ron laboray studio
61st International Art Exhibition · La Biennale di Venezia · 2026
Disappearance as Perceptual Inquiry
Nauruan National Pavilion · 9 May – 22 November 2026 · Preview: 6–8 May 2026
Ron Laboray has been selected to participate in the 61st International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia — In Minor Keys — running 9 May through 22 November 2026 in Venice, Italy. His work is presented as part of the inaugural Nauruan National Pavilion, an official national participation in the world's oldest and most prestigious international art exhibition.
The Work
Disappearance as Perceptual Inquiry, 2026
Installation — Two Drawings, Black Marker and Enamel on Plastic Drop Cloth, Video Animation · Curated by Camilla Boemio
Ron Laboray presents a multisensory meditation on disappearance as both cultural condition and perceptual phenomenon — dealing with the instability of cultural values and codes, and the influence of dominant paradigms which tend to categorize and cancel what is not compliant.
The installation comprises two large-scale drawings executed in black marker and enamel on plastic drop cloth, each operating as a collision of systems — Western scientific classification, mythological imagery, pop music iconography, and indigenous identity pressed together at monumental scale.
The first, The National Flower of Nauru, a Medieval Mermaid and the cover of Dark Side of the Moon (approx. 3 × 6 meters), layers Nauru's national flower against a medieval mermaid illustration and the iconic cover of Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon — beauty as a site of competing claims, natural and national, commercial and universal. Laboray is among the very few artists in the pavilion to incorporate imagery drawn directly from Nauru itself, rooting the work in the specific ecological and cultural reality the pavilion addresses.
The second, The Dance Steps of the Waltz, an Enlightenment Octopus, and the Colors of Bowie's Lightning Bolt (approx. 6 × 4 meters), overlays an Enlightenment-era illustration of an octopus — emblem of Western taxonomic ambition — with the geometric precision of waltz dance steps, symbols of European cultural refinement and colonial order. Across these configurations burns the electric palette of David Bowie's lightning bolt: transformative power, performative identity, aesthetic rebellion. Where the octopus and the waltz impose system and structure, Bowie fractures them.
The installation continues in a video playlist of Little Richard's Almanac, the collective composed by Laboray and Niki Elliott, which has realized video works with bands of the global counterculture — preserving and amplifying what commercial systems attempt to displace. The LRA video portfolio is displayed on an 80-inch LED monitor, bringing the animation works into the physical space of the installation..
Little Richard's Almanac
Animation in the Minor Keys
Little Richard's Almanac is an experimental animation collective founded by Ron Laboray and Niki Elliott, creating 2D collage-style animated music videos for artists of the global psychedelic and experimental underground.
Koyo Kouoh conceived In Minor Keys as an exhibition attuned to lower frequencies and quieter tonalities — listening to, in her words, “the songs of those producing beauty in spite of tragedy, the tunes of the fugitives recovering from the ruins.” LRA's entire practice inhabits exactly this territory: bands operating outside commercial systems, voices the mainstream attempts to displace, beauty made in the margins and preserved there.
LRA's video playlist forms an integral and structural part of Disappearance as Perceptual Inquiry — bringing the installation into motion, introducing sound into the gallery, and extending the drawings' argument into time-based media. Where the drawings chart what dominant systems attempt to categorize and erase, the animations bear witness to what survives.
Recent LRA works have received recognition at PopCon Indianapolis, Miami International Science Fiction Film Festival, and Paris W
The Nauruan National Pavilion
Imagining Life After Land
“The future inundates present Nauru, the world's smallest island nation, as both a warning and a guide.”
The inaugural Nauruan National Pavilion, Imagining Life After Land, presents Nauru as a place where the consequences of global decision-making have long been lived realities. Addressing environmental decline and its intertwined histories of extractive activity and post-colonial impact, the pavilion positions Nauru at the intersection of ecological urgency and the fragile conditions of territorial survival.
Through the visions of international artists, the pavilion frames disappearance not as spectacle or catastrophe imagery, but as an event that alters knowledge, memory, and presence. Ron Laboray is among the artists selected to inhabit this frame — bringing his investigation of cultural disappearance, perceptual systems, and the politics of preservation into direct dialogue with Nauru's lived experience.
