Venezia, 6 May. (askanews) – It rains, after days of sunshine, on the first pre-opening day of the 2026 Biennale Arte, “In minor keys”, designed by Koyo Kouoh and then created by a curatorial team of his assistants. It’s raining and it’s probably rightly so, both for a tribute of melancholy to the curator who suddenly passed away a year ago, and for the climate of fierce controversy that accompanied the gestation and now the opening of the event: the presence of Russia, Israel, the absence of Italian artists, the lack of participation of Iran, the tensions between the Biennale, the government and also the EU, the resignation of the jury and the postponement of the awards ceremony. In all this no one talked about art. It’s raining, they said, and one might think that, in fact, it couldn’t be otherwise.
But beyond the rain the exhibition exists, it has revealed itself in its richness of practices and worlds, in its desire to broaden the space of art and show the work of artists who are deeply immersed in contemporaneity and who allow us to change perspective.
“What you see in the exhibition – Rasha Salti of the curatorial team explained to askanews – are first of all artists with whom Koyo has worked for a long time, so they truly represent her way, but at the same time there are also artists that we have proposed to her, practices that she discovered through us, who are in a fertile conversation with those that she had thought of for this Biennial”.
An exhibition that does what a Biennial should do, that is, it looks at the most vibrant manifestations of the art systemwelcomes territories, physical and mental, that have long been excluded from a Western-centric discourse, looks at practices that concretely think about the present and, even more specifically, reflects on words such as hope, future, spirituality.
“One of the goals of this exhibition from the beginningright from the idea from which Koyo started and on which it built relationships and work – added Siddhartha Mitter, another of the curators – was that had a soul, the spirit. And without worrying about what the critics might say, because the most important thing is the public, and I think that today we can say that this exhibition has a soul and if in some way it reaches other souls it is already a success”.
In the exhibition there are artists who use the structure of the séance, others who create ritual and propitiatory clothing; there are films that tell the story of an African Robin Hood and olive trees that rotate on their base; there is a lot of painting, especially in the renovated central pavilion, but without any taste, we could say, “orientalist”, no, what we are talking about is our life on planet earth, it concerns all of us. And then, and this is probably the most intense part, there are many large installations at the Arsenale, which use science and technologybut which look at the human being as the first aspect, even in this world at war and in the midst of controversy.
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