About the Artists

Lavett Ballard
b. 1970, East Orange, New Jersey
Lavett Ballard (b. 1970, East Orange, NJ) anchors the presentation with richly layered portraits that fuse historical consciousness and decorative abstraction. Holding dual Bachelor’s degrees in Studio Art and Art History with a minor in Museum Studies from Rutgers University, and an MFA from the University of the Arts, Philadelphia, Ballard brings academic rigor and cultural sensitivity to her practice. Her compositions often incorporate wallpaper-like motifs, gilded surfaces, and symbolic patterning that reference African textiles while engaging Western portrait traditions. Ballard’s national recognition includes her commission by Time Magazine.

Damilare Jamiu Kanyinsola
b. 1994, Lagos Island, Nigeria
Damilare Jamiu Kanyinsola (b. 1994, Lagos Island, Nigeria) grounds the presentation in lived African experience and philosophical reflection. Apprenticed early under Lagos-based artist Muyiwa Williams, Damilare developed a practice deeply informed by his environment and the realities of contemporary Nigeria. Self-described as an African Realist, he centers authentic African narratives through figurative painting that often includes animals—cats and dogs—as symbolic companions. His work reflects a meditative engagement with humanity, spirituality, and Black consciousness. Within the booth, Damilare’s paintings offer an intimate, grounded perspective on African identity, memory, and resilience.

Megan Lewis
b. 1989, Baltimore, Maryland
Megan Lewis (b. 1989, Baltimore, MD) contributes a dynamic, painterly counterpoint through highly physical figurative works that pulse with movement and color. A graduate of Ringling College of Art and Design (BFA, Illustration, 2011), Lewis is both a painter and muralist, known for wielding a palette knife with decisive precision. Her figures are rendered in bold hues and geometric forms, often adorned with layered textiles that draw from African design traditions. Ankara fabrics—some acquired during her travels to Johannesburg, South Africa—are integrated directly into her paintings, collapsing boundaries between surface, pattern, and body.

Source: Galerie Myrtis

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The presentation centers on paintings that explore what it means to remain psychologically and morally present in a world marked by suffering. Informed by Gethsemane, the works paint the residue of suffering through silence, dread, endurance, and the strain of continued witness. Across the presentation, pain appears as something absorbed, carried, and lived with, leaving its weight on the surface.

Working on glazed tarpaulin and cotton duck canvas, Kudi builds his surfaces through liquid metal, ink, enamel, and acrylic. Layering, settling, cracking, and erosion shape each composition, guided by a sustained attention to process, repetition, and restraint. His paintings develop through close observation of material behavior, in which pressure, control, and release remain in active relation.

Set within antique gold frames, the paintings enter into deliberate tension with the European institutional structures that have historically shaped how painting is framed and received. At the same time, Kudi’s practice draws ancestral visual knowledge into conversation with the formal language of international abstraction. This places the work within a broader modernist history shaped through non-Western perspectives, bringing local systems of knowledge into dialogue with abstraction.

Titles such as Pillars of the Firmament, Syllables for a Midnight Vigil, and Hymn to the Heavy Root extend the presentation’s interest in time, transformation, and interior states.

Presented by Adegbola Gallery, a Lagos-based gallery with a program grounded in research, historical continuity, and rigorous curatorial thinking, the booth reflects the gallery’s commitment to artists whose practices are shaped by material intelligence and sustained inquiry.

Source: Adegbola Gallery

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The 2026 edition will take place at the Starrett-Lehigh Building in Chelsea, positioning the fair in the heart of one of New York’s most vibrant cultural districts. Returning during Art Week New York, 1-54 offers a dynamic platform to discover contemporary art from Africa and its diasporas. Within the energy of the city’s wider art world, we will be bringing together artists, galleries and audiences.

We look forward to welcoming you to this exciting chapter of 1-54 New York in the heart of Chelsea. Stay tuned for more details!

VIP & Press preview:
Wednesday 13 May 2026, 11 am – 7 pm
Thursday 14 May 2026, 11 am – 4 pm

Public opening:
Thursday 14 May 2026, 4 pm – 8 pm

Friday 15 May 2026, 11 am – 7 pm
Saturday 16 May 2026, 11 am – 7 pm
Sunday 17 May 2026, 11 am – 5 pm

Location:
Starrett-Lehigh Building
600 W. 27th St
Manhattan, New York

Source: 1-54

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Author: Elias Joaquim

 

The 61st Venice Art Biennale takes place from May 9 to November 22, 2026. Who are the Afro-descendant artists in the spotlight? What did they bring? How did they translate the “minor keys” of acclaimed curator Koyo Kouoh?

