This year, African art is finally not somewhere on the margins of the Biennale anymore. It is in the main exhibition, the national pavilions, major solo shows, and quiet side spaces. The old question — “where is African art in Venice?” — already feels outdated. The better one is: which Africa, which histories, which voices are we willing to follow? Not all of these exhibitions are equally polished, but together, they show that African art at this Biennale is not a category to be represented, but a field of competing languages, tensions, and ways of seeing.

Amoako Boafo — It doesn’t have to always make sense / Museo di Palazzo Grimani

It is hardly surprising that one of the biggest stars of contemporary Black art has now arrived at the Biennale, contemporary art’s Olympics. His first solo exhibition in Italy gives us the Boafo everyone knows: the sensual, finger-painted faces, the frontal figures, the vibrant colors, and the constant play between identity and style. But here, Boafo does not simply give us the polished version of himself that the market already knows how to love. The familiar things are still there: the elegant gestures, the rich colors, the vibrating patterns. But here they are pushed a little further. Embroidery appears, mosaic-like surfaces enter the paintings, and the materials feel less controlled, less sealed.The setting also changes the work. His figures stand in rooms full of Venetian elegance, while their clothes, colors, and patterns bring in another visual rhythm, closer to African textiles, decoration, and contemporary Black self-fashioning. Often, the patterns in the paintings rhyme with those already on the walls. The works blend into the palazzo, but not politely. They become part of the space, and at the same time, they push back against it. 

Second Nature | Manyonga / Zimbabwean Pavilion, Santa Maria della Pietà

The Zimbabwe Pavilion does not try to smooth Zimbabwean art into one clean image. Second Nature | Manyonga, curated by Fadzai Veronica Muchemwa, brings together Gideon Gomo, Eva Raath, Felix Shumba, Franklyn Dzingai, and Pardon Mapondera, and the works do not pretend to belong to the same visual language. That is already a strength. 

The official starting point is neuroplasticity — the brain’s ability to rewire itself. On paper, this could sound like a curatorial concept trying too hard. But the pavilion works when the artists make the idea less theoretical and more physical. Change appears through color, collage, political tension, surface, material, saying together that things are constantly being reorganized. Franklyn Dzingai brings a restless, collage-like energy; Felix Shumba gives the pavilion a sharper political edge; Pardon Mapondera and Gideon Gomo let material and texture do much of the talking; Eva Raath opens another line around the body, gender, and vulnerability. The result is not perfectly polished, but it feels alive. Together, they present a much more complex picture of Zimbabwean art than the usual labels allow.

In Minor Keys curated by Koyo Kouoh / The International Exhibition, Giardini and Arsenale

The Biennale’s main international exhibition, In Minor Keys, curated by Koyo Kouoh, is where you really begin to see how many different directions African and African diasporic art can take today. What makes it worth seeing is the density of the whole exhibition. There are textiles, huge installations, layered surfaces, works built from fragments, fabric, rituals, and bodily experience. Spirituality is not just illustrated here. Magical realism, ancestral memory, mourning, repair, and political unease all move through the exhibition, often in quiet but very sharp ways. In Minor Keys shows African art not as one category, one aesthetic, or one political label, but as something much larger and more restless: monumental and intimate, spiritual and political, fragile and forceful, deeply material and still full of ghosts.

Tegene Kunbi — Shapes of Silence / Ethiopian Pavilion, Palazzo Bollani

The Ethiopian Pavilion is one of those places where you do not need to read long text to understand everything. The work simply starts to act on you. Marking Ethiopia’s second participation in the Biennale, Tegene Kunbi’s Shapes of Silence is pure painting: physical, dense, vibrating, and bodily.Kunbi brings traditional textile materials into his work, but he does not treat them as decoration or as a cultural quotation. He pushes them into painting, combining them with thick, almost excessive layers of color. The result is a monumental abstract structure built from bands, surfaces, rhythms, and interruptions. From a distance, the works feel almost architectural. Up close, small organic patterns begin to appear, as if something quieter were hiding inside the force of the paint. And in this sense, they connect beautifully to the mood of In Minor Keys.

Michael Armitage — The Promise of Change / Palazzo Grassi

Michael Armitage arrives in Venice with a huge museum show at Palazzo Grassi: The Promise of Change brings together works from roughly the past decade, including early pieces, large-scale paintings, and drawings, so this is not just a glimpse of his practice.Armitage’s paintings are beautiful, but never innocent. At first, they may seem dreamlike, lush, almost magical: bodies, animals, landscapes, strange gestures, scenes that feel suspended between memory and hallucination. But the longer you look, the more unstable everything becomes. Under the color and beauty, there is political chaos, social tension, violence, inequality, migration, sexuality, and the pressure of everyday life in East Africa. The magic comes first. But once you are inside, the paintings begin to reveal the cutting weight of the questions they carry. 

