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In Minor Keys: A Biennale of Quiet Catastrophes, Memory, and Unfinished Voices
Text and photos by Julia Sysalova, critic (AICA), curator, Vice President of the Institute of Mediterranean Culture, research fellow at the European Institute of Communications @julietath
The 61st Venice Biennale is held under the title In Minor Keys. The concept was developed by Koyo Kouoh, one of the most influential figures in the contemporary curatorial scene and director of Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town, who passed away shortly before the exhibition opened.
This fact alone makes the current Biennale exceptional.
This fact alone makes the current Biennale exceptional.
Introduction
Main Exhibition: Between the Giardini and the Arsenale - several of the most memorable works
Pavilions Most Resonant with the Intonation of In Minor Keys
Overview of the Pavilions in the Theme “Space as Experience”
Pavilions That Became Subjects of Debate
Parallel Projects: Another Map of Venice
One of the largest international art projects of recent years was realized after the death of its conceptual author.
Such circumstances rarely remain merely a biographical footnote. In the case of In Minor Keys, they alter the very way the exhibition is read. Conceived as an exploration of memory, care, vulnerability, and difficult-to-articulate states, the Biennale is from the outset placed within a space of incompletion.
This is not only about the absence of the author. Rather, it reflects a broader sense of lost coordinates: stable political positions, familiar models of coexistence, trust in institutions, and confidence in the future itself. The death of artist Henrike Naumann before the opening of the German Pavilion further intensifies this feeling of fragility and interrupted presence.
The theme of In Minor Keys proposes a departure from grand manifestos and art as a display of power, shifting attention instead to forms of experience that usually remain outside the center of history.
The Biennale’s visual identity is built around the Japanese concept of komorebi—sunlight filtering through the leaves of trees—an image of ephemerality, diffused presence, and barely perceptible time.
After several days in the Giardini and the Arsenale, it becomes clear that many of the most compelling projects are united by an attention to what remains after destruction: archives, traces, vanishing identities, and unfinished memory. Thus, the central figure of this Biennale unexpectedly becomes not the hero, but the witness—the one who records the aftermath rather than the moment of catastrophe.
Yet the main paradox of In Minor Keys lies elsewhere. A Biennale devoted to quiet states and the refusal of grand gestures has turned out to be one of the most tense in recent years.
Political conflicts surrounding the participation of certain countries (primarily Israel and Russia), protests, institutional crises, disputes over the legitimacy of national representation, and boycotts have created a dense backdrop that cannot be fully separated from the artistic experience.
While many pavilions spoke of memory, care, and the possibility of coexistence, the space around art itself was occupied by conflicts, accusations, and debates over the boundaries of cultural autonomy.
The culmination of this tension was an unprecedented step: just days before the opening, the entire international jury resigned.
The formal reasons were not fully explained, but the decision followed a public statement by the jury declaring its intention not to consider for awards participants from countries whose leaders are under investigation by the International Criminal Court. Reports later emerged of legal risks and pressure from various parties involved.
Following the jury’s resignation, the Biennale introduced, for the first time, a system of audience voting—Visitors’ Lions. At the same time, dozens of artists and representatives of national pavilions withdrew their works from competition or refused to participate in the award system in solidarity with the departing jury.
It is precisely here that a sense of displacement emerges: the minor key, this time, became the Biennale itself as an institution. As a result, the art often became less audible than the circumstances surrounding it.
Perhaps this is why In Minor Keys will be remembered not only as an exhibition about fragility and attention, but also as a Biennale that called into question its own mechanisms: the system of awards, the idea of cultural neutrality, and the very possibility of separating art from political reality.
It is precisely here that a sense of displacement emerges: the minor key, this time, became the Biennale itself as an institution. As a result, the art often became less audible than the circumstances surrounding it.
Perhaps this is why In Minor Keys will be remembered not only as an exhibition about fragility and attention, but also as a Biennale that called into question its own mechanisms: the system of awards, the idea of cultural neutrality, and the very possibility of separating art from political reality.
Main Exhibition: Between the Giardini and the Arsenale
The central exhibition, conceived by Koyo Kouoh and realized independently by her team, unfolds as a space of slow accumulation of states. Kouoh wrote about “minor registers” as forms of knowledge that resist dominant systems of power and historical narrative.
Importantly, the Giardini and the Arsenale do not appear as two separate parts of the exhibition. If the former speaks of memory from within the individual, the latter presents a project of memory as a collective experience.
The main pavilion in the Giardini operates through an internal condition: silence, contemplation, the body, vulnerability, and organic forms. Many of the works here are perceived as reflections on what remains after history.
Importantly, the Giardini and the Arsenale do not appear as two separate parts of the exhibition. If the former speaks of memory from within the individual, the latter presents a project of memory as a collective experience.
The main pavilion in the Giardini operates through an internal condition: silence, contemplation, the body, vulnerability, and organic forms. Many of the works here are perceived as reflections on what remains after history.
The project in the Arsenale, by contrast, is structured as movement. The elongated architecture of the space transforms viewing into a process of passing through testimonies and collective traumas. A sense of procession emerges, as if the viewer is moving through a sequence of voices and witnesses.
As a result, the main exhibition is perceived almost as one continuous work, divided only by the architecture of Venice. It is here that Koyo Kouoh’s curatorial idea becomes most tangible: not a direct commentary on crises, but an exploration of what they leave behind within people and cultures.
At the Venice Biennale, there is always a risk that national pavilions will begin to overshadow the main exhibition. This year, that did not happen. Despite the intensity of discussions surrounding certain countries, it was the central project In Minor Keys that, in many cases, became the space for the most precise articulation of the proposed theme.
Before turning to an overview of the pavilions, it is worth highlighting several of the most memorable works.
María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Memory as a Form of Continuation
(Central Pavilion, Giardini)
María Magdalena Campos-Pons’ work Anatomy of the Magnolia Tree for Koyo Kouoh & Toni Morrison (2026) belongs to those pieces that are first perceived as a space and only later as an image.
There is no attempt at spectacle here. Instead, another state emerges: the sense of presence of those who are no longer physically here, yet whose influence continues to shape language, memory, and ways of seeing the world.
Campos-Pons has long worked with themes of migration, the African diaspora, family memory, loss, and cultural inheritance. However, within the context of this Biennale, her work - installed in the Central Pavilion in the Giardini - acquires an additional dimension. The dedication to Toni Morrison and Koyo Kouoh transforms the piece into something close to a ritual of preserving voices.
It is important that memory here is not romanticized. It exists as an active force, as something that continues to live within the present. This is precisely why the work leaves such a lasting impression. It speaks less about loss than about the impossibility of complete disappearance.
