“There is a reason, after all, that some people wish to colonize the moon, and others dance before it as an ancient friend” (Baldwin, as cited in Kouoh & Kouoh’s Team, 2025, p. 1).
The Venice Biennale has long functioned as more than an exhibition of contemporary art. Through its curatorial themes, it provides an international forum in which artists and audiences can engage with questions of social, political, environmental, and cultural significance. In this sense, the Biennale may be understood as a form of public pedagogy, using artistic practice to encourage reflection on contemporary issues through affective and sensory experience rather than purely didactic means. Examining The Milk of Dreams, Foreigners Everywhere, and In Minor Keys, a circular curatorial conversation emerges. Read together, the three exhibitions honour preceding dialogues while responding to new global realities. Rather than isolated thematic statements, they can be understood as successive responses to enduring questions concerning power, belonging, relationality, and coexistence.
As an Australian-born Māori woman of both Māori and European ancestry, I approach these exhibitions through multiple onto-epistemological traditions. This positionality informs my attention to questions of power, belonging, relationality, and the ongoing impacts of colonial histories.
Cecilia Alemani's The Milk of Dreams draws on the surrealist imagination of Leonora Carrington to explore transformation during a period marked by ecological uncertainty, technological acceleration, and social upheaval. Guided by questions about humanity's relationship with technology, the environment, and one another, Alemani brings together artists whose work imagines what she calls a "posthuman condition" that challenges the "universal ideal of the white, male 'Man of reason'—as fixed centre of the universe and measure of all things". Through explorations of metamorphosis, interdependence, and new relationships between humans, non-humans, and the natural world, the exhibition proposes alternative ways of understanding coexistence in a rapidly changing world.
In Foreigners Everywhere, Pedrosa adopts the figure of the foreigner as a curatorial lens through which to reconsider belonging, identity, and cultural authority. Drawing together artists who are migrants, diasporic peoples, Indigenous peoples, queer communities, and outsiders, the exhibition reveals how "foreignness" is continually produced through social and political structures. Read through Spivak's concept of othering, these figures are connected by their historical positioning at the margins of dominant narratives. Pedrosa's repeated invocation of the Global South is particularly revealing. Originating as a framework for understanding global inequalities, the term is repurposed here as an artistic and curatorial orientation, shifting attention toward histories, knowledges, and aesthetic traditions frequently positioned outside the cultural centres of the Global North. The result is an exhibition that asks not simply who belongs, but who has traditionally possessed the authority to define belonging itself.
Koyo Kouoh's In Minor Keys shifts the conversation from questions of belonging to questions of attention. Writing at a time when war, displacement, and social fragmentation dominate public discourse, Kouoh turns away from the "orchestral bombast" and "goose-step military marches" of power, instead attending to those worlds that emerge "from the ruins". The title itself is revealing. In music, a minor key carries complexity without requiring resolution. Kouoh extends this metaphor beyond music, turning attention towards those worlds that endure amid conflict, displacement, and uncertainty, and continue to generate beauty without denying suffering. Through recurring references to gardens, poetry, improvisation, and what James Baldwin describes as dancing before the moon "as an ancient friend", the exhibition foregrounds ways of being grounded in relationship rather than possession. In doing so, In Minor Keys proposes listening not simply as an artistic act, but as a curatorial and ethical practice.
The intellectual architecture of In Minor Keys is equally revealing. Kouoh frames the exhibition through traditions concerned with relation, imagination, survival, and collective life. The statement suggests that Indigenous, local, and terrestrial knowledges have been rendered marginal not through any lack of value, but through the historical logics of “capital and empire”. The exhibition's ethical centre emerges in Kouoh's commitment to "listening to, rather than speaking for". In a world saturated with commentary, expertise, and competing claims to authority, listening becomes not a passive act but a radical curatorial gesture.
Across the three exhibitions, a circular curatorial conversation emerges. Alemani reimagines humanity's relationship with the world, Pedrosa reconsiders who belongs within it, and Kouoh asks how we might attend to it. Together, the exhibitions demonstrate the capacity of contemporary art to engage critically with the concerns of their moment while inviting audiences to imagine more relational futures.