26 Jan 2026
The Biennale After-Party: Artistic Intelligence, Corporeal Knowledge and Curation under the rise of AI
Essayby Dela Christin Miessen
Regarding The Wrong Biennale, Dela Christin Miessen spoke with Aishwarya Kumar and Suruchi Pawar on the programme Down The Rabbit Hole.
Two years ago, I got invited to write on my first ever Biennale - the 25th Biennale di Venezia Strangers everywhere. I arrived prepared to learn how to see. How to read scale, ambition, excess. In a city that's famous for its exquisite intolerance for invisibility. Art, city, spectator – all locked into a demand of attention where being seen feels synonymous with existing at all.
After two days in the Giardini, the Biennale begins calibrating the viewer’s nervous system. Attention stretched thin, perception overfed. Meaning forced to compete with monumentality. Venice makes one thing brutally clear: visibility is power. It’s not optional, it’s structural. The question is not whether one is seen, but how long one can keep being seen under these conditions.
For decades, biennials responded to this pressure by attempting to educate it. Exhibition as a discursive machine - panels, symposia, readers, and guided discussions - promised to counter spectacle with knowledge. To replace the image with argument, excess with sharp critique. Yet, visibility itself remained untouched: still mandatory, unequally distributed, costly to sustain.
But what happens when the biennial itself becomes infrastructure? When exhibition-making migrates from pavilions, plazas and Giardini into servers, platforms, feeds? Decentralization promises escape from the extractive logics of large-scale cultural events, yet introduces other forms of pressure: permanent connectivity, algorithmic visibility, stiff metrics, unknown public. What kind of intelligence remains possible when visibility is no longer an event, but managed as a condition?
This is where The Wrong Biennale enters the picture. Not an alternative but a counter-pressure, The Wrong was famously framed as the digital answer to Venice by The New York Times. Launched in 2013 in Copenhagen as a global art biennale, it was created to promote digital art and culture across the world. Taking place online and offline, it aims to connect the world through virtual spaces, and offline exhibitions at embassies and art spaces.
Many AI-focused exhibitions risk performing technological literacy, showcase technical skill, novelty or innovation. Show that artists and curators “understand” AI, rather than interrogating the conditions of attention, labor and presence that AI reorganizes in the dark.
Down the Rabbit Hole, a pavilion curated by Aishwarya Kumar with (Studio) Stage Rabbit and Suruchi Pawar emerges from this pressure point, asking what happens when visibility is negotiated through digital infrastructures. Conceived as a living, time-based pavilion rather than a finite exhibition, it approaches AI not as a theme to be demonstrated but as a condition already reorganizing attention, labor and perception. Structured as a series of portals into ongoing artistic practices as well as a podcast series, the pavilion understands artistic intelligence as the process behind the work, as well as what happens before the opening of a show. Five months of live presence, then the archive remains.
In conversation with Aishwarya Kumar, trained dancer and doctoral researcher in Culture Studies and Suruchi Pawar, practising between strategy and curatorial thinking, we trace how artistic intelligence is recalibrated under networked conditions, and how curatorial practice might respond to AI as a condition - through questions of corporeal knowledge, and the sustainability of artistic practice.
ARTISTIC INTELLIGENCE
Every technological revolution affects artistic intelligence, and it should. For Aishwarya Kumar, this is neither a threat nor a promise, but a historical given: Just as the industrial revolution reorganized labor and authorship, and photography displaced realism as the primary task of visual art, each technological shift recalibrates how artists think, perceive, and make. AI enters this lineage as another force that reshapes patterns of cognition: how connections are formed, how ideas move, how knowledge emerges through networks rather than deep singular zoom. At the same time, Pawar points out the cultural mess: AI “slop”, overproduction, blurred lines between integrity and market survival. The rules are unstable; everyone is learning a new game.
Their curatorial responsibility, then, is not to stage AI as spectacle but to build conditions in which artists can locate themselves, often by asking prior questions such as those asked by Mumbai-based artist Ankita Shah: who am I, what is language, what am I before language? Central to this approach is the primacy of communication itself: the pavilion foregrounds how AI systems are shaped, refined, and “perfected” through communicative processes, and how each project revisits, reconfigures, or troubles communication under contemporary digital conditions.
THE PAVILION AS A CURATORIAL STRUCTURE IN TIMES OF AI
Guy Ben-Ary’s piece Music for a Surrogate Performer, which examines posthumous creativity and ways of communicating with cells through music, was the basis for the pavilion. It steamrolled Kumar’s interest in ways of communication and structured the lens through which the artists were invited. Each art practice, whether it be Diane Giraud’s investigation into her own memory of her mother’s heritage through mixed-methodology, Nithya Iyer’s phenomenological inquiry of body through and as borderlands, Mohammed Chiba's experiments with the interpretive labour of language - all seem to pose a difficult reality: At the cost of efficiency, are we forgetting ways of remembering, speaking, and creating, which have no end?
