Biennale Arte 2026

IN MINOR KEYS

DI/BY KOYO KOUOH

The Caravan’s Torchlights Tremble a Sea of Shadows across the Desert Dune Field, & I Am Here in the Caravan’s Belly, Wondering Who Now Will Bless This Boat of Our Bodies, Sailing These Waves of Sand

Natalie Diaz

Without her you would not have set out. She has nothing left to give you now.

~ C. P. Cavafy, Ithaka1

Multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus

Many the peoples many the oceans I crossed ~ Catullus 1012

I was dreamed into being—: I was the dreamer. Skin fleshes the world it’s made of, in overwhelm—: mother of pearl & coral, amber & ebony, sensual perfume…

Less human than we are the world’s imagination. Granite weeping its hornblende to the surface, the long sorrow of emergence. Garnet & tourmaline—: a way the body has been & will become.

Grief for our elemental life respires our bodies. Snakes lick us from the wind like a chemical, return us to electric signal—: a web of small lightning suturing the mouth to the skull. Pleasured & unlanguaged.

We dream with the mountain because we are of the mountain. We dream seas because we are the seas’ first bodies—: crowning like islands from fathoms of history. Quanta of our mothers—archipelagos of desire, lush & xeric.

Cloud shadow drifts a gray whale across the salt flats—: a periphery of white halite crust surrounds its behemoth shade. We surfaced from deep submersion. Forged, earthen & wet. Ancient ocean, we say—: & we mean every body.

How much love can a desert drink to bone? How many bodies—: pressed beneath this tectonic pie? A wrecked ship lodged in the landscape—: slow bleed of oxide, rust making lace of the blown-out hull, mast, flag & master long lost.

Along the beaten route of the traders, a ram’s scattered skeleton—: empty lake of pelvis, desert grapevines threading the bone sockets, tugging the jaw vee deeper into the canyon.

Its broken horn is a curl of gold telephone. With no one to call, I hold it to my eye. I am dislocated, unmoored. Some knowledge is not mine, some is but I have not arrived to it yet.

A long time ago the wind licked the camel’s skull to glass—: this is how we happen. Atom-born & atom-bombed. How rain & clouds happen to one another. In my desert on a mountain top, we dance up red clouds of dust—: touch the blue rain,

we rain the future, pull it down into our mud. Wet though risen up from dust, abundant. Abundant in our many words for those who make & destroy us—: & how we call to them in the night.

‘Amo—: the bighorn sheep made of stars & staggered, spear still warm from the warrior’s hand, its shattered torso notching the night. The first wound was also the first clock, our hunger. We ate the mountain sheep—:

now our moon is a curve of cold fat congealing on a blued bone & lives in daylight, diurnal leftover. Over night’s black dunes we follow the trail of ‘Amo’s white face.

If I speak of love—: who will believe me?

The only poets in this desert are beryl & jasper. Thunder is not thunder but the air broken by lightning.

He looks at the image in his shivery hands. It is made on particle board some discarded thing fresh as dew old as myth. Lighter than wood but he feels he could plunge through the earth it is so weighty. Charcoal and chalk the face of the Guide emerging dark out of the whiteness of his turban. The other looks around the guard house with the image in his shivery hands. Oh no. Devoted too mild a word. In panel after panel charcoal and chalk the face of the Guide emerging dark out of the whiteness of his turban. Bell after bell struck out of the whiteness of his turban. That one now is yours says the one. That one now is yours. I was given and now I give. The one watches for response. The other is lifted. Please accept something for it please accept something small. That one now is yours and nothing more is needed. I don’t mean it as payment. Then whatever you wish. The other is lifted. So given. This is too much. No it is too little I don’t mean it as payment. So accepted. I will share it with the old man. Who old man. The old man who made the image. The old man who made all the images.

