In Minor Keys: Venice Biennale 2026 Pays Tribute to Koyo Kouoh
The official poster for the 2026 Venice Art Biennale | Courtesy © La Biennale di Venezia
The 61st International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale bears the title In Minor Keys, chosen by curator Koyo Kouoh and conveyed to the Biennale in April 2025, just weeks before her untimely death. The institution decided to realise the exhibition in full accordance with the original project, carried forward by the curatorial team she had assembled: Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Hélène Pereira, Rasha Salti, Siddhartha Mitter and Rory Tsapayi. A total of 111 participants - artists, duos, collectives and organisations - were selected by privileging resonances and affinities between practices from widely different geographies. The conceptual core of the exhibition unfolds through motifs drawn from works capable of engaging both soul and intellect: "Are" (shrines), procession, wonder set against cynicism, oases of spiritual rest, and "Schools" as ecosystems of collective learning. Inspired by literary touchstones such as Toni Morrison's Beloved and Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, the exhibition weaves together worlds and temporal thresholds across the Central Pavilion, the Arsenale and scattered city venues. A performance programme including a poets' procession in the Giardini - a homage to Kouoh's 1999 Poetry Caravan from Dakar to Timbuktu - places the body at the centre as a site of knowledge, memory and collective resistance.