The 61st International Art Exhibition, titled In Minor Keys, unfolds under exceptional circumstances. Conceived by Koyo Kouoh before her sudden passing in 2025, the Biennale proposes a more intimate and sensitive reading of the world, one attentive to silence, fragility, ritual and non-hegemonic forms of knowledge. Yet the opening days were marked by intense geopolitical tensions that transformed Venice itself into a site of confrontation between art and contemporary global conflicts.
Activists, artists and curators called for the closure of the Israeli pavilion and questioned the participation of Russia and even the United States within the current geopolitical climate. During the preview days, protests organized by groups such as the Art Not Genocide Alliance led to demonstrations around the Israeli pavilion, while Pussy Riot organized actions against Russia’s return to the Biennale after years of absence following the invasion of Ukraine. At least 27 of the 100 national pavilions were reported as partially or completely closed during one morning of the preview days, while artists participating in the central exhibition covered or altered works in gestures of solidarity. Among the pavilions affected by symbolic strikes or temporary closures were Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, the Netherlands, Ireland, Japan, South Korea, Lebanon, Luxembourg, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Turkey, among others.
In this climate of uncertainty and political fracture, In Minor Keys becomes something paradoxical: a Biennale simultaneously marked by instability and profound artistic intensity. Within this charged atmosphere, the Brazilian artists presented across Venice do not avoid these tensions, they move through them, transforming memory, spirituality, ritual and historical violence into new forms of visual and poetic resistance.
National Pavilion: Comigo Ninguém Pode, the Botanical Archaeology of Brazil
The Brazil Pavilion, curator Diane Lima presents Comigo ninguém pode, bringing together Adriana Varejão and Rosana Paulino in a deep dialogue. The title derives from the Dieffenbachia plant, popularly known in Brazil as “comigo-ninguém-pode,” activating ambiguous meanings of protection, toxicity and resistance. The pairing of the two artists establishes a powerful dialogue between practices that are fundamental to understanding Brazil’s colonial formation, its violence and its enduring structures.
Rather than functioning as a neutral modernist structure, the pavilion is transformed into a fragmented spatial experience, where ruins, unfinished architectures, exposed beams and stair-like structures delineate a territory marked by the instability of Brazil’s historical foundations. Beginning with the cracked azulejo ceiling conceived by Adriana Varejão, the exhibition immediately questions the very structure of a country whose remains seem at risk of collapsing onto us. Some walls appear interrupted, structures partially collapsed, while suspended passages and forms suggest movement, transition and the possibility of rebuilding. This intervention creates the sensation of moving through a country under permanent reconstruction, a nation simultaneously haunted by colonial violence and driven by the ongoing desire to reinvent itself. In this sense, the pavilion ceases to operate as a stable representation of national identity and instead becomes a living territory of tension, memory and transformation.
For decades, Adriana Varejão’s practice has explored architecture as a wounded body. Her paintings, azulejos,Incisions a la Fontana and Ruinas Serie expose the violence concealed beneath a Brazil shaped by colonization, baroque aesthetics, miscegenation and violence inscribed upon bodies and spaces. Many of her works resemble ruins that still carry traces of life, trauma and memory. Her presence within the pavilion intensifies the sensation that Brazilian history remains physically embedded within its structures.
Among the works presented, Paisagem Canibal, 2003 stands out as a visceral landscape where tropical vegetation merges with wounded flesh, evoking a Brazil simultaneously fertile and violent, seductive and cannibalistic. The work, previously exhibited in earlier institutional contexts, belongs to an important Brazilian private collection.
Also presented is a ceramic vase developed during Varejão’s recent research period in Greece, in dialogue with the surreal and organic forms of Maria Martins. This body of ceramic works is represented by Gagosian, further reinforcing the artist’s growing international institutional and market presence.
Together, these works transform the Brazil Pavilion into a fractured architectural body where colonial memory, tropical imagination and historical violence coexist in permanent tension. Varejão’s work does not offer historical resolution; instead, it exposes the instability of the narratives upon which Brazil itself was constructed.
Rosana Paulino, meanwhile, operates through the critical reconstruction of memory, introducing another dimension: repair. Through sewing, embroidery, drawing, printmaking and the appropriation of archival imagery, her practice confronts the erasure of Black women from Brazilian history and reinscribes violated bodies into processes of healing, repair and affirmation, processes that do not deny violence, but transform it into collective memory. If Varejão exposes the wound, Paulino insists upon the possibility of suturing it.