Speaks the one to the other of another. Gestures with greenstrap wrist He lives down over there. Gestures He makes them over there. Dust. Light. The corniche. He makes them as though they are already made and only have to be retrieved. Do you know the Holy City says the one. Do know it says the other. Says the one In the Holy City is a great tree on which people write their names to register themselves for Paradise. This is the old man’s great tree. Does not indicate what he means by This. And This is his name written to register himself for Paradise. Does not indicate what he means by This. He is always making these images says the one. He makes them and gives them away. He has family members somewhere but he has no home. Gestures with greenstrap wrist He lives down over there. He is an old man. He is not in his right mind. Less mirth now in the voice that says this. An old man who is not in his right mind.

And the sun lowers over the city the shadows lengthen the waves crash on the rocks below the corniche. The other has accepted the image and the shiver in his hands has subsided. He leaves that place with the image. Miracled and manacled with it. In his dreams that night a dark gentle face. It is the face of the one. Mirthful once more. In his dreams also the old man. The presence of the old man but his face cannot be retrieved. The other wakes suddenly emerging dark out of the whiteness of the dream. He has placed the image on a table over there his bed over here in the darkness. He looks across the room unseeing but feels the Guide looking back across the room at him. He falls back asleep now dreamlessly and in the morning finds thin brown paper and wraps the image. As he overcasts the face of the Guide with the brown paper he thinks of the array in the guard house where now there is a gap the size of four hands. A gap where the image overcast by brown paper used to be. An absence. What is to be done.

Second day. The other finds a piece of card the size of four hands. He looks into that blankness fearfully takes graphite in hand. What is called on in the making of a mark what is the source of truth in the making of a mark. The other listens as closely to the white card as to the surface of a sea into which he is about to immerse a net. He begins to draw his hand is uncooperative his mind shakes like a branch. He who knows of the Guide without knowing the Guide. Oh no. Now comes a failure and he begins to pleadingly draw and plead. With graphite tries to summon the shadowed face and the white turban. That doesn’t work. With graphite tries to conjure the shadowed face and the white turban. That doesn’t work. He tries not to try. The fatigue of trying not to try. Please murmurs he. Please murmurs he Grant that I make a worthy image. Grant that I make an image worthy of the one. He lays down the marks slowly now nothing fine or fancy. Slowly drawing the net out of the surface of the paper. The shadow the deep shadows where reside the eyes of the Guide. The other slowly drawing and forgetting his hand without trying to forget his hand. Only the murmured prayer Grant that I though not worthy myself might make a worthy image an image worthy of the one an image worthy of his mirth and compassion. Hours he is at it in the bright room in the room as bright as a field. At long last something true begins to hum as the hum of the decaying sound after a bell is struck. Not the sound of the striking but the sound of the hum afterwards. Faint hum but true. The drawing looks back at him. The brightness of the room gives way to darkness as the whiteness of the paper gives way to shadow. Exhausted he falls asleep. Few stars no dreams.

There have been attempts to find parallels in order to fit Issa Samb into conventional art history, as though he needed to be situated in a larger or “universal” movement. It is a paradox: a man who attempted all his life to escape conventions and classifications, finding himself compared to exponents of Abstract Expressionism or defined as a conceptual artist. To reduce Samb to these notions would be to ignore the significance of his search and the meaning of the actions to which he devoted his life. His performances (to employ words familiar to everyone) go beyond what is generally understood by this term. Dédoublement – dissociation, doubling, dualism – was at the heart of his concept. In this near-psychic process, the sense of the body eludes its basic nature and scrambles the message of its appearance. The reference, or at least the referent, is often the stranger, the other. We do not describe ourselves for people close to us but for those who are far away, for those who perceive an image of us that does not necessarily correspond to our sensibility. Samb’s body would become the atopos about which Roland Barthes spoke – corresponding to a single truth that could not be confused with those of other people. To question the fixed image within which others would like to enclose us while thinking about our place in the world entails a process of asceticism that begins and ends with oneself. The exercise is more than a little schizophrenic,

because it presupposes being turned both inside and out at the same time.

