Buhlebezwe Siwani will participate in the 61st International Art Exhibition of the La Biennale di Venezia, presented in the Giardini and Arsenale from 9 May to 22 November 2026.

Titled In Minor Keys, this edition was conceived by the late curator Koyo Kouoh and will be realised by the curatorial team she assembled, faithfully carrying forward her vision, from the artists and theoretical framework to the exhibition design and catalogue she began shaping last year.

In Minor Keys marks a powerful return to the sensory, affective, and subjective dimensions of art. Buhlebezwe Siwani’s participation is both an honor and a responsibility within a project that foregrounds subtle registers of perception, intimacy, and resonance.

The exhibition is realised with the curatorial team assembled by Kouoh, including advisors Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Hélène Pereira, and Rasha Salti; editor-in-chief Siddhartha Mitter; and assistant Rory Tsapayi.

More information: 61st International Art Exhibition of the La Biennale di Venezia

Buhlebezwe Siwani, by Koos Breukel

Buhlebezwe Siwani is a visual artist that lives and works between Cape Town and Amsterdam. She completed her BAFA at the Wits School of Arts in Johannesburg in 2011 and her MFA at the Michaelis School of Fine Arts in 2015. Siwani works with performance, photography, sculpture, and installation. Siwani’s work interrogates the patriarchal framing of the Black female body and Black female experience within the South African context. As a Sangoma, a spiritual healer that works within the space of the death and the living, Siwani focused her artistic prac- tice into rituality and the relationship between Christianity and African spirituality.

Each of her projects deals with the relationship between ancestral rituals and mod- ern life, touching social and political topics, such as the female body, Black commu- nities, histories of colonisation and the paradoxes of our contemporary society, all seen through the filter of the artist’s own biography and experience.

Buhlebezwe Siwani is shortlisted for the Prix de Rome (2025), was nominated for the Future Generation Art Prize (2024) and was the winner of the 2021 Standard Bank Young Artists Awards in the category of Visual Arts.

Solo exhibitions include: Intsomi, No Man’s Art Gallery (2025); ulwela amaza, Rozenstraat - a rose is a rose, Amsterdam (2025); iYeza, Standard Bank Gallery, Johannesburg (2023); Amanzi angena endlini, Madragoa, Lisbon (2022); Impilo Inegama, No Man’s Art Gallery, Amsterdam (2022); Dedisa ubumnyama, Cairns Art Gallery, Cairns (2021), group exhibitions include: Good Mom/Bad Mom, Centraal Museum, Utrecht (2025); Manifesto 15 (2024); 14th Gwangju Bienni- al, Gwangju (2023); Chrysalis, The Butterfly Dream, Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, Geneva (2023); A Clearing in the Forest, TATE Modern, London (2022).