Name: VI Bienal del Sur — Pueblos en Resistencia: El Poder de la Diversidad
Start: 2025-10-10
End: 2026-04-18
Location: Museo de Bellas Artes

The Bienal del Sur — Pueblos en Resistencia

Venezuela's state-organised international biennial of contemporary art, founded in 2015 in Caracas by the Ministerio del Poder Popular para la Cultura and operated by the Instituto de las Artes de la Imagen y el Espacio (IARTES). Conceived as the cultural expression of the Bolivarian government's political-South argument — explicitly aligned with Hugo Chávez's framing of a "political South" and articulated against what its organisers describe as the cultural hegemony of the Global North — the biennial runs as an anti-imperialist solidarity programme convening artists from Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa and Asia. The sixth edition, El Poder de la Diversidad (The Power of Diversity), ran from 10 October 2025 to 18 April 2026 at the Museo de Bellas Artes, the Galería de Arte Nacional and a network of state cultural venues in Caracas.

Established2015 — 20266 editions

The Caracas biennial of the political South

The sixth Bienal del Sur — Pueblos en Resistencia: El Poder de la Diversidad — ran in Caracas from 10 October 2025 to 18 April 2026. Organised by Venezuela's Ministerio del Poder Popular para la Cultura through IARTES, the edition convened more than 150 artists from forty-five countries across Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa and Asia. The biennial's framing argument — that contemporary art can serve as the working register of historical memory for peoples in political resistance to the cultural hegemony of the Global North — is the longest-running institutional articulation of the Bolivarian state's cultural argument since the programme was founded in 2015.

By the Biennale Editorial Team

The Bienal del Sur — Pueblos en Resistencia (Biennial of the South — Peoples in Resistance) is the principal international biennial of contemporary art organised by the Venezuelan state. Founded in 2015 by the Ministerio del Poder Popular para la Cultura (MPPC) and operated by the Instituto de las Artes de la Imagen y el Espacio (IARTES), the programme has staged six editions across eleven years: Caracas in 2015–2016 and 2017–2018, Ciudad Bolívar in 2019, an online edition in 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic, Aragua in 2023, and a return to Caracas in 2025–2026. The programmatic frame — that art operates as the echo of individual and collective voices committed to social justice, equality and solidarity south of an imagined political line, and that the biennial constitutes a contested space against what its organisers describe as the cultural hegemony of the Global North — is the institution's continuing thesis.

The sixth edition, El Poder de la Diversidad, was inaugurated on 10 October 2025 at the Museo de Bellas Artes (MBA) in the Plaza Morelos cultural quarter of Caracas, with additional programming across the Galería de Arte Nacional (GAN), the Museo de la Estampa y el Diseño Carlos Cruz-Diez, the Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos Rómulo Gallegos (CELARG) and other state cultural venues in the capital. The Ministry's announcement placed the participating artist count at more than 150 from forty-five countries across Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa and Asia; the closing communiqué from Vice-Minister of Image and Space Arts Mary Pemjean placed the figure at 170 artists — eighty national, twenty-five international from eighteen countries, and a further sixty in the collective exhibition Venezuela tu mirada. The edition closed at the Cinemateca Nacional inside the Museo de Bellas Artes on 18 April 2026, after a six-month run.

An institution conceived as an alternative to the Global North

The structural feature that distinguishes the Bienal del Sur from the other principal Latin American biennials — São Paulo (founded 1951), Havana (founded 1984), Mercosul in Porto Alegre (founded 1997), Curitiba (founded 1993 as VentoSul), and the Argentine BIENALSUR (founded 2017 by the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero) — is that the Venezuelan biennial is explicitly state-organised, programmatically aligned with the political argument of the Bolivarian government, and run not from the academic or independent curatorial sector but from inside the Ministry of Culture itself. The proposal originated, in the institution's own account on the IARTES website, from "the conception of the political South of the world defined by Hugo Chávez", and the biennial's continuing argument is that it does not pursue commercial goals for art but rather frames art as a vital necessity and a register of historical memory for peoples in political resistance.

The founding edition — the I Bienal del Sur, Pueblos en Resistencia, which ran at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas from November 2015 to February 2016 — convened, according to the institution's own published figures, 138 artists from forty countries with the programmatic aim of building "bridges of cultural interaction from the peoples in resistance, located on five continents." The second edition (2017–2018) was housed at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas (MAC) and convened 81 artists from 35 countries with an international curatorial team including the Trinidadian artist Adele Todd, the Brazilian curator Angela Barbour (director of the Galería Marta Traba) and the Cuban researcher Dayalis González. The third edition (2019), inaugurated at the Museo de Arte Moderno Jesús Soto in Ciudad Bolívar, took the decolonisation of knowledge and art as its central argument with Bolivia as the honoured country, programmed within the framework of the bicentennial of the Discurso and Congreso de Angostura. The fourth edition (2021), held during the COVID-19 pandemic, ran as a hybrid digital-and-physical programme with 125 artists from twenty-seven countries and Colombia as honoured country, with works hosted on a dedicated portal at bienaldelsur.gob.ve. The fifth edition (2023), titled Calle, Memoria y Esperanza, moved the biennial out of Caracas entirely to the streets and public spaces of the Aragua municipalities of Girardot and Santos Michelena from 30 September to 15 December — a deliberate displacement from the museum into public space, with twelve invited countries and a curatorial committee that included the art historian Élida Salazar, the architect Edgar Cruz, the artist-scholar Evelio Salcedo, the sociologist Raúl Chacón, the aesthetics researcher Miguel A. Baloa and the artist Obed Delfín.

