Welcome to Venice: the shows you won’t want to miss at the 61st Biennale

On the ground floor of the Hotel Metropole is a small, dark room where the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud partially wrote The Interpretation of Dreams. Inside, light filters warily through a narrow window, casting vertical shadows across the green damask wallpaper. The artist Bracha L. Ettinger has transformed this tiny corner of Venice into what she calls a ‘borderspace’: a place where the bathroom overflows with pink seashells and the bedroom opens Freud’s theories to the feminist gaze.

Things operate differently on water; nothing is fixed, and landmarks have a habit of moving around. Freud wrote that ‘in the unconscious nothing can be brought to an end, nothing is past or forgotten’, and In Minor Keys — the title of the 61st International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale — evokes that same state of flux.

Conceived by the late Koyo Kouoh and realised by her team after her sudden death in May 2025, the exhibition gathers an ensemble of adventurous and open-minded artists whose frequencies are tuned down low, vibrating to the Earth’s primordial hum. Kouoh wrote in her proposal that she wanted an exhibition sotto voce, yet the works on show are anything but muted. History, colonialism, war and environmental destruction are all examined here, often in forensic detail, yet the overall impression is one of liberation. This is poetic justice.

As always with the keynote exhibition, which spans the Central Pavilion in the Giardini and the old imperial Arsenale, there is a great deal to absorb, and the dialogues between artworks can at times feel elusive. It helps to keep in mind the writer Edouard Glissant’s observation that ‘opacities can co-exist and converge, weaving fabrics’, when surveying the 110 artists and collectives on offer.

If there is one central thrum to In Minor Keys, it is that we should pay closer attention to those ungovernable artists and collectives who, in the face of opposition, have continued to sound the alarm.

Omnipresent in this regard is the late Senegalese artist Issa Samb, a lyrical virtuoso of non-reason who reimagined the possibilities of a pan-African avant-garde through street performance and improvisation. Emerging in the early 1970s as a member of the Dakar-based collective Laboratoire Agit’Art, Samb cultivated an unsettling psychosocial eccentricity. Yet that powerful presence is represented only by a narrow wall of artefacts — he may well have left little behind after his death in 2017, but as one of the lodestars of this exhibition, the presentation is slim.

Like Samb, the African-American artist Beverly Buchanan made art that honoured the everyday. Her makeshift ruins, assembled from offcuts of cardboard and wood, possess a deliberate off-kilter charm. Yet they also emerge from a place of foreboding: the crumbling textures and shack-like fragility speak of communities abandoned by the state, where people are forced to take matters into their own hands.

Hala Schoukair’s metaphysical imaginings look like biomorphic specimens and reinforce the exhibition’s vision of a rich ecosystem of artistic enterprise. At the Arsenale, meanwhile, Florence Lazar’s It’s All Thanks to Bad Weather considers the effects of Hurricane Dean on Martinique, which inadvertently exhumed the bones of enslaved people on the grounds of a sugar plantation.

Alfredo Jaar creates a pulsing red shrine to the world’s resources, listing the minerals over which humanity has fought and for which it has wrought such environmental destruction. Daniel Lind-Ramos’s carnivalesque sculptures are fabricated from detritus collected after a storm; and the exhibition closes with an installation by the New Orleans artist Dawn DeDeaux, who has been grappling with the consequences of Hurricane Katrina since 2005.

Outside, the political temperature is rising. Following the jury’s resignation in response to the reinstatement of the Russia and Israel pavilions, the Biennale opened with a protest by Pussy Riot outside the former. Pink flares and chants of ‘Love is Russia’s heart’ drowned out the techno throbbing inside.

Florentina Holzinger, representing Austria, raises the alarm over rising sea levels in a brilliantly visceral performance in which dancers navigate sewage and bodily fluids while Holzinger uses her naked body to toll a warning bell.

The South Africa pavilion remains empty following the decision not to exhibit Gabrielle Goliath’s project, Elegy. The three-part installation can instead be seen at the Chiesa di Sant’Antonin, featuring singers reaching a state of grace by sustaining a single note for an hour as a memorial to murdered women.

Beyond the Biennale, Peggy Guggenheim in London: The Making of a Collector at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection is that rare thing: an exhibition with a tightly curated vision that suggests 1930s London was not quite the artistic backwater it is often thought to have been. The wealthy and far-sighted American’s gallery on Cork Street exhibited works by many of the artists who would go on to become major figures in the radical avant-garde — Wassily Kandinsky’s explosive Dominant Curve (1936) and Rita Kernn-Larsen’s radiating self-portrait being cases in point. (The show moves to London’s Royal Academy on 21 November 2026.)

Helter Skelter: Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince, at the Fondazione Prada, creates a sense of nerve-shredding lawlessness. The two artists’ gritty aesthetic works surprisingly well within the 18th-century palazzo of Ca’ Corner della Regina. While both scavenge widely from counterculture, Jafa operates in a league of his own. Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death is an eight-minute montage featuring police brutality, street riots and mesmerising footage of James Brown, transforming even the most fraught subject matter into moments of euphoric transcendence.

Another unexpected pairing is Michael Armitage and Amar Kanwar at Palazzo Grassi, Armitage’s dreamy, cinematic paintings complementing the poetic abstractions of Kanwar’s film installations. Armitage is an artist capable of turning darkness into something sublime; there is a lonely heroism to his paintings that echoes through Kanwar’s film about a bookseller in Myanmar who tore propaganda pages from his books and was imprisoned for doing so. A similar poetry resonates through Lorna Simpson’s exhibition at the Punta della Dogana, where the histories of transatlantic slavery emerge from the cooling waters of the Arctic in layers of deep blue and grey.

Of Woman Born is Nalini Malani’s exhibition at the Magazzini del Sale: a cacophony of images riffing on the ancient Greek myth of Orestes. Her works ruminate on nationalism and violence against women. Anxiety skitters across the frame of her iPad animations; it is like being immersed in Dadaist poetry, threatening and immediate.

The Korean artist Lee Ufan brings the temperature down at SMAC Venice (San Marco Art Centre), where his elemental works — often made by crushing minerals into the paint — evoke a distilled serenity. Elsewhere, the Fondazione Giorgio Cini commemorates the German painter Georg Baselitz, who died on 30 April this year. Eroi d’Oro is a series of gold paintings, shimmering with metaphysical light, that were made in the final months of his life, paying homage to his wife Elke and his hero, Willem de Kooning.

Perhaps the final word should go to the theatre director Tadeusz Kantor, the subject of a show at the Procuratie Vecchie. An unruly genius of the Polish avant-garde in the 1960s, he invented the artistic process of emballage — the act of wrapping as a means of protection and concealment. It was a vital strategy in a country behind the Iron Curtain, with strict censorship rules, but feels arguably even more resonant today, when exposure can carry such perilous consequences. ‘Emballage, emballage, between eternity and garbage,’ he wrote in his 1964 manifesto. ‘We are witnesses of a clown-like tomfoolery, juggling pathos and pitiful destruction.’

The 61st Venice Biennale is led by the International Art Exhibition In Minor Keys by Koyo Kouoh, on show at the Arsenale, the Giardini and various locations around the city until 22 November 2026