For more than two decades, Egyptian artist Rana El Nemr has cultivated one of the most intellectually expansive and materially sensitive practices in contemporary African art. Working across photography, installation, moving image, sculpture and research, her work consistently resists fixed readings, instead inviting viewers into spaces where memory, perception, ritual and embodied knowledge unfold through subtle encounters. Rather than documenting reality, El Nemr creates systems through which meaning is continuously produced, questioned and transformed.
At the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, curated by the late Koyo Kouoh under the title In Minor Keys, El Nemr presents The Sugarcane Choir, one of the exhibition’s most ambitious multi-sited installations. Stretching across the Arsenale’s indoor and outdoor spaces, the work assembles fabric prints, suspended photographs, recycled plastics, mirrors, sugarcane, carved metal, sound, projection and site-specific interventions into an immersive environment structured through four elliptical paths. Curated through a text by Ahmed Refaat, the installation explores attunement, gravity, alignment and the subtle frequencies through which memory and knowledge circulate. Sugarcane itself becomes both material and metaphor: recalling labour, migration, colonial trade, Sufi musical traditions and the histories shared between Egypt and Venice. Rather than offering a singular narrative, The Sugarcane Choir asks visitors to move through a living labyrinth where sound, material and movement continually generate new possibilities of perception.
Developed through extensive collaboration with artists, researchers, musicians and makers, the project expands beyond the exhibition itself through performances, storytelling, ritual, games and collective acts of listening that will culminate during the Biennale’s closing week. It is precisely the kind of work that embodies In Minor Keys: one that privileges resonance over spectacle, process over certainty, and subtle transformation over immediate visibility. Ahead of the Biennale, Africans Column spoke with Rana El Nemr about material intelligence, the politics of visibility, sugarcane as both archive and living entity, and why the invisible may ultimately hold the deepest forms of knowledge.
Africans Column: Your practice often engages with memory and the politics of visibility; how do these concerns take shape in the specific works you are presenting, and how do they connect to your broader artistic trajectory?
Rana El Nemr: My interest in what we know begins with the questions of how we know it. Who or what brings it to our attention? and in which states and moments do we arrange (and re-arrange) the pieces of our knowledge?
In the “the sugarcane choir”, viewers encounter fluid, curving, and spiraling movements embodied within the artwork’s different mediums. The mediums vary from print and projection, hard and soft plastic, stainless steel, glass & mirrors, sugarcane, and a looping audio. The diverse materials in the 2-parts indoor- and outdoor- installation, play an integral role in the quality of perception and the politics of assigning meaning. They are arranged in mazes and endless entanglements of connections that fold within one another.
For example, a large 6×3 meters curtain “the newborn birthchart #2” is made out of recycled plastic that is pressed together with heat by a group of women ironing it. The curtain is rough and raw. Going through or behind the curtain, one encounters a much smaller immaculate print with a handmade sugarcane pulp frame “engramat: Zygote”. Also behind the curtain, 7 pieces of finely carved small zinc plates are immersed in a bright red tray of melted plastic, “engramat: The Sources”.
Substance and form in the sugarcane choir point to material history and symbolic references. Embedded in the works, between still, moving and suspended images, some of my late grandma’s buttons, from her sewing box, are embroidered with a black-gold thread on textile prints “the tachograph records”.
In tailoring, buttons are small fasteners that connect two separate planes. In this work, the tailoring’s tiny plane-joiners, serve as dimensional gateways and enable an intentional transition. Their presence is subtle, you may miss them, the way one misses the moment of slipping into sleep, dream or trance. Yet it is only from this subtle existence, that they play their role: seeds of potential and of imagination.
I use one of the buttons in the video “E.M.E.R.A.L.D.” (Arabic title: “The river thirsts for your tender mouth”). Across the various works, the seeds are carried within womb-like enclaves and channeled through orbits, rivers and birthing tunnels. They do not carry a message or recount a narrative, but rather they become a threshold, a step that is designed to hold a lot of potentiality.
When in this zone, one peeks into the possibilities of creating narrative and meaning. In that sense, the politics of visibility cease being passive modes of seeing what one already sees and knows, instead they become active generators of what can be scripted and created.
Africans Column: In Minor Keys suggests subtlety and nuance—how do you interpret this curatorial framework, and do you see your focus on “non-events” or peripheral spaces as a form of resistance against high-spectacle art?
Rana El Nemr: Audibility is inseparable from the extent and depth of its vibration. Yet because vibration is only visible through its impact, minor keys appear subtle from the perspective of major keys. In that sense, the minor key is closer extension to the event than is the major key. Non-events are, in my opinion, non-existent.
