Not All Who Wander are Lost. Notes on the 36th São Paulo Biennale.

When students asked anthropologist Margaret Mead when civilisation began, she answered that evidence of the earliest true civilisation was a healed femur – a leg bone that she held up before them in the lecture hall. She explained that such healings were never found in the remains of competitive, savage societies, where clues of violence abounded: skulls pierced by arrows and crushed by clubs. But the healed femur showed that someone must have cared for the injured person – hunted on their behalf, brought them food, and served them at personal sacrifice. We may read in that story that we became human when we started to care for and provide for the weakest.

The São Paulo Biennale curatorial team – Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Alya Sebti, Anna Roberta Goetz, Thiago de Paula Souza, Henriette Gallus, Keyna Eleison,  André Pitol, and Leonardo Matsuhei – took a different stance. According to them, we practice humanity when we follow certain moralities and ideologies that profess community over individuals, togetherness over alienation, and nature and the sacred over capitalism and modernity. In the statement published in the Reader accompanying this edition of the Biennale, we find: “It is about humanity as a verb and a practice, it is about joy and beauty and their poeticalities as the gravitational forces that keep our worlds on their axes… for joy and beauty are political”.

This is where the problem starts and impacts the way the exhibition was developed and is perceived and felt by viewers. The connections between ideas are logical and semantic. The connections between humans are emotional, messy, unpredictable, chaotic, and hazardous. They are to be captured in imperfections, in struggles, in lived raw vulnerability, and in the power dynamics of interhuman encounters and relations. Therefore, the artefact of a healed bone says more about the core of human nature than proclamations and collections of artworks.

Let’s unpack what was good and what could be better at the 36th São Paulo Biennale and how I still believe that humans, including curators, are also daydreamers–wanderers who are not lost but who, through trial and error, eventually get somewhere.

Witnessing fractured and liquid humanity

One of the reasons for this hopeful assessment is the haunting and eerie installation Someone’s Child by Pol Taburet, commissioned for this edition, which proposes a more honest, down-to-earth version of what it means to be human by pointing out the dreams and horrors that inhabit the human psyche and influence actions. It is one of the masterpieces presented in São Paulo. In its form, it seems to allude subtly to Saint-Exupéry’s drawing of an elephant swallowed by a boa that at first sight looks like a hat. But Taburet’s version of mysterious figures merged into one mass – with two bodily bumps and hats on them – is grounded in Caribbean mythology and contemporary pop and urban culture. The work is composed of bronze sculptures with trumpets attached to their mouths, called Lungs; a bronze sculpture in the shape of a face, called Guts; and a central piece in earth and polystyrene, called Belly. Brought together in a room conceived as a swamp – with an earthen floor and an immersive atmosphere – these works form a scene suggesting a natural landscape, dense and in constant transformation. At the centre, two figures that seem to be wearing hats whisper a secret to each other. They appear to be watched by the other sculptural creatures that surround them. The ambiguity of this work is its strength: it combines hidden and revealed realities of the soul that whispers and the ability of the mind to reconfigure concepts and experiences so that the horror is not scary and the beauty is not seductive.

Equally piercing to the body and soul is the installation by Berenice Olmedo – Pnoê (“Breath”) – which is made of orthoses and prostheses. The artist in her practice materialises and translates through her works the concept of humans as entirely prosthetic beings. She exposes the hybrid beings where the body is sustained and goes through life thanks to medical devices. Pnoê constellation is composed of three large sculptures that hang from the ceiling and breathe, supported by the machine that sustains respiratory function called an iron lung. Within this structure, the mechanism connects to the silicone organs via plastic hoses, allowing visitors to perceive the airflow between the synthetic organs, as well as the muffled sound of their operation. This work expands our definitions of human existence by demonstrating that human beings strive to preserve life with artificial tools, as if the will to live conquers despair and biological limitations. It also confronts us with non-ideal bodies and the organic, ended nature of life.

