Soft competition

One of the clichés of the Venice Biennale is that it is the art world’s Olympics. This phrase has made little sense for many years when the competition has been mainly about who adheres most faithfully to the central tenets of contemporary art — its global politics, for example — rather than stand out aesthetically. There was an unusual amount of prognostication in the art press before the opening of this year’s edition. The Biennale now turns the idea of rivalry on its head, tricking viewers into a false sense of non-competitive calm.

The event’s central exhibition, In Minor Keys, conceived by the Cameroonian-Swiss curator Koyo Kough, reconfigures the very notion of variation. After the last edition’s overt ideological reliance on historical material and outsider narratives that heralded the end of the contemporary paradigm, this project was billed as a shift into subtler tones. With over a hundred artists, nearly a quarter of whom come from Africa and Northern America each, the exhibition presents contemporary art as it may look when its battles have been won.

Many of the works in In Minor Keys concern themselves with the ethnographic, botanical, or archaeological. At the entrance of the central pavilion, for example, visitors are greeted by a bright red bird totem embroidered with scenes of rebellion made by Big Chief Demon Melancon of New Orleans. The Sri Lankan sculptor Rajani Perera and Filipino painter Marigold Santos’s giant clay humanoid figure, hidden behind an ornate mask and resting on her elongated breasts, is another example of the genre. The Pakistani Wardha Shabbir’s geometrical gouaches of gardens linked to satellite imagery and family memory are part of another strand, which also includes the Swiss artist Uriel Orlow’s photographic herbarium.

What is surprising about this assembly of interests is that it doesn’t dwell on a museological taxonomy. Whereas one might have expected a critique of classification systems (“colonial”, as in the Congolese sculptor Sammy Baloji’s digs at Italy), In Minor Keys seamlessly absorbs them for its purpose. Another project of Orlow’s, which catalogues the geographic provenance of the flora in the Giardini, as if this were new knowledge, highlights the method. If only there were an international event, a competition perhaps, in which the nations could show off the artefacts, natural, intellectual, or aesthetic, of which they are the custodians!

As intriguing as one may expect the ostensible geographic diversity of the project for an audience in Venice, In Minor Keys is monotonous. Room after room, the show nods at some new knowledge system without bothering to explain what embracing it may entail. One may partly account for the solemnity of the presentation with the curator Kough’s death in 2025 in the middle of her appointment. But that would also underscore that this show was curated in her absence by a leaderless committee. Is the resulting veneration and appropriation of the mystified other — a trope which has long fuelled contemporary art — sheer inertia? 

That precisely is what has happened to the art world in recent years. Consequently, the exhibition includes some bafflingly credulous works, such as the Kenyan painter Wangechi Mutu’s kinetic and video ode to animistic creation mythologies. But it also contains works by Marcel Duchamp and quaint photographs and colour-bar window tints by the Irish imaging artist Alan Phelan which, despite providing much-needed respite in the exhibition, make little conceptual sense in the line-up. 

If one ignores the artist biographies, many infused with the customary tales of migration, the overt politics is gone too. Aside from the Lebanese conceptual archivist Walid Raad’s paintings of Yasser Arafat’s beds and the Japanese “feminist” Yoshiko Shimada’s pink champagne Molotov cocktail, the (art) world’s politics has been entirely sublimated in the exhibition’s aesthetic. 

Gone, therefore, is the ostensible urgency of entirely routine calls to action. Few of the works demand action from the visitors. That shift itself is welcome, of course, yet an ominous sense of a set of values having been forgone hangs over some presentations. The South African painter Johannes Phokela’s mock history oils rendered in a Rococo hand and vivid blue both extol and lampoon virtues such as temperance, fidelity, and piety. Phokela turns vital morals into mere European tropes, but his images are frustratingly attractive. Elsewhere, the Canadian installation artist Bonnie Devine juxtaposes bison etched in animal skin with wall drawings of tall ships, submarines, and military drones. These are false but, frustratingly, plausible dichotomies.

The unstated warning to these kinds of narratives may once have been that undermining a civilisation can only go without consequence for so long. Before In Minor Keys, Biennale visitors could have wondered if the West would fall not owing to external competition but because of its internal tensions. This exhibition captures the ideas that underpin the tradition (including the notion of a Biennale in which conflicting ideas may compete) and presents them as a property with no corporate provenance. This is a post-contemporary art, in the sense that it no longer requires the centrality of Western thought for its origins without, alas, foregoing the Western art world’s self-affirming critical infrastructure.

Setting out to be non-confrontational, In Minor Keys has the comforting feel of a competition win when other participants have conceded. It’s like taking the late American land artist Beverly Buchanan’s childlike drawings and maquettes of shacks and rural houses as indicators of a win in a history-defining territorial dispute. This is only an illusion, because the exhibition engages few of the realities its paradigms are struggling with outside the Biennale. Hardly any works in the show, for example, take on technology or acknowledge that the politics they silently buoys them is in decline. Even the Western museum — the one structure that may conceivably host a display of works that question its legitimacy — is in ruins. These blind spots limit the use of the contest.

This paradigm appears to have been internalised by many of the national contributions to the Biennale outside In Minor Keys, and not many pavilions have chosen to chase the social or technological contemporary. For geopolitics, which is the art world’s proxy for figuring out how societies may come to live together in the ways that many of the works in In Minor Keys promote, one must turn to the demonstration outside the Israeli pavilion, the flash mob disco by punk activist collective Pussy Riot at the opening of Russia’s exhibition, and the mass resignation of the Golden Lion jury in protest of the two countries’ inclusion in the Biennale’s competition. 

With even the committee gone, who will judge the contestants in the art world race next, and on what basis? The non-hierarchical softness of In Minor Keys hands out participation prizes to everyone. “When The Idea Is Extinguished The Word Sparkles”, a cryptic slogan by Phelan installed in a passageway between exhibition halls, suggests that this settlement relies on non-contestation. How realistic this is remains to be seen. 

---

The 61st Biennale of Art continues until 22 November 2026.

https://www.labiennale.org/en/art/2026