Vittoria Benzine on the anthropological impulse of the late Koyo Kouoh’s final vision.
I made plans to attend the 61st Venice Biennale this spring. October marks six years since I left my post as a Madison Avenue shopgirl to write about art full-time, and missing a third Biennale felt irresponsible—embarrassing, even. In January, while trading stories with Brooklyn-based painter Caroline Absher over candlelight and mint spliffs, I realised her latest exhibition, Lost Language, was set to open in Copenhagen days before. I prefer stacking Euro trips in multiples. Who better to do it with than another magician?
Fate would have my first Venice Biennale shrouded in controversy—Russia returned, Israel remained, the jury resigned, and legendary Swiss Cameroonian curator Koyo Kouoh, appointed to oversee the main show, suddenly passed away, leaving only notes for the five arts professionals appointed to realize In Minor Keys. This story has been told a lot by this point, yet it still feels requisite.
The world’s many fair and biennale weeks simultaneously compare and contrast, despite their disparate roots (the former are trade events, the latter intellectual). But Venice is a standalone place, I quickly realised. No wonder the world convenes here every other year, one hundred nations demonstrating cultural prowess in this edition—twenty-nine in the Giardini’s permanent pavilions, twenty-five in the Arsenale’s former shipbuilding facilities not far north, and forty-six more throughout Venice.
Kouoh’s Biennale also admitted thirty-one collateral events, like Korean abstractionist Lee Ufan’s retrospective featuring meditative site-specific paintings, at the San Marco Art Centre, which I caught before walking to the Biennale’s traditional Wednesday press preview. A photographer stopped me as I drew near, asking to snap the way I was using my scarf as an umbrella. A writer I’ve known since we were green let me join her in line.
Inside, I headed straight for the Giardini’s clearly labelled Central Pavilion, containing part one of In Minor Keys. Ostrich feathers on two tall costumes by New Orleans-based Black Masker Big Chief Demond Melancon flutter in the breeze inside. They stand proud back to back, just far enough apart to appreciate the tropical blooms their versos form.
Two hallways within the freshly renovated interior extend from this foyer. One, painted alluring navy blue, leads you into a pleasure den featuring a glimmering assemblage by Chicago and Kingston-based Ebony G. Patterson, sensual drawings by Brooklyn-born Kambui Olujimi, and a wisping mural by Japanese-Canadian Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka.
Birds sing from the opposite bright white hallway, which opens out on an airy gallery offering thirty-four black and white prints of a helicopter by American photographer Zoe Leonard. Nearby lie crumbled, industrial mixed media works by Japanese-American sculptural painter Carrie Yamaoka, as well as for the birds (2003/2026) by sculptural filmmaker Joy Episalla. All three artists helped found the lesbian art collective fierce pussy.
No matter which route you choose, all these spaces resolve into so-called “Biennial Art” in its purest, highest form—sensory, immersive, and statement-oriented.
I went down navy my first time through, without really thinking about it. When I returned, before I even realised, In Minor Keys whisked me straight ahead, a third way, into the pavilion’s lofty rotunda, where clay statuettes by late Senegalese sculptor Seni Awa Camara stand atop blue platforms and feminine, oceanic scenes by Cameroonian multitalent Werewere Liking—one of the show’s stars—face off with Galileo Chini’s 117 year old Italian Art Nouveau ceiling murals.
This comparative approach abounds. That rotunda also presents opposing nooks devoted to Marcel Duchamp, the widely-studied father of conceptual art, and Beverly Buchanan, star sculptor of the American South two generations later. In the cavernous Arsenale, suspended collages combining African ritual statues with modern Western art usher guests into an immersive installation of mirrored ropes and a multichannel film by Algerian artist Kader Attia.
About a dozen more galleries, meanwhile, lie beyond the Central Pavilion’s rotunda in numerous permutations. An entire moody room by Kenyan multi-hyphenate Wangechi Mutu, centred around a short film on Mother Earth’s importance, proves one standout moment. So does another shrine-like space, where the choir in Buhlebezwe Siwani’s five-channel film animates the Amsterdam and Cape Town-based activist’s two nearby soap sculptures, Zanenkosi (2022) and Izintaba (2023). Both resemble antiquities; their green surfaces play pleasingly with the soft pink banners by Japanese printmaker Yoshiko Shimada hanging opposite them. Another gallery convenes three distinctly maximalist visionaries for a balanced conversation—Kumiko Hatanaka, Patterson, and American painter Tammy Nguyen.
Like all Biennial Art, In Minor Keys is dazzlingly—though not merely—pretty. Maybe the questions raised in its midst prove art isn’t broken. It’s grappling with its role in this ravaging reality. “The 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia intends neither a litany of commentary on world events, nor an inattention or escape from compounding and continuous intersecting crises,” the exhibition’s curatorial statement says. “Rather, it proposes a radical reconnection with art’s natural habitat and role in society.”
Alas, the first feeling I had here evoked Mexico City’s dizzying anthropology museum. Numerous moments throughout In Minor Keys aesthetically evoke such institutions. What’s more, in many places, the exhibition outright teaches, from the Duchamp nook (Buchanan’s is more like an art altar) to the gallery where the Nairobi Contemporary Art Centre presents works by alumni of Uganda’s Makerere College. This is a great moment to rest your tired legs and read the timeline ringing the room, too.
That educational atmosphere abounds throughout both venues. The more traditional video on Nigeria’s Guest Artists Space at the Arsenale builds on less conventional anthropological propositions at the Giardini, like the hair-themed room pairing Irish artist Alice Maher’s charcoal drawings with Nigerian interdisciplinary artist Marcia Kure’s paintings and hair suits.
As I wandered the show’s dense thickets, the matter of anthropology’s problematic heritage dawned on me. That field has been art’s raison d’être in the identity politics era. Biennales may be “vibes based” now, but as far as I can tell, that old teaching impulse isn’t receding. Should it? Can it? Doesn’t everything teach, somehow? Maybe formalism is the answer—you can only bring a horse to water. For me, this Biennale comes down to Audre Lorde’s timeless question of the master’s tools and the master’s house. She had a definite opinion on the matter, yet art keeps on trying.