Everything everywhere all at once

The 36th São Paulo Biennale is conceived and treated by the curatorial collective as a PhD thesis or as a moral treatise on humanity. The ideas and concepts behind it are explained in multiple documents – website, Catalogue, Reader – but not that much on the walls of the actual pavilion, so they could help spectators understand or digest the whole rich, multilayered, complex experience.

The curators put themselves in the role of authors and took ethical assumptions about what practising humanity means and constructed a multilevel thesis with a dense web of references from philosophy and poetic sources, mostly rooted in non-Western thought and literature. 

The title Not All Travellers Walk Roads is a quote from a poem by Afro-Brazilian writer Conceição Evaristo, suggesting that being a human means being a wanderer, migrant, or pilgrim who commutes between earthly, above-ground realities and in registers that are poetic, ethereal, or sacred. Besides the title, there are multiple other theses or conceptual axes that are spelt out as fundamental for the understanding of the exhibition. The curators name three axes that guide them: the first advocates for claiming space and time, the second invites the public to see themselves in the reflection of the other, and the third focuses on spaces of encounters and the collective social brain. 

“The curators name three axes that guide them: the first advocates for claiming space and time, the second invites the public to see themselves in the reflection of the other, and the third focuses on spaces of encounters and the collective social brain.”

Then they convince us that this biennale is grounded in the metaphor of the estuary – a place where different water currents meet and create a space for coexistence – which guides the curatorial project, inspired by Brazilian philosophies, landscapes, and mythologies. And in the last chapter of the show, they reveal the initial thesis of this exhibition: beauty itself is political and, for the disenfranchised of the world, beauty is resistance – for them, a little beauty would make them more human. 

The beauty talked about here is the kind Ben Okri writes about in his Musings on Beauty, included in his poetry collection A Time for New Dreams: “The beauty of surfaces and the beauty of depths. Beauty in ugliness. Beauty in how time resolves evil. Beauty in birth and beauty in death. Beauty in the ordinary. Beauty in memory, in fading things, in forms perceived and not perceived. Beauty in awkward, unfinished, ruined, broken things. Beauty in creation and in destruction. Beauty in time and in timelessness. Beauty in the infinite that encompasses all, before the beginning and beyond the end”.

Beautiful Chaos: Discontinuities and Artistic Mastery

The show is displayed at the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion, designed by Oscar Niemeyer. Works, installations, sound art, textiles, sculptures, paintings, and videos are gathered at all three stages; they follow the structure of six chapters that, on top of metaphors, axes, and theses, also dictate the logic that the viewers are invited to follow. And it is more a logic than a narration or story that develops. 

On the ground floor, the first chapter, Frequencies of Landings and Belongings, thought of as a partner in dialogue with the Ibirapuera Park, which surrounds the Pavilion, greets the audience and promises an intro that bridges nature and human habitats. However, not all works consistently address the premise of the chapter.  The ruptures and discontinuities are visible already from the get-go. 

At the entrance to the pavilion, we spot the most striking and potent works of the biennale, located in that chapter, and we notice their very loose interpretation of the chapter’s objective and actual works presented. In this section, we are mesmerised by the installation by Precious Okoyomon, Sun of Consciousness. God Blow Thru Me – Love Break Me (who engages with the aesthetics and poetics of plants and ecosystems as metaphors of social systems modelling and metaphysical presence in human life) and the installation by Nádia Taquary, Ìrókó: A árvore cósmica (centred around the mythologies of Afro-Brazilian religions, with symbolism of ethnic beliefs around the origin and meaning of the Orishas on earth, and proposes figurative representation of human-nature relations enveloped by sacrum). There is also the display of the woven flat soft sculptures and textiles by Madame Zo (employing traditional Madagascar techniques and mixing them with copper wires, herbs, wood, plastic, food bits, and magnetic bands, interlacing the artisanal with contemporary industrial and technological threads) and paintings by Frank Bowling in the style of abstract expressionism of color field but with the political address touching on the colonization and formation of Latin American solidarity in the context of hegemonic oppression and violence.

