Venice Biennale’s “In Minor Keys” Treats Survival as an Art Form
The Venice Biennale’s “In Minor Keys” opens not with spectacle, but with a poem. At the Arsenale, visitors encounter Refaat Alareer’s words, written before he was killed by the Israeli military in Gaza in 2023: “If I must die / you must live,” he writes, imagining a white kite assembled from “a piece of cloth and some strings.” The gesture is small, but the exhibition it introduces is built on that scale of feeling — intimate, durable, and insistently forward-looking.
The strongest works in the biennial return again and again to perseverance, adaptation, and the labor of making a livable world. Guadalupe Maravilla’s Disease Thrower sculptures are among the most affecting. Their new iteration is charged by the blue bunny hat worn by 5-year-old Liam Conejo-Ramos when he was kidnapped by ICE on his way home from preschool, a detail that sharpens Maravilla’s long-standing meditation on migration, illness, and healing into something more immediate and politically raw.
At the Giardini, Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka’s linocuts on handmade paper depict melting snowdrifts used by the Inuit as navigation guides. The works are rooted in a study suggesting that bipolar disorder, which Hatanaka has, may once have functioned as an adaptive response to extreme weather variability. In the Arsenale, a section devoted to nature emphasizes not fragility, but endurance: Carolina Caycedo, Waqas Khan Shabbir, Michael Joo, and Vera Tamari all engage weeds, seed-saving traditions, and fossilized forms as evidence of survival through change.
The exhibition’s historical references widen the frame. Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise appears as a model of adaptation under the pressure of fascism, while Walid Raad’s work traces weapons and images across the Lebanese Civil War, the Yugoslav Wars, and hidden copies of Arab and Turkish paintings. Together, these works suggest that circulation itself can be a survival strategy.
Koyo Kouoh, who died before completing the biennial, shaped the project through the team she assembled. The exhibition also devotes space to artist-led groups including Denniston Hill, the Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute, and fierce pussy, underscoring her commitment to institution-building as a form of cultural care.
Not every section lands with equal force, but the biennial’s central argument is clear: art can be a tool for world-building, and world-building is inseparable from the social structures that allow it to endure. In a year when so much feels provisional, “In Minor Keys” makes a case for patience, coalition, and the long view.