Several works presented at the Brazil Pavilion deepen this reflection on transformation, ancestry and resilience. In Atlântico Vermelho, 2027, Paulino deepens her investigation into the unresolved scars linking colonial history, race and gender in Brazil. Through drawings and textile-based works, the artist subverts materials historically associated with the feminine sphere, such as embroidery and fabric, transforming them into surfaces marked by rupture, violence and memory. Fragmented bodies, stitched wounds and layered textures reveal the persistence of historical trauma within contemporary Brazilian society, while the Atlântico Vermelho emerges as both sea and scar: a symbolic territory shaped by slavery, forced displacement and erased identities. Within the Brazil Pavilion, the work resonates directly with the exhibition’s fractured architectures and wounded landscapes, reinforcing the idea of Brazil as a nation still negotiating the ghosts of its colonial past through processes of repair, survival and transformation.
In Crisálida, 2026, Paulino expands the metaphor of metamorphosis through her first bronze sculpture. The work ultimately emerged from Ninfa Tecendo o Casulo, 2005, a drawing from Paulino’s Tecelãs series in which a female figure produces, from her own body, the threads forming a cocoon around herself. Transformed two decades later into bronze, Crisálida evokes a suspended state between trauma and transformation, where fragility itself contains the possibility of rebirth and continuity. Bodies appear caught in processes of mutation and emergence, reinforcing one of the pavilion’s central ideas: Brazil as a nation permanently oscillating between collapse and reinvention.
The Búfala series, 2019, meanwhile, introduces another symbolic dimension through the figure of the female buffalo, a powerful archetype of strength, protection and ancestral feminine force. Executed in watercolor and graphite on paper, the works merge human and animal presences into hybrid figures that seem simultaneously vulnerable and indomitable. The buffalo becomes a metaphor for Black womanhood itself: marked by historical violence, yet carrying an irreducible spiritual and bodily force. Within the Brazil Pavilion, these figures operate almost like guardians inhabiting the ruins of national memory.
In Tecelãs, 2003, female figures emerge through threads, fabrics and intertwined structures, evoking weaving not only as manual labor but as a metaphor for the reconstruction of memory itself. The act of weaving becomes an act of resistance: the patient reconstruction of histories fragmented by slavery, racism and patriarchal violence. Within the context of the pavilion, the work resonates directly with the architectural fractures surrounding it, proposing the possibility of reassembling what history attempted to dismantle.
Represented by Mendes Wood, while also maintaining her independent platform through Rosana Paulino Studio, her works belong to institutions such as Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, Pinacoteca de São Paulo, Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Museu Afro Brasil, Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires and the University of New Mexico Art Museum.
Together, Varejão and Paulino do not illustrate an idea of Brazil; they place its foundations under tension while constructing a space oscillating between ruin and dream. One opens the skin of history; the other stitches together its fragments. One exposes colonial wounds through painterly and architectural matter; the other reconstructs genealogies ruptured by racial and patriarchal violence.
There is also a subtly surrealist atmosphere permeating the pavilion. Bodies seem to dissolve into landscapes, architectures become unstable, while memory assumes an almost dreamlike dimension. Yet this surreal aspect does not function as an escape from reality. On the contrary, it reveals the impossibility of narrating Brazilian history through purely rational or linear structures. The exhibition ultimately suggests that the very idea of Brazil may exist within this space between trauma and imagination: a continuous attempt to build a nation despite its fractures, while anchoring ancestral inheritances, spiritual knowledge and processes of collective transformation.
The Arsenale: Koyo Kouoh’s Spiritual Cartography
The Arsenale, the curatorial vision of Koyo Kouoh unfolds as one of the most spiritually and conceptually charged dimensions of the 61st Venice Biennale. Appointed as the first African woman to curate the Biennale’s central exhibition, Kouoh conceived In Minor Keys as a response to the violence, acceleration and fragmentation of the contemporary world, proposing instead a more intimate and sensitive listening to history, attentive to silence, memory, spirituality and marginalized forms of knowledge. Following her sudden passing in 2025, the exhibition was carried forward by her curatorial team with remarkable fidelity, resulting in an atmosphere that feels fragmented, ritualistic and deeply embodied, where visitors move not simply through artworks, but through states of perception shaped by decay, transformation and ancestral memory.
One of Kouoh’s central curatorial axes emerges through practices connected to the African diaspora, ancestry, the body, time, decomposition, memory and non-hegemonic forms of knowledge. Within this framework, the three Brazilian artists invited to the central exhibition, Ayrson Heráclito, Eustáquio Neves and Dan Lie, deepen the Biennale’s reflection on histories that persist through fragments, rituals, spiritualities and invisible processes of transformation.
Ayrson Heráclito: The Alphabet of the Orixás
Ayrson Heráclito, artist, professor, curator and ogã within the Jeje Mahi Candomblé tradition, presents a practice deeply rooted in Afro-Brazilian cosmologies. Biennale, his monumental stainless steel sculptures spectacularly evoke the presence of spiritual entities, creating an immersive environment that resembles a sacred temple through which visitors can wander. Rising like columns supporting an ancient sanctuary, the works transform the space into a place of ritual, contemplation and mystery. Mysticism permeates the entire experience, alongside the desire to decipher the deeper meanings embedded within the installation.
