61st Venice Biennale, “In Minor Keys”

The first thing visitors to the Arsenale see is a strip of fabric onto which Refaat al-Areer’s “If I must die” has been printed. Composed a few weeks before the Palestinian poet and his family were killed by an Israeli airstrike in 2023, the poem asks readers to remember its author by making a white kite to fly over Gaza. Above it hangs a painting by Issa Samb in which a disembodied face seems, as a consequence of its placement with al-Areer’s words, to float through a fragmentary landscape. And so a work of art is recast as a kite: signal for help, witness to history, symbol of defiance, source of hope.

Here is the outline of a much-needed exhibition, which might serve both to document the disastrous present and, through that act of witnessing, make a better future possible. It suggests a role for art as guarantor of continuity, means of transmission between generations, and active contributor to the construction of new worlds out of the available ruins. This is an admirable proposal to make even if, perhaps inevitably, it is one that this show fails properly to flesh out.

But the force of that opening statement carries through the early stages of this exhibition, featuring work by over a hundred artists and collectives presented cheek-by-jowl in the ostensible attempt to create an atmosphere of quiet reflection. Given the space it needs is Khaled Sabsabi’s khalil (2026), a forty-meter-long canvas installed as a circle enclosing the viewer, onto which is projected the negative image of faces in a crowd. By making it impossible to separate the abstract painting from the figures beamed onto it, this mesmerizing work introduces the idea that no part of the world can be understood independently of any other, and that what we experience as reality is a collage of interlinking perspectives. Which is to say that everything needs a witness and truth is always collective.

Visitors will not be able to escape the sense that they, too, are being watched, notably by Daniel Lind-Ramos’s Guardaverde (2024–25). Built out of detritus gathered from the streets of Loíza after a hurricane, this staring figure is one of three such “sentinels” scattered through the exhibition as if to guard it. In Florence Lazar’s It’s All Thanks to Bad Weather (2024), the role of witness is taken up by the landscape. Martinique’s violent past is exposed, in this short documentary film, by the effects of a hurricane and the testimony of its trees. It is reassuring to be reminded that the living environment carries records that cannot be destroyed or denied, and that future generations will judge ours according to its evidence.

As Lazar’s film asks us to be silent so that we can hear what the world might tell us, so Sofía Gallisá Muriente’s Observatorio de lagunas (2023–24) sets out silently to observe it. The lacunae hinted at by the title might be understood as gaps in our understanding upon which we might meditate, as in the beautifully executed short film Últimas luces (2024). By attending to these spaces—rather than attempting to fill them—we might become aware of how much lies beyond our comprehension, which is what distinguishes wisdom from knowledge. Sofía Gallisá Muriente’s oblique and allusive work operates through those long-established weapons of postcolonial literature: silence, exile, and cunning.

That not every space needs to be filled is advice that the curators might have taken to heart. The threads of the exhibition soon begin to unravel, and by the time you reach the Giardini it is difficult to identify any pattern at all. It is here that the absence of this exhibition’s orchestrator, after the untimely death of Koyo Kouoh last year, becomes most apparent. Put bluntly, there are too many works crammed into these rooms, the hang is a mess, and the stated commitments to political resistance and poetry as a means of precisely articulating eccentric positions dissolves into ethical atmospherics and a pervasive indecision about the function of art amidst a frightening collapse of the established orders.

Wangechi Mutu’s The End, Where All began, EdEN (2026) is indicative. By retelling the story of Eden by replacing the “Father” that was God with the “Mother” that is “Earth,” it keeps humanity in the role of disobedient children whose only hope is to appeal to parental authority. A capsule exhibition showcasing the politically engaged paintings that have emerged from the Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute (founded in 2020 by Michael Armitage) has the unintentional effect of throwing such loose appeals to spiritual tradition into unflattering relief. C. Driciru’s Crowds and Insects (1976), in which an army of insects marches past a vainglorious leader, was painted when critics of Idi Amin were routinely imprisoned. If this critique of authoritarianism is veiled, then the veil is all but transparent. I found myself yearning for new works with anything approaching the same bite.

Some works succeed in creating their own space amidst the jumble. Walid Raad’s far from quieting (1969–2026) comprises eleven trompe l’oeil paintings on wood of stock photographs of bedrooms in which, according to a short accompanying text, Yasser Arafat once slept. That the narrator of this story might be unreliable, that the history being told might be constructed, and that I cannot with any certainty know what is going on is not a symptom in this case of a general imprecision but instead a lesson that should be carried away from the work into the world. A small selection of Issa Samb’s untitled paintings (1991–2017) confuse contorted or dissembled human figures with colors and textures implying earth and water. They extend a theme of our material entanglement in landscape that runs through the show, notably in the pencil and oil-stick drawings of Sabian Baumann and in Mohammed Joha’s moving patchwork textile paintings of his native Gaza, collected under the title “No Shelter.”

Displayed to their advantage on a sloping platform that removes them from the visual clutter, Amina Saoudi Aït Khay’s glorious textiles are poetic in the sense that they excite the senses through perfectly judged variations on set patterns and rhythms. The compositional process behind these works is illuminated by a second display, on the above floor, of preparatory sketches resembling experimental musical scores. Drawings such as Souffle 8 (1994–2020) reveal how apparently improvised forms are structured through a grid, suggesting an art that emerges—like poetry, jazz, and blues—from the combination of intuition with strict compositional frameworks that are bent out of shape by the encounter. Which is to say, by the meeting of feeling and thought, material and form.

The spirit of poetry, jazz, and the blues runs through Cauleen Smith’s multimedia installation The Wanda Coleman Songbook (2024), not only in its composition but in its recognition of the alchemical potential of art to transmute historical suffering into joy. To a soundtrack of seven musical interpretations of Wanda Coleman’s poetry, a comparably melodious montage of images plays out on four giant screens arranged around a seating area: the Watts Tower and a circling police helicopter; Los Angeles’ financial district and bodybuilders glimpsed through the window of a gym. The enjambment insists on the equal reality of all these aspects of lived experience in the city: nothing meaningful can be separated from anything else. A sense of the redeeming potential of poetic ventriloquism also animates Rose Salane’s hypnotizing Mercurial New York (2025–26), which collages a series of staged conversations—between lovers, friends, family members—into a seamless composite portrait of a cosmopolitan city. It works because to hear someone speaking of love binds the listener to them.

That life gains its meaning from the interplay between subjects—in the act of observing and being observed, speaking and listening—is most poignantly articulated by Eric Baudelaire’s elegiac five-channel video installation Death Passed My Way and Stuck this Flower in My Mouth (2026). The observations of an elegantly dressed man, who might also be Death, not only remind us of how any experience of love is sharpened by the inevitability of loss, but that, as Gwendolyn Brooks puts it: “We are each other’s harvest; / We are each other’s business; / We are each other’s magnitude and bond.”1

It is perhaps natural that the attempt of several collaborators to realize a curator’s multifaceted vision should collapse into incoherence, in the absence of that person to tie it together. But the influence of any significant figure is incalculably diffusive and so, like Refaat al-Areer, the most important part of Kouoh’s legacy will be manifest in the continuing work of others she has inspired. Here is a more profound memorial than this commendably ambitious, but ultimately disjointed exhibition.


This is the first in a series of responses to the 61st Venice Biennale by e-flux Criticism. Reviews of selected national pavilions, as well as appraisals of its satellite projects, will be published over the coming days and weeks.