{"id":1923195,"date":"2026-05-07T09:35:39","date_gmt":"2026-05-07T06:35:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1923195"},"modified":"2026-05-07T09:35:39","modified_gmt":"2026-05-07T06:35:39","slug":"venice-diary-day-2-in-minor-keys-is-a-statement-on-perseverance-and-play","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1923195","title":{"rendered":"Venice Diary Day 2: \u201cIn Minor Keys\u201d Is a Statement on Perseverance and Play"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\n\t\u201cIn Minor Keys\u201d is the only biennial in memory that\u2019s made me find a dark corner to cry in.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Arsenale opens with a poem on the wall by Refaat Alareer, written before he was killed by the Israeli military in Gaza in 2023. \u201cIf I must die \/ you must live,\u201d he writes, \u201cto tell my story \/ to sell my things \/ to buy a piece of cloth and some strings,\u201d to assemble a white kite that might serve as a symbol of hope for a child somewhere in Gaza, floating in the sky.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe strongest threads of the show take up the poem\u2019s themes of perseverance and play\u2014with our tragic times always heavily present, but more as exposition: looming backdrops against which artists imagine the worlds to come. It\u2019s a show not only about surviving against the odds, but thriving through them. It aims, per the wall text, to \u201cnurture society\u201d and provide \u201cspiritual rest.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n\tIt was Guadalupe Maravilla\u2019s sculptures that first choked me up. I have always loved his work, which is all about mourning and healing from biological and social ills\u2014in his case, migration by foot from El Salvador to the US as a child, and his subsequent, not unrelated experience of stomach cancer. But these new versions of his Disease Thrower<\/em> sculptures\u2014chillingly titled for our \u201cICE Age\u201d\u2014incorporate versions of the blue bunny hat memorably worn by 5-year-old Liam Conejo-Ramos when he was kidnapped by ICE on his way home from preschool.<\/p>\n

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Work by Guadalupe Maravilla in the 2026 Venice Biennale.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tMaravilla\u2019s work confronting how illnesss is socially and politically produced finds its echo in the Giardini, in Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka\u2019s linocuts on handmade paper. They depict melting snowdrifts the Inuit have used as navigation guides for centuries. The work was made partly in response to a study suggesting that bipolar disorder\u2014which Hatanaka has\u2014may have emerged during the first Ice Age not as a disorder at all, but as an adaptive tool for navigating extreme weather variability. In the Arsenale, a section devoted to nature emphasizes not its ephemerality, but its capacity for perseverance. Works by Carolina Caycedo, Wardha Shabbir, Michael Joo, and Vera Tamari take on defiant \u201cweeds,\u201d seed-saving traditions, and fossilized forms. If the saying \u201cadapt or perish\u201d derives from Charles Darwin, these are lifeforms that have survived by adapting across countless contexts. Naturally, our species would be wise to take note.<\/p>\n

\n\tWorks in \u201cMinor Keys\u201d\u2014a title that invokes both sonic tonality as well as islands\u2014are invested in world-building and change, but often on an intergenerational scale, evoking transformations that may not happen within our lifetimes. Where the show frames art as a tool for world-building, curator Koyo Kouoh dedicated her own work to institution-building, and devotes galleries to a number of artist-led groups invested in the same ethos: Denniston Hill, the Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute, and fierce pussy.<\/p>\n

\n\tKouoh died before completing the biennial, and the exhibition was carried out by the team she assembled. From what I gather from those who knew her well, if anyone could build a coalition and pass the torch, it was Kouoh.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s part of why I wanted, in this quick-response diary, to identify a few of the show\u2019s strongest threads. Inevitably, without a lead curator present to articulate them directly, some of those connections remain unnamed\u2014and I\u2019m left wondering whether the argument would have felt tighter had Kouoh been able to see it through herself. Certainly, the groundwork is there; naturally, I\u2019m curious as to what could have been. I\u2019ll also add that, as with most sprawling international exhibitions, there was plenty of work I found mediocre\u2014not bad in a way that\u2019s particularly interesting to critique, just not exactly to my taste either.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut I do believe, ultimately and strongly, in the model of art that \u201cMinor Keys\u201d advocates. It\u2019s a show invested as much in the social as in the visual, in the realities of the world as in imaginations of what it might become. And it\u2019s about art that takes the bad of the world and transmutes it into something else. I\u2019ll dwell on that more in a proper review later, and leave you for now with two examples of what I mean.<\/p>\n

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Work by Walid Raad in the 2026 Venice Biennale.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tDuchamp\u2019s Bo\u00eete-en-valise<\/em> is on view in the Giardini, a work that\u2019s been haunting me as we approach a new \u201930s. \u201cEverything important I\u2019ve ever done can fit inside a suitcase,\u201d he is known to have quipped before recreating miniature paper versions of his most iconic works and boxing them up. I always took the line as self-deprecating, which it is. But he also said it as fascism was rising, war loomed on the horizon, and he faced the real possibility of fleeing Europe. He was choosing to adapt, not perish.<\/p>\n

\n\tWalid Raad points to a similar resourcefulness-as-resilience the Arsenale. After the Lebanese Civil War ended in 1990, militias sold off weapons, many of which found their way to the Balkans\u2014meaning the Yugoslav Wars were largely fought with Lebanese weapons. Yet underneath the wooden pallets the weapons were shipped on, according to Raad, people found beautiful copies of Arab and Turkish paintings that had long been reported stolen. Imagining who was brilliant enough to put them there, I\u2019m reminded that adaptation and creativity are one in the same.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/IMG_6280-1.jpg?w=1024″] \u201cIn Minor Keys\u201d is the only biennial in memory that\u2019s made me find a dark corner to cry in. The Arsenale opens with a poem on the wall by Refaat Alareer, written before he was killed by the Israeli military in Gaza in 2023. \u201cIf I must die \/ you must live,\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1923195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1923195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1923195"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1923195\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1923195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1923195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1923195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}