Asia Forum at the Venice Biennale 2026
Asia Forum returns to the Venice Biennale with Minor Feelings, a programme of conversations, artistic interventions and screenings exploring diasporic experience, collective care and the politics of being rendered ‘minor’. The forum will be held on 9 May 2026.
In resonance with the 61st Biennale di Venezia, Minor Keys, curated by Koyo Kouoh, the programme takes as its departure point a concept both intimate and political. Borrowed from poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong, minor feelings describe the emotional register that arises when one’s lived reality is persistently contradicted by dominant narratives — the quiet dissonance of existing at the margins of a story that was never written for you.
Through conversations, artistic interventions and screenings, the programme interrogates the conceptual framing of minor itself — asking who is made minor, and by whose authority, and what it means to imagine embracing the ‘minor-majorities’. It turns to the significance of the collective — how forms of togetherness, care and solidarity might emerge from these conditions.
The forum also considers how rest and love can function as anti-colonial practices — ways of honouring minor feelings while tending to what extraction and erasure have depleted.
Asia Forum is organised by Annie Jael Kwan, Hammad Nasar, John Tain and Ming Tiampo.