Suchitra Mattai
The Fundação Bienal, which organizes the Bienal de São Paulo, has announced the 120 artists who will be participating in the event’s thirty-sixth iteration, to launch on September 6. Curated by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, the director and chief curator of Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt, with assistance from cocurators Alya Sebti, Anna Roberta Goetz, Thiago de Paula Souza, co-curator at large Keyna Eleison, and communications and strategy advisor Henriette Gallus, the Bienal is titled “Not All Travellers Walk Roads—Of Humanity as Practice” and is inspired by Conceição Evaristo’s poem “Da calma e do silêncio” (Of Calm and Silence).
The conceptual team in a statement said that they had looked to bird migration patterns, including those of the red-tailed hawk, the ruff, and the Arctic tern, when selecting participating artists. “This methodological process helped us avoid classifications based on nation-states and borders,” said chief curator Ndikung in a statement. “By studying birds’ navigation skills, their impulse to migrate across land and water, their survival instincts, their expanded sense of space and time, and their urgency and agency, we were able to engage with artistic practices in different geographic regions while reflecting on the meaning of bringing humanity together in the context of the Thirty-Sixth Bienal de São Paulo.” Performance, video, painting, sound, installation, sculpture, writing, and collective and musical experiments will be included in the Bienal, as will works based on community practices, ecologies, oral traditions, and non-Western cosmologies.
The Fundação Bienal, which organizes the Bienal de São Paulo, has announced the 120 artists who will be participating in the event’s thirty-sixth iteration, to launch on September 6. Curated by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, the director and chief curator of Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt, with assistance from cocurators Alya Sebti, Anna Roberta Goetz, Thiago de Paula Souza, co-curator at large Keyna Eleison, and communications and strategy advisor Henriette Gallus, the Bienal is titled “Not All Travellers Walk Roads—Of Humanity as Practice” and is inspired by Conceição Evaristo’s poem “Da calma e do silêncio” (Of Calm and Silence).
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The conceptual team in a statement said that they had looked to bird migration patterns, including those of the red-tailed hawk, the ruff, and the Arctic tern, when selecting participating artists. “This methodological process helped us avoid classifications based on nation-states and borders,” said chief curator Ndikung in a statement. “By studying birds’ navigation skills, their impulse to migrate across land and water, their survival instincts, their expanded sense of space and time, and their urgency and agency, we were able to engage with artistic practices in different geographic regions while reflecting on the meaning of bringing humanity together in the context of the Thirty-Sixth Bienal de São Paulo.” Performance, video, painting, sound, installation, sculpture, writing, and collective and musical experiments will be included in the Bienal, as will works based on community practices, ecologies, oral traditions, and non-Western cosmologies.
The event will take place at Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion in São Paulo’s Parque Ibirapuera, and will run through January 11, 2026. With its expanded four-month duration, the Bienal “aims to broaden public access, promoting culture and education for a larger number of visitors,” said Andrea Pinheiro, president of the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, in a statement, further noting, “Our attendees also benefit from an educational program that is internationally recognized, and which has also been expanded in this edition, reinforcing our commitment to the educational character of the exhibition.”