And perhaps this is one of the key tonalities of the current Venice Biennale: the most powerful works are not those that speak the loudest, but those that continue to exist within the viewer over time - not through tragic pathos, but through the preservation of voice.
The Central Pavilion in the Giardini
Ebony G. Patterson: Between Luxury and Traces of Destruction
(Central Pavilion, Giardini)
One of the most visually intense works in the main exhibition belongs to Ebony G. Patterson. Her large-scale installations are initially perceived almost as spaces of excess: dense red forms, decorative elements, textiles, glittering surfaces, vegetal structures, and organic accumulations create an environment that simultaneously attracts and generates a sense of unease.
The first impression is one of beauty, overwhelming abundance, and almost Baroque ornamentation. Yet it quickly becomes apparent that this excess functions differently. The sense of luxury is constructed from fragments of consumption, traces of production, and materials circulating within postcolonial economies. The surface ceases to resemble mere decoration; ornament becomes a language through which collective traumas are articulated.
Within the context of In Minor Keys, Patterson’s installations acquire an especially precise resonance. They do not illustrate catastrophe, but instead create an almost physical sensation of a world after it—a space where memory continues to accumulate in layers, much like organic matter.
The red mass filling the space can be perceived simultaneously as landscape, body, coral, internal organ, or the trace of a collective presence. It is precisely this ambiguity that makes the work so enduring in memory. It does not offer a single interpretation and does not seek to be read literally.
The Central Pavilion in the Giardini
Buhlebezwe Siwani: The Body as Archive
(Central Pavilion, Giardini)
Buhlebezwe Siwani’s works belong to those artistic practices that are difficult to consider solely within the field of art. She is not only an artist, but also an iSangoma and iNyanga - a bearer of South African healing traditions and spiritual practices. Therefore, many of her projects are perceived not as representations of experience, but as acts in themselves.
In the main exhibition of the Biennale, the artist turns to the image of Black femininity, placing it within a complex dialogue with the history of colonialism, the legacy of apartheid, and European artistic traditions. Nude female figures surrounded by protea and strelitzia flowers evoke Renaissance painting. Yet this familiar visual language is used differently: not to reinforce the canon, but to reconsider and transform it.
The Black female body here ceases to be an object of the gaze; it becomes a carrier of memory. Particularly significant is the presence of materials connected to healing practices, such as imphepho - a plant used in purification rituals and communication with ancestors.
As a result, the work begins to exist simultaneously between art and ritual.
The sculptures Zanenkosi and Ilifa lakhe, created from inexpensive green soap familiar to many low-income families in South Africa, address another almost invisible subject: pregnancy and motherhood. The artist uses a material associated with everyday life and economic inequality to speak about a condition that is perceived as a form of everyday survival.
Within the context of In Minor Keys, Buhlebezwe Siwani’s works appear especially precise, as they speak of memory not as a historical archive, but as something that exists within the body itself.
The Central Pavilion in the Giardini
Kaloki Nyamai: A History Written Over Another History
(Arsenale)
Kaloki Nyamai’s monumental canvases in the Arsenale belong to those works that first create an almost physical impression through their scale, and only gradually reveal themselves as a complex system of traces, layers, and repetitions. His painting is not perceived as a single image; the surface constantly breaks apart into fragments, simultaneously evoking an archive, a map, a textile, and a damaged memory.
The artist’s practice is deeply connected to the history of Kenya, the collective heritage of the Kamba people, and the consequences of the colonial experience. However, within the context of In Minor Keys, these works extend far beyond a specific geography. They begin to speak about the mechanisms of memory itself—memory that never exists in a completed form and always remains a space of rewriting.
This is why his canvases produce an almost archaeological impression: the viewer encounters not so much a representation of the past, but its remains after countless acts of reinterpretation, loss, and attempts at preservation.
In the Arsenale, where many projects address collective experience, migration, and the prolonged duration of historical trauma, Nyamai’s works do not offer a ready-made statement and do not seek a direct political declaration. Instead, the artist presents history as an unstable surface, within which other histories continue to exist—displaced, forgotten, or yet to be told.
Arsenale
Sawangwongse Yawnghwe: The Experience of the Masses
(Arsenale)
People’s Desire (2018) by Sawangwongse Yawnghwe is one of those works in the Arsenale that is first perceived through rhythm and only gradually reveals itself as a human catastrophe. From a distance, the installation resembles an archaeological field or a map of an unknown territory. Up close, it becomes clear that the viewer is facing thousands of individual figures - people, families, bodies frozen in movement, awaiting displacement.
The work consists of numerous small clay sculptures arranged in a long collective procession. This almost monotonous repetition creates a powerful effect: individuality dissolves, giving way to the experience of the mass, exile, and forced migration. There is no heroic narrative here, only the accumulation of human presence.
The artist addresses memories of political violence, military regimes, and ethnic conflicts; however, People’s Desire extends beyond any specific geography. The work can be read as a visual archive of the present, in which millions of people exist in a state of transition between countries, identities, and systems.
It is especially significant that the material is clay - one of the most ancient carriers of memory. These figures appear simultaneously as testimonies of the past and as traces of future excavations. The installation becomes a kind of archaeology of the present: an attempt to capture an era of global instability through fragile human forms.
Within the context of the Arsenale, the work speaks quietly, without visual pressure, yet it is precisely this restraint that makes it one of the most compelling pieces.
People’s Desire addresses collective destiny not through the magnitude of tragedy, but through repetition - thousands of small figures, each of which could represent an individual story. This kind of art does not offer an answer. It leaves the viewer among countless traces, where questions of belonging, memory, and the right to movement remain unresolved.
Arsenale
Between the Main Exhibition and the National Pavilions: When a Theme Ceases to Be a Curatorial Framework
The theme of this year’s Biennale extended far beyond Koyo Kouoh’s curatorial concept. Memory, the fragility of systems, and the impossibility of definitive answers began to reappear in spaces created independently of one another. Perhaps this is because the reality of recent years has itself shaped a similar sensibility.
For this reason, the current exhibition is perceived as a polyphonic conversation: contradictory and conflict-filled. Yet, if this Venice Biennale truly had a shared intonation, it did not sound like a manifesto. Rather, it resembled a quiet question: what forms of memory, care, and collective existence are we still capable of preserving when the familiar mechanisms begin to collapse?
Perhaps this is the question that will remain after the pavilions close, lasting longer than any awards, rankings, or lists of the best projects. Because some exhibitions end with the season, while others continue to exist, having shaped a particular way of looking at the world.