Before any hasty conclusions, it should be noted that the 2026 Biennale was architected by a Black woman, born in Cameroon. The late Koyo Kouoh built, over recent decades, one of the most influential curatorial trajectories in contemporary African and diasporic artistic thought. As Executive Director of Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town, Koyo not only fostered and expanded African presence in the international circuit, but also helped reshape the very ways of looking, exhibiting, listening, and organizing cultural sensibilities within contemporary art.

And perhaps that is precisely what makes this Biennale so singular, so special. This shift in tone that seems like an intimate desire to collectively create a sensibility tribe.

In a world saturated by speed, visual excess, hyperproduction of images, and curatorial monumentality, In Minor Keys emerges almost as a forced brake, an essay on the conscious deceleration of perception. Less spectacle. Less noise. Less excess of the future. More listening. More intimacy. More silence. More relationship between bodies, memory, and territory. And in the end, silence again.

Did Koyo Kouoh attempt to translate the language of birds?

In Minor Keys does not seem to function as a curatorial title. But how do you truly translate the theme Koyo proposed, since it functions more as an emotional state, a kind of sensory enigma about the present, or a birdsong on a sunny or rainy day? It seems to function as a translation before the translation, as if, even before the artists began translating the world through their works, there had already existed a first great gesture of translation: that of Koyo herself, trying to name what the contemporary world feels, but which slips through her hands amid the chaos with which it has grown familiar.

There is something profoundly African and simultaneously universal in this proposal. We venture to say that the African and Afro-diasporic presence in this edition is not merely present for the sake of it, nor merely as a geographical emblem, it occupies instead a conceptual center within the Biennale. Walking through the pavilions of Venice, one notices that many of the strongest works of this edition refuse the very logic of immediate impact.

Art saves us!

What do these Black artists communicate within the Biennale? Where do they want to go?

Artists like Otobong Nkanga, from Nigeria, and Sammy Baloji from the DRC, dialogue in many ways, they are members of that sensibility tribe. The works of both shout, are stained with sweat and blood, are sharp and corporeal, but viewed in reverse or from another perspective, they are the perfect illustration of minor keys, of touches from within, of waves in a gentle breeze that embrace us. As the saying goes, art saves us: it is political, but it does not make politics on its own.

Both work on the relationship between land, mineral extraction, ecological violence, and colonial memory. They create works, through photography, visual arts, or performance, in which the African soil manages to rise beyond its beauty to challenge global capitalism. In their installations, the materials seem to carry subterranean wounds, as if the modern world had been built upon minerals forcibly torn from certain territories.

Beyond these, several other Afro-descendant artists stand out in this edition, such as Wangechi Mutu, born in Kenya, Billie Zangewa from Malawi and South Africa, Buhlebezwe Siwani from South Africa, and Kader Attia, born in France and deeply connected to Algeria.

There is a kind of conceptual maternity in In Minor Keys, capable of generating life, creating tensions, raising doubts, bringing hope. And this prominent Black presence, though plural and quite diverse, manages to capture and even embody the essence of minor keys, as in the case of South African artist Helen Sabidi, who brings the sensibility of home, the roots and traditions inherited from her grandmother, to explore the traumas of Apartheid through beautiful paintings. Yes, art does save us, art always points to a path, even when it does not know it.

The mouth of the Global South

In the previous article we asked: if the artistic system has decentralized, what remains the center that legitimizes global art?

Perhaps Venice has partially answered that question. Or perhaps the Global South itself answered through its own mouth, saying that it was not merely a theme of contemporary art, it was the minor key itself, a producer of language, a producer of sensibility, and a producer of curatorial methods.

Because what is observed here is not a simple substitution of centers, as has already been said, but something more complex: a gradual displacement of the emotional frequencies of contemporary art. The dominant axis remains institutionally strong, but the imaginary, the questions, and much of the conceptual vitality seem today to be shifting increasingly toward geographies historically considered peripheral.

And that inevitably raises an uncomfortable question for the old center: What return paths are even possible now?

Images: Celestino Bastos and Eduardo Lima.

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Autor: Elias Joaquim

 

A 61ª Bienal de Arte de Veneza acontece de 9 de maio a 22 de novembro de 2026. Quem são os artistas afrodescendentes em destaque? O que trouxeram? Como traduziram eles os “tons menores” da aclamada curadora Koyo Kouoh?

