At Venice Biennale 2026, Diane Lima stages a sensorial encounter between Adriana Varejão and Rosana Paulino that turns architecture into a site of resistance, rupture, and repair.
21 April 2026
In the Giardini, where national pavilions have long performed the politics of representation, Brazil arrives in 2026 with a proposition that refuses containment. ‘Comigo ninguém pode’, curated by Diane Lima, does not simply occupy the Brazilian Pavilion. It unsettles it, breathes through it, and ultimately transforms it into a porous body where history, matter, and spirit are entangled.
Curator Diane Lima.© Igor Furtado, courtesy of Fundação Bienal de São Paulo.
The title, borrowed from a plant known for its toxicity and protective symbolism, sets the tone. It is at once a warning and an invocation. A phrase that oscillates between defiance and survival. In Lima’s hands, it becomes a curatorial method. The exhibition draws together two of Brazil’s most formidable artists, Adriana Varejão and Rosana Paulino, into a shared field of tension. Their practices do not merge seamlessly. Instead, they rub against each other, producing friction, resonance, and unexpected alignments.
This is not a duet in harmony. It is something closer to improvisation. Lima herself describes the exhibition as a composition of “harmonies and dissonances,” a performative encounter rather than a didactic narrative.
What emerges is a refusal of linear time. Historical works spanning more than three decades sit alongside newly commissioned pieces, collapsing temporal distance. Varejão’s painterly investigations into colonial materiality engage with Paulino’s incisive reconfigurations of the Black female body as an archive, a wound, and a site of reconstruction. The past does not sit quietly in the background. It pulses, leaks, and insists.
Artist Rosana Paulino. © Igor Furtado, courtesy of Fundação Bienal de São Paulo.
The architecture of the Brazilian Pavilion, designed in 1964, becomes an active participant in this unfolding. Recently restored, its modernist clarity is not preserved as a neutral container. Instead, it is disrupted. Exhibition designer Daniela Thomas works closely with Lima and the artists to create an installation that resists spatial predictability. Paintings spill across surfaces. Sculptures interrupt circulation. The building is no longer a backdrop. It is implicated.
Varejão’s new works, developed specifically for the pavilion, push her long-standing engagement with material illusion into spatial territory. Surfaces mimic flesh, ceramics, and architectural fragments, destabilising the viewer’s sense of what is seen and what is felt. Her practice has always been concerned with the violence embedded in colonial aesthetics. Here, that violence becomes immersive, almost atmospheric.
Paulino, meanwhile, returns to the figure of the Black woman not as subject but as agent. In works such as Aracnes and Ninfa tecendo o casulo, the body becomes both the origin and the instrument. Threads emerge as metaphors for continuity, repair, and resistance. There is a quiet insistence in her work. A refusal to allow historical trauma to remain unarticulated. Instead, it is stitched, reworked, and made visible.
Together, their practices construct what might be understood as a counter-archive. Not one rooted in institutional authority, but in lived experience, spirituality, and embodied knowledge. Lima frames this as a movement towards perceiving “the transcendent in the visible,” a recalibration of how we understand reality itself.
Spirituality here is not ornamental. It is structural. The plant comigo-ninguém-pode, often placed at thresholds in Brazilian homes, serves as both a symbol and a guide. Its presence signals both protection and danger. This duality runs through the exhibition. Beauty and toxicity coexist. The sacred and the violent are intertwined.
Artist Adriana Varejão. © Igor Furtado, courtesy of Fundação Bienal de São Paulo.
What is particularly striking is how the exhibition resists the temptation to resolve these tensions. There is no singular narrative offered to the viewer. Instead, one is invited into a sensorial experience that privileges feeling over explanation. The works do not illustrate history. They activate it.
In the context of the Venice Biennale, where national pavilions often operate within the logic of soft power, ‘Comigo ninguém pode’ feels like a deliberate misalignment. It does not seek to present a unified image of Brazil. Rather, it exposes the fractures, contradictions, and complexities that constitute its cultural fabric.
This is a significant gesture. Especially under Lima’s curatorship, which is deeply informed by Black feminist thought and anticolonial critique. Her approach does not simply include marginalised narratives. It recentres them, allowing them to shape the exhibition’s very conditions.
The result is a pavilion that does not ask to be understood at a glance. It demands time. Attention. A willingness to sit with discomfort. In doing so, it opens up a space where memory is not fixed, but continually rewritten.
In Venice, where histories of empire linger just beneath the surface, Brazil’s pavilion becomes something else entirely. Not a representation, but a confrontation. Not a display, but a living, breathing organism.
And like the plant from which it takes its name, it stands as both shield and provocation. A reminder that some histories cannot be neutralised. And that, sometimes, the most powerful gesture is to say, with unwavering clarity: nobody can handle me.
This exhibition will be on view at the Giardini at the Venice Biennale.