Pavilions Most Resonant with the Intonation of In Minor Keys
Any attempt to compile a list of the “best” pavilions of the Venice Biennale is inevitably subjective. Scale, visual impact, or the amount of public discussion rarely correspond to the depth of an artistic statement. This is especially true in the case of In Minor Keys, where the curatorial concept itself was built around a rejection of the obvious gesture, the loud declaration, and art as a form of domination.
Therefore, this review does not seek to create a hierarchy of national exhibitions or identify winners. Rather, it pursues another goal: to highlight projects that most accurately captured the inner tone of the current Biennale - its attention to memory, fragility, slowness, incompletion, and those states that usually remain outside historical narratives.
What unites these pavilions is not a shared aesthetic or similarity of artistic methods. On the contrary, many of them exist within entirely different visual languages. Yet they all work with a similar type of sensitivity: a refusal of definitive answers, an attention to traces rather than events, an interest in what disappears rather than what asserts its own permanence, and a particular relationship with time.
This is why some of the most convincing projects of this Venice Biennale are not the loudest pavilions, nor those that generated the greatest amount of discussion.
Egypt: Silence as a Form of Presence
Commissioner: Ministry of Culture of the Arab Republic of Egypt - Egyptian Academy of Rome
Curator / Exhibitor: Armen Agop
Venue: Giardini
Among the national pavilions, Egypt became one of the spaces where the artwork ceases to be merely an object of contemplation and becomes a state of being.The pavilion succeeds in creating an environment in which time slows down to the point of becoming tangible.
The works of Armen Agop exist on the boundary between natural matter, archaeological artifact, and something almost cosmic. Granite here does not appear as a processed material; it retains a sense of primordial existence, as if these forms were not created in the artist’s studio but discovered somewhere between geology and a forgotten civilization that understood geometry in another way.
The project unfolds as a gradual immersion: from a barely perceptible sense of emptiness toward the physical presence of matter, and then toward an almost mystical experience of the invisible. The space does not offer the viewer a clear narrative and does not demand interpretation. It offers something else - to stop.
It is precisely this slowing down that becomes the defining gesture of the pavilion. Here, silence transforms into a form of knowledge: hidden layers begin to emerge, along with the memory of the material, the trace of time, and internal rhythms that usually remain beyond our attention.
Memory in this project is experienced physically through the weight of stone and the emptiness between objects. Granite seems to hold both the geological time of the Earth and the human time of disappearance.
Within the context of In Minor Keys, the Egyptian Pavilion becomes one of the most precise embodiments of the idea of listening to what usually remains unheard and recognizing the almost imperceptible vibrations of existence.
After visiting, what remains is not so much a specific thought or interpretation, but rather a sensation of internal displacement—a rare experience in which art affects not the evaluation of what has been seen, but the very way we inhabit and perceive the world.
Egyptian Pavilion
Serbia: Memory as a Mechanism of Preservation
Commissioner: Ivan Milošević (Belgrade City Museum)
Curator: Tomáš Koudela
Artist: Predrag Djaković
Venue: Giardini
The Serbian Pavilion emerged as one of the most emotionally precise at this year’s Biennale. Without large-scale effects, visual pressure, or the familiar logic of spectacle, and almost ascetic in its tone, it produces a particularly strong impression.
Predrag Djaković’s project Through Golgotha to Resurrection engages with memory as a mechanism of storage, loss, and the constant rewriting of history.
Here, the archive ceases to be a neutral tool of preservation and becomes a space of selection, raising the question of what is preserved and what is pushed beyond the boundaries of collective memory. Photographs, maps, documents, personal testimonies, and administrative records come together as a system of fragments in which the twentieth century is perceived not as a continuous historical line, but as the trace of lost ideas about human progress.
Particularly significant is the image of suitcases—a recurring motif of forced movement. They evoke emigration, deportations, flight, and the impossibility of return. The suitcase becomes a mobile archive that a person is compelled to carry together with their own history, effectively turning into a portrait of its owner.
Against the backdrop of a reality in which identities increasingly become instruments of division, the pavilion raises the question of how communities construct their own memory and whom they choose to include within it. Notably, it addresses collective trauma without directly representing catastrophe itself, instead exploring what remains after it.
For this reason, the Serbian project is perceived as one of the most restrained yet profound statements of the Biennale. It proposes viewing memory as a fragile system that society continuously reconstructs.
Serbian Pavilion
Finland: Maturity as a Form of Observation
Commissioner: Juha Huuskonen (CEO of Frame Contemporary Art Finland)
Curator: Stefanie Hessler
Artist: Jenna Sutela
Venue: Giardini
The Finnish Pavilion became one of the quietest spaces of the Biennale - and precisely for that reason, one of the most memorable. Without dramatic effects, it creates a particular state of slowness, in which attention gradually shifts from the external to the internal.
Jenna Sutela’s project traditionally engages with themes of biology, embodiment, non-human forms of life, and interspecies connections. However, the experience of being within the pavilion opens up another layer of interpretation - a reflection on age, time, and the changing ways of seeing the world.
Certain elements of the exhibition - large forms resembling hair, organic structures, or heads - evoke associations with aging, wisdom, and the accumulation of experience.
Gray hair here is perceived almost as a state of consciousness: a moment when one ceases to strive for control or to seek definitive explanations. Instead, there emerges a capacity to coexist with uncertainty, to observe it without the need for immediate resolution.
Against the backdrop of many pavilions built around anxiety, acceleration, and technological overload, Finland offers a rare intonation - calmness, not as an escape from reality, but as a form of maturity.
It is one of the few pavilions where the Biennale begins to speak about time not through catastrophe or progress, but through a transformation of perception itself - as the ability to recognize the complexity of the world without the urge to simplify it.
Finland offers wisdom instead of speed, and perhaps that is why it lingers in memory longer than many more overtly dramatic projects.
Finnish Pavilion
Canada: The Fragility of Systems
Commissioner: National Gallery of Canada (Jean-François Bélisle)
Curator: Kim Nguyen
Exhibitor: Abbas Akhavan
Venue: Giardini
Abbas Akhavan’s Canadian Pavilion is one of those projects where the strength of the statement emerges from slow, almost laboratory-like observation. Entre chien et loup engages with the fragility of systems - natural, imperial, architectural, and symbolic.
Akhavan reimagines the pavilion itself as a Ward’s case - a glass container historically associated with the transportation of plants during the era of the British Empire. This is crucial: what we encounter is not merely an image of a greenhouse or a botanical experiment, but a precise metaphor for colonial knowledge, where nature became an object of relocation and a demonstration of power.
