Thomas Rom On His Top Exhibitions in Venice for the Biennale This Year

This year’s Venice Biennale vernissage week brought more than the usual round of openings for art adviser and Performance Space New York board chair Thomas Rom, as the institution’s Visionaries Circle co-hosted a performance by theater impresario-turned-artist Jordan Roth at Palazzo dei Fiori. We asked Rom to share his reflections on everything he saw in La Serenissima—from the Biennale’s main exhibition, “In Minor Keys,” to quieter collateral shows, like Kan Yasuda’s “Isole del Silenzio.” What follows are his observations, lightly edited for clarity.

It is said that Venice is the place where one goes to lose oneself elegantly. I have always found it to be the place where I go to find my friends, while ideally keeping a certain degree of elegance intact. In May I arrived at the Biennale opening week with that exact objective in mind, leading a group of patrons, collectors, and artists on behalf of Performance Space New York’s Visionaries Circle through the canals, islands, and palazzos of Venice in search of inspiration, beauty, and connection. Venice, as ever, rewarded the pursuit.

I found the main exhibition, the late curator Koyo Kouoh’s “In Minor Keys,” deeply compelling. Her approach of looking at the world through the lens of a non-linear storyteller felt not only timely but essential to understanding a global cultural landscape outside traditional institutional frameworks. Much like life across Africa, the exhibition was layered, textured, richly sensual, and at times confrontational. It asked viewers to feel before thinking, to lean in softly before speaking, and to remain open to transformation. Kouoh privileged sensitivity over certainty, creating spaces that felt genuinely alive and insistently representative of the world around us.

Her swan song was communal, ritualistic, and grounded in lived experience. The exhibition seemed to convey that art belongs to the living, and that the living turn to art to contemplate existence itself. As Yukio Mishima put it: “Living is merely the chaos of existence.”

In the Danish Pavilion, Maja Malou Lyse approached fertility as a metaphor for broader societal exhaustion and destabilization: the toxicity of digital overstimulation and its erosion of intimacy, desire, and human connection.

At the Canadian Pavilion, Abbas Akhavan created a sensorial environment centered on fragility, displacement, breath, and survival. His poetic minimalism produced an atmosphere that screamed quietly.

In the Polish Pavilion, Bogna Burska and Daniel Kotowski explored communication beyond spoken language through immersive sound and image, proposing vibration, listening, and collective attunement as alternatives to institutional authority.

Tori Wrånes’s sculptural installation in the Nordic Pavilion was among my favorite dialogues between art and architecture in the Giardini. Leaning into mythology, folklore, and fragmented identity, the work created a psychic landscape that lingered long after I left. The performative dimension of her practice remained fully embedded within the sculpture itself.

Miet Warlop’s emotionally charged Belgian Pavilion echoed Kouoh’s curatorial theme with remarkable force through its embrace of instability, vulnerability, and non-linear meaning-making. Rather than offering a fixed narrative or monumental statement, the pavilion operated at an emotional frequency: fragmented voices, collapsing language, bodily exhaustion, rhythmic repetition, and collective movement existing in constant flux.

I left overstimulated, fragile, and thinking deeply about our diminishing capacity to remain in communication in the face of overload and ideological collapse. It was there, within the Giardini itself, that I realized how desperately the Biennale was missing spaces for civic gathering and collective reflection. Later in the week, I returned to find many of the pavilions closed in solidarity with Palestinian liberation, prompting me to reflect on the role art can still play in fostering empathy, healing, and meaningful exchange.

We should never underestimate art’s ability to move the needle forward and build bridges where politics often fails. It is through art that we locate both ourselves and our shared humanity. Standing in the silence of the Giardini, among deserted pathways and emptied pavilions, I found myself thinking that now is precisely the time for conversation, communion, and shared reality. The road is shorter when we walk it together. Artists continue to pave that road. We should allow them to guide us toward common ground.

Some of the most riveting conversations I had all week took place inside the Russian, Israeli, and Saudi pavilions. I met new friends and left hoping I had contributed a few new ideas of my own. These global art gatherings continue to create unexpected networks of exchange, optimism, and cultural diplomacy. I share my life with an artist and move through spaces shaped and authored by artists every day. I feel my responsibility is to listen deeply to perspectives that are not my own and to help protect spaces for meaningful exchange. What is the value of protesting against art itself? In this context, closure began to feel dangerously close to erasure. We should be protesting alongside artists and within our cultural spaces, not silencing artistic voices altogether.