The sculptural component of the Juntó series introduces a striking minimalist order to the Arsenale space, defined by symmetry, balance and elegance. Unlike the organic totemic sculptures of Mestre Didi, traditionally composed of shells, beads and vegetal fibers, Heráclito constructs his sculptures from welded stainless-steel sheets. These almost planar forms abstract the symbols of the orixás into gleaming contemporary surfaces: Exu’s trident becomes a force of communication, while Xangô’s double-edged axe evokes justice and the fire of truth. Through industrialized materials, ancestral cosmologies are translated into a contemporary sculptural vocabulary without losing their spiritual force, combining monumentality with an unexpected softness and refinement. Together, the sculptures and drawings transform references from Candomblé into a powerful contemporary language in which ancestry, spirituality and cosmology become both visual structure and spatial experience.
The Juntó series itself contains an extraordinary potential for expansion. Prices currently range approximately from $30.000–60.500 for small, medium and large sculptures, while drawings are priced around $3.250 each. Certain monumental sculptures already exceed two meters in height, and the project also opens the possibility for site-specific public commissions on an architectural scale. One monumental version installed in Salvador reaches nearly 40 meters, revealing how Heráclito’s cosmological structures can expand from intimate ritual objects into vast spiritual architectures inhabiting public space.
The Biennale has also marked an important moment of international recognition for Heráclito’s practice. His installation received a particularly strong critical and institutional reception, attracting interest from curators, museums and residency programs from Africa, Mexico and beyond. Several sculptures and drawings from the series were acquired during the opening days, while institutions expressed interest in acquiring the entire installation of drawings as a museum ensemble.
Represented by Portas Vilaseca, Paulo Darzé and Simões de Assis, his works have recently entered major international public collections, reflecting the growing institutional recognition of his practice and of Afro-Brazilian contemporary art more broadly. His works belong to collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, Fundación TBA21, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Museum der Weltkulturen, Raw Material Company, MASP, Instituto Itaú Cultural, Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia, Museu do Homem do Nordeste, Museu de Arte do Rio – MAR, Associação Cultural Videobrasil, Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo and Inhotim. These acquisitions reinforce Heráclito’s growing international importance and the increasing visibility of artistic practices rooted in Afro-diasporic cosmologies within major museum narratives.
Eustáquio Neves: Photography as Living Archive
Eustáquio Neves, born in Juatuba and based in Diamantina, is one of the central figures of experimental Brazilian photography. His practice investigates the historical and social fractures connecting the past and present of Afro-diasporic presence in Brazil.
Through manipulated negatives, prints and chemical processes, Eustáquio Neves explores race, identity, memory and historical violence. His aim is for no individual to remain identifiable, transforming photography into a meditation on collective memory, mourning and survival. His images emerge as spectral archives, suspended between disappearance and permanence, with a striking attention to texture and material intervention that elevates them to the status of contemporary icons. Within In Minor Keys, his photography functions as a counter-archive: an image that does not merely represent history, but excavates it through traces, scars and layered memories.
This approach unfolds differently across the two series presented at the Biennale. Arturos, 1993–1995, one of Neves’s earliest and most emblematic bodies of work, emerged from his immersion within the quilombola community of Arturos in Minas Gerais. The series reveals ancestral knowledge, spirituality and Afro-Brazilian traditions that survived centuries of violence and erasure. Nebulous figures, overlapping symbols and scarred surfaces create images that oscillate between revelation and concealment, while references to Congado rituals and the influence of Arthur Bispo do Rosário reinforce the spiritual and symbolic density of the works.
In contrast, Cartas ao Mar, 2016 unfolds as a more mournful meditation on historical trauma. Developed after Neves’s encounter with the ruins of Valongo Wharf in Rio de Janeiro, once the world’s largest landing site for enslaved Africans, the series transforms anonymous faces, torn papers, ashes and scratched surfaces into symbolic messages cast into the sea of racism and forgetting. Unable to photograph the site directly, Neves returned to his studio and constructed images that seem to resurrect buried presences from the depths of history itself, transforming photography into an act of remembrance and symbolic repair.
The reception of the works during the Biennale’s preview days has also been particularly strong. According to sources close to the artist and gallery, sales performed very well between the announcement period and the pre-opening days, especially for two major works from the series. Represented by Galeria Vermelho, Eustáquio Neves’s works belong to important photography collections including Museu Afro Brasil, Museu de Arte do Rio – MAR, MASP, MAM-SP, Yvory Press Collection – Spain, C Magazine Collection – United Kingdom, World Bank Collection – United States, Museum of Fine Arts Houston – United States, Cuba Fototeca – Cuba, J.P. Morgan Collection – United States and the Regional Center of Photography – Uruguay, among others.
