Venice, between the Giardini and the Arsenale, once again becomes not merely a geography of art but an ontological device: a site where Dasein is questioned in its nakedness. The 61st International Art Exhibition, titled In Minor Keys, unfolds as an act of listening in a minor register—withdrawn from clamor, opening instead a space of resonance.
Following the premature passing of Koyo Kouoh, the decision to realize her project in its entirety assumes the weight of an act of care. Care not as a sentimental gesture, but as an ontological stance: Sorge, as Heidegger would say. To take charge of an idea means to guard it through time, to allow it to unfold. In this fidelity, the Biennale does not preserve a legacy; it sets it back into circulation, like a seed capable of germinating even in absence.
“Care is the being of Dasein.”
— Martin Heidegger
— Martin Heidegger
In Minor Keys is an invitation to displace the center. There is no monumentality here, no encyclopedic accumulation. Instead, there is a search for a permanent center of gravity—not fixed, but inward—capable of orienting experience without hardening it. A center that does not coincide with the West, nor with the market, nor with the chronology of the avant-gardes, but with the possibility of encounter.
The exhibition brings together 111 participants from diverse geographic and symbolic constellations. It does not aim to represent the world, but to place it in relation. Kouoh privileged subterranean affinities and unexpected resonances: art as a gravitational field in which distant practices recognize one another without prior acquaintance.
Here, the thrownness of Dasein—that condition of already being in the world without having chosen it—is not a condemnation but a creative premise. Artists work within colonial memories, environmental disasters, and historical fractures; yet from this exposure to contingency emerges a generative possibility.
The exhibition unfolds not through didactic sections but through motifs, like a musical score. The “Shrines” pay tribute to two world-makers, Issa Samb and Beverly Buchanan—figures who conceived art as generative energy rather than as an object to be preserved. The shrine is not nostalgic celebration but a space of intensity: a site where the work becomes presence.
The procession, inspired by Afro-Atlantic choreographies, transforms the audience into a collective body. One does not observe from the outside; one enters the rhythm. Within this movement, hierarchies are suspended, archives unsettled, symbols traversed anew. Knowledge is no longer vertical, but circular.
The “Schools” emerge as ecosystems of learning—rooted in specific territories yet transnational in scope. Here, pedagogy yields to living transmission. The aim is not to explain art, but to inhabit a practice together. Sensation precedes concept; experience surpasses instruction.
In an era obsessed with productivity, In Minor Keys reclaims the right to rest. The Creole garden and the courtyard—historically born under conditions of constraint—become metaphors of self-sufficiency and reconnection. Spaces in which the human retunes itself to the more-than-human.
The exhibition design, entrusted to Wolff Architects, approaches the threshold as a transformative experience: vast indigo drapes filter the gaze like leaves modulating light. The visual identity draws inspiration from komorebi, the Japanese term describing sunlight filtering through foliage. It is not merely a visual effect, but an exercise in perception. What matters is not only to understand, but above all to feel.
To attune oneself to nature does not mean illustrating or thematizing it, but allowing oneself to be traversed by it. Art thus becomes a device of sensory resonance.
The performance program places the body at the center as a living archive. In the Giardini, a poetic procession echoes the journey Kouoh undertook in 1999 from Dakar to Timbuktu: a chorus of voices restoring to language its primordial function of care and power. The griot is not an entertainer, but a guardian of memory.
Here, healing is not a New Age metaphor, but a political practice. Through rhythm, song, and presence, a provisional community reconstitutes itself. Dasein discovers itself as plural.
The catalogue reflects the same posture: not a mere documentary instrument, but a choral weaving of over one hundred voices. Each artist enters into dialogue with an invited author, generating an ensemble that resists monologic unity. The archive becomes a living organism.
At the same time, the Biennale’s environmental commitment—from emissions reduction to the use of renewable energy—does not appear as a superficial declaration, but as a coherent extension of care. To care for art implies caring for the world that makes it possible.
In Minor Keys offers suspension, deceleration, attention. In a time dominated by noise and saturation, choosing the minor key means restoring value to the inconspicuous.
Perhaps the true permanent center of gravity is not a place but a practice: that of listening. Listening to the earth, to the body, to the other. Listening to that which, though thrown into the world, continues to seek a form of coexistence.
The 61st Biennale Arte does not merely exhibit works. It exposes us. It reminds us that art is not an object to be understood, but a condition to be traversed. And that, in the cool shade of a tree—real or symbolic—we may once again learn how to exist.
“Poetically man dwells upon this earth.”
— Friedrich Hölderlin
— Friedrich Hölderlin
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For information: Press Office – Architecture and Visual Arts
La Biennale di Venezia
tel. +39 041 5218 849 | [email protected] | www.labiennale.org
For information: Press Office – Architecture and Visual Arts
La Biennale di Venezia
tel. +39 041 5218 849 | [email protected] | www.labiennale.org
Facebook: La Biennale di Venezia | X: @la_Biennale | Instagram: @lab
