In Minor Keys: The Legions of Passions & the Biennale of Relics

Venice Biennale opened on 9th May 2026 and runs until 22nd November. It was immediately described as historic—for the first time, a Black woman would curate the main exhibition. And the exhibition itself would be built around the intellectual and artistic legacy of the Afro-Atlantic world. Even before it opened, however, it became an act of remembrance. Koyo Kouoh, the curator, died suddenly of cancer on 10th May 2025 (a year before the vernissage). By then, the concept, the list of artists, the spatial configuration, and the theoretical underpinnings of the exhibition were largely in place. So the Biennale leadership made the unusual decision not to appoint a new artistic director but to realize the exhibition exactly as Kouoh had envisaged it. “Koyo’s team” (la squadra di Koyo Kouoh) continued with the work and stressed that their role was to realize the concept without any cuts [1].

In his introduction, the president of Venice Biennale, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco[2] recalls their conversation regarding the invitation: “On that occasion, Koyo said to me: ‘ I would never have expected to be called to Venice to lead the contemporary art exhibition by you.’ In that previously unspoken thought, then made explicit, there was a precipitate of prejudgment, the thought of which amused us. With her direct approach, she then added: ‘You are Sicilian, therefore African.’” Today, it is rare to witness such an idyll between an ultra-conservative cultural official and a decolonial curator, something usually seen only for high stakes, career advancement, or fame. And as Buttafuoco himself emphasizes, in the exhibition “the human dimension, the benchmark of everything, which […] yet the most opulent and over developed world—identified in the name ‘West’—has long since lost sight of, misplaced. Thus, from the powerhouse of Africa, and from one of its leading voices, comes a whisper that leads us back to authenticity, acknowledging that the greatest happiness lies in the use of our own hands” [3].

The exhibition “In Minor Keys” centers on musical composition, jazz, images of islands, and Caribbean rhythms. In the text with a sketch of ideas that can be read in the catalog, Kouoh writes: “This is an invitation to encounter […] in the immediate physical, meteorological, ambient, and karmic conditions in which they meet you. To shift to a slower gear and tune in to the frequencies of the minor keys […] The songs of those producing beauty in spite of tragedy, the tunes of the fugitives recovering from the ruins, the harmonies of those repairing wounds and worlds. The minor keys refuse orchestral bombast and goose-step military marches and come alive in the quiet tones, the lower frequencies, the hums, the consolations of poetry, all portals of improvisation to the elsewhere and the otherwise. […] The minor keys are also the small islands, worlds amid oceans with distinct and endlessly rich ecosystems, social lives that are articulated, for better and worse, within much larger political forms and ecological stakes. Here, the evocation of the key and the island extends to an archipelago of oases: gardens, courtyards, compounds, lofts, dance floors…”[4]. What she describes, anyone familiar with the history of the avant-garde will recognize as Wassily Kandinsky’s concept of symphonic composition, as interpreted by Hugo Ball: “Kandinsky’s idea of a monumental stage composition is based on opposite [author’s note: to Wagner] premises. He envisages a counterpositioning of the individual arts, a symphonic composition in which every art, reduced to its essentials, provides as an elementary form no more than the score for a construction or composition on the stage. Such a composition would allow each individual art its own material mode of operation, and it would create the future monumental work of art from a blend of the refined materials”[5]. Note that the principle itself—in its Dadaist interpretation—already contains a division between the authoritarian Wagner and the anarchist Kandinsky. Ball drew on these reflections when founding Cabaret Voltaire. What Kouoh describes is not a breakthrough, but the mainstream.

The exhibition’s most important distinguishing feature, then, is “Black optics.” In this text, Kouoh and her co-curators turn to four key thinkers and writers of the Afro-Atlantic tradition. James Baldwin (1924–1987) reflected on the interrelation of racial violence, identity, and human dignity, transforming the experience of Black Americans into a universal moral question of modernity. Édouard Glissant (1928–2011) formulated the concepts of creolization and the right to opacity, asserting the multiplicity of cultural identities. Patrick Chamoiseau developed these ideas through an engagement with the memory of colonialism, linguistic diversity, and the cultural hybridity of the Caribbean region. Toni Morrison (1931–2019) explored historical memory, the aftermath of slavery, and language’s role in shaping collective identity. The turn to these authors shows that the exhibition interprets Black culture not as an object of representation, but as an autonomous intellectual tradition.

And Elijah took twelve stones…

The first thing I saw as I approached the exhibition was a group of pro-Palestinian activists gathering for a protest. Inside the Arsenale, I was greeted by a prologue work, one ArtReview would later describe as “a protest conducted with fine-print slogans and no concrete demands.”[6] We see a canvas by the Congolese nonconformist Issa Samb (1945–2017; Untitled, 2017), and beneath it a poem by the Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer, killed in Israeli airstrikes (1979–2023), “If I Must Die.” In these works, Kouoh’s private tragedy, Samb’s painting from the last year of his life, and Alareer’s martyrdom come together.

The curatorial team and Kouoh herself singled out what they called “shrines” as the exhibition’s most important pillars. These are mini-retrospectives offering a sense of the artistic worlds of two artists: Beverly Buchanan (1940–2015) and Issa Samb (1945–2017).

