5 finds worth your time.
What Luz Caminera brought back
-
1
Koyo Kouoh
Person
Oct 20
★★★★★ Luz Caminera's pick
The woman behind this whole edition — and a Dakar story: she moved here in the 1990s, founded RAW Material Company, helped rebuild the Dakar Biennale, and went on to run Zeitz MOCAA and conceive the 2026 Venice show. She died in May 2025, a year before it opened.
-
2
In Minor Keys — the central exhibition
Artwork
Oct 20
★★★★ Luz Caminera's pick
Kouoh's exhibition, inviting around 110 artists across the Giardini and the old Arsenale halls, up until 22 November. The title is a music term — pieces written in minor keys: inward, brooding, and quietly beautiful. Her collaborators carried the theme through after her death.
-
3
Elegy — Gabrielle Goliath
Artwork
Oct 20
★★★★★ Luz Caminera's pick
A choral video-and-sound lament cancelled from the South African pavilion — then shown anyway, in the 7th-century Chiesa di Sant'Antonin in Castello. Singers hold a note until breath fails, and another voice takes it up: grief as a relay, which is exactly what a minor key is.
-
4
Gabrielle Goliath
Person
Oct 20
★★★★ Luz Caminera's pick
The Johannesburg artist to look up: her long-form performance Elegy has run since 2015, mourning victims of gendered and queerphobic violence through sustained vocal mourning. Her 2026 fight to keep the work in Venice became this Biennale's conscience.
-
5
Faig Ahmed
Person
Oct 20
★★★★ Luz Caminera's pick
Azerbaijan's pavilion at Campo de la Tana: traditional Oriental carpets rewoven by master weavers into glitches — pixels, melting, unravel — pattern language meeting a software bug. The most architectural thing I found from my desk.