Antes de qualquer avanço precipitado, é preciso ressalvar que a Bienal de 2026 foi arquitetada por uma mulher negra, nascida nos Camarões. Koyo Kouoh construiu ao longo das últimas décadas uma das trajetórias curatoriais mais influentes do pensamento artístico contemporâneo africano e diaspórico. Como diretora executiva do Zeitz MOCAA, na Cidade do Cabo, Koyo, para além do fomento e da ampliação da presença africana no circuito internacional, ajudou a reformular os próprios modos de olhar, expor, escutar e organizar o sensível dentro da arte contemporânea.

E talvez seja precisamente isso que torna esta Bienal tão singular, tão especial. Esta mudança de tom que parece um desejo íntimo de criar em conjunto uma tribo da sensibilidade.

Num mundo saturado por velocidade, excesso visual, hiperprodução de imagens e monumentalidade curatorial, In Minor Keys surge quase como um travão forçado, um ensaio sobre desaceleração consciente da percepção. Menos espetáculo. Menos ruído. Menos excesso de futuro. Mais escuta. Mais intimidade. Mais silêncio. Mais relação entre corpos, memória e território. E no fim, silêncio outra vez.

Koyo Kouoh tentou traduzir a linguagem dos pássaros?

In Minor Keys não parece funcionar como título curatorial. Mas afinal, como traduzir verdadeiramente o tema que Koyo nos propõe, uma vez que funciona mais como um estado emocional, uma espécie de enigma sensorial sobre o presente, ou um canto de pássaros num dia de sol ou chuva? Parece que funciona como uma tradução antes da tradução, como se antes mesmo dos artistas começarem a traduzir o mundo através das suas obras, já tivesse existido um primeiro grande gesto de tradução: o da própria Koyo tentando nomear aquilo que o mundo contemporâneo sente, mas que lhe escapa das mãos em meio ao caos com o qual se familiarizou.

Há qualquer coisa de profundamente africano e simultaneamente universal nessa proposta. Arriscamo-nos a dizer que a presença africana e afro-diaspórica nesta edição não está apenas por estar, nem está apenas como um emblema geográfico, ocupa antes um centro conceptual dentro da Bienal. Ao atravessar os pavilhões de Veneza, percebe-se que muitas das obras mais fortes desta edição recusam a própria lógica do impacto imediato.

A arte nos salva!

O que comunicam esses artistas negros dentro da Bienal? Aonde querem chegar?

Artistas como Otobong Nkanga, da Nigéria, e Sammy Baloji da RDC, dialogam em muitos aspetos, são os tais membros daquela tribo da sensibilidade. As obras de ambos gritam, estão manchadas de suor e sangue, são ácidas, corpulentas, mas se vistas ao contrário ou sob outra perspectiva, são a perfeita ilustração dos tons menores, dos toques de dentro, das ondas em brando sopro que nos abraçam. Como se costuma dizer, a arte nos salva: é política, mas ela não faz política por si só.

Os dois trabalham a relação entre terra, extração mineral, violência ecológica e memória colonial. Criam obras, por meio da fotografia, artes visuais ou da performance,  em que o solo africano se consegue erguer para além das suas beldades, para pôr em xeque o capitalismo global. Nas suas instalações, os materiais parecem carregar feridas subterrâneas, como se o mundo moderno tivesse sido construído sobre minerais arrancados à força de determinados territórios.

Além destes, outros vários artistas afrodescendentes destacam-se nesta edição, como Wangechi Mutu, nascida no Quénia, Billie Zangewa do Malawi e África do Sul, Já Buhlebezwe Siwani, da África do Sul e Kader Attia, nascido em França e profundamente ligado à Argélia.

Há uma espécie de maternidade conceptual em In Minor Keys, capaz de gerar vida, criar tensões, fazer dúvidas, trazer esperança. E essa presença negra em destaque, apesar de plural e bastante diversa, consegue captar e até capturar o essencial e a essência dos tons menores, como no caso da artista sul africana Helen Sabidi, que traz a sensibilidade de casa, as raízes e as tradições herdadas da sua avó para explorar os traumas do Apartheid com quadros belíssimos. A arte nos salva sim, a arte aponta sempre um caminho, mesmo que não saiba.

A boca do Sul-global

 No artigo anterior perguntávamos: se o sistema artístico se descentralizou, qual continua a ser o centro que legitima a arte global?

