Lost in Translation

As Venice approaches, much criticism surrounding the Biennale's principle exhibition has focused on censorship and the politics of national pavilions. Yet I also heard a more unusual critique regarding its title, In Minor Keys. The late Cameroonian-Swiss curator Koyo Kouoh said the title invokes the darker tonalities of the piano as a metaphor for attuning marginalised voices and a world out of harmony. But this title, I was told, suggests a distinctly ‘Western construct’. Whereas Western classical music is structured around scales and the distinction between major and minor keys, other musical traditions operate outside of that major-minor tonal logic entirely, like West African griot music or Indonesian gamelan ensembles. For a biennial that aims to uplift less dominant perspectives, framing the exhibition through the metaphor of the ‘minor keys’, this person argued, imposes a limited, Western framework for understanding the world. 

Part of their objection to the title was an admittedly personal pet peeve about art borrowing terminology from music, which often feels like a stretch, especially when it doesn’t actually make sense. They pointed to the 2024 Whitney Biennial title, Even Better than the Real Thing, which leaned towards abstraction yet borrowed its title from a conspicuously mainstream source – a song by U2. The problem wasn’t the reference itself so much as the mismatch between metaphor and meaning. 

Can any title or theme ever really be ‘good’? They usually promise more than the exhibition can realistically deliver. Art-speak has a way of collapsing under its own ambition. This year’s Whitney Biennial attempted to sidestep the problem altogether by having no title or theme, with curators Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer claiming that, rather than a predefined concept, the show was guided by conversations that emerged naturally over the course of two years as they made over 300 studio visits across the country and abroad. There are no lofty didactic texts justifying why the works add meaning to our fraught times, which could have been refreshing, but left something wanting.

Much of the untitled biennial felt guided by atmosphere, and its reliance on vibes alone led to unanswered questions, like at the VIP preview when someone asked me, “What was this one about?” When I said I struggled to find a narrative, another person asked, almost rhetorically, “Why even say you didn’t like it? Why even ask if it was good? It’s never going to be good.” Their point was that biennials are too sprawling, too contradictory and too overloaded with meaning to ever be good or coherent as exhibitions. The next morning, a magazine editor said he saw me leaving Pastis and added that he didn’t really remember any of the art.

The 2024 Venice Biennale, curated by Adriano Pedrosa with the title, Foreigners Everywhere, was also criticised for lacking a strong enough thesis. The show was intended to expand the representation of historically overlooked figures and artists from the Global South, including several Indigenous artists and collectives. The issue wasn’t a shortage of ideas, since the premise around foreignness and marginalisation was clear, but the concept was so expansive that it diluted the exhibition. The metaphor clearly failed to land with critics, such as one who felt it tokenised the artists and who made a grotesque comparison of the show to a ‘human zoo in colonial-era exhibitions’ in the German publication Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Precious Okoyomon, Sun of Consciousness. God Blow Thru Me – Love Break Me, 2025 (installation view, 36th Bienal de São Paulo). Photo: Natt Fejfar © Natt Fejfar / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo. Courtesy Fundação Bienal de São Paulo

The worst example of art-speak gone wrong was last year’s São Paulo Biennial, which had the sprawling title, Not All Travellers Walk Roads – Of Humanity as Practice, and was divided into nebulous sections such as, ‘Frequencies of Arrivals and Belongings’, ‘Grammars of Insurgencies’ and ‘On Spatial Rhythms and Narrations’. The theme was so vague and so all-encompassing that it effectively meant nothing. 

When the São Paulo Biennial closed in January, a publicist posted a photo of the press team smoking cigarettes outside of the main pavilion with the caption: ‘When you practice humanity too hard.’ This really captured how exhausted we all felt after trying to unpack the show through its conceptual language, which was splashed all over the pavilion columns in unreadable paragraphs. In contrast, it was difficult to find basic information about the artists or the works themselves, which were generally striking and important.

I was on a tight deadline to file my review of the biennial but my immediate thought was that it felt alienating. The Brazilian critic Silas Martí voiced similar frustrations in the Folha de S.Paulo, arguing that curator Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung’s ‘heavy hand,’ or his dense curatorial rhetoric, obscured rather than illuminated the works. As Martí said, the once-fashionable idea of curatorial spectacle now feels increasingly hollow, with grandiose language used to anchor exhibitions that struggle to communicate clearly. The response to the show was so bad that the biennial board announced it would impose legal standards in the drafting of contracts for future curators, requiring simple and direct captions that would drop ‘conceptual excesses’ in order to ‘democratise access to art’. It’s the only instance I can think of where such a decisive, measurable solution to art-speak actually happened. 

What goes into the title of an exhibition? Years ago, my former colleague James Miller wrote about the long negotiations between curators, artists, advisers and museum marketing departments. In the article, the curator Kathleen Berzock spoke about the ‘pitfalls’ of failing to clarify a curatorial thesis, noting that exhibition titles inevitably become compromises. Every decision about framing, even whether to name an exhibition at all, is entangled with questions of clarity, accessibility and institutional identity, and there are always trade-offs. 

Exhibition titles promise coherence for something that is by nature unwieldy. A metaphor like In Minor Keys might sound poetic in a press release, just as Foreigners Everywhere or Of Humanity as Practice once did. The success of a biennial rarely depends on the elegance of its framing but rather on whether the works themselves manage to resonate with viewers – despite the curatorial scores written around them.