Decolonising and listening: a Swiss curator discusses the São Paulo Biennial

Anna Roberta Goetz tells Swissinfo about listening to and including voices from the Global South in an exhibition that challenges the historical racial elitism of the Brazilian art circuit. The 36th São Paulo Biennial, which runs until January 2026, is seeking to build on the work of its last edition in disrupting a model that has existed since the event’s creation in 1951: a predominantly white art circuit in a country where more than half the population identifies as non-white. Even in the very rare exceptions to this rule, such as the participation of African delegations in the first ten years of the exhibition (1951-1961), interest was limited “to the south as a territory, not including social, racial and artistic counter-narratives”, researcher Luciara Ribeiro points out. At this 36th Biennial, the work of the conceptual team led by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, who is also the director of the House of World Cultures in Berlin, reflects the impulse to present a map of the ...