Talvez Veneza tenha respondido parcialmente à questão. Ou talvez o próprio Sul Global tenha respondido pela própria boca dizendo que não era apenas um tema da arte contemporânea, era o tom menor por si só, produtor de linguagem, produtor de sensibilidade e produtor de método curatorial.

Porque o que se observa aqui não é uma substituição simples de centros, como já se disse, mas algo mais complexo: uma deslocação gradual das frequências emocionais da arte contemporânea. O eixo dominante permanece institucionalmente forte, mas o imaginário, as perguntas e parte da vitalidade conceptual parecem hoje deslocar-se cada vez mais para geografias historicamente consideradas periféricas.

E isso produz inevitavelmente uma pergunta desconfortável para o velho centro: Que caminhos de volta são possíveis agora?

Imagens: Celestino Bastos e Eduardo Lima.

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Grada Kilomba, with a body of work spanning large-scale installations, sculptures, video, and performance, approaches the concepts of memory, trauma, violence, and repetition in a striking yet poetic manner. In the exhibition O Fundo do Mundo (The Bottom of the Earth), the artist envisions a scenography of the future, posing a disturbing and urgent philosophical question that weaves through both her works and their material forms: “What would the bottom of the ocean tell us tomorrow, if it were emptied of water today?”

Kilomba invites us to imagine a futuristic landscape in which the “bottom of the earth” becomes a site of memory. The ocean floor is a repository of geological sedimentations and transformations, but also a repository of routes and traces of human activity—often barbaric and violent—from slavery to colonialism, from multiple wars to climate crises, all the way to the tragic genocides of today. The seabed holds countless corridors of human bodies, revealing nature itself as an archive of human existence.

In her work, the frailty of materials such as glass and nearly see-through fabric contrasts with the resilience of stone and the silent memory of burned and cut wood, which bear the traces of hundreds of years. Traversing and shaping these materials—at times elevated, others more direct—the written, sung, or merely alluded to is another recurring element in Kilomba’s moving and inspiring practice, reflecting both the breadth of her interests and her academic background.

Source: The Albuquerque Foundation

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Kenyan-British artist Michael Armitage presents at the Palazzo Grassi a selection of forty-five paintings, including newly created pieces, and over one hundred studies that reveal his dense and vibrant pictorial language, staging figures in rich compositions with remarkable chromatic intensity, at the crossroads of several aesthetic canons. His choice of subject matter and interpretive undertones share the same expressive power. The painter does not shy away from violent and harsh themes, believing that art cannot ignore reality but must instead grapple with it: the consequences of war, corruption and instability in equatorial regions, the migration crisis, the weight of societal judgment, and abuses of power form the backdrop of some of his poignant works.

Based between Kenya and Indonesia, Armitage draws inspiration from a wide range of sources: historical and contemporary news, political demonstrations, literature, cinema, local rituals, colonial and modern architecture, flora and fauna, and global art history. At the heart of his iconography is East Africa, and Kenya in particular, which he explores with both critical, satirical insight and visionary depth. While some scenes are precisely located or situated in time, notably when the artist followed a team of journalists covering the opposition movements and their violent repression during the 2017 elections in Kenya, or when he depicts incidents related to the 2020-21 lockdown, others remain more elusive and universal. This ambiguity leads Armitage into fluid territories.

The exhibition, spread across two levels of the Palazzo Grassi, gradually delves deeper into this exploration of inhabited landscapes and visions. Armitage’s scenesbecome denser, even blurred, leaving room for our own interpretation. When viewing a painting by Michael Armitage, the eye hesitates, skitters and darts away. Several narratives and lines of horizon cohabitate, real and fictional spaces are entangled, and different versions and viewpoints are superposed. Treated with a mix of violence and gentleness, the compositions retain their flamboyance despite their subjects’ harshness. Armitage gives free rein to his visions, creating haunted or even hallucinatory landscapes.

Among his motifs are real and imagined figures, drawn from contemporary African literature as well as Greek mythology, who embody a certain inner state and testify from external conditions. At other times, anonymous individuals are depicted, as in the series on migration, which attempts to represent in large-scale tableaux the perilous journey of migrants across Africa, the often-deadly sea crossing to Europe, and the disillusionment of those who succeed. Drawing on sometimes direct references to scenes from films by the Senegalese director Sembene Ousmane (1923-2007), to characters from the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s novels (1938-2025), or to painting compositions by Francisco de Goya (1746-1828), or by modernist African artists such as Jak Katarikawe (1940- 2018) and Peter Mulindwa (1943-2022) among others, Armitage brilliantly condenses these inspirations into a form of synthesis to create a new language for our time.