Beverly Buchanan created anti-monumental land art. Her hut-sculptures and earthworks refer to places saturated with historical memory. The exhibition presents documentation of several of her projects. Ruins and Rituals (1979, Macon) consists of concrete foundations and steps resembling sarcophagi. She guerrilla-installed this work next to a reconstructed cabin of the writer Henry Sytwell Edwards, known for his racist fiction. In this way, the site was turned into a memorial to the victims of the idealization of the Confederate South.

Another work, Marsh Ruins (1981), consists of three mounds made of tabby, a lime-and-shell concrete that enslaved people used to build their huts. The work is located near the site where, in 1803, a group of Igbo sold into slavery chose death over bondage.

If Smithson’s “non-site” was more a conceptual fiction made possible by the photograph of the earthwork, then Buchanan turns to the sacredness of suffering itself and of collective trauma, literally charging her own art with them. The exploration of the medium, so characteristic of conceptualism, here gives way to an investigation of presence—the sacredness of history and memory rooted in the landscape. The Catholic tradition called such an experience praesentia—the real presence of the sacred within the material world[7].

The artist worked on the other series presented, Huts, from 1980 until her death. Small assemblages made from improvised materials, cardboard, wood, bottle caps, license plates, reproduce the homemade dwellings of members of poor Black communities in Georgia and Carolina. To some objects, the artist attached short fictional stories of their inhabitants, and she deliberately burned some of the houses—a reference to the terror of the Ku Klux Klan.

A similar turn toward the sacredness of trauma appears in Christian Boltanski. If the artist’s early works still investigate the readymade and the everyday, Inventory of Objects Belonging to a Young Man of Oxford (1973), then Monument to the Lycée Chajes already folds the found photographs of Holocaust victims into the form of a kind of altar. In both cases, the work stops being an investigation of artistic language and becomes a medium of collective memory.

The second artist included in the Shrines section is Issa Samb. For Kouoh, he was not merely an artist but a teacher and an institutional touchstone. Samb did not adapt to formalist tendencies; he chose a radical, agitational, and propaedeutic art. His Laboratoire Agit’Art (1974) rejected objecthood, formalism, and elitism. The artist openly polemicized with Senegal’s first president, the renowned poet and philosopher Léopold Sédar Senghor, considering that his aesthetics promoted “a naive and fetishized idea of African symbols, decoration and beauty.”[8] Issa hardly strove for a museum career, led a secluded life, and staged exhibitions in his home courtyard for decades. He created collages, bricolage, installations and paintings—which is what was presented at the exhibition.

In many ways, his fate converges with Kurt Schwitters’: both held enormous authority, sought to transform art into a total installation, and influenced others far more strongly than their fame allowed. However, their solitude took opposite turns. For Schwitters, it followed a historical catastrophe. Not accepted by the Berlin Dadaists, he created the Merzbau as his own artistic universe in bourgeois Hanover. After the Nazis came to power and declared his art “degenerate,” he fled first to Norway. Then—after the German occupation—to Great Britain, where he was interned as an “enemy alien.” Each new version of the Merzbau became simultaneously a shell-like refuge and a potentially lost work. Schwitters died in 1948 almost forgotten, only to become, a decade and a half later, a key figure for Robert Rauschenberg and the generation of Pop Art[9].

Samb, by contrast, parted ways with the institution of his own free will. The museum did not reject him; he rejected the museum. His rejection of the state-run École de Dakar led him to choose artistic autonomy: for forty years, he used only his own courtyard as his main exhibition venue, with complete freedom to experiment. For Schwitters, this became historical fate and forced solitude; for Samb, it was a voluntary strategy of resistance and independence.

Behind the curatorial understanding of “shrines” lies a literal and unironic reading of a thoroughly religious concept. If Thomas Hirschhorn’s series of “altars” retained a critical and atheistic stance, then “In Minor Keys” emphasizes an aspiration to cult status. The exhibition itself becomes a symptom of a broader shift: contemporary art’s transition from postmodern parody to a new sincerity.

Undeclared mausoleum

However, the exhibition contains yet another altar—not declared as such, but producing this effect precisely. Its absence from the curatorial narrative seems to be one of the display’s most notable omissions.

This concerns the work of María Magdalena Campos-Pons. The artist was born in Cuba in a settlement at a former sugar plantation, where the descendants of Yoruba slaves brought from Nigeria lived. The memory of slavery, non-white femininity, and Afro-Cuban religious traditions form the core of her practice[10]. By 2026, Campos-Pons had become one of the most influential figures in the African-American art community: co-founder of Engine for Art, Democracy and Justice and recipient of a major public commission from the Obama Foundation[11].

It is Campos-Pons who made Anatomy of the Magnolia Tree for Koyo Kouoh & Toni Morrison (2026), the work that welcomes the viewer at the entrance to the Central Pavilion in the Giardini. Huge panels executed in watercolor, ink, and gouache fold into something like a contemporary fresco. The iconography of this work almost literally reproduces the composition of a sacra conversazione. The curator stands beside the Nobel laureate just as, in Renaissance painting, one saint is juxtaposed with another in a single extra-historical space: between them, magnolia branches grow, and before the image, seven glass flowers are placed on pedestals. The traditional role of the donor is also transformed: the artist creates an icon of the curator.