Down the Rabbit Hole takes this premise as a curatorial starting point. Rather than staging AI as a discrete subject or tool, the pavilion adopts a structure that mirrors the cognitive and perceptual transformations such technologies set in motion. Instead of one central narrative route, each artist has “a universe” that holds different temporalities, formats and levels of completion - some with a journalistic lens while others with a more speculative angle. The programming evolves through monthly conversations with artists and people adjacent to the theme, artist residencies to help develop the works are co-designed alongside, new consortiums are underway for projects which will see the day of light in 2028, and satellite shows in Lisbon, India, and the Netherlands. Like this, the pavilion seems to become more of a generator for future collaborations and support systems rather than an event.
So when I ask whether The Wrong could become an alternative to large-scale biennials, Kumar and Pawar refuse the word “alternative”. Not because critique is absent, but because “alternative” is often another fantasy - idealistic intent without material support - and “alternative” might quickly become another way to naturalize unpaid labor. At the same time, they insist on what the lack of funding produced: autonomy, agency, and the capacity to do everything “wrong” and therefore invent forms that would be impossible under institutional scripts. Freedom and precarity arrive together.
NETWORKED BODIES
What Down the Rabbit Hole brings into question is the nation-state as a curatorial unit of representation. A Tasmanian artist in Portugal, a German artist in Galicia, Indian artists in India and Spain, a New Zealander touring Europe, a visual artist from former Yugoslavia now in Poland. A Brazilian artist in a different language of belonging. It breaks the default curatorial reflex “from where”. The point is not that heritage is irrelevant, but that identity politics - especially in the post/decolonial boom - can be a chain. Marginalized voices need space outside.
Western Canons, absolutely. But the discourse risks hardening into a marketable script: the sari as proof, food as credential, heritage as currency. The duo criticize the strain of being expected to perform a legible identity in Europe, and the temptation to “play the game” to make things easier. In response, the pavilion aims to allow practices to exist without being anchored to a flag or a passport. Artists appear not only as embodiments of a place, but as networked bodies moving across contexts.
CORPOREAL LITERACY ON A SCREEN
When we finally arrive at corporeal literacy, the answer snaps back to the beginning: the body as a knowledge system. Understanding through doing, not an idea you can download. It is practice, training, and lived experience. A way of processing information that refuses total translation into language. The screen does not abolish the body; it reconfigures it. Pawar’s practice makes this explicit. Based in India, one of the reasons she is able to work with as many artists as she does with Down the Rabbit Hole is precisely because the pavilion is partly online.
The digital format allows for a different economy of presence: artists and the public do not need to travel or insert themselves into spaces not designed with them in mind. Corporal limitation - fatigue, disability, distance - is no longer treated as an exception to be overcome, but as a condition to be worked with.
This stands in sharp contrast to the spatial politics of many large-scale biennials. As Kumar and Pawar note, these exhibitions are often designed for a specific body. One that can walk or stand for hours, absorb crowds, absorb noise. Whether implicitly coded as white, economically secure, or culturally fluent, this “default” body becomes the unspoken measure around which exhibitions are organized. From this perspective, corporeal literacy becomes a curatorial responsibility and ask curators to recognize that bodies encounter exhibitions differently.
Rather than treating digital mediation as a loss of embodiment, the pavilion reframes it as a redistribution of bodily possibility. What emerges is a curatorial logic sensitive to difference – not by naming it explicitly but by designing structures flexible enough to accommodate it. It makes visible the fact that exhibition-making has always been bodily, and the question whose body counts should be asked more critically.
In the post-digital, The Wrong does not present an alternative to, or an escape from the biennial format, but recalibrates its terms. If Venice teaches its audience the politics of visibility, Down the Rabbit Hole starts from the opposite assumption: not everything needs to arrive fully formed.
Aishwarya Kumar makes clear that what has emerged through the course of the pavilion is that while the rhetoric of AI foregrounds efficiency, artists are critiquing the need for said efficiency through means of creative research and communication. Artistic intelligence appears as a process over time, through conversations and returns. AI remains present but (still) hovers backstage. Less about arrival and more about staying, the after-party might be the space for the conversations that weren't scheduled.
Entitled The Wrong Returns, the 7th edition of the Biennale focuses on the artistic dimensions of artificial intelligence and presents works by 2,266 artists, selected by 175 curators, exhibited in 145 pavilions and embassies. It runs from 1 November 2025 to 31 March 2026. Online pavilions at thewrong.org and selected embassies in London, Trondheim, Mexico City, Münster, Porto, Matosinhos, Sunderland, Buenos Aires, Baltimore, Milan, Montreal, Valencia, Budapest, Glasgow, Bergen, Philadelphia, Velbert, Naples, Aberdeen, Moscow, Toronto, Harwich, Caracas, Plymouth, São Paulo, Amsterdam, Miami, Berlin, Chicago, Riba-roja de Túria, Los Angeles, among others. More information available here.
BIOGRAPHY
Dela Christin Miessen is a researcher, writer and editor. She is part of Aberta Studio in Lisbon and the co-founder of Echoes Residency for socially engaged art practices.
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