The artist’s works are painted with oil on a bark cloth, a traditional bark cloth sourced from Uganda and Indonesia, transgressing the canvas typical in Western tradition. The natural irregularities of the material – holes, creases, and rough textures – directly inform the visual composition. Executed in a distinctive lush and sensuous palette, Armitage’s works are built through a multi-layered process: paint is applied in layers, resulting in evocative, distinctive imagery. The practice of drawing, to which a large room in the exhibition is devoted, reveals the level of attention that the artist pays to details, composition and preparatory studies.

Source: Pinault Collection

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Mathieu’s interests are partially informed from his upbringing in Haiti, and his experience emigrating to Montréal at the age of 19. Freely operating in between and borrowing from numerous historical influences and traditions, Mathieu aims to find meaning through a spiritual or asemic mode of apparition.

Mathieu has developed a distinctive abstract visual language, used to create phenomenological encounters that confront our didactic traditions. Amorphous forms vacillate and dissolve into one another, creating boundless landscapes traversable through desire. Through his quest for meaning, transparency and openness he undertakes a process of discovering his work, as opposed to creating it; by doing so the work holds its autonomy and can be assimilated into a space of collective consciousness. The vibrational effect of his work elicits physical and emotional frequencies that offer alternative methods for navigating the world.

Drawing from a wide-range of subjects, Manuel’s practice combines his sensibility and his formal arts education, which culminated in an MFA Degree from Goldsmiths, University of London.

Source: Manuel Mathieu

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Author: Elias Joaquim

 

For a long time, talking about contemporary art was, at its core, talking about a relatively stable axis: The great European centers and the United States as the focal point of the art world, from which trends, legitimacy, and even value emanated. This model has not entirely disappeared today, but it has become obsolete and perhaps insufficient to explain the present, or as Camões would say: “times change, desires change.”

Today, global art organizes itself less as a single center and more as a network. A deliberate constellation of voices, distributed across diverse geographies, where cities and contexts once considered peripheral have begun to play an active and increasingly central role in artistic production and circulation.

 

But this transformation inevitably raises an essential question:

If the art world has decentralized, which center continues to define what counts as art and global trend?

Displacement and Permanence

The emergence of new poles such as Lagos [Nigeria] in Africa or São Paulo [Brazil] in South America, as well as Dubai, cannot be ignored. In these contexts, artistic production grows with force, fueled by their own local dynamics, political tensions, and new ways of imagining identity, the territory that surrounds them, their bodies, and the embrace they extend toward the future.

Here, contrary to what one might think, art does not arise as a mere extension of other agendas or global trends, but as a cultural vanguard, frequently more experimental, more rooted, and at times more urgent than in the traditional centers.

However, there is an important nuance to bear in mind:

production, however impressive, is not yet the same as legitimation.

Despite the vitality of these contexts, symbolic validation continues, to a large extent, to pass through established institutional circuits: museums, fairs, and above all, major international exhibitions such as the one in Venice. And it is at this point that the Venice Biennale becomes unavoidable.

Venice: Mirror, Mirror on the Wall

Beautiful city, beautiful people. Venice seems entirely suspended between water and stone, taken over by a continuous movement of people speaking different languages, different accents, different gazes. With improvised maps in hand, forming orderly queues for everything and anything. Immense pavilions, immense churches, palaces and spaces transformed into exhibitions. It is a vast scene, seen up close or from afar, almost excessive. At every corner, a work; at every canal, a displacement. There is a good and constant sense of global simultaneity, as if suddenly the entire world had been compressed into an archipelago of art and circulation, where everything happens at the same time and in many places at once.

Frequently presented as a global space par excellence, the Biennale functions simultaneously as an opening and a filter. On one hand, it welcomes artists from multiple geographies; on the other, it remains one of the primary mechanisms of international legitimation.

Its structure, with enormous reach and influence, reminds us that, despite the global rhetoric, art continues to engage with forms inherited from modernity. And it is precisely on that terrain that some of the most interesting tensions of the present arise. The wars of the world in dialogue or confrontation, if you will, with the quieter tones of Koyo, the intimate, the sensorial, the subtle. The edition conceived by Koyo Kouoh proposes a relevant inflection.

