The Venice Biennale will move forward with its 2026 edition—even after the unexpected death of its curator, Koyo Kouoh, earlier this month.
On Tuesday, the Biennale revealed that it intended to realize Kouoh’s exhibition, which she had already begun to devise prior to her passing. The exhibition’s leaders said she had already begun selecting artists, thinking through their commissions, and building out programming, and that she had also come up with her show’s central concept.
Her exhibition will be titled “In Minor Keys,” and it is still due to open on May 9, as was initially planned. It is going ahead with a team of five advisers that Kouoh had herself selected: curators Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Helena Pereira, and Rasha Salti; Siddartha Mitter, a critic who will serve as the editor of written materials associated with Kouoh’s Biennale; and Rory Tsapayi, who will act as an assistant to the team.
At a press conference on Tuesday, Cristiana Costanzo, the Biennale’s lead press officer, said that the choice to realize the show was done “with the full support” of Kouoh’s family. According to the Biennale, Kouoh worked on the show between mid-October, when the Biennale accepted her proposal, and early May.
Kouoh died earlier this month at 57 after a recent cancer diagnosis. She was formerly executive director and chief curator of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town, South Africa. Born in Cameroon and raised in Switzerland, she was the second African-born curator to be appointed the organizer the Biennale’s main exhibition and one of the very few women ever to receive the honor.
Her passing appeared to have come suddenly, occurring less than two weeks before she was expected to reveal her Biennale’s theme.
Tuesday’s press conference began with a brief video of a smiling Kouoh welcoming everyone to Venice. Those in the press room stood and applauded once the video concluded.
Salti, one of the curatorial advisers, started the presentation of Kouoh’s concept with an invitation to slow down, as written by Kouoh herself: “Take a deep breath. Exhale. Drop your shoulders. And close your eyes.” This, Kouoh’s text explained, befits the show itself. “The minor keys refuse orchestral bombast,” Salti said, reading Kouoh’s words.
Koyo Kouoh.
Dave Southwood for ARTnews
“The minor keys ask for listening that calls on the emotions and sustains them in return,” Pereira, another adviser, explained. “The minor keys are also small islands with endlessly rich ecosystems.” Beckhurst Feijoo followed, noting that there would be an emphasis on “the sensory, the affective, and the subjective.”
Moreover, Mitter said, “In refusing the spectacle of horror, it has come time to listen to the minor keys, to listen to the sotto voce, to find the oases, the islands, where the dignity of all living beings is regarded.” He said there would be a focus on artists whose practices “seamlessly bleed into society.”
Behind these advisers played a slideshow of images: pictures of cave paintings and city streets, images of tiny isles surrounded by blue oceans. The advisers also quoted from a litany of influential thinkers, including Édouard Glissant, a writer born in Martinique, based in France, and known for his writings on concepts such as opacity; the American novelist Toni Morrison, known for books such as Beloved; Patrick Chamusso, who was born in Mozambique and became a hero to many during the fight against Apartheid in South Africa; and James Baldwin, an American poet and novelist known for books such as Giovanni’s Room.
The Venice Biennale is commonly considered the world’s greatest art exhibition, with a main exhibition surveying a theme or a tendency taking place alongside presentations selected by countries from across the globe.
No curator of any Biennale edition staged in the past century has died during the making of their exhibition, but there have been editions that were disrupted by world events. In 1974, a show for “democratic and anti-fascist culture” was held in place of main exhibition as a protest against the Pinochet regime in Chile, and in 2020, the Covid pandemic forced the Biennale to push its planned 2021 edition to 2022.
The Biennale’s presentation featured an Instagram Story from Kouoh.
Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, the Biennale’s president, insisted that the 2026 edition was not severely disrupted, however. “We are realizing today her exhibition as she designed it, as she imagined it, as she gave it to me personally,” he said, adding, “La Biennale is doing today what it has been doing for 100 years.”
Buttafuoco movingly recounted the moment when Kouoh first found out that she had been selected to curate the Biennale in 2024. “May I tell this to my mother?” she asked him.
“Koyo’s work is speaking to us, facing the work of curators before her and the ones that will come after her,” said Buttafuoco. To that end, the conference closed out with words from Tsapayi, the curatorial team’s assistant, who read a piece of writing penned by Kouoh in 2022.
“And quite frankly, I am tired,” said Tsapayi, reading Kouoh’s words. “People are tired. We are all tired. The world is tired. Even art itself is tired. Perhaps the time has come. We need something else. We need to heal. We need to laugh. We need to be with beauty, and lots of it. We need to play, we need to be with poetry. We need to be with love again. We need to dance. We need to rest and restore. We need to breathe. We need the radicality of joy. The time has come.”
Though an artist list for Kouoh’s show will not be announced until next year, some countries have already revealed their picks for their national pavilions at the 2026 Biennale. The national pavilions are not part of the main exhibition and therefore are not related to Kouoh’s curatorial vision.
