The 61st Venice Biennale: ‘artists who confront difficult realities in unusual ways’ at Palazzo Grassi and the Punta della Dogana

In Venice, everything begins with a crossing — water, trade routes, cultures. Histories converge and disperse with the tide, and it is this ebb and flow that underpins the latest curatorial vision from Emma Lavigne and Jean-Marie Gallais at the Pinault Collection during the 61st International Art Exhibition.

‘Venice is a kind of intersection,’ says Lavigne, director of the collection, describing a desire to engage with both the Biennale’s global outlook and what she calls ‘the city’s DNA’ — its Eastern influences, mercantile history and proximity to contemporary migration routes. Against the backdrop of the ongoing humanitarian crisis in the Mediterranean, the curators have invited four artists whose work responds to the tensions shaping the world today.

At the Punta della Dogana, artists Lorna Simpson and Paulo Nazareth consider the building’s history as a former customs house that traded in salt, once known as ‘white gold’ — a commodity that flowed through the city like high water in the winter months. Its corrosive presence is put to good use by Nazareth, who has used salt to draw the outline of a ‘ghost ship’ — a term used by Portuguese traders to describe vessels carrying enslaved people.

Curated by Fernanda Brenner, the Brazilian artist’s exhibition is titled Algebra, an allusion to the way people were once seen as a commodity to be checked and numbered. The word comes from the Arabic al-jabr, which means ‘the setting of bones’ — and Nazareth sees a role for artists in repairing the fractured histories between nations. Over the years, he has undertaken a number of epic walking journeys along routes that were historically marked by colonial violence, as a way of re-mapping these territories. He has devised a parallel event to his Venice show in Veneza, a small city in the Brazilian interior that shares its name, creating a dialogue across time and space.

Like Nazareth, Simpson also finds inspiration in the liminal aspects of life. The American artist’s paintings seem to dissolve into the city itself; the nocturnal blues, greens and greys of her canvases echo the lagoon’s filmy light and atmosphere. Her work unfolds like a series of chapters. ‘Moving through the exhibition is like reading a fragmented novel,’ says Lavigne. ‘You see themes of identity, history and representation, but they appear and recede.’

In one gallery, large black-and-white collages constructed from back issues of Ebony and Jet magazines create dense, layered histories that overlap. Drawn from publications that shaped Black cultural identity in the United States, they collapse time, linking the civil rights struggles of the 1960s and the free jazz of John Coltrane to the political realities of today.

Elsewhere, a room of Arctic landscape paintings — described by Lavigne as ‘the blue chapel’ — blends the cold waters of the northern hemisphere with the Black Atlantic crossing, creating a melopoeia of ghostly voices that speak of histories hitherto erased.

‘There is a strong sense of storytelling and an engagement with resistance across all the exhibitions,’ says curator Jean-Marie Gallais. ‘At Palazzo Grassi, as at the Punta della Dogana, we wanted to pair two artists who confront difficult realities in unusual ways.’

Although separated in age by 20 years, the Kenyan-born British painter Michael Armitage and the Indian filmmaker Amar Kanwar share a similar aesthetic. ‘Armitage’s paintings are very cinematic, and Kanwar’s films are quite painterly,’ says Gallais. The relationship between Kanwar’s two key films, The Torn First Pages and The Peacock’s Graveyard, circles similar concerns. The first focuses on individual protest — particularly that of a shopkeeper in Myanmar who removed the propaganda pages from the books he sold and was imprisoned for his actions. The later video installation, The Peacock’s Graveyard, takes a timeless fictional form that meditates on human nature, injustice and arrogance. In many ways, the first film is a premonition of the second.

‘Armitage’s paintings have similar concerns,’ says Gallais. ‘On one level, most of them depict real people and events — such as the upheavals of the 2017 Kenyan elections — and on another, they have a dreamlike quality that mirrors the sensibility of Kanwar’s film installations.’

Armitage’s captivating inhabited landscapes and scenes of African life, painted on bark cloth and playing with art historical or filmic references, have been widely celebrated in recent years, including the staging of a solo exhibition at London’s Royal Academy of Arts when he was just 37. His works have a lyrical sensibility, and the paint flows alluringly, creating wide chasms of colour, suggesting silence where historical narrative should emerge.

His paintings for Palazzo Grassi are presented under the title The Promise of Change. ‘It reflects both hope and scepticism,’ says Gallais. ‘Across all four exhibitions, you see tragedy and resilience, but the final message is a unifying one: that change is still possible.’

Lorna Simpson. Third Person and Paulo Nazareth. Algebra are on show until 22 November 2026 at the Punta della Dogana. Michael Armitage. The Promise of Change and Amar Kanwar. Co-travellers run until 10 January 2027 at Palazzo Grassi

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