The reception of the works during the Biennale’s preview days has also been particularly strong. According to sources close to the artist and gallery, sales performed very well between the announcement period and the pre-opening days, especially for two major works from the series. Represented by Galeria Vermelho, Eustáquio Neves’s works belong to important photography collections including Museu Afro Brasil, Museu de Arte do Rio – MAR, MASP, MAM-SP, Yvory Press Collection, C Magazine Collection, World Bank Collection, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Cuba Fototeca, J. P. Morgan Collection and the Regional Center of Photography, among others.
Dan Lie: The Sublime of Life Transition
Dan Lie deserves a reading of their own. Within the context of In Minor Keys, their practice expands the Brazilian presence beyond fixed national identity. A Brazilian-Indonesian trans non-binary artist, Lie works with living installations developed in collaboration with fungi, bacteria, plants, organic matter and processes of decomposition.Their installations combine flowers, seeds, soil, spores, fabrics and ceramic vessels into living ecosystems that continue transforming throughout the exhibition.
Their work investigates the porous boundaries between life and death, growth and disappearance, presence and transformation. It speaks of cycles, matter, mourning, non-human ancestry and expanded temporalities. By collaborating with living organisms, Lie displaces the centrality of the human and proposes an art that transforms, decays, breathes and disappears. It is an essential contribution to a Biennale that seeks precisely to slow down perception and listen to what normally remains invisible. At once shocking and deeply poetic, the installation directly evokes the flowers left in cemeteries and confronts viewers with the physical presence of death itself. The intense scent of vegetation entering putrefaction permeates the space, creating an unsettling sensory experience where beauty, fragility and decomposition coexist in a state of suspended transformation. The curatorial text by Thiago de Paula Souza describes how Lie’s practice focuses on “the transformations time imposes on organic matter,” understanding decomposition not as disappearance, but as passage toward other forms of existence.
Their practice has been presented at institutions including the New Museum, Art Sonje Center, Hamburger Bahnhof and Pinacoteca de São Paulo, as well as the Carnegie International, Singapore Biennale and the 35th São Paulo Biennial.
Thus, the Brazilian presence in Venice 2026 unfolds across multiple fronts: at the Brazil Pavilion, through the historical and symbolic force of Adriana Varejão and Rosana Paulino; and at the Arsenale, through the spiritual, photographic and organic density of Ayrson Heráclito, Eustáquio Neves and Dan Lie. What unites them is their refusal of a decorative reading of Brazilian contemporary art. Their works address trauma, memory, the body, coloniality, spirituality and transformation, themes that traverse not only Brazil, but the contemporary world itself.
The 2026 Venice Biennale ultimately asserts itself as an edition of contrasts: between mourning and permanence, institutional crisis and artistic potency, global politics and sensitive listening. For Brazil, it represents a moment of strategic visibility, but also of complexity. It is not merely about occupying Venice; it is about disputing narratives, reinscribing histories and demonstrating how Brazilian contemporary art participates decisively in some of the most urgent conversations of the present.
Punta della Dogana: Paulo Nazareth Rewriting Colonial Routes
The strong presence of Brazilian artists across the 2026 Venice Biennale extends far beyond the Brazil Pavilion and the Arsenale. Throughout Venice, Brazilian contemporary art emerges as one of the most conceptually and politically compelling presences of this edition, engaging directly with the Biennale’s broader themes of memory, displacement, spirituality and historical repair.
Within this context, Paulo Nazareth presents a major exhibition at Punta della Dogana, curated by Fernanda Brenner. The exhibition investigates colonial cartographies, forced displacement and Afro-diasporic memory, transforming history into a lived geography. Walking itself becomes both method and language in Nazareth’s practice, as the artist turns his body into a living archive of colonial histories and contemporary inequalities.
The installation unfolds through spirals of left-foot shoes collected from travelers and borderlands, evoking undocumented journeys excluded from official histories. Nazareth frequently walks barefoot himself, honoring enslaved ancestors for whom the absence of shoes functioned as a visible mark of subjugation. Following abolition in Brazil, shoes paradoxically became symbols of citizenship and freedom long denied to formerly enslaved populations. The work also incorporates embroidered representations of Exu and Zé Pilintra, presented not as folkloric figures but as spiritual technologies of survival, movement and resistance. Together, these elements transform the installation into a ritual space where memory persists through bodily experience, migration and spiritual continuity.
At Punta della Dogana, Nazareth creates a powerful dialogue between Venice’s maritime history and the violent histories of the Atlantic slave trade. Alongside artists such as Adriana Varejão, Rosana Paulino, Ayrson Heráclito, Eustáquio Neves and Dan Lie, his work reinforces the centrality of Brazilian contemporary art within some of the Biennale’s most urgent conversations: colonial memory, spiritual resistance, migration and the possibility of reimagining history beyond official narratives.
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