Conceptualised by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung – alongside co-curators Alya Sebti, Anna Roberta Goetz, Thiago de Paula Souza, co-curator at large Keyna Eleison, and communications and strategy advisor Henriette Gallus – the 36th Bienal is inspired by the poem “Da calma e do silêncio” [Of Calm and Silence] by poet Conceição Evaristo. It is founded on active listening to humanity as a practice of constant displacement, encounter, and negotiation.
The conceptual team was inspired by bird migration patterns as a methodological guide for selecting participants. These patterns include the red-tailed hawk’s journey between the Americas, the ruff’s flight between Central Asia and North Africa, and the Arctic tern’s long polar routes. These birds’ precise cross-continental and cross-climate zone trajectories serve as a metaphor for curatorship itself: like birds, we carry memories, experiences, and languages across borders. We migrate not only out of necessity but also as a form of continuous transformation. “This methodological process helped us avoid classifications based on nation-states and borders. 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 36th Bienal de São Paulo,” says Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung.
Participants in this Bienal hail from regions traversed by rivers, seas, deserts, and mountains. These landscapes, with their accompanying waters and shores, are imbued with stories of migration, resistance, and coexistence. Rivers such as the Wouri, the Thames, the Amazon, the Hudson, the Limpopo, the Essequibo, and Matanzas Bay guide the symbolic mapping of the artists’ origins and routes. This process values practices from multiple territories and their shared waters. “Through these paths, we brought together artists from all corners of the world for the 36th Bienal de São Paulo. Water is fundamental to human existence and the basis of life. The Bienal’s Invocation themes are organized around these multiple bodies of water – oceans, seas, lakes, rivers, and streams – and their confluences, such as estuaries. These serve as metaphors for encounters between cultures, human beings, and animate and inanimate beings, as well as what we can learn from one another. Despite humanity’s efforts to control the flow of water and the migration of birds, all waters are connected, and birds still migrate without passports or visas. Humans could be better if they learned from other beings,” Ndikung concludes. The list includes participants exploring languages such as performance, video, painting, sound, installation, sculpture, writing, as well as collective and musical experiments, among others. Many participants also propose investigations based on community practices, ecologies, oral traditions, and non-Western cosmologies. The 36th Bienal de São Paulo began with the Invocations program, which took place across different continents between November 2024 and April 2025, and engaged in dialogue with situated knowledges and practices in Marrakech, Guadeloupe, Zanzibar, and Tokyo.
The architectural and exhibition design is signed by Gisele de Paula and Tiago Guimarães. “Inspired by the fluidity of rivers and the image of the estuary present in the curatorial proposal, the exhibition space is being designed as a sensory journey, with sinuous margins that invite listening, encounters, and pause. The proposal embraces emptiness as a force and space as a landscape in constant motion. Like travellers, it does not repeat the path, but reinvents itself in a continuous rite of transformation and presence,” the architects affirm. The exhibition design of the 36th Bienal de São Paulo evokes the fluid and transformative nature of rivers. Like a moving body that crosses, outlines, and reinvents space, the exhibition is built in dialogue with the idea of crossing. Organic forms, and lightweight structures compose a sensory landscape. More than defining paths, the design suggests ways of being and moving, understanding flow as a form of existence. The project also counted with initial architectural advisory by Agence Clémence Farrell. Andrea Pinheiro, the president of the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, comments: “The 36th Bienal de São Paulo stands as a milestone in the institution’s history due to its extended duration of four months, from September 2025 to January 2026. This initiative aims to broaden public access, promoting culture and education for a larger number of visitors. 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.” The Fundação Bienal de São Paulo would like to thank its strategic partner Itaú, its master sponsors Bloomberg, Bradesco, Petrobras, Instituto Cultural Vale, Citi and Vivo, and its official carrier Royal Air Maroc. This project is carried out with resources from the Culture Incentive Law, Ministry of Culture, and Federal Government.