Here, the exhibition imperceptibly turns into something like a mausoleum with Kouoh’s altar. But the curatorial team hardly problematizes this gesture, continuing to assert that they realized the project “without changes,” strictly following the concept left behind. Thus, a paradox arises: the curator of the exhibition, as if by herself, determines a place of veneration for herself after death.

This reminded me of how the author-function (especially in the era of Artificial Intelligence) continues to exist beyond life. The eulogy at Robert Kennedy’s funeral was co-written by his own speechwriters, as if Kennedy had written it himself. From the intonation, it was clear that the political subject lived, lives and will live. An analogous effect arises here too: the curatorial concept and the exhibition’s production do not stop with death; on the contrary, they work for the show-business myth of the Venice Biennale itself.

But the work of Campos-Pons is not the only example of the excessive sacralisation of Kouoh. In the catalogue published for the exhibition, the curatorial team writes the following: “Koyo shepherded us while crossing the globe….” “We gathered in April 2025, for an intense week of work, from morning to evening. Recalling that week is like remembering a rehearsal for a musical performance: she was our conductor, and while each of us arrived with a finely-tuned instrument, it took those few days for us to tune to one another. […] We worked in the courtyard of RAW Material Company[…]. A prolific mango tree, its branches cambered from the weight of ripening fruit, watched. The first morning, as Koyo stepped into the courtyard, beaming with her inimitable smile, she picked up the mangoes that had fallen, washed them and bit into one gleefully. The second morning, emboldened by her delight, we imitated her. […] After that, our discussions were often interrupted by the thudding sound of mangoes falling into the courtyard. […]. We noted that fruit fell when the name of an artist was spoken,”—the curators write with a distinct air of reverence[12]. And this scene reminded me—a person of post-Soviet background—of the mythology that arises around dictators, “fathers of nations” and “great leaders.” And what is alarming is not even the formulations themselves, in the spirit of “Koyo assigned missions to each of us,” “Koyo shepherded us,” but the content of the magical myth as a whole. Nature seemed to confirm Kouoh’s choice.

Or here is yet another example with the mango. In 1968, Mao gave a basket of mangoes, originally a diplomatic gift from the Pakistani foreign minister, to worker propaganda teams. The fruits quickly became objects of worship: people embalmed them in wax, carried them around factories, and copied them in wax. A village doctor was even executed for comparing a mango to a sweet potato. The Mango cult is a documented event of the Cultural Revolution. Such myths add no poetic dimension to the exhibition, only the sense that fictions are slipping out of control, multiplying unchecked, and constructing a sacred hierarchy before an unattainable Kouoh in a golden halo, whose team follows the path she paved.

But the “shrines” section only partially captures the exhibition’s overall quasi-religiosity. And here, unwittingly, the curators offer a clue: they include an artist who, amid post-conceptual art, looks like an alien. The exhibition includes a small nook, a mini-retrospective of Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968). Among the works are the Boîte-en-valise (1941–1966), instructions for Étant donnés (1969), and other documentary evidence. The artist who might have claimed a place in the Shrines turns out to be immune to the sanctity of the oppressed; it is simply alien to him.

The Eternal Cult of the Saints

In The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity, Peter Brown writes about the role played by relic —”of whole tombs, of relic fragments and of objects closely connected with the dead bodies of holy men and women, confessors and martyrs”[14]—in fostering social solidarity and mobilizing Christian communities and societies.

Brown writes that early Christianity achieved what ancient society could not. Namely, to go beyond the boundaries of the biological family and clan and to give society closeness in a universal community, in Christ. He writes: “the Christian church had risen […] because its central ritual practices and its increasingly centralized organization and financial administration presented the pagan world with an ideal community that had claimed to […] delimit the bonds of the kin. The church was an artificial kin group. […] Nowhere was this made more plain than in the care of the dead. […] The careful noting of the anniversaries of the deaths of martyrs and bishops gave the Christian community a perpetual responsibility for maintaining the memory of its heroes and leaders”[15]. Such a community, as we see, goes beyond the boundaries of family and ethnos—and even beyond the boundary of life and death. A similar attitude persists not only in Marxism but also in other modern ideologies.

At the same time, it must be understood that Brown speaks not only of the ideological side of such relations, but of quite earthly matters: “Here we should not forget one factor: the growing wealth of the church. […] They had all the means of social dominance, and none of the means of showing it in acceptable form. […] Building and the increase of ceremonial in connection with new foci of worship was the only way out. And where better than at the graves of the martyrs?”[16]. The Church had to spend what it had accumulated—on the logistics of relics and symbols, on making and distributing them—in order to multiply it many times over. This is precisely how what contemporary art calls “institutions of care” operate, seeing the international biennale as an instrument for the logistics of testimony.

