Venice Biennale Opening Week Finds Art, Politics, and Communion in Tension
At the Venice Biennale’s opening week, the most resonant moments were not the loudest. They came through Koyo Kouoh’s main exhibition, “In Minor Keys,” a project that Thomas Rom describes as deeply compelling for its sensitivity, ritual atmosphere, and refusal of linear storytelling. In his account of the week in Venice, Rom frames the exhibition as a reminder that art can still create a space for feeling before interpretation, and for lived experience before institutional certainty.
Kouoh’s curatorial approach, as Rom presents it, gave the Biennale a rare emotional coherence. He describes the exhibition as layered, sensual, and at times confrontational, with works that asked viewers to remain open to transformation. He also cites Yukio Mishima’s line, “Living is merely the chaos of existence,” as a fitting echo for the exhibition’s sense of instability and vitality.
Rom moves through several national pavilions with the same attention to atmosphere. In the Danish Pavilion, Maja Malou Lyse examined fertility as a metaphor for exhaustion and the erosion of intimacy under digital overstimulation. The Canadian Pavilion, with Abbas Akhavan, centered fragility, displacement, breath, and survival. In the Polish Pavilion, Bogna Burska and Daniel Kotowski explored communication beyond speech through sound and image. The Nordic Pavilion’s sculptural installation by Tori Wrånes stood out to Rom as a particularly strong dialogue between art and architecture, while Miet Warlop’s Belgian Pavilion translated instability, vulnerability, and bodily exhaustion into an emotionally charged environment.
The week also included a performance by Jordan Roth at Palazzo dei Fiori, co-hosted by Performance Space New York’s Visionaries Circle, underscoring how closely performance and social gathering remain linked in Venice. Rom also points to the unofficial South African Pavilion, where Gabrielle Goliath’s “Elegy” was presented at Chiesa di Sant’Antonin after South Africa withdrew from the Biennale.
Later in the week, many pavilions closed in solidarity with Palestinian liberation, a gesture that sharpened Rom’s sense that the Biennale was missing spaces for civic reflection. He recalls some of the most compelling conversations taking place inside the Russian, Israeli, and Saudi pavilions, and argues that art still has the capacity to foster empathy, bridge difference, and sustain meaningful exchange. In Venice, that claim felt less abstract than urgent.
