Venice Biennale 2026: A Global Celebration of Art

A Vision Realized: Koyo Kouoh’s In Minor Keys Takes Center Stage

By the time visitors drift off the vaporetto and into the green expanse of the Giardini della Biennale, the story of Koyo Kouoh’s final, posthumous exhibition is already part of the city’s lore. Announced in late 2024 and shaped until her passing in 2025, In Minor Keys is less a theme than an atmosphere, a low, sustained tone that threads through 111 artists, collectives, and artist-led organizations gathered from every corner of the globe. It is a biennale not of bombast but of murmurs, of intimacies that travel quietly across oceans.

Born in Douala and long based between Dakar and Cape Town, Kouoh forged her curatorial language in spaces that rarely enjoyed the glare of Western institutions. At RAW Material Company in Dakar, the independent art center she founded, she cultivated a practice rooted in conversation, hospitality, and rigorous inquiry. That sensibility saturates In Minor Keys, an exhibition that privileges resonance over representation, affinities over categories. Instead of a census of nations, she mapped what she once called a geography of relations, tracing how artists in places as distant as Salvador, Beirut, San Juan, and Nashville might find each other through shared questions of memory, repair, and spiritual connection.

After Kouoh’s death, La Biennale made an unusually tender commitment: the exhibition would be realized exactly as she had conceived it, carried forward by the curatorial team she had personally assembled. Advisors Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Hélène Pereira, and Rasha Salti now work alongside editor-in-chief Siddhartha Mitter and research assistant Rory Tsapayi, moving frequently between Venice and Dakar. In their hands, In Minor Keys has become a work of collective devotion: months of seminars under the mango trees at RAW, long-distance calls that stretch late into the night, and meticulous negotiations with artists whose practices hinge on nuance rather than spectacle.

From the outset, the team resisted the familiar biennale impulse toward grand statements and definitive positions. Instead, they placed their trust in what Kouoh often called undercurrents: shrines and resting places, processions and schools, creole gardens and threshold spaces that might invite visitors not to race through a checklist but to dwell, to listen. The biennale’s conceptual motifs function as overlapping streams rather than rigid sections, allowing one work to drift from shrine to procession, from classroom to garden, depending on how each visitor moves through the exhibition.

One of the most visible gestures of continuity with Kouoh’s own history is a performance at the heart of the Giardini. On several days throughout the exhibition, a slow-moving procession of poets winds its way between the pavilions, voices rising and falling in multiple languages. The performance is inspired by Kouoh’s 1999 project Poetry Caravan, a legendary journey she organized from Dakar to Timbuktu with a group of African poets and griots. In Venice, instead of dusty Sahelian roads, the procession traverses gravel paths and clipped lawns, yet the air trembles with a similar urgency: that words might still be able to hold grief, anger, and desire without collapsing into noise.

As visitors encounter this procession, they are not merely spectators but potential participants. A listening crowd becomes an impromptu choir; a child repeats a line of verse in a language she does not yet understand; an elderly couple, pausing on a bench, lets the syllables settle over them like incense. The curators encourage this porousness between artwork and audience, echoing Kouoh’s conviction that exhibitions are not static arrangements of objects but living architectures of relation. In this sense, In Minor Keys is as much a choreography of bodies and breaths as it is a gathering of paintings, films, and installations.

That choreography extends behind the scenes too. Kouoh’s team speaks often of their duty not to monumentalize her, but to keep faith with the agility, humor, and restlessness that defined her practice. Rather than framing In Minor Keys as a mausoleum to a departed curator, they treat it as a continuation, a conversation she began and that they are now tasked with carrying forward. The result is an exhibition that feels less like a eulogy than a shared inhale, an opportunity for artists and audiences alike to take stock of what it means to live, and make art, when the world itself seems exhausted.

Navigating the Labyrinth: Key Venues and National Pavilions to Explore

The geography of the Venice Biennale is a labyrinth of water, brick, and history, and in 2026 In Minor Keys infuses its familiar spaces with a new kind of intimacy. The exhibition unfolds primarily across the Giardini della Biennale and the vast Arsenale di Venezia, two anchor sites whose architectures could not be more different. The Giardini, with its dappled light and stately trees, feels almost pastoral, dotted with permanent national pavilions that have become symbols in their own right. The Arsenale, a monumental complex of former shipyards and armories, carries a muscular, industrial presence: long brick halls with timber beams where ships were once assembled now house fragile films, intricate sculptures, and sound works that pulse through the air like sonar.