Carolin Gueye — Wurus / Senegal Pavilion, Palazzo Navagero 

You enter Caroline Gueye’s Wurus almost blindly: a dark, intimate, almost labyrinth-like environment, and the shift is immediate. The outside world disappears. You are surrounded by darkness, and for a moment, you feel slightly lost. Golden structures are the first things that cut through the darkness. In Wolof, wurus means gold, and Caroline Gueye builds the pavilion around this material: not only around its beauty, but around everything it carries — power, extraction, desire, history, and the violence hidden behind wealth.

The golden elements appear in a dark, and the mirrors multiply them. They do not simply shine; they bounce around the room, open up the space, and make it feel less stable. The gold becomes seductive, but also slightly disturbing. You are drawn to it, then caught by it. The pavilion gives us gold as a contradiction: something beautiful and brutal at the same time. A promise of prosperity, but also a reminder of what has been taken from the earth and from people.

Mondi Presenti  | Worlds of Today / Sierra Leone Pavilion, Liceo Artistico Statale Michelangelo Guggenheim

Sierra Leone’s first appearance at the Venice Biennale is not only a historic debut. It also questions what a national pavilion can do. Instead of using this first moment to present a fixed image of Sierra Leone, the pavilion brings together artists from several West African countries. National representation becomes less territorial and more polyphonic. A first pavilion could easily become a showcase of national identity: one country, one image, one carefully packaged story for the international gaze. Sierra Leone however uses its place in Venice to gather different West African positions around itself, as if to say that visibility does not have to be built through isolation. In this sense, the pavilion gently pushes against the very idea of the national pavilion. Sierra Leone uses its debut differently: as a way to open a wider conversation about shared histories and voices that do not fit neatly within borders. 

Ibrahim Mahama — A Shea Garden / Galleria Barovier&Toso pop-up, Dorsoduro

Ibrahim Mahama’s A Shea Garden may be one of the most quietly memorable exhibitions. As you enter the space, the objects almost open up in front of you like strange lotus flowers. Their lower parts recall traditional clay vessels from northern Ghana, while their upper sections are made from Murano glass. Ghana and Venice meet here in a very simple but powerful way, however Mahama is not forcing a connection between the two places; he lets the materials carry it. West African trade routes and Venetian craftsmanship meet in the same room without turning into a grand statement. Clay is earthbound, heavy, opaque. Glass is fragile, bright, transparent, born from fire. They should resist each other, but here they hold together. The work asks for quiet attention — and that is also why it feels close to the spirit of In Minor Keys. 

NZƎNDA – The Path Home / Cameroon Pavilion, Gervasuti Foundation, Cannaregio

The Cameroon Pavilion is one of the most openly spiritual stops of the Biennale. NZƎNDA – The Path Home feels more like as a journey, where each room adds a different layer to the experience: sound, video, sculptural figures, plants, volcanic sand, darkness, light, and ritual gestures. The pavilion not only talks about healing. It stages it. Soundscapes and healing frequencies are making sound one of the exhibition's main materials. In some rooms, you can lie down in front of the videos and let the images and vibrations surround you. This makes the whole thing feel more like entering a treatment or a ritual.

The female presence is also very concrete. Sylvie Njobati invokes Ngon’so, the primordial feminine figure connected to the Nso people; Bienvenue Fotso brings in Cameroonian pharmacopoeia and the knowledge of Baka medicine women, connecting the pavilion to plants, healing practices and ancestral knowledge. Beya Gille Gacha’s own sculptural world also gives the space this strange, protective, magical atmosphere: female figures, spiritual bodies, beings that seem to stand between the human and the invisible. The pavilion also turns Cameroon into a wounded body, but also into a body capable of repair.

Kampala / Uganda Pavilion, Palazzo Navagero Gallery, Riva degli Schiavoni

The Uganda Pavilion starts from the capital city itself. The seven artists — Joseph Ntensibe, Lilian Mary Nabulime, Ronex Ahimbisibwe, Lakwena Maciver, Sheila Nakitende, Stacey Gillian Abe and Aloka Mark Trevor — do not seem to offer one clear image of the city. And that is the point. The pavilion responds to Koyo Kouoh’s In Minor Keys and it shows Kampala as a network. It understands that a city is not only architecture or history. It is also conversation, exchange, and the people who keep showing up for one another. If the pavilion avoids becoming too celebratory, it could be one of the places where the Biennale feels less like a display of nations and more like a map of living scenes.