‘In Minor Keys’ Looks at Lush Gardens and a Scarred Earth

At the heart of the exhibition are two deceased artists, Issa Samb and Beverly Buchanan, whose ways of thinking animate “In Minor Keys,” with multiple galleries, called “Shrines,” in the Central Pavilion dedicated to their work. In one section, we see a translation of Samb’s La Cour (The Yard), his “permanent and ever-evolving installation of a courtyard-home-studio,” which Kouoh picked as the most influential work of the 2010s; a video by Adrienne Edwards, projected over some of his sculptures, gives life to this. Most impressive here is the love and care given to Buchanan and her expansive practice. Underrecognized for her groundbreaking contributions to Land Art, Buchanan comes into full focus in “In Minor Keys.” In one room, video documentation maps many of her earthworks series—small monuments alongside roadways that mark space and can easily go unnoticed.

Another guide of this exhibition is Marcel Duchamp, whose innovations like the readymade are framed as a practice that understands the art world as a machine to be subverted via “works that lodge themselves inside this machine, dripping glue into its gears,” per a wall text. (A catalog essay by Elena Filipovic explores the artistic affinities between Samb and Duchamp and their interest in the margins.) On view is Boîte-en-valise, showing his most famous works at miniature, portable scale. Duchamp’s influence on the art of the past century is undeniable, and many of the artists here offer work that stands within that legacy. Installed above Boîte-en-valise is a photograph by Akinbode Akinbiyi showing a pile of urban detritus in Berlin, including a discarded toilet that reads “Fuck Duchamp.”

Samb, Buchanan, and Duchamp provide the seeds for this exhibition, an important metaphor that recurs throughout Kouoh’s exhibition. Spread across both venues is a section named “The Schools” that focuses on highlighting the contributions of artist-run spaces that have, in the past two decades or so, nurtured multiple generations of artists. Installations by groups like Denniston Hill in Upstate New York, Guest Artists Space (G.A.S.) Foundation in Lagos, blaxTARLINES in Ghana, and the Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute (NCAI) are chaotic and multifaceted, showing many ways of art-making.

In this same vein, Guadalupe Rosales presents an installation that organizes slivers of the vast community-built archive she has assembled over the past decade to visualize the beauty of L.A.’s Latinx community. Projected onto three sets of vertical blinds is Retiro (2019), a series of video interviews in which Natalia Lassalle-Morillo interviews her mother and collaborator Gloria Maria Morillo, who rewrites her personal history in real time. Guadalupe Maravilla collects the material trace of migration, adding found objects that retrace his own childhood migration to the U.S. from El Salvador, and assembles them into his “Disease Throwers” sculptures, which he describes as “both shrines and healing instruments.” The gaps in the archive are rendered beautiful and to be respected by holding space for this lacuna, in works like the “Observatorio de Lagunas” series by Sofía Gallisá Muriente. One entry, Guaniquilla luminosa / Luminous Guaniquilla (2023), features digitized blue-ish Super 8 footage of an inlet in Puerto Rico’s Cabo Rojo that has been taken to the point of abstraction.

One of the exhibition’s most poignant works is Avi Mograbi‘s installation Between a River and a Sea (2026), which on one screen shows business directories from Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria from 1938, while facing it we see Mograbi scroll through an online version of the Yellow Pages for Gaza from 2023. The first era precedes the creation of the state of Israel, while the second comes just before Israel’s destruction of Gaza after October 7. Life and the businesses that sustain it have been irreparably damaged by these conflicts, 80 years apart. Walid Raad, whose work has long questioned the objectiveness of archives by creating fictional and speculative ones of his own, presents two powerful installations that challenge viewers to figure out if what is in front of us is fact or fiction. At the Giardini are 11 photographs that allegedly show some of the beds where Yasser Arafat, the deceased leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, slept. Arafat famously never slept more than two nights in a row in the same place. Back at the Arsenale is a set of palettes featuring copies of missing artworks that hadn’t been seen in decades; the palettes had been shipped from Lebanon, following the end of its civil war in 1990, to different Yugoslav countries as they were preparing for their own wars. “One war ends, another begins. The weapons moved easily from one battlefield to the next,” Raad reminds us in a wall text.