Continuing the reasoning about the cult of the martyrs, the scholar identifies two important aspects. These are Relics (reliquia): “the reasons for the rapid and flagrant departure from pagan and Jewish practice involved in the Christian transfer of relics. The relic is a detached fragment of a whole body: as Victricius said, ‘You see tiny relics, a little drop of blood’ […] Detached fragments of the saints in gold and silver caskets, or in their miniature marble shrines, had some of the measureless quality of an objet trouvé”[17], and secondly, these are Passions (passione): “The martyrs were miracles in themselves. The accounts of their deaths, in the Passiones and the Gesta martyrum, was one point only in a long chain of manifestations of the power of God throughout their lives, continued up to the present at their shrines.[…] ‘Insipid and pretentious’ though such passiones might seem for us, like their equally maligned secular predecessors, the panegyrics, their performance was a recognized moment in a ritual of power. Without a passio the praesentia of the saint lacked weight. […] Yet merely to speak in terms of excitement is not enough. It seems to me that the public reading of the passio was, in itself, a psychodrame that mobilized in the hearer those strong fantasies of disintegration and reintegration which lurked in the back of the mind of ancient men”[18].

The Passions had virality, accumulated details, and spread from mouth to mouth, later becoming large-scale Renaissance and Baroque canvases; take, for instance, Saint Sebastian. Relics possessed the same potential for replication: splinters of the cross on which Christ was crucified were split into ever smaller parts, and torn flesh was doubled. The reason for this was Christian communities’ need for closeness to the saints and the church; the experience had to be immediate… as well as virulent. The scholar of religion calls this experience “presence” (praesentia): “As a result, the Christian world came to be covered with tiny fragments of original relics and with ‘contact relics’ held, as in the case of Saint Peter, to be as full of his praesentia as any physical remains. Translations—the movement of relics to people—and not pilgrimages—the movement of people to relics—hold the center of the stage in late-antique and early-medieval piety”[19]. What role, then, did the saints’ deeds and sufferings play? Brown concludes: “Their deaths, therefore, involved more than a triumph over physical pain; they were vibrant also with the memory of a dialogue with and a triumph over unjust power”[20]. When we consider that decolonial and left art defines itself through the struggle against the “unjust power” of imperialist hegemony, everything falls into place.

Post-Secular Relics of Contemporary Art

One might ask: what do the relics and Passions of martyrs, or the drawing of the flock closer to the saints, have to do with any of this? But the fact is that the overwhelming majority of the artists presented (in my view, at least 80 out of 110) rely on trauma, suffering, the colonial past, exploitation or class/gender/environmental violence. In essence, they create either quasi-religious “Passions” or documentary testimony and its reconstruction—no less quasi-religious “relics.” Around 20 more projects present a certain “presence”: communities, schools, shared labor, infrastructures of care, sovereignty, and autonomies. And let me say straight away: “cult” here is not a term of abuse, but a structure in Brown’s sense. An entire corpus of works at this Biennale is tied to real catastrophe and material testimony[21].

Avi Mograbi’s two-channel video installation Between a River and a Sea (2026) shows two “business directories”—Palestine in 1938 and Gaza in 2023; the accompanying text states outright that it is unknown whether any of the listed enterprises, organizations, or hospitals are still operating. Mohammed Joha’s watercolor series No Shelter (2025) records destroyed Gaza from memory. Berni Searle’s video installation Interlaced (2011) populates the space with golden-handed ghosts, a literal reference to colonial Congo, where workers’ hands were cut off for failing to meet rubber-collection quotas. The same logic underlies the curators’ programmatic gesture—placing at the entrance to the Arsenale Refaat Alareer’s poem “If I Must Die,” printed on fabric above a painting by Issa Samb; Alareer was killed in an Israeli airstrike in December 2023[22].

Dawn DeDeaux, an artist from New Orleans, works with the racial, political, and ecological aspects of Hurricane Katrina and, more broadly, of global climate change. In Dirt Bowl Table (2021), she collects soil samples from around the world in handmade wooden bowls. In the documentary film Retiro (2016–2019), Natalia Lassalle-Morillo and Gloria Morillo discuss Hurricane Maria, which, for Puerto Rico, became not merely a natural disaster but a debt trap to the United States, a direct consequence of the PROMESA law[23]. Manuel Mathieu, in the work GENOCIDE (2026), names Gaza directly, through the geological metaphor of the “fragility of compassion.” Bonnie Devine, in the works Woodlands and the series Land in War, documents uranium mines on the lands of the Serpent River First Nation.

Uriel Orlow, in Unmade Film, almost entirely abandons conventional cinematic form: one part of it has no image, another has no sound. Both take the viewer back to the Palestinian villages of Deir Yassin and Lifta, where abandoned buildings and plants become the only witnesses to the tragedy of 1948[24]. Vera Tamari in the work Tale of a Tree (2002) sculpts 660 olive trees in ceramics—the metaphor of expropriation of Palestinian land is so transparent that it needs no explanation. Sawangwongse Yawnghwe assembles an entire army of small clay figures—2,500 of them in the installation People’s Desire (2018)—in memory of the Rohingya genocide; the theme is continued in the work The Idiot’s Parallax (2025).

