Visitors to the Venice Biennale have, over the course of the past several decades, come to anticipate an increasingly spectacular, sprawling, and correspondingly hectic affair. This year’s iteration, the venerable institution’s 51^st, was spread between the permanent national pavilions and central pavilion of the Giardini, the vast exhibition spaces of the Arsenale, and a range of smaller venues around the lagoon. Though the vibe remained closer to festival than gallery, particularly during the intense heatwave that coincided with the height of Venice’s tourist season, that mood was tempered by the international exhibition’s theme “In Minor Keys.” Curator Koyo Kouoh intended, among much else, to return a sense of intimacy, attention to the natural world, and reflection amidst the static of everyday life and art institutions alike.

        Presented here is a small selection of works scattered among the national and international spaces of the exhibition. In the Central Pavilion of the Giardini site, visitors undertake a fluid itinerary through spaces often imbued with vibrancy, light, and color. Groups of artworks and installations work in conversation to quietly evoke some of the exhibition’s intended motifs, such as “joy, solace, hope and transcendence,” rather than relying upon prescribed subthemes and labeled rooms to direct the viewer’s gaze. At the Arsenale, “In Minor Keys” capitalized on the murkiness of the dramatically high ceilings of the vast warehouse space to produce a sense of memorial to the late curator. Koyo Kouoh’s untimely death reframed how the Biennale team executed her vision for the exhibition to balance joy with “strangeness, melancholy, and sorrow” as spotlit installations emerge from the darkness and often confront the viewer with artistic responses to memory and loss.

        Through-lines connecting artworks across the Giardini, Arsenale, and the National Pavilions presented here include ecology and the natural world, the ongoing vibrancy of craft, and negotiations between contemporary lived experiences and inherited traditions in the global south. Ultimately the 51^st Venice Biennale imparts some small sense of Kouoh’s vision of art’s capacity to bring us together “across the voice of alienation and the crackle of conflict.”

Sean Roberts is a Teaching Professor at the University of Tennessee. Kelli Wood is the Dale G. Cleaver Assistant Professor, at the University of Tennessee.