“A feast to the body: São Paulo Bienal 2025/2026”
Cláudio Carvalhaes
To the memory of Colombian artist Beatriz González
Tanka Fonta
Philosophies of Being, Perception, and Expressivity of Being (2025)
Born in Buea, Cameroon, now lives and works in Berlin, Germany.
I was able to visit the last days of the 2025/2026 art biennial in São Paulo.[1] The Bienal is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year with a long and rich history of art around the world.
Along with Venice and Kassel’s Documenta, São Paulo constitutes one of the three of the most expressive global art exhibitions in the world.
This year, the theme of the 36th Bienal de São Paulo’s was “Not All Travellers Walk Roads-Of Humanity as Practice.” There were a whole host of curators but the chief curators were Prof. Dr. Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung from Cameroon and Alya Sebti from Morocco. The exhibition featured the participation of 125 individual and collective artists, in an edition focused on reflection about humanity, inspired by African Brazilian writer Conceição Evaristo.
The poem On Calm and Silence, that titles the Bienal from Conceição Evaristo is the following:
On calm and silence
When I bite
the word,
please,
don’t rush me,
I want to chew it
tear it between teeth,
the skin, the bones, the marrow
of the verb,
to verse thus
the heart of things
When my gaze
gets lost in the nothingness,
please,
don’t wake me up
I want to retain
inside the iris,
the small shadow,
of the tiniest movement.
When my feet
slow down in gait,
please,
don’t force me.
Walking to what?
Let me stay
let me be still
in apparent inertia.
not every traveler
walks roads,
there are submerged worlds,
that only silence
from poetry penetrates
The exhibition is a feast to the body and all its senses but taste. We see, listen, touch, smell and feel different things throughout the very large three floors of the pavilion whose architecture was planned by Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer.
Throughout the large space, the Bienal was exhibit as six chapters, each presenting humanity as the encounter of different experiences and points of view. A variety of art expressions were present: sculptures, paintings, tapestries, videos, installations, poetry and so on using a vast array of different materials. Along with the art objects there were movies, and artists performing and giving lectures in the pavilion.
The major curatorial concept was described this way:
The central proposal of this Bienal is to rethink humanity as a verb, a living practice, in a world that requires reimagining relationships, asymmetries and listening as the basis for coexistence, based on three curatorial fragments/axes. The metaphor of the estuary – a place where different water currents meet and create a space for coexistence – guides the curatorial project, inspired by Brazilian philosophies, landscapes and mythologies. This concept reflects the multiplicity of encounters that have marked Brazil’s history and proposes that humanity comes together and transforms itself through an attentive ear and negotiation between different beings and worlds.[2]
There was something to wonder and to feel nothing, to be in awe but also ask “why is this here?” Some critiques went from supporting the diversity of the exhibition and its poetics to statements that criticized the complete non cohesiveness of the whole. No art exhibition will be unanimous and it is good that it isn’t. Cohesive or not, we are able to have a feel of how people are thinking and creating around the world. All of the artists tried to approach the theme of what to be human is all about and offer a critical engagement with it.
The audience might continue to ask, as I heard from a person near me: is it art? Or is this art? Perhaps we should move the question and start asking with Arthur Danto: When is art art? Danto shifts the questions of art. Instead of asking how art looks, he says we should ask what makes something art at all.
While this shift is fundamental, the artists in this Bienal move beyond that, showing that everything in life can be art. Art comes from the very breathing and living of life, making art an unending hub of other questions, wrestlings, responses, and connections. This is precisely what decolonial aesthetics refuses to separate: art from survival, beauty from resistance, making from being.
These artists, mostly from the global south/soul, did more than that. They were challenging these very notions of aesthetics based on a certain Western understanding and education of senses. Throughout the exhibition we could see embodied meanings that did not follow the perceptions in place in our understanding of art. Art liberates, confounds, and opens the senses to other sensibilities, not all we can apprehend or explain in concepts. There are ruptures, refusals, other forms of re-cognition and forms of inclusion and liberation. Art and politics, liberation and resistance go hand in hand with art that doesn’t have a clear sense of any of that. Art in the Bienal was not art that stays fixed forever; rather, it carried a sense of flight, vulnerability, effacement, disappearance. Most of the art in the Bienal was a con-fluence of worldviews, of entanglements, somewhat showing possible worlds yet to come. As a whole, the Bienal brought forth the past in new ways, created by different forms of imaginations of futures and as a consequence, offering us other forms of living and to be together now. From a decolonial perspective, the bienal continued to break the distinctions of life, understanding beauty not as a thing in itself, but rather, enmeshed throughout life. It presented art as a collective event, and all the senses called to participate. There were offerings of healing, refusal of dominion, survival practices and thus art as life in fullness!
The Bienal begins with “The Sun of Consciousness Blow Thru Me – Love Break Me,” by artist Precious Okoyomon. Okoyomon creates an amazing garden with plants and roots and vegetation that comes from all of the Americas, the Caribbean and mostly from the Brazilian Cerrado. We walk around amidst plants, trees, mosses, water, roots, scents, and sounds. We are literally grounded in a place where the earth is the center of everything. While we can’t escape the fact that we are in a pavilion and the lack of birds, worms, insects gives the garden the feel of an artificial garden, this art work places the earth as the center of the experience and we are called to pay attention to smells, feeling of the water and other beings we don’t pay attention. She places the land at the heart of the exhibition and our attention.
