An emotional hangover from Venice
Becky and Tinna travelled to Venice for the pre-opening of La Biennale di Venezia, while Helena followed from afar.
This is not a definitive review of this year’s Biennale, but an attempt to process the emotional, political and social contradictions surrounding it.
The first thing Tinna said when she came back from Venice was that she felt nauseated. Not just physically, though there had been enough spritz, enough small talk and late-night dinners eaten standing outside crowded bars beside canals glowing in the dark. It was something else. An emotional hangover that lingered longer than the trip itself. The kind that makes you unsure of the reasons you chose to dedicate yourself to art in the first place.
What she described was not a single experience, but a split one. A sense that two Biennales were unfolding at the same time, moving alongside each other but never fully meeting.
What follows moves between conversation and reflection as we navigate what Venice represents, both within contemporary art and within ourselves. We write as Iceland-based mid-career curators shaped by Western cultural frameworks, continually trying to keep aware of the limitations and privileges these positions entail.
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T: I felt like there were two Biennales this year. One was business as usual: people moving frantically between openings, dinners and parties, chasing whatever spectacle had briefly captured attention that day. The spectacles felt awfully familiar by now, rehearsed gestures trying to pass as transgressions. Anne Imhof’s raw chicken from 2017 was replaced with piss in Flo Holzinger’s current contribution to La Biennale. Then there was another Biennale, quieter, mostly within the central exhibition and among the artists, curators and researchers shaping it.
Having worked across several Biennales, including leading the production of the Icelandic Pavilion in 2022 and 2024, I know the machinery of Venice intimately. But this felt different. It was carried largely by African and diasporic artists alongside practitioners from the Global South. The gestures seemed rooted in two parallel rhythms. One was willing to sit with grief and discomfort long enough to process the scale of what we are collectively living through. The other seemed determined to keep moving at all costs, as if constant motion itself could prevent people from fully processing tragedy or loss.
Helena did not go to the opening this year. At first, the decision felt uncertain. The Venice Biennale still holds its place as a point of convergence, where the art world gathers to set its pace, where visibility accumulates quickly and unevenly. To miss the opening week is, in some sense, to step outside that momentum.
H: I wasn’t sure at first. It still feels like the centre of the art world’s calendar, whether we believe in it or not. The place where careers are propelled forward and nations rehearse cultural prestige. You assume that if you are not there, you’re missing something essential, removing yourself from the spectacle means moving away from the networking and from the conversation starters of the year.
That assumption carries weight. The opening days are structured around urgency to see as much as possible, to be present in the right places and to keep moving. The intensity produces its own logic. For a few days, it can feel as though everything important is happening at once, and only there.
B: There is a gravitational pull to it. Being there means being inside the moment while it is forming. But the intensity is not neutral. It asks something from the body, from attention and from emotion. And it is not always clear what remains when it’s over, what is constructed and what is truly urgent.
H: I know that feeling. Running from pavilion to pavilion, ending the night tipsy on overstimulation, convinced, if only briefly, that art matters more than anything else in the world. But this time, watching from a distance, I didn’t have FOMO. With each day that passed, its Instagram stories and endless reviews, I began to see through the spectacle. Distance shifted the scale of things. What appears immersive from within begins to flatten when seen from elsewhere. The pace becomes visible and the repetition becomes clearer. In other words, the display starts to reveal its structure.
B: You’re inside it, and at the same time trying to acknowledge how it’s built. Pleasure and discomfort are both present. That tension doesn’t resolve. It’s part of the experience.
T: And this year, that contradiction felt especially amplified, it didn’t even wait for the official opening to reveal itself.
B: What once felt like anticipation now carried a different tone. Not absence, exactly, but a growing sense that stepping back did not necessarily mean missing out. It made other things visible instead.
H: This year’s Venice Biennale seemed to begin in collapse.
Before it had even opened, a series of fractures had already surfaced. What is usually staged as a moment of arrival felt unsettled from the start.
The entire international jury resigned after announcing their intention to exclude Russia and Israel from awards consideration in response to ongoing accusations of crimes against humanity. The European Commission threatened to suspend funding over Russia’s inclusion. Artists protested. Iran withdrew entirely. Palestinian flags appeared in place of artworks, while demonstrations gathered outside the pavilions. Inside, the usual rhythms continued: conversations around market trends, prosecco under soft lighting.
The contradiction of one reality pressing against another felt immediate and impossible to ignore.
