Venice Biennale 2026: In Minor Keys

The Venice Biennale 2026 Theme

The 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia opens under the title In Minor Keys, curated by Koyo Kouoh. The theme was announced on May 27, 2025, during a press conference at Ca' Giustinian in Venice, marking both a continuation of the Biennale's tradition and a distinct curatorial vision.

In Minor Keys brings together 111 artists working across performance, installation, video, painting, and sound. The exhibition centers on artistic practices that inhabit fragility, pause, and dissonance, creating spaces for quiet resistance and contemplation in contrast to the urgency that dominates much contemporary discourse.

The choice of musical terminology is deliberate. Minor keys in music traditionally evoke melancholy, introspection, and emotional depth. Kouoh uses this metaphor to explore artistic voices that work outside dominant narratives, finding power in subtlety rather than volume.

Who is Koyo Kouoh?

Koyo Kouoh is the founding artistic director of Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA) in Cape Town, a position she held from 2019 until her untimely passing in 2025. Before Zeitz MOCAA, she founded and directed RAW Material Company in Dakar, Senegal, a center for art, knowledge, and society that became one of Africa's most important contemporary art institutions.

Kouoh's curatorial practice consistently centered artists from Africa and its diaspora while insisting on their place within global contemporary art discourse, not as representatives of a continent but as individuals making work that speaks across contexts.

Her appointment as artistic director for the Venice Biennale 2026 made her the first African woman to hold this position in the Biennale's 130-year history. The announcement on May 27, 2025, came shortly after her death, making this edition both a realization of her vision and a tribute to her legacy.

What In Minor Keys Means

Kouoh's curatorial statement describes In Minor Keys as an exhibition that "constructs a polyphonic landscape of artistic gestures that refuse grand narratives and instead dwell in the gaps, the silences, and the overlooked."

The theme responds to a specific moment in contemporary culture where loudness often substitutes for meaning. Social media platforms reward virality over substance. Political discourse favors spectacle over nuance. Against this backdrop, Kouoh proposes an exhibition that makes space for work that requires time, attention, and quietness.

The Four Curatorial Threads

According to the curatorial team completing Kouoh's vision, In Minor Keys organizes the exhibition around four interconnected concepts:

• Gardens and Oases: Spaces of refuge, growth, and cultivation as both literal and metaphorical sites of resistance
• Ghosts and Memory: The presence of absence, what remains when direct representation fails or refuses
• Devotions and Rituals: Repetitive practices that create meaning through duration rather than singularity
• Performance and Jazz: Improvisation, collaboration, and the ephemeral as fundamental artistic methodologies

These threads weave through the exhibition rather than organizing it into discrete sections. You might encounter works addressing memory and ritual simultaneously, or gardens that function as sites of ghostly presence.

The 111 Artists

The complete artist list for In Minor Keys was announced in February 2026, representing 63 countries across six continents. The selection balances established names with emerging artists, historical figures with contemporary practitioners, and Western art centers with perspectives from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.

Kouoh deliberately avoided the model of national or regional representation quotas. Artists were selected because their work speaks to the exhibition's themes, not to fulfill geographic diversity requirements. The result is a genuinely international exhibition that feels less like a United Nations assembly and more like a conversation where participants actually have something to say to each other.

Notable Inclusions

While La Biennale encourages visitors to discover the full exhibition without preconceptions, several artists represent significant curatorial statements. These include historical figures whose work prefigures contemporary concerns, mid-career artists receiving long-overdue international attention, and younger practitioners reshaping what contemporary art can be.

Performance occupies a central role. Rather than treating live art as supplementary programming, In Minor Keys integrates performance directly into the exhibition fabric. Visitors will encounter durational works, scheduled interventions, and installations that blur the line between object and action.

How the Artistic Director is Chosen

The selection of the Venice Biennale's artistic director follows a process that balances institutional tradition with contemporary relevance. The board of La Biennale di Venezia, composed of Italian cultural figures and government representatives, evaluates candidates typically 18-24 months before the exhibition opening.

Selection criteria include demonstrated curatorial excellence, international standing in the contemporary art world, ability to create a cohesive thematic vision, and capacity to navigate the complex logistics of the world's largest recurring art exhibition.

Recent artistic directors represent the Biennale's increasing internationalization. Cecilia Alemani (2022, Italian-American), Adriano Pedrosa (2024, Brazilian), and Koyo Kouoh (2026, Cameroonian-Swiss) reflect a conscious effort to expand beyond the Western European and North American curators who dominated earlier decades.

The Role of the Artistic Director

Many visitors assume the artistic director curates the entire Venice Biennale. This is incorrect. The artistic director curates only the International Exhibition, which occupies the central pavilion in the Giardini and the vast Arsenale venue.