The giant water lilies of the Victoria genus are not decorative elements here but carriers of historical memory. Once presented as a “wonder of nature” in the Victorian era, they became part of an imperial spectacle, transformed into exhibits. In the Canadian Pavilion, representing a Commonwealth country, this motif acquires a particular political tension: the plant becomes not a symbol of beauty, but a symptom of a system that appropriated the living, renamed it, and absorbed it into its own iconography.
The project unfolds as a reflection on biological, ecological, and temporal processes. Growth, environmental change, and observation themselves become the structure of the work. Akhavan effectively rejects the idea of a finished object.
In this sense, the pavilion resonates with contemporary bio-art, yet is not reducible to it. Its focus extends beyond life as material to the history of systems that have placed life under glass: botany, the museum, the empire, the exhibition, the national pavilion. It suggests that any system, even the most powerful, is sustained by a fragile equilibrium.
Canadian Pavilion
Portugal: The Experience of Slowness
Commissioner: Américo Rodrigues (Directorate-General of the Arts)
Curators: Ana Baliza, Ricardo Nicolau
Artist: Alexandre Estrela
Venue: Fondaco Marcello, Calle del Traghetto / Ca' Garzoni, San Marco
The Portuguese Pavilion belongs to those projects whose effect unfolds gradually - not at the moment of viewing, but later, sometimes hours afterward, sometimes only once the viewer has left the exhibition space. Such works rarely become the most discussed, as they exist outside the logic of immediate impact that today governs not only information flows and image production, but often art itself.
There is no attempt here to compensate the statement with spectacle or to impress at any cost. On the contrary, the project exists through a nearly imperceptible shift of attention. For this reason, the pavilion resonates with the overall tone of In Minor Keys: a refusal of the heroic, the final, and the loud becomes not merely an aesthetic choice, but a way of existing within contemporary reality.
Alexandre Estrela’s practice has long been concerned with the instability of perception. In this project, this quality is felt with particular intensity: the viewer is placed not so much in front of a work as inside a process of observation, where the very mechanism of attention gradually shifts.
It is telling that the pavilion’s primary material is not so much an object as duration itself. The amount of time the viewer is willing to spend within this experience becomes no less important than the work itself.
Perhaps it is precisely such projects that respond to the question of what it means to be contemporary today. Not to amplify speed, production, and the volume of the statement, but to preserve the capacity for attention—to the indeterminate, the unfinished, and that which does not reveal itself at once. For this reason, the Portuguese Pavilion remains one of the quietest, yet at the same time one of the most consistent statements of the current Biennale.
Portuguese Pavilion
UAE: Communication and the Impossibility of Keeping Up
Commissioner: Salama bint Hamdan Al Nahyan Foundation
Curator: Bana Kattan
Artists: Mays Albaik, Jawad Al Malhi, Farah Al Qasimi, Alaa Edris, Lamya Gargash, Taus Machačeva
Venue: Arsenale
The UAE Pavilion stands out as one of the most subtly constructed spaces of this year’s Biennale. It addresses a condition familiar to almost anyone within contemporary mobile culture: the constant movement between countries, languages, and professional environments, alongside a chronic sense of being out of sync with the speed of events.
The exhibition title Washwasha is a phonetic transliteration of the Arabic word for “whisper.” This image becomes a key to the entire project. What is at stake here is not declaration, but quiet forms of transmitting memory - fragmentary stories and experiences that resist definitive capture. The artists explore migration, sound, oral history, technology, and language as spaces within which contemporary identity is formed.
The participation of Taus Machačeva is particularly significant. Her work, built around endless apologies for delayed replies and the inability to remain constantly available, unexpectedly extends far beyond everyday communication. Gradually, it becomes clear that the focus is not correspondence or personal discipline, but a broader condition of our time.
Here, the late response becomes a symptom. It reveals professional burnout, life across time zones, constant movement, the need to exist simultaneously within multiple cultural contexts, and the persistent sense of insufficient time. What emerges is the figure of a person who is continuously engaged in communication, yet increasingly unable to keep up with its rhythm.
In this sense, the pavilion captures with striking precision one of the most characteristic forms of contemporary absence. One remains connected, yet presence itself becomes increasingly formal.
The UAE Pavilion examines how digital, social, and spatial infrastructures reshape human relationships and transform the experience of belonging. Who has the right to speak today? Who is actually heard? And what happens to memory when communication becomes continuous and attention ever more fragmented?
It speaks of fragility through the everyday condition of a person who is constantly present and, at the same time, absent.
UAE Pavilion
Japan: Caring for the Future
Commissioner: The Japan Foundation
Curators: Lisa Horikawa, Mizuki Takahashi
Artist: Ei Arakawa-Nash
Venue: Giardini
The Japanese Pavilion has become one of the most discussed projects of this year’s Biennale, not so much because of its visual scale or technological complexity, but because of the unexpected shift in the role of the viewer itself. Here, visiting the exhibition transforms into a situation of participation, where the distance between the artwork and the individual begins to dissolve.
Grass Babies, Moon Babies, created by Ei Arakawa-Nash, grew largely from the artist’s personal experience as both an author and a parent. Yet the work extends far beyond private biography. By connecting artistic practice with the idea of care, the pavilion proposes viewing care for another not as an individual obligation, but as a collective action and a form of social responsibility for both individual and shared futures.
From the very beginning, visitors are invited to take one of hundreds of baby dolls and carry it through the pavilion and the Giardini gardens. The artist’s children’s voices accompany the journey, while archival and contemporary video materials address questions of Japanese identity, migration, and diasporic experience. Gradually, however, it becomes clear that the project’s central material is neither the image nor even the narrative itself, but the transformation of the viewer’s own behaviour.
The object held in one’s hands ceases to be perceived as part of the exhibition and begins to demand attention, memory, and physical presence. The visitor becomes involved in one of the simplest yet most unfamiliar gestures within an institutional art space: the necessity of caring.
Visitors are invited to change the dolls’ diapers and participate in a kind of ritual of care. For some, this experience feels touching; for others, uncomfortable or even irritating. Yet it is precisely this ambiguity that makes the project convincing.
The Japanese Pavilion reveals how deeply the position of the distanced observer has become embedded in contemporary art, and how unusual the situation becomes when the viewer is asked not to interpret, but to participate.
In a broader sense, the project addresses the question of inheritance—not only familial, but also historical, social, and ecological. It invites reflection on generations that inevitably inherit the consequences of decisions made by others, and on whether contemporary societies are capable not only of passing the future on to those who come next, but also of undertaking the work of restoration before that future arrives.