At the centre of this sat In Minor Keys, the final exhibition conceived by the late curator Koyo Kouoh (1967-2025) before her death in May and carried forward by her closest collaborators (Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Hélène Pereira, Rasha Salti, Siddhartha Mitter and Rory Tsapayi). She was the first African woman chosen to curate the Venice Biennale.
From afar, the exhibition appeared like a collective mourning space. One that is meditative and grounded in healing, contemplation and deep listening used as political gestures.
And yet many Western critics seemed deeply uncomfortable with that register. Reviews quickly described the exhibition as “too quiet,” “too contemplative” or insufficiently confrontational for the political moment. I partly understood that reaction at first. How can slowness coexist with genocide, authoritarianism and accelerating global violence? But I kept returning to something my partner said about grief, mourning and contemplation not being passive states, particularly within Black cultural traditions where mourning and resistance have long existed alongside one another. White European political culture, by contrast, often privileges confrontation, visibility and aggression as the primary language of urgency.
I kept thinking about how differently certain aesthetic languages circulate through Venice. Florentina Holzinger’s Austrian Pavilion quickly became one of the Biennale’s defining viral moments. Bodies suspended from church bells, blood, acrobatics, urine filtration systems, jet skis and choreographed excess endlessly reproduced across Instagram feeds and criticism alike. While In Minor Keys was described as restrained, Holzinger’s aesthetics were immediately legible to white Western critics as radical, transgressive and political.
Sara Ahmed describes whiteness as an orientation system: something that shapes what feels familiar, central and immediately intelligible within space. Watching Venice unfold, it became difficult not to notice how much the Biennale still operates through those orientations. Loudness, rupture, irony and spectacle circulate easily because institutions already know how to receive them. Critics know how to write about them and audiences know how to photograph and redistribute them.
But when political expression emerges through mourning, slowness or emotional opacity, particularly through Black, diasporic and non-Western frameworks, the response often shifts. The work is framed as vague, overly poetic or insufficiently urgent. As though politics only becomes recognisable once it begins to shout.
The problem is not simply that whiteness dominates the Biennale demographically, but that it continues to structure the very conditions through which “realness”, radicality and political intelligence are recognised in the first place.
And perhaps that was part of what felt so exhausting this year. Even within a Biennale profoundly shaped by African and diasporic curatorial frameworks, many responses still seemed to demand translation back into familiar white European terms before the work could be granted legitimacy.
How much of the contemporary art world’s understanding of “radicality” still depends on aesthetic traditions of white European collapse?
T: And the timing of that response mattered. Criticism felt immediate, reactive and before there was space to actually engage. It felt predetermined, and, as has been mentioned many times before, probably shaped by the absence of Koyo Kouoh herself, no longer there to defend it or frame the work.
B: In Minor Keys was intimate. It invited us into a grieving ritual. The procession, the poetry, hearing Heba Abunada’s I grant you refuge read by Gabrielle Goliath and Maneo Mohale’s The Second City for Heba Abunada, the sonic performances, all of it resisted emotional detachment in favour of collective presence. To recognise the value of that exhibition might be more about rethinking inherited understandings of grief, resistance and political expression. Works like Theo Eshetu’s Garden of the Broke Hearted (2026), Rose Salane’s Person 61-91 (from Panorama 94) (2019), Bonnie Devine’s Stories from the Shield: Radiation and Radiance (1999) and Manuel Methieu’s Pendulum (2023) remain present with me in this regard.
H: At first I thought: how can you meditate in this context, while Gaza is flattened, while Ukraine remains under attack, Sudan, Congo, Venezuela, Haiti, Iran, Lebanon. Then I caught myself and replaced the word meditate with celebrate, as in how can you celebrate in this context?
T: What seemed to me like a quieter form of resistance or liberation as art making persisted throughout the Biennale, but it largely went unrecognised. It wasn’t loud enough, not confrontational enough, not easily legible within dominant frameworks of urgency.
B: And, those gestures of mourning, slowness and collective care may be doing a different kind of work. Work that refuses to detach, or in another sense refuses to attach to the logics of spectacle.
T: Of course, In Minor Keys is not perfect. No exhibition is. But that is also beside the point. Criticism should not function as an authoritative mechanism of tastemaking disguised as objectivity, flattened into headlines and thousand-word reviews engineered for algorithmic attention spans. It is something far more subjective and contingent than that, shaped by the positionality, lived experience and emotional frameworks of the writer themselves.
Perhaps allowing Russia and Israel to remain was not solely a geopolitical decision, but also a way of preserving visible villains within the architecture of the Biennale itself. A familiar political strategy of offering audiences a clear site onto which outrage can be projected.