In other words and in my experience, tuning into minor keys, one encounters a very high level of intensity that is unmistakably felt in one’s body and emotions. What we often do when we encounter minor keys, is that we feel urged to find a sensorial equivalent to the invisible turbulence we just experienced: we create a major key that renders a tangible version of the minor key.
What I find particularly inviting and challenging in the curatorial framework of “In Minor Keys”, is the experience of staying within the minor keys and exploring the quality of their potential through their own frequency and existence.
I therefore find delving into minor keys reflects a collective, growing ability and intention to engage with the invisible, to learn to trust it, to stay with (and bear with) its ambiguity and uncertainty. I personally don’t feel the need to resist the central in favor of the peripheral, or as you put it “high-spectacle art” in favor of low or minor-key art. Rather I believe that we naturally understand things in their physical and sensorial existence, yet when we have enough understanding and knowledge of what we see, there is a need and even a necessity to transcend the visibly highlighted forms (by that I mean, to get over our need to repeatedly affirm and reaffirm what we already know) and start exploring the deeper qualities and meanings that are unfamiliar to us.
My works in In Minor Keys do not pursue a gaze, neither one that celebrates them or victimizes them or romanticises them (or anything else). They do not squeeze their existence or step into the spotlight, or re-arrange their pieces to articulate titles, thesis questions or other organizational tools that have been designed for major keys. They maybe resemble a roadmap. The cartographic elements are there, yet without engaging either one’s intuition, one’s senses or one’s intrinsic motivation for play, we’d stand clueless in front of the map, not knowing which route to take. In this case, the works, regardless of whether they do or do not have an aesthetic or technical value, remain opaque.
Africans Column: You often navigate the line between document and fiction; how do you approach the image in this exhibition, and how do you decide what is intentionally left out of the frame to maintain that sense of quietude?
Rana El Nemr: I believe the “quietude” in my visuals points to a surface-level composure that invites a sense of anticipation. A necessary moment of visually standing still, not because nothing is happening, but rather because colors, shapes and patterns are charged with where they came from, where the happening is taking place. It is usually an invisible happening, which is why it can be traced via coded keys and symbols that reside within an infinite network of realms, such as memories, spontaneous expressions, information, inspiration, bodily practices, historical narratives, dreams, academia, theory and other. I see those realms as interwoven sources of understanding, with no hierarchies between them. I do not perceive or assign what’s documentary and what’s fictional. What I leave out intentionally, are elements that make one settle easily on a literal meaning or translation.
Africans Column: In what ways do the structures of Cairo inform your visual language, and did the meaning of these works shift for you once they were transplanted into the specific global and architectural context of Venice?
Rana El Nemr: Rana El Nemr: I think of artworks as living entities. They engage with the spaces they temporarily inhabit and absorb elements and perspective from their surroundings, whether material, spiritual, cultural or otherwise.
Rising from the marshes as a sanctuary for those fleeing invasion in the 5th and 6th centuries, Venice’s origins are deeply rooted in the stories of refugees—a city born of necessity, resilience and the human quest for safety. This timeless pursuit, which shaped Venice’s historical foundation, continues to drive countless communities of the South today as they flee violence with the same urgency and need for refuge.
The Sugarcane Choir echoes songs of the South: songs of forced labor and resistance, of reaping and celebration, of getting lost between the long reeds and of finding shelter within the dense fields. It also embodies the sounds of the sugarcane—the collective swishing, swinging and humming, the fast shoots, the time-sensitive harvest, the intractable fibers, the pressure, the extraction and the sweet juice.
Sugarcane itself has long been intertwined with Venice’s history. The port served as Europe’s principal importer of the crop, and the city developed elaborate sugar refineries that enabled it to export sugar to the rest of the continent at unprecedented prices.
Trade, trade routes, natural and human resources, immigration, economy, capitalism and contemporary politics are therefore integral forces that shape the resonance of The Sugarcane Choir. Through the project, our team explores these intersecting dynamics alongside mythical and everyday encounters and interpretations of the plant.
Tracing ways of navigating the dense grass across diverse communities and at different moments in history, one may see a resemblance between cane fields and the reed beds of Venice.
Africans Column: Are there particular materials, archives, or physical processes—such as scale or lighting—that were essential to the “body” of the photographs shown here, and how do they help evoke the memories you are exploring?
Rana El Nemr: As mentioned above, the materials used in the pieces, as well as the shapes and function of them, are integral aspects that make the work what it is.
