In Minor Keys

The 60th Venice Biennale, which took place in 2024, made history by having Adriano Pedrosa from MASP as its curator. It was the first time the world's most important art exhibition had a Latin American curator at the helm, bringing space to Indigenous artists, dissidents, and communities historically marginalized within contemporary art.

This year, from May 9 to November 22, the 61st Venice Biennale @labiennale will take place, this time curated by curator Koyo Kouoh, who passed away during the Biennale's production, leaving the project in the hands of her team.

Koyo Kouoh, curator, architect, and executive director of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, was the first African woman in this role.

Throughout her career, Koyo defended the idea that African curators should act as "cultural agents" and "spirit workers," seeing art as inseparable from memory, identity, and life in society.

There was a deep care in the way she envisioned exhibitions, artists, and cultural narratives, always bringing humanity, listening, and belonging to the center of the conversation.

With the theme In Minor Keys, which draws from a musical reference: in minor scales, emotion usually appears in a more subtle, introspective, and sensitive way, the exhibition seeks an aesthetic of listening, resistance, and collective healing, valuing subtler, more emotional, and humane narratives in contrast to the fast pace and visual excess of the present.

Occupying the spaces of the Giardini and the Arsenale, the exhibition invites the public to slow down and explore themes such as memory, spirituality, belonging, and imagination through more immersive and sensorial experiences.

Comigo Ninguém Pode

This year's Brazilian project for the Brazil Pavilion at the Venice Biennale is titled "Comigo ninguém pode" (Dieffenbachia), taking the popular Brazilian plant as the central metaphor of the exhibition.

Between protection, toxicity, and resistance, the show builds a narrative that crosses spirituality, historical violence, and cultural survival through the works of Rosana Paulino and Adriana Varejão.

Diane Lima's curatorship also marks an important moment for Brazil's presence in Venice. For the first time, the Brazil Pavilion will be entirely led by women, bringing together two of the most relevant Brazilian contemporary artists under the gaze of the first Black woman to curate the pavilion.

The first images released of the space already show a pavilion built in a very sensorial way, bringing together nature, spirituality, and memory in a more immersive experience.

The proposal seems to move away from obvious interpretations of Brazilianness to present a more symbolic, dense, and emotional Brazil within the Biennale.

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