Opening on 6 September 2025 at the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion, the 36th Bienal de São Paulo unfolds after eighteen months of curatorial encounters held across the world. Beginning in late 2024 with a series of “Invocations” in Marrakech, Guadeloupe, Zanzibar, and Tokyo, the Bienal has grown out of performances, debates, and rituals that explored themes of belonging, memory, emancipation, care, technology, and transition. These gatherings now flow into the exhibition in São Paulo, conceived as an “estuary”, a meeting place of multiple voices.

The exhibition features 125 artistic positions spread across six interrelated chapters. Together they explore the ties between humans and the earth, forms of resistance and survival, displacement and migration. Works range from pieces made with soil, roots, and pigments to installations, sound works, films, performances, and evolving kinetic artworks.

Alongside the main exhibition, the Tributaries programme extends to Casa do Povo in São Paulo and Marseille’s la Friche la Belle de Mai, with screenings co-organised with Cinémathèque Afrique. A wide-ranging public programme, Conjugations, brings together international partners from Africa, Europe, the Americas, and Asia for debates, performances, and collaborations.

A highlight of this edition is Apparitions, a new augmented reality project that makes fragments of Bienal works appear in Ibirapuera Park and in chosen global sites, from the Congo River to the Mexico–US border.

The Bienal also launched an ambitious editorial programme: four educational publications co-produced with the Center for Art, Research and Alliances, alongside a catalogue and a reader of essays and poems, all distributed in Portuguese and English.

The Bienal is guided by the poetry of Conceição Evaristo and the principle of humanity as an active, collective practice.

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Image: Installation view of the 36th Bienal de São Paulo. Photo: Levi Fanan / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo