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It will bear the curatorial signature of the late Koyo Kouoh the 61st International Art Exhibition of the La Biennale di Venezia, titled In Minor Keys, which will take place from Saturday, May 9 to Sunday, November 22, 2026 (preview on May 7, 8, and 9) in the spaces of the Giardini, the Arsenale, and various venues across the city.
An edition born in the wake of a painful absence - the passing of the Cameroonian curator on May 10 - it seeks to preserve, honor, and disseminate her ideas. “Take a deep breath. Exhale. Relax your shoulders. Close your eyes.” Kouoh still speaks to us, with the clarity and gentleness that distinguished her curatorial vision, asking us to slow down. In an art system often dominated by urgency, hyperproduction, and spectacle, In Minor Keys chooses the opposite path: that of minor tonalities, low registers, murmurs that resist the background noise.
The “minor keys” are understood as islands, worlds in the midst of oceans, with distinct and extraordinarily rich ecosystems, traversed by complex and fertile social lives. They are spaces where joy coexists with hope, transcendence with care, poetry with the politics of everyday life. Within these lower frequencies lie possibilities for healing and reconnection: with the earth, with the soul, with one another.
The 61st Biennale Arte thus presents itself as a sensory experience: art returns to being a communal act, a collective score capable of strengthening and renewing rather than exhausting. In this sense, In Minor Keys reaffirms the original role of art in society — emotional, visual, sensory, affective, and subjective. Not a device for cultural consumption, but a space of experience.
During the curatorial process, numerous inspirations resonated with the literary references indicated by Kouoh as matrices of her imagination, including Beloved by Toni Morrison and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, works united by their traversal of worlds and temporal thresholds and by a magical realism capable of amplifying the emotional intensity of the narrative.
In the Giardini of the Biennale, a procession of poets inspired by the Poetry Caravan will take place, recalling the journey undertaken by Koyo Kouoh in 1999 together with nine African poets from Dakar to Timbuktu. The performance aims to honor her memory and the tradition of the griots - custodians of collective history and keepers of knowledge and authority - reaffirming the generative power of the spoken word and opening a space for possible spiritual healing.
In this edition, there are 111 participants - including artists, duos, collectives, and organizations - from diverse geographic contexts, selected by Kouoh by privileging resonances and affinities among practices that may be far apart. In Minor Keys thus takes shape as an attempt to restore - and at the same time expand - this geography of relationships, woven over the course of a lifetime and grounded in encounter. Looking toward realities in Salvador, Dakar, San Juan, Beirut, Paris, and Nashville, the Curator envisioned how different scenarios might intertwine in a dialogue among artists and movements, even in the absence of direct ties.
The 61st International Art Exhibition will be accompanied by 99 National Participations and 31 Collateral Events. Seven countries will be taking part for the first time: Republic of Guinea, Republic of Equatorial Guinea, Republic of Nauru, Qatar, Republic of Sierra Leone, Federal Republic of Somalia and Socialist Republic of Vietnam. All countries recognized by the Italian Republic may participate independently by simply notifying the owners of the Pavilions at the Giardini, or by submitting a letter from the relevant governmental authority if they do not have a permanent Pavilion.
At the beginning of 2025, Kouoh entrusted the exhibition design to Wolff Architects (Cape Town), inviting the studio to reflect on the transformative power of the threshold, understood as an opening toward alternative modes of knowledge and experience. The result is an architecture capable of fully embracing each artist’s universe, with particular attention to the sensory dimension of passage between different constellations of practices. In the Central Pavilion at the Giardini and at the Arsenale, large indigo-colored drapes, suspended from the beams down to the ground, mark the thresholds of the spaces, preparing the senses for the discovery of one environment and accompanying the transition to the next.
For the seventeenth consecutive year, La Biennale di Venezia also renews the Biennale Sessions project, aimed at Universities, Academies of Fine Arts, and Institutes of Higher Education and Research, offering special conditions to integrate the exhibition visit into educational programs.
The 2026 Biennale Arte thus invites visitors to marvel, contemplate, imagine, rejoice, and question; choosing to tune into minor keys takes on an almost radical value. Created with the contribution of the professionals directly involved by Kouoh - Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Hélène Pereira, Rasha Salti, Siddhartha Mitter, and Rory Tsapayi - this edition stands as a living legacy. If art still retains a function, In Minor Keys seems to suggest, it is that of teaching us to listen to what does not raise its voice, to recognize value in what does not impose itself, to restore space and time to what, quietly, holds the world together.
All images courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia
Cover image © Andrea Avezzu
