A new humanism in the Koyo Kouoh Art Biennial

Altars, dedicated in the Central Pavilion to Issa Samb (1945-2017) and Beverly Buchanan (1940-2015), to privilege the generative force of art rather than its mere objecthood and conventional practices of art object preservation. Again, processions, oases to rest and art schools, ecosystems rooted in territories and at the same time transnational, are the symbols at the centre of the 61st International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale by Koyo Kouoh, who chose to celebrate relationships, the collaborative practice that interweaves art and social responsibility. The West is in danger of fading in its pursuit of profit and result: speed is being replaced by stillness. The next Biennale invites us to pause: the very title 'In Minor Keys' by the late Kouoh shifts the focus to the sides, edges, borders and thresholds. Themes such as the plantation, colonial settlement, environmental disaster and geological memory run through many of the works we will see in Venice (and here in the gallery), in parallel, the Creole garden and the courtyard - spaces of self-sufficiency born within conditions of constraint - become real and metaphorical places of rest, reconnection and relationship with non-human forms of life. Multisensory installations encourage reverie and enchantment, inviting one to slow down, to let oneself be transformed by the experience. It was the design of the curator, who died prematurely in May 2025, inherited by her team with the full support of her family.

The Biennale opens to the public from Saturday 9 May to Sunday 22 November 2026 at the Giardini, the Arsenale and various venues in Venice. The pre-opening will be held on 6, 7 and 8 May, while the prize-giving and opening ceremony will take place on Saturday 9 May.
There are 111 participants - including artists, artists, duos, collectives and organisations - from different geographical contexts, selected by Kouoh by privileging above all resonances, affinities and possible convergences between even distant practices. The participants were selected by the curatorial team by observing realities active in Salvador, Dakar, San Juan, Beirut, Paris and Nashville. Curator Koyo Kouoh has imagined how the ingenuity and experimental tension of each can meet with those of other artists and movements, even without direct relations. "In Minor Keys" thus aims to restore and expand this relational geography, woven over a lifetime and founded on encounter. Many come from African countries, South East Asian countries and Latin America, many also from the United States (probably of different ethnicities), very few from Europe. Koyo did not have time to select Italian artists. The national participations in the Pavilions will be announced on 4 March.

In spite of the mourning, the Venice Biennale has decided to hold the exhibition according to the plan devised by the Cameroonian-Swiss curator, former director of the Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town, in order to preserve, valorise and disseminate her ideas and dedicated work. This is the first time such an event has happened. Kouoh, who was appointed Artistic Director of the Visual Arts Sector in November 2024, had in fact already developed the curatorial project, defining the theoretical text, artists and works, catalogue, graphic identity and architecture of the spaces, constantly dialoguing with the artists to be invited and choosing the title (In Minor Tones), as indicated in the curatorial text she forwarded to the President of the Biennale, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, on 8 April 2025.

The Exhibition is realised with the help of the team selected by Koyo itself: Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Hélène Pereira and Rasha Salti (advisors); Siddhartha Mitter (editor-in-chief); Rory Tsapayi (research assistant). The members live in different cities around the world - in London, Dakar, Berlin, Beirut, Marseille, Cape Town and New York - and over the past few months they have continued the work on the realisation of the Exhibition, calling on the Biennale structure to make a special effort in the definition phase of the project, and in particular the Visual Arts Sector. Their shared work culminated in a significant meeting led by the curator herself, held in Dakar in April 2025 at RAW Material Company (a cultural centre founded by Kouoh). That experience remains symbolic of the way she conceived curatorial practice: attentive to relationships and open to the unexpected. 'During that week in Dakar,' said Koyo's team, 'we laid the foundations for the 61st edition of the Art Biennale. We mapped practices and projects, derived motifs around which to organise the exhibition and the pillars on which to base it. Themes such as enchantment, fecundity and sharing, as well as generative practices aimed at the community, emerged naturally. On the last day, certain of having achieved the most difficult objective, Koyo assigned each of us a mission. The exhibition had now taken concrete form, it was no longer just an idea or an intention. We could hear the music that Koyo had so gracefully composed with us under the protective shade of a generous mango tree. In early 2025, Koyo commissioned Wolff Architects (Cape Town) to design the exhibition.

Among the literary references shared by Kouoh as sources of inspiration are Toni Morrison's Beloved and Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, which share the crossing of worlds and time thresholds and a magical realism that intensifies the emotional register.