The 8 Most Talked-About Artworks at the São Paulo Bienal 2025

The São Paulo Art Bienal has a long history: Indeed, it’s the oldest biennial event in the world after Venice, and this month, it’s opening its 36th edition. According to Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, who helms the 2025 edition alongside co-curators Alya Sebti, Anna Roberta Goetz, Thiago de Souza, and Keyna Eleison, it’s also “one of the few platforms in the South that can speak back to the art-world centers of the North.” At the press conference, Ndikung stressed Brazil’s geographic and cultural proximity to Africa, making it a nexus of migratory narratives. As he put it, in an interview with Artsy, Brazil is “a site where Indigenous, African, and European trajectories intersect in painful but also generative ways.”

Featuring fewer local works than past editions and focused primarily on African and Black Brazilian artists, the 2025 São Paulo Art Bienal is nevertheless a powerful vindication of the wider changes underway in Brazil. As many galleries and art institutions play catch-up to redress the historical underrepresentation of Black artists and art professionals, Black thought is shaping universities and schools, public discourse, and the art market of this major international art hub.

While “conjugating humanity” is the biennial’s thematic core,sensual immersion—sound in particular—is its aesthetic one. Many works stress art’s capacity to help us see through someone else’s eyes. Water—from trans-Atlantic routes to ecologies of estuaries and subterranean drifts—informs the visual concept, with many works embracing textural fluidity and wavy partitions throughout the show. The biennial occupies the three floors of the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion, where it’s taken place since 1957, with some artworks also installed on its façade and outdoors.

During the opening days, Artsy spoke to attendees—from curators to artists to collectors—to find out which works stuck in their minds. Here are the buzziest artworks of the 2025 São Paulo Bienal.

Sun of Consciousness. God Blow Thru Me – Love Break Me (2025)

B. 1993, London. Lives and works in New York.

Precious Okoyomon’s sprawling garden installation embodies this biennial’s immersive and material exuberance. Positioned at the exhibition’s entrance, it invites visitors to take time walking its winding paths, climbing the manmade mounds of earth and rock, and admiring a surprisingly verdant desert ecosystem known as cerrado that the artist transported from Brazil’s Northeast to the pristine white, modernist biennial Pavilion. Here, it’s sustained by artificial ponds and mist dispensers.

One of the most photographed artworks at the biennial, the work requires constant care—even before the public opening, the show’s technical staff were clearing up leaves and propping up earth to prevent it from sliding. In online texts about the world, the curators stressed that such unpredictability underscores the surprising, even chaotic coexistence of all living things. Meanwhile, visitors carried the dirt with them on their shoes into the rest of the pavilion, leaving footprints around other artworks—a literal trace of art opening itself up to the contamination of passage.

“Girls”

B. 1951, Tsue, Japan. Lives and works between Cologne and Berlin.

São Paulo is home to the largest population of Japanese descendents outside Japan. The biennial highlights this fact, however, not by featuring works by Japanese Brazilians but instead by conveying the fluidity of experiencing one’s identity more generally. Leiko Ikemura’s paintings, for instance, depict the female body as diffuse and spectral. Often highlighting eyes or sexual acts, they frame the drama of youth as one of ever-shifting, haunted identity. In the painting Dear Spirit (2025), human features are transformed entirely to appear animal or ghost-like: otherworldly.

“Similarly to Tomie Ohtake, Ikemura is a striking example of a Japanese artist developing work outside her native country. Her work captivates us immediately by using transparency and chromatic contrasts in allegorical scenes permeated by multiple references and imagery,” said Paulo Miyada, who co-curated the 34th edition of the São Paulo Bienal, and who currently works as curator at Tomie Ohtake Institute in São Paulo and at Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Tanka Fonta’s enormous mural is one of the most striking works at the pavilion, which has curvy staircases and side galleries that wrap around the work as if it were an altar. The almost sacred aspect echoes one of the biennial’s six themes: the plurality of cosmologies. In a video posted by the biennial on social media, Fonta explained that the work expresses “the sun’s vitality, its warmth,” imagining Brazil as its central point.

