On the ground floor of the Hotel Metropole is a small, dark room where the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud partially wrote The Interpretation of Dreams. Inside, light filters warily through a narrow window, casting vertical shadows across the green damask wallpaper. The artist Bracha L. Ettinger has transformed this tiny corner of Venice into what she calls a ‘borderspace’: a place where the bathroom overflows with pink seashells and the bedroom opens Freud’s theories to the feminist gaze.
Things operate differently on water; nothing is fixed, and landmarks have a habit of moving around. Freud wrote that ‘in the unconscious nothing can be brought to an end, nothing is past or forgotten’, and In Minor Keys — the title of the 61st International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale — evokes that same state of flux.
Conceived by the late Koyo Kouoh and realised by her team after her sudden death in May 2025, the exhibition gathers an ensemble of adventurous and open-minded artists whose frequencies are tuned down low, vibrating to the Earth’s primordial hum. Kouoh wrote in her proposal that she wanted an exhibition sotto voce, yet the works on show are anything but muted. History, colonialism, war and environmental destruction are all examined here, often in forensic detail, yet the overall impression is one of liberation. This is poetic justice.