For example, “the newborn birthchart #2” is a 6 meter high curtain that hangs in the shape of a curve in front of one of Arsenale’s high windows. The window is maybe the only, or at least one of the very few ones where the shades have been removed. On one hand, this removal of shades is essential, to make the work function as a curtain, and on the other hand, the center of the curtain across from the window features a 30cm round enclave. In its position, shape, and bright shades of yellow and gold, it acts as a collector of sun rays. The back of the enclave, on the opposite side of the curtain, protrudes as a full moon, manifesting a womb into space.
Another work, “Winged Fruits Rising”, is a site-specific outdoor installation in the guarding house/kiosk (La Garitta). The house has 2 tiny rooms and an open passway between, that occupies more or less the same area of each room. The installation’s exposed part is a large blue disk that covers the face of the front room and small parts of its side. It is made of HDPE recycled plastic sheets that have been heat-pressed with cane parts squeezed within them. The plastic, in my recent work, illustrates a common, tightly restricting and dis-integratable structure. This quality is emblematic of a very familiar power structure that confines our everyday life and politics. Its presence is loudly deafening yet invisible.
I cannot go over many details of this work, because it is a new piece with many components and I am still writing about it, yet I’d like to point to its four main elements in short:
- The canes arrangement within the blue plastic suggests a geometry that is visibly interrupted. It may possibly be randomness that is struggling to organize itself, or it may be alignment that time has forcibly pressured and disturbed. In both cases, it is an awkward and uncomfortable arrangement that lies within a disc form, reminding us that time is cyclical and that we may have lost our ways moving into (yet also stuck between) the past and future at the same time.
- Mazes, in their contemporary understanding, are structural, and are concealed in visible clarity. The disc has a small opening in the center. It is the nucleus of the maze and it bears the shape of eyes on peacock feathers, like two circles that move towards becoming one, but that have only partially done so (the upper part of the circle has merged, but the lower not yet). Like an aperture of a camera, this shape indicates a vision in its focus finding phase (or its focus developing phase): Two eyes finally meeting, like in intercourse, to birth the wiser and more encompassing, third eye.
- The third eye is the door to the nucleus’ mouth and its inner body (or we can call it the essence of this entity).
- Not until ready for birth, this mouth speaks in riddles:
“Only when peeking through the eye of becoming, you see its core, you see its breath.
But also, this flows in reverse, from rest to life, or life to death.
So also, if hearing the mouth calling, you peek through the eyes of becoming alive.
You see your eye breathing and you arrive.”
“Wingfruits Rising: Sa-Fa-Ra” is the name of the audiopiece, which is installed in the small passway behind the mouth. It breathes out a humming merged with a cane flute sound and timbres from a string instrument that is made out of a Southern fruit.
Africans Column: How do you hope audiences experience the “invisible” layers of your work within the pavilion, and what central questions from this presentation are currently shaping your practice moving forward?
Rana El Nemr: My practice involves a lot of research and a lot of experimentation with the material I work with. What comes out of this process can be described as spacial formulas that I like my audiences to experience and engage with in the form that it has arrived at. Trying to trace them back to the research they came from is often, in my opinion, a futile exercise, that defies the purpose of creating the artwork.
However, after one engages with the work experientially, there are of course, many different methodical or organic possibilities for reflecting on the experience and engaging with the original research and material.
We are currently creating a set of cards that involve some of the research material, drawing from historical narratives, songs, botanical information, mythology and other material and conceptual references, insights and connections gathered during our work.
The set of cards have a dual nature; besides being an object themselves, they function as a chronicle or folio that one can leaf through and read like a publication, or as a game that can be played solo or with a group.
With the activities we are initiating this month, we want to use the cards as a starting point for story-telling, poetry reading or writing and singing. Within the small groups, we plan to explore together, different directions and knowledge systems that the cards evoke and activate.
To close out the Venice Phase of the project in November 2026, we are bringing the cards for a live public event of ritual and play during the Biennale’s finnissage. The artworks, and the sugarcane itself, extend into a living breathing space through reading, singing and experimenting with the voice.
Rana El Nemr’s The Sugarcane Choir stands among the most conceptually layered and materially ambitious contributions to In Minor Keys. Rather than asking audiences to consume images, the installation asks them to slow down, to listen, to move, and to inhabit uncertainty. Through sugarcane, sound, recycled matter, memory and ritual, El Nemr proposes another way of understanding knowledge—one that unfolds through vibration rather than declaration, resonance rather than spectacle.
In a Biennale shaped by Koyo Kouoh’s invitation to attend to quieter frequencies, El Nemr offers a profound meditation on what remains unseen yet deeply felt. Her work reminds us that the most transformative encounters are often not those that demand attention the loudest, but those that patiently alter the ways we perceive, remember and imagine the world around us.
