The 36th Bienal de São Paulo
06.09 - 11.01.2026

The 36th edition of the São Paulo Biennial opened to the public on 6th September under chief curator Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, and co-curators Alya Sebti, Anna Roberta Goetz and Thiago de Paula Souza. Despite the premise of the theme, “Not all travellers walk roads – Of humanity as practice”, there is a curatorial assumption that we do all walk the same way. It makes for a presentation that is as metaphysically connective as a continuous feed on social media. But as a platform for more than 100 artists, whose praxis spans multiple decades and wide-ranging media, the Biennial offers a critical assessment of contemporary art. 

My confusion with the curatorial approach begins with the first work at the entrance of the Biennial pavilion. It is a garden, with plants and trees on an elevated “landscape”, a dirt pathway and a stream that empties into a pond. It is a work by Precious Okoyomon, Sun of Consciousness. God Blow Thru Me – Love Break Me (2025). I recall she planted a garden of invasive plants as a commentary on the Anthropocene at the Venice Biennale of 2022. Presuming a similar interrogation, I turn to the catalogue to look for confirmation or clarification.  Instead, I read that the work intends to draw “parallels between one of Brazil’s largest biomes and humanity” and that the garden is offered as a space of “calm and quiet” against “chaos”.  What chaos do the curators think will happen in the Biennial? And why, if respite is needed, is it better provided by an art garden rather than the actual one of Ibirapuera Park, which is visible through the tall floor-to-ceiling glass wall, and is mere steps away?

Precious Okoyomon, installation view of the 36th Bienal de São Paulo – “Not All Travellers Walk Roads – Of Humanity as Practice” © Levi Fanan / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo. Courtesy of the Bienal de São Paulo.

I came to realise that the purpose of the Okoyomon garden is to introduce the “river” as the central metaphor of the curatorial theme. First, it should be explained that the Biennial title comes from a poem, “Not all travellers/ walk roads/ there are submerged worlds/ that only the silence/ of poetry penetrates,” (Da calma e do silêncio by Conceição Evaristo). The river system epitomises the “submerged world”, as the curators observe, it is at the meetings of rivers that humankind and nature meet and negotiate their interdependence. This translates into a Biennial concept thus: “the physical and philosophical space of the estuary will be used as a metaphor for spaces of encounter, of negotiations, of exchange, of living, of survival, of nourishment, of struggle, of despair, of repair, of rehabilitation, of needs…spaces in which practices of humanity could acquire new meanings.” (p.26). 

In practice, this seems to mean minimal information about artists and artworks, as if somehow the lack of information would create that submerged space of encounter. There is a visitors map, but it only gives artists’ names, no biographical information, nor artwork titles or descriptions. There are wall texts, but these are not next to the artworks but grouped at columns, with some of the columns some distance from the artworks described. Most visitors seem to drift from work to work, not consulting their maps; even fewer seek out the column texts, and rare are those who refer to the catalogue. (The catalogue is only available through purchase, and the artwork entry provides scant information on the artist and mainly explains why the artwork is included in the Biennial.) As an experiment to embrace the spirit of the curatorial intent, I put away my map and catalogue (only consulting them afterwards), and I have likewise omitted biographical references in this review.  

Amongst the positive outcomes of the experiment was making unexpected connections. For instance, from seeing works by Ernest Cole and Wolfgang Tillmans back-to-back, as their works were next to each other. This is unusual in an art historical context, for their works come from different eras and cultures. Cole’s photographs, black and white printed on photographic paper, document life under apartheid-era South Africa in the 1960s. There is Penny, boss, please, boss, I hungry… a photograph of a black boy being pushed aside by a white man who doesn’t bother to even break his stride. Whereas Tillmans’ work, a rapid cascade of images shown on a multi-channel video platform, speaks of our contemporary consumption of banal images on screens. During one moment of his Watching a minute for a minute (2025), there is a close-up of a lemon on its tree, whilst on the other monitor, an overhead shot of polluted water rushing down a mountain pass. But seeing the two artists’ works one after the other, I get a sense of humanity’s failure to understand cause and effect. Tillmans’ film seems to ask us to consider that the lemon might be watered by the polluted stream, and it may come to flavour our bottled water. And Cole’s boy is still being pushed aside today in urban centres everywhere, perhaps not with physical violence but with the force of indifference. Like the juice of that poisoned lemon, might that indifference slowly seep into our societal blood?

