Titled ‘Not All Travellers Walk Roads – Of Humanity as Practice’, the exhibition opens in September 2025 with over 120 artists
Julianknxx, Still from Shifting Spirit Time, 2025. Shown at Buro Stedelijk, Amsterdam. Courtesy of the artist and Studioknxx. © Studioknxx
The Fundação Bienal de São Paulo has announced the list of participants for its 36th edition, titled ‘Not All Travellers Walk Roads – Of Humanity as Practice’. The exhibition will take place from September 6, 2025, to January 11, 2026, at the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion in Ibirapuera Park, São Paulo, with free admission.
Conceived by artistic director Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, with co-curators Alya Sebti, Anna Roberta Goetz, Thiago de Paula Souza, and co-curator at large Keyna Eleison, the exhibition draws inspiration from the poem Da calma e do silêncio by Brazilian writer Conceição Evaristo. It invites a profound reflection on humanity as a practice shaped by movement, encounter, and listening.
This edition features 120 participants exhibiting at the Bienal Pavilion and five more at Casa do Povo as part of the Tributaries programme, curated by Benjamin Seroussi and Daniel Blanga Gubbay.
A methodology of migration
Bird migration patterns guided the curatorial approach, tracing the journeys of species like the red-tailed hawk, the ruff, and the Arctic tern as metaphors for the artists’ varied trajectories. These patterns informed the selection process, which deliberately avoided classifications based on nation-states or borders.
“This process allowed us to think beyond geopolitical categories,” says Ndikung. “Birds migrate without passports or visas. They carry knowledge across lands and waters. If humans listened to them—and to each other—we might become better beings.”
The exhibition embraces a planetary perspective, tracing symbolic paths through rivers, mountains, deserts, and coasts. Waters such as the Amazon, the Hudson, the Thames, the Limpopo, and Matanzas Bay form part of the Bienal’s conceptual cartography, shaping an invitation to consider coexistence, resistance, and shared ancestry.
A gathering of practices
The 36th Bienal brings together diverse artistic practices, encompassing painting, installation, sculpture, film, sound, performance, and collective experimentation. It also highlights research-based and community-rooted practices, oral traditions, and non-Western cosmologies.
Among the featured participants are Adama Delphine Fawundu, Firelei Báez, Isa Genzken, Gervane de Paula, Nguyễn Trinh Thi, Frank Bowling, Shuvinai Ashoona, Moffat Takadiwa, Wolfgang Tillmans, alongside many others from diverse contexts and geographies. The Tributaries programme at Casa do Povo includes Alexandre Paulikevitch, Boxe Autônomo, Dorothée Munyaneza, Marcelo Evelin, and MEXA.
Space as a fluid journey
The architectural and exhibition design by Gisele de Paula and Tiago Guimarães echoes the curatorial metaphor of the estuary—a place where waters converge and new forms emerge. The spatial concept invites visitors to move through fluid pathways, curved lines, and light structures that foster attention, exchange, and pause.
“Inspired by the flow of rivers, we designed the exhibition space as a sensory landscape in constant transformation,” the architects note. “Like travellers, it never repeats the same route.”
The design embraces openness and impermanence, understanding the exhibition not as a fixed path but as an evolving act of presence.
An extended invitation
Marking a milestone in its history, the 36th Bienal de São Paulo will unfold over four months—its longest edition to date. This extended duration aims to broaden public access and deepen engagement with the exhibition’s themes. Its expanded educational programme further supports this ambition, encouraging dialogue between local and international audiences, artists, and communities.
The Bienal began with its Invocations programme, which ran from November 2024 to April 2025 in Marrakech, Guadeloupe, Zanzibar, and Tokyo, building connections with situated knowledge and practices around the globe.
The result is a Bienal that invites us to reconsider how we move through the world—how we listen, relate, and transform. As Ndikung notes, “Water is fundamental to life. And despite all human attempts to control it, waters remain connected. This edition of the Bienal follows that current.”
For more information, please visit the 36th Bienal de São Paulo.