By favoring a more sensitive, slowed-down, and relational approach, the curator suggests a reading of contemporary art that moves away from excess, from vices, from the easy, and from spectacularization.

Her project can be understood as an effort to redefine Modernism “under a new hemispheric perspective.”

Episodes like this remind us that Curating often wears a life jacket with two panels: mediation and translation.

Curation assumes a role grounded not merely in the selection of works and organization of artists, but above all in the construction of meaning, connecting local contexts to global circuits, transforming production into visibility, and visibility into recognition. Initiatives such as WAAU (World African Artists United) illustrate this movement well. Operating between artists, institutions, and markets, this type of platform acts as a mediator, allowing artistic practices situated in specific contexts to enter into dialogue with the international system.

Does Expansion Have Limits?

Despite everything, speaking of an absolute decentralization would still be premature. What is observed can be understood not as a replacement of one center by another, but as an expansion of the system’s latitudes. New contexts emerge, new voices gain space, new desires are born from Camões’s mouth, but the structures of validation remain, to a large extent, concentrated.

This scenario generates tension, but a productive tension, sometimes revealing signs of global exhaustion with a system that continuously expands, incorporating new geographies, discourses, and bodies, without necessarily transforming its foundations. Perhaps the most interesting question today is not to identify new centers, but to understand how narratives are being reconfigured.

We always want to tell and live the history of art as we tell and live the history of humankind and the history of their nations: linear, hierarchical, heroic, centered on few places and few mixtures. That is not the truth. The present challenges this logic, not through total rupture, but through a multiplication of perspectives.

Contemporary art today has no single center, no single tone, no single thread that stitches it together. It has multiple points of intensity, multiple regimes of visibility, multiple ways of existing and being recognized.

And perhaps it is precisely there, in that imperfect, at times contradictory coexistence, that its current strength and its new center reside.

 Images: Celestino Bastos and Eduardo Lima.

Autor: Elias Joaquim

 

Durante muito tempo, falar de arte contemporânea foi, no fundo, falar de um eixo relativamente estável. Os grandes centros europeus e Estados Unidos como ponto focal da arte mundial, de onde emanavam tendências, legitimidade e até valor. Esse modelo, atualmente, não desapareceu por completo, mas tornou-se obsoleto e quiçá insuficiente para explicar o presente, ou como diria Camões: “mudam-se os tempos, mudam-se as vontades”.

Hoje, a arte global organiza-se menos como um centro único e mais como uma rede. Uma constelação de vozes intencional, distribuída por geografias diversas, onde cidades e contextos antes considerados periféricos passaram a desempenhar um papel ativo e cada vez mais central na produção e circulação artística.

 

Mas esta transformação levanta, inevitavelmente, uma questão essencial:

Se o mundo artístico se descentralizou, qual é o centro que continua a definir o que conta como arte e tendência global?

Deslocamento e Permanência

A emergência de novos polos como Lagos em África ou São Paulo na América do Sul, passando também por Dubai, não pode ser ignorada. Nestes contextos, a produção artística cresce com força, alimentada por dinâmicas locais próprias, por tensões políticas e novas formas de imaginar identidade, o território que os circunda, os seus corpos e o abraço que dão ao futuro.

Aqui, ao contrário do que se poderia pensar, a arte não surge como mera extensão de outras vontades ou de tendências globais, mas como vanguarda cultural, frequentemente mais experimental, mais enraizada e, por vezes, mais urgente do que nos centros tradicionais.

No entanto, há uma nuance importante a ter em conta:

produção, ainda que imponente, ainda não é o mesmo que legitimação.

Apesar de imponente e da vitalidade destes contextos, a validação simbólica continua, em grande medida, a passar por circuitos institucionais consolidados: museus, feiras e, sobretudo, grandes exposições internacionais como a de Veneza, e é neste ponto que a Bienal de Veneza se torna incontornável.

Veneza: espelho-espelho-meu

Cidade linda, pessoas lindas. Veneza inteira parece suspensa entre água e pedra, tomada por um movimento contínuo de pessoas que falam línguas diferentes, sotaques diferentes, olhares diferentes. Com mapas improvisados nas mãos, a formarem filas bem-dispostas para tudo e alguma coisa. Imensos pavilhões, imensas igrejas, palácios e espaços que se transformam em exposições. É um cenário vasto visto de perto ou de longe, quase excessivo. Em cada esquina, uma obra; em cada canal, uma deslocação. Há uma sensação boa e permanente de simultaneidade global, como se de repente o mundo inteiro tivesse sido comprimido num arquipélago de arte e circulação, onde tudo acontece ao mesmo tempo e em muitos lugares ao mesmo tempo.

