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Curator’s Note

In Minor Keys
61st Biennale di Venezia
By Koyo Kouoh

Curatorial Team:
Marie Hélène Pereira
Siddhartha Mitter
Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo
Rory Tsapayi
Rasha Salti

05 May, 2025 – 22 November, 2026

Location:
Giardini
Central Pavilion

Photos: Marco Pavan

Produced with the support of Teiger Foundation, in partnership with American Friends of Zeitz MOCAA

catalogue text by claire shea

Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka documents humanity’s physical and emotional relationships with the natural world, considering how environmental changes can also be reflected in our “inner landscapes”. Materially, her work is dedicated to upholding embodied knowledge related to the environment that is increasingly endangered or ignored.

Recent research into the evolutionary origin of bipolar “disorder” suggests that it may have developed during the last Ice Age as an adaptive response to extreme climate variability. For Hatanaka, who lives with the condition, this research explains that it may have evolved as a sensitive attunement to nature by cultivating a spectrum of moods – from the extremely energetic and creative manic periods through to shutdown or hibernation in the more depressive periods to conserve energy. Considering this entanglement of affect with the environment, Hatanaka wonders what we might learn from bipolar condition that could be helpful as the climate continues to change.

This understanding resonates with Hatanaka’s wider concern with the corporeal knowledge that moves across generations and connects us beyond our individual existence. A key part of her practice is her research and work with papermaking techniques, particularly washi, continuing a tradition practiced across East and Southeast Asia for over two thousand years. She embraces printmaking as well, as an embodied language honed through sensory repetition, in which even the ideal ink viscosity can be heard before it is seen.

Hatanaka’s works often depict the High Arctic, where she has been involved in community-engaged projects in Kinngait, Nunavut, for over a decade. There, she witnessed the tangible effects of climate change and learned from Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit (Inuit generational wisdom), which carries a remarkable attunement to nature as a means of survival. The works Moveable and Immovable feature linocut prints of the snowdrifts Inuit have used for centuries as natural navigational guides. They double as documentation of this fragile environment, which is under threat from rising temperatures.

Hatanaka also practises gyotaku – a traditional Japanese printmaking method that fishermen employed to record their catches before the invention of photography. Today, scientists examine these historical prints to assess the biodiversity of fish species in centuries past. Hatanaka, whose grandfather and great-grandfather were fishermen, creates gyotaku prints during her travels and residencies, maintaining a symbolic and material connection to the marine world while upholding this practice of documentation. She stitches together prints, created across geographies and time, to form larger works such as Namazu (2023), which retells the Japanese legend of a catfish that thrashed about, causing earthquakes. In the period following the 1855 Edo (now Tokyo) earthquake, images of Namazu-e, or “catfish prints”, began to circulate widely, as this “earthquake fish” was considered responsible for initiating the great disaster. But this legend is not pure fabrication, as seismologists have since confirmed that catfish exhibit increased agitation several hours before earthquakes, enabling them to “predict” these events with remarkable accuracy.

Echoing this seismic theme, Faultlines and Loneliness (2024) and Instability (2024) explore the changing language of emotion, mapping collective psychological shifts. In both works, Hatanaka embeds a graph that charts the steep rise in the usage of the words loneliness and instability, respectively, over time. In the Giardini, Susceptibility to Gravity (2026), a series of seven outdoor flags, draws inspiration from koinobori, or carp flags. Made by sailmakers, they soar in the winds that contribute to more frequent occurrences of acqua alta flooding in Venice. Recalling the Japanese legend of carp that swim upstream despite strong currents, they symbolise strength and courage.

—Claire Shea, 2026