The contradiction, however, remained. One moment people denounced state violence outside a pavilion, the next they were drinking sparkling wine just beside it. It was a bit procedural. This is also how the Biennale sustains itself. Through tension and the continued absorption of critique back into its own structure. What is most difficult is recognising how easily even resistance can become absorbed back into that machinery.
H: There is no clean way to hold both realities simultaneously. You cannot sincerely denounce state violence at noon and toast it away at a collector's palazzo by evening. Or perhaps you can? Perhaps that is precisely what this system trains us to do?
The Biennale has become a machine that wields crisis into an atmosphere. War becomes discourse, colonialism becomes wall text and genocide, programming. And I keep finding myself confused by artists I admire, artists who are openly against the genocide in Palestine, who sign petitions, post statements and speak publicly about liberation and solidarity while still fully participating in the machinery of the Biennale. I remain confused by artists who take sponsorship money from luxury conglomerates currently facing lawsuits over exploitative labour conditions and pose for photographs at dinners financed by brands whose wealth depends on extraction somewhere else in the world. Dancing exactly the dance the institution requires of them.
I cannot stop thinking about the scale of this. The amount of money spent transporting artworks across continents, constructing temporary architectures, hosting dinners and receptions, flying collectors, curators and journalists into Venice for a single week. I keep wondering what it would mean if even a fraction of those budgets were redirected elsewhere, to mutual aid networks, medical relief and grassroots organisations in Palestine. I will include links to some of those fundraisers at the end of this text.
Artists are often told these opportunities cannot be refused. That this is how survival works, especially outside dominant centres. That saying no means disappearing. But I still cannot stop asking myself if the reward is really that significant. Does participating actually change your life enough to justify swallowing all these contradictions? Or am I simply too idealistic? Too naive about how deeply compromise is woven into cultural work?
T: Hypothetically, would we refuse the opportunity to curate the Icelandic Pavilion ourselves? Probably not. We would accept and try to inhabit that contradiction differently.
H: I would like to think that’s possible, but I’m not convinced.
T: Despite everything, I still believe exhibitions can create temporary forms of solidarity and intimacy exceeding the institutions containing them. But, that also means refusing the performance the Biennale so often seems to demand of its curators (and artists). Refusing to treat artists as cultural currency or the pavilion as a branding exercise for a nation-state. For us, curation has never been focused solely on selection or visibility, but about building conditions for people to encounter one another differently. To be emotionally porous against increasingly structured demands of detachment and self-preservation. Maybe that sounds naive within the context of Venice. But if there is any reason left to participate at all, it would have to be in pursuit of something genuinely resistant, even if only temporarily.
H: Increasingly, the most radical art in Venice does not appear inside the official Biennale at all. Critics repeatedly observed this year that the unofficial exhibitions scattered through the city carried more emotional and political force than the national pavilions. The real urgency existed outside the institution, not within it. Which raises the question few in the art world seem willing to articulate: is the Biennale over? The format itself feels exhausted. Every edition grows larger, more expensive, more politically cautious and more spiritually empty. Critics now speak openly about “biennial fatigue” and about the exhibition becoming a “relic from a bygone era.” The structure of national pavilions already feels like an artifact from another century of nations competing through culture while pretending art can somehow float above geopolitics. But art does not float above geopolitics. Every artist who enters this system becomes smeared by it.
T: petals gave me a copy of The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture after I returned from Venice and I had sat on their couch trying to explain how this Biennale made me feel as a curator, critic, new parent and human being. Slowly reading Kevin Quashie has helped me hold together some of the larger and more uncomfortable emotions Venice left behind.
One idea kept resurfacing while looking back on In Minor Keys: that quiet is not the absence of politics, but another mode of being political altogether. Perhaps that is what so many Western critics failed to recognise in Koyo Kouoh’s exhibition. Slowness was mistaken for passivity because urgency is so often only recognised when it arrives loudly or confrontationally. But grief is not passive. Mourning is not apolitical. Perhaps Koyo’s final curatorial gesture is not a cure but a kind of potion that must be absorbed slowly over time. A remedy against numbness. One that allows seeking kindred spirits, communing around art, music and poetry, cry and love in spite of despair.
H: In the spirit of grief and memory, I should also say that Koyo Kouoh was my teacher. In 2019, I attended the RAW Académie fellowship in Dakar, which became my first real education in curating beyond the narrow Western frameworks I had inherited and still move through. With Koyo, I was introduced to African curatorial and artistic practices not as additions to an existing canon, but as ways of thinking and relating that fundamentally reshaped my understanding of art, politics and care. That experience continues to shape my practice deeply.