Installation view of A casa de Bené, by Ana Raylander Mártis dos Anjos, during the 36th Bienal de São Paulo © Natt Fejfar / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo

I already know of Cole’s and Tillmans’ works, so what of works by artists I don’t know and works that are non-representational or non-verbal?  So we come to my misreading of the work by Ana Raylander Mártis dos Anjos. Her work consists of fabric-wrapped wooden poles that are wedged at various angles between floor and ceiling. They are installed on all three stories of the pavilion and, placed in the same spot on each floor, they read as if they extend from the ground floor, through the floorplates, to the roof. Interspersed between the poles are fragile elements like baskets, and organic matter like charcoal and stones. There are also items of a more personal nature, but I did not see them at the time, as they were relatively small in size and placed amongst the larger objects (I would only know of them after the fact through the catalogue). Without knowing the artist, without textual content, and having first encountered works about the environment, my reading of this work was that it was architectural and totemic, that it likely relates to society, possibly of the people living by Brazilian rivers, and holds an environmental intent. I was only partially right. The work is titled A Casa de Bené (Bené’s House, 2025) and the artist’s search is inward, not outward, to herself and her family, stating “these are pieces left over from my great-grandfather’s house, all used or made by him: a piece of vine with a base; a lighter in the shape of a bullet; a bamboo basket; a gourd; a long and a short pau-mulato stick; and a small wooden box” (p.66). 

Ernest Cole na 36ª Bienal de São Paulo. 01/09/2025 © Levi Fanan / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo

Much has been written about art and interpretation, and the death of the author, and whilst it lends legitimacy to my reading, apropos of the Biennial’s central message, I cannot help thinking that I have subjugated Raylander’s agency for my own. For I came to her work with what I already know, framed by what I had seen just before her work. I am not beating myself up, however, for how could it be otherwise? To expect me to interpret Raylander’s work as she intended is the equivalent of assuming I could fluently pick up the Portuguese language, having arrived in Brazil 10 days earlier.   Here, then, is how the curators fail to explain humanity as practice. For imagine I am not writing about art but about the visitors in the Biennial. What can I know about them?  How can I know about them? Why should I know about them?

The curatorial framework aside, the Biennial is also a showcase of artworks that engage with contemporary issues. Some, like Okoyomon’s garden, focus on the environment. Aline Baiana’s Ouro negro é a gente (We are the black gold) (2025) is a film about the impact on the livelihood of a community in Brazil from environmental degradation due to oil extraction. Interspersed between the dialogues are surreal footage of flames floating on Brazilian rivers. Also focusing on the impact of petroleum extraction is the work by Forensic Architecture, who use public and archival images to reveal and bear witness to human atrocities. Their work, The People’s Court I, is the first phase of a multi-year research project on the impact of petroleum extraction on the once-contiguous Pangaean forest, which, divided by Earth’s plate tectonic movements, is now spread across the Niger Delta, slave burial groves of Louisiana, and Brazil.

Vista da instalacao de Marlene Almeida. 36th Bienal de Sao Paulo. © Levi Fanan. Fundacao Bienal.

Offering a more critically balanced consideration of the Earth, as both a resource of beneficence and subject of exploitation, is Marlene Almeida’s Terra Viva (Living Earth) (2025). Materials such as soil, plant resins and minerals, in raw and human-processed forms, are tidily organised in cabinets and shelves of glass. Whilst the installation would not look out of place in a geo-science lab or museum of natural history, there is poetry in the notes being handwritten, as if in acknowledgement of the impact on humankind, and the composition, which includes laboratory equipment, offers aesthetic pleasure. 

Since the fourth edition, the Biennial has been hosted in the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion, designed by famed architect Oscar Niemeyer. At its heart is a large, single, sinewy ramp that connects the pavilion’s three stories, providing the central access for visitors to ascend and descend. Otobong Nkanga’s works, three large tapestries from her Unearthed (2021) series, are installed on each of the ramp landings and therefore visible across all floors from the vantage points of the ramp. The tapestries are woven from a mix of human-made materials, such as outdoor polypropylene, and natural materials, such as mohair, and depict the ocean as a holding place of fishing nets, empty plastic bottles, and other detritus of humankind. With their large scale and the waterline depicted well above eye level, it is as if we, too, are suspended in the miasma. 