Issa Samb was a stranger. A strange being, in the sense that he succeeded in not being pigeon-holed. By the radical nature of his propositions, he obliged whoever entered his universe to leave preconceived ideas outside his courtyard gate. He was not from Senegal, he was not from Dakar, he was not from Africa. He did not belong to the world… And yet, he was all this at once, without ostentation, by leaving everyone free to develop their own discourse. He succeeded in developing an artistic non-discourse by creating a singular aesthetic and by making it intelligible to the greatest possible number of people. And by building this new matrix over the years, he offered a proposition that is constantly renewed to this day, unwavering, pertinent, in contrast to global monotony.

This text is adapted and condensed from the author’s previously published essay of the same title which appeared in Koyo Kouoh (ed.), WORD! WORD? WORD! Issa Samb and the Undecipherable Form / PAROLE! PAROLE? PAROLE! Issa Samb et la forme indéchiffrable, Sternberg Press, London / OCA – Office for Contemporary Art Norway, Oslo / RAW Material Company, Dakar 2013, pp. 35-49.

LLS I’ve been working on the artist Syd Carpenter, who is based in Philadelphia9 In 2012, Syd began to do research on Black farmers. There’s this statistic that in the 1920s, there were nearly one million Black-owned farms; now there are barely fifty thousand. Syd started making work that, like Beverly’s, captured the characters of homesteads and those who dwelled on the land. Among the forms those works took were wall pieces that were inspired by Richard Westmacott’s 1992 publication on African American yards and gardens. Syd did a wall piece based on a diagram that Westmacott created of Mary Lou Furcron’s homestead. So I said, “Whoa, we have Beverly, we have Mary Lou, and we have Syd”.

[1] Lowery Stokes Sims, Home is Where the Heart Is: Beverly Buchanan’s Shack Sculpture in Context, in Beverly Buchanan, shackworks: a 16-year survey, exhibition catalogue, edited by Eleanor Flomenhaft, Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, New Jersey 1994.

[2] The seminar Mixing it Up was held 21-22 April 1988 at the University of Colorado, Boulder, organised by Lippard and led by the artists Jaune Quickto-See Smith, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Yong Soon Min and Buchanan.

The coincidence frames Beverly’s work from an interesting perspective. The history of African Americans is inextricable from the land and enforced agricultural activity – the transition from being a sharecropper or tenant farmer to land ownership, and now how it’s being taken away by corporate interests. The people who lived in the shacks probably worked the land; they certainly had a sense of yards and gardens, like growing their own vegetables and creating their own recreational spaces. For Beverly, her work was always about the culture, and how she grew up. Jock Reynolds reminds us that we need to understand the impact of the jobs and interactions that her father and stepmother had, the impact of her experience accompanying them in their community, staying in the shacks, eating in shacks, getting to meet the people in the shacks. It was really about who those people were and how engaged she got in their lives10

In that larger sense, Beverly’s enterprise has become even more profound and has incredible implications, not only in terms of her lifespan, but also moving into the future. So I think it’s fantastic that Beverly is having such a moment. I wish she was around.

LL It’s wonderful. And this goes for a number of women who have died – or are my age or older. It is about survival.

[3] Lucy Lippard, Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America, Pantheon, New York 1990.

[4] Lucy Lippard, Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory, The New Press, New York 1983.

[5] According to the story of Igbo Landing, a group of enslaved Igbo people, upon landing on the Georgia coast in 1803, walked back into the water to drown, or to spiritually return to Africa.

[6] Benny Andrews (1930-2006) was known for his expressive paintings, incorporating collaged fabric and other materials, that often featured Southern life and culture.

[7] Sara Richter, ‘splinter to the heart of the world’: Beverly Buchanan’s shack works, “Journal of Visual Culture”, vol. 23, issue 1, 2024, pp. 22-50.

