Exhibitions
São Paulo Biennial 2025: From Humanity as Practice
From September 6, 2025, to January 11, 2026, the 36th São Paulo Biennial, the second oldest biennial after Venice, will take place. It is one of the most significant international gatherings, where the political and emotional shift in Latin American art takes on a particular intensity of meaning and depth, ever since its legendary beginnings. In this regard, it is worth recalling that in its second edition, it featured Picasso's Guernica, which was in the custody of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a success skillfully secured by the biennial's founder, the powerful businessman Ciccillo Matarazzo.
Since 1957, the Biennial has been held in the pavilion designed by Oscar Niemeyer, within the grounds of Ibirapuera Park, the city's green lung. The area has a unique energy: it covers 158 hectares of Tupi Indigenous territory. São Paulo is a fascinating city. Founded on January 25, 1554, it is the most populous city in Brazil and South America. It has 12,396,372 inhabitants, rising to 22,048,504 if its suburbs are included. That's 34.5 million. It has been nicknamed the New York of South America.
On this occasion, the curatorial team is led by Cameroonian curator Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, who serves as curator-at-large at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin, Germany. He is accompanied by Keyna Eleison and a team consisting of Alya Sebti, Anna Roberta Goetz, and Thiago de Paula Souza. Henriette Gallus is the strategic communications consultant.
Art biennials today are mechanisms that strongly influence museum and market agendas. The São Paulo biennial is not organized by national submissions, but rather relies on a selection process. In this edition, we can identify three axes. The first is structured around the phrase: “Nem todo viandante anda estradas” (Not every traveler walks roads), taken from a verse in the poem Da calma e do silêncio by Conceição Evaristo, seeking to reflect on opacity and the encounter of worlds immersed in the power of poetry.
Secondly, another poet offers us a crucial key. This is "A Consciousness in Bloom for Itself," by the Haitian poet René Depestre, who explores the interconnectedness of experiences, proposing a way of living together that is more attentive to collective needs.
And a third line is represented by the metaphor of the estuary, as a meeting place for fresh and salt waters, but also for worlds, as meeting places for indigenous Amerindian peoples, enslaved people, people kidnapped from Africa, and conquerors who have sought to impose the founding logic of a "New World."
Between these three lines, a sort of sublemma emerges that completes the dense curatorial elaboration, adding "Of Humanity as Practice," as a verb, that is, action, practice, vitality, search for common ways of imagining, but with a guide situated where, as is often the case with the strong local identity of this international art proposal, inspiration is given by Brazilian philosophies, landscapes and mythologies.
The selection of its 120 artists was based on the migratory flows of three birds: the red-tailed hawk in the Americas, the combatant bird that moves between Central Asia and North Africa, and the long polar journeys of the Arctic tern, also known as the tern. This idea of travel, of movement, of searching, is key to mapping artists who circulate through the same areas where these birds roam, which implies a different logic regarding the mode of selection, validation, and production of legitimacy and circuits.
In the words of the curators of this event: “The trajectories of these birds, which cross continents and climatic zones with precision, serve as a metaphor for conservation itself: like birds, we also carry memories, experiences, and languages when we cross borders. We migrate not only out of necessity, but as a form of ongoing transformation.”
