Venice Biennale: ‘In Minor Keys’ Looks at Lush Gardens and a Scarred Earth

Imagery of lush gardens, jungles, and other green spaces makes up one of the core metaphors of “In Minor Keys.” The catalog essays of Biennale president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco and La Squadra both describe meetings with Kouoh under trees: the weeping fig tree in Ca’ Giustinian, the Biennale’s headquarters, and a mango tree in RAW Material’s courtyard, respectively. A core concept of the exhibition is the creole garden, as theorized by Édouard Glissant. Throughout both the Giardini’s Central Pavilion and the Arsenale, nature comes in—via paintings depicting flora, sculptures using the earth as material, videos and sound recordings of the rhythms of nature—beckoning viewers to take it all in.

The Central Pavilion opens with a facade installation by Otobong Nkanga, who has covered the structure’s four columns with bricks, into which she has inserted plants whose vines will likely obscure the building by the end of the Biennale in November. At the Arsenale, Uriel Orlow makes that most visible in his installation Dedication II (2021/2026), in which screens show the roots of trees as poetic text scrolls by and a wooden platform vibrates, as if to amplify the movements of the ground below. Outdoors, in both venues’ gardens, Orlow identifies the various plants that make up the greenery surrounding us, highlighting the places in Africa, Asia, and South America where some of them come from, showing them “not as a passive backdrop of history (and the Biennale), but as agents that move with humans across the world,” per the catalog. In a related work, Reveries of Collective Walkers (Reading to Plants), he invites visitors to do just that—read to the plants and to imagine how they might hear what they say, and even what they might say back.

Dan Lie presents Temple of Passages (2026), a large-scale installation of scented flowers; they are strung together via maritime rope, recalling the history of this warehouse of the Arsenale where such fibers were once knotted. In the Arsenale’s garden, Wardha Shabbir‘s A Home Is Where My Leaves Are is a red-painted bronze sculpture that combines different plants that adapt to, survive, and ultimately thrive in the most extreme and hostile of conditions. Clay sculptures by the likes of Seyni Awa Camara and Célia Vásquez Yui are given prominent places in the Giardini, contrasted by the work of an artist like Sabian Baumann, who works with unfired clay, crafting sculptures of stacked forms that are inherently unstable, as they could return to the earth from which they are formed at any second.

Shabbir’s idyllic gouache paintings delicately meld depictions of plant life with colorful geometric shapes, relating them in the way you might see in a home’s courtyard garden. Mohammed Joha shows a series of watercolors titled No Shelter 12-29 (2025) that render the landscape of Gaza, which he imbues with color, rebutting Israel’s destruction of this land that has been ongoing since 2023. Ebony G. Patterson‘s gleaming …fester… (2023) presents dozens of yards of Jacquard floral fabric that have been further embellished with glitter, lace, beads, and more. The density of the work recalls a rainforest or jungle, but as its title implies and the work’s verso reveals—an innumerable mound of red-painted hands through which black thorns sprout—behind such depictions of the Caribbean as beautiful hide the brutal history of colonialism.

But the earth isn’t always a verdant place, some of the artists in the exhibition remind us. Theo Eshetu’s Garden of the Broken Hearted (2026) is a large olive tree on a rotating platform that has been transported from an undisclosed location; once a site of respite and gathering, it bears the scars of conflict, yet has still survived. Manuel Mathieu’s mixed-media painting GENOCIDE (2026) shows a coastal landscape, almost certainly Gaza, whose sandy landscapes look like bruised flesh, while the sea is a deep black. Bonnie Devine presents a suite of eight landscape paintings tiled “Land in War,” that shows once vibrant scenes that have been transformed into noxious places at the hands of empire: in one, a biplane is set across a bright red sky, the plumes of smoke, from a bomb it just dropped seen in the distance. Dawn DeDeaux’s Dirt Bowl Table (2021) collects soil samples from around the world, visualizing the ills wrought by climate change on our mother earth, a plea in a way not to abandon her or cause more ruin.  

Vera Tamari’s subtle installation, Mantra, places ceramic renditions of the seeds of Astomaea seselifolia, a plant native to Palestine and other parts of the Mediterranean, that “grows freely among vineyards and olive groves,” though some have labeled it a weed and the British Mandate identified it as one of 32 such species that should be exterminated, according to a wall label. In a stunning room by collective fierce pussy/arms ache avid aeon, Zoe Leonard presents images of the US-Mexico borderlands, where a border patrol helicopter hovers overheard, surveilling and policing a landscape scarred by geopolitical division, while Joy Episalla’s foldtogram (brackwish waters, NYC / Venezia, rcp 95 ft x 50 in), iteration 1 is a massive sheet of light-sensitive paper picturing a landscape that has been crumbled into a messy pile.

Relatedly, multiple works in the Arsenale look at the histories of extractivism. Florence Lazar’s 125 Hectacres features farmer Véronique Montjean tells us that the lush land you see “isn’t some utopia,” but a place where local, diversified vegetation once grew and via colonialism was replaced by cash crops like bananas and sugar for export to Europe; to this day, international aid to farmers often goes to support these kinds of lands, as opposed to small farmers. Sawangwongse Yawnghwe’s paintings present dense charts that map the world order, connecting, for example, “universal lack“ with a red line to “fetishism of commodities.” This comes to a head in Alfredo Jaar’s The End of the World, a red-lit, cathedral-styled space that on one end lists eight metals, including cobalt, lithium, and copper, that are essential to contemporary life and whose mining is at the center of geopolitical conflicts and illness to those who mine them. At the other end, he has pressed them into a 4-centimeter-square that risks aestheticizing these important concerns but that is also, if taken apart, would be among the most valuable objects on view in the Biennale.