Frequentemente apresentada como espaço global por excelência, a Bienal funciona simultaneamente como abertura e filtro. Por um lado, acolhe artistas de múltiplas geografias; por outro, mantém-se como um dos principais mecanismos de legitimação internacional.

A sua estrutura, com pés e braços enormes, recorda-nos que, apesar da retórica global, a arte continua a dialogar com formas herdadas da modernidade. E é precisamente nesse terreno que surgem algumas das tensões mais interessantes do presente. As guerras pelo mundo em diálogo ou confronto, se quisermos, com os tons menores de Koyo, o íntimo, o sensorial, o subtil. A edição concebida por Koyo Kouoh propõe uma inflexão relevante.

Ao privilegiar uma abordagem mais sensível, desacelerada e relacional, a curadora sugere uma leitura da arte contemporânea que se afasta do excesso, dos vícios, do fácil, e da espetacularização.

O seu projeto pode ser entendido como um esforço daquilo que seria o redefinir o Modernismo “sob uma nova perspectiva hemisférica”. 

Episódios como este lembram-nos que a Curadoria veste, muitas vezes, um colete salva-vidas com duas abas: mediação e tradução.

A curadoria assume um papel não apenas embasado na seleção de obras e organização de artistas, mas sobretudo na construção de sentidos, ligando contextos locais a circuitos globais, transformando produção em visibilidade, e visibilidade em reconhecimento. Iniciativas como a WAAU (World African Artists United) ilustram bem este movimento. Operando entre artistas, instituições e mercados, este tipo de plataforma atua como mediador, permitindo que práticas artísticas situadas em contextos específicos entrem em diálogo com o sistema internacional.

A expansão tem limites?

Apesar de tudo, falar de uma certa descentralização absoluta seria ainda precipitado. O que se observa pode ser entendido não como uma substituição de um centro por outro centro, mas como expansão das latitudes do sistema. Novos contextos emergem, novas vozes ganham espaço, novas vontades nascem da boca de Camões, mas as estruturas de validação mantêm-se, em grande medida, concentradas.

Este cenário gera uma tensão, mas gera uma tensão produtiva, revelando por vezes sinais de exaustão global com um sistema que se alarga continuamente, incorporando novas geografias e discursos e corpos, sem necessariamente transformar as suas bases. Talvez a questão mais interessante hoje não seja identificar novos centros, mas compreender como se reconfiguram as narrativas.

Queremos sempre contar e viver a história da arte como contamos e vivemos a história dos homens e a histórias das suas nações: linear, hierárquica, heróica, centrada em poucos lugares e poucas misturas. Não é essa a verdade. O presente desafia essa lógica, não através de uma ruptura total, mas por meio de uma multiplicação de perspectivas.

A arte contemporânea não tem hoje um único centro, nem um único tom nem um único fio que a costure. Tem múltiplos pontos de intensidade, múltiplos regimes de visibilidade, múltiplas formas de existir e de ser reconhecida.

E talvez seja precisamente aí, nessa coexistência imperfeita, por vezes contraditória, que reside a sua força atual e o seu novo centro.

 Imagens: Celestino Bastos e Eduardo Lima.

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The exhibition is curated by Emma Lavigne, General Director and General Curator of the Pinault Collection, in close collaboration with the artist. The Venetian exhibition offers a renewed and expanded selection conceived specifically for the spaces of Punta della Dogana, through which the artist weaves the narrative threads that give shape to the fictional worlds and stories suggested by her work.

Since gaining recognition in the mid-1980s for her groundbreaking approach to conceptual photography, Lorna Simpson (born in 1960, United States) has consistently and critically examined the mechanisms through which images are constructed. Since the mid-2010s, painting has become a particularly fertile ground for her artistic exploration, extending the core concerns that run through her practice: the erosion and resurgence of memory, the failures of representation, and the instability of narratives. The exhibition brings together significant groups of works from her most emblematic series of this period, including Ice, Special Characters, and Earth and Sky. It spans over twenty years of Simpson’s practice, including a number of paintings created for her participation in the 2015 Venice Biennale, curated by Okwui Enwezor, to the debut of several new works made specifically for this exhibition. Defying any singular interpretation, Simpson’s paintings draw viewers into uncertain zones at the edges of the visible.