Another corpus of works turns not to a current catastrophe, but to inherited trauma and historical injustice. Pio Abad, in the works Banua (2026) and I Am Singing a Song That Can Only Be Borne After Losing a Country (2023), turns to the theme of the restitution of looted objects—the Benin bronzes and the cloak of Powhatan. Godfried Donkor, in the collage Ankyre’s Dance II (2017), unfolds the history of the transatlantic slave trade directly on the pages of the Financial Times. Kemang Wa Lehulere, in the allegorical library I Bleach My Words for Your Comfort—consisting of more than 700 clay bricks in place of books, painted to resemble a school blackboard, with bronze casts of hands in place of spines—turns archival silence into a form of violence. Eustáquio Neves, in the series Arturos (1993–1995) and Cartas ao Mar, returns to Valongo—the world’s largest port of arrival for enslaved people.

Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn in the two-channel video installation Ní demoon ño dellusi (2026) traces the fate of Senegalese soldiers in Indochina and their Vietnamese wives through the figure of “Bouba Chinois.” Johannes Phokela in the work Original Sin (Inner Circle) (2021, oil on canvas, 290 × 226 cm) overturns hagiography itself: the only figure to survive Rubens’s Last Judgment becomes a pregnant Black woman.

Alice Maher in the solo works Les Filles d’Ouranos (1996; recreated for Biennale Arte 2026) and The Sibyls (2025) continues the line pursued by the campaign to repeal the abortion ban in Ireland in 2018. In collaboration with Rachel Fallon, in the embroidered tapestry The Map (2021, 430 × 620 × 60 cm), she turns to the Magdalene laundries—institutions of the confinement of women in Ireland, operating under the management of religious institutions. BuBu de la Madeleine, in the solo work A Mermaid’s Territory (2022), presents the mermaid as an allegory for the body’s boundaries through the prism of HIV activism and sex work.

Sammy Baloji, in sculptures with uranium crystals, draws a direct line from Congolese raw material to the atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Alfredo Jaar in The End of the World (2023–2024) encloses cobalt and coltan—and with them the subtext of child labor in the DRC—in a glass cube in the middle of a red corridor. And so on…

Stop, let us return to Duchamp. The curators read Duchamp’s critique, the destruction of the connection between sacredness and artistic objecthood, regressively, treating it as a methodology for manufacturing relics rather than a practice of exposing them. The exhibition, by contrast, accumulates and invokes sacredness. This means that including the Dadaist in the exhibition is rather an act of self-exposure.

The Relics and Passions that Brown writes about are the direct opposite of the readymade. The aura has returned—hypertrophied, ritualized—as the veneration of post-secular saints in decolonial, queer, left, or feminist art.

How Many Angels Can Dance on the Head of a Pin?

The altar no longer stages the tragic chord of a single victim; it is now the scene of an unending struggle for recognition, authority and visibility. African Americans killed during the civil rights struggle, Jews killed in the Holocaust, Palestinians during the intifada, settler violence, or IDF military operations, and slaves in the Congo—all compete for a share of the victimhood market. But if every object becomes a relic, all poetry turns into the Passions of saints, and any exhibition or installation ultimately becomes a place for liturgy, then how does this entire new polytheism exist at all, and what is its hierarchy? Which alpha-victim will this selection choose?

Intersectional feminism has already answered: the super-saint arises at the intersection of oppressions. But anyone who has read the news, reviews of the Venice Biennale, and my review up to this point understands that such a point will be the collective victim of the Palestinian people. In “In Minor Keys, ‘ this saint eclipsed all the others so thoroughly that all the rest were displaced from the altar of oppression.

An example is Gabrielle Goliath’s work. Her multi-channel video installation Elegy (2015–ongoing) was initially scheduled for the South African national pavilion. Thematically, the project is devoted to victims of femicide in South Africa, with racial, gender, and class subtext. The project began with the story of the murdered student Ipeleng Christine Moholane. The version for the Biennale was to retain femicide in South Africa as its central theme, but also included a part devoted to the Palestinian poet Heba Abu Nada (killed in October 2023). It was precisely this that caused a conflict with the South African Ministry of Culture: the presentation was canceled, the country withdrew from the Biennale, and Elegy was shown outside the main program, in the Church of Sant’Antonin (St Antoninus Martyr)[25].

These videos closely resemble Bill Viola’s cycle The Passions (2000–2002): slow-motion video, a black background delineating the figures, and New Testament poses. The sole difference is that Goliath’s work presents not Viola’s typical babel of figures, but an endless stream of non-white heroines, taking turns stepping onto a small ledge and standing on it as long as they can hold a single, high, continuous note. When one voice is exhausted, another replaces it, creating a continuous collective action: half mourning, half glorification of sacrifice.

In this work, the quasi-religiosity of contemporary art is pushed to absurdity. It is not only that the works were moved into a functioning church. Nor that the works so closely resemble Viola’s cycle of “Passions,” nor even that the artistic representation of trauma is itself that very passio, the Passion. But rather that if the victims of femicide in South Africa obey the leftist notion of inclusivity, queuing up and receiving their minute of glory, then all their suffering is displaced by the dedication and the conflict around the Palestinian poetess. The queue is for ordinary saints, not for super-saints.

The exhibition’s internal content was overwhelmed by the external: actions and protests against Israel and its national pavilion. Most of the mobilization was led by ANGA—Art Not Genocide Alliance. One could say the alliance became a co-curator and co-author of the exhibition, influencing not only its content but also how it was received.

