Venice, May 6 (askanews) – After days of sunshine, it's raining on the first day of the pre-opening of the 2026 Art Biennale, "In Minor Keys," designed by Koyo Kouoh and then realized by a curatorial team of her assistants. It's raining, and probably rightly so, both as a melancholic tribute to the curator who passed away suddenly a year ago and because of the climate of fierce controversy that surrounded the preparation and now the opening of the event: the presence of Russia and Israel, the absence of Italian artists, Iran's non-participation, tensions between the Biennale, the government, and even the EU, the resignation of the jury, and the postponement of the awards ceremony.
In all this, no one mentioned art. It's raining, they said, and one wonders if it couldn't have been 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 showcase the work of artists who are deeply rooted 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 and foremost artists with whom Koyo has worked for a long time, so they truly represent her style, 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 she had envisioned for this Biennale." An exhibition that does what a Biennale should do, that is, it looks at the most lively manifestations of the art system, it welcomes territories, physical and mental, that have long been excluded from a Western-centric discourse, it looks at practices that concretely reason about the present and, even more specifically, it reflects on words like hope, future, spirituality." One of the objectives of this exhibition from the beginning, from the idea from which Koyo started and on which she built relationships and work – added Siddhartha Mitter, another of the curators – was that it had a soul, a spirit.
And without worrying about what the critics might say, because the most important thing is the public, and I think today we can say that this exhibition has a soul, and if it somehow reaches other souls, it's already a success." In the exhibition, there are artists who use the structure of the séance, others who create ritual and propitiatory clothes; there are films that tell the story of an African Robin Hood and olive trees that rotate on their bases; there is a lot of painting, especially in the renovated Central Pavilion, but without any, we might say, "Orientalist" flavor. No, what is being discussed is our life on planet Earth, it concerns us all.
And then, and this is probably the most intense part, there are many large installations at the Arsenale, which use science and technology, but which look first and foremost at the human being, even in this world at war and amidst controversy. (Leonardo Merlini)
Notizie.it editorial team