The Venice Arsenale is an implacable place. Its proportions say so — the vertiginous length of the Corderie, that sequence of industrial spaces designed to contain the force of a naval power — and so do the stones themselves, steeped in centuries of manual labour, corroded iron, coiled ropes, wood seasoned to become hull. To bring art into these shipyards means accepting the weight of this memory as a permanent condition: every work enters into conversation not only with the other works, but with the echo of everything that was built here to navigate, to conquer, to survive.
In Minor Keys — the curatorial vision of Koyo Kouoh, the Swiss-Cameroonian curator who died in May 2025 — chooses the Arsenale to move through it the way a sonic landscape breaks apart: through resonances, through low frequencies, through those tonalities that the major key lets fall. Five artists, among the many who populate this itinerary, inhabit it with a depth worth pausing to name.
Alice Maher · The daughters who emerge, and those who choose not to
There is a question that a French girl addressed to her mother in front of Alice Maher's work — "Maman, les sirènes — if the mermaids stood up, would the lake go down?" — which the Irish artist cites as the most precise response she has ever received to her own work. It is the right question: not what the work means, but what would happen if the bodies it contains chose to move differently.
Les Filles d'Ouranos (1996/2025) — fifteen orange-coloured heads barely breaking the water's surface, anchored to the bottom like buoys — is one of the most unsettling and most faithful images of the present that the 2026 Biennale hosts. They are figures in the act of emerging — or perhaps in the act of deliberately choosing not to emerge completely, of remaining at that threshold which is simultaneously protection and resistance. Maher takes the myth of the birth of Aphrodite — born of the sea-foam around the severed genitals of the Father — and inverts it: not the female body born of paternal violence to become an object of beauty, but fifteen bodies that self-govern their own degree of visibility.
Alongside, The Sibyls (2025): four figures of seers swallowed by their own hair — "figures struggling with the weight of their heads" — each surmounted by dark mirrors at whose base lie objects in nickel and bronze that recall the practice of scrying, divination through reflective surfaces. The message, says Maher, remains incomprehensible. And this incomprehensibility is not a failure but a programme: prophetic vision is not delivered as merchandise. It is glimpsed, intuited, felt in the body before it reaches the mind.
The Map closes the triptych: a giant textile that can only be understood by approaching it from behind, with light filtering through it as though through the psyche of a territory. Not the map as an instrument of geographical control, but as the skin of the world — as what a place contains of its interior that no cartographic projection can restore.
Wangechi Mutu · The hybrid body as cosmology
SimbiSiren (2026) rises near the Arsenale basin like a creature that has decided to stop precisely at the border between elements: part mermaid, part sphinx, part Kongo spirit, part Mugumo root — the sacred fig tree of Kenya, beneath which rites of foundation and conflict resolution were celebrated. The bronze sculpture's flippered limbs drape over a perforated metal base with the elegance of one who has no need to explain where she comes from or where she is going.
The practice of Wangechi Mutu — Kenyan, raised between Nairobi and New York, formed between art, anthropology, and postcolonial feminism — has always centred on the question of the body: not the body as biological fact but as a field of forces, as a territory in which colonial history, African cosmology, gendered violence, and the capacity for metamorphosis coexist without resolving into any comfortable category. Her hybrid figures are not monsters: they are hypotheses of existence that Western modern thought has lacked the tools to imagine, and which she constructs with the precision of someone who has much to say and knows exactly how to say it.
SimbiSiren speaks to MothersMound — the mound in the shape of a pregnant body that Mutu places elsewhere — across the lagoon and the walls of the Arsenale, like two versions of the same thought: that the generating body and the hybrid body are both forms of knowledge, not decorations of a concept.
Nick Cave · The sentinel, the tree, the migration
The American artist Nick Cave — not the Australian musician, but the sculptor and performer from Chicago born in 1959, creator of the celebrated Soundsuits, sculptural garments born as a response to police brutality against Black bodies following the beating of Rodney King in 1991 — plants his Amalgam (Origin) (2025) outside the Corderie like a bronze sentinel keeping watch over the Arsenale basin.
The figure, cast in monochrome bronze and based on Cave's own body, carries across its surface an entire vegetation of floral reliefs that soften without cancelling the stance of power. From the waist upward the body becomes a tree, and the tree hosts a flight of fifty different avian species that Cave calls a "migration hub": a point of convergence, a place where different trajectories meet without any one suppressing the others. The metaphor is politically explicit but poetically necessary: community as ecosystem, resistance as biological practice as much as cultural one.