Black Optics Wide Shut

Imagine that you are an artist or curator of African heritage. You are given one of the main platforms in the art world. You decide to make an exhibition with openly declared Black optics, on firm postcolonial foundations. And at that very moment, a genocide is taking place in the world. But not the one you thought of. What is at issue is the genocide of Africans, one of the largest and most brutal in recent decades. What are your actions?

One of the most criminal omissions of this exhibition is its complete silence about the genocide of Africans in Sudan, carried out by the Arab paramilitary groups of the RSF (Rapid Support Forces). At the exhibition and around it, you see numerous references to Gaza, but you hear nothing about Sudan. Perhaps there are fewer victims there? No—by minimal estimates, 150,000; realistically 400,000, but Sudanese are of no interest to anyone—and journalists travel there less often. Nevertheless, 12 million people are displaced, that is 6 times more than in Gaza[26]. Or perhaps it is an ordinary conflict? N —Arab villages remain untouched, while African ones disappear.

And there is even a direction for boycott and activist work. At the Biennale, the UAE has a national pavilion of the UAE—a country directly involved in the conflict (as Sudan states). 90% of Sudanese gold exports go to the UAE[27]. Of the 200 tonnes of gold smuggled out of Sudan between 2012 and 2023, 182 were sent to the Emirates[28]. The Arab paramilitary RSF forces have exported gold worth $850 million[29]. It has been proven that the UAE supplies the RSF with weapons[30]. Like Israel, the UAE could have found itself before the UN International Court of Justice—Sudan filed a genocide claim. But while the court accepted Israel’s case for consideration, it removed the claim against the UAE from the General List in May 2025, as the Emirates had ratified the Genocide Convention with a reservation to Article IX, excluding the court’s jurisdiction. Nevertheless, the genocide in Sudan is internationally recognized [31].

The absurdity of the situation is aggravated at precisely the moment when the curators of the UAE national pavilion sign ANGA’s letter against genocide and, as a sign of solidarity, withdraw from the competition[32]. And no one is embarrassed by this.

But why is Black optics so blind? Someone will say that if the conflict is postcolonial, then it is not the West’s business to interfere in it; this is the distinction between Palestine and Sudan drawn, for instance, by Suren Pillay, a (rather influential) decolonial scholar from South Africa [33]. But can such a distinction be found in the manifestos of ANGA or other organizations—that only colonial violence can be called genocide, while postcolonial violence cannot? Such a qualification simply cannot exist, and therefore this argument cannot be accepted either. The blindness regarding Sudan is connected to something else.

From a Black optics standpoint, the UAE is an interesting phenomenon altogether. The rulers of Trucial Oman abolished slavery only in 1971[34], when the UAE formed [35]. The slaves themselves were mainly from Zanzibar, East and South Africa—that is, Black Africans. The descendants of slaves[36] in the Emirates faced difficulties in obtaining citizenship—they had to prove Arab origin. Also, for the UAE itself, as for the Arab world in general, the common designation for a Black person is “abeed,”[37][38] which translates as “slave,” in which the Arab population, of course, sees no problem—unlike, say, the United States, where the N-word is absolutely taboo.

Around 88–89% of the Emirates’ population are migrants [39], and labor migrants from the Indian subcontinent live in what is effectively an apartheid regime: the kafala system, labor camps and debts to recruiters. Artists tried to protest: since 2011, the Gulf Labor coalition has boycotted the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi over conditions during the construction of the museums on Saadiyat Island, the “island of happiness.” The protest failed: in 2016 the museum broke off negotiations, and cooperation with the Emirates was normalized.

The Materiality of Silence

Examining the exhibition’s lists of curators and artists, I found one interesting pattern. By my count, about 30 of the 110 artists presented had publicly verifiable institutional, exhibition, collection, or fair connections to the UAE art infrastructure: participation in the Sharjah Biennial and programs of the Sharjah Art Foundation, Art Dubai, the Jameel Arts Center, and the Barjeel Art Foundation.

Public sources verify some of these connections directly; taken together by year, they form a dense chronology. It all began long before “In Minor Keys”: as early as 2005, Otobong Nkanga took part in the 7th Sharjah Biennial[40], and the 10th (2011)[41] was co-curated by Rasha Salti—alongside her, Alfredo Jaar, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Walid Raad, Raed Yassin were shown there, while Theo Eshetu took part in its film programme. RAW Material Company came to Art Dubai in 2013 in the curated section Marker, where Bisi Silva gathered five West African spaces, including Raw Material Company (Dakar)[42]. At the same time, at the 11th Sharjah[43] there were again Nkanga, as well as Khaled Sabsabi.

From then on, the network only grows denser. In 2015, Salti and Eric Baudelaire worked at the 12th Sharjah[44] and March Meeting[45], while works by Kader Attia would later enter the Barjeel Art Foundation and Sharjah Art Foundation collections and be shown at Dubai’s Jameel Arts Centre (2019–2020)[46]; in 2017, Attia took part in the 13th Sharjah[47], and Raed Yassin receives an Art Dubai commission as part of the collective Atfal Ahdath—the project The Room: Cooking Liberty, where he also took part in daily performances[48]. Uriel Orlow receives the Sharjah Biennial Prize, and Salti co-curates, with the Atassi Foundation, the exhibition Syria: Into the Light at Dubai’s Alserkal[49]. By the 14th Sharjah [50] the numbers climbed into the dozens: Nkanga, Kemang Wa Lehulere, Jaar, Torkwase Dyson, Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn, Daniel Lie; at the same time Koyo Kouoh speaks at March Meeting[51], and Pio Abad appears at the Jameel Arts Centre[52].

