The Brooklyn Rail

The Venice Biennale often takes time to digest and find a thread—if there is one—that unites the art that has been chosen to sum up the world at this moment. This installment is no different. Titled In Minor Keys, the word minor carries heft; it describes the choices made by these featured artists to offer a soft touch, a light footprint, barely whispering meaning.

In searching for this thread of meaning, I noted something which I don’t remember seeing so prominently in past Biennales. It’s something that I’ve been seeing for quite some time in contemporary art practices: the use of miniatures, either as part of a work, or as the main act. Of course, there is a long tradition of miniature art, from the Venus of Willendorf (who is small enough to nest in the palm of a human hand) (ca. 24–22,000 B.C.E), to portable altarpieces or miniature illuminated manuscripts. Victorians wore tiny paintings of their beloved in lockets around the neck. But there has been a rise in this practice that seems to have been reignited in the last few decades. Think of Charles Simmonds’s miniature “Dwellings” that popped up all over Manhattan in the late seventies. Or Yinka Shonibare’s 2002 dollhouse and Sanctuary City (2024) architectural models. Alberto Burri painted miniatures of his own work in the 1950s, but were only exhibited in the Guggenheim Museum show of 2015-16.

Now the trend is evident in this year’s Biennale. Perhaps because of the fiction I write for young readers, I stopped for a moment at the written introduction in the central pavilion, describing the term “minor key” as not only a reference to music, but the geographical meaning of “small islands, worlds amid oceans,” and that “the exhibition’s composition is formed by artistic practices that open portals.”

Small worlds and portals. But to where? In her book On Longing, Susan Stewart analyzed the use of miniature, throughout history, as a metaphor for human interiority. For instance, dollhouses offer, among other things, a physical means of psychic control over a world of your own making. We may think of them mostly as relegated to childhood, together with dolls, model trains, Lego worlds, small backyard forts. But miniatures are a powerful tool at any age. Who doesn’t yearn for psychic control? Certainly, many of the artists working in this time of worldwide upheaval and displacement display this need. Are miniatures more than a metaphor? Do they work as a physical portal or shortcut to human interiority?

Within the first few steps into the central pavilion, I came across a vitrine of miniature structures, the work of Beverly Buchanan. Standing barely a foot tall, had these structures been built full size, they would be considered shacks or shanties, made with cast-offs and reused bits, some painted stark white, others colorfully painted or covered in a mosaic of buttons and bottlecaps. They are beautiful and vibrant. I watched people in the gallery, smitten and mesmerized by these intimate structures. Raised in South Carolina, she incorporated southern building practices into her work. On the wall nearby hung “legends”—short texts meant to collect the testimonies of people within her community.

After that, I could not help but see miniatures everywhere I looked, hiding in plain sight. An installation by Mohammed Z. Rahman, titled Lovers’ Vigil (2024), consists of, in part, a large grouping of very small paintings, lined up and spaced grid-like on four rows of simple pine shelves. Looking closely, I realized they were all painted on matchboxes. Rahman—a British-Bengali artist living in London—painted mundane objects that are associated with heartbreak: flowers, candles, a house, a single sock, all in a subdued palette. They worked as a group (much like a childhood collection of Matchbox cars) but you had to come up close to see the subject of each one. Again, a reference to something we thought we left behind in our childhood—the obsessive organizing of a collection. But here it is used as a way to work through trauma, pain, a safe means for reorganizing after the disruption caused by loss.

Larger still is the installation in the Spanish Pavilion, Los Restos, by Oriol Vilanova. The word restos itself is dependent on context, but it can mean “the remains” or “leftovers.” Even in English those definitions can be loaded with meaning. The installation consists of thousands of postcards, wallpapering the entire interior, room to room, floor to ceiling, corner to corner. Like the piece by Rahman, it first reads big, until you realize that its reason for being is the lowly, common postcard. But a postcard is a miniature; it represents a place we’ve been, or a thing we’ve seen that we want to have a picture of small enough to hold in our pocket. The cards were arranged loosely by color, at a distance giving the effect of an almost shimmering tiled surface. In this context, the double meaning of restos is important; the postcard is both the remains and the leftovers. The postcard helps keep your memories—the remnants of experience—in order, safe and sound. Again, the collision of collecting and miniaturizing serve the same purpose.

