The 2026 version of the Venice Artwork Biennale will likely 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 Could, 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, stated Kouoh had labored “intensively on the event of the curatorial venture, defining its theoretical framework, deciding on artists and works, appointing catalogue contributors, figuring out the exhibition’s graphic id and spatial design, and fascinating immediately with the invited individuals”.
The present will now be accomplished by Kouoh’s core staff “in strict accordance with the plan she outlined, with the intention 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 Could, the press occasion was postponed by every week following the curator’s demise. Throughout 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, considered one of Kouoh’s collaborators, described the exhibition as “neither a litany of commentary on world occasions, nor an escape from compounding or repeatedly intersecting crises”. Reasonably, it “proposes a radical reference to artwork’s pure habitat and position in society.
“In Minor Keys are sequences of exhilarating journeys that tackle the sensate and the efficient, inviting guests to marvel, meditate, dream, revel , replicate and commune in realms the place time just isn’t company property nor on the mercy of relentlessly accelerated productiveness,” she continued.
Siddhartha Mitter, one other collaborator, stated: “Artists are channels to and between the minor keys and listening to, moderately 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 stated.
Full particulars of the venture, together with the record of artists and the exhibition’s format, will likely 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 lady to curate the Biennale.
Her demise in a hospital in Basel, Switzerland, prompted a wave of tributes from throughout the artwork world. At at present’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 that means for the world we at the moment reside in—and, most significantly, for the world we wish to make”.