The next section, Grammars of Defiances, assumes a normative position that being human is to resist any dehumanisation, violence, discrimination, enslavement, even if, to the contrary, history provides more evidence that contradicts this noble prescription. The curators prefer to present a repertoire of works that document or comment on human defiance in the face of “appropriation, extractivism, disenfranchisement of people and their cultures, enslavements”. Here also, there are ruptures or inconsistencies, pieces that directly represent the chapter thesis coincide with works that more refer to broader themes of the biennale, like beauty, joy, encounters, and conviviality. From this segment of the exhibition, a couple of works pop up as emotionally honest or ethically committed but still formally fresh or intriguing.

Firstly, Theo Eshetu’s The Garden – Ode to Courage captivates through its skilful montage of ten stacked monitors. The work suggests nature possesses its own logic and conscience – a kaleidoscope where forms are manipulated, inverted, fragmented, mirrored, and spiralled in constant flow. A metaphor for life’s cycles of transformation and stability, the installation induces both disorientation and heightened awareness, making viewers more present and engaged. Secondly Ana Raylander Mártis dos Anjos’s A casa de Bené (“Bené’s House”) also stands out in that chapter as well and in the whole space, as it pierces and continues throughout the three levels of the pavilion, establishing a structure of her grandfather’s house without walls, where memories (good or bad) of family history fill out the emptiness and are triggered by materials, objects attached to the patriarch. The installation materialises belonging to lineage; each level represents a generation. By creating a vertical axis penetrating the building’s levels, Ana Raylander Mártis dos Anjos demonstrates how intimate histories cut through social structures and political realities. She dialogues empathically with the chapter’s defiance theme, asserting that resistance begins at home, within family dynamics.

The third chapter, Of Spatial Rhythms and Narrations, is about rhythms, movements, corridors, passages, and migration. It is marked by another dominant piece that takes up a space of three levels of the building; it occupies the central column of the Bienal Pavilion. The painting by Tanka Fonta, Philosophies of Being, Perception, and Expressivity of Being, which also stands out in the main nave of the building, is accompanied by musical compositions to symbolically capture the public, who can listen to three orchestral pieces in seven movements, recorded by the Orquestra do Teatro São Pedro at the Teatro Cultura Artística, under the direction of Carlos Moreno. The audio and visual rhythms and colours collide into synergy where the waves and energy of the physical world pass through and unify with humans, represented by the artist as schematic figures against a vibrant background.

Nari Ward’s Spring Seed creates a body-abducting experience through large speakers behind the viewing bench and in front of LCD screens showing footage from São Paulo’s Liberdade neighbourhood (Japanese-Brazilian community), Bahia, and Jamaica’s Blue Mountain coffee region. Recordings from São Paulo’s Chapel of Our Lady of Souls – built on a Black and Indigenous gravesite – pierce ears and envelop bodies. The installation weaves urban music culture with the international coffee trade, exposing how identity connects to the global economy and migration.

This part of the exhibition is also punctuated rhythmically by Wolfgang Tillmans’ photos that freeze in a picture poetic, sensual, beautiful reality of rivers, waters polluted and exploited. We can easily be consumed by them, as they seem to reflect the Platonic virtue triad, Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, guiding the soul from worldly illusions towards eternal, perfect ideals, where beauty serves as a pathway to apprehend truth, and both beauty and truth draw the soul towards the ultimate Good.

As with previous chapters, the third is also lacking sometimes consistency in the way the conceptual framework of the biennale and of the section is being translated into the organisation and choice of the works. The space is difficult to work with, but also, as the viewers flow through it, the pieces that are sometimes very close to each other compete for attention and clash with each other rather than having their own cocoon, enabling the reception, contemplation, or digestion of the experience and message.