I think many people will remember Koyo through the scale of her influence on contemporary art, but what remains with me is the warmth and attentiveness of her presence. The way she made people feel capable of thinking more deeply and more collectively. Some teachers alter not only your thinking, but your emotional relationship to the world itself. Koyo was one of those people for me.
B: That sense of being changed by proximity to a way of thinking, or a way of being with others, has stayed with me in other contexts too. There are moments that remain not because they were spectacular, but because they shifted something quieter in the structure of attention itself. Despite the scale, despite the contradictions, there were still encounters that opened rather than closed.
T: Yeah like when we stumbled upon Gabrielle Goliath’s installation Elegy. It was heartbreaking and heartwarming at the same time. And when we witnessed the procession, it was beautiful and extremely sad.
B: I reread Tinna’s copy of Ingibjörg Sigurjónsdóttir’s Málamiðlanir (Mediations) on the flight there, and Audre Lorde’s When I Dare to Be Powerful followed me home. They felt less like readings than reminders that attention itself is a form of responsibility. Something that can be held, shared or exhausted.
T: The national pavilions remain wildly uneven in how they seem to distribute care, labour and visibility. There seems to be no shared understanding of what a curator’s role within these pavilion structures actually is, or perhaps too many competing ones.
Some pavilions rely on jet-setting curators who barely write, produce or install with the artist at all, instead organising exclusive dinners and gatherings for the global elite, while making sure the pavilion trends across social media feeds. Others give absolutely everything to the process and burn themselves out entirely, moving from symbolic to total exhaustion.
B: Between these poles, it becomes difficult to locate a sustainable ethic of practice for curators, where our interests lie, only differing intensities of withdrawal or overextension. Sometimes even disconnect from the art, its artists and context.
T: If I return, I think I would spend most of my time outside the official structures altogether. I would move slowly through the neighbourhoods of Venice, differently. Venice does slow you down whether you want it or not, you walk, you wait, you drift. You encounter things without planning to. You use the time to meet colleagues from across the world and stand in an Venetian pastry shop with old Italians and gossip, and laugh and talk about what made you stop and question your own bias.
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This is where our conversation pauses. The exhaustion carried home from Venice and witnessed from afar was not accidental, but a logical consequence of trying to remain emotionally present inside a cultural system that increasingly demands simultaneous outrage, productivity, visibility and detachment. Detachment in the sense that the artists become removed from the communities for which they make their art, and their art becomes more of a product for mass consumption.
There is something deeply obscene about watching the art world rehearse empathy while genocide continues in real time. About moving from conversations on Palestine, Sudan or Congo directly into branded dinners, networking breakfasts and champagne receptions funded by the same structures of extraction that underpin so much global violence.
We too are complicit. We are not outside these systems. We continue to work within them, benefit from them and move through their contradictions. Perhaps the question now is not whether total “purity” is possible, it clearly is not, but whether we are willing to let these contradictions genuinely alter how we live, curate, write, travel, fund and gather around art. Whether we are willing to consume art differently altogether.
Maybe now is a time to stop treating exhibitions as content, politics as aesthetics and grief simply as a vibe. Now is a time to refuse the acceleration machine that mistakes visibility for care and attendance for solidarity. Now is a time to ask questions about where the money that funds art comes from, where it flows and who is disappeared by it as the art we love remains uninterrupted. Because if artworkers claim to be political or emotional, they cannot rely on VIP openings, institutional statements or symbolic gestures of resistance safely absorbed into the machinery of spectacle. Art has to exist in how we redistribute resources, how we show up for one another materially and how we remain emotionally available to realities that institutions themselves cannot resolve.
Perhaps mutual aid, slowness, collective mourning and refusal are not secondary to art practice right now. Perhaps they are the practice. The Biennale will continue. The parties will continue. The market will continue. The question is whether we continue moving through all this unchanged.
And so before buying another round of spritz beside a canal while discussing urgency and liberation, consider donating to the mutual aid links below. Consider this an art tax. This is the very least we can do, not as a symbolic gesture to ease guilt, but because people need food, medicine, shelter and routes to survival while the art world continues talking in circles about representation, visibility and ethics.
Zahrat Alhanun Mutual Aid (Gaza)
Operation Olive Branch (Palestine)
Mutual Aid for Lebanon
