025, Swiss-Cameroonian curator Koyo Kouoh referenced the notion of call-and-response as a grounding framework for the 61st Venice Biennale, which includes 110 artists and collectives, on top of 100 national pavilions. The consequent exhibition foregrounds overlooked and discursive practices, some of which struggle to make themselves heard amidst the crowds. Given time, however, many present compelling and aesthetically rigorous strategies not only for survival but also for flourishing in the contemporary. Several weeks after opening, what lingers most is not any singular artistic tendency, but Kouoh's insistence on artistic practice as something sustained through relationships and collective forms of care.

In Minor Keys circles motifs including shrines, processional assemblies, and schools of influence. The referencing of mentorship is more pronounced than in any Biennale presentation I can remember, perhaps inevitably given the loss of Kouoh, a famously supportive presence. Again and again, her absence is felt less through overt memorialization than through the exhibition's repeated attention to the connections and communities that sustain artistic practices over time. Kouoh’s RAW Foundation makes space for knowledge production in Dakar and across Africa and its diasporas. RAW, alongside the US residency program Denniston Hill, based in the Catskills, and the non-profit Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute, are all accorded their own displays at the Biennale. While many visitors sweep past these archivally coded displays, they’re a reminder of the desperately needed and under-threat structures that ground so much of this work.

The Central Pavilion opens with a dedication to one of Kouoh’s mentors, Issa Samb, co-founder of the revolutionary Senegalese collective Laboratoire Agit’Art. At the Giardini, Samb’s courtyard is transplanted into the lofty Italianate architecture — art and video combine with Samb’s belongings, forming a shrine to a way of being rather than an individual. Samb’s courtyard is a site of meeting, experimentation, learning, speaking, and rest, in which the pedestal is obsolete. There is a joyful unrehearsed quality to this opening display, while a small side exhibition of Marcel Duchamp nods playfully to irreverence in a Central Pavilion more broadly freighted with a sense of elegy.

More space, more support — literally, in terms of seating — would aid the sort of careful listening Kouoh advocates for. Regardless, there is a wealth of brilliant work on display. Many of the strongest contributions extend Kouoh's interest in the people and systems that sustain cultural memory. Marcia Kure’s Network V draws lines between material histories and labor, pointing to entrenched, often invisible entanglements. Kure’s Roadkill sculptures — huddles of hand-braided synthetic hair extensions — are suspended eerily among drawings made with indigo, kola nut, charcoal, and gold: materials that map African diasporic trade routes and labor. Billie Zangewa’s exquisite fragmented tapestries of raw Dupion silk also consider the politics and potentiality of materials and gendered labor. Zangewa depicts scenes of what she calls “daily feminism” — cooking, resting, carrying groceries, childcare — the tapestries’ partial nature refusing narrative conclusion. In the Arsenale, Kaloki Nyamai’s stunning floor-to-ceiling paintings combine rope, sisal, newspaper, fabric, photographic transfer, and yarn to present moving figurative scenes, while suggesting cycles of rupture and repair. In different ways, these artists’ compositions propose a state of continual emergence in a world ridden with racialized power structures, dissolving any supposed demarcation between the personal and political.

The sense of a processional, a forward-projecting momentum, finds easier passage in the vast old armament building of the Arsenale. Nick Cave’s newly commissioned Two Points in Time – At Once forges its path inside and outside on the docks; a community of monumental forms fuses medium and matter — household objects, the natural world, vast gramophones, and intricate needlepoint — to suggest unfixed or liminal realms. The suite’s seven stages allude to the stages of grief, and they are equal parts celebratory and strange.

Guadalupe Maravilla’s majestic Disease Throwers combine handmade elements with found objects the artist and healer collected while retracing his migration route through Central America. The Throwers can be played as instruments or worshipped as shrines, their magnificence valorizing heroic journeys made to relative safety. Maravilla, whose name is adopted in solidarity with his undocumented father, more recently suffered the violence of cancer. His work is an energizing, spiritually infused ode to resilience in all forms. 