The fourth section, Currents of Nurturing and Plural Cosmologies, as explained by the curators, “concerns itself with possibilities, philosophies, and practices of nurturing that are decidedly non-patriarchal, generous, reciprocal, non-exploitative, matriarchal”. The chapter comprises sensual, to some extent erotic, visually pleasing, and powerful work, including Laure Prouvost’s and Kader Attia’s video La Valise oubliée (“The Forgotten Suitcase”; 2024), which is raw, sentimental, profoundly honest, and resurfaces collective and personal stories from the colonial war between France and Algeria (1954–1962). It requires a certain effort to match these works with the narrative provided in the intro text to the chapter. As a result, as the public passes through the exhibition, they are pulled into different aesthetics and messages, becoming dizzy and overwhelmed to the point that they get tired rather than being drawn and invited to consume more.

The fifth chapter, Cadences of Transformations, is interested in change as a constant characteristic of practising humanity, bringing together works that deal with all kinds of transformations in different domains or spheres of life. The sixth, The Intractable Beauty of the World, the last one, professes the importance of beauty as a revolutionary and transformative force. But in the already established pattern, it also aims to “question colonial and capitalist programmes and their futures”.

When the viewers get to these two parts of the exhibition, looking for guidance and forced to establish relations with each work on their own, as nothing is attributed or interpreted, or clarified, they move frantically, searching for instinctive connections or familiar aesthetics. If it were the purposeful and deliberate result, why even bother with curatorial texts? If it was achieved by chance, it is a disservice to the curatorial work as well as to the artists and the public. Spectators are placed in a challenge of making sense of overwhelming complications that should have been addressed. Could this too much liberty be perceived as neglect? This is why the last chapters also do not stick in the memory. And works presented there are blurring into one sensation: everything, everywhere, all at once.

Simplicity and minimalism are the antithesis of this biennale. But there was a relief provided in the last part of the show, a stop to air out any thoughts, emotions that accumulated throughout the demanding walk. It was embodied in two installations. Raukura Turei’s works, Te Ara Uwha – mai i Kurawaka (“The Female Path – from Kurawaka”), seven rectangular and square surfaces covered with clay, acrylic, and water on digital print. Through earthy matter, they connect to land, female and male energies, and Māori spirituality. Soil embodies Papatūānuku/Kurawaka and Hineahuone, the first woman formed from Kurawaka’s red earth. An inverted Poutama weaving pattern materialises the masculine element. Raukura Turei offers grounding and peace because of its materiality and rhythmical patterns. The installation by Alberto Pitta, O ateliê do artista na Bahia (“The artist’s studio in Bahia”), balanced it with the joy and vivacity of delirious motifs of the textiles juxtaposed with a white-on-white festivities platform. Fabrics that are displayed in his installation have a rebellious vibe of the carnival. They remind us of a fiesta that disrupts the mundane day-to-day life and cuts through the misery of everyday struggles. Against the colourful and kaleidoscopic materials, white, abstract paintings are shown. The contrast achieved brings the equilibrium, really needed at the end of this stimulating and rich media experience.

Too much and not enough

The 36th São Paulo Biennale presents a paradox: it is simultaneously too much and not enough. Too much conceptual scaffolding, too many competing voices, too many layers of interpretation demanded from an already overwhelmed public. Yet not enough clarity, not enough coherence, not enough trust in the power of the artworks to speak without the weight of curatorial thesis bearing down upon them. This tension reveals a broader challenge facing contemporary biennales – how to balance intellectual rigour with accessibility, how to honour diverse global perspectives without losing narrative cohesion, and how to create exhibitions that are both politically engaged and aesthetically compelling. 

The most successful moments in this biennale are those where artists and curators achieve a rare equilibrium, where form and content, theory and practice, beauty and resistance converge without force. Moving forward, perhaps the lesson is not to abandon ambition but to temper it with humility, recognising that sometimes the most profound statements about humanity are made not through elaborate treatises but through careful attention to how individual works breathe, resonate, and transform within the spaces they inhabit.

