“This bienal is not about identities and their politics, not about diversity nor inclusion, not about migration nor democracy and its failures,” writes curator Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung. The disclaimer might appear politically cautious, if not reactionary. Yet Ndikung has signaled that this is a biennial that conceives of humanity “as a verb and a practice,” something to be “negotiated.” It is perhaps the subject of “negotiation” itself that Ndikung attempts to center in this exhibition. Leaving aside the gnomic yet familiar biennial-speak notion of how we might “conjugate humanity,” the exhibition more readily, and perhaps importantly, searches for broader empathies amid polarizations that have only been exacerbated by an increasingly emboldened far-right across democratic countries.
Ndikung’s statement might also be read as a subtle rebuke of criticisms leveled at recent biennales—including last year’s Venice, curated by Adriano Pedrosa—in its attempt to move away from any pre-existing aegis of gridded identity and geopolitical relations. Featuring 125 artists mostly from the global majority, which to some South American journalists seemed disproportionately short of Brazilians, the show proposes how our personal interactions with the material world coexist with more planetary existentialism and fears. Immersing viewers in layers of sounds, walls veiled in translucent cloths or saturated in bold blocks of color, and featuring an impressive number of newly commissioned works, it asks how might we listen and record the stories of those who face generational hardships or remain stateless.
One curatorial directive offered by Ndikung is the near absence of wall texts by any artwork, a point compounded by the cryptic map and accompanying signage. In our age of immediately sourced references and phone-led capture of artworks, seeking to delay or avoid the absorption of artwork into recategorization was a sharp if occasionally frustrating adjustment. Indeed, it often read as a curatorial overstep, one that risked subordinating artworks into a vision that undermined the very notion of “humanity as practice.” If the aim was to foster less direct connections between works, it also thwarted the accessibility and readability of the exhibition as a whole—perhaps ironically so, given that the biennial is broken down into poetically billed “chapters,” for example the lyrical if vague “Cadences of Transformations.” Still, directed to abandon such framing devices, I departed from more familiar ways of designating works for the purpose of review, and wandered the Bienal with a more sensorial, casual intent.
The tendency towards immersive installations was apparent throughout, including Precious Okoyomon’s installation Sun of Consciousness. God Blow Thru Me – Love Break Me (2025). Okoyomon’s familiar but distinctive arboreal environment took up the entrance to the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion, an elaborate stage of slowly browning trees, pools containing fish, vivid colored moss, occasional bird calls, and jets of mist. Meandering visitors could compare environments inside and outside the venue: one, a park built into the city’s structure, popular with residents, the other a temporary structure in a gallery space. While the work subtly commented upon the way corporations continue to operate with impunity on extracting resources from the Earth—including the continued propulsive, racialized impact it inflicts—to the social conditioning of what is commonly conceived as the “natural” within depictions of nature, the work’s own cost to the environment felt more redolent. Yet the piece felt indebted to momentary spectacle—why install a temporary garden at great expense in the grounds of a permanent and sustainable park? The committed interests of longer-term earthwork projects, such as Agnes Denes’s Tree Mountain project from the mid-1990s, came to mind.
More vigorous takes on displacing western-centric branches of thought could be found in the rhythmical breath work of Myriam Omar Awadi’s La Réunion (2025), where assembled performers chanted under veils of highly embellished traditional Comorian fabrics. Similarly attuning our edges of auditory perception was Antonio Társis’s catastrophe orchestra #1 (Act 1) (2024–25), in which charred remains suspended on mechanical levers gently scraped drumskins or vibrated on speakers, sheltered by shroud-like hangings, or Simnikiwe Buhlungu’s Ventilated Pipe Progenies in Another Elsewhere (2025), whose warp of aluminum ducts whistled with air. Korakrit Arunanondchai’s two-screen video about communing with the dead, Unity for Nostalgia (2025), was laden with ritualized, paranoid horror.
A handful of artists also featured throughout the pavilion’s three floors. These operated as small clusters of works thrown into the mix, rather than standalone mini-survey shows inside the Bienal. Here, Frank Bowling’s substantial and still largely under-explored back catalog was a recurring touchstone. While Bowling’s work would have benefitted from a more concentrated display, its presence resonated in the context of representation: in a 1970 essay, the artist made the compelling assertion that “Blackness is no more expressed, in the literal sense, by painting a black face than by a black line.” Such a return to the potencies of abstraction was found throughout the Bienal, including the now established works of Huguette Caland, which stood as glyphs of gendered, sensual intensity laid into dreamlike abstraction (such as the erotic Desert, 1985). The evocative smears of paint on aluminum by Behjat Sadr, made before the Iran Revolution, stood out, as did Madame Zo’s dense weavings of electromagnetic tapes, film stock, newspaper, and herbs: both presented shimmering surfaces replete with political transmission.
In many ways, Ndikung is drawn to ideas of conviviality, of social spaces framed by music or noise, and how and under what conditions they are convened. Such examples could be found in the joyous paintings by Maria Auxiliadora of the 1970s and Heitor dos Prazeres’s paintings from the 1950s, or in Sharon Hayes’s recent compelling videos, which peppered the biennial, where the artist plays a kind of street, chat-show host, asking a crowd of voluntary participants various questions relating to gender, sex, and freedoms. The curators cited Rumi’s thirteenth-century poem “The Guest House.” In its appeal to the value of welcoming others, the text shares concepts with Jacques Derrida’s writings on hospitality, including an analysis of who has the power to welcome or refuse. The poem was a necessary turn that politicized an exhibition that might otherwise be read as a little “kumbaya.” Mao Ishikawa’s photographs of Okinawan women in bars with mostly Black, largely low-ranking US soldiers, during their military occupation complicated narratives of conflict and oppression.
Yet the feeling that this exhibition too readily ignored its political moment in favor of a curatorially led optimism was brought into relief during the opening, after the trial and conviction of former president Jair Bolsonaro on coup charges—a rare occurrence of accountability and outcome in our era of rising authoritarianism. Likewise, given that Ndikung was criticized in Germany for his alleged public support of BDS and the continued divisiveness this subject holds for many public institutions in the country, it is perhaps telling that Gaza was only addressed indirectly in the exhibition—Christopher Cozier’s red, green, and black bunting, After the Appeal Will Come the Next Delivery (2025), being one example. The notion of “humanity as practice” can only do so much work here. Representation does matter, and the inclusion of more Palestinian artists would have helped open up those vital conversations that the exhibition aimed at producing.
The Bienal redirected these political tensions by centering documentary and personal stories amid conflict. Forensic Architecture’s Delta-Delta: People’s Court I (2025), featuring brilliant activist and novelist Ken Saro-Wiwa, challenges the exploitation of the Nigeria’s Delta by British and US oil companies Shell and Chevron. The latter dredged the river and flooded the surrounding delta, submerging over 1,000 homes and many schools under the Atlantic Ocean. Elsewhere, a tight selection of Wolfgang Tillmans’s photographs, which bookended every floor, depicts rivers—some of them dry—as invisible routes of global trade and pollution. The photographs encapsulated many of the Bienal’s themes, including how artworks might function as forms of testimony.
Despite the continued sense of fatigue about the place of large-scale biennial projects, from the purpose they serve to the ecological costs that they incur, one can’t still help but uphold them as destinations that bring together conversations and “encounters” that would otherwise not be possible. Yet in an exhibition that largely emphasizes curators’ interests over that of artists—despite its laudable attempts to avoid nation-state classifications—one can’t help but arrive at a certain cynicism about the way it has chosen to describe optimism itself.
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