Minoria IV: Return

MINORIA IV: Return is the fourth chapter of MINORIA, an ongoing curatorial project developed by ORAC Gallery during the 2026 Venice Biennale season.

Developed in dialogue with the conceptual framework of Biennale Arte 2026, In Minor Keys, curated by Koyo Kouoh, MINORIA approaches artistic form not as a fixed or final condition, but as something provisional — emerging, shifting, and never entirely resolved.

Across its earlier chapters, the project examined trace, movement, discovery, and the unstable threshold between matter and meaning. Each chapter marked a different moment within an evolving curatorial field, where form appeared not as an end point, but as a temporary intensification within a larger process of becoming.

MINORIA IV: Return introduces a reverse movement into this trajectory.

In this performative chapter, shells previously gathered from the Venetian coastline and temporarily brought into the gallery space are returned to the sea. The gesture does not conclude the project so much as redirect it: what had been encountered, displaced, and held within the reflective space of exhibition is released back into flux, uncertainty, and continuity with its original environment.

Rather than preserving the trace as an object of permanence, Return acknowledges impermanence as an essential condition of artistic existence. What enters form may also leave it. What appears may also recede. Return becomes an act of acceptance — an admission that not all forms are meant to be stabilised, protected, or possessed.

In this sense, the chapter extends the logic of MINORIA beyond emergence toward release. It suggests that dissolution is not the opposite of form, but one of its possible destinies. The work does not disappear into negation; it returns to movement, to circulation, to the larger rhythms from which it first arose.

Presented in Venice, a city shaped by tides, sediment, repetition, and disappearance, MINORIA IV: Return takes on a particular resonance. It becomes a reflection on the ethics of holding and letting go, on the instability of form, and on the necessity of recognising when the most truthful gesture is not to preserve, but to return.

Curated by Monika Turczyńska