Notes Toward A Plural Canon

For a long time, relevance in the arts was regulated by a quasi-homogeneous critical establishment: the Western canon. Its contested aesthetic insurgencies—Impressionism, Cubism, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism—eventually became historical milestones: once absorbed into the institution, they rose the very criteria by which relevancy was policed, and art history's admissions adjudicated. Closely aligned with a Western capitalist ideology championing intellectual and material progress, this canon produced formidable ways of interpreting and contextualizing art that remain indispensable. As the balance of power in the art world shifts, however, the Western canon no longer rules unchallenged. The growing inclusion of work by the geopolitically marginalized—the colonized, women, the descendants of slaves, and so on—is something many of us who come from the so-called minorities celebrate.

The 61st Venice Biennale, “In Minor Keys”, reinforces this expanded landscape of cultural legitimacy. Works of remarkable patience and skill—rooted in craft traditions and rich in ornamental sophistication—abound. Their presence demands an urgent reconsideration of beauty and craft-making as serious critical categories; far from decorative, these forms reveal themselves here as finely tuned visual languages for the tasks of navigating histories, ecologies, and the entanglements of contemporary geopolitical life. 

Nevertheless, in a multifarious network of simultaneously operating regimes of legitimation—each with its own disparate resources, networks, and constituencies—any act of art criticism, especially covering a biennale with an international reach, is, at best, a tribune for those who share enough common ground with the writer. At worst, it is one voice among many others—each community speaking to their own on their own. Without consensus, or, rather, without the supremacy of a single dominant framework, criticism risks either lacking the cultural grounding to fully digest what is shown or losing the echo chamber that once gave it authority.

For an art critic—a profession the art world claims to need yet one which it only half-heartedly supports—reviewing large international exhibitions that aspire to map the contemporary moment represents both an intellectual and an emotional conundrum. Of course, the curator faces this challenge first and most acutely: she must make the show before the critic can respond to it. But where the curator asks how—how to frame, select, and give form to a global conversation of works in which she deeply believes—the critic asks what is relevant, a question inseparable from the harder ones that follow: relevant to whom? And why?

“In Minor Keys” positions itself within today’s unstable and necessary transition of rewriting the art canon. Throughout the exhibition, works and practices emerge as complex visual languages for crossing our contemporary unforgiving terrains. At the Arsenale, for instance, the South African multidisciplinary artist Thania Petersen presents the large-format beaded hand-embroidery Cosmological Offerings for a Drowning World (2026). Based on the artist’s research into the migration of Sufi music as a living archive, the work weaves together the kramats of the Cape Peninsula, Islam’s sacred landscape, with levitating vessels and a sinuous procession of Sufi practitioners in prayer threading across the embroidered surface—thus charting across terrestrial and celestial realms the deep roots and vast oceanic reach of a transcendental spiritual tradition. 

A similarly layered dialogue emerges in the Giardini, though in this case between materials rather than realms. Marcia Kure’s fierce Hair Jackets, made by the multidisciplinary Nigerian artist from synthetic hair and carved wood, conjure powerful standing busts. In doing so, the artist embodies a diasporic sensibility wherein what we often cast as oppositions—the synthetic and the handcrafted, the industrial and the ancestral—merge seamlessly into a unified lived experience.

Nearby, emphasis on handmade artistry is seen in the work of the Pakistani contemporary miniaturist, Wardha Shabbir, whose gouaches organically entangle elements from her environments—mostly gardens—and her imagination. These result in a delicate mix of foliage and geometries that brings the miniature tradition into the 21st century. Nearby, mixed-media paintings by the multidisciplinary American artist Tammy Nguyen first appear as rich, collaged narratives overgrown by post-apocalyptic lushness, only to reveal references to geopolitical and spiritual legacies through visual narrative elements of Dante’s Divine Comedy. 

What these practices disclose is how beauty has been reintegrated into the contemporary canon as something freighted and expansive. Beauty, long regarded with suspicion—whether as morally escapist in the shadow of historical catastrophe, intellectually shallow by a conceptualism that privileged ideas over sensations, or as politically complicit in the encoding of Western, patriarchal hierarchies of taste—was effectively exiled from serious critical discourse for decades. Yet the artists render that exile obsolete, weaving beauty inextricably into geopolitical, ecological, and spiritual significance. Most importantly, a genuinely globalized art world is now doing what Western modernism could not: decolonizing beauty itself.

This is not the first Biennale to assert its thesis through the voices of artists from the African continent, its diasporas, and the broader Global South. Yet the appointment of the Cameroonian-Swiss curator Koyo Kouoh as the first Black woman to curate the Venice Biennale, a curator who was also leading a major institution in South Africa, remains historically notable. However, the consequences of her death are painfully felt in the exhibition itself, which reads at times like an overstocked reserve collection—bursting and generous, yet inconsistent and lacking curatorial precision. The show would have benefited greatly from some restraint and sharp editing. The decision to include several series per artist, for instance, however well-intentioned, ultimately cuts against the works themselves. Cecilia Alemani’s 2022 Biennale, with over twice as many artists, felt considerably more breathable and, as a consequence, more legible.

This becomes especially apparent in the presentation of vivid oil paintings produced in the early 1980s in Kampala, Uganda, by the Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute and including works by Josephine Alacu, Banadda Godfrey, and Peter Mulinda. Allegorically reflecting Uganda's political and social conditions during a tumultuous historical period, they possess the kind of self-evident power and gravitas that demand more room to be properly absorbed. The same applies to the figure of Senegalese artist, poet and playwright Issa Samb (1945–2017)—specifically to his persona, which deserves more than a documentary screened on a monitor placed on the floor and a handful of works presented as though they are ethnographic artifacts. His influence seemed larger than life, expressed through his personality, his words, and singular way of inhabiting the world through his presence. The problem here is not the quality of the artists but the exhibition’s layout choices, which too often rushes encounters that require time and room to breathe.