[8] Mary Lou Furcron’s homestead in rural Georgia was featured in Richard Westmacott’s 1992 publication, African-American Gardens and Yards in the Rural South. Furcron was distinctive because as a single woman she began constructing her home herself in her sixties. Buchanan made a shack sculpture as a tribute to Furcron, as well as photographs of Furcron and her home between 1989 and 1994.

[9] See Lowery Stokes Sims, Of Clay, Culture and Cultivation: The Sculpture of Syd Carpenter in Syd Carpenter: Planting in Place, Time, and Memory, exhibition catalogue, edited by William R. Valerio, Woodmere Museum, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 2026, pp. 51-71.

[10] Buchanan’s father, Walter Buchanan, was Dean of the School of Agriculture at South Carolina State College (now University), the historically Black public university in Orangeburg. He conducted extensive field research on African American agriculture and rural life. See House and Home: Spirits of the South: Max Belcher, Beverly Buchanan, and William Christenberry, exhibition catalogue (23 April – 31 July 1994, Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts), curated by Jock Reynolds, University of Washington Press, Seattle and London 1994, p. 30.

This is even more the case each time it takes on a new form – the piece has previously been installed in Nyon, Berlin, Lisbon and Tokyo, as well as in other iterations, partly different but imbued with the same spirit. This mutability is an invitation to a “Voyage(s) en Godardie(s)”, to echo Voyage(s) en utopie (Voyage into Utopia), the exhibition conceived by the cinéaste at the Centre Pompidou in 2006. Bon voyage, with your eyes and ears wide open.

—Jean-Michel Frodon

SABIAN BAUMANN

1962, Zug, Switzerland Lives in Zurich, Switzerland

Sabian Baumann’s work opens a passage into the unfamiliar embedded within the familiar, unfolding worlds that fork and bloom in the plural. Spanning sculpture, film, installation, and an extensive body of drawing, it moves toward narratives in minor keys that highlight relationality and a deeply entangled mode of existence. Diffracting the hegemonic singular notion of “the world”, Baumann evokes worlds that are held, negotiated, and reshaped through plurality, complexity and contradiction.

Recurring throughout is an understanding of relationality as a form of worlding – in which the state of being is inherently enmeshed with and inseparable from others. Social and ethical concerns follow, drawing attention to bodies and modes of existence that are particularly vulnerable and exposed to forms of violence.

Baumann approaches these concerns along two primary paths: collaborative projects in transdisciplinary groups across art and activism and a dedicated studio practice rooted in drawing. These paths are tightly interwoven but operate on different scales. For three decades, Baumann has initiated and participated in collaborative efforts with artists, activists and thinkers that include filmmaking, archival work, and gatherings. These endeavours, such as An Unhappy Archive (2013-2017) or The Big Re_Ordering – Privileges for All (2018), involve long-term commitment and articulate intersectional concerns and political demands. They expose, examine and unsettle structural forms of violence and the contingent character of normativity.

The studio practice unfolds more quietly, and may seem solitary compared to the collective work of political negotiation. Yet, it too is grounded in a mode of being that is plural and relational, developing its own cosmology in which drawing functions as language. Through the acknowledgement of more-than-human agencies and a generative imagination that leaves material traces, Baumann’s work invites viewers into a tacit form of collectivity.

The drawing series nature (presque) mort exemplifies this approach. The title invokes the still-life genre, yet inflects it with an added “almost”. The series becomes a project of mourning, for what is lost, what is coming, and what has not yet been destroyed. For example, one drawing in the series, Zwischen zwei Bäumen: Landschaft werden (Between Two Trees: Becoming Landscape, 2025), seems to collide scientific illustration with the aesthetics of children’s books and comics; it portrays a scene that is at once our planet and yet not, with flowers, butterflies, a spider, a waterfall, a rainbow. Symbols of transformation and hope are set against dystopian details and dark humour. Here and across Baumann’s work, contradiction, contingency and complexity are held through imagination, humour and poetic tension.

