Welcome to Venice: the shows you won’t want to miss at the 61st Biennale

The 61st Venice Biennale, titled "In Minor Keys," opens with a keynote exhibition conceived by the late Koyo Kouoh and realized by her team after her sudden death in May 2025. The show spans the Central Pavilion in the Giardini and the Arsenale, featuring 110 artists and collectives. Highlights include Bracha L. Ettinger's installation at the Hotel Metropole, where she transforms a room where Sigmund Freud wrote part of *The Interpretation of Dreams* into a feminist 'borderspace,' and works by artists such as Arthur Jafa, Richard Prince, Issa Samb, Beverly Buchanan, and Daniel Lind-Ramos. The exhibition explores themes of history, colonialism, war, and environmental destruction, aiming for a 'sotto voce' tone that nonetheless delivers powerful, liberating statements.

Simultaneous or Poly-Cinema

The Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy proposes a radical departure from traditional filmmaking in his 1925 text, "Simultaneous or Poly-Cinema." He envisions a cinematic experience that moves beyond the static, rectangular screen, suggesting instead curved, spherical, or multi-planar surfaces that can accommodate multiple simultaneous projections. By utilizing rotating prisms and intersecting film strips, Moholy-Nagy describes a system where different narrative threads—such as the lives of multiple characters—can physically overlap and merge, creating a dynamic architectural arrangement of light and movement.

‘It’s a huge, futuristic space with massive skylights’: Ali Zolghadri’s best phone picture

Ali Zolghadri, a Tehran-born fine art photographer, captured a composite image of the central atrium of the Iran Mall in Tehran—the world's largest shopping mall—which was shortlisted in the creative category of the 2026 Sony World Photography Awards. The photograph, taken four months before the US and Israel launched their war on Iran, depicts the mall's futuristic architecture with sweeping curved lines, metallic surfaces, and massive skylights, and includes a lone passerby to emphasize scale. Zolghadri emphasizes that his process involves manual editing in Photoshop without AI, blending three frames and removing unnecessary elements to construct meaning.

In love with trees, sculptor Lélia Demoisy elevates nature through hybridization

Amoureuse des arbres, la sculptrice Lélia Demoisy sublime la nature par l’hybridation

Lélia Demoisy, a French sculptor born in 1991, creates hybrid works that blend wood with animal elements, such as a yew wood sculpture covered in fox fur or a suspended skeleton made from naturally curved thuya branches. She lives in a small village in the Yvelines region, where she works with wood and metal herself, often sourcing materials locally, and recently participated in the Maif pour le vivant committee as the only artist on the jury.