“Necessity may take the form of protest—as a means of survival and a manifestation of life—but it may also appear as an intimate gesture, an escape from visibility, or a turning inward toward the self. This year’s biennale proposes artistic form as a vehicle for solidarity and compassion, functioning as a carrier, proxy, and instrument for strengthening insurgent communities as much as addressing personal urgency. These practices sustain relationships from within, amplify silenced voices, and nourish hope by calling allies to action in response to oppression. Necessity is about learning to live with contradictions, embracing an irresistible rhythm, and navigating the choreographies of limitations. Art born of necessity is thus also an art of the poetics of reduction, involving not-doing as well as practices of restraint, refusal, boycott, and withdrawal.”
— Curatorial statement 

Adrián Kriška is currently based in rural Fuerteventura, where he has founded an artist-in-residence center and a community garden. His installation Where Even the Ravens Daren’t Go will incorporate elements of queer culture, DIY principles, and social activism. The work of David Apakidze, who is based in Tbilisi, revolves around queering Georgian Orthodox imagery. The commissioned project, titled The Last Basilica, reimagines Georgia’s earliest church—Bolnisi Sioni, built in the fifth century—as a symbolic “last church” before the end of times.

The word Tadamun stands for “solidarity” in Arabic, and it is also the name of a collective based in Prague that brings together a community of migrants from the SWANA region as well as local allies. Their video installation for the biennale, titled Here, For Now (هنا حتى الآن), takes the form of documentary film portraits of three migrants from southwest Asia and northern Africa region who are now living in Prague.

The Bratislava-based artist Aliza Orlan focuses on the topics of gender identity and body intimacy. In her new work, she draws inspiration from the ancient religious cult of Cybele and her transgender priestesses, the Galas, and combines them with her personal experience of transition.

Yana Bachynska, a.k.a. Jan Bačynsjkyj, is a Lviv-based visual artist, curator and film director. As a war refugee fleeing Ukraine, he had no stable place to work and no budget for materials, which prompted him to start using various textiles, including his own clothing, as his primary material for making art. Exploring the boundaries between the rehearsed and documentary, Palestinian artist Noor Abed’s new film we walk in our sleep (المتجاوزون) was shot in the West Bank during the past year. The film navigates the intersection of the sacred and the modern and invokes the political potential of a new spatial imagination as the necessary counter-force to historical closure, which has rendered Palestine an occupied territory. The project by Noor Abed was co-commissioned by the Biennale Matter of Art and the BredaPhoto Festival as part of a project supported by the Mondriaan Fund. The work was further supported by the Han Nefkens Foundation.

The curatorial approach draws on the notion of necessity as the vital force and political guiding principle behind one’s decisions. Art as a necessity appears as neither an aesthetic choice, a commodity, nor a professionalised activity but rather as an instinctive, embodied response to lived conditions—something unavoidable and embedded in the very structure of daily life and its politics.