Baumann’s commitment to drawing – which has expanded in recent years to include coloured pencil on black surfaces – stems from the capacity to work in large-scale formats with minimal means, marking a conscious distance from the historically charged terrain of oil on canvas, and privileging vulnerability over sovereignty.

GEORGINA MAXIM

Georgina Maxim’s practice is grounded in reading and revealing processes through which knowledge, memory and intimacy circulate across bodies and time. Working primarily with textiles, discarded clothing and handwritten text, Maxim approaches material not as neutral support but as a conduit of lived histories: garments worn and repaired, inherited books heavily annotated, and letters, exchanged and pressed gently into piles – keepsakes for a slow unfolding that accumulate meaning through repetition, revision and care.

A signal work in this evolving practice is Borrowed books and underlined statements (2023-2026), a textile installation that takes site-specific forms. The work comprises long, stitched fabric panels that are saturated in red, and that bear fragments of underlined text gleaned from books the artist has borrowed, read and returned. The piece, which Maxim often calls simply “the red work”, operates as both an offering and an intervention: a reading made visible, a knowledge-making process marked by intimacy rather than authority. It has remained open and unfinished since its first presentation, changing form as it moves through different contexts. Rather than stabilising into a definitive version, it continues to grow, following Maxim’s gentle coaxing and refusing closure even as it expands, increasing in scale and complexity. In this iteration, the artist deepens the composition by introducing new black stitched panels in the centre of the red field. The darker additions interrupt and complicate the surface, adding contrast, pause and weight, and suggesting that reading, like memory, is never singular or innocent. Here, Maxim continues a negotiation with site, gravity and movement – layered metaphors for her own constantly shifting internal state, reflected in a widening of what the work is able to hold.

A new body of work, 33 letters of knowing you will reply (2026) is composed of thirty-three letters drawn from personal correspondence between the artist and her late sister during their university years, accompanied by fragments of her sister’s clothing. The number 33 is significant as it marks the age at which Maxim’s sister passed away – grounding the work in a precise yet quiet reckoning with loss, through the intimacy of this private archive now made public. Each letter is individually stitched, varying slightly in size, before being placed within fine silk cloth that recalls the envelopes in which the letters were delivered. The gesture is intimate and restrained; it insists on care over pageantry.

Together, these works position writing, reading and stitching as acts of survival and continuity. Maxim does not monumentalise grief or knowledge; instead, she allows them to accumulate through touch, time and repetition. Text appears as the residue of quiet days and lifelong relationships – underlined passages, partial sentences, remembered exchanges – inviting viewers into a slowed, attentive mode of encounter.

Across her practice, Maxim returns to the idea that what is borrowed must also be carried and transformed, and sometimes will return altered. Her words do not seek resolution; they remain in progress, open to revision, expansion and vulnerability. In this sense, this particular presentation is not a culmination of a specific moment but an intensification – one in which fear, readiness and gratitude co-exist. Vulnerability, Maxim suggests, is not weakness but a sign of care: a recognition that what is being held matters, and that it must be handled with attention.

—Renée Akitelek Mboya

BIG CHIEF DEMOND MELANCON

Tradition implies a bedrock foundation, an entity in which a culture is implacably rooted; at the same time, culture is a living entity that changes over time. The question of the “proper place” of tradition and its articulation into the contemporary moment lies at the heart of Demond Melancon’s practice. Melancon is the Big Chief of the Young Seminole Hunter tribe, thereby playing a central role in the Black Masking tradition that developed in New Orleans in the eighteenth or nineteenth century.

The roots of Black Masking Culture lie in ceremonial practices that enslaved Africans brought to the Americas, likely inflected by encounters with Indigenous North Americans. In its current incarnation, Black Masking Culture comprises ritual pageantry, ceremony and public celebration, the ensemble forming an expression of community resilience. Each tribe is headed by a Big Chief, who is accompanied by an attendant “spy boy”. The Big Chiefs appear in elaborately crafted regalia known as suits, at select times, notably during Fat Tuesday, at the end of Mardi Gras season – a day also referred to as “Black Tuesday” to mark the tribes’ collective show of unity and cultural continuance.

