The Trauma Hothouse in Venice

The Biennale’s anchor In Minor Keys exhibition mass-produces woe, and lots of bad art follows.

‘A s the world cries out and voices are distorted in the din — to the point of all meaning being obscured” — this describes the human condition in 2026, at least as the head of the Venice Biennale, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, sees it. That’s how he introduces In Minor Keys, the over-boweled, insistent, and predictable anchor exhibition at the world’s biggest contemporary-art exposition — the art world’s Olympics. Sounds like the perfect soil for mediocre art, and there’s lots of it among hundreds of works by 111 artists and collaborations. Amid cries, din, and distortion, who, after all, can possibly discern quality or coherence or craftsmanship or originality? Well, I can.

It all started with such promise. It would be a contemplative, slower Biennale, I heard, not shouty but focusing on the close-to-home-and-hearth, the prosaic, the mournful here and there, invoking the subtle, quiet things we overlook, the things that ground us. “Convivial collectivity,” processional, no goose-stepping allowed, and very creole, casting soft light on the affective and reparative. Tunes in a minor key have a touch, sometimes a dollop, of sadness. Simon and Garfunkel’s The Sound of Silence, California Dreamin’, and Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata are examples.

Koyo Kouoh, based in Cape Town and a curator there but from Cameroon, though she grew up Swiss, was chosen as the curator of In Minor Keys. She was the first black African woman to be given the extraordinarily tough job of organizing a relevant, gripping show under multiple guns: a huge number of artists, a high-wattage spotlight, with only a couple of years’ time, and in spaces owned and run by Italians. I didn’t know much about African and South American contemporary art but knew she’d emphasize it. That’s good. I’d learn something. Days before she was to announce her fully developed theme, Kouoh died of a galloping cancer. With her days numbered, she picked a curatorial team — a committee — to run with her ideas.

In Minor Keys starts with Big Chief Demond Melancon’s Amistad Takeover, a man-size glass-beaded processional object, basically a giant mask, meant to be carried in Mardi Gras parades. Melancon (b. 1978) is from New Orleans and makes these things as part of the black Louisiana Bayou masking tradition. The Amistad rebellion in 1839 by a group headed from Sierra Leone to slavery in the Caribbean is famous, though the tread of that tire is worn. I like color, and, as a work of art, it’s good, but what happened to using our indoor voices, supposedly among the major themes of In Minor Keys? I’m skeptical.

The main Biennale building in the Giardini, Venice’s public gardens, has a rotunda and grand hall for big effects, counterintuitive for the themes that Kouoh wanted to highlight in the show. But, let’s face it, this was going to be a goose-stepper of a show. How could it not be? We live in the weirdest time, when the art establishment, and the Biennale is part of it, favors grievance pimps. Among the countless voices in the third world, they get the megaphones. Give them that power, they aggrandize themselves and their big causes: colonialism, slavery, oppression, and antisemitism for which Gaza is the totem. They don’t soothe cacophony. Rather, they make more of it.

I didn’t hate all of it or even much of it. The committee had Kouoh’s blueprints and probably fell into a bitch-and-moan default pattern. At the center of the grand hall is an installation by Celia Vásquez Yui (b. 1960), an Amazon Peruvian indigenous artist. Her Council of the Mother Spirits of the Animals, dozens of handsome, sassy ceramic figures from the early 2020s, is assembled like a parliament in curved rows on platforms. She believes in interspecies communication, animal rights, and design as medicine. That’s her thing, and it’s well done.

The subjects — jaguars, little bears, deer, birds, fish, pigs, armadillos, and monkeys, among others — smile sometimes and look very cute. They seem to go with the flow. I don’t know anything about religion among the Amazon Peruvians, but the art is affective and effective. They are things that ground us. I couldn’t pick one up and examine it, so who knows about their craftsmanship. They look like they might verge on high-end museum-shop goods, trendily indigenous, but don’t look for the union label.

