A Radical Proposal for Art to Rethink the World

The São Paulo Biennial, one of the world’s most historically significant and politically engaged contemporary art exhibitions, has once again asserted itself not simply as a showcase of visual creativity but as a platform for political imagination, poetic resistance and epistemic disruption, offering a bold redefinition of what an art biennial can and should be in an era of planetary crisis, social fragmentation and historical debt, as this latest edition—led by Cameroonian curator Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung—places at its centre the urgent question: “how can we live better together?”, not as an abstract utopia but as a deeply practical, aesthetic and ethical enquiry, foregrounding the excluded, the racialised, the colonised and the dispossessed as agents of world-making through aesthetic insurgencies and cultural memory, and structuring the exhibition around the theme of “humankind” in order to challenge the very assumptions behind universalist humanism, exposing how traditional conceptions of the human have historically served to exclude vast populations through racial, gendered and colonial logics, a critique materialised through installations, performances and site-specific works that speak from the margins of global narratives, including Indigenous cosmologies, diasporic visions, queer futurisms and decolonial eco-thinking, all coalescing in what Ndikung calls a “listening exhibition”, where dialogue replaces spectacle and poetry resists reduction, exemplified in the artificial garden by Precious Okoyomon, where plants, soil and light simulate a post-apocalyptic ecosystem of resilience and mourning, or in the clay wall built by Brazilian artist Jota Mombaça, which becomes a tactile archive of resistance and refusal, while elsewhere, French artist Laure Prouvost constructs a surreal greenhouse inhabited by cyborg flora, infected by bacteria and memory, a liminal zone between ruin and regeneration, where petals become tongues and broken glass blooms into seeds, collectively suggesting that art is not here to decorate the crisis, but to invent the language and tools through which survival, justice and joy might still be possible in the face of systemic collapse and political exhaustion.