As the first late-spring warmth reaches Europe, the art world turns its attention to two unmissable events: the Venice Biennale – whose eventful launch week just wrapped – and Art Basel’s flagship fair in Basel. Both draw the world’s leading artists, curators, collectors, institutions, and art lovers. This year, they have more in common than ever.

The connection between the two feels especially strong in light of Koyo Kouoh’s lasting influence. Kouoh, the Swiss-Cameroonian curator who shaped this year’s Biennale before her death in May 2025, was a part-time Baseler and deeply rooted in Basel's cultural life. She also served as a jury member for the inaugural Art Basel Awards. Her Venice exhibition, ‘In Minor Keys’, asks visitors to slow down and look to art for solace rather than spectacle. Themes of memory, identity, healing, materiality, and visibility run like undercurrents through her show, alongside a deep commitment to artists from the Global South and its diasporas.

Those same currents will run straight into Basel this June. Here are the artists exploring urgent topics and shaping conversations in Venice, all set to command attention on the fair floor in Basel.

On remembering and documenting

Gala Porras-Kim (Sprüth Magers, Commonwealth and Council)
Applied Arts pavilion

Gala Porras-Kim thinks that museums might be forgetting something about the objects they house – their spiritual lives. The 2025 MacArthur Fellow works with curators and conservators to understand how artifacts are classified, stored, and preserved in collections – and how much meaning gets lost in the mix. Her research manifests in meticulous drawings of cataloged objects, mold cultures grown from collected items, and proposals for how objects might be returned to their original spiritual contexts. In a special project for the Biennale’s Applied Arts pavilion, developed in collaboration with the V&A, works and objects drawn from collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art are presented in quietly elegant displays.

Guadalupe Rosales (Commonwealth and Council)
61st International Art Exhibition 

When Guadalupe Rosales could not find an archive that reflected her experiences in East LA, she made her own. The artist runs two Instagram projects documenting the vibrancy of Latinx life in Southern California: @veteranas_and_rucas, a crowdsourced photo archive of Chicana and Latina women, and @map_pointz, which chronicles LA’s underground rave and party crew scene of the 1990s. For Rosales, the work is both a love letter to her community and a pushback against the racist stereotypes of Latinx people in media – tensions that come into sharp focus in her powerful ‘Portal’ installation on view in Venice.

See also:

61st International Art Exhibition: Zoe Leonard (Galerie Gisela Capitain; Galleria Raffaella Cortese; Maxwell Graham, Paula Cooper), Walid Raad (Paula Cooper Gallery, Galerie Thomas Schulte, Sfeir-Semler Gallery)
German pavilion: Sung Tieu (Emalin, Trautwein Herleth, Sfeir-Semler Gallery)
Spanish pavilion: Oriol Vilanova (Galería Elba Benítez)

On reclaiming and reframing histories

Kemang Wa Lehulere (Galerie Tschudi)
61st International Art Exhibition

Kemang Wa Lehulere believes that objects lead double lives. The Cape Town-based artist salvages ordinary-seeming items from the apartheid era, reconfiguring them into installations that reveal their hidden meanings. Suitcases speak to forced exile, tires refer to township blockades, school desks recall the Soweto student protests of 1976 (during which the artist’s aunt was shot by police), and in Venice, a book-lined library punctuated with plaster hands becomes a meditation on language, memory, and erasure. Through these works, Wa Lehulere reminds audiences that while apartheid ended in 1994, its aftereffects are ever present in South African life.

Kaloki Nyamai (Galerie Barbara Thumm)
61st International Art Exhibition

Kaloki Nyamai refuses to let Kenyan history be flattened to a single narrative. Inspired by his mother’s and grandmother’s storytelling and the precolonial oral traditions of the Kamba people, his paintings of Kenyan life are built up with thick layers of acrylic, sisal rope, and newsprint photo transfers. Through these layers, figures seem to emerge and recede from view. Some canvases – including most of the striking pieces on view in Venice – are stitched together with burnt tire strings, which Nyamai sees as symbolic of healing in a fractured society.

