This year’s Venice Biennale curatorial proposition, In Minor Keys, developed by late Koyo Kouoh and posthumously realized by the team she assembled, does not present itself as a commentary on the world’s crises, nor as an escape from them, but as a wager on art’s sensory, affective, and subjective force[1]. It is built on the assumption that artists remain interpreters of the social and psychic conditions, and that an exhibition might renew perception rather than simply instruct it.
This move sets Venice 2026 as a laboratory to test if institutional art can still operate and inspire, even if under unprecedented historical pressure. Whether the works gathered under that proposition actually sustain such a claim is one of the questions Hyper Annotations 5.0 is going to explore.
The political conditions of this year’s Biennale are not separable from the aesthetic ones, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. The structure of the Biennale, a gathering of national states, many of them directly or indirectly implicated in ongoing violations of international law, is and has always been a precondition of the event.
The institution of Venice Biannale has, on occasion, acted on this: apartheid South Africa was excluded for twenty-five years, and Pinochet’s Chile was refused in 1974. Yet, this year’s edition arrives in conditions of exceptional political intensity and the institution has been, on a number of occasions, accused of complicity with the national states for hosting their pavilions while they were breaching international law. This year Russia returns with The Tree is Rooted in the Sky, a music festival framed as cultural openness; Israel returns with Rose of Nothingness, Belu-Simion Fainaru’s installation of black water drawn from Paul Celan’s imagery of black milk, amid intensifying calls for their exclusion by more than two hundred participating artists; the US pavilion opens under explicit State Department framing around “American excellence”; and Qatar’s first permanent pavilion in the Giardini, the only new structure to enter that Venetian politically-charged geography in thirty years, was secured through a multi-million euro investment in the city’s municipal infrastructure rather than through any artistic distinction, what Reza Negarestani calls the largest single act of art-world bribery in history[2] .
Contextualising Italy’s convoluted marriage between arts and politics is essential for understanding the Biennale’s image as the “UN of the art world”. Nominated by Giorgia Meloni’s government in 2024 as part of her push to re-shape the country’s cultural and artistic landscape, the President of La Fondazione del Biennale Pietrangelo Buttafuoco has made a series of surprisingly independent decisions, contradicting fears of a heavily nationalistic edition despite being tasked to transform the institution to a “fundamental element of the Italian imagination”.
The first move was the selection of Koyo Kouoh as curator, the first African woman to hold the post. The second was allowing the Russian pavilion to reopen, against the wishes of the Italian government and the EU. Beyond the threat of EU funding cuts, the latter decision drew a vocal rebuke from Meloni and prompted calls from the Ministry of Culture for the resignation of its appointee on the board. The Board of Directors of the Venice Biennale has only four voting members: the President, the Mayor of Venice, the President of the Veneto Region, and the Ministry of Culture appointee.
These are conditions, and they deserve to be named. But naming them from a sufficient distance produces its own problem, which Alois Riegl identified in 1899. Writing from an Alpine summit, Riegl observed that from sufficient elevation the endless struggle of natural forces resolves into harmony: what appears as pitiless struggle up close becomes, from height, a bright silver band against the dark wilderness. He called this Stimmung, or mood, and defined it as the presentiment of order and legitimacy over the chaos, of rest over movements. Its necessary elements are restfulness and far-sightedness. The moment something comes close enough to demand a bodily response, the chamois springing suddenly into view, the mood vanishes.
The purely political reading of the Biennale is itself a Rieglian elevation. From the summit, the geopolitical structures, the artwashing, the pavilion logic all resolve into a critical harmony: the consoling conviction that you understand how the machine works. But that critical survey from above is also a mood, it provides the same order-beneath-chaos as any other form of aesthetic distance, just in a political register.
The vision this method produces is also lacking. Since, because it is too busy naming the structure, it misses the chamois: the individual artworks that don’t resolve into the pattern, the specific encounter that the structural reading was not designed to produce.
Hyper Annotations 5.0 proposes to insist on aesthetics as the final judgment, as if we were to test whether an artwork exceeds the explanation prepared in advance for it, if it successfully functions politically as planned. If at at the end, whether the work, both formally and technically, brings something new to the table of art criticism and art history.
On top of dancing every two years at the intersection of (geo)politics and (global)aesthetics, Biennale’s infrastructure has, over its hundred-and-thirty-year history, done something that no curatorial decision can undo: it has transformed the national pavilion into an art genre with its own distinct political/historical ramifications.
However, genre is not always just a prison limiting the potentials of an artwork of an exhibition. It is also a set of inherited constraints that also concentrates the conditions of possibility. Every time an artist or curator genuinely accepts those constraints as formal conditions and works within them far enough to find their limit, something happens that the genre was not supposed to be able to produce.
The brilliant pavilions are those that take the weight of national representation seriously rather than deflecting it, that use the structure rather than apologizing for it. Every attempt to completely negate the genre, Ruth Patir’s closed pavilion in 2024 was absorbed by the Biennale as evidence of its own openness, while the fact that Russia’s pavilion stood empty in 2022 after its invited artists withdrew in protest at the invasion of Ukraine, stood as evidence of the institution’s political will in defending international law.
It is easy, and not wrong, to observe that the Venice Biennale barely affects the course of the politics it appears to stage, that the geopolitical conditions of the pavilions are determined by petropolitics, sanctions regimes, sovereign wealth decisions, and military calculations that the art world is a derivative of rather than a force upon.
However, this observation, true as it is, does not answer the question of what happens inside the pavilion. Within these limitations, within the genre, within the political hardware, within the infrastructure that produces critical harmony from a distance, certain artists and curators nevertheless make something outstanding. Hyper Annotations 5.0 wants to find out which of the pavilions succeed but then, the chamois has to be let into the frame.
A work matters here not because it escapes those conditions but because it organizes historical pressure into sensuous forms without simply converting that pressure into another mode of elevation, distance, or resolution.
If In Minor Keys proposes an exhibition that is more sensory than didactic, and that treats artists as interpreters of social and psychic life, then aesthetic judgment is the test of whether that proposition holds at the level of the work: whether anything precise, necessary, or strange enough has been made to renew perception rather than merely confirm the position.
[1] La Biennale di Venezia, Introduction by Koyo Kouoh / Koyo’s Team, 61st International Art Exhibition, In Minor Keys, 2026, Available at https://www.labiennale.org/en/art/2026/introduction-koyo-kouoh-koyo’s-team/.
[2] Reza Negarestani, The Human Centipede II: Qatar & the Broker’s Cut, TripleAmpersand Journal (&&&), February 5, 2026, Available at https://tripleampersand.org/the-human-centipede-ii-qatar-the-brokers-cut/.