The late curator Koyo Kouoh’s vision for the 2026 Venice Biennale will go forward as planned, organizers announced Tuesday, just weeks after her unexpected death. Titled “In Minor Keys,” the 61st International Art Exhibition will be realized by the curatorial team Kouoh had assembled, who pledged to carry out the show as she conceived it—down to the artists, theoretical framework, and catalogue she had begun shaping last year.
Held in the Sala delle Colonne at Ca’ Giustinian, the headquarters of La Biennale in San Marco, Venice, the press event opened with a short video of the late Kouoh stating, “I am the artistic director of the Biennale Arte, and I look forward to seeing you in Venice in May 2026,” followed by a round of applause from the crowd.
Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, president of La Biennale di Venezia, noted that the organizers decided to persevere with Kouoh’s vision with support from her family and curatorial team.
“We are realizing today her exhibition as she designed it, as she imagined it, and as she gave it to me personally,” he said.
“In Minor Keys” will be the title and theme of the 61st International Art Exhibition, which will run from May 9 to November 22, 2026. Kouoh worked intensively to develop the project’s theoretical framework and design before her untimely death earlier this month. Between her appointment as the edition’s curator in late 2024 and May 2025, she had selected many of the artists and artworks, as well as authors for the catalogue, organizers noted.
The major concepts of next year’s edition were outlined by peers and collaborators that Kouoh had handpicked during the course of the development of the exhibition. They include advisors Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, a London-based art historian and curator; Marie Helene Pereira, a Berlin-based curator with ties to both Dakar, Senegal, and Beirut; Berlin-based writer and curator Rasha Salti; and New York-based journalist Siddhartha Mitter, the editor-in-chief of the exhibition catalogue.
Koyo Kouoh. Photo: ©Mirjam Kluka.
Pereira noted that in music, the minor keys are often associated with strangeness, melancholy, and sorrow. “They hold the cadencies melodies and silences of resonant walls that gather and create together a polyphonous assembly of art, convening and communing in convivial collectivity, beaming across the void of alienation and the crackle of conflict,” she explained of the exhibition’s title.
The 61st edition of La Biennale is “grounded in a deep belief in artists as the vital interpreters of the social and psychic condition and catalyst of new relations and possibilities,” Pereira added, underscoring that the exhibition will feature the artists who were chosen by Kouoh. These are artists whose practices push the boundaries of form and “seamlessly blend into society.”
Kouoh’s assistant Rory Tsapayi recited the verses composed by the late artistic director in 2022: “We need to be with love again. We need to dance. We need to make and give food. We need to rest and restore. We need to breathe. We need the radicality of joy. The time has come.”
Kouoh was the first African woman tapped to helm the illustrious biannual art extravaganza. The art world was shocked by her sudden death when the news was confirmed on May 10 by the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA), her home institution in Cape Town, South Africa, where she served as executive director and chief curator.
Born in 1967 in Cameroon, Kouoh grew up in Zurich, Switzerland. She became the co-founding artistic director of Raw Material Company art center in Dakar in 2009. She was a member of the curatorial teams for documenta 12 and 13 in 2007 and 2012, respectively. Kouoh also served as curator of the artistic program of 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair from 2013 to 2017. Her appointment to curate the 2026 edition of the Venice Biennale was announced in December.
Additional details about the project—including the list of participating artists and the exhibition design—will be announced on February 25, 2026.
Featuring a central curated exhibition, national pavilions, and independent shows across La Serenissima, the Venice Biennale is one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious cultural festivals. Often dubbed the “Olympics of the art world,” nearly 700,000 people—or about 3,321 visitors daily—attended the 60th International Art Exhibition entitled “Foreigners Everywhere,” which was curated by Adriano Pedrosa.
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