Stepping into the Giardini this year, the visitor senses an added layer of tension. National pavilions, those stubborn reminders of the nation-state within an exhibition that otherwise seeks to complicate borders, are more politically charged than ever. In a world strained by wars, contested elections, and shifting alliances, some pavilions are confidently present, while others bear the ghosts of delays, internal disputes, or quiet withdrawals. The absence of certain flags feels as eloquent as their presence, a map of who can, and cannot, appear in this global conversation at a given moment.

Among the most closely watched contributions is the Australia Pavilion, nestled against the pines at the far edge of the Giardini. Here, Lebanese-Australian artist Khaled Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino present an immersive installation that spills subtle sound and light onto the path outside. Their presence was far from guaranteed: after being initially selected to represent Australia, they were dramatically dropped in early 2025 amid a storm of political controversy, only to be reinstated following an independent review and public outcry. In 2026, that history clings to the pavilion like a faint aftertaste, giving Sabsabi’s spiritual, Sufi-inflected work an added poignancy. Inside, visitors remove their shoes, step onto soft surfaces, and find themselves enveloped by low-frequency murmurs and shifting projections that encourage quiet reflection on migration, faith, and collective responsibility.

A short walk away, the Austria Pavilion hums with a very different energy. Choreographer and performance artist Florentina Holzinger brings the language of the body crashing into the world of national representation. Known for her fearless, often confrontational pieces that merge stunt work, dance, and theatrical spectacle, Holzinger transforms the pavilion into a kind of training ground or ritual arena. At scheduled times, performers strain, lift, plunge, and glide through space, their exertion underscored by amplified breath and the squeak of soles against a polished floor. The pavilion becomes both gymnasium and stage, exploring how women’s bodies in particular are disciplined, desired, surveilled, and celebrated.

Across the lagoon, the Cyprus Pavilion takes up residence in one of the temporary venues scattered through the city’s palazzi and warehouses. Artist Marina Xenofontos, working with curator Kyle Dancewicz, constructs an environment where memory seems to flicker between analog and digital states. Video loops shimmering across the walls are intercut with fragments of domestic architecture and sculptural gestures that evoke both the construction boom and the dislocations of recent Cypriot history. Visitors navigate between fragile structures and projected light, piecing together a narrative in which personal recollection rubs against collective myth and geopolitical fracture.

Beyond these high-profile pavilions, Venice itself becomes an extended, liquid campus for In Minor Keys. Off-site projects spill into sites like Forte Marghera, where the old Austrian powder magazine hosts a collaborative project by Temitayo Ogunbiyi, Uriel Orlow, and Fabrice Aragno. Here, undulating sculptures, moving-image works, and botanical maps invite audiences into a choreography of wandering, play, and rest. The marshy outskirts of the lagoon seep into the installations: wind rustles through nearby trees, the smell of brine mingles with that of damp stone, and visitors find themselves momentarily forgetting where inside ends and outside begins.

In the Arsenale, the central exhibition braids together works from every continent under the headings of shrines, processions, schools, and spaces of rest. Yet even here, the nation-state whispers from the margins. Some countries, mired in political crises or budget cuts, have minimized or suspended their presence, leading to empty rooms or quietly repurposed spaces. Other pavilions appear to have been assembled at the eleventh hour, their installations still faintly smelling of fresh paint and sawdust. The contrasts are telling: in a biennale that foregrounds slowness and care, not every national bureaucracy has been able—or willing—to keep pace.

For visitors, this patchwork of presences, absences, and improvisations contributes to a more complex understanding of what the biennale actually is. It is not merely a parade of slick, well-funded showcases, but a fragile ecosystem in which artists, curators, diplomats, and cultural agencies negotiate, argue, and occasionally fail. Moving between the assured serenity of long-established pavilions and the urgent, provisional character of last-minute spaces, one senses the geopolitical vibrations undergirding the entire project. In Minor Keys does not pretend to smooth out those tensions. Instead, it gently asks: what might it mean to make space for vulnerability amid the grand architecture of the world’s most watched art exhibition.