In this work resides the same intuition that runs through Cave's entire career: that beauty is not the opposite of politics, but its most radical instrument. A body that flowers is already a declaration. A tree growing from a human body is a manifesto without words.
Theo Eshetu · The garden of the broken-hearted
Born in London in 1958 to an Ethiopian father and a Dutch mother, raised between Addis Ababa, Dakar, and Belgrade, resident in Rome since the 1980s, and a close friend of Koyo Kouoh — Theo Eshetu is one of those artists whose biography is already in itself an aesthetic argument, not through exoticism but through density. His video work, which across four decades has explored the possibilities of the screen as a membrane between worlds, arrives at the 2026 Arsenale in the most disarming and most simple form he has ever produced.
Garden of the Broken-Hearted (2026): a real olive tree, on a rotating platform, lit by spotlights, onto which a video of the same olive tree is projected. The tree is simultaneously subject and screen. The medium — the projection, the video, the screen — disappears, leaving only the thing itself, emanating its own image as though it were its own light. The rotation evokes the primary forms of storytelling — the round, the spiral, circular time — but in the end it is the gesture of care that prevails: keeping a tree alive in a Venetian industrial space requires a daily attention that is itself part of the work.
Eshetu has recounted that this installation was born from his conversation with Koyo Kouoh about the challenge of making art while mourning the present. The olive tree — plant of peace, of waiting, of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern rootedness, of grief and resistance — turns upon itself projecting itself onto itself, like a being that must continually remind itself of its own existence. In a space that still resonates with sawmills and ropes, that delicate sound of rotation becomes one of the most silent and most necessary acts of the entire Biennale.
Chiara Camoni · The forest of figures, the time of clay
The Italian Pavilion — which Chiara Camoni occupies with Con te con tutto, curated by Cecilia Canziani in the Tese delle Vergini at the Arsenale — is Italy's response to the minor key of the Biennale, and it is so without any concession to the nationalist grandeur that has often afflicted this representation. For the first time in the history of the Italian Pavilion, the project is entrusted entirely to female knowledge and sensibilities: and this is not a symbolic gesture, but a choice that changes the grammar of the space.
One enters an almost dark forest. Colonne, Sister, Daimon — anthropomorphic figures slightly larger than human scale, built with the coiling technique or composed of fragments of terracotta that give form to bodies in continuous metamorphosis — face the entrance like a silent procession that receives without dominating. There are no plinths: the bodies stand on the floor as they would in a forest, with the same logic of spatial occupation that belongs to beings who grow from the earth. The first Tesa is pure sculpture, but sculpture in the sense it was before modernity codified it as an object: it is presence, it is weight, it is relation.
The second part of the pavilion introduces the Dialoghi section, conceived by Fiammetta Griccioli and Lucia Aspesi: Camoni's work enters into conversation with an Etruscan amphora from the Rovati collection, works by Fausto Melotti, Alberto Martini, Marisa Merz, archival materials connected to Loïe Fuller, Martha Graham, Medardo Rosso, and Senga Nengudi, through to fossils and objects that expand the account of matter and its transformations over time. Etruscan craft as the direct ancestor of Camoni's practice: the arts called "minor" that were never minor, only forgotten by a narrative of art history built to exclude them.
Con te con tutto is a title that sounds like a promise but is in fact a phenomenology: the encounter with the other — body, matter, time, form of life — requires bringing oneself entirely, holding nothing back. Clay has always known this. The problem was that we had stopped listening to it.
The minor key as a frequency of survival
To move through the Arsenale of this Biennale means reckoning with a question that art rarely poses so directly: what remains when whoever imagined something is no longer here to see it realised?
Maher, Mutu, Cave, Eshetu, Camoni: five practices that bear no resemblance to one another, departing from profoundly different geographies and traditions, and yet sharing something harder to name than a theme: a disposition toward slowness, toward matter as interlocutor, toward the body as archive rather than surface. A common conviction that beauty is not decoration but argument — that making something beautiful in the middle of a world coming apart is already a form of resistance, perhaps the oldest one that exists.
The minor key is not sad. It is the key in which one says what the major key cannot contain: complexity, ambiguity, loss without consolation. It is the key of the olive tree that projects its own image and turns upon itself in a visceral, numinous, and hypnotic former Venetian shipyard.
61st International Art Exhibition · La Biennale di Venezia · In Minor Keys · Arsenale · 9 May – 22 November 2026 · labiennale.org
