Caroline Gueye, curated by Massamba Mbaye, Senegal Pavilion at the 61st International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, Palazzo Navagero.
21 April 2026
A glimmer, uncertain, almost peripheral, draws the body forward into the rooms of Palazzo Navagero, where the Senegal Pavilion unfolds as less an exhibition and more a shifting field of attention. WURUS, a new installation by Caroline Gueye, curated by Massamba Mbaye, does not reveal itself all at once. It withholds, disperses, recalibrates. What is seen depends on how one arrives, where one stands, and how one moves.
Caroline Gueye, Wurus Detail, 2026. ©courtesy Caroline Gueye.
“Value does not reside in objects,” the premise suggests. “It emerges through conditions of perception and position.” And so the work begins there, within the instability of looking.
Lines of brass hover and intersect, forming structures that seem at once precise and provisional. Polymer bronze elements punctuate the space, their materiality complicated by mirrored surfaces and carefully orchestrated light. Nothing settles into permanence. Reflections fracture the field of vision, shadows extend beyond their sources, and forms slip in and out of legibility. A step to the side is enough to undo what was just seen, to produce something else entirely.
Caroline Gueye, 2026. Photo Caroline Gueye.
The viewer becomes a participant in this unfolding. Vision is no longer passive; it is activated through movement. Some elements declare themselves immediately, while others require a slower negotiation, glimpsed through angles, disclosed through reflection, or revealed only in passing. Access is never fixed. It is constructed, moment by moment, through the body’s trajectory in space.
Within this system, value loosens its attachment to the object. It is not embedded in the material, nor guaranteed by presence. Instead, it accumulates through the conditions that make perception possible—the interplay of distance, light, orientation, and time. Gold, invoked in the title WURUS, lingers as both reference and refusal. It opens onto histories of extraction and exchange, onto symbolic and economic weight, yet it never consolidates into a singular meaning. It remains a point of departure, a question rather than an answer.
Caroline Gueye, Wurus Detail, 2026. ©courtesy Caroline Gueye.
The architecture itself is drawn into this enquiry. Palazzo Navagero is not simply a host but an active agent, its volumes reconfigured into a perceptual apparatus. Surfaces extend the work, absorbing and returning its forms. Space thickens with superimpositions, as if the building were learning to see alongside the viewer.
Gueye’s practice has long been concerned with these dynamics. Working across installation and sculpture, she constructs environments in which perception is contingent, always in flux. Her background in fundamental physics, reaching into astrophysics, resonates here, not as illustration but as method: a disciplined attention to systems, to relationships, to the conditions under which phenomena appear. What is visible is never absolute. It depends on the position.
Across exhibitions from Dakar to Berlin, her work has consistently resisted immediacy, unfolding instead through duration and encounter. Recognition emerges gradually, as the eye adjusts and readjusts, as certainty gives way to a more complex form of awareness.
At the 61st International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, WURUS extends this investigation with quiet intensity. It offers no fixed centre, no singular image to hold onto. Instead, it invites a different kind of looking, one that accepts instability, that understands value as something produced in relation, contingent and alive.
What remains is not an object, but an experience of shifting ground.
And in that movement, between visibility and obscurity, between presence and disappearance, value begins to take shape, only to dissolve again.
61st International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, Palazzo Navagero.