Artists in Harmony: Spotlighting Key Voices and Perspectives

If the 2024 biennale was defined by sheer volume, with hundreds of participants jostling for attention, In Minor Keys feels like a carefully tuned ensemble. Kouoh invited 111 participants, a constellation that balances legendary figures with younger voices, established institutions with artist-led initiatives. The result is an intergenerational dialogue that stretches from artists born in the 1940s to those emerging in the late 1990s, their works placed not in didactic lineages but in subtle contrapuntal relations.

In one of the shrine-like spaces of the Arsenale, visitors encounter the work of Nick Cave, whose practice has long moved between sculpture, performance, and social choreography. Here, Cave’s signature Soundsuits—those riotously textured, full-body garments made from beads, raffia, buttons, and discarded objects—are not arranged as a spectacular army but as a more intimate gathering. A single suit, glinting under a low spotlight, is flanked by video documentation of processions in which community participants donned these sculptural skins. The rustle of raffia, the muffled thump of steps, the occasional peal of laughter: together, they reveal Cave’s practice as less about costume than about collective becoming, about who we might be when we inhabit a body that refuses easy classification.

Nearby, a sculptural installation by Wangechi Mutu unfurls like an otherworldly grove. Born in Nairobi and long based in New York, Mutu has spent decades crafting hybrid beings that collapse the boundaries between human, animal, machine, and plant. For In Minor Keys, she extends this language into the register of the creole garden, populating the space with sinuous bronze figures whose limbs echo the twisting roots of mangrove trees and the coiled grace of snakes. Their surfaces are pitted and scarred, as if weathered by salt and time, yet iridescent pigments catch the light, suggesting resilience rather than ruin. Visitors weave between them as they would among living trees, feeling their own bodies subtly recalibrated by this forest of guardians.

Elsewhere, Kader Attia’s work continues his long-term engagement with repair, colonial violence, and the politics of the archive. In a dimly lit gallery, vitrines display broken objects—ceramic vessels, carved masks, fragments of architectural ornament—each bearing traces of repair: sutures of thread, metal staples, visible joins that refuse invisibility. Projected on the adjacent wall, interviews with philosophers, activists, and healers explore the idea that to repair is not to erase a wound but to honor it, to acknowledge the histories it carries. In the context of In Minor Keys, Attia’s insistence on visible repair resonates deeply with Kouoh’s desire to build an exhibition that does not mask global trauma, but seeks forms of beauty that can coexist with it.

The exhibition’s attention to intergenerational dialogue is palpable. Veteran figures such as Laurie Anderson share space with younger artists whose practices were shaped in the digital age. Anderson’s contribution, a layered sound work that threads spoken word with music and ambient recordings, spills gently into a neighboring gallery where an emerging artist from Nairobi manipulates live video feeds in real time. The effect is of a cross-temporal jam session, one that underscores how questions of language, technology, and embodiment have evolved yet remain linked.

Crucially, In Minor Keys also foregrounds artist-led organizations as protagonists in their own right. The Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute, founded by curator and artist Jim Chuchu and colleagues, appears not merely as a partner but as a participant, presenting archival materials, films, and commissions that trace the evolution of Kenya’s contemporary art scene. In another section, RAW Material Company’s presence extends beyond its role as Kouoh’s base in Dakar. Posters from past exhibitions, photo documentation of public programs, and recordings of long, meandering conversations reveal RAW as an ongoing experiment in how institutions might be reimagined as spaces of study, conviviality, and political engagement.

Other artist-led initiatives, from G.A.S. Foundation in Lagos to Denniston Hill in upstate New York, appear throughout the section known as Schools, not as didactic classrooms but as living, sometimes messy ecosystems. Their inclusion reflects a subtle but important shift in biennale logic. Rather than showcasing only individual genius, In Minor Keys insists on the importance of collective infrastructures: the residencies, reading groups, and community workshops that allow fragile practices to thrive in the face of market pressure and political precarity.

Across the exhibition, this emphasis on harmony is never naïve. The dialogues are often dissonant, full of disagreement and friction. A film on land dispossession in Latin America confronts a sculptural meditation on climate grief from the Pacific; a sound work addressing police violence in a major US city reverberates against a delicate installation about queer intimacy in South Asia. Yet Kouoh’s score, as realized by her team, allows these differences to coexist without forced resolution. Visitors are invited to move through overlapping worlds, to hold multiple truths at once, and to understand that harmony, in this context, is less about agreement than about the capacity to listen.

