There is a detail about this year’s Venice Biennale that is almost too poetic to be true. Everything begins with a hand-drawn map by the curator — a constellation of coordinates orbiting the exhibition’s title, sketching out the thematic architectures that would structure the artist selection. The map exists. The curator does not.
Koyo Kouoh — born in Cameroon, raised in Zurich, and appointed as the first African woman ever to lead the Venice Biennale’s main exhibition — died in May 2025, just days before she was scheduled to reveal her vision to the world. She had spent months in intensive preparation, defining the theoretical framework, selecting the artists and artworks, commissioning catalogue authors, determining the graphic identity, and shaping the architecture of the exhibition spaces. She had done everything except arrive.
The Biennale, with the full support of her family, made the decision to proceed. At the press conference, a short video played of Kouoh saying, “I am the artistic director of the Biennale Arte, and I look forward to seeing you in Venice in May 2026” — followed by a standing ovation from the crowd.That ovation, for a voice on a screen, for an absence that was also a presence, was perhaps the most fitting possible opening to an exhibition titled In Minor Keys.
The Regret: A Voice That Cannot Explain Itself
The loss of Kouoh is not merely personal or institutional. It is curatorial in the deepest sense — because the one thing no exhibition team, however loyal and skilled, can fully restore is the living mind that made its choices.
The show brings together 111 participants from cities including Dakar, Beirut, Paris, and Nashville, selected with attention to what Kouoh described as a “relational geography” — a network of encounters built over a lifetime, where meaning develops through connection rather than category. This is a curatorial logic that lives in the body as much as the brain — in memory, in friendship, in the accumulated instinct of someone who has spent decades moving between Dakar, Cape Town, Zurich, and Venice, understanding something in each place that cannot be reduced to a thesis statement.
The Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement will not be awarded this year, as Kouoh was unable to finalize her selections before she died. It is a small, specific absence, but it carries weight. The Biennale has decided, correctly, not to improvise where she left incompleteness. That restraint is its own form of respect — and its own form of grief.
What we will not have, and cannot fully know we are missing, is the exhibition as Kouoh would have walked visitors through it: the asides, the unexpected pairings, the explanation of why this artist was placed next to that one, and what she heard in the silence between them.
The Theme: Melancholy as Method
And yet. In Minor Keys is, in its very conception, an exhibition that knew something about loss before loss arrived.
Kouoh’s curatorial text invites audiences to “shift to a slower gear and tune in to the frequencies of the minor keys” — to listen for “the songs of those producing beauty in spite of tragedy, the tunes of the fugitives recovering from the ruins, the harmonies of those repairing wounds and worlds.” She was writing about art. She was also, without knowing it, writing her own epitaph for a Biennale she would never see open.
The theme proposes an exhibition attuned to quieter tonalities and lower frequencies, privileging practices that unfold through intimacy, improvisation, and poetic persistence — emphasizing the capacity of art to nourish, sustain, and reconnect. In music, minor keys carry sorrow, yes — but also strangeness, mystery, and the particular kind of beauty that only emerges when the major-key certainties have given way. Kouoh’s vision is explicitly “not a litany of commentary on world events, nor an inattention or escape from compounding crises — rather, a radical reconnection with art’s natural habitat: the emotional, the visual, the sensory, the affective, the subjective.”
This is a significant artistic statement at a moment when biennales have often felt obliged to be news bulletins — to respond, to position, to declare. Kouoh’s exhibition refuses that obligation without retreating into aestheticism. It proposes something harder: that art’s most political act may be to insist on feeling, on slowness, on the kind of attention that the world’s current pace actively discourages.
The Radiance: An Exhibition Built Like a Garden
The installation design for the Central Pavilion, by Wolff Architects, draws inspiration from two novels — One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez and Beloved by Toni Morrison — prioritizing sensory experience over didactic display. The result is intended to be informal, polyphonic, and deliberately unruly.These are not incidental reference points. Both books are about the persistence of the dead among the living, about memory as a force that shapes the present whether acknowledged or not. In 2026, that framework has become something more than literary inspiration.
Kouoh drew on thinkers such as James Baldwin, Édouard Glissant, and Toni Morrison, convening artists who work through improvisation, generosity, and collective imagination — grounding their practices in the blues, the whisper, the island, the courtyard, the creole garden, those “small keys” that hold immense spiritual, cultural, and ecological power. The creole garden is a particularly resonant image: not a designed landscape but a living system, where different species coexist by adaptation and proximity rather than hierarchy. It is how Kouoh conceived of the exhibition — and, one suspects, how she conceived of the world.
A defining feature of the 2026 edition is the strong presence of practices that challenge the dominance of visual perception. Performance, poetry, and spoken word play a central role. The Biennale will open with a poetic procession through the Giardini, inspired by Kouoh’s own Poetry Caravan — a cultural journey she had once undertaken across Africa with nine poets, from Dakar to Timbuktu. To restage it here, in the gardens of Venice, as a tribute to the woman who first imagined it, is a gesture of extraordinary tenderness. A journey she made decades ago, now becoming a procession in her honor.
The scale itself is a statement: 111 artists, significantly fewer than the previous edition, reflecting a curatorial intention to prioritize depth over quantity. In an era of biennale inflation — more artists, more countries, more pavilions, more statements — the decision to do less, and to mean it, is its own form of radicalism.
The Brightest Light: A Biennale That Became Its Own Theme
There is something that no amount of careful curatorial work could have manufactured, and that is the strange coherence that Kouoh’s death has lent her exhibition. In Minor Keys was always going to be about listening to what is usually drowned out, about attending to what persists beneath spectacle. It is now also, unavoidably, a meditation on the way a vision can outlive its author — on how ideas, once genuinely held and carefully tended, continue to sound even after the person who voiced them is gone.
Lubaina Himid will transform the British Pavilion with new work that, in her own words, “looks to a more collaborative future.” Across the Giardini, a Senegalese sculptor who died earlier this year will be represented alongside artists born in the 1990s. The exhibition’s own curatorial text closes with: “The time has come to listen to the minor keys” — words Kouoh wrote knowing she was building something she believed in, not knowing those words would become the last public ones she ever offered the art world. Domus
The music, as she wrote, continues. Venice in 2026 is the proof.
Reporting and references include Artsy, Artnet News, Domus, ArtAsiaPacific, Designboom,Universes in Universe and official materials from La Biennale di Venezia.
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