Biennale Arte 2026: In Minor Keys
The 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, In Minor Keys by Koyo Kouoh
Arsenale and Central Pavilion
Saturday 9 May to Sunday 22 November 2026
Associated text
Catalogue essay
For more than three decades, Dublin-based artist Alan Phelan has worked across a range of disciplines, from sculpture and printmaking to video. Since 2018, however, Phelanโs practice has become increasingly entwined with the Joly screen process โ a short-lived, early colour photography method invented in 1894 by John Joly, an Irish physicist and professor of geology at Trinity College Dublin. Jolyโs pioneering work created the first practical and stable additive process for producing colour images from a single photographic plate. His technique used black-and-white film in conjunction with a screen filter made of thin red, green, and blue (RGB) lines, which laid the groundwork for later screen-plate photographic technologies like the
Lumiรจre brothersโ Autochrome.
In reviving this technically demanding analogue process, Phelan has embraced and personalised the distinctive Joly aesthetic, characterised by RGB patterns and geometries. His ongoing body of unique, non-editioned Joly screen photographs draws on a fusion of art-historical and cultural references, chronicled within sometimes elaborate titles. The artistโs ambition is to cultivate a visual history for the Joly process where none previously existed.
Falsified, fictional, doctored, or queered, yet anchored by real people and actual events, these โcounterfactualโ histories span five centuries of image-making that predates the invention of photography itself.
In photographs of contemporary floral arrangements, Phelanโs references include seventeenth-century Dutch flower painting โ a genre associated with western imperialism and exoticism. Throughout the Golden Age, paintings contained vanitas (or hidden messages), variously linked to sexuality, the transience of beauty, and the inevitability of death. In a similar vein, Phelanโs self-portraits incorporate codes and signifiers (clothing, props, innuendo) that connect to the performance of queer identities and subcultures across the history of photography โ from Robert Mapplethorpe and Jimmy DeSana to Fรฉlix Gonzรกlez-Torres.
Unlike most photographic prints, which normally exist as reproducible elements of larger editions, Phelanโs Joly photographs are one-off, autonomous artworks that embody an illuminated intensity, small scale, and objecthood. Best observed within darkened environments, they are lit from behind by LED panels. Phelan often employs bespoke presentation devices of
his own design, crafted from repurposed antique furniture, scientific instrument cases, cake boxes, and brass ribbon frames.
In recent years, Phelanโs interest in the Joly screen aesthetic and process has infiltrated his public artworks as well, in particular his hyacinth sculptures (both papier-mรขchรฉ and augmented reality) and the large, 3D-printed, RGB Sconce, Hold Your Nose (2021) for Dublinโs City Hall. Other interventions in the public realm have rendered architectural details and fence railings in RGB colours, with the palette gradually becoming a motif for expanded Joly exhibition-making. Similarly, windowpanes and glazed doors have been striped in RGB printed vinyl, casting colourful refractions onto floor, ceiling, and walls, as if transforming spaces into camera interiors, placing the viewer inside the process itself.
Given Phelanโs extensive critical engagement with contemporary art โ through writing, criticism, and experimental publishing โ it seems fitting that text art would manifest in his practice as an unyielding narrative impulse. Examples include an ongoing series of RGB text paintings (featuring short, pithy statements) and a wall text from 2019, which reads: โWhen the Idea is Extinguished, the Word Sparklesโ. This line, taken from Jean Genetโs unfinished epic poem Fragments (published 1990), emerged during Phelanโs research into the French writer for Folly & Diction (2020), a music video focusing on Joly and his collaborator, Henry Dixon, that recounts a tale of loss, abandonment, and obsolescence.
Across Phelanโs ลuvre, meaning emerges in the purposeful gaps and slippages between text and image. Neither anachronistic nor fully rooted in the contemporary moment, meaning, like Jolyโs near-forgotten process, is transitory, contested, and subject to erasure.
โJoanne Laws
GUIDE
Since 2018, Alan Phelan has explored the Joly screen process, an early colour photography method invented in 1894 by the Irish physicist John Joly. The first practical and stable additive process for producing colour images from a single photographic plate, it used black-and-white film in conjunction with a screen filter made of thin red, green, and blue (RGB) lines, laying the groundwork for later technologies like the Lumiรจre brothersโ Autochrome.
The artistโs unique Joly screen photographs draw on a fusion of art-historical and cultural references, cultivating a visual history for the Joly process where none existed. Fictional, doctored or queered, these โcounterfactualโ histories span five centuries of image-making, from Dutch flower painting to the performance of queer identities and subcultures in photography. Lit from behind by LED panels, sometimes in presentation devices made from antique furnishings, Phelanโs Joly photographs embody an illuminated intensity, small scale, and objecthood.
Phelan has extended the Joly process into public art projects and architectural interventions โ including new RGB and text-based works discreetly placed in the Biennale venues. In the gaps and slippages that he explores between text and image, meaning is neither anachronistic nor fully contemporary, but rather transitory, contested, and subject to erasure.
โJoanne Laws
The 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, In Minor Keys by Koyo Kouoh