In 2021–2022, Sammy Baloji speaks at the March Meeting, while Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn and RAW receive a Sharjah Art Foundation publishing grant[53]. But the real knot is the 15th Sharjah Biennial of 2023[54]: it gathered at once Attia, Baloji, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Carolina Caycedo, Annalee Davis, Wangechi Mutu, Berni Searle, Hadjithomas and Joreige, Kambui Olujimi. In the same year, Salti acted as one of the nominators of films for Sharjah Film Platform 6[55], and Godfried Donkor had already exhibited works through Gallery 1957 at Christie’s Dubai in 2021[56].

In 2024 Salti’s name appears in the publishing framework of the UAE National Pavilion[57], and Kouoh a year later speaks at the government-run Culture Summit Abu Dhabi[58]; the 16th Sharjah (2025)[59] adds Akinbode Akinbiyi, Himali Singh Soin (as part of Hylozoic/Desires), Kaloki Nyamai and Rajni Perera, while Campos-Pons opens a solo exhibition at Dubai’s Efie Gallery[60]. Finally, Elvira Dyangani Ose—from that very jury that resigned[61]—in 2026 heads the Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial[62], and the 17th Sharjah (2027)[63] already announces Nolan Oswald Dennis and Senzeni Marasela.

Several other artists are also tied to the UAE’s art infrastructure, though not always within a single institution: Attia and Vera Tamari are represented in the Barjeel Art Foundation collection[64]; Marcia Kure, Temitayo Ogunbiyi and Rajni Perera have been represented by galleries at Art Dubai[65].

Of the 42 participants in “In Minor Keys” who signed ANGA’s letter against Israel[66], about fourteen, roughly a third, are connected to that same Emirati infrastructures. Now, imagine a comparable density of connections with Israel. Can you?

Neo-Manichaeism

Accusing artists of selectivity merely because of financial interest seems naive to me. This blindness seems entirely sincere. One can fail to notice what is happening in Sudan simply because the post-secular church itself attaches no significance to it. No one was interested in North Korea when it attacked the South. But peace campaigns began when the US intervened. So it was with Vietnam too: the escalation of the war engaged the peace movement only after the US entered it. Without a Manichaean vertical, political morality does not work either.

Our involvement is the consumption of images of violence, but not in the form of admiration for murder, sadism and pleasure in it, but in that Bataillean feeling of love for the tormented. The killing of Hind Rajab (2018–2024)[67] does not exist as a simple fact, a legal case of a war crime. But it exists as a hypertrophied image of sacredness. Forensic Architecture makes a project about her[68]; a film, The Voice of Hind Rajab, is being shot. A Washington Post investigation comes out. People march with placards bearing a single word: HIND. In May 2024, the American rapper Macklemore released the protest song “Hind’s Hall”[69]. The new track features vocals by Palestinian rapper MC Abdul, Palestinian-American singer Anees, writer and activist Amer Zahr, and a choral performance by the L.A. Palestinian Kids Choir, Lifted! Youth Gospel Choir, Tiffany Wilson and Friends. The little girl killed by the military enters every home, becomes a Baroque angel, a saint.

The early Christian “Passions” that Brown writes about shed their direct connection with Christ and the Church in the twentieth century. Georges Bataille in Inner Experience describes this phenomenon as follows: “In any case, we can only project the object-point by drama. I had recourse to upsetting images. In particular, I would gaze at the photographic image—or sometimes the memory which I have of it—of a Chinese man who must have been tortured in my lifetime. […] His hair standing on end, hideous, haggard, striped with blood, beautiful as a wasp.[…] I had at the same time recourse to a type of dramatization stripped to the bare essentials. I did not set out like the Christian from a single discourse, but also from a state of diffuse communication, from a felicity of inner movements. […] The young and seductive Chinese man of whom I have spoken, left to the work of the executioner—I loved him with a love in which the sadistic instinct played no part: he communicated his pain to me or perhaps the excessive nature of his pain, and it was precisely that which I was seeking, not so as to take pleasure in it, but in order to ruin in me that which is opposed to ruin.[…] Before excessive cruelty, either that of men, or that of fate, it is natural to rebel, to cry out (our hearts fail us): ‘That can no longer be’ and to weep, to lay the blame on some whipping-post. It is easier to tell oneself: that which weeps and damns within me is my desire to sleep in peace, my fury at being disturbed. Excessive acts are signs, suddenly given support, of what the world sovereignly is”[70]. Now the Christian church is no longer needed in order to feel ecstasy while gazing upon the crucifixion.

