Preview: A First Look Inside the 36th Bienal de São Paulo

This September, São Paulo’s iconic Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion in Ibirapuera Park opens its doors to the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, inviting visitors into a sweeping reflection on humanity, movement, and coexistence. Running from 6 September 2025 to 11 January 2026, and titled Not All Travellers Walk Roads – Of Humanity as Practice, the Bienal gathers more than 120 artists from across the globe. At its helm is Cameroonian Berlin-based curator Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, working alongside co-curators Alya Sebti, Anna Roberta Goetz, Thiago de Paula Souza, and Keyna Eleison.

Borrowing its title from a poem by Brazilian writer Conceição Evaristo, the exhibition positions humanity as a migratory, relational force, interwoven with nature and memory. With water and flight as guiding metaphors — estuaries, rivers, and migratory birds recur throughout — this Bienal offers a bold curatorial map that avoids national borders in favour of poetic cartographies shaped by rhythm, displacement, and ancestral knowledge.

Among the anticipated contributions is a constellation of works by Oscar Murillo. The London-based Colombian artist’s large-scale multimedia installation will extend his ongoing exploration of the movement of bodies and materials, and the frictions they generate. In Disrupted Frequencies, a series of gestural, oceanic blue paintings, Murillo builds upon his Frequencies project, which collected markings from schoolchildren on raw canvas across dozens of countries. These works do not seek to represent individuals, but rather to record the collective imprint of a generation — visual, rhythmic echoes of social conditions and regional differences.

Elsewhere, the Sierra Leonean London-based poet and visual artist Julianknxx’s multi-screen installation Shifting / Spirit / Time builds on his 2024 performance Chorus in Flight. This evolving work entwines music, memory, and moving image, centring the choral voice as a conduit of diasporic experience. With its repeated, trance-like chant of “Wai,” the piece operates as a form of sonic ritual — a site for mourning, celebration, and the transgenerational transmission of culture. By engaging both sound and silence, Julianknxx constructs a space where African diasporic memory can reverberate freely.

Zózimo Bulbul, the late Brazilian filmmaker and cultural activist, is a towering figure of Afro-Brazilian cinema. Bulbul’s radical short film Alma no Olho (1974) is regarded as a seminal work, blending performance and visual metaphor to confront the legacy of slavery and racism in Brazil. Through his founding of the Centro AfroCarioca de Cinema and the Encontro de Cinema Negro, Bulbul laid the groundwork for generations of Black Brazilian filmmakers. His posthumous presence at the Bienal serves not only as homage but as a call to carry forward his uncompromising vision of cultural and political sovereignty.

Korakrit Arunanondchai’s 2025 video work Unity for Nostalgia follows his earlier installation, nostalgia for unity, shown in the ruins of a former publishing house in Bangkok. Arunanondchai’s practice blends pop culture, animism, and postcolonial reflection, conjuring ritualistic spaces from scorched earth, smoke, and spectral language. Clay and carbon — materials associated with both worship and violence — are central to his installations, allowing him to collapse boundaries between myth and history, the personal and the planetary.

A pioneering figure in her country’s independent cinema, Vietnamese artist Nguyễn Trinh Thi’s works delve into Vietnam’s contested histories and silenced traumas. Her installations often favour stillness over spectacle, allowing landscapes and individuals to speak in their own time. Rather than offer definitive narratives, she gently unspools memory through sound, gesture, and layered imagery — practices shaped by her documentary background and engagement with oral histories and marginalised voices.

A glossy fusion of science fiction and African mythology, Cameroonian French artist Josèfa Ntjam‘s Dislocations follows a shape-shifting protagonist known as Persona undertake a transformative journey; gender dissolves, time splinters, and the cave walls flicker with visions of Cameroon’s anti-colonial struggle. Ntjam’s work resists linear interpretation, instead inhabiting liminal realms where bodies morph and meaning leaks across boundaries. It is in these places, the artist suggests, that new forms of knowledge, and new futures, might emerge.

In its totality, the 36th Bienal de São Paulo aims to resist conventional spectacle in favour of something more porous, generative, and reflective. Its curatorial team, inspired by the instinctive paths of migratory birds, offers a model for how art might move through the world — intuitively and communally. Here, travellers do not simply follow roads; they make them. And in this act of collective wayfinding, we are invited not only to look, but to listen — to each other, to the past, and to the murmuring possibilities of what might come next.



Feature image: Julianknxx, Still from Shifting Spirit Time, 2025. Presented at Buro Stedelijk, Amsterdam. Courtesy of the artist and Studioknxx. © Studioknxx