Painted in vibrant, pulsating colors, the mural depicts human, animal and plant forms through loose, floating geometric shapes. At the top of the ramp, headphones allow visitors to experience the work’s sonoric aspect: an energetic orchestral score, performed by the Orchestra of the São Pedro Theater in São Paulo.

Ìrókó: The Cosmic Tree (2025)

B. 1967, Salvador, Brazil. Lives and works in Salvador.

The bronze sculptures by Brazilian artist Nádia Taquary, created for this biennial, were the favorite of several visitors at the opening: highlighted by art collector couple Stefan Vilsmeier and Sergio Linhares, as well as Bernardo Mosqueira, the curator of the independent art space Solar dos Abacaxis in Rio de Janeiro.

Taquary’s sculptures reimagine women’s bodies as birdlike figures with feathery frames and powerful talons. Her awe-inspiring yet eerie works echo the words of the Bienal’s communication advisor, Henriette Gallus, at the press conference:“Not all forms of freedom are comforting.” Taquary, whose practice is inspired by ancestral traditions and stories of Black women from Brazil’s colonial period, also presented a vibrant orange-colored tree in fiberglass, representing gameleira, a tree through which, according to the Afro-Brazilian tradition of terreiros (original Black Brazilian communities), the orixá deities descended to Earth.

In this biennial, Marlene Almeida, whose career spans over 50 years, presents a large, flowy sculpture suspended from the ceiling with cascading leather strips. Next to it, she also shows an installation in the form of a personal laboratory: Glass vitrines and metal shelves display bottles and jars filled with the soil and rocks she collected in her region of Northeastern Brazil. Together, the objects capture a spectrum of warm-hued colors, while individual labels list the specific sites where the soil was gathered.

“Her pigments, extracted from Brazilian soil—which she herself collects and transforms—speak of a silent, telluric Brazil that resists historical erasure and ecological violence,” noted Berlin-based Brazilian art historian and curator Tereza de Arruda.

She added, “Almeida’s work takes center stage with rare force. She doesn’t illustrate the landscape: She embodies it. Her practice is a gesture of restitution—to the land, to invisible narratives, to forgotten materials. Seeing her work integrated into this international landscape also confirms that her work, for decades, has been anticipating issues that are central today: sustainability, decolonization, and caring for the planet.”

Tetas que deram de mamar o mundo [Teats that suckled the world], (2015–25)

B. 1970, Terra Rosa, Brazil. Lives in São Paulo.

Hélio Menezes, one of four curators of the 35th São Paulo Bienal, highlighted Lidia Lisbôa’s work—one of the few by Indigenous Brazilian artists in this edition. Her work includes four crocheted sculptures suspended from the ceiling and braided together on the pavilion’s second floor.

“Lisbôa’s Tetas que deu de mamar ao mundo is an installation of hand-sewn and hand-shaped breast-like forms in opaque, earthy tones. The work’s craftsmanship reveals wrinkles, folds, and seams, like scars left on a collective body. The installation allows one to walk among them, inviting one into a cavernous landscape,” said Menezes. “Between abstraction and figuration, the sculptures recall breasts, but also fruits, bags, organs, stones. They hang in an ambiguous field between exhaustion and abundance, inscribed in the bodies that have nourished not only children, but entire systems of power.”

The Way Earthy Things Are Going II (2025)

B. 1977, Enugu, Nigeria. Lives and works in Berlin.

In an interview with Artsy, Ndikung wrote, “I feel deeply connected to works that, like Conceição Evaristo’s writing [whose poetry inspired the biennial’s title, Not all Travelers Walk Roads], create space for silence, for listening, for remembering. Works that refuse spectacle and instead invite us to pause, to inhabit vulnerability, to reflect.”

One such work is Nigerian artist Emeka Ogboh’s sepulchral sound and smell installation, created specially for the biennial. It’s installed inside a dark room—one of many built throughout the side areas of the Bienal pavilion—for pieces requiring silence. The space is permeated by an enveloping red light with sound emitting from speakers inserted into chopped-off tree trunks. The work’s mournful rhapsody and intense burned aromas testify to the massive devastation of natural habitats in the Amazon rainforest and beyond, and to profound ecological grief.