The 2026 edition of the Venice Art Biennale will be realised in full accordance with the original vision of its curator, Koyo Kouoh, who died earlier this month aged 57. Scheduled to open on 9 May, the edition is titled In Minor Keys.
Unveiling the curatorial concept at a press conference in Venice on Tuesday, Maria Cristiana Costanzo, the Biennale’s head of press, said Kouoh had worked “intensively on the development of the curatorial project, defining its 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”.
The show will now be completed by Kouoh’s core team “in strict accordance with the plan she defined, in order to preserve, enhance, and share her ideas and the work to which she dedicated herself until the very end”. Costanzo added that the plan had the “full support” of Kouoh’s family.
Originally scheduled for 20 May, the press event was postponed by a week following the curator's death. During the presentation, the curators with whom she collaborated on the exhibition read texts she had prepared, while images she had selected—including embroidered fabrics, flowers and Arabic script—scrolled across screens behind them.
“Everything you will see is the fruit of her work,” Costanzo anticipated.
Reading out Kouoh's words, Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, one of Kouoh's collaborators, described the exhibition as “neither a litany of commentary on world events, nor an escape from compounding or continuously intersecting crises”. Rather, it “proposes a radical connection with art’s natural habitat and role in society.
"In Minor Keys are sequences of exhilarating journeys that address the sensate and the effective, inviting visitors to marvel, meditate, dream, revel , reflect and commune in realms where time is not corporate property nor at the mercy of relentlessly accelerated productivity," she continued.
Siddhartha Mitter, another collaborator, said: “Artists are channels to and between the minor keys and listening to, rather than speaking for 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,” Mitter said.
Full details of the project, including the list of artists and the exhibition's layout, will be announced in Venice on 25 February 2026.
Born in Douala, Cameroon, Kouoh was the executive director of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town. She gained recognition as a champion of Black artists from Africa and the diaspora and would have been the first African woman to curate the Biennale.
Her death in a hospital in Basel, Switzerland, prompted a wave of tributes from across the art world. At today's 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 called the Biennale “the centre of gravity for art for over a century”. She promised that the 2026 edition would “carry meaning for the world we currently live in—and, most importantly, for the world we want to make”.
