At Koyo Kouoh’s Biennale, performance is the real centerpiece

The Venice Biennale is now open to the public and will remain so through November. After the first wave of previews and hot takes, after the frenzy of pavilion rankings—often shaped by vague and deeply subjective criteria—and after the inevitable social chronicles, the time has come for a more measured reflection on this global event. While it is still too early to ask what will endure from this edition, and particularly from the main exhibition curated by Kouoh—the Swiss-Cameroonian curator whose untimely death in 2025 came after every aspect of the project had already been conceived, later brought to completion by a team including Rasha Salti, Gabe Beckhurst Fejioo, Marie Hélène Pereira, Rory Tsapayi, and Siddhartha Mitter—the title she chose already offers a precise interpretive key. “In Minor Keys” draws its title from music, evoking an introspective mode of listening attuned to marginal and oblique narratives, voices that exist just outside the frame and therefore frictionally resist the dominant noise of media discourse.

Among the abundance of works spread across the Central Pavilion and the Arsenale, each visitor will inevitably find some that resonate more deeply than others. Many will feel disoriented by the proliferation of themes; some may remain indifferent, or openly critical, of both the overall proposition and individual works. Yet it is difficult not to recognize the ritual and ceremonial thread running through the entire exhibition. Kouoh’s curatorial statement echoes the words of Toni Morrison: “In our myths, in our songs: that is where the seeds are. We cannot go on endlessly dwelling on crisis. We need love, and we need magic—this too is life.”

From the hypnotic Blessing the Ancestors by Big Chief Demond Melancon to the poets’ procession inspired by the Poetry Caravan—the journey Kouoh undertook with nine African poets in 1999—the public has been drawn into a series of invocations, enchantments, and collective processions inspired by carnival parades and gatherings from across the Afro-Atlantic world. The result is a radically different register: participatory, communal, and alive. It restores vitality to a genre that has often felt exhausted—performance art itself, which features prominently in several national presentations, including the Austrian Pavilion, where Florentina Holzinger revisits Viennese Actionism with a theatrical excess that clearly delights audiences.

It is precisely through this ritual dimension that the true nature of Kouoh’s Biennale becomes legible. Many critics have interpreted this “minor” perspective as a retreat, or as a refusal to confront the major crises of the present, from war to artificial intelligence. Yet the exhibition remains firmly anchored in the contemporary, animated by a polyphony of voices resisting disappearance, extinction, silence, coercion, and violence—voices carrying experiences of loss, illness, exile, and domination. Within this horizon, In Minor Keys restores to art a certain timelessness, pulling it away from the tyranny of immediate urgency and reopening it to a deeper, more restless, more necessary duration. This shift is not only temporal; it is also spatial. It concerns how the world itself is imagined. Against the nineteenth-century geography of nation-states still embedded in the pavilion system, the exhibition proposes instead a constellation of transnational and intergenerational relations: ancestral communal genealogies, urban proximities, territorial and emotional bonds, hybrid traditions, and what the Martinican philosopher Édouard Glissant described as processes of cultural “creolization.”

To reduce the exhibition to a simple “woke” gesture, or to label it generically decolonial or postcolonial, is to fundamentally misunderstand its scope. Certainly, the familiar geographic balance has been overturned: South America commands more space than North America, Africa more than Europe. But the point is not the replacement of one center by another. It is the destabilization of the very idea of center. More importantly, the essential gesture of Kouoh’s proposal—and perhaps its most compelling legacy—is its movement away from a dominant political framework toward a more anthropological understanding of art: art as anthropology.

In opposition to the presentism so often associated with contemporary art—an attitude driven less by technological acceleration than by the speculative logics of the market, according to which even the Biennale must synchronize itself to the seasonal rhythm of fairs and the cult of novelty—the exhibition claims a slower, more layered temporality. It is a temporality capable of holding together the immediacy of emotional vibration and the sedimented memory of geological strata.

Many works, from Alvaro Barrington to Daniel Lind-Ramos, from Avi Mograbi to Ebony G. Patterson, grapple with mourning. Yet throughout the exhibition, a melancholic hope persists. Art appears here as a practice of memory and invocation: a way of honoring ancestors and continuing a conversation with the absent. From the Shrines section opening the Central Pavilion—evoking the work of Issa Samb, co-founder of Dakar’s revolutionary Laboratoire Agit’Art, alongside that of Beverly Buchanan—to the powerful installation by Alfredo Jaar, conceived as a blazing red temple dedicated to rare earth minerals, those indispensable raw materials at the center of both technological industry and geopolitical tensions, one intuition emerges with force: the world—not only the art world—is shaped by rituals, symbolic systems, shared myths, and invisible bonds.

To insist on this dimension is to shift the axis of art itself. No longer merely a critical device, art becomes a reparative practice: a form of mutual recognition, of shared awareness of common fragilities and of a collective need for reconciliation, breath, and belonging. It becomes an attempt to reconnect with the earth, the elements, genealogy, and affective ties. Rather than detached contemplation, ritual leads to emotional participation—to compassion in the literal sense of the word: to feel together.

Leaving the exhibition, one’s gaze inevitably falls on the lines outside the pavilions, the quiet movements through the galleries, the almost devotional attention paid to the works on display. It becomes evident that even secularized Western culture continues to sustain a profoundly ritual relationship with art. As the anthropologist Alfred Gell once observed, art may well be the last domain in contemporary societies where a form of totemism—even animism—still survives. Yes—but in minor keys.