The 61st Venice Biennale opens this Saturday under a title chosen by a curator who did not live to see it. In Minor Keys, conceived by Koyo Kouoh, the Cameroonian curator who became the first African woman appointed to direct the Biennale, was submitted to La Biennale on April 8, 2025. She died on May 10, at 57. Nevertheless, her team will realize the exhibition exactly as she designed it: 111 artists, many from the Global South, gathered around her refusal of spectacle and her insistence on quieter frequencies. Among them, Sara Flores arrives at the Venice Biennale carrying a question Kouoh designed her frame to receive.

In refusing the spectacle of horror, she wrote, the time has come to listen to the minor keys, to tune in sotto voce to the whispers, to the lower frequencies; to find the oases, the islands, where the dignity of all living beings is safeguarded.

That she will not be in Venice to deliver this exhibition has not muted its politics. If anything, it has clarified them. In Minor Keys asks who the global art world hears when it tunes to its usual register. Indeed, Kouoh built the exhibition as a refusal of that register.

The 2026 edition arrives shaped by that argument and by the conditions of the national pavilion system itself. Seven countries participate for the first time: Guinea, Equatorial Guinea, Nauru, Qatar, Sierra Leone, Somalia, and Vietnam. El Salvador shows its own pavilion for the first time. Furthermore, a federal directive requiring the art to promote “American values” has complicated the US pavilion. The international jury acknowledged this in its opening statement. They named what the structure produces: a “complex relationship between artistic practice and nation-state representation” that “binds artists’ work with the actions of the state they represent. “Within that frame, several pavilions are doing more than exhibiting. They are reclaiming the terms of representation itself.

Sara Flores at the Venice Biennale: Perú’s first Indigenous pavilion

For the first time in the country’s history, an Indigenous artist represents Perú. Sara Flores was born in 1950. She is Shipibo-Konibo and based in Yarinacocha. Flores will bring to the Arsenale a body of work formed over decades, including large-scale paintings on raw cotton, sculptures dressed in painted gauze, and the film Non Nete (A Flag for the Shipibo Nation). Issela Ccoyllo and Matteo Norzi curate the pavilion, De otros mundos (From Other Worlds). Norzi also serves as executive director of the Shipibo Conibo Center in New York. Patronato Cultural del Perú commissioned the project with ICPNA.

Flores’s framing of her presence in Venice is sovereign rather than national. The flag of Perú was born from a dream, she has said. We, the Shipibo, carry a dream of our own: the dream of self-determination as an Indigenous nation. Her relationship to the market that surrounds the Biennale is equally clear: kené has always existed and always will, regardless of what the market does.

Kené: a visual language at full strength

At the centre of the work is kené: the Shipibo-Konibo visual language, painted with vegetal pigments and river clay, passed from mother to daughter. The lines are cartography. Body, plant, water, cosmos. One of the most sophisticated abstract systems in the Americas. To see kené at the scale of the Arsenale is to see a system of knowledge, governance, and belief presented at full strength, untranslated.

The pavilion lands inside Kouoh’s frame as if it were always meant to be there. Here is a practice that mothers carry to daughters, a visual grammar making its claim of nationhood in paint and gauze rather than rhetoric. The pavilion does not adapt itself to the Biennale’s idiom; the Biennale, this year, has built an idiom that finally has room for it.

For De otros mundos, Flores has produced the largest canvas of her career, the result of four months of uninterrupted painting. Indeed, some works open to the scale of a forest clearing.

Yarinacocha sits on the upper Ucayali, the same river system Delfín navigates downstream in Pacaya-Samiria. The Shipibo-Konibo are among the river cultures whose knowledge has shaped what the Amazon means in the contemporary imagination. Until now, the art world has mostly read their artistic practice as ethnography rather than contemporary art. However, the Biennale changes that frame.

In the end, what Sara Flores brings to Venice is the Amazon thinking out loud, in its own grammar. This year, the Biennale has the ear for it.

De otros mundos is at the Arsenale, May 9 through November 22, 2026.

Photo Credits
Sara Flores, 2026
© Musuk Nolte,
Courtesy The Shipibo-Conibo Center, NY

White Cube

Sara Flores
From Other Worlds’, Peru Pavilion, 61st Venice Biennale
9 May  22 November 2026
© Sara Flores. Photo © White Cube (Eva Herzog)