Nowhere was this clearer than in the unofficial South African Pavilion presenting Gabrielle Goliath’s Elegy. Following South Africa’s withdrawal from the Biennale and the decision to leave its national pavilion empty, the work found an independent home at Chiesa di Sant’Antonin. Seven female opera singers sustained long notes in succession, creating a collective mourning ritual for women lost to racialized and gendered violence. The South African government deemed the work divisive. But since when did we decide that art exists to make us comfortable? Thank you, Ibraaz, for bringing this urgent and profoundly humane project to life. It was one of a few works this week I found genuinely difficult to leave behind.

Elsewhere, the Scotland + Venice presentation embraced queer opulence and maximalism with unapologetic theatricality. Overflowing with ornament, sensuality, humor, and performative excess, the exhibition understood extravagance itself as a political language: a refusal of erasure, austerity, and normative restraint. Its radical glamour felt defiantly alive, insisting on visibility, pleasure, and self-invention as acts of cultural resistance.

Later in the week I found refuge in exhibitions that approached humanity through a wider historical and spiritual lens. Su Xiaobai’s use of millennia-old lacquer techniques connected ancestral knowledge with contemporary abstraction and ritual, while Lee Ufan’s insistence that we sit quietly with the work and surrender to its contemplative environment—rather than give way to meditations on spirituality—reminded me that the real labor of art is often simply learning how to be present.

Bracha Ettinger’s jewel-box exhibition at Hotel Metropole deepened this meditative and psychological terrain through a spectral dialogue with Freud in the very room he once occupied. The work was haunting, elegant, and emotionally precise. Language became secondary to the energetic and psychic field it generated.

Kan Yasuda’s exhibition, “Isole del Silenzio” (Islands of Silence),” offered a rare sense of serenity amid the intensity of Venice. His luminous marble sculptures invited not just viewing but physical and emotional surrender: forms that called to be touched, embraced, leaned against, even reclined upon. The timeless quality of Yasuda’s work felt almost radical. These organic forms were quiet, humanistic, restorative, and deeply connected to the enduring relationship between body, nature, and stone. I took a much-needed reprieve before I continued my journey.

Michael Armitage’s “The Promise of Change” at Palazzo Grassi was a masterclass in contemporary painting: politically charged yet deeply poetic, oscillating between documentary reality and dreamlike imagination. Armitage fused East African histories, mythology, sexuality, violence, and colonial memory into lush, unstable compositions that felt simultaneously intimate and epic. One of the greatest masters of our time.

At Palazzo dei Fiori, I had the pleasure of co-hosting Jordan Roth’s performance, a meditation on transformation through focused, intentional movement. With almost tai chi–like precision, Roth embraced softness, ritual, and fluidity as forms of power, evoking a lineage of feminine influence rooted not in force but in elegance, psychological command, and presence. His sustained concentration throughout the 70-minute performance was hypnotic.

Everywhere I went in Venice this year, live arts felt front and center. I suspect this resurgence has much to do with the political and psychological atmosphere of our moment: rising authoritarianism, technological acceleration, AI-driven disembodiment, and a growing sense that human presence itself is becoming increasingly mediated and commodified.

In that context, performance offers something increasingly rare and irreducible: presence, vulnerability, ritual, concentration, and the experience of a living body unfolding in real time before a collective witness.

Many of the strongest works this year embraced spectacle while grounding it in intimacy, endurance, and emotional frequency. From Florentina Holzinger’s operatic intensity at the Austrian Pavilion to Marina Abramović’s near-sacerdotal presence at the Accademia, and Kelsey Lu’s haunting activation at Palazzo Diedo, live arts emerged not only as a medium but as a form of resistance: insisting on embodiment, presence, and human complexity at a moment increasingly defined by simulation, speed, and control.

Perhaps that is precisely where art still holds power: not in retreat from conflict, but in its ability to keep us accountable to one another through it. Even in fracture, artists continue building bridges the rest of the world seems intent on burning.