Against the backdrop of many pavilions engaging with memory, trauma, and political crisis, Japan proposes a different question: what does it mean today to be responsible for those who will come after us?
Japanese Pavilion
Space as Experience
Not all projects in this year’s Biennale operate through memory, fragility, or slowly unfolding inner reflection. Some remain in the viewer’s memory through a physical sensation of space - as an altered perception of one’s own body within the exhibition.
Such pavilions do not always correspond most directly with the overall tone of In Minor Keys. Their strength lies elsewhere: in their ability to transform architecture, material, and scale into an independent language. The focus is not so much on spectacle as on forms of spatial experience.
This is why the following group brings together pavilions whose impact cannot be described solely through their themes. Their language is primarily connected to their ability to literally reshape the viewer’s position within space.
In these cases, the artwork ceases to exist as an object of contemplation and begins to function as an environment - immersive, sometimes unsettling, and at other times almost meditative.
Morocco: Tradition as a Contemporary Language
Commissioner: Mohammed Benyaacoub
Curator: Meriem Berrada
Artist: Amina Agueznay
Venue: Arsenale
The Moroccan Pavilion belongs to those projects that remain in memory above all as a spatial experience. Its strength lies not only in its visual coherence, but also in its ability to transform tradition into a living, active system of relationships between the body, memory, and collective experience.
The project Asǝṭṭa by artist Amina Agueznay unfolds as an environment woven from repetition and collective labour. Hundreds of elements created with the participation of artisans form a structure that simultaneously evokes architecture, textile, and an organic form of life. The installation is experienced not so much as an object, but as a space within which the viewer gradually becomes immersed in a different rhythm of time.
The title Asǝṭṭa refers to the Berber (Amazigh) concept of ritual weaving—a practice that brings together technical knowledge, women’s memory, collective experience, and the transmission of knowledge between generations. In this context, it is not a question of craft in the conventional sense; rather, it begins to function as a method of cultural production.
This is precisely why the pavilion approaches tradition not as a preserved past or as an element of identity to be displayed. Instead, tradition exists here as an active mechanism for creating meaning.
It is particularly significant that collective labour, material culture, and women’s practices are translated into the language of contemporary art without romanticising origins or turning local identity into an exotic image. Moroccan culture is not presented as a symbol.
The installation constantly maintains a state of transition between interior and exterior, private and collective, architecture and the body. This ambiguity becomes one of the project’s greatest strengths: the pavilion avoids fixed definitions and remains a space of continuous movement between different states.
Perhaps this is why the pavilion represents one of the rare examples where visual beauty does not contradict intellectual complexity, but becomes its continuation.
Moroccan Pavilion
India: Scale as a Form of Memory
Commissioner: National Gallery of Modern Art, Ministry of Culture
Editor: Amin Jaffer
Artists: Alwar Balasubramaniam, Sumakshi Singh, Ranjani Shettar, Asim Waqif, Skarma Sonam Tashi
Venue: Arsenale
The Indian Pavilion creates an almost physical impression. Large-scale structures that simultaneously evoke root systems, cracked earth, organic forms, and expanding architecture create a sense of an environment rather than an exhibition space. The viewer finds themselves inside a space of memory, gradually moving away from the position of an external observer.
The project constantly returns to the theme of collectivity. Memory here exists not as a personal experience or nostalgia, but as a collectively created structure assembled from repetition, craftsmanship, traces of labour, and enduring material practices.
The theme of home in Geographies of Distance: Remembering Home is approached not as a fixed place, but as a condition carried within oneself. Home becomes a fluid system of gestures, materials, and memories. This motif is particularly powerful in the context of contemporary India - a country undergoing rapid urbanisation, where the expansion of cities is often accompanied by the disappearance of local landscapes, crafts, and familiar ways of living.
Each of the artists approaches memory through material, yet does so differently: Alwar Balasubramaniam’s clay forms evoke the fragility of the earth; Sumakshi Singh’s threads reconstruct a destroyed home as an almost ghostly architecture of remembrance; Ranjani Shettar’s organic structures transform the natural environment into an internal experience; Skarma Sonam Tashi’s paper constructions address the changing landscape of Ladakh, while Asim Waqif’s works explore accelerated growth as a process that simultaneously creates and erases collective pasts.
What is characteristic is that memory is constantly being reconstructed, changing together with the individual and the environment in which life continues.
This is why the Indian Pavilion remains one of the most powerful spatial statements of the current Biennale. It speaks of home not as a place of return, but as a condition that must be continually rebuilt within oneself amid movement, transformation, and the loss of familiar reference points.
Within the context of In Minor Keys, memory becomes a process of continuously recreating belonging.
Indian Pavilion
Argentina: The Architecture of Instability
Commissioner: Directorate of Cultural Affairs of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, International Trade and Worship of the Argentine Republic
Curator: Josefina Barcia
Artist: Matías Duville
Venue: Arsenale
The Argentine Pavilion remains in memory above all as an intense spatial experience. Monitor Yin Yang by Matías Duville is a monumental work created using salt and charcoal. It brings together drawing, sound, video, and the architecture of the space, gradually transforming not so much into an object, but into an environment in which the viewer becomes physically immersed.
The work addresses a condition of contemporaneity in which an unsettling future is increasingly perceived as an already existing reality, while the human ability to maintain inner stability, recognise beauty, or sustain attention becomes ever more vulnerable.
Instead of a completed form, Duville creates a space of instability - a territory that must literally be traversed, gradually revealing its internal logic. The reference to Yin and Yang functions here not as an image of harmony, but rather as a reminder of the constant oscillation between opposing states: destruction and renewal, fear and hope, fragility and resistance.
The white surface of the installation simultaneously evokes salt, ash, mineral deposits, and fragments of a devastated landscape. The materials acquire meaning not only as physical substances, but also as traces of time - as remnants of natural cycles, human intervention, and processes that cannot be completely halted.
If, in its literal sense, “the salt of the earth” refers to something that preserves life, here the concept acquires a different, dual nature. Salt appears not so much as a symbol of preservation, but as a residue of history - something that holds memory while simultaneously speaking of destruction, becoming a language of time.
Because of this, the pavilion begins to be perceived as a kind of archaeology of the future: a map of a world after transformations whose consequences are already visible, yet not fully understood.
The sensation of instability within the structure itself is particularly powerful. There is an impression that the space could shift or collapse under the influence of any movement nearby. It is precisely this vulnerability that becomes the project’s central statement.
In an era of continuous crises, stability increasingly appears as a temporary condition, while instability gradually becomes a new form of normality.
