Latin America's oldest and most influential contemporary art exhibition, founded in 1951 and held across Oscar Niemeyer's modernist pavilion in Ibirapuera Park. Conceived to rival Venice while amplifying the art of the Americas and the wider Global South, the Bienal de São Paulo has shaped the Southern Hemisphere's artistic discourse for more than seventy years, and remains one of the very few major international biennials with free admission.
The Lead Essay The 36th Edition
The 36th Bienal de São Paulo, Not All Travellers Walk Roads: Of Humanity as Practice, opened free of charge on 6 September 2025 and runs through 11 January 2026 in Oscar Niemeyer's Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion. Curated by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, the edition proposes humanity not as a fixed state but as an active, collective practice.
The São Paulo Biennial stands as Latin America's oldest and most significant contemporary art exhibition, a cultural platform that has shaped artistic discourse across the Global South for over seven decades. Founded in 1951 by the Italian-Brazilian industrialist Francisco "Ciccillo" Matarazzo, it emerged from Brazil's post-war ambition to position itself at the centre of international cultural dialogue, creating a venue that would rival Venice while amplifying voices from the Americas and beyond. Housed since 1957 in Oscar Niemeyer's pavilion in Ibirapuera Park, the Bienal has evolved from its initial mission of bringing international modern art to Brazil into a critical space for examining power, representation and resistance through contemporary practice. More than sixteen thousand artists from some 170 countries have participated across its thirty-five completed editions, and it remains one of the few major international biennials to hold to free admission, treating art as a public right rather than an elite privilege.
The 36th edition opened at the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion on 6 September 2025 under chief curator Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, with co-curators Alya Sebti, Anna Roberta Goetz and Thiago de Paula Souza, co-curator at large Keyna Eleison, and the strategy and communication advisor Henriette Gallus. Its title, drawn from the Afro-Brazilian writer Conceição Evaristo, sets out the territory Ndikung intends to explore: not the well-trodden paths of international art-world circulation, where the same names appear in Venice, Kassel and New York, but the unmarked routes, the desire paths worn by those who move outside official channels. The edition unfolds across an unusually extended span, a deliberate slowing of biennial time that the board, under president Andrea Pinheiro, extended by four weeks to reach a wider public across the school-holiday period.
Ndikung's guiding metaphor is the estuary, a place where different waters converge without losing their distinct properties. It speaks directly to Brazil's complex history of cultural mixture and violence. Unlike the often-celebrated notion of mestiçagem, which can obscure ongoing structures of racism and exclusion, the estuary acknowledges difference while creating space for encounter. The distinction reflects Ndikung's years running SAVVY Contemporary, the Berlin art space he founded in 2009 that became a beacon for non-Western perspectives, and his understanding of the Bienal as what he calls a "seismograph," not merely recording the tremors of the present moment but actively participating in shaping a more just future for animate and inanimate beings alike. The programme engages sound seriously as a carrier of knowledge and resistance, an emphasis that feels apt in a city whose daily life is scored by samba, funk and a dozen other traditions.
Critical Perspective Art and politics
From the 1969 boycott against the military dictatorship to the empty floor of 2008 and the first majority-Black curatorial team in 2023, the Bienal's history has mirrored Brazil's own political trajectory, and it has repeatedly used the exhibition form itself as an argument.
The São Paulo Biennial has consistently positioned itself at the intersection of aesthetic innovation and social critique, using art as a lens to examine Brazil's realities and its place in global conversations. From its early role introducing international modernism to Brazilian audiences, it has grown into a platform for challenging Eurocentric narratives and amplifying perspectives from the Global South. That trajectory has not been smooth, and the Bienal has rarely tried to make it look so.
In 1969 an international boycott protesting the military regime demonstrated art's capacity for political resistance, and emptied the pavilion of many of the artists it had hoped to show. Decades later, Ivo Mesquita's 2008 edition, "Living Contact," left an entire floor of the pavilion empty, a deliberate provocation that questioned the biennial format and the institution's own exhaustion. In 2021 the 34th edition, "Though it's dark, still I sing," responded to the pandemic and to a renewed political crisis; in 2023 the 35th, "Choreographies of the impossible," was programmed by the institution's first majority-Black curatorial team. The 36th edition's extended, research-led structure is the most recent move in that long argument about what a biennial is for, and whom it serves.
