Koyo Kouoh’s Venice Biennale Looks to Ancient Wisdom to Mend a Fractured Present

In it, artists from around the world revisit colonial histories, ecological trauma and spiritual traditions to imagine coexistence grounded in attunement rather than domination
Elisa Carollo, Observer, May 11, 2026
There is very little human figuration in the 2026 Venice Biennale, which signals a significant shift away from an anthropocentric vision of art and the world toward a more post-human universalism that reconsiders human presence and creation within a broader ecosystem of interrelations. At least in its main exhibition, the Biennale moves away from identity-based frameworks—national, racial and gendered—that dominated many past editions, shifting instead toward an exercise in healing and mending historical fractures, not only between humans, but between beings more broadly.
 

The late curator Koyo Kouoh had promised an exhibition concerned with “thresholds between lifeworlds and temporalities,” with “collective resistance and healing,” in the curatorial essay she wrote before passing away unexpectedly a year ahead of the opening—an essay her international curatorial team, or “la squadra di Koyo Kouoh,” composed of Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Hélène Pereira, Rasha Salti, Siddhartha Mitter and Rory Tsapayi, followed in mounting “In Minor Keys” according to her plans.

 

Despite the exhibition foregrounding listening as a tool of connection, and Kouoh having envisioned it to “refuse orchestral bombast and goose-step military marches and come alive in the quiet tones,” this edition was instead accompanied by louder political tensions, culminating in the withdrawal of the international jury, the Pussy Riot action in front of the Russian Pavilion on the morning of the second day and protests throughout the opening week. All of this probably only reflected the Biennale’s historical nation-based structure, which is becoming increasingly problematic, particularly within today’s fragmented geopolitical landscape—an unavoidable backdrop to this edition. Politics often came before content, despite the enormous amount here to see, absorb and reflect upon.

The Biennale’s 110 participating artists, collaborative duos, collectives and artist-centered organizations, manifest Kouoh’s relational geography of encounters with artists across her lifetime. The exhibition itself is vast and dense—despite having fewer participants than last year—creating a heterogeneous chorus of voices, or a polyphonic poem as Kouoh described it, loosely entangled by a common thread that relates more to methodology than content: an invitation “to shift to a slower gear and tune in to the frequencies of the minor keys.” These minor frequencies become an invitation to slow down, contemplate and meditate in silence through the encounter with art.

There are, in fact, very few paintings, with the exhibition dominated instead by sculpture and mixed-media installations that are often immersive and multisensory, engaging viewers simultaneously at conscious and subconscious levels. Most of the artists featured in this edition are alive and considerably younger than those included in the last two Biennales, so the practices one encounters unmistakably emerge from the crises of our own historical moment, even as many of them turn deeply toward the past in search of ways to imagine and reimagine possible futures.

 

While this Biennale lacks visible curatorial subcategories that might have helped navigate such a dense concentration of narratives, certain threads continuously reappear across both the Giardini and the Arsenale: postcolonial ruminations and critical fabulation used to fill historical gaps and heal fractures between individual and collective, and between human and nature; plant knowledge and geological time; reflections on making tied to tactility, ritual and inherited traditions; and the sea and the earth understood simultaneously as archives, repositories of memory and sources of human connection. [...]

Myth, matter and counter-histories

Quoting a reflection by Toni Morrison from 1974, which Kouoh herself included in her curatorial text, feels helpful here to illuminate the underlying approach shared by many of the artists in the exhibition: “In our myths, in our songs, that’s where the seeds are. It is not possible to constantly hone in on the crisis. You have to have the love, and you have to have the magic, that’s also life.”

It is traditional knowledge that artists present as already containing many of the answers modernity has lost. Artists at both locations engage in a broader generative exercise of rebuilding and rethinking human creation and action, often through forms of attunement and collaboration with geological and natural time and cycles, which frequently unfold through the revisitation of ancestral technologies and systems of knowledge.

This is evident in Annalee Davis’s multimedia installation Let This Be My Cathedral (2025-2026), where herbaria, embroidered textiles, palm drawings and the spectral presence of the extinct Eskimo curlew transform the space into a contemplative sanctuary rooted in Caribbean vernacular gardening traditions and post-plantation healing. Working from the former Barbados plantation where her family lived for generations, Davis has made her studio practice a ritual of healing that intertwines ecology, colonial history and spiritual awareness, proposing attentive coexistence with the land as a form of restoration and collective repair.

 

Historical and societal traumas reappear throughout the exhibition, filtered through myth, spirituality, speculative cosmologies, and, at times, even humor—all employed as strategies through which artists appropriate, revisit and rewrite colonial histories via alternative symbolic orders. Escaping both utopian futurism and dystopian resignation, many of the artists engage instead in a creative reimagining of the past before even the future itself, constructing hypothetical “uchronias,” symbolic counter-histories and alternative narratives that reclaim historical wounds while destabilizing official structures of memory, time and power. [...]