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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.

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.

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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.

As Kouoh wrote, the Biennale “intends neither a litany of commentary on world events, nor an inattention or escape from compounding and continuous intersecting crises.” Instead, at the heart of many of these practices lies a shared reflection on the ongoing crisis of an entire ideological, epistemological and spiritual system that has shaped the modern Western capitalist worldview—a rupture now visibly transforming society while reopening pathways toward alternative cosmologies and forms of knowledge closer to traditional beliefs long denied, dismissed or erased.

While Adriano Pedrosa’s Biennale leaned more heavily toward the Global South and Indigenous frameworks, this edition offers a broader, more geographically layered polyphony, tracing how contemporary artists across cultures revisit human and ecological histories to rediscover myths, rituals and systems of belief that preceded today’s dominant paradigms. In doing so, the exhibition suggests how a greater human maturity—and with it a stronger willingness to serve a broader collective good—can emerge through learning to recognize and value not only the existence of diverse communities but also entire worldviews, systems of knowledge and spiritual traditions that, despite their differences, continue to grapple with the same existential human questions.

A core concept of the exhibition is the creole garden, as theorized by Édouard Glissant, used here less as a political notion and more as a metaphorical tool and community platform that gathers diverse voices. A large part of the Giardini is indeed an expansive garden—not necessarily of Eden, but of work that seeks to recover that primordial, long-lost, empathic and mythic connection with the earth. Nature is presented not as scenery, backdrop or idyll, but as a vital force and protagonist in many of the works on view, with several already created in direct collaboration with it.

Floating along the path leading to the main pavilion at the Giardini are the standards of Japanese Canadian artist Alexa Hatanaka, works that already embody, both materially and conceptually, many of the exhibition’s central........

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