If the exhibition's title promised something—a tuning into the minor keys of existence and spaces to rest—its physical experience did not deliver it. And yet, beneath the visual cacophony, the values associated with Kouoh’s vision were present, carried by the works themselves: warmth, compassion, care for the vulnerable, defense of the natural world, and an attunement to ritual and spiritual healing. It happens that humane values of this kind were actively devalued by the Western canon—dismissed as sentimental, decorative, or at best anthropologically exotic—subordinated to the intellectual and the formal. To foreground them now constitutes a critical expansion: a recognition that the frameworks by which art was judged for over a century were not only aesthetically narrow but also humanly impoverished.

Here, ritual and healing dimensions are powerfully present in the work of the Salvadoran artist and healer Guadalupe Maravilla. His Disease Thrower series presents throne-like sculptures made from natural materials such as straw as well as found objects collected by the artist while retracing parts of the migratory route he travelled as a child from El Salvador to the United States. Despite the mundanity of their materials, the works appear noble, almost luxurious—as though the ordinary has not only been recontextualized, as the readymade would have it, but genuinely transfigured into the sacred. Equally ritually infused and intense are the sculptural regalia and beaded canvases of Big Chief Demond Melancon, worked in glass beads, rhinestones, velvet and feathers. A Big Chief of the Young Seminole Hunters tribe and a central figure in the Black Masking culture of New Orleans, Melancon creates suits that are instruments of ceremony as well as art objects destined for museums. These works truly become alive in performance. 

Overall, the exhibition bears a double layer of mortality: the posthumous shadow of Kouoh’s passing and the works themselves circling the same awareness of presence and loss, and not only through ritual and healing. How we live, what we make, how we care for one another—all of this is shaped by impermanence. This knowledge is what makes the humane values running through this exhibition existential and profoundly related to art-making, in whatever form works take.

The exhibition also encompassed practices within more established contemporary expressions—documentary film, video installation, conceptual, and archival work, for instance—bringing a different formal language to its broader propositions. Among these, premiering at the Biennale is an excellent film by Tuan Andrew Nguyen, whose work often grows out of extensive research through personal stories and sustained immersion within communities affected by displacement, economic, and freedom struggles—posed against the larger backdrop of postcolonial history. Ñi demoon ñoo dellusi (Those Who Left are Those Who Return) (2026) is a two-channel video that unfolds as a cinematographically rich portrait of a feared West African bandit and revolutionary known as Bouba Chinois, where images, testimonies, and narration intertwine masterfully and with humor.

Further, Eric Baudelaire and Alfredo Jaar are each given their own spaces—a curatorial generosity that served both artists well. Baudelaire’s five-channel installation This Flower in My Mouth is a mesmerizing meditation on the globalized flower industry, moving between the human stories and the vast warehouses that sustain its economy. Jaar’s The End of the World (2023–2024) draws the viewer through a long room bathed in an uncomfortable red light toward a small glass vitrine at its far end, containing a compressed cube of metals, materials whose extraction is bound up in environmental devastation and acute socioeconomic exploitation, as the wall texts explain, yet which remain indispensable to our technology-driven consumer society. The discomfort the room produces is real and the formality precise, yet it leaves little mental space for the viewer beyond this efficiently engineered experience.

The Puerto Rican artist Sofía Gallisá Muriente's Ciné Inútil / Useless Cinema I–IX (2023–2024) presents a series of blurred, out-of-focus film stills taken by police officers who were surveilling leftist groups in Puerto Rico—images so technically inept that the surveillance itself failed with them. There is something poetically satisfying in that fact, even if the work asks whether failed evidence of oppression constitutes, on its own, a sufficient artistic proposition.

In 2015, the late curator Okwui Enwezor—often credited with the institutional shift that brought the peripheries into the centre of art discourse in the Biennale he curated—said: “I cannot remember a time more precarious, more foreboding, than the current moment.” That was eleven years ago. One wonders what he would make of now, especially with regard to all the polemics, resignations, and strikes that surrounded this edition.

Armed with inevitably partial knowledge and an open mind, this critic approaches her task with curiosity and an awareness that the rewriting of art history is far from over, and that the process, with all its moving parts, has only just begun. What “In Minor Keys” confirms—despite its organizational shortcomings and the immeasurable loss of its originating vision—is that the fight for a genuinely plural canon remains an absolute necessity. The urgency of that fight will be sharpened considerably by what comes next. It has become common knowledge that works seen at the Venice Biennale in May will reappear at Art Basel in June, and, I suspect, in Paris in October. The market absorbs with extraordinary efficiency postcolonial critique, spiritual healing discourses, protest, craft, and, of course, beauty. It has demonstrated, repeatedly, that it can metabolize anything without taste—only appetite. While I am not opposed to artists earning a living—far from it—ceding art criticism to the market allows speculation to become the sole author of art history. Nobody, not even those who profit from it, would be willing to defend such a prospect openly, not to mention that the market is a poor critic: it has no patience. Which is why we must keep asking the questions that neither have the time nor the interest to ask. For beneath all of it runs the one thing every art community holds in common: the knowledge that we are mortal, and that this is perhaps why we make art. That may be the most minor key of all—and the most enduring.

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• Cover image

  Big Chief Demond Melancon, from Black Masking Culture Series. 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, In Minor Keys