The 2026 version of the Venice Artwork Biennale can be realised in full accordance with the unique imaginative and prescient of its curator, Koyo Kouoh, who died earlier this month aged 57. Scheduled to open on 9 Might, the version is titled In Minor Keys.
Unveiling the curatorial idea at a press convention in Venice on Tuesday, Maria Cristiana Costanzo, the Biennale’s head of press, mentioned Kouoh had labored “intensively on the event of the curatorial undertaking, defining its theoretical framework, deciding on artists and works, appointing catalogue contributors, figuring out the exhibition’s graphic id and spatial design, and interesting straight with the invited contributors”.
The present will now be accomplished by Kouoh’s core workforce “in strict accordance with the plan she outlined, with a purpose to protect, improve, and share her concepts and the work to which she devoted herself till the very finish”. Costanzo added that the plan had the “full assist” of Kouoh’s household.
Initially scheduled for 20 Might, the press occasion was postponed by every week following the curator’s dying. Through the presentation, the curators with whom she collaborated on the exhibition learn texts she had ready, whereas photographs she had chosen—together with embroidered materials, flowers and Arabic script—scrolled throughout screens behind them.
“All the things you will notice is the fruit of her work,” Costanzo anticipated.
Studying out Kouoh’s phrases, Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, one among Kouoh’s collaborators, described the exhibition as “neither a litany of commentary on world occasions, nor an escape from compounding or constantly intersecting crises”. Moderately, it “proposes a radical reference to artwork’s pure habitat and function in society.
“In Minor Keys are sequences of exhilarating journeys that deal with the sensate and the efficient, inviting guests to marvel, meditate, dream, revel , replicate and commune in realms the place time isn’t company property nor on the mercy of relentlessly accelerated productiveness,” she continued.
Siddhartha Mitter, one other collaborator, mentioned: “Artists are channels to and between the minor keys and listening to, quite than talking for them, is on the core of the curatorial idea. In Minor Keys stands as a collective rating, composed with artists who’ve constructed universes of creativeness,” Mitter mentioned.
Full particulars of the undertaking, together with the record of artists and the exhibition’s format, can be introduced in Venice on 25 February 2026.
Born in Douala, Cameroon, Kouoh was the manager director of the Zeitz Museum of Modern Artwork Africa in Cape City. She gained recognition as a champion of Black artists from Africa and the diaspora and would have been the primary African girl to curate the Biennale.
Her dying in a hospital in Basel, Switzerland, prompted a wave of tributes from throughout the artwork world. At at this time’s presentation, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, the president of the Biennale, described her as “a thinker who whispers from one other place” and “a drawer of latest maps”.
Kouoh had referred to as the Biennale “the centre of gravity for artwork for over a century”. She promised that the 2026 version would “carry which means for the world we presently stay in—and, most significantly, for the world we need to make”.
