In Minor Keys – 61st Venice Biennale

CHIMERA unfolds as a collective organism within In Minor Keys, the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Koyo Kouoh. Conceived by Denniston Hill, the large-scale installation reimagines the Surrealist game Exquisite Corpse as a living ecosystem composed of fragmented artistic voices, histories, and material encounters. Bringing together works by 154 alumni artists across sculpture, video, sound, painting, photography, and drawing, CHIMERA forms a room-sized collective portrait that reflects two decades of artistic exchange, collaboration, and sustained community across borders.

The installation takes the mythical chimera as both form and metaphor: a hybrid creature assembled from disparate bodies, memories, and geographies. Inspired by the architecture of colonial museums and cabinets of extraction, CHIMERA transforms systems of classification and display into an animated landscape of interconnected totems. Fragmented contributions merge into composite beings that speak to migration, ecological entanglement, displacement, and the politics of collective worldmaking. Positioned within the Giardini and in direct dialogue with the surrounding landscape, the work emphasizes land not as backdrop, but as an active collaborator in artistic and communal life.

Within this environment, Nadja Verena Marcin presents The Cube (2026), a sculptural video installation that examines the tension between enclosure, identity, and mediated perception. Combining 3D printed resin skull, hair, aluminium base, electronics, and dual LCD screens, the work constructs a fragmented body suspended between physical object and moving image. The Cube functions simultaneously as container and stage: a confined architecture in which the self becomes multiplied, observed, and fluid.

Marcin’s work resonates with the broader conceptual framework of CHIMERA through its exploration of hybridity and transformation. The fragmented visual language of the installation reflects the instability of contemporary subjectivity within systems of technological mediation and collective memory. Oscillating between intimacy and estrangement, materiality and illusion, The Cube becomes part of the exhibition’s larger ecology of interconnected forms—an evolving constellation of voices shaped through encounter, coexistence, and shared imagination.

Denniston Hill, CHIMERA (2026)
The 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia – In Minor Keys
On view May 9 – November 22, 2026
Preview: May 6 – 8, 2026