These suits are unique sculptural objects, and, like those employed in West African masquerades, they are danced and performed into being. The garments are meticulously constructed out of thousands of glass beads sewn onto canvas panels before being attached to rigid frames, depicting various narratives, images and patterns. Each year calls for the making of a new suit, and tribes vie to create the “prettiest” confection. The elaborate designing and labour – one needle, thread and bead at a time – is a group activity that takes place throughout the year.

Melancon began participating in Black Masking Culture in 1992, honing his craft and learning from those who came before him, including the late Big Chief Allison “Tootie” Montana of the Yellow Pocahontas tribe, one

of the defining figures in the culture. In 2017, having achieved a high level of skill and originality in the making of his suits, Melancon decided that the practice and his work should have a larger platform beyond the annual ritual context of New Orleans. He began exhibiting his beadwork costumes – including works like Jah Defender (2020) – in galleries and museums as stand-alone art objects. This decision has allowed him to break new ground, taking the Black Masking tradition into places on the global stage where it was previously little known. For the Biennale Arte 2026, Melancon has created a new suit, titled Amistad Takeover, which he will activate in a procession at the opening of the exhibition.

When I first spoke with Melancon about his practice, we broached the question of whether his move into a larger, less ceremonial or ritual arena met with resistance or pushback from within the New Orleans Black Masking community. Over time, he told me, any initial scepticism has dissipated. Perhaps this stems from the rigour and clear intentionality with which he represents the culture. His appearance in Venice seems poised to lift the culture onto the global stage even further. A good thing for Black Masking Culture, and a good thing for New Orleans.

—Dawoud Bey

Commissioner

Culture Ireland

Curator

Georgina Jackson,

Director of The Douglas Hyde Gallery of Contemporary Art

Exhibitor

Isabel Nolan

Assistant Curator

Niamh Darling

Producer

Cian O’Brien

Co-ordinator

Rachel McIntyre

With the Support of Arts Council of Ireland

Trinity College Dublin, The University of Dublin

Dublin City Council

Clinch Wealth

Management

IPUT

Kerlin Gallery, Dublin

Tia Collection

The Embassy of Ireland, Italy

Educational Partners

Burren College of Art

Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Dún Laoghaire

Limerick School of Art and Design, TUS

MTU Crawford College of Art & Design, Cork

National College of Art & Design, Dublin

The Department of History of Art and Architecture at Trinity College, University of Dublin

School of Art History and Cultural Policy at University College Dublin

Patrons and Donors

Sarah Buckley

Priscilla Cauldwell

Peter Crowley

Anna Devlin and Paul Gannon

Paul & Liz Duggan

Sarah Elson

Gerard & Monica Flood

Emma & Fred Goltz

Avice & Stewart

Harrington

Alice Jacobs

Simone Janssens

Michael & Roberta Joseph

Michael Lainoff & Kathryn Kincaid

Mason Hayes & Curran

Anne Mathews

Adrian & Jennifer O’Carroll

David O’Donoghue

Elizabeth Prendergast & David O’Leary

Dave Raethorne & Bernie

Kinsella

Laura Taft

Clare Tayback

Aidan Walsh & Kelley Smith

Mary Wolridge

Peter Woods

IRELAND DREAMSHOOK

Isabel Nolan’s work is rich, compelling and visually arresting, encompassing enigmatic sculptures, colourful hand-tufted tapestries, radiant paintings, drawings and writing. Her practice is driven by a fascination with the “made-ness” of the human world – our inventions, beliefs and narratives – and by an acute awareness of their fragility, contingency and the capacity for transformation.