Tertullian’s formula “The blood of Christians is seed” has not grown stale in the least, even today. Only now is the church the media themselves, activists, contemporary artists and parties, and the blood of the martyrs spreads out in a thousand rivulets. Analyzing contemporary art, Lyotard describes the sublime as pleasure mixed with pain: “…aesthetic of what I consider to be its major stake—to show that the sublime is kindled by the threat of nothing further happening. Beauty gives a positive pleasure. But there is another kind of pleasure that is bound to a passion stronger than satisfaction, and that is pain and impending death. In pain the body affects the soul”[71]. Mediated grief consumes our souls, opening them to new clerics and a new church. They have already built an entire infrastructure of reproduction and a hierarchy of sacredness, relics, sufferings. We grow submissive before another’s trauma; we accept the authority of the post-secular clergy’s power. And we glorify them with tears in our eyes.

The Antidote to Faith

How to resist the rebirth of contemporary art and leftist ideas into religion, I do not know. Radical atheism seems not working. Crypto-religion, which sincerely does not recognize itself, is even less susceptible to critique than true faith. And the situation in art becomes all the more frightening. Instead of a modernist project, we get surrogate liturgics, where relics must be placed in the right places, and people submit to the protocols of sacred sacraments, calling this art for some reason. Here one can no longer blaspheme against the saints—non-white women, Palestinians and queers—nor can one take the side of Satan—the imperialist West, capitalism and everything masculine. Let such liturgies encounter a multitude of logical contradictions, but therein lies the essence: without irresolvable contradictions, there is no faith either.

Crypto-religion is perceived as normal, hiding in activities that recently still exposed it. But what distinguishes it from real religion is that the latter does not pretend to be something else, nor another institutional practice. Religion calls itself religion. But this post-secular cult pretends to be secular politics or contemporary art. Raymond Aron wrote precisely about this substitution, long before any decolonial turn. In The Opium of the Intellectuals, he emphasized: “The doctrine provides true Communists with a global interpretation of the universe; it instils sentiments akin to those of the crusaders of all ages; it fixes the hierarchy of values and establishes the norms of good conduct. It fulfils, in the individual and in the collective soul, some of the functions which the sociologist normally ascribes to religions”[72].

So we find ourselves in a paradoxical situation where the very logic Peter Bürger described in his Theory of the Avant-Garde has been turned inside out. The avant-garde is not followed by a post-avant-garde, nor even by that aesthetic turn toward neo-conservative postmodernism against which Benjamin Buchloh fought, but by something else: the decolonial and post-Marxist wave re-enacts post-conceptual practices—but now as cultic ones. If one recalls the table Bürger draws, cultic art largely converges with avant-garde art, and one can easily mistake it for the other if one overlooks its fixation on victimhood and tribalism.

Or perhaps it is worth returning to the heroic figure. For example, I was struck by a work genuinely rare for this year’s Biennale, which I found in the national pavilion of Kyrgyzstan.

In his monumental project BELEK (2026), presented in the former Church of Saint Catherine (Ex Chiesa di Santa Caterina), Alexey Morozov turns to Tengrian cosmology, and returns the almost taboo figure of the hero to contemporary art. Heroism here is reduced neither to military valor nor to political myth. It consists in a person’s capacity to stand firmly on the earth and hold up the sky on his shoulders, taking responsibility for the world’s existence. No one can refuse this burden: the world itself rests on Temir Kyzyk, the “iron pillar,” the world axis connecting sky and earth.

The monumental, almost monument-like sculptures resemble centaurs—half Kyrgyz horsemen, half war machines. Painstakingly polished concrete gives them simultaneously an archaic monumentality and a futuristic power. They do not perform a heroic deed; they await it, like titans whose purpose is constant readiness to act.

This action is kok-boru (Kyrgyz: көк бөрү—“grey wolf»), a traditional horse game of Central Asian peoples, included in the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Originating in the era of nomads, it was not an amusement but a way to train future warriors: horsemanship, collective tactics, physical endurance, and the skills needed to survive on the steppe were practiced. The horsemen, divided into teams, fight over a goat carcass (in one widespread version, symbolizing a killed wolf), striving to deliver it to the taikazan, a round target resembling a huge cauldron.

The video work of the same name transports the viewer inside this fierce clash. Its heroes are kok-boru masters who in everyday life often work in markets, workshops and on construction sites, although they could devote themselves entirely to professional sport. The game is not an escape from their everyday lives; instead, it emphasizes that daily labor, caring for family, and readiness for self-sacrifice are just as heroic.

The rider’s body becomes a single whole with the horse: the human half of the centaur, fused to the saddle, almost touches the ground as it wrestles the goat’s carcass from its rivals. Sweat, blood, overheated bodies, maddened horses, clouds of dust, a world described not through dramatization in “Passions,” but through a legendary epic.

In any case, the Symphony of “In Minor Keys” was not realized; every possible actor intervened in Kouoh’s design: her death, the idolatry of her team, the Emirati state-institutional art infrastructure, selective blindness and an uninvited but very loud co-curator—an activist and “white savior.” And the best of the opportunities to show “Black optics” at work failed. And no one is to blame for this, not even the right, because this exhibition happened thanks to them, and in particular to the Biennale director Pietrangelo Buttafuoco.

This review was originally published in Moscow Art Magazine, No. 134 (September 2026).