Bienal de São Paulo 2025, titled Not All Travellers Walk Roads – Of Humanity as Practice, will feature 120 artists working across media such as performance, video, painting, sculpture, sound, installation, writing, and collective practices. The 36th edition explores themes of displacement, encounter, and human interconnectedness.
Conceived by chief curator Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and a team including Alya Sebti, Anna Roberta Goetz, Thiago de Paula Souza, Keyna Eleison, and Henriette Gallus, the Bienal draws inspiration from Conceição Evaristo’s poem Da calma e do silêncio and from bird migration patterns as a metaphor for artistic movement and cross-border connection. This approach informed the selection of artists from diverse geographies through international workshops held in Marrakech, Guadeloupe, Zanzibar, and Tokyo.
Rejecting nation-based classifications, the curators emphasized fluidity, adaptability, and natural systems like river networks—including the Amazon and Hudson—as a framework for mapping artistic trajectories. The exhibition includes 19 Brazil-based artists and 20 deceased artists, such as Bertina Lopes and Ernest Cole.
Recently announced, notable participants include Isa Genzken, Firelei Báez, Wolfgang Tillmans, Forensic Architecture, Frank Bowling, Laure Prouvost, and Cevdet Erek. Designed by Gisele de Paula and Tiago Guimarães, the exhibition layout offers a sensory experience with winding paths that invite listening, reflection, and pause. Structured around themes of slowness, relationality, and encounter, the Bienal aims to transform the pavilion into a “vast estuary of experiences and negotiations between diverse worlds.”
An expanded educational program will accompany the exhibition, reinforcing the Bienal’s commitment to cultural access and public engagement.
The 36th Bienal de São Paulo will run from September 6, 2025, through January 11, 2026, at the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion in Parque Ibirapuera, with free admission.