Laure Prouvost, installation view of the 36th Bienal de São Paulo – Not All Travellers Walk Roads – Of Humanity as Practice © Levi Fanan / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo

Humankind and its cultures are another subject of many other artworks. Some works addressed the marginalisation of groups, most notably of women. There were the large-scale “breasts” made of colourful crochet fabric hanging from the ceiling by Lidia Lisbôa, Tetas que deram de mamar o mundo (Teats that suckled the world) (2015-25) and the multiple pink-glassed ones revealed and hidden by gauzy veils, a part of a kinetic work, which also involves a living plant, by Laure Prouvost, Flow, Flower: Bloom! (2025). There are also the blinding sparkles from the sequins in the installation of textiles by Myriam Omar Awadi. Fortunately, besides the obvious and the self-ironic, there are more thought-provoking works, such as Nádia Taquary’s Irókó: A árvore cósmica (Irókó: The Cosmic Tree) (2025), which consists of bronze casts of women warriors and “bird women” who have the body of human women and the head and wings of birds. Some hold weapons, others hold gifts, and all are adorned with jewellery. The figures are arranged around a glowing, beaded yellow tree. The artist’s work is informed by mythology, such as the reference to Irókó, the lord of time and ancestralism, and by her research into Afro-Brazilian history, such as the wearing of the balangandans around the waist by Black women during the slavery period. The might of bronze and the fragility of beadwork, the women as warriors and slaves, provide a truer narrative of the history of these depicted women than the empty gestures of female identity.

Traditionally, the São Paulo Biennial gives preference to artists outside of the West or artworks that explore points of view outside of those of the West, and this edition is no exception. There is inclusion of work by Raven Chacon, whose graphic compositions capture the oral and dance performances of indigenous peoples of North America. The drawings are not attempts to replicate Western musical scores but to create “sound portraits” that use symbols, shapes and notations meaningful to the performers. For the Biennial, he made portraits of music by Iggor Cavalera and Laima Leyton and the musicians of the Xavante people of Brazil, interrogating connections between the different indigenous peoples.

Many of the artworks try to find human concerns, such as Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s Amongst the Disquiet (2024), which tells the story of a multi-generational family of Vietnamese ancestry who have emigrated to the United States. Interspersed through dialogue between the family members are songs, ghosts, and landscapes of their ancestral and adopted countries. It is a juxtaposition of the real world with the imagined, the living with the ancestral, to ask if home is where one lives, where one remembers, or where one is buried.

Tanka Fonta, installation view of the 36th Bienal de São Paulo – “Not All Travellers Walk Roads – Of Humanity as Practice” © Levi Fanan / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo. Courtesy of the Bienal de São Paulo.

In contrast, there is the frivolous take on human spirituality of Tanka Fonta’s Philosophies of Being, Perception, and Expressivity of Being (2025). The artist’s stated intention may be to draw from the philosophies of humanity to invoke universal cosmologies, but his colour “bursts” and faux-Jungian archetypes draw on conventional depictions of “cosmology”. The mural is painted on the massive support structure of the ramp, but there is no clear relationship between the images and the architectural form of the support. Three orchestral compositions recorded by the Orquestra do Theatro São Pedro are supposed to accompany the viewing of the mural, but they can only be heard through headphones at three listening stations, not all of them near the mural. If Fonta’s work is overly complex, then Thania Petersen’s work is overly simplified. In her catalogue entry, Petersen writes of finding her spiritual journey through Sufi-ism.  Her work attempts to invoke the hypothetic rhythm of Sufi-ism through the use of repetitive imagery of whirling dervishes and a repetitive bass soundtrack. But because the imagery is simplified – almost cartoon-ish – and the musical beat bland, the effect is more of a video game than a spiritual experience. 

I found a truer sense of the spiritual from works curatorially grouped under the chapter heading “The Intractable Beauty of the World”, where “Beauty” is defined in the context of Ben Okri’s poem Musings on Beauty:

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.

Installation view of works by Madame Zo during the 36th Bienal de São Paulo © Levi Fanan / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo

This “beauty” is found in the artwork of Hessie, who uses everyday materials such as cotton fabrics and packaging materials to create works that blur the boundary between embroidery and collage. It is also in the works of Madame Zo, who uses natural materials such as banana fibre and manmade materials such as film tape to weave tapestries which are at once abstract but also reminiscent of topographical maps or lyrical strands of automatic writing. The juxtaposition of materials and textures jars conventional thinking of craft. Chief Curator Ndikung previously described Zo’s work as “techno-spiritual”. “Beauty” is also in how Madiha Umar’s paintings fuse Arabic calligraphy and abstraction, and Ernest Mancoba’s works negotiate African and European visual languages. These are works that mix media and artistic languages. These are works that are complex because they reveal – not hide – difference. 

If we substitute “humanity” for “beauty”, these artworks seem to offer a potentially meaningful route towards humanity as practice. For even as we have shared commonalities, we are also different. Perhaps humanity begins by respecting the right to difference, and humanity develops through negotiating our differences. As the “beauty” of the artworks shows us, it is a process that is complex, leading to failures as well as successes. But perhaps it is in the persevering that humanity can become practice.