The exhibition unfolds around three major ensembles. It opens with a first group of dense compositions, populated by enigmatic figures, historical echoes, and political tensions, evoking uprisings and their repression. These works become the stage for inhospitable and unstable environments, traversed by diffuse forces. Further along, a series of Arctic panoramas, recreated from expedition archives, unfold in ranges of nocturnal blues and frosted greys, imbuing these dark landscapes with a suspended, dreamlike quality. At the edge of the Venetian lagoon, they appear to hover between two states – porous to the elements and inhabited by spectral presences ready to dissolve. Finally, a gallery of majestic and enigmatic female figures, presented notably in Tadao Ando’s Cube, confront the viewer with a complexity of identities and the ambiguity of their representation.

For the past fifteen years, collage has played a central role in Simpson’s creative process, reflected in the exhibition in a major forty-part installation. Drawing on a vast visual archive, she turns this practice into a field of experimentation where juxtaposition, slippage and free association transform these images into “source notes” that later inspire many of her compositions. The exhibition highlights the richness of a conceptual and visual language that is abundant and gives great importance to intuition. The artist explores collective memory, stereotypes, and the mechanisms of erasure – all critical lenses through which to revisit over half a century of history. The evocation of states of matter and natural phenomena – water, fire, ice, dust, meteorites, clouds – compose an unstable world, one that invites metamorphosis and suspended temporalities.

Source: Pinault Collection

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Bringing together three decades of Kunbi’s artistic exploration, Shapes of Silence examines silence as a deeply social and political condition. Through layered paintings that merge textiles, abstraction, and assemblage, Kunbi transforms material into narrative—challenging hierarchies of voice, visibility, and power while foregrounding Ethiopia’s rich cultural histories within a global contemporary art context.

Silence as a social practice in Ethiopia often draws its justification from the country’s rich folkloric traditions. Within these traditions, silence holds an ambivalent and paradoxical status, praised as a virtue while simultaneously regarded as a potential misdeed.

The proverb “Silence is gold” frames advised silence as a sign of wisdom and restraint, yet this valuation is tempered by caution. Other expressions warn that “He who does not name his illness finds no cure” or that “By not speaking, one risks exclusion from opportunity”.

Silence thus emerges not as a mere absence, but as a space of restraint, tension, and ethical negotiation. This space is also deeply political, as the right to speak and to interpret is unevenly distributed along entrenched social and political binaries—male over female, center over periphery, sacred over ordinary. Those positioned on the latter side are denied discursive authority, making silence a contested political condition.

In Tegene Kunbi’s work, the political enters through material choice: his practice invites these asymmetries into the pictorial field. His paintings bring together textiles of starkly contrasting provenance and significance, hand-knitted fabrics made by his mother alongside industrial textiles produced for African markets; sacred garments used in religious contexts alongside utilitarian materials designed for mattresses. Drawing on Ethiopia’s cultural diversity, once described by Carlo Conti Rossini as a “museum of peoples”, Kunbi also incorporates weaving traditions from different regions, where clothing and costume have historically marked cultural and political autonomy, forcing these distinct practices into a shared visual field. Each material carries specific histories of labor, belief, and political positioning. When assembled on the pictorial surface, these categories fracture, and painting becomes a site where socially and culturally segregated materials are compelled into proximity and renegotiation.

These questions of silence as a hierarchical and political condition extend to exhibition practice itself. In exhibition spaces, artworks are routinely framed by explanatory texts, labels, captions, and curatorial narratives that claim interpretive authority. Language speaks for the artwork, while the visual and multimodal are rendered silent, reinforcing a hierarchy in which written language becomes the primary site of meaning-making.

Against this backdrop, Kunbi approaches painting as a platform where such regimes of silence are both enacted and unsettled. His works refuse the conception of painting as a passive or purely visual medium; instead, painting functions as a layered archive of labor, memory, and history, operating in a minor key in which silence takes material form and meaning emerges through duration, proximity, and material presence rather than explanation.

The exhibition is also made possible with the support of Primo Marella Gallery, an art gallery based in Milan and Lugano that represents the artist.

The Ethiopia Pavilion will be inaugurated during the preview days of the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia (May 6, 7 and 8, 2026). It will be open to the public from Saturday, May 9 to Sunday, November 22, 2026.

The Ethiopia Pavilion is at Palazzo Bollani, Castello 3647, Venice from 9th May to 22nd November, 2026.

Source: Culturalee

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