The Argentine Pavilion makes this feeling almost physically tangible.
Argentine Pavilion
Italy: Between Ruin, Memory, and the Body
Commissioner: Angelo Piero Cappello
Curator: Cecilia Canziani
Artist: Chiara Camoni
Venue: Arsenale
The Italian Pavilion deserves to be considered separately, as it makes the connection between history and the present particularly tangible. Italy rarely engages exclusively with contemporaneity; it almost always works with cultural layers, archives, ruins, and traces of civilisations that continue to exist within contemporary experience.
For this reason, the pavilion is perceived as a space where the past has not ended or become merely an object of study, but continues to exist within the present.
The project With You and Everything, created by Chiara Camoni and curated by Cecilia Canziani, is built around the idea of collectivity. The artistic process is understood not as an individual statement, but as a collective production of memory, gestures, and experience. This choral structure is felt throughout the pavilion - from the organisation of the space to the objects themselves.
In the first part of the exhibition, visitors encounter human-scale figures. In the subdued light, they appear simultaneously ancient and alive, like guardians of the space or witnesses of time. Their bodies are composed of plants, flowers, plastic, found materials, and traces of everyday life, existing somewhere between human and landscape, between archaeological artefact and an image of the future.
It is particularly significant that the body here is never autonomous. It is constantly revealed as something composed of other forms of life, other materials, and traces of collective existence.
In the second part of the pavilion, the space fills with natural light and begins to resemble not an exhibition, but a place of shared presence: tables, cabinets, surfaces for conversation, rest, and contemplation. The domestic gradually transforms into the public, and the private into the collective.
Memory here exists not as an archive or a form of nostalgia, but rather as a continuation of life itself - where the past remains part of the present, and the human being never exists separately from the surrounding world.
Italian Pavilion
Germany: The Pavilion as a Space of Loss
Commissioner: ifa – Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations, supported by the Federal Foreign Office of Germany
Curator: Kathleen Reinhardt
Artists: Sung Tieu, Henrike Naumann
Venue: Giardini
The German Pavilion proved to be one of the most emotionally intense spaces of this year’s Biennale. Here, history is not reconstructed or commented upon from a distance. Instead, it remains present, influencing the perception of every object, surface, and architectural decision.
The project addresses the spectral spaces of Germany’s past: the disappeared GDR pavilion, the post-socialist experience, migration, and the traces of political systems that have formally ended but continue to exist within collective memory. The curatorial concept is built around the idea of historical ruptures - states whose consequences cannot be fully overcome.
The work of Sung Tieu plays a particularly important role. The artist covers the pavilion’s façade with an illusory mosaic referring to the residential architecture of East Berlin and the environment associated with the lives of Vietnamese workers who arrived in the GDR through state-organised programmes. Private biography here becomes connected to a broader conversation about control and migration, gradually becoming part of larger political mechanisms.
In one of the spaces, Sung Tieu uses the image of ladybirds - a familiar symbol of luck and childhood innocence—which is stripped of its original function. The chocolate inside is replaced with wood. This small object unexpectedly begins to speak about mechanisms of perception as convincingly as the architecture of the pavilion itself.
Henrike Naumann turns to another form of archaeology - the archaeology of everyday life. Interiors, furniture, domestic aesthetics, and the visual codes of late socialism become witnesses of an era, revealing that ideology persists not only within official history, but also in habits, objects, tastes, and private spaces.
Another defining feature of the German Pavilion is that its material is not only the exhibition itself, but also the building. The pavilion, historically connected to the National Socialist period, cannot be perceived as neutral architecture. Memory here is literally embedded in the walls.
A further dimension is added by the news of Henrike Naumann’s death shortly before the opening of the Biennale. This fact is difficult to separate from the experience of the exhibition. As a result, the pavilion begins to speak simultaneously about multiple forms of absence: vanished political systems, personal memory, generations, and the impossibility of ever completely moving beyond one’s own history.
German Pavilion
Pavilions That Became Subjects of Debate
One of the distinctive features of this year’s Venice Biennale is that some pavilions were discussed far beyond their artistic content alone. The subjects of debate included selection mechanisms, forms of national representation, the political context of participation, provocation, and the permissible boundaries of artistic freedom in relation to events taking place beyond the exhibition space.
Protests, institutional criticism, and disagreements within the professional community created an additional layer of perception that cannot be ignored.
These pavilions are not united by a common artistic language. What connects them is something else: each of them prompted a discussion not only about the artwork itself, but also about the system within which it exists.
Austria: The Body as Infrastructure
Commissioner: Art and Culture Division of the Federal Ministry of Housing, Arts, Culture, Media and Sport – Republic of Austria
Curator: Nora-Swantje Almes
Artist: Florentina Holzinger
Venue: Giardini
The Austrian Pavilion, featuring Florentina Holzinger’s project Seaworld Venice, became one of the most widely discussed exhibitions of this year’s Venice Biennale. Much of this attention is connected to its extremely direct engagement with the body: physiological processes, vulnerability, physical strain, and states of discomfort become integral parts of the project’s artistic structure. As a result, the pavilion quickly moved beyond professional discourse and became one of the most frequently referenced projects in media and social networks.
The pavilion space simultaneously evokes an amusement park attraction, a laboratory, a closed ecosystem, and a production cycle. Yet behind its radical appearance lies a more complex layer of interpretation. The project can be understood as a reflection on the body not only as a personal or biological space, but also as an element within different systems: ecological, technological, and social. In this reading, the body ceases to be perceived solely as a carrier of individuality and begins to function as a resource, a mechanism of transformation, an object of regulation, or a component of a broader infrastructure.
It is particularly interesting to consider the project through visual associations with Hieronymus Bosch. In his works, the human body often ceases to belong entirely to itself: it becomes an instrument, part of a mechanism, or an element within systems of punishment and warning. One of the most recognisable images is the figure of a person transformed into the language of a bell.
In the Austrian Pavilion, there is an almost literal echo of this motif. The performer becomes the tongue of a bell bearing the inscription O tempora, o mores! (“Oh, the times! Oh, the morals!”), an expression historically associated with anxiety about the condition of society and the crisis of an era. The bell here functions not only as an object that marks time, but also as a warning and a commentary on the present.
This scene creates a rare and powerful connection between Bosch’s medieval imagery and contemporary debates around the body, forming a posthumanist statement.
In this context, Seaworld Venice can be understood not so much as a provocation, but as a question addressed not to sin, as in earlier moral narratives, but to the condition of a society in which the boundaries between human being, infrastructure, and resource are becoming increasingly unclear.