The biennial as state cultural policy

A biennial whose programmatic frame is overtly state-political — anti-imperialist solidarity, the Global South, the "political South" of Hugo Chávez — sits uneasily inside the international art-press grammar of curatorial neutrality. The structural cousin is the Havana Biennial, founded 1984 by the Cuban state and the original Global South biennial. The Bienal del Sur is the Bolivarian sequel: organised inside the Ministry of Culture, programmed against the Global North, and consequently engaged and disengaged with by the international art press in patterns that recur across both institutions.

By the Biennale Editorial Team

The editorial question the Bienal del Sur poses to the international art press is not whether the work shown there is of interest — the participating artist rosters across editions include figures with substantial international careers from across the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, the Arab world and Asia — but how to read a biennial whose programmatic frame is the working political argument of a single state government rather than the curatorial-academic register more commonly associated with the post-1989 international biennial system. The institution's own founding rhetoric is explicit. The IARTES website describes the biennial as a "contested space" against the cultural hegemony of the Global North and traces the institutional origin to "the conception of the political South of the world defined by Hugo Chávez." The Ministerio del Poder Popular para la Cultura's press releases place the biennial inside an "anti-imperialist concept" and use the language of resistance, struggle and Bolivarian solidarity without the diplomatic euphemism that other state-organised biennials tend to deploy.

The structural cousin in the international biennial system is the Havana Biennial, founded by the Cuban state in 1984 as the original Global South biennial — conceived as an alternative platform for the Caribbean and Latin America before extending in its second edition (1986) to artists from Africa, Asia and the Middle East. The Havana programme has been, across four decades, simultaneously the most-cited foundational reference of the Global South biennial argument and the focus of recurring debates in the international art press about the relationship between contemporary art and the cultural apparatus of the Cuban state — debates that have grown sharper across the post-2018 period of intensified political tension in Cuba. The Bienal del Sur sits in a structurally similar relationship to the Bolivarian state: it is the principal cultural emblem of the government's argument that art is a register of resistance rather than a commodity, and it is engaged with and disengaged with by the international art press in patterns that recur from the Havana case.

The reduced English-language documentation of the Bienal del Sur — relative to the comprehensive coverage of São Paulo, Curitiba or the Argentine BIENALSUR — is part of the editorial situation and not separable from it. Most of the institutional record sits in Spanish on Ministry-of-Culture, IARTES and state-aligned news portals (RNV, VTV, Correo del Orinoco, Alba Ciudad, Últimas Noticias, Diariovea), with limited cross-coverage in the major Anglophone art publications. The pattern is in part the consequence of the broader international art-press disengagement from Venezuelan state cultural production across the past decade — itself a function of the wider political and sanctions context — and in part the consequence of the institution's deliberate distance from the international art-market and academic-curatorial circuits whose recognition would constitute the metric of institutional success in the post-1989 biennial frame.

The editorial question, then, is not whether to read the Bienal del Sur but how. The biennial is the institutional record of a continuing argument, sustained across six editions and eleven years, that contemporary art can be organised inside state cultural policy as an instrument of political solidarity south of an imagined line, and that the resulting programme is legible as a biennial in the international sense — neither a propaganda exhibition nor a conventional curatorial international, but a working third form whose precedent is the Havana Biennial and whose continuing function is to hold open, against the structural pressures of the international art-market and the political isolation of the Venezuelan state, a space in which the political-South argument is materially staged. The 2025–2026 edition's six-month run, multi-venue programme and forty-five-country participation are the institution's working demonstration that the form continues to operate.

2015Foundation

The Caracas founding at the Museo de Bellas Artes

The I Bienal del Sur, Pueblos en Resistencia, was inaugurated at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas in November 2015 and ran through February 2016. Organised by the Ministerio del Poder Popular para la Cultura and operated by IARTES under the direction of Morella Jurado, the founding edition convened, in the institution's own published figures, 138 artists from forty countries on five continents. The framing argument — that the biennial constitutes a contested space against the cultural hegemony of the Global North, operating from the "political South" defined by Hugo Chávez — was set out in the founding edition and has been the continuing institutional thesis across all subsequent editions.