Displaying The Council of the Mother Spirits alone with evocative lighting and mood music would have made a statement — home-and-hearth, communing with benevolent, ancestral spirits, and contemplation — but the space immediately turns shouty, with a niche in the grand space that’s devoted to Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968). Nothing says warm and cozy, stop and smell the roses, “Boy, I want to be grounded” better than the artist who, in 1917, submitted a urinal to be displayed at the Society of Independent Artists fair near Grand Central Station. And who was an inventor of Dada. And was Mr. Irony. And was a charlatan.

Duchamp has been mouldering in his grave a long time, but his work’s there to make a point. Duchamp “understood that the museum is a machine — of judgment, framing, and power,” the wall panel tells us. “He made works that would lodge themselves inside this machine, dripping glue into its gears.”

His Boîte-en-valise from the late 1930s is one view. That’s his suitcase with replicas of his entire oeuvre shrunk and compacted to fit into the suitcase, a mini museum, something curated, a form of fiction, and packaged as a power play for us yahoos to consume as the canon of refined taste. The curators of In Minor Keys insist they’re subverting this, but they’re not. They’re playing their own power game.

Subverting the order of things is a good mission statement for an artist, but you’re not subversive if you’re preaching to the choir. It’s a limousine-liberal, Davos-infused crowd, alongside critics and academics who are either real Trots or who mouth the commie prayers because that pays the bills and groupthink is easy. For this crowd and the artists catering to them, original thoughts are few and far between and blasphemous. For all the yadda yadda about healing, no one wants anything or anyone to heal. That would put the shtick out of business.

Behind The Council of the Mother Spirits is María Magdalena Campos-Pons’s massive, bombastic Anatomy of the Magnolia Tree for Koyo Kouoh and Toni Morrison, a billboard-size painting from 2026 that depicts the two dead women as patron saints of black female solidarity. On the floor between the painting and Vásquez Yui’s Mother Spirits are seven resin and glass human-size sculptures of magnolias. Kamaal Makak’s synthesized bass-guitar music — in minor keys — plays in loops in the background.

Compos-Pons is a very good artist. A tribute to Kouoh makes sense, but not there and not with Toni Morrison. The committee’s heavy-handed decision to plop Morrison, with all her baggage, into the beginning of the show undercuts the visitor’s authority to find his or her own meaning in the art. It’s curatorial insecurity, too, hanging the creative hat on someone that famous. Morrison’s work anchors the dodgy black studies academic discipline, and her 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature was less about her work than her as an idea. It’s a coincidence, but in Beloved, a mother murders her two-year-old child — slits her throat — and, of course, the Clancy trial is in the news. And the resin magnolias are ugly.

A huge problem in the exhibition is repetition. The art of Werewere Liking (b. 1950), a Cameroonian artist living in the Ivory Coast, is everywhere, in the beginning, middle, and end of In Minor Keys. Her work is African Surrealism, dream-adjacent, drawn from fables, paintings, and sculptures over 50 years, and there’s a lot of it, so much of it that I thought “She must have friends in high places.” And she did. Kouoh was from Cameroon. They were best buds.

Liking’s Lampedusa, from 2019, is an 18-foot-wide scene of illegal immigration in Italy. It’s one more flashy, pompous work of art crammed in the grand hall space as if there wasn’t enough happening there already. My hunch is that not six but three, two, or even one degree of separation describes the relationships among artists and the committee giving us In Minor Keys. A handful of Liking works would have been fine, especially since her art is derivative and warmed over this and that — Ensor, Guernica, even Thomas Hart Benton.

Less is more, a Zen approach consistent with In Minor Keys’ theme, goes out the door and into a canal. Kambui Olujimi (b. 1976) is from Brooklyn. Ten big ink, watercolor, and graphite pictures are “explorations of Self and Blackness that are as expansive and boundless as the cosmos.” Hee’s captivated by nuclear fission, not a bad idea, but he “posits gravity as a metaphor for white supremacy,” which is among the dumbest things I’ve ever read.