Austrian Pavilion
Luxembourg: Shame as Artistic Material
Commissioner: Kultur | lx – Arts Council Luxembourg on behalf of the Ministry of Culture
Curator: Stilbé Schroeder (Casino Luxembourg – Forum d’art contemporain)
Artist: Aline Bouvy
Venue: Arsenale
The Luxembourg Pavilion, with Aline Bouvy’s project La Merde, became one of those exhibitions around which discussion begins even before encountering the work itself. Its provocative title, direct engagement with physiology, and references to disgust easily create the expectation of an artistic strategy built around shock. However, within the pavilion it becomes clear that the work addresses a more complex set of questions: the mechanisms of shame, the production of norms, and the social regulation of the body.
The central installation unfolds around a mirrored structure that blurs the boundaries between object, space, and viewer at the moment of encountering one’s own reflection.
This confrontation gradually begins to function as a metaphor for self-surveillance: the internalised gaze through which society teaches individuals to regulate their bodies, desires, behaviour, and notions of what is acceptable.
The second part of the space presents the film La Merde, a work that explores shame as a social construct, examining how society produces categories of bodies that require discipline and regulation.
The discussion of femininity becomes particularly significant. Historically, the female body has often been associated with physiology, excess, vulnerability, or the need for control. Bouvy works precisely within this excluded territory—those aspects that are expected to remain hidden, repressed, or considered unacceptable.
For this reason, physiological imagery here functions not so much as provocation, but as a tool for analysing social mechanisms.
In this context, the pavilion proposes viewing physiology as a space of power - a place where ideas of normality, acceptability, and control are formed. Shame ceases to be understood solely as a personal emotion and begins to be read as a social mechanism involved in producing the “proper” body.
In this sense, the Luxembourg Pavilion proves to be closer to the overall tone of the current Biennale than it may initially appear. Like many other projects, it addresses vulnerability, but does so through discomfort, the disruption of familiar boundaries, and an examination of forms of shame that are experienced as personal, although they are often shaped by cultural environments.
Luxembourg Pavilion
Israel: Absence as a Form of Presence
Commissioner: Michael Gov
Curators: Avital Bar-Shay, Sorin Heller
Artist: Belu-Simion Fainaru
Venue: Arsenale
The Israeli Pavilion became the centre of international debate even before the opening of the Venice Biennale. Against the backdrop of the ongoing conflict and accusations of genocide, discussions extended to the very question of the participation of a national pavilion. Public debates around the legitimacy of its presence shifted attention away from the artwork itself and toward the institutional framework of its existence.
The Israeli Pavilion in the Giardini remained closed, and the very fact of its presence became part of a broader political discussion: is it possible today to consider national artistic representation separately from geopolitical reality?
However, if the political conflict is temporarily set aside and attention is directed specifically toward the artwork, the project begins to reveal another dimension.
The installation The Rose of Nothingness refers to the poetry of Paul Celan, particularly to the image of “black milk,” which brings together memory and loss, life and disappearance. A dark liquid slowly fills a rectangular reservoir, creating a space of almost ritual stillness. The work evokes not so much an object as a state of waiting or suspension.
Emptiness becomes one of the central elements of the piece. The black surface simultaneously recalls water, ink, and a mirror—materials associated with memory, inscription, and reflection. In the context of Venice, this image acquires an additional layer of meaning: a city where the Talmud was first printed, and where history itself is connected with the preservation, transmission, and interpretation of texts.
The perception constantly shifts between two modes: reading the work as an autonomous artistic statement and interpreting it through the political circumstances surrounding its existence.
Israeli Pavilion
Russia: Between Symbol and Context
Commissioner: Anastasiia Karneeva
Curator: Collective programme
Artists: Oleg Gudachev, Ekaterina Antonenko / Intrada, Roman Malyavkin, Tatiana Khalbaeva, Timofey Dudarenko, and others
Venue: Giardini
The Russian Pavilion also became one of the projects whose perception is difficult to separate from the circumstances of its presentation. After several years of absence, Russia’s return to the Venice Biennale was inevitably discussed as part of a broader conversation about national representation, the institutional autonomy of art, and the possibility of artistic expression existing beyond political context.
The pavilion’s particularity also lay in its mode of existence. The space was accessible only during the preview days for the press and professional community. At the same time, for the general public, the pavilion remained simultaneously open and inaccessible: through the windows and protective structures, visitors could only partially glimpse what was happening inside. In the official catalogue, the pavilion’s page remained empty. This state between presence and absence unexpectedly became an additional layer of the project’s perception.
The project was titled A Tree Is Rooted in the Sky, referring to Simone Weil’s reflections on spirituality and creativity as phenomena whose source exists beyond everyday experience. However, the image of a tree with roots directed upward carries a broader cultural context. In various philosophical and religious traditions, the inverted tree has been perceived as a symbol of a world in which the source of life lies not in the earthly, but in a transcendent order. Such an image can be read simultaneously as a vertical axis of memory, a connection between different realms, or a sign of a time when stable foundations have been lost.
The project is structured as a series of musical and performative actions involving performers working with folk music, ritual practices, and traditions from different regions. The engagement with folklore and the cultural traditions of smaller communities could be understood as an attempt to speak about multiple identities and peripheral voices - a theme close to the broader tone of the Biennale.
When considered outside political interpretations, the pavilion can be read as a meditation on spiritual support in conditions of instability, as an attempt to address memory, ritual, and inner verticality in an era marked by the loss of stable points of reference.
Russian Pavilion
Greece: A Debate on What a National Pavilion Should Represent Today
Commissioners: Epaminondas Christophilopoulos, Fani Tsatsaia (MOMUS)
Curator: George Bekirakis
Artist: Andreas Angelidakis
Venue: Giardini
The Greek Pavilion, Escape Room by Andreas Angelidakis, became one of the most ambiguously received projects of this year’s Biennale. The work functions simultaneously as a spatial installation, an intellectual construction, and an attempt to examine the mechanisms through which historical, political, and national identities are formed.
The starting point is Plato’s cave, reinterpreted through the lens of the digital age, the culture of simulations, and the condition of post-truth. The pavilion becomes a space where the viewer encounters not so much reality itself, but its interpretations. Truth ceases to be perceived as something stable and begins to exist as a shifting construction, dependent on context and modes of representation.
Inside Escape Room, fragments of twentieth-century Greek and European history emerge alongside political references, archival materials, and reflections on collective memory and the creation of national myths.
At first glance, the pavilion can be perceived as one of the most conceptually dense projects of the Biennale. Yet it was precisely around this work that local debates emerged within the Greek artistic community. Discussions focused on the selection procedure, criticism of the institutional process, and broader questions about what a national pavilion should be today: a space for artistic experience, intellectual inquiry, or a platform for public discourse.