The Institutional Spine
Six episodes from seven decades of the Southern Hemisphere's principal art biennial.
The first São Paulo Biennial was established by the industrialist Francisco "Ciccillo" Matarazzo, presenting some 1,800 works from 19 countries. Modelled on Venice but with distinctly Latin American ambitions, it set out to make São Paulo a global cultural capital and quickly became the Southern Hemisphere's most important platform for contemporary art.
Sources: Fundação Bienal; Biennial Foundation
The Bienal moved to Oscar Niemeyer's modernist pavilion in Ibirapuera Park, its permanent home ever since. The building's serpentine ramps, column-free floors and floor-to-ceiling glass created an unusual dialogue between art, architecture and the surrounding parkland, and remain inseparable from the exhibition's identity.
Source: Fundação Bienal
An international boycott protesting Brazil's military regime stripped the edition of many participating artists and demonstrated the exhibition's entanglement with national politics. The episode became a reference point for later debates about art, complicity and resistance under authoritarian rule.
Source: Biennial Foundation
Ivo Mesquita's "Living Contact" left the pavilion's second floor empty, a deliberate questioning of the biennial format at a moment of institutional crisis. Free admission, introduced in this period, democratised access and reframed the Bienal as a public good.
Source: Fundação Bienal
The 35th Bienal was programmed by the institution's first majority-Black curatorial team, extending a long reckoning with representation and access. It set the institutional ground from which Ndikung's 36th edition, and its argument about humanity as practice, would follow.
Source: Fundação Bienal
The 36th edition opened on 6 September 2025 and runs through 11 January 2026 under chief curator Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, extended by four weeks to widen its reach. Drawing on Conceição Evaristo, Indigenous cosmologies and Afro-diasporic traditions, it treats humanity as an active, collective practice.
Sources: 36th Bienal; e-flux
People in the Biennial
Chief curator · 36th edition (2025)
Curator, author and trained biotechnologist (b. Cameroon). Founder in 2009 of SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin, a space that became a leading platform for non-Western perspectives, and since 2023 director of Haus der Kulturen der Welt. His curating treats exhibitions as living systems that evolve through interaction, an approach he carries into the 36th Bienal's estuary metaphor and its argument for humanity as practice.
Source: 36th Bienal de São Paulo
Curatorial team · 36th edition (2025)
The curatorial team of the 36th edition: co-curators Alya Sebti, Anna Roberta Goetz and Thiago de Paula Souza, with Keyna Eleison as co-curator at large and Henriette Gallus as strategy and communication advisor. The team's three-fragment structure proposes a sustained conversation across the edition's extended span rather than a single compressed spectacle.
Source: e-flux
Founder · 1951
Italian-Brazilian industrialist and patron who founded the Bienal de São Paulo in 1951, seeking to position São Paulo as a global cultural capital. The pavilion that has housed the exhibition since 1957 carries his name. His founding ambition, to rival Venice from the Southern Hemisphere, remains the institution's constituting idea.
Source: Biennial Foundation
Organising institution — continuing
The foundation that has organised the Bienal since its separation from the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art, programming the exhibition across the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion and, in recent editions, across additional sites throughout the city. Under president Andrea Pinheiro, its board extended the 36th edition by four weeks to broaden public access.
Source: Fundação Bienal
Geography
Pavilhão Ciccillo Matarazzo
Permanent home since 1957 · Oscar Niemeyer
Getting there
Metro · AACD-Servidor (Line 5-Lilac)
From the Directory
Essential Reading
Curatorial publication of the current edition, drawn from Conceição Evaristo's poetry.
Programme of the edition led by the institution's first majority-Black curatorial team.
Institutional record of thirty-six editions, from Matarazzo's founding to the present.
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