in minor keys: venice art biennale 2026 reveals its theme

venice art biennale 2026 announces its theme

La Biennale di Venezia officially announces the theme of the 61st International Art Exhibition, In Minor Keys, set to open on May 9 and run through November 22, 2026. The announcement, delivered during a press conference on May 27, 2025, at the historic Sala delle Colonne in Ca’ Giustinian, Venice, marks a deeply emotional and pivotal moment for the institution. Just weeks prior, the art world was shaken by the unexpected passing of appointed curator Koyo Kouoh. With the full support of her family and in collaboration with her core team, La Biennale will move forward with the 2026 exhibition entirely under Kouoh’s conceptual framework, preserving and amplifying the vision she had meticulously shaped in the months leading up to her death.

Kouoh’s curatorial proposal, submitted on April 8, 2025, laid out the philosophical and artistic foundation of In Minor Keys, a project she had been intensely developing since her appointment in late 2024. This included the theoretical texts, artist selections, spatial design, visual identity, and catalogue contributions of the exhibition. With deep conviction, La Biennale affirms that the edition will unfold exactly as she intended. Her legacy now lives through a collective effort carried forward by five professional figures she personally selected to accompany her on this curatorial journey: Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Helene Pereira, Rasha Salti, Siddhartha Mitter, and Rory Tsapayi, who together presented the exhibition’s framework during the press conference. The presence of the team underscored Kouoh’s collaborative ethos and their commitment to transmitting her voice and intentions in their most faithful form.

While anticipation builds for the 2026 edition, take a look at the ongoing 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, available here, and the past 2024 Art Biennale, available here.

the announcement was delivered during a press conference on May 27, 2025 | image by Andrea Avezzu

in minor keys unfolds as a collective score

In Minor Keys draws its name and inspiration from a musical structure often associated with melancholy, improvisation, and intimacy but, in the Venice Art Biennale 2026 context, is transformed into a larger metaphor. Kouoh envisioned a constellation of artistic practices that resonate in quieter registers, that dwell in the fugitive and the fragmentary, and that challenge dominant narratives not through spectacle but through poetic persistence. In her words, the exhibition is ‘a polyphonous assembly of art… convening and communing in convivial collectivity, beaming across the void of alienation and the crackle of conflict.’ Grounded in a profound belief in the artist as a vital interpreter of the social and psychic condition, the Biennale proposes not a didactic commentary on global crises, but a sensory, relational, and transformative experience.

Drawing on references from jazz improvisation, Caribbean poetics, and the metaphor of the Creole garden, the exhibition posits artistic practice as both refuge and radical proposition. The ‘minor keys’ emerge as sonic, social, and spatial metaphors for islands of resistance, for oases of care, for frequencies of beauty in spite of tragedy. Kouoh describes a Biennale in which time is reclaimed from acceleration, where art is neither exhausted nor exhausting, but instead nourishing, fortifying, and necessary. As she wrote, ‘There is no choice but to tune in like the jazzman to these imperative mutations.’

preserving and amplifying Koyo Kouoh’s vision | image by Andrea Avezzu, courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

this edition honors profound loss of its curator, Koyo Kouoh

Originally appointed in December 2024, Kouoh (1967 – 2025) had been the first African woman to be named curator of the Venice Art Biennale. She was globally recognized for her intellectual rigor and unwavering commitment to contemporary art as a site of political and cultural reclamation. As executive director and chief curator of Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town since 2019 and the founding artistic director of RAW Material Company in Dakar, she shaped platforms that amplified overlooked narratives and reimagined the infrastructure of contemporary art from the Global South outward.

Kouoh’s previous exhibitions, such as Still (the) Barbarians (Ireland Biennial, 2016) and Dig Where You Stand (Carnegie International, 2018), stood out for their incisive exploration of colonial residues, diaspora, and the possibility of healing through collective memory. Her appointment to Venice was hailed as a defining moment, with Buttafuoco describing her vision as aligned with ‘the most refined, young, and disruptive intelligences.’ Though her death altered the path of the Biennale, her presence continues to echo in the questions the 2026 edition will ask—and in the curatorial sensitivity now required to carry it forward.

portrait of Koyo Kouoh | photo by Mirjam Kluka, courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia

her legacy now lives through a collective effort | image by Andrea Avezzu, courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, president of the Venice Biennale | image by Andrea Avezzu, courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

Siddhartha Mitter, Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Helene Pereira, Rasha Salti, and Rory Tsapayi | image by Andrea Avezzu, courtesy La Biennale di Venezia