61st International Art Exhibition: Otobong Nkanga (Lisson Gallery)
Canadian pavilion: Abbas Akhavan (Catriona Jeffries)
Saudi Arabian pavilion: Dana Awartani (Lisson Gallery, Sfeir-Semler Gallery)
French pavilion: Yto Barrada (Pace Gallery, Sfeir-Semler Gallery)

On healing and the body

Guadalupe Maravilla (P.P.O.W, mor charpentier)
61st International Art Exhibition

Guadalupe Maravilla was 8 years old when he crossed the US border alone, part of the first wave of unaccompanied children to do so during the Salvadoran Civil War. Decades later, a cancer diagnosis prompted him to look back to his roots and the healing rituals of his ancestry. From this has come a compelling practice built around healing. Maravilla’s ‘Disease Thrower’ series incorporates gongs, shrines, and headdresses made from found materials and activated during sound ceremonies. The powerful, colorful El Brujo Disease Thrower (2024), on view in Venice, is a throne that includes objects collected while retracing his original migration route.

Ranti Bam (James Cohan Gallery)
61st International Art Exhibition

Ranti Bam uses clay to collapse the distance between the human body and the natural world. For her otherworldly ‘Ifá’ sculptures – on view in the Biennale’s main exhibition – the artist presses clay against her own body until it puckers and folds like skin or muscle. Some works rest on akpoti, Indigenous stools associated with rest, gathering, and spiritual sustenance. In Venice, the sculptures feel at once ancient and bodily: vessels carrying memory, ritual, and traces of touch.

See also:
61st International Art Exhibition: Kader Attia (Galerie Nagel Draxler), Nick Cave (Jack Shainman Gallery).

On nature and the material world

Dan Lie (Barbara Wien)
61st International Art Exhibition

Dan Lie works with unlikely collaborators: bacteria, fungi, plants, decay. The Indonesian-Brazilian artist’s installations evolve, and slowly break down, over the course of an exhibition, filling spaces with earthy, organic scents. In Venice’s Arsenale, Temple of Passages (2026) strings fragrant flowers along thick maritime rope, transforming the space into something ritualistic and fleeting. Drawing on Queer studies, grief, and migration, Lie’s work asks viewers to sit with transformation and find beauty in what does not last.

Sara Flores (White Cube) 
Peruvian pavilion 

The first Indigenous artist to represent Peru in Venice, Sara Flores works in kené – an ancient visual language passed down through generations of Shipibo-Konibo women in the Peruvian Amazon. Working entirely freehand, she draws intricate geometric patterns onto wild cotton using pigments harvested from bark, plants, and fruits. The patterns map relationships between body, nature, and spirit – and carry healing properties according to Shipibo-Konibo tradition. To Flores, the works are an expression of the environment they come from and of the people fighting to protect it.

See also: 
61st International Art Exhibition: Alvaro Barrington (Emalin; Sadie Coles HQ ; MassimoDeCarlo, Thaddaeus Ropac), Sohrab Hura (Experimenter)
Italian pavilion: Chiara Camoni (Andrew Kreps Gallery)
Danish pavilion: Maja Malou Lyse (Galleri Nicolai Wallner)

On race, gender, and who gets to be seen

Lubaina Himid (Greene Naftali, Hollybush Garden)
British pavilion

Painter, curator, and cultural activist Lubaina Himid’s British pavilion asks uncomfortable questions of her home country amid colorful paintings of domestic scenes and a bucolic soundtrack of birds and buzzing flies. Himid has spent her career advocating for Black artists, organizing landmark exhibitions, and championing the work of her peers. Her jewel-toned paintings picture Black figures with a deep consideration for inner lives that history long overlooked. In 2017, Himid became the first Black woman to win the Turner Prize.

Wangechi Mutu (Gladstone Gallery, Victoria Miro)
61st International Art Exhibition

Watching Western media as a child in Nairobi, Wangechi Mutu wondered: ‘Where am I in these stories?’ Years later, she moved to the United States and took representation into her own hands, reassembling cut magazine images into fantastical composites of Black women. She has since moved into sculpture, incorporating materials gathered in Kenya into supernatural portraits celebrating the resilience and diversity of African women. In 2019, the Metropolitan Museum of Art commissioned four of these seven-foot figures to preside over its Fifth Avenue facade; in Venice, she moves into broader worldbuilding with a lush multimedia installation evoking a layered, fractured Garden of Eden, and the striking sculpture SimbiSiren (2026), which celebrates water's fluid power.

See also:
61st International Art Exhibition: Kennedy Yanko (James Cohan)
Japanese pavilion: Ei Arakawa-Nash (Galerie Max Mayer)
Irish pavilion: Isabel Nolan (Kerlin Gallery)