Special Section: 61st Venice Biennale
If art and its exhibition are a kind of gnomon to guide us to the right time of reckoning, quite a few pavilions showed us the length of the shadows and the nuanced complexities (sometimes as amusing as they were alarming) that illuminate the world at this moment.
By Steven Henry Madoff
Still Joy?
In the face of the ongoing, catastrophic war, the Ukrainian exhibition proposes that joy, despite everything, is a sign of strength and resistance.
By Justin Apice
Collective Respiration: Embodied Knowledge in Minor Keys
Despite little evidence to support the harboring of hope, these works allow us to imagine that through collective care and action, renewal and repair are possible.
By Romy Cohen
Paradise Must Not Last Forever
The Latvian Pavilion does a far better job of embodying intimate and convivial universes created by artists compared to the Biennale’s overstuffed and incohesive main exhibitions in the Giardini and Arsenale.
By Colleen Dalusong
Liquid Tongues: Expanding Language, Limiting Experience
There is a difference between making deaf people the topic of an exhibition and actually being inclusive of them in making the exhibition.
By Chaieun Lee
Our New Teacher
Our agency is parodied and mourned by this chattering, oneiric devil as we cruise at ballistic speed not only toward the conjugation of democracy's collapse but toward the collapse, too, of the division between human and machine.
By Steven Henry Madoff
Whose Wet Dream Is This?
The body becomes its own archive of the exhibition’s demands in the Austrian Pavilion, and this visibility raises the very question it might intend to foreground: Who is this visibility for?
By Kiera McIntosh
Rehearsals for Possible Futures
Through smirks, dry delivery, and the revelation of constructed stagecraft, the Danish Pavilion places small cracks in the fantasies and realities of performance and desire.
By Naomi Moser
A Shift in the Air
Venice was unexpectedly hopeful, not because it offered solutions, but because it reminded me that there are other stories, other histories, other ways to understand the world.
By Diana Sardaryan
The Interstitial Stitch: Goen Choi’s Meridian in Venice
These arced movements spark the imagination, raising questions about how borders shift across national lines, and how such artistic activity can expose and unsettle the invisible infrastructures underpinning a nation's governance.
By Hyun Sung
Minor Life in the Embrace
Through the clever use of weighted dolls, the exhibition proposes that tenderness also holds a sense of burden, both symbolic and actual.
By Hongjin Zhou
Breaking Out of Dominant Temporalities: Demodernizing the Museum?
Demodernizing is not a return to the pre-modern past, but an attempt to release new potentialities within modern cultural practices by taking modern ideology out of them.
By Charles Esche and Hélène Valance
Walking & Talking with Katerina Gregos
Curator Katerina Gregos reflects on the architectural history, public space, cultural life, and recent urban transformations in Athens.
By Katerina Gregos with Bige Örer
Nnena Kalu’s 2025 Turner Prize
Only if institutions move beyond symbolic validation—toward sustained collecting, rigorous criticism, and genuine integration—will this so-called “watershed moment” mark real change rather than a passing gesture.
By Andrew Hunt
The Sovereign Fox Persuades Law to Dissolve into Politics
The juridical ambitions of Zasha Colah for her edition of the biennale were laudable, but elusive as her symbolic fox.
By Sophie Barfod
Outsideness, and Other Words of Advice for Young Curators
The problem, especially for emerging curators, should not be how to get inside the sphere and sensibility of rote privilege and power in the art world and exhibition-making, but how to stay out of them.
By Niels Van Tomme
Walking & Talking with Tīna Pētersone
Latvian curator Tīna Pētersone speaks about the dynamics and challenges of curatorial practice amid today’s political and social climate in the Baltic countries.
By Tīna Pētersone with Bige Örer
Poor Space
In schematizing the poor space, the intention is to envision it as a locus of disobedience, ambiguous as well as potentially ambivalent, performing non-totalizing gestures in place of the authoritarian impulse.
By Steven Henry Madoff
Thoughts on Repair and Remediation
Remediation is not nostalgia, nor is it a utopian projection. It is work performed and actualized, always oriented toward the present and the possible futures that emerge from it.
By Daniela Zyman
Curating / The Curatorial
If curating is an action that involves labor (both physical and cognitive) in producing the end result as exhibition or curation, curatorial is an extended field that enables one to think about curating beyond Capitalist production.
By Multiple authors