National pavilions are curated independently by each participating country. These selections happen through separate processes managed by national cultural ministries, arts councils, or appointed commissioners. The artistic director has no formal role in pavilion selections, though informal conversations between the director and national commissioners often occur.

This structure creates fascinating tensions. The International Exhibition proposes a curatorial vision. National pavilions respond, ignore, or contradict that vision according to their own priorities. The result is less unified than a single curator's exhibition but more representative of contemporary art's genuine diversity.

The 2024 Theme: Stranieri Ovunque

To understand where In Minor Keys positions itself, looking back at the 2024 edition provides context. Adriano Pedrosa's Stranieri Ovunque (Foreigners Everywhere) took its title from a collective of artists addressing migration, displacement, and identity.

Pedrosa's exhibition featured 332 artists, a significantly larger roster than Kouoh's 111. Stranieri Ovunque emphasized Indigenous artists, queer artists, outsider artists, and historical figures excluded from Western art historical narratives. The exhibition was expansive, deliberately overwhelming, and politically explicit.

From Stranieri Ovunque to In Minor Keys

The shift from 2024 to 2026 represents a recalibration rather than rejection. Where Pedrosa assembled a vast chorus of excluded voices demanding recognition, Kouoh creates space for work that refuses to shout for attention.

Both exhibitions address power, both challenge Western art world dominance, both insist on expanding who gets heard. The difference lies in methodology. Pedrosa's approach was additive and accumulative. Kouoh's is concentrated and patient.

Neither approach is superior. They respond to different moments and different curatorial instincts. Together, these consecutive Biennales suggest an institution genuinely rethinking its relationship to global contemporary art rather than applying superficial diversity measures.

What Recent Biennale Themes Tell Us

Venice Biennale themes over the past decade reveal consistent patterns. Artistic directors increasingly address geopolitics, climate, technology, and identity. The romantic notion of art existing separate from politics feels quaint beside exhibitions that treat contemporary art as inseparable from the conditions producing it.

Recent Themes

• 2022: The Milk of Dreams (Cecilia Alemani) - Surrealism, the body, and transformation
• 2024: Stranieri Ovunque (Adriano Pedrosa) - Migration, displacement, and outsider artists
• 2026: In Minor Keys (Koyo Kouoh) - Fragility, pause, and resistance through quietness

These themes share a focus on marginalized perspectives and alternative modes of being. They differ in how they approach these concerns. Alemani used surrealist strategies of transformation, Pedrosa deployed direct political engagement, Kouoh proposes contemplative resistance.

The trajectory suggests the Biennale responding to a world where urgency competes with exhaustion, where political engagement risks becoming performative, and where art might offer something other than mirroring the chaos surrounding it.

Visiting In Minor Keys

Kouoh's curatorial approach suggests certain viewing strategies will serve visitors better than others. This is not an exhibition to rush through checking off famous names. In Minor Keys rewards time, repeated viewing, and attention to work that doesn't announce itself loudly.

Practical Viewing Advice

Budget more time than usual for the Arsenale. Performance and time-based works require actual duration to experience. Treating a 45-minute video as something to watch for three minutes defeats the curatorial point.

The exhibition includes significant sound works. Bring headphones for installations that provide them, but also expect environments where sound bleeds between spaces deliberately. The acoustic experience is part of the curatorial concept.

Visit multiple times if possible. Works addressing memory, ritual, and performance change across repeated encounters. What seems obscure on first viewing often clarifies through patient return.

Beyond the International Exhibition

Remember that In Minor Keys is one element of the larger Biennale. Approximately 90 national pavilions present separate exhibitions that may align with, ignore, or contradict Kouoh's theme.

Some national commissioners will engage directly with In Minor Keys, creating intentional dialogue. Others will pursue completely independent directions. Both approaches are valid. The Venice Biennale's productive chaos comes from this combination of curatorial vision and national autonomy.

The Legacy of Koyo Kouoh

The Venice Biennale 2026 carries unusual emotional weight given Kouoh's death before the exhibition opening. Her curatorial team, working from her detailed plans and ongoing conversations, completed the project as envisioned.

This creates a complex viewing experience. In Minor Keys is simultaneously a major curator's definitive statement and a posthumous tribute. Visitors will encounter work selected to create specific meanings that now acquire additional resonance through their maker's absence.

The theme itself, with its emphasis on ghosts, memory, and what remains when direct presence withdraws, takes on dimensions Kouoh could not have anticipated. An exhibition about minor keys becomes itself a minor key, a meditation on what persists beyond the voice that first articulated it.