On Seeing and Being Seen: Notes from the Venice Biennale
By Mpho Molefe
Venice, during the Biennale, reveals itself as more than a geographical location or cultural destination. It becomes a temporary ecosystem of global artistic consciousness — a site where artists, curators, collectors, academics, institutions, and emerging practitioners converge to negotiate the terms of contemporary visual culture. Yet beyond its institutional scale and spectacle, the Biennale also offers something quieter and more formative: an opportunity to reconsider one’s relationship to art itself, and to the structures that shape how art is encountered, circulated, and understood.
To experience the Biennale while still in the process of intellectual and personal becoming is a particularly disorienting experience. One arrives carrying inherited ideas about the art world — ideas shaped through distance, aspiration, critique, and mythology — only to discover that the reality is far more textured than its reputation suggests. Venice has a way of collapsing symbolic distance. What once appeared inaccessible suddenly becomes tangible: conversations after exhibition openings, encounters between strangers navigating the Giardini, moments of collective exhaustion after hours of sustained looking, and the slow recognition that cultural spaces are not abstract entities but living social structures shaped by people, relationships, and systems of access.
The city itself intensifies this condition of encounter. Venice during the Biennale feels suspended between historical permanence and temporary occupation. The movement between pavilions, canals, crowded vaporetto stations, and late evening gatherings produces a rhythm in which art and daily life become inseparable. One does not simply view exhibitions in Venice; one inhabits an atmosphere of continuous observation and exchange. The city becomes both exhibition space and conceptual framework, shaping how artworks are interpreted and how cultural participation itself is experienced.
Among the national presentations, the Indian Pavilion remained particularly resonant in its meditation on home as an unstable and evolving condition rather than a fixed geography. Responding to the Biennale Arte 2026 theme In Minor Keys, the pavilion approached belonging through memory, migration, materiality, and ritual, proposing home not as permanence but as something continually reconstructed through fragments, feeling, and inherited histories.
What distinguished the pavilion was its refusal of spectacle in favour of intimacy and reflection. Through materials such as soil, bamboo, thread, natural fibre, and papier-mâché, the participating artists — Alwar Balasubramaniam, Ranjani Shettar, Sumakshi Singh, Skarma Sonam Tashi, and Asim Waqif — foregrounded the emotional and political weight carried by material traditions. Their works operated not only as representations of India, but as investigations into what remains of home amidst accelerated urban transformation, migration, and generational change. The pavilion’s curatorial framework recognised that contemporary experiences of belonging are increasingly shaped by movement: movement between cities, across borders, through histories, and between inherited and emerging identities.
Encountering the pavilion while existing oneself within a condition of movement and temporary dwelling in Venice produced an unexpected emotional proximity to its concerns. The exhibition’s reflections on portability, memory, and reconstruction extended beyond the gallery space and into the lived rhythms of the trip itself — into conversations, shared meals, temporary intimacies, and the quiet return each evening to an Airbnb that gradually assumed the emotional texture of home. In a city defined by transience during the Biennale period, the domesticity of that space became unexpectedly significant. After days spent navigating institutional spaces, openings, public programming, and the social velocity of the international art world, returning to a space marked by stillness and familiarity created an important counterbalance. The rhythms of resting, cooking, speaking freely, and reflecting together introduced another dimension to the experience of cultural participation: one rooted not in visibility or performance, but in care and grounding.
Equally compelling was the Austrian Pavilion, whose spatial and conceptual language operated with striking precision. The pavilion carried a tension between restraint and confrontation, using architecture, embodiment, and absence to destabilise conventional viewing habits. Its engagement with the body — both politically and materially — produced an atmosphere that was intellectually rigorous without becoming inaccessible. Rather than offering fixed conclusions, the exhibition sustained ambiguity and trusted the viewer to remain within discomfort and uncertainty. This refusal of simplification felt particularly important within a Biennale environment often characterised by excess and overstimulation.
Yet the significance of Venice often extends beyond the exhibitions themselves. Some of the most meaningful moments occurred within the interstitial spaces surrounding the official programme: conversations after panels and openings, shared meals with newly met artists and curators, unexpected exchanges that evolved into sustained intellectual dialogue, and the gradual recognition that one’s own perspective belongs within these conversations. The Biennale revealed the art world not as a singular or monolithic entity, but as a deeply contradictory social ecosystem — one shaped simultaneously by generosity and hierarchy, openness and exclusion, intimacy and institutional power.
This duality became increasingly visible throughout the trip. There were moments where subtle forms of exclusion and microaggression surfaced quietly but unmistakably, reminding one that international art spaces continue to reflect uneven histories of race, class, geography, language, and access. Yet these experiences existed alongside moments of genuine generosity and solidarity. Such contradictions are perhaps inseparable from the contemporary art world itself: a field deeply invested in critical discourse while remaining susceptible to reproducing the inequalities it seeks to interrogate.
To encounter this complexity firsthand altered the lens through which the art world could be understood. Art no longer existed solely as object, theory, or aesthetic experience, but became inseparable from questions of labour, mobility, care, infrastructure, and relation. Venice made visible the human conditions underpinning cultural production: exhaustion, ambition, vulnerability, precarity, companionship, intellectual curiosity, and the persistent desire to make meaning despite instability.
In this sense, the Biennale functions less as a singular event than as an educational condition. It teaches through encounter. It demands attentiveness not only to artworks, but also to systems — to who moves comfortably within institutional spaces, who remains peripheral, and how cultural legitimacy is continually constructed and negotiated. The experience of Venice therefore extends beyond the exhibitions themselves. It reshapes one’s understanding of participation within global cultural life and complicates inherited assumptions about what the art world is, who it serves, and what forms of belonging remain possible within it.
Perhaps this is what remains most enduring about the Biennale: not the certainty of any singular interpretation, but the recognition that contemporary art’s most meaningful contributions often emerge through complexity rather than resolution. Venice does not offer clarity so much as heightened attentiveness — to material, to memory, to relation, and to the fragile yet persistent human impulse to construct forms of home amidst continual change.
