Koyo Kouoh’s In Minor Keys asks for radical refusal of how we usually move through art. You slow down, to listen and smell and rest, and to trust poetry over the institutional voice. Across the Giardini and the Arsenale, a few overlapping trends made themselves felt.
It’s the poetry of infrastructure, a return to small, found, almost residual things, treated with extraordinary care. It tunes lower, asking us to register what we’d otherwise walk past: a smell, a ladybug, a pencil note, a ring, a held breath in a darkened room. These are human rights, too: the right to a mundane day, an enjoyable one, the lighter and simpler things. All of it is being threatened right now. In Minor Keys insists those rights are worth defending — and that defending them starts with refusing to walk past.
Two performances crystallized the show’s invitation most viscerally for me. At Minor Music at the End of the World, Saidiya Hartman and Arthur Jafa’s collaboration, though visually fantastic its own right, I closed my eyes— because the narration insisted on being listened to. A thick, iridescent river undulated across the floor, and the dancers moved in lyrical repetition, embodying the burdens and barriers of Black womanhood until I found myself swaying with them, with the river.
At Lorna Simpson’s performance in the Punta della Dogana, Esperanza Spalding led the room through an improvisation that climbed into high, almost weightless hums and dropped into the deep gravity of cello, threaded with singing bowls that we interacted with while taking in the paintings.
The same insistence on embodiment ran through the visual work Kouoh curated. Nick Cave, Ebony G. Patterson, Wangechi Mutu, Kennedy Yanko, Adébunmi Gbadebo, Torkwa Sedyson, and Big Chief Demond Melancon can be seen as a kind of material chorus. Material that has been salvaged, embroidered, smelted, beaded, and layered until it carries time. The show made a strong case that the most political gesture available to art right now is patience with stuff.
@madamekoyo 🕊️
