The 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, In Minor Keys by Koyo Kouoh, will take place from Saturday, May 9 to Sunday, November 22, 2026 (preview on May 6, 7, 8)
Realized according to the curatorial vision of Koyo Kouoh and titled In Minor Keys, Biennale Arte 2026 centers on artistic practices that inhabit fragility, pause, and dissonance with works that construct a different temporality, one made of listening, proximity, and details that resist simplification.
In Minor Keys represents from the outset an invitation to inhabit a slower and more sensitive time, where perception is refined, gestures become more conscious, and the gaze opens to the possibility of grasping what usually escapes notice.
The curatorial guidance bears the signature of Koyo Kouoh, who passed away suddenly on May 10, leaving as a legacy to the Biennale—and to the global art public—a project as radical as it is poetic, one that asks us to slow our pace, to refine our listening, to attune ourselves to those subtle frequencies that inhabit the folds of the world, and that are often suffocated by dominant noise; it is there that the song born from ruins manifests itself, the blues that consoles, the lament that transforms into harmony, and it is there that, with rigor and tenderness, Kouoh invites us to pause.
“There is a reason, after all, why there are people who want to colonize the Moon, and others who dance before it like an ancient friend.”
Through the words of James Baldwin the curatorial text opens, revealing a powerful and multifaceted reflection on human nature and the multiplicity of its visions: on one side the obsession with dominion, control, conquest, and on the other the desire to establish affective, poetic, imaginative relationships with what surrounds us—whether human beings, celestial bodies, or non-human living forms—in a movement that transforms the exhibition space into an environment of listening and relationship, where geographical, identity-based, and linguistic boundaries dissolve, making way for openings, possibilities, forms of cohabitation that center on detail, minimal gesture, and care.
It will be precisely in the spirit of fidelity and gratitude that the La Biennale di Venezia Foundation will fully realize the exhibition project according to the indications left by Kouoh, in agreement with her family and with the direction of her curatorial team, so that her work and commitment may find full expression in every part of the exhibition, just as Kouoh had conceived it.
The Vision In Minor Keys
The title of the Biennale, In Minor Keys, opens the doors to an experience founded on a different depth of vision, on a different availability to listening, evoking the musical structure of minor keys not so much for their technical definition, as for their capacity to activate deep emotional resonances, to suggest interior landscapes, states of the soul, forms of resistance and beauty that emerge powerfully precisely when everything seems to yield.
During the press conference on May 27, it was Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo who read the curatorial text in its entirety, giving voice to Kouoh and restoring with clarity and respect its conceptual richness: minor keys are islands—distinct and vital worlds, scattered among the oceans of contemporary complexity—that configure themselves as gardens, dance floors, residences, studios, rooms, places of everyday life and creation, in which artistic practice intertwines with life and regenerates it, holding within itself the possibility of encounter, reflection, and consolation.
In this diffuse archipelago of oases, where each island is an intimate universe yet open to the other, a radical invitation is affirmed: to slow down, to tune into whispers and lower frequencies, to shift the center of gravity of listening and welcome the unexpected, according to a model inspired by free jazz, where voices maintain their own autonomy and find points of contact, momentary chords, provisional harmonies, in a constantly renegotiated balance between cohesion and dissonance, form and openness.
The poetic reconnection to the ancient world
During the official presentation, evocative images selected by Kouoh herself scrolled behind the curators: embroidered fabrics, flowers, Arabic scripts, symbolic elements that compose a sensitive atlas of personal and collective references, and that embody the profound value of local knowledge, often relegated to the margins of dominant culture or reduced to mere ornament. Here restored to their centrality as living sources of knowledge, relationship, and meaning.
Fabrics become emblematic of Kouoh’s curatorial vision: objects made of time, of repeated gestures, of hands that weave threads, that construct patterns, that narrate stories. Each fabric is an inhabited landscape, a form of language, a threshold between the everyday and the ritual, between the intimate and the political.
Flowers, symbols of oases and minor keys, represent the manifestation of beauty in the most difficult moments, the eruption of joy even where everything seems compromised: each flower is an act of vital resistance, a promise of regeneration, a silent form of hope.
Arabic scripts impose themselves as visual traces of an ancient and stratified knowledge, linked to poetry, philosophy, spirituality, and as testimony to an aesthetic dimension in which thought merges with sign, and sign with voice. In full harmony with the quotation from Patrick Chamoiseau, according to whom “the poems of the ancient world are already precious scores”, Arabic calligraphy offers itself as a visual score of collective memory and as a gateway to forgotten metaphysics, which today can return to illuminate our life practices.
Koyo Kouoh: the first African curator called to lead the Biennale Arte in Venice
Kouoh, Senegalese-Cameroonian, has always placed at the center of her work the necessity to rewrite the canons of global contemporary art by valorizing African, diasporic, and marginalized perspectives, with particular attention to women artists, feminist languages, and the construction of new relationships between knowledge and form.
Since March 2019 she was director of the Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town and was founder of the RAW Material Company in Dakar, a center that works precisely to deconstruct Euro-Western centrality in cultural production with exhibitions that have opened critical spaces on themes such as the body, memory, and decolonization.
Her curatorial approach has dismantled dominant models, bringing attention to forms and cultures often marginalized: she has constructed different geographies, tracing paths that unite artistic sensibilities and cultural responsibility.
Official partner of Biennale Arte will be Maison Bulgari
The details, invited artists, graphic identity, installation project, and list of participating countries in the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia – In Minor Keys will be unveiled during the customary presentation that will take place in Venice on Wednesday, February 25, 2026.
The news announced at the press conference is that Maison Bvlgari will be Exclusive Partner of the International Art Exhibition for three consecutive editions (2026, 2028, 2030).
Founded in Rome in 1884, the High Jewelry Maison has always been committed to supporting contemporary art and dialogue between different cultures.
Also read our in-depth feature on Biennale Architettura 2025: collective intelligence and nature in dialogue among the pavilions.
Article by Lucia Pecoraro.
Portraits of Koyo Kouoh by Mirjam Kluka. The other images by Andrea Avezzù are courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia.
