May 9, 2026, 9:15am
Venice 30122
Italy
In resonance with the 61st Venice Biennale: Minor Keys, curated by Koyo Kouoh, Asia Forum 2026 takes as its departure point a concept both intimate and political: Minor Feelings. Borrowed from poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong, whose landmark work excavates the psychological and cultural terrain of the Asian diaspora, minor feelings describes the particular emotional register that arises when one’s lived reality is persistently contradicted by dominant narratives—the quiet dissonance of existing at the margins of a story that was never written for you.
To invoke the minor is to acknowledge an entire architecture of power. In music, the minor key carries the feeling that the major suppresses—tension, longing, unresolved complexity. In culture, the minor has long been the register assigned to those whose histories, languages, and subjectivities have been deemed subsidiary: ornamental to the main event, peripheral to the centre. And yet the so-called Global South, or its adjacent formulation, the Global Majority, represents not a periphery but a plurality—of minor majorities, vast and irreducible, whose voices have been systematically diminished or erased on a world stage they have always fundamentally shaped.
Through conversations, artistic interventions and screenings, the programme interrogates the conceptual framing of minor itself—asking who is made minor, and by whose authority, and what does it mean to imagine embracing the “minor-majorities.” It thus turns to the significance of we: the collective pronoun as an act of solidarity, a refusal of isolation, a gathering of those whose stories have been told in fragments or not at all.
Minor feelings are not small feelings. They are the feelings that survive the weight of being made minor. And so the programme also proposes rest and love as anti-colonial practices in their own right; ways of honouring minor feelings, of tending to what extraction and erasure have depleted, and of insisting that to nurture one another is also to resist.
Asia Forum holds this contradiction without resolution. The works and conversations assembled across this programme attend to what has been erased, mistranslated, or rendered illegible. We gather here not to be folded into a universal harmony, but to sound our own chord: dissonant where necessary, searching always.
Programme schedule
9:15am: Coffee & Welcome
9:50am: S T I L L (Exercise I), a gift intervention by artist Adeline Kueh
10am: Conversation 1: “Minor-majorities”
With artist Gabrielle Goliath (Artist, South Africa), Ong Kian Peng (Artist, Singapore) and Denise Ryner & Zairong Xiang (Andrea B. Laporte Curator, ICA Philadelphia and Associate Professor of Comparative Literature/Director of Art, Duke Kunshan University respectively; Co-Curators of The Conditions of Being Near)
11:15am: Conversation 2: What kind of we could we be? Withnessing in times of crisis
With Ryan Inouye & Liz Park (Curator, International Art, and the Richard Armstrong Curator of Contemporary Art, Carnegie Museum of Art respectively; and Kathe and Jim Patrinos Curators of the 59th Carnegie International), Khaled Sabsabi (Artist, Australia Pavilion), and X Zhu-Nowell & Kandis Williams (Executive Director/Chief Curator, Rockbund Art Museum and Artist/Co-Curator respectively, The Great Camouflage)
12:30pm: Screenings
We Are All Mothers, 2022 (19min 52s) by Patty Chang
Amnion, 2022 (12min) by Lynn Lu
Monster, She Wrote, 2025 (13min 4s) by Natasha Tontey
Lunch is available at the Querini cafe, as well easily accessible at different restaurants in the Campo Santa Maria Formosa.
1:30pm: Conversation 3: Care and Rest
With Binna Choi (Curator, Korea Pavilion), Jon Cuyson (Artist, Philippines Pavilion), Selene Yap (Curator, Singapore Art Museum / Singapore Pavilion), and Rahul Gudipudi (Founder, ke-na- artists’ initiative)
2:30pm: ‘Minor Evaluation(s)’ - performance by artist collective, FAC XTRA RETREAT (FXR) in association with the Japan & Korea Pavilions.
FXR’s performances at the Japan Pavilion are a co-production and continuation of a J. Paul Getty Museum program first performed at the Getty Center.
3:15pm: S T I L L (Exercise II)—drinks offering by artist Adeline Kueh (offsite)
Asia Forum is organised by Annie Jael Kwan, Hammad Nasar, John Tain and Ming Tiampo.