Henrike Naumann’s The Home Front (2026) in the German pavilion presented yet another way in which the late artist called on miniatures to help convey her meaning. Walking into the large room, the first thing you notice is the green color of the walls, which is anything but cozy or inviting. In fact, it is the shade of mint green used in the former Soviet barracks in East Germany. Around the room are full size dioramas of domestic interiors furnished in the style of New German Design. The wall label explains that she was inspired by traditional miniature dioramas of farmhouse scenes found in a particular region of East Germany. Many of these miniatures are hanging on the walls nearby. Like the large diorama, these small ones have a shallow depth (Naumann trained in set design), and they hang like paintings, amid other objects, many being miniature versions of tools, vehicles, chairs sliced in half, and common household items. Looking around, I noted that viewers gravitated to the miniature dioramas which held their gaze longest. (You don’t see this in the official promotional photography). The space felt like a collection of disassembled things, all referencing a domestic world pulled apart by political circumstance. But the miniatures remained intact, left to convey that yearning for psychic control, and a nostalgia for something as simple as a tidy farmhouse.

People’s Desire (2018) is the title of Sawangwongse Yawnghwe’s work, installed in the Arsenale. He is from Myanmar and lives in the Netherlands and Thailand. Once again, this is a large work made from thousands of small parts. In this case, the small parts are miniature humans, modeled in clay with only the simplest of details. The faces are not individuals, and they are clothed in similar dress. Some have hands clasped, some kneel, some carry objects that look like baguettes. A few are children, and there is a smattering of animals. A significant number are either lying on palettes, or perhaps they are in coffins. They all face the same direction where a brass plaque is inscribed with “The People’s Desire,” which is four statements of (very reasonable) socio-political demands. As I looked at it, I wondered, would this piece work in any other scale? What would these non-descript humans mean to us if we encountered them in life-size? The ability to take in the entire group all at once enables the viewer to see exactly how big this river of humans is. Seeing them in the diminutive is almost endearing, they appear fragile, one wants to protect this populace. Full scale, I imagined they might seem threatening, like an army on the march. Size matters here.

Thania Petersen’s Cosmological Offerings for a Drowning World (2026) a full-scale tapestry in the Arsenale, at first glance brings to mind nothing if not Indian miniatures, illuminated manuscripts, and treasure maps. Petersen’s work is rooted in her background as a South African of Afro-Asian creole heritage. The roughly ten-foot-tall hanging presents colorful images woven in tiny detail across a map of sea and islands. It is unclear if the clouds surrounding the islands represent the heavens or bring the sky to earth. A ribbon of Muslim saints lined up like fence posts wraps and zig-zags off into infinity. A sturdily rooted tree at the bottom provides shade (with tiny individual leaves!) over what might be the grounds of a royal residence, with elegantly garbed people enjoying this idyll. Like any good map, these images are surrounded by a border of symbols and words embellished with beadwork. What is a map if not a representation—in miniature—of a world? We are drawn to look closely at each stitch.

My favorite pieces at the Biennale are Nina Katchadourian’s The Sjobloms and Batsmans (2026) and The Recarcassing Ceremony video (2016), both in the Arsenale. The first is a vitrine set up with a couple dozen Lego-like characters, amid a backdrop of rocks and pebbles, AstroTurf, fabric, a toy windsurfing board, and other miscellany. It looks like the handiwork of a kid on a Saturday morning, creating a world. Which it more or less is. Then you step into the next room to watch her film, Recarcassing Ceremony, and you learn about who these characters are and the world they inhabit. You learn what meaning they hold. The film—which is a cross between a documentary and a home video—is strangely riveting, and anyone who grew up in this era will recognize the type of play going on. Katchadourian understands the seriousness of play. In this case, the narrative unfolds as a crisis is averted, a scary moment at the seashore for a pair of siblings, and the way in which the miniature world allowed them to work through near trauma, to reorganize, to overcome the fear of death. She interviews her brother, with whom she created this world as a child, and her parents who thankfully understood the importance of the world their two creative children invented (and fortuitously taped the ceremony!). Much like her ongoing project “Seat Assignment” (that began in 2010), Katchadourian unabashedly embraces the small, allowing anything that fits on a drop-down tray—tiny toys, tiny pieces of cheese, tiny bits of Kleenex, airplane pretzels—to carry (with great humor) profound meaning.