Interestingly, it is precisely this ambiguity that makes the Greek Pavilion particularly relevant to the current Biennale. In this sense, Escape Room is less an attempt to provide answers than a reflection of the growing uncertainty surrounding the notions of identity, representation, and collective expression.
Greek Pavilion
Instead of an Epilogue: Why In Minor Keys Will Remain Important
Every Venice Biennale usually leaves behind several defining images, a list of favourites, and a concise formula capturing the moment in which it took place.
In the case of In Minor Keys, what remains is a sense of an unfinished conversation. Days later, it is not necessarily the loudest works or the pavilions surrounded by the greatest amount of discussion that return to memory.
The 61st Venice Biennale will probably not be remembered as an event of the most radical artistic gestures, nor as an exhibition that offered new answers. Quite the opposite. It will remain as the Biennale that revealed how deeply the contemporary world has grown tired of grand ideologies, confident predictions, fixed identities, and a language that claims to explain everything.
Against the background of wars, institutional crises, migration, ecological anxiety, and constant informational noise, In Minor Keys proposed an unexpectedly simple gesture: to slow down and try to hear what usually remains at the margins of attention.
This is why the central figure of the current Biennale was neither the artist, nor the curator, nor even the institution. It was the human being living within an era of incompleteness - between a past that has not disappeared and a future whose contours are not yet possible to discern.
Today, when almost everything demands a reaction, a position, and certainty, the right to doubt unexpectedly becomes a form of resistance, while the right to remain within complexity becomes a form of honesty.
Parallel Projects: Another Map of Venice
During the Venice Biennale, it becomes especially evident that the city itself gradually transforms into a multilayered exhibition.
The official programme ceases to be the only route. Some of the strongest impressions often emerge outside the Giardini and the Arsenale - in palazzi, former warehouses, private institutions, or projects existing alongside the main structure of the Biennale.
These exhibitions are rarely united by a single theme, yet together they reveal another condition of contemporary art - less national and more exploratory.
Personal Structures. Venice Biennale Arte 2026
The biennial project Personal Structures by the European Cultural Centre has long ceased to be merely part of the official collateral programme. Located across three venues - Palazzo Mora, Palazzo Bembo, and Marinaressa Gardens - it now offers an independent map of Venice, separate from national representation and open to experimentation.
Since 2011, the project has been presented within the collateral events programme of the Venice Biennale, and in 2026 it returns for its eighth edition, reaffirming its international status.
This year, the project is organised around the theme “Confluences”, proposing to view art as a space of interaction between disciplines, memory, technologies, geographies, and identities. More than 175 artists from over 40 countries create a multilayered dialogue about the contemporary condition.
While the official Biennale continues to reflect the geopolitical map of the world, Personal Structures increasingly works with another map - a map of fluid identities, research-based practices, and new ways of understanding humanity in an era of constant transformation.
Georg Baselitz: The Inverted World as a Permanent Condition
Exhibitions by Georg Baselitz create an impression that seems almost independent of time.
Eroi d’Oro (“Golden Heroes”) at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini became one of the most discussed exhibitions outside the main Biennale programme. The exhibition presents new monumental works by the artist, built around golden backgrounds that simultaneously evoke medieval icons and Renaissance painting. Against these luminous surfaces appear inverted, fragile figures—Baselitz’s self-portraits and images of his wife, Elke.
The exhibition is perceived with particular intensity today, as many consider it one of the artist’s final statements. The works do not speak of heroism in the traditional sense, but rather of ageing, vulnerability, corporeality, and time. Gold here ceases to function as a symbol of grandeur and becomes a background for reflection on the limits and finitude of human experience.
Anish Kapoor: Space as Pressure
Anish Kapoor’s exhibition at Palazzo Manfrin in Venice became one of the strongest parallel projects of the Biennale season. The exhibition brought together new and iconic works by the artist, exploring emptiness, matter, reflection, and the perception of space.
Kapoor’s practice has traditionally been connected to scale as a means of transforming perception. Here, too, polished surfaces, dark pigments, and monumental forms operate on the boundary between physical and almost metaphysical experience.
Like many projects presented in Venice this year, the exhibition addresses instability, but does so through space and the viewer’s body. The works do not simply present an object; rather, they make one experience their own presence, vulnerability, and the shifting nature of perception.
Against the background of the In Minor Keys theme, Kapoor’s project unexpectedly resonates with the overall tone of the Biennale—not through memory as an archive, but through an internal state of experience.
Pinault Collection: Memory, the Body, and Disappearance
During the Biennale period, the Pinault Collection traditionally becomes a separate point of attraction, often offering a more intimate and research-oriented perspective compared to the scale of national pavilions.
Among the strongest impressions of this season are the works of Lorna Simpson at Punta della Dogana.
For decades, her practice has explored memory, female identity, race, and those forms of historical visibility that remain incomplete or have been deliberately suppressed. Photography, collage, painting, and sculpture come together to create a space where the past exists not simply as a trace, but as something that continues to shape the present.
Within the context of In Minor Keys, the exhibition unexpectedly resonates with particular precision. Here, too, memory is not perceived as a possibility of fully restoring what has been lost, but remains fragmentary.
And perhaps this is one of the central tones of this year’s Venice: some stories continue to exist not because they have been completely preserved, but because they can never be entirely erased.
Pavlina Vagioni: Kinship as a Form of Existence
The project OIKEIOSIS (Kinship) takes place at Spazio Tana, located directly opposite the main entrance to the Arsenale. A parallel project of the 61st Venice Biennale by artist Pavlina Vagioni, curated by Laura Kritis, it addresses a theme that is increasingly discussed today, yet rarely made genuinely tangible: the idea of kinship as a way of being in the world.
Not so much as a family or social connection, but as a state of belonging - to memory, to the environment, to another person, to space, and even to one’s own vulnerability.
The term oikeiosis originates from Stoic philosophy and describes the process of recognising oneself through another, the formation of natural connection, and mutual belonging. In the context of the project, this concept acquires a contemporary resonance: kinship becomes an alternative to isolation, a way of resisting alienation.
The installation, positioned near the exit of the Arsenale, is perceived simultaneously as a shelter and as a living environment. It does not demand immediate interpretation or intellectual effort. Rather, it invites the viewer to pause.
This is precisely why the work unexpectedly remains in memory longer than many larger-scale projects. It operates quietly, through the feeling that connection with another may not be a lost category, but a still possible form of existence.