Then there’s just out and out bad art. First Nation Canadian Bonnie Devine (b. 1952) “erodes the colonial world, shaping the imaginings of a decolonial one,” I read, but I can’t say I was pre-bored since I’d already looked at her Battle for the Woodlands, an installation from 2014, not exactly new. It’s a colonial map of Canada with the Great Lakes in red oxide. It’s about radioactive mining, but the art is sophomoric, as in high school sophomore standards of nuance, enigma, enchantment, and craftsmanship, and let’s not even toss beauty in the mix. Or minor keys. She makes John Philip Sousa seem coy. And, as with Liking, her work appears again and again in the show.

More junk is to come, literally. Daniel Lind-Ramos (b. 1953) does rip-offs of John Chamberlain car-part sculptures, except he uses ratty old textiles. His work “symbolises the stakes of water-bound travel for black life, past and present, in Puerto Rico.” Yoshiko Shimada (b. 1959) is a Japanese feminist, but her paintings are deadpan ugly. Buhlebezwe Siwani’s two-part work is a video depicting six black women “in divination and healing” in deep chiaroscuro, with accompanying sculptures in the green color of the soap used in low-income South African households. I read that the subject is inequality, pregnant women, and “the profundity and mundanity of motherhood.” The artist, born in 1987, lives in Cape Town and Amsterdam, and her work is junk, noisy junk, since the women in the video sing. On and on it goes.

I always look for the silver lining behind those dark clouds of drudgery and despair and doom, however contrived, since going through In Minor Keys is a slog. Mohammed Joha’s collages of paper, cardboard, and fabric are very beautiful and are displayed with his watercolors in a group called No Shelter. Joha (b. 1978) grew up in Gaza but left in 2004 for Marseille. He’s very smart with geometric shapes and different textures, and he’s a great colorist. “A fundamental formal influence was his childhood in Gaza,” the label says. “No Shelter is not merely a mournful chronicle of indignity, forced displacement, and loss. It is also an elegy for steadfastness, care, and the refusal to disappear.”

Let’s be honest. Joha’s fundamental formal influence is Matisse, Bonnard, Derain, Monet, and the rest of the cohort of artists who painted the light and color of the French Riviera. There’s fracture and sadness in them as well as a sense of place — tent cities. Part of Joha’s family died in Israel’s attacks to defend itself from Hamas. It all, of course, could have been averted but for Hamas.

I loved Sohrab Hura’s art. Things Felt but Not Quite Expressed is a group of paintings depicting scenes of everyday life. About 30 of them are on the wall, some with titles written in pencil on the wall, such as The Introvert, but some titles are painted into the scene. Some are funny, some poignant, and they’re among the few honestly human and grounding things I saw. Hura (b. 1981) is from New Delhi. I wish there were more art from India in the show.

I chuckled at a group of Walid Raad’s small painted photographs of imaginary beds, eleven of them, where Yasir Arafat slept. Infamously, he slept in a different place every night to evade all the people who wanted to kill him. Too bad someone didn’t get him circa 1970, but he seems to have had girly-man taste in boudoirs. Raad (b. 1967) is Lebanese but lives in the U.S. and teaches at Bard.

In Minor Keys unfolds first at the Biennale’s main exhibition hall in the Giardini, and then it’s reprised at the Arsenale, where the countries without permanent pavilions in the Giardini send their exhibitions. It’s not a second part of In Minor Keys but a replica of it, mostly the same artists and themes but with different art, so I undertook a Venetian death march twice. This convinced me that the committee is, to draw from Oklahoma!, a crew that cain’t say no, couldn’t edit itself, couldn’t stay on message, and, to compensate for uncertainty and insecurity, went for flaunty, flatulent art rather than the small, intimate things that the topic should have warranted, work such as Hura’s and Joha’s and Raad’s. It’s an excruciating, deadening experience.