Curated by Koyo Kouoh under the title In Minor Keys and realized according to a predetermined program, the 61st International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale focuses on questions of identity, social inequalities, and cultural symbols. In accordance with the established thematic framework, it encompasses not only self-expressive propositions but also divergent orientations at the level of discourse, thereby analyzing an internally constructed present that clusters around a collectively anticipated shared language.

What we encounter here, then, is a vast installation into which a schizoid minor-difference structure infiltrates every interval: one that is bound to Black geographies, clarified within the context of hegemonic narratives and discourses of precarity, and that redefines traditional heritage through a kind of bending of artistic language. Within the Arsenale, this environment, composed of woven and textile works, ethnographic object arrangements, and multivalent configurations of varied complexity, has further been transformed into a field of experience in which interlocking identity problematics and cultural belongings are recombined. These traumatic narratives, reminiscent of psychological and socio-political mechanisms of resistance, are also seen to emerge as liberating dynamic elements that protest economic inequality and the absence of social justice. It must equally be emphasized, within this framework, that approaches nourished by sexuality, nature, the environment, local connections, and cultural influences have been transformed into installative works through a peculiar display of corporeality, seeking to establish consensual relationships with the viewer.

fragile formations that unsettle the present

As is plainly evident, Koyo Kouoh grants priority to African, Latin American, and Asian women artists and narratives. In doing so, a map is constructed that completes this field, one that seems to chart a precarious world order within the post-colonial condition, generating fragile formations that unsettle the present. The aura emanating from this enchanting and colorful totality that Kouoh has assembled within a map of depressive identification oriented toward Black geographies exists in a state of summoning or searching for social dialogue.

There can be no doubt that Kouoh’s textual directives consciously aim, on the one hand, at the repair of damaged psychic worlds produced by socio-cultural tensions, while on the other, they seek the emergence of new expressive models and independent performances taking shape within a turbulent visual language. Through the minor interactions she foregrounds in this context, one arrives at a space in which policies of suppression spreading through deprivation, vulnerability, and identity erosions are interrogated, and where artist-activist resistances are experienced. It is evident that artistic practices and initiatives, having assumed the character of relational acts of identification, are here transformed into a systematic transgression and cry aimed at mitigating the effects of the inequalities being lived in a tragic present, or that they generate an independent, unbounded, and singular clustering. Through this totalizing imaginary, new conceptual deviations and subjective sensations intersecting with deep and dynamic artistic practices are subjected to a kind of analysis.

artist practices transformed into an adventure of transgression

There is little doubt that the compressed arrangement of the Central Pavilion, by creating a singular linguistic coherence through cultural symbols and comparable material elements, expands the field of freedom of movement. In this direction, along a line parallel to Kouoh’s core propositions, it is significant that cultural practices governing everyday life, as well as matters such as identity, belonging, and displacement, adhere to this collective plane and are transformed into an artistic adventure of transgression.

In this context, In Minor Keys, reaching toward the pure states of meaning through tendencies of sublimation and symbolization, seems to draw its power from a depressive energy that anticipates a metamorphosis. It must also be noted that there is a phantasmatic effort at work here, shaped by strange ruptures felt especially in the weaving and textile-heavy works, one that essentially sweeps along all surface residues, penetrates the reality of things, and renders minor tonalities visible in an artistic sense.