In Minor Keys: Unpacking the Exhibition’s Conceptual Motifs

The title In Minor Keys is not a metaphor to be decoded once and set aside; it is a method, a way of inhabiting the exhibition. In music, minor keys often carry associations of melancholy, introspection, and unresolved longing. They bend away from triumphant closure, lingering instead in a register of tenderness or unease. Kouoh seizes on this musical structure and extends it into a curatorial proposition: what if an exhibition refused the major key rhetoric of spectacle and progress, opting instead for the subtle, the subjective, the quietly transformative.

Jazz improvisation offers one important touchstone. Throughout the Arsenale, wall texts and listening stations allude to sessions where musicians circle around a theme, departing and returning, layering solos over a steady pulse. Likewise, In Minor Keys is organized not by strict sections but by motifs that drift in and out of focus—Shrines, Procession or Invocation, Schools, Rest, the Threshold, and the Creole Garden. Works do not sit neatly in one motif; rather, they slide between them, improvising relations as visitors chart their own routes. A video of a funeral ceremony might function simultaneously as shrine and procession; an installation about community gardening becomes both rest and school.

Caribbean poetics form another deep undercurrent. The notion of the creole garden, drawn from Afro-Caribbean horticultural practices, appears in texts and spatial gestures throughout the exhibition. In such gardens, plants from different continents grow side by side, their roots tangling in a shared, improvised ecology. They are spaces of subsistence and symbolism, where medicinal herbs, food crops, and ritual plants coexist. In Venice, this metaphor translates into intimate zones where chairs, cushions, and low platforms are scattered among artworks, inviting visitors to pause. Potted plants and projected images of mangroves, sugarcane fields, and urban community gardens hint at the layered histories of forced migration and self-determined cultivation that shaped the modern world.

The four primary conceptual motifs—shrines, rest, procession, and schools—serve as portals into this broader imaginary. Shrines are not treated as static altars, but as living sites of presence within absence. Rest is elevated to a political and spiritual necessity, a response to what Kouoh described as a global exhaustion. Procession becomes both a literal and metaphorical movement through the world, from carnival to protest march. Schools are less about accreditation than about the informal, fugitive ways people learn together in kitchens, backyards, and temporary studios.

Literary echoes reverberate through these motifs. Without ever resorting to didactic illustration, the exhibition nods to works like Toni Morrison’s Beloved, whose haunted landscapes of slavery and maternal grief have long informed Black diasporic thought, and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, with its swirling temporalities and magical realist treatment of history’s repetitions. In wall texts and reading rooms, lines from these and other texts surface like fragments of a shared dream, inviting visitors to bring their own reading histories into dialogue with the artworks.

The exhibition’s minor key is not synonymous with resignation. Rather, it seeks refuge and beauty in the very midst of tragedy. In one gallery, a delicate installation of hand-stitched textiles recounts stories of environmental devastation, yet the care embedded in each stitch refuses despair. In another, an audio piece layers field recordings of protests with the soft susurrus of waves and rustling leaves, suggesting that resistance and rest are not mutually exclusive but deeply intertwined. Throughout, the curatorial team has resisted the temptation to smooth over complexity. The exhibition acknowledges that we are living through a time of overlapping crises—climate catastrophe, war, inequality, and resurgent authoritarianism—yet it insists that art can still offer spaces of resonance where individuals might catch their breath, recalibrate their senses, and imagine otherwise.

Moving through In Minor Keys, one comes to understand that its conceptual structure is less about naming themes than about tuning oneself to a particular frequency. To walk from shrine to school, from procession to rest, is to experiment with different modes of attention. Perhaps you slow down in front of a small photograph that another visitor breezes past. Perhaps a line of poetry heard in the Giardini returns hours later, while you are seated on a cushion beneath a projected mango tree. The exhibition’s true architecture lies in these resonances, the ways in which works, words, and bodies brush against one another over the course of a day, or a week, or an entire season.