Sources: IARTES — I Bienal del Sur; Asian Cultural Council; Greek News Agenda

2017II

The II Bienal at the MAC with Adele Todd, Angela Barbour and Dayalis González

The second edition, again titled Pueblos en Resistencia, ran at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas (MAC) from 3 December 2017 to 25 February 2018. The international curatorial team included the Trinidadian artist Adele Todd, the Brazilian curator Angela Barbour (director of the Galería Marta Traba) and the Cuban art history researcher Dayalis González, with Morella Jurado continuing as institutional director from IARTES. The edition convened 81 artists from 35 countries, with Trinidad and Tobago named the honoured country; participating-country lists in state-press coverage included Bahamas, Barbados, Bolivia, Brasil, Chile, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia, Argentina, México, Haití, Uruguay, Perú, Trinidad & Tobago, China, Egypt, Ghana, Greece, Iraq, Iran, Guadeloupe, Kyrgyzstan, Namibia, Palestine, São Tomé & Príncipe, Senegal, Syria, South Africa and Suriname.

Sources: NODAL, Nov 2017; teleSUR, 2 Dec 2017

2019III

The III Bienal at the Museo Jesús Soto, Ciudad Bolívar — Bolivia honoured

The third edition was inaugurated on 25 October 2019 at the Museo de Arte Moderno Jesús Soto in Ciudad Bolívar — the Guayana-region museum dedicated to the kinetic-art legacy of Jesús Rafael Soto — with works by Venezuelan artists from across the country and from a further nineteen invited nations. Bolivia was named the honoured country and the decolonisation of knowledge and art was set out as the edition's central argument, programmed within the framework of the bicentennial of the Discurso and Congreso de Angostura. The opening was presided over by Minister of Popular Power for Culture Ernesto Villegas and the ambassadors of Bolivia, Palestine and Nicaragua.

Sources: Diario Primicia; El 19 Digital, Nicaragua

2021IV

The pandemic edition — digital and physical from the Museo Alejandro Otero

The fourth edition, opened from the Museo Alejandro Otero in Caracas in August 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic, was the institution's hybrid digital-and-physical response to the global suspension of in-person biennials. The edition featured 125 artists from twenty-seven countries; works were hosted on a dedicated portal at bienaldelsur.gob.ve and presented across Venezuelan museum venues, with Colombia named the honoured country. The Ministry's stated frame for the edition was "multiethnic, pluricultural and multilingual" dialogue — a recasting of the institutional argument for the conditions of pandemic distance.

Sources: VTV — IV Edición Bienal del Sur; VTV — IV Bienal inauguration

2025VI

The return to Caracas — El Poder de la Diversidad at the Museo de Bellas Artes

The sixth edition was inaugurated on 10 October 2025 at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas under the subtitle El Poder de la Diversidad (The Power of Diversity) and ran for six months across the MBA, the Galería de Arte Nacional, the Museo de la Estampa y el Diseño Carlos Cruz-Diez, the CELARG and other state cultural venues. Opening figures placed participation at more than 150 artists from forty-five countries across Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa and Asia. The closing communiqué from Vice-Minister of Image and Space Arts Mary Pemjean — issued from the Cinemateca Nacional at the MBA on 18 April 2026 — recognised the Indian artist Reena Saini Kallat, the Cuban writer Giselle Lucía Navarro and the Brazilian artist Eduardo Ekman Simões, with special mentions for representatives from Russia, Rwanda, Iran and Mexico, and confirmed that a seventh edition is programmed for 2027.

Sources: Alba Ciudad — VI Bienal inauguration, Oct 2025; MPPC — clausura, Apr 2026; Alba Ciudad — closing

The Bienal del Sur — Pueblos en Resistencia

The Caracas biennial of the political South

An institution conceived as an alternative to the Global North

The biennial as state cultural policy

Defining moments

The Caracas founding at the Museo de Bellas Artes

The II Bienal at the MAC with Adele Todd, Angela Barbour and Dayalis González

The III Bienal at the Museo Jesús Soto, Ciudad Bolívar — Bolivia honoured

The pandemic edition — digital and physical from the Museo Alejandro Otero

The return to Caracas — El Poder de la Diversidad at the Museo de Bellas Artes

The figures behind Pueblos en Resistencia

Morella Jurado

Mary Pemjean

Adele Todd

Angela Barbour

The Bienal del Sur at the Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas

Principal venues across editions

Related Latin American and Global South biennials

For further work

I Bienal del Sur — Pueblos en Resistencia

II Bienal del Sur — Pueblos en Resistencia

III Bienal del Sur — Pueblos en Resistencia

IV Bienal del Sur — Pueblos en Resistencia 2.0

V Bienal del Sur — Calle, Memoria y Esperanza

From the news desk

Institutional record

Context: the Global South biennial