The 2026 edition of the Venice Art Biennale will be realized according to the vision of its late curator, Koyo Kouoh. The exhibition, titled “In Minor Keys,” is set to open on May 9, 2026, and will be completed by Kouoh’s core team, adhering to the plans she developed before her untimely death. At a press conference in Venice on Tuesday, Maria Cristiana Costanzo, the Biennale’s head of press, emphasized Kouoh’s intensive work on the project.
Kouoh was deeply involved in defining the theoretical framework, selecting artists and works, appointing catalogue contributors, determining the exhibition’s graphic identity and spatial design, and engaging directly with the invited participants. Costanzo stated that the plan has the full support of Kouoh’s family and will be preserved and shared as a testament to her dedication and vision. The press event, originally scheduled for May 20, was postponed by a week following Kouoh’s death.
During the presentation, collaborators read texts she had prepared, accompanied by images she had selected, including embroidered fabrics, flowers, and Arabic script, which scrolled across screens behind them.
Kouoh’s lasting vision honored
Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, one of Kouoh’s collaborators, described the exhibition as proposing “a radical connection with art’s natural habitat and role in society.” The exhibit aims to address the sensate and the effective, inviting visitors to marvel, meditate, dream, revel, and reflect in realms where time is not dictated by productivity demands.
Siddhartha Mitter, another collaborator, added: “Artists are channels to and between the minor keys, and listening to them is at the core of the curatorial concept. In Minor Keys stands as a collective score, composed with artists who have built universes of imagination.” Full details of the project, including the list of artists and the exhibition’s layout, will be announced in Venice on February 25, 2026. Koyo Kouoh was one of the most influential curators in the global art world and a champion of Black artists from Africa and the diaspora.
Born in Douala, Cameroon, she was the executive director of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town. Kouoh would have been the first African woman to curate the Venice Biennale. Her passing in a hospital in Basel, Switzerland, prompted a wave of tributes from across the art world.
At the presentation, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, the president of the Biennale, described her as “a thinker who whispers from another place” and “a drawer of new maps.” Kouoh had referred to the Biennale as “the center of gravity for art for over a century.” She believed that the 2026 edition would carry meaning for the current world and the future we aim to create.