A Sensory Symphony: Experiencing Art Beyond the Visual

Although the Venice Biennale has long been associated with the visual spectacle of painting and sculpture, In Minor Keys invites visitors to engage with art as a fully embodied experience. From the first steps into the Arsenale, sound is a constant companion: low frequencies you feel in your chest, murmured voices, sudden bursts of song that drift across galleries. Smell, too, has been carefully considered. In one room, the faint aroma of coffee lingers, conjuring evenings in Dakar where artists and thinkers gathered over small cups to argue and dream. In another, the sharp scent of citrus, sourced from groves on nearby islands, infuses a sculptural installation about migration routes across the Mediterranean.

The exhibition’s commitment to slowness is most palpable in spaces designed explicitly for rêverie. Cushions and low benches are positioned not as afterthoughts but as integral components of the installations. Visitors are encouraged to sit, lie down, and linger. In a dimly lit chamber, a large-scale video projection shows a mangrove swamp at dusk, filmed in lingering, unhurried takes. Fireflies pulse against indigo water, bird calls echo in the distance, and the screen’s edges occasionally blur as if filmed through breath on glass. The work is less a documentary than an invitation to sink into another rhythm of time, to register the fragile ecosystems that both sustain and are imperiled by human life.

Performance, in In Minor Keys, is never far from the surface. The curatorial team has conceived a program that treats the body as a site of knowledge and memory, deploying dance, ritual, and everyday gesture as tools of inquiry. In one recurring piece, performers enter a gallery barefoot, carrying small stools. They sit among visitors, hum barely audible melodies, and then, without warning, begin to trace slow, spiraling movements with their arms. The action is subtle enough that some onlookers do not immediately recognize it as performance. Over time, a quiet energy accumulates in the space, a sense that something is being remembered or transmitted beyond language.

Multisensory installations extend this embodied thinking. An artist from the Caribbean has constructed a room in which the floor is covered with soft, springy material reminiscent of dried seaweed or sugarcane bagasse. As visitors walk, the surface gives slightly underfoot, activating hidden sensors that trigger fragments of sound—snatches of folk songs, the creak of wooden boats, waves hitting a shore lined with broken coral. The effect is both playful and disorienting. One becomes acutely aware of each step, of weight, of balance, of the privilege of mobility in a world where so many journeys are undertaken in peril.

Even within more traditional media, the sensory emphasis is pronounced. A series of large-scale drawings, for instance, is displayed at a height slightly lower than usual, inviting viewers to lean in closely. The graphite marks, dense and layered, give off a faint metallic sheen under the lights. Looking becomes almost tactile; one can imagine the pressure of the artist’s hand, the repetitive motion of wrist and shoulder over days and weeks. In another section, a sound installation asks visitors to rest their palms on a long, polished wooden beam. Vibrations travel through the wood into the body, carrying recordings of drum circles, heartbeats, and distant thunder. Listening here is not an activity of the ears alone; it is something felt in bone and muscle.

The overall effect is that of a sensory symphony played at a low volume, rewarding those willing to attune themselves. Rather than overwhelming visitors with simultaneous noise and image, the exhibition folds experiences into one another like overlapping melodies. A poem heard in the Giardini resurfaces as a printed fragment in a reading room at the Arsenale. A texture underfoot recalls a textile seen hours before. By the end of a day, the boundaries between works begin to blur in memory, not because they are indistinct, but because they have entered into a shared internal archive of sensations.

For all its emphasis on subjectivity, the exhibition remains sharply attuned to contemporary urgencies. Installations dealing with climate change, displacement, and systemic violence do not scream their messages; they hum them. A room filled with slowly melting ice blocks, for instance, is cooled just enough that they will last the duration of the exhibition, but not without visible change. Visitors can hear the intermittent drip of water into steel basins, can smell the faint mineral tang as it evaporates. The piece is both a meditation on planetary fragility and a demonstration of how the smallest sensory cues can carry immense emotional weight.

Echoes of the Past: Remembering Issa Samb and Beverly Buchanan

At the heart of In Minor Keys lies a pair of shrines devoted to two artists whose lives and practices profoundly shaped Kouoh’s thinking: Senegalese artist, poet, and philosopher Issa Samb, and African American sculptor and installation artist Beverly Buchanan. Far from conventional retrospectives, these spaces operate as living rooms of remembrance, places where the philosophies of Samb and Buchanan continue to act upon the present.