The People’s Republic of China offering, at the farthest reach of the Arsenale, presented the work of many artists, all with extraordinary technical proficiency. Working together, two of the artists, Jiang Suxuan and Yu Jiangfan created a stunning work in miniature titled 2027 Shen Kuo (referring to a scholar of the Song Dynasty who wrote the Dream Pool Essays). All you need to do is to imagine a long Chinese scroll painting (about 1 foot high and 65 feet long) come to life as a miniature diorama. And make the unfolding narrative a science fiction tale, set in the future, and built with exquisite skill. An abandoned factory, a mine, a wind turbine, an asteroid embedded in the earth, solar panels and other industrial era detritus cover a landscape that looks like the surface of the moon. The background and sky are black. Perhaps it is the moon. But there is evidence of life, in the form of a pink blooming tree, some green mossy undergrowth, a warm golden light emanating from within one of the built structures, and one lone human walking in this strange place. Once again, I do the thought experiment—would this be as powerful full scale? I think not. The miniature allows us to see the whole unsettling world these artists created, all at once, both close up and safely miniaturized.

In the Venice Pavilion and in Ca’ Tron, the late Ilya and Emilia Kabakov installed the Venetian Diary. It consists of dozens of vitrines, filled with bits of diary entries by people who have chosen to live and create in Venice, along with artifacts they have curated to represent clues for why they have made this choice. It is a museum of artifacts of personal meaning. What struck me was how many of these artifacts are miniatures. Beautiful examples of carved miniature furniture in one vitrine, next to one with a hand painted cardboard backdrop of Venetian buildings and tiny plastic toy figures in front. A car from the animated movie Cars. A very small portrait of Joseph Brodsky. Miniature gondolas (of course). A scaled-down replica of a lumber mill (that seems to be manufacturing pylons?). When asked to provide reasons why people live where they do, and then ask for visual representations of those reasons, it is no surprise that we choose things we can put in our pocket, place safely in a vitrine, or carry with us from home to home in a box. We hold these items, and they hold our memories.

The last—and most powerfully moving—exhibition we saw in Venice was one of the collateral shows, Still Joy: From Ukraine into the World, at the Palazzo Contarini Polignac. The building was filled with stories of joy, gathered during Ukraine’s ongoing war with Russia, and artists’ responses to life right now. The testimonies were equal parts terrifying and inspiring. A video titled Land (2026) by filmmakers Yury Gruzinov and Oleksij Sai, in which body cams were placed on the army advance recon—the soldiers who go in first and face the greatest danger (you actually hear them breathing as they wend their way through abandoned buildings). In another room, a stunningly beautiful sphere made of shiny brass bells hanging on golden threads, called Than Para — No Land Without Us (2025), by Bangladeshi artist Ashfika Rahman. Each bell represents the hundreds of people who have lost their homes in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, one of Bangladesh’s most diverse Indigenous regions. The bells can ring gently in a breeze. A piece by Ryan Gander was perhaps the most unassuming. From the UK, he is known to me for his installation of a tiny animatronic mouse, who appears from a hole in wood moldings where the wall meets the floor. The mouse’s British accented voice plays on a loop, as he opines about this and that. In this piece, titled Hope Is a Discipline – An Apology (They Will Only Encourage You to Perform the Script) (2026), the mouse is replaced by a doll or puppet about 20 inches in length, of a man lying face up on what looks like a full garbage bag. The bag is Ukraine blue. Next to it is another bag, standard white, also ready for pick up at the curb. The man lies there, only his head moving a bit. He wears black pants, a gray vest, and a yellow knitted cap, completing the reference to the Ukrainian flag. He has a dark beard and wears black-rimmed glasses. Like the mouse, he speaks in a soft, unthreatening and childlike voice as he reflects on the nature of life in a dark yet ironically optimistic way. We listen to him. Like one’s childhood Teddy bear allowing a space for empathy and catharsis, you can almost feel yourself wanting to pick him up, to have a conversation with him. You can’t help but identify with his humanity.