Lifelines of support networks — thematically and practically — extend beyond the Biennale’s many walls and doors. At the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, The Making of a Collector focuses on Guggenheim’s first gallery, active in London between 1938 and 1939. Guggenheim Jeune mounted Vasily Kandinsky’s first solo show in London and many exhibitions by women artists. The Venice exhibition features work by artists including Kandinsky, Barbara Hepworth, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, which remain electrifying, but must have stunned in the traditional environs of 1930s Cork Street. Fondazione In Between Art Film’s group show Canicula presents eight ambitious film commissions in a former hospital building, proving what properly funded support — a particular challenge for artists working in moving image — looks like. Among the installations is Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s 450XL: The Story of a Fugitive Sound, which gathers silent testimonies from victims of a sonic weapon, deployed by government forces — who deny its use — against students partaking in a silent protest in Belgrade. Displayed across fifteen screens, one for each earwitness account, it’s a spellbinding work of investigative journalism.

In the Giardini, the processional returns with Alvaro Barrington’s Labor Day Parade ’91, which carries memories of the West Indian Day Parade in Brooklyn the year Barrington moved to the US from the Caribbean. The vast road truck, wrapped in West-African-informed Kuba tapestries and painted burlap, houses sculptures and figurines. It is a restless and mystical presence replete with references, from Titian’s Madonna and Child to Beyoncé’s Renaissance album. Parked amid the permanent pavilions, it channels syncretic histories forged in the face of violence and forced movement.

The sense of polyphony inevitably shifts gear among the national pavilions, which jostle competitively for the viewer’s attention. While an undeniably momentous energy surrounds the performance-based pavilions — Austria, Japan, Belgium, and the Netherlands — a trend of Biennales of the last decade, a quieter form of dynamism is located in Abbas Akhavan’s Canadian Pavilion. Entre chien et loup is a bold exercise in patience within a productivist milieu. The pavilion’s architecture is transformed into a greenhouse or terrarium: sites of nurture, also used for the colonial extraction of native plant specimens. A pool hosts the inception of giant water lilies of the genus Victoria, native to South America, but named after Queen Victoria, who made them her emblem. Thwarting the vernissage-week focus of the Biennale, the pads will reach spectacular maturity towards the end of the exhibition’s seven-month run. Like many of the strongest presentations in Venice this year, it privileges nurture over spectacle and duration over immediacy.

Some of the strongest pavilions, including Sung Tieu and Henrike Naumann’s Ruin at the German Pavilion and Rosana Paulino and Adriana Varejão’s dialogue in the Brazilian Pavilion, are two-person conversations that consider, through individual lexicons, the ongoing legacies of their respective countries’ histories. These directly engage with the ever-problematic premise of the national pavilions and their positioning. Tieu covers the pavilion’s facade with mosaic, a reconstruction of the graffitied East Berlin housing complex she was raised in, along with the families of many other Vietnamese migrant workers invited to the Federal Republic of Germany, only to be cast violently adrift upon the nation’s fall. Inside, Naumann’s affecting study of the iconography of East Germany is paired with quiet, minimally infused displays by Tieu, dedicated to her mother’s unending battles with state bureaucracy. For Comigo ninguém pode in Brazil, Varejão’s ceramic installations combine with Paulino’s paintings and drawings — entangled studies of legacy, myth, and memory — in an interventionist architectural display named after a toxic plant that is a native symbol of spiritual protection.

Two-person exhibitions have proliferated in recent years with mixed success, but Fondazione Prada’s Helter Skelter: Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince is a mischievous Duchampian triumph. Set to the unnerving arrhythmic pulses of Detroit techno pioneer Robert Hood, which soundtrack Jafa’s 2022 film SloPEX, the artists cut up, splice, and extract from the archives of visual, material, and online cultures that testify to American life in all its majesty and mess. It’s a fitting exhibition to accompany a Biennale that admits its own incapacity to hold a singular metaphor (and is largely the better for it). Several weeks on, what remains most striking about Kouoh's vision is the way its polyphony emerges through acts of mentorship, dialogue, and collective care. In Minor Keys refuses the myth of artistic isolation, insisting instead on the relationships that allow artistic worlds to endure.