Moving fluidly between wonder and unease, she explores how humans orient themselves within a vast universe and unstable world, questioning and collapsing the hierarchies that shape experience and expectation. Her enquiries are both particular and wide-ranging, rooted in expansive fields such as cosmology, deep history, religion, literature and mythology. The breadth of her interests are mirrored in the materials and scales employed: from architectural steel sculptures that frame or obstruct our movement, to renditions of dust; from largescale wool tapestries animated by abstract, cosmic or iconographic imagery, to intimate pencil drawings and text.

As Nolan has written, her work is haunted by the question of “how to love a tumultuous world, an indifferent universe and humans that are so often awful to each other.” Her works create a sense of material intimacy that draws the viewer into something far bigger than themselves, giving form to fundamental questions about how human activity renders both order and chaos meaningful, unnerving or beautiful.

Entangled histories of humanism and Christianity have led Nolan to the story of the invention of the “paperback” in Venice in the late 1400s by ambitious and idealistic Italian printer and humanist Aldo Manuzio/Aldus Manutius, who said, “It is our lot to live in turbid, tragic and tumultuous times, times when men more commonly turn to arms than books; and yet I shall have no rest until I have created a plentiful supply of good books.” His vision is a starting point for Nolan’s exhibition Dreamshook comprising large-scale tapestries, floor-based sculptures and drawings presented in the Arsenale.

—Georgina Jackson

Isabel Nolan, Miracle wave, 2698 C.E., 2021 (detail). Hand-tufted 100% New Zealand wool, 15 mm pile, 300 x 200 cm. Photo Lee Welch. Collection of Emma and Frederick Goltz.

Courtesy the Artist; Kerlin Gallery, Dublin. © Isabel Nolan

Isabel Nolan, Revelation, 2024 (detail). Watercolour on paper, 42 x 59.4 cm. Photo Lee Welch. Private collection. Courtesy the Artist; Kerlin Gallery, Dublin. © Isabel Nolan Isabel Nolan, Island, 2025 (detail). Hand-tufted 100% New Zealand wool, 15 mm pile, 200 x 156 cm. Photo Lee Welch. Private collection. Courtesy the Artist; Kerlin Gallery, Dublin. © Isabel Nolan

Curator

Seohyun Kang

Exhibitors

Song E Yoon

Frédéric Bruly Bouabré

SONG E YOON: SONGS ACROSS TIME THE FOUNDATION OF ART NYC

The history of humanity is fundamentally a history of communication. Long before the invention of writing, humans expressed thought, fear, and hope through gestures, sounds, markings, cave paintings, and symbolic carvings. These were not decorative acts but records of how humans understood and communicated with the world, the cosmos, and the divine. Such traces connected earth and sky, body and spirit, individual and community, forming the earliest evidence of human presence.

At the heart of these early systems of meaning stood the shaman, not as a figure of superstition but as a mediator between the visible and invisible worlds. By observing the movements of stars, the sun, the moon, and the cycles of nature, the shaman provided guidance essential to survival. The signs and images left behind were proto-scientific records that gradually evolved into systems of writing, allowing civilisations to preserve memory and knowledge across time.

Frédéric Bruly Bouabré condensed this long trajectory of human communication into his life’s work. By creating the Bété Alphabet, he sought to preserve oral tradition and collective memory. His symbols function not merely as linguistic signs but as a prophetic system, transmitting the consciousness of a people beyond their own time.

In dialogue with this legacy, Song E Yoon presents her petroglyph-like paintings and installations as another form of recording. Drawing from ancient human symbols, she re-inscribes them across walls and space through lines and luminous marks. Her work is not a reconstruction of the past but a cartography of human journeys across millennia. Time layers overlap, symbols intersect like star charts, and Polaris emerges as a guiding motif – an enduring point of orientation for humanity.

Together, these works form a dialogue between recording and journey, memory and movement. Set within the historic architecture of Venice, itself an archive of accumulated time, the exhibition asks a timeless question: what do we record, and how do we remember? The journey toward Polaris continues, reminding us that humanity has never ceased to seek direction – across history, cultures, and generations.

—Song E Yoon, Frédéric Bruly Bouabré