The shrine to Issa Samb evokes, in condensed form, the legendary courtyard in Dakar where he lived and worked for decades. As a co-founder of Laboratoire Agit’Art, an avant-garde collective that emerged in the 1970s, Samb transformed that open-air space into a constantly evolving assemblage of sculptures, found objects, and ephemera. In the Arsenale, fragments of that environment reappear: weathered chairs, painted boards, masks, bundles of fabric, all arranged in a careful yet seemingly improvised constellation. Photographs and film footage show Samb reciting poetry, debating politics, or simply sitting beneath a tree, surrounded by friends and collaborators. The air in the room is thick with incense and the faint scent of dust and charcoal, conjuring afternoons in Dakar when, under a changing sky, ideas were allowed to meander without the pressure of conclusion.

For Kouoh, Samb was not just an artistic influence but a mentor, a living example of how an artist might inhabit the world on their own terms. He modeled a form of radical hospitality, one that treated conversation, shared meals, and communal improvisation as central components of artistic practice. The shrine captures this ethos by creating small pockets of seating within the installation itself. Visitors are invited to sit, read facsimiles of Samb’s texts, or simply watch archival footage in which he speaks slowly, his words intercut with shots of passing clouds or children playing in the street. In these moments, time seems to stretch; the biennale recedes, and another tempo—more local, more circular—asserts itself.

Across the exhibition, the shrine to Beverly Buchanan offers a very different, yet resonant, meditation on place and memory. Known for her evocative shack sculptures and earthworks in the American South, Buchanan spent much of her career exploring how humble architectures bear the weight of history. In Venice, small wooden structures—some perched on stilts, others leaning slightly as if mid-sigh—are arranged on low plinths. Their surfaces are rough, painted in muted tones of rust, moss, and faded blue, sometimes inscribed with cryptic marks. Archival photographs and drawings reveal how Buchanan often sited these works in rural landscapes, near rivers or crossroads, allowing them to weather and shift over time.

Within the shrine, Buchanan’s shacks converse with the watery, precarious foundations of Venice itself. A soundtrack of cicadas, distant thunder, and lapping water fills the room, subtly tying the humid summers of Georgia and South Carolina to the lagoons of the Adriatic. The space honors not only Buchanan’s formal inventiveness but also her commitment to what might be called minor histories—the lives of Black communities whose homes and stories rarely made it into official archives. By situating her work within In Minor Keys, Kouoh and her team underscore the kinship between Buchanan’s modest, resilient architectures and the exhibition’s broader attention to fragile, fugitive forms of being.

These shrines are not sealed off from the rest of the biennale. Instead, they act as gravitational centers, drawing other works and motifs into their orbit. A nearby installation by a younger artist from West Africa, for instance, riffs on Samb’s assemblage strategies, incorporating plastics and electronic waste into an evolving sculpture that will change over the course of the exhibition. Visitors who have spent time in Samb’s shrine recognize his spirit not as something to be embalmed, but as an active, generative force. Similarly, Buchanan’s influence can be felt in works that attend closely to vernacular architectures—from raised houses in coastal Brazil to temporary shelters along migration routes in the Sahel.

In elevating Samb and Buchanan in this way, In Minor Keys reveals something essential about Kouoh’s curatorial ethics. She did not only champion artists who were already canonized by Western institutions; she sought out those whose contributions had been undervalued or misunderstood, and insisted on their centrality to any serious account of contemporary art. The shrines become spaces where visitors are gently, but firmly, invited to adjust their own maps of art history, to recognize that the lineages shaping today’s practices often run through courtyards and rural backroads, through makeshift stages and hand-built shacks, as much as through museums and academies.

As you leave these rooms and step back into the flow of the exhibition, something of Samb’s courtyard and Buchanan’s landscapes lingers. You might notice, for the first time, the small wooden stoop outside a palazzo on your walk home along the Zattere, or the patch of improvised garden on a tiny balcony overlooking a canal. In Minor Keys follows you into the city, whispering that shrines are not always monumental, that remembrance can be as simple as pausing, looking closely, and acknowledging the lives and labors that have made our present possible. In this, as in so much else, Kouoh’s final exhibition offers not just a way of seeing art, but a way of moving through the world: attentive, grateful, and attuned to the quiet, persistent music of the minor key.