The 36th São Paulo Bienal explores what it means to be human. Yes, all art does this to some degree. But recently, art world fads have tried to repent for our species’ planet-destroying anthropocentrism, emphasizing everything from cyborgs and posthumanism to interspecies relations. Today, though, humanity seems harder and harder to find in an era characterized by genocide and the rise of AI.
But if humanity sounds like a broad curatorial theme, don’t worry: there are many others. At the Bienal’s opening press conference, the curators—led by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung—said that the show is also inspired by avian migration and the ways birds ignore borders and carry their songs with them wherever they go. They claimed the exhibition is structured, too, like estuaries and tributaries—bodies of water connecting “the river to the sea,” they kept saying, echoing the slogan for Palestinian sovereignty without speaking of Palestine directly.
The show is organized into six chapters, starting with the primordial and ending with the transcendent. It opens with a Precious Okoyomon installation of dirt and plants, alongside wall texts reminding viewers that “humus” and “human” share an etymology. You then ascend the Bienal pavilion’s iconic Oscar Niemeyer–designed ramp and eventually, at the top, find a final chapter on beauty. Punctuating it all is a career-spanning Frank Bowling survey interspersed throughout each chapter.
As if to avoid having to state outright that all humans comprise humanity and dehumanization is cruel—which should go without saying, but unfortunately does not—the curators complicated the idea with art-speak in what they deemed their guiding question: “If humanity were a verb, how would we conjugate it?” Though I’m unsure what these hypothetical verb endings would add, I do think the show meaningfully evokes the double meaning of the word “humanity.” “Humanity” can refer to the human species, whose survival is threatened in uneven ways, as evoked in Aline Baiana’s video work set in Bahia. There, chemical companies have killed off local fish and banana trees, threatening the human way of life and subsistence there, too. But “humanity” can also refer to the things that make us human—humaneness and kindness and love, or the human culture found in our art and our literature. The show seems to insist on both together, featuring artists subject to potential dehumanization for their race, gender, sexuality, or nationality. But the show is more about thriving than surviving, with a selection of works that insist emphatically on all of humanity’s right to beauty and dreaming and play.
Conceptually, there’s a lot going on, but aesthetically, the exhibition is very tight, favoring work in textiles and sound (another theme is listening) and dominated by jewel tones. A standout example is a presentation of dozens of playful and perverse wood carvings by the Brazilian artist Gervane de Paula. Only upon close inspection does one discover that the works, loud and colorful and based on animals, are also subtle and incredibly weird. It takes a minute to notice, for instance, that a cute big-eared mouse is riding a giant wooden dildo, or that a cheetah is burying its face in a furry bright green field that isn’t grass but, instead, pubic hair.
Meanwhile, canvases by the late Haitian painter and poet Frankétienne make remarkable use of varnish and glitter in works where raw playfulness meets a sophisticated command of color and composition. And I always love seeing Sharon Hayes’s “Research” series (2019–24), featuring verité video interviews with groups of people about their lives. For the works on view here, she talked to a women’s football team from the Southern United States about their gender expressions—aggression by day, eyelash extensions by night. And when she asked children about whether they expect to change or to stay the same, they speak excitedly of all they’ll learn. Hayes’s raw footage of candid conversations exudes humanity in a world dominated by carefully edited views into the lives of others.
I have generally considered myself a sound art agnostic, but there were some very impressive sound installations by Nguyễn Trinh-Thi, Leonel Vásquez, and Myriam Omar Awadi in which mechanized sculptures and instruments elegantly make intriguing noises. In Nguyễn’s installation—a dark space illuminated only by a camera obscura with unseen instruments surrounding visitors’ heads like a halo—I found myself engaging my sensorium in a new way.
The São Paulo Bienal differs from most biennials in that it is free and open to the public, and located inside one of the city’s major parks. School children are bussed in to see it from around the country by the hundreds of thousands, and its audience is local as much as it is global. So it seems fitting to put on a show as earnest as this one.
Still, amid all the inclusivity was an ableist metaphor that I would be remiss to let pass. An installation from Oscar Murillo’s “Social Cataracts” series boasts a bunch of fake Monets stuck onto plastic lawn chairs. Its title refers to the Impressionist’s late-career cataracts—and regrettably equates vision loss with ignorance. The work is meant, per the artist, to be about “societal blindness” to the experiences of others, one example being the ways Monet’s disability is sometimes ignored in narratives of his artistic genius. But Murillo himself seems oblivious to complaints from the disabled community about harmful metaphors like these. And there is no better proof of that metaphor’s illogic than Monet himself: his cataracts were not an impediment to the innovations in his “Water Lilies” paintings, but rather the catalyst. He started painting bigger and brighter so that he could see through clouded eyes.
Lots of art—even Monet’s—is made not in spite of struggle but because of it, and this seems to be the show’s point. You can see it too in Moffat Takadiwa’s ornate architectures made from trash. Rattling off a long list of contemporary crises at the press conference, Ndikung, the curator, described himself as a “hopeless optimist.” With this oxymoron, he seemed to suggest that he thinks a better world is possible even if he doesn’t think it is very practical—and that it is always worthwhile to dream one up with art. The show’s finale, about beauty, stars enchanting abstractions by Aislan Pankararu. But it isn’t any more beautiful than any other section. At first this confused me, but then it clicked: the show was saying the world is wretched and beautiful at the same time. Probably, remembering both together is our best option in times like these.