At the heart of the exhibition are two deceased artists, Issa Samb and Beverly Buchanan, whose ways of thinking animate “In Minor Keys,” with multiple galleries, called “Shrines,” in the Central Pavilion dedicated to their work. In one section, we see a translation of Samb’s La Cour (The Yard), his “permanent and ever-evolving installation of a courtyard-home-studio,” which Kouoh picked as the most influential work of the 2010s; a video by Adrienne Edwards, projected over some of his sculptures, gives life to this. Most impressive here is the love and care given to Buchanan and her expansive practice. Underrecognized for her groundbreaking contributions to Land Art, Buchanan comes into full focus in “In Minor Keys.” In one room, video documentation maps many of her earthworks series—small monuments alongside roadways that mark space and can easily go unnoticed.

Another guide of this exhibition is Marcel Duchamp, whose innovations like the readymade are framed as a practice that understands the art world as a machine to be subverted via “works that lodge themselves inside this machine, dripping glue into its gears,” per a wall text. (A catalog essay by Elena Filipovic explores the artistic affinities between Samb and Duchamp and their interest in the margins.) On view is Boîte-en-valise, showing his most famous works at miniature, portable scale. Duchamp’s influence on the art of the past century is undeniable, and many of the artists here offer work that stands within that legacy. Installed above Boîte-en-valise is a photograph by Akinbode Akinbiyi showing a pile of urban detritus in Berlin, including a discarded toilet that reads “Fuck Duchamp.”

Samb, Buchanan, and Duchamp provide the seeds for this exhibition, an important metaphor that recurs throughout Kouoh’s exhibition. Spread across both venues is a section named “The Schools” that focuses on highlighting the contributions of artist-run spaces that have, in the past two decades or so, nurtured multiple generations of artists. Installations by groups like Denniston Hill in Upstate New York, Guest Artists Space (G.A.S.) Foundation in Lagos, blaxTARLINES in Ghana, and the Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute (NCAI) are chaotic and multifaceted, showing many ways of art-making.

In this same vein, Guadalupe Rosales presents an installation that organizes slivers of the vast community-built archive she has assembled over the past decade to visualize the beauty of L.A.’s Latinx community. Projected onto three sets of vertical blinds is Retiro (2019), a series of video interviews in which Natalia Lassalle-Morillo interviews her mother and collaborator Gloria Maria Morillo, who rewrites her personal history in real time. Guadalupe Maravilla collects the material trace of migration, adding found objects that retrace his own childhood migration to the U.S. from El Salvador, and assembles them into his “Disease Throwers” sculptures, which he describes as “both shrines and healing instruments.” The gaps in the archive are rendered beautiful and to be respected by holding space for this lacuna, in works like the “Observatorio de Lagunas” series by Sofía Gallisá Muriente. One entry, Guaniquilla luminosa / Luminous Guaniquilla (2023), features digitized blue-ish Super 8 footage of an inlet in Puerto Rico’s Cabo Rojo that has been taken to the point of abstraction.

One of the exhibition’s most poignant works is Avi Mograbi‘s installation Between a River and a Sea (2026), which on one screen shows business directories from Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria from 1938, while facing it we see Mograbi scroll through an online version of the Yellow Pages for Gaza from 2023. The first era precedes the creation of the state of Israel, while the second comes just before Israel’s destruction of Gaza after October 7. Life and the businesses that sustain it have been irreparably damaged by these conflicts, 80 years apart. Walid Raad, whose work has long questioned the objectiveness of archives by creating fictional and speculative ones of his own, presents two powerful installations that challenge viewers to figure out if what is in front of us is fact or fiction. At the Giardini are 11 photographs that allegedly show some of the beds where Yasser Arafat, the deceased leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, slept. Arafat famously never slept more than two nights in a row in the same place. Back at the Arsenale is a set of palettes featuring copies of missing artworks that hadn’t been seen in decades; the palettes had been shipped from Lebanon, following the end of its civil war in 1990, to different Yugoslav countries as they were preparing for their own wars. “One war ends, another begins. The weapons moved easily from one battlefield to the next,” Raad reminds us in a wall text.

As “In Minor Keys” implies, listening to “the quiet tones, the lower frequencies, the hums, the consolations of poetry, all portals of improvisation to the elsewhere and the otherwise,” as Kouoh puts it in her essay, is essential to life in our current world. The sonic plays an essential role in the show, with sound pieces by Pauline Oliveros and Laurie Anderson asking viewers to don headphones, close their eyes, and listen to the compositions and narration, respectively, by these artists. Cauleen Smith‘s The Wanda Coleman Songbook immerses us in the sights, sounds, and vibes of Los Angeles through the lens of poet Wanda Coleman. At the center entry room of the Central Pavilion stand two beadwork costumes by Big Chief Demond Melancon, honoring the vibrancy of the New Orleans Black Masking Indians traditions and the movement and joy they inspire as they process during Mardi Gras.

In her essay, Kouoh cites James Baldwin: “There is a reason, after all, that some people wish to colonize the moon, and others dance before it as an ancient friend.” That is best exemplified in the installation in the Arsenale’s Casetta Scaffali by Clarissa Herbst and Dominique Rust. Parfumerie honors an underground gathering space in Zurich the two founded that served as a gathering place for artists; Kouoh worked the bar some nights. It’s an impressionistic memory of the nights spent there on the dance floor, a much-needed respite. Throughout it all, “In Minor Keys” reminds us that celebration is key to survival, resilience, endurance—to recharge from the woes of one day to continue the fight and the struggle for the next day.