“The most successful moments in this biennale are those where artists and curators achieve a rare equilibrium, where form and content, theory and practice, beauty and resistance converge without force.”

Biennale and the art field

Biennales are like cyclical rituals that the art field enacts. Some intervene, some celebrate, some fossilise what is currently produced and circulated.  They consecrate certain objects and bring new saints to the altars. The art canon is transformed with each edition. So what did this Brazilian art feast bring?

The São Paulo Biennale – the second largest and oldest international biennale after Venice – shares these same purposes. This year, the curatorial team sought to stage a revolution: a leap toward colour- and ethnicity-blind programming. They proclaimed that dramatic change was possible through beauty and joy, belonging and community. The curatorial texts read like incantations, as if the word could become flesh. Though this utopian daydreaming is deeply human, it has its limits. Yet there were no labels for many works that mentioned the authors’ practices or ethnic backgrounds – a preventive measure to avoid bias. However, many artists with origins in the Global South make their living and careers in the Global North. This biennale feels like a complete and drastic reversal of what it was even a decade ago – a programmatic cultural shock. Historically, all-male exhibitions were unremarkable; nowadays, all-female exhibitions are noteworthy; this time, nearly all artists were not from hegemonic nations. This experiment or innovation could propel a transformation of the field, a morphogenesis of the art system. But there are two cautionary tales. First, of Kazimir Malevich and the rejection of the avant-garde in Stalinist Russia in favour of Socialist Realism. Second, the Salon des Refusés, when impressionists completely reshaped the art and revolutionised the art field.

I would argue that any tangible reformulation of the system demands both dreamers and realists – those who dare to imagine different worlds while understanding the complexities, shadows, and lights of being human. It also requires translators and interpreters who, aware of the human brain’s capacities, do not overload the system but guide it with patience and concepts simpler than those presented in São Paulo. Finally, it needs a whole structure of the market and institutions to shift towards the new paradigm, as we could learn from the historical art revolutions. It is a different story to monitor how private and corporate donors, collectors operate in turbulent economic times, with the right or conservative governments and political movements on the rise. 

Preaching vs. accompanying

At the arena of the biennale, three principal actors meet: artist, curator, and spectator. The exhibition is a negotiated and fluid space where meanings, emotions, and impressions are exchanged and formulated. 

In São Paulo, there is a disjunction or confusion. The entire curatorial narrative is a heavy structure, often based on sources that come from subaltern cultures – less familiar cultures that require more introduction and interpretation to be fully absorbed and appreciated. At the same time, the exhibition space is almost empty when it comes to text guides, labels, and contextual information that would help provide insights on the spot about the work. Works on display are often built from materials, symbols, and artefacts typical of minority cultures that, without explanation, appear as simply vernacular items. Connecting fully to them requires guidance.

This biennale gathered works predominantly from South America, Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East. Cultural mediation is therefore necessary to allow viewers to absorb and appreciate them with greater curiosity. It is like hearing a symphony, organised and performed according to certain rules that the human brain receives and enjoys. When these rules disappear, the whole experience becomes a cacophony instead of music. One could think that the curatorial decision to strip the pavilion of its narrative and from the dictum of interpretations was a liberating and brave gesture. But yet again, it makes me rather think that this was a disregard for human capacities and needs, of mortal, flesh and bones humans with brains, not abstract beings that are aspirations to share but not lived. Art demands witnesses, not just visitors – and witnesses need more than good intentions to truly see.

The curatorial team was generous and inquisitive with the research that brought the exhibition to fruition; as a result, they proved that building transcultural connections is achievable.  Their effort was tremendous; it follows the paths of Okwui Enwezor, Cecilia Alemani, and Adriano Pedrosa. The public was offered a challenging outlook of how artistic practice has been transforming in the past decades. The commitment of the curators to reconstruct narration about contemporary art around ideas like beauty and joy was clear and palpable throughout the show. Bringing back these values to the current discourse is refreshing because it is rooted in human instinct to create and innovate.