Image: Installation view of Gala Porras-Kim in In Minor Keys, 61st Venice Biennale, 2026. Photo: Marco Zorzanello
Gala Porras-Kim is presenting a project in the Applied Arts Pavilion at the Arsenale as part of In Minor Keys, the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. The pavilion, housed in the Sale d'Armi, was developed with the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the artist takes part out of competition, according to the Biennale. The exhibition ends on Sunday, November 22, 2026, the same day as its awards ceremony.
Porras-Kim was chosen for the pavilion by Koyo Kouoh, who was appointed Artistic Director of the Biennale's Visual Arts Department in November 2024. Kouoh died in May 2025, and the Biennale decided to realize the exhibition she had conceived. By then she had set its framework, selected the artists and works, and begun working with participants. Her advisors Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Hélène Pereira and Rasha Salti, with editor-in-chief Siddhartha Mitter and research assistant Rory Tsapayi, carried the project through.
The Venice presentation combines drawings, sculpture and video. Its subject is what happens to cultural objects once they enter museums: how they are classified, how institutional habits frame their place in history, and how conservators, curators and others in the field decide what those objects mean and what they are for. The Biennale ties this inquiry to the wider exhibition's interest in approaching the archive from an oblique angle.
The project extends a practice that, as described by CalArts, examines how intangible forms such as language and sound are shaped by linguistics, history and conservation. Porras-Kim earned an MFA in Art from CalArts in 2009.
In Minor Keys is not divided into sections. It is built instead around five recurring concerns defined by the curatorial team, namely shrines, processions, enchantment, rest and schools, and it extends across the Central Pavilion in the Giardini, the Arsenale and other sites in the city. It brings together 110 invited participants, alongside 100 national participations and 31 collateral events, in a scenography designed by Wolff Architects of Cape Town.