Precious Okoyomon
Sun of Consciousness. God Blow Thru Me – Love Break Me (2025)
Born in London, now lives and works in New York, USA.
Along the same way, Marilena Almeida has “Terra Viva”, a double work of art. One art shows an inventory of the many soil and rocks of various regions of Brazil, a sort of a museum of colors, textures and shapes and ways of being of different territories. The other one shows strips of papers hanging from the ceiling all the way to the ground. Papers painted with mineral pigments, a work of decades, showing the colors and textures of the rocks, rocks that hold the strips on the floor.
Marilena Almeida
Terra Viva
She was born and lives in Brazil
Both artists make their work carry aesthetic and experimental modulations. Both make art ecological, social, economical, political. They both challenge earth without agencies, ownership extraction, relating the land with us, making us ponder what we do, think, and how we relate with the land. There is a dialogue to be made between territory and exploitation, its cycles and bioregions, art as living organisms and from whom we depend. The fact that they bring a small bioregion into an art exhibit and create a museum of rocks, shows what we have already lost. They show what we are losing, what we might only see rarely here and there. In this way their ark makes us shiver.
One moment of peace was to walk around the work of Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, a big piece of silk painted with flowers hanging from the ceiling. To walk around it gave me an indescribable peace, or in the words of Conceição Evaristo “calm and silence.”
Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons
Macuto
Born in Cuba, now lives in Nashville, Tennessee, USA.
Similar in theme were Marcia Falcao’s stunning, immense paintings of the body. The colors, figurative, intense and abstract elements of her painting makes the body a knot of relations, tensions, demarcations, complexities and immensities of bodies, which can be also seen as the continuation of the territories manifested around the Bienal.
Márcia Falcão,
Posição 22, da série Ioga Psicológica,
Was born, lives and works at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
The work of Nigerian artist Emeka Ogboh was one of the most difficult ones to see. It is absolutely stunning! Called The Way Earthly Things Are Going II (Mother Earth’s Lament) this installation shows “profound and often violent entanglement between human progress and ecological collapse. Rooted in the lens of deforestation, the installation weaves together the emotive force of folk rhapsody, contemporary data-driven compositional structures, and a multisensory environment to create an immersive experience that reflects on the interdependence between the human and the environment.” This work of art helps us understand our moment, it gives us channels to mourn the earth. I was speechless and cried.
Emeka Ogboh
The Way Earthly Things Are Going II (Mother Earth’s Lament)
Born in Nigeria, now lives in Berlin, Germany
There are so many other works of art to mention but I will stop here. Perhaps what hit me the most was to see that we still have lots of imagination going on around the world. The world is being destroyed right in front of our eyes and yet we can indeed imagine both the past, the future and the present. We always have possibilities to create new worlds, undo ourselves and create new possible ways to live.
My only critique would be the heavy handed presence of the curatorial conceptualization. It is rich but also heavy, it seems to want too much, and it tends to overwhelm the movements, presences and the doing of the works of art. The Bienal had six chapters[3] that followed the main theme “of calm and silence.” The chapters did and did not connect with the artists’ work but cast a shadow over them. While the curatorial vision encompassed a vast notion of multiplicities, the anthropocentric curatorial focus had earthly elements mostly as metaphors. Conceição Evaristo’s poem was hard to find throughout the exhibition. One could find submerged worlds, some weak, some strong, but “calm and silence,” as the curators intended, I am not sure where to find it.
The theme however, makes us think of a necessary calm and silence while we live in a world of anxiety, destruction and loud voices of capitalistic destruction, the tumultuous political extreme right politics, the deafening of ecological machinery of death, the thundering noise of geopolitical global order in chambers, the clamorous cries of immigrants and refugees everywhere, the head and ear-splitting of every society and the ripping apart of all its holding social threads.
How to find calm and silence in this world? And how to make art in this world? All of these global disasters affects everything! Even the art world runs the risk of lack of innovation, of repetitiveness, of staleness, of work of art half way done, of self-enclosure, of being lost, dealing with lack of imagination and creativity.
In spite of all of that, this bienal shows that life can stay alive, that evil worlds can be destituted, and new worlds can imagined! In the midst of the heaviness of our world, to experience a biennial of arts such as this is a gift! Whether in Sao Paulo or Venice, these exhibitions fill us with inspiration and longing for these possible new worlds. In a world that is trying to shrink our imagination, we need artists to show us that yes we can be expanded, we can still think otherwise, feel otherwise, build something else that is very different from what we have in our daily lives. Art can indeed save us!
[1] https://bienal.org.br/en/
[2] https://36.bienal.org.br/en/about-the-36th/#curatorial-project
[3] The Bienal had 6 major chapters, namely: 1. Frequencies of Landings and Belongings; 2. Grammars of Defiances; 3. Of Spatial Rhythms and Narrations; 4. Currents of Nurturing and Plural Cosmologies; 5. Cadences of Transformations; and 6. The Intractable Beauty of the World.