The Magic Collection Retreats artists at the Biennale di Venezia 2026
There are weeks in Venice that feel like a homecoming. The 61st Biennale di Venezia — In Minor Keys, the late curatorial vision of Koyo Kouoh — was one of them. Walking the Giardini, the Arsenale and the long ribbon of palazzi between them, we kept turning corners and finding the artists we live with year after year at our retreats: in pavilions, in old gardens, in the gallery rooms of friends. This Magic Journal entry is for them.
Before we begin, a thought we want to carry through the whole post — shared with us during the opening days by our team-member Gigiotto Del Vecchio:
“This Biennale… reminds us of the need to change the way we look. We are still too accustomed to a Western, male, white framework of vision… To unlearn certain hierarchies of perception.”
— Gigiotto Del Vecchio
It is exactly this widening of the eye that, year after year, we try to make possible at our retreats — by spending time with artists whose practices come from very different geographies, lineages and rhythms. Eleven of them have works on view in Venice this season. Here they are.
Loris Cecchini — Allochories
Palazzo Nani Bernardo, Dorsoduro · curated by Valentino CatricalÃ
Inside the secret garden of Palazzo Nani Bernardo, Loris’s modular forms grow into the trees as if they had always been there — botanical, architectural, almost cellular. Allochories is a small show with a short run; it rewards a slow walk and a long look.
Shilpa Gupta & Qiu Zhijie — A Necessary Fiction: Maps, Art and Models of Our World
Abbazia San Gregorio, Dorsoduro · Saudi Arabia Collateral Event
Two artists we have hosted on different occasions, brought into dialogue here. Shilpa’s quiet, exact gestures meet Qiu Zhijie’s expansive cartographic thinking. The Abbazia is the right room for it: heavy walls, soft light, time slowed down.
Zhanna Kadyrova — Three works across the city
Ukrainian Pavilion (Arsenale) · Still Joy (Palazzo Contarini Polignac) · Origami Deer (Giardini)
Zhanna’s presence in Venice this year is a triple one. Security Guarantees at the Ukrainian Pavilion is the most demanding — and the most necessary. Still Joy, the group show at Palazzo Contarini Polignac with PinchukArtCentre, is a counterweight: gentler, communal. And Origami Deer in the Giardini sits outdoors, almost as a punctuation mark in the trees. Seeing the three together is like reading her practice in three registers at once.
Zhanna Kadyrova installation view, ourtesy of Oleksandra Horchynska
Joana Vasconcelos — Group show at Palazzina Fortuny
Palazzina Fortuny, Giudecca · from 9 May
The 1950s Palazzina, beside the historic Fortuny textile factory on Giudecca, has reopened as an exhibition venue and Joana is part of the inaugural conversation between contemporary practice and architectural memory. Her work has always been about scale, colour and joy in the face of seriousness — a register In Minor Keys itself makes room for.
Kiki Smith — solo presentation
Galleria Lorcan O’Neill, Santa Croce · Ponte Pesaro 2074
A small, perfectly composed solo by Kiki at the gallery’s Venice space. The paper, the bronze, the lifetime of attention to bodies, animals and stars — all there, in a room you can almost have to yourself if you visit early.
Buhlebezwe Siwani · Kader Attia · Carsten Höller — In Minor Keys
Central Pavilion, Giardini & Arsenale · curated by Koyo Kouoh
Three of the artists we work with appear inside Koyo Kouoh’s main exhibition itself — among 110 invited participants. To see Buhlebezwe Siwani’s ritual gravity, Kader Attia’s careful repair-work and Carsten Höller’s experiments in perception inside In Minor Keys is to understand the curatorial intelligence of the show: these are practices that ask us, each in their own language, to reconsider how knowledge is held in the body.
Kader Attia, installation view, courtesy of BerlinArtLink
Luigi Serafini — Codex Seraphinianus Pavilion
Giardini della Biennale · part of the 61st International Art Exhibition
A pavilion devoted to the visionary universe of the Codex — the book that has fascinated generations of readers without ever quite agreeing to be read. To enter the pavilion is to step inside Serafini’s grammar.
Giovanni Ozzola — Albedo: You See Me in the Twilight
Calle della Madonna 1976 / Corte Petriana 1448, San Polo · with Galleria Continua
A coup de cœur. Two spaces facing each other across the Rio de la Madoneta, joined by a boat crossing that turns the canal itself into part of the exhibition. Albedo is immersive in the proper sense — light, water and threshold doing the work that words cannot.
Giovanni Ozzola installation view, courtesy of Giovanni Ozzola
Beyond our family — a few more shows we loved
The week was full. Among the works that stayed with us most: the group show Still Joy — From Ukraine into the World at Palazzo Contarini-Polignac, Matthew Wong’s Interiors at Palazzo Tiepolo, the Soundwalk Collective at the Holy See’s Complesso di Santa Maria Ausiliatrice, Lubaina Himid’s Predicting History in the British Pavilion, Ei Arakawa-Nash’s Grass Babies, Moon Babies for Japan, Sung Tieu’s Ruin for Germany, Tadeusz Kantor’s Madame Jarema at the Procuratie Vecchie, Shirin Neshat’s Do U Dare! at Palazzo Marin, and the Charrière + Canova Spiral Economy at Museo Correr.
And one project we hold particularly close: Hannah Weinberger’s Tidal Listening on the Isola di Sant’Andrea, curated by Andrea Bellini for the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève — a sound work inside the old fort, supported by Archivorum and organised with Microclima, in which the sounds did not so much fill the island as emerge from it: wind, lagoon, stones, breath.
What we take with us
To return to Gigiotto’s reflection — we left this Biennale with the strong sense that the most generous thing it asked of us was a change of vision. Our retreats have always been built on the same principle: to bring people into spaces with artists whose work asks us to widen what we are willing to see. In Minor Keys is a curatorial blessing for that ambition.
The Magic Collection Retreats · themagiccollectionretreats.com
With thanks to Gigiotto Del Vecchio for the conversation. The 61st International Art Exhibition — La Biennale di Venezia, “In Minor Keys”, runs from 9 May to 22 November 2026.
