The 61st edition of the Venice Biennale will proceed as planned, despite the sudden passing of curator Koyo Kouoh. More importantly, it will still be guided by Kouoh’s vision, Cristiana Costanzo, the Biennale’s lead press officer, announced today (May 27) at a press conference at the historic Sala delle Colonne in Ca’ Giustinian. Titled “In Minor Keys,” the 2026 Venice Biennale will be realized thanks in part to the efforts of a multicultural team of advisors with whom Kouoh was already working closely: curators Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Helena Pereira and Rasha Salti, critic and editor-in-chief Siddhartha Mitter, and assistant Rory Tsapayi.
The Biennale chose to move ahead with Kouoh’s curatorial concept based on a comprehensive proposal she submitted on April 8 that included theoretical texts, artist selections, spatial design, visual identity and catalogue contributions—with the “full support of Koyo Kouoh’s family,” Costanzo said. “We are realizing her exhibition as she designed it, as she imagined it, as she gave it to me personally,” added Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, the Biennale’s president. “La Biennale is doing today what it has been doing for 100 years.”
As the musically inspired title suggests, the artistic framework for the upcoming edition promises to showcase intimate and introspective forms of listening, contemplation, exchange and understanding that can counter the overwhelming and disorienting oversaturation of our turbulent times. In Kouoh’s words, the exhibition will be “a polyphonous assembly of art… convening and communing in convivial collectivity, beaming across the void of alienation and the crackle of conflict.”
According to Rasha Salti, Kouoh envisioned a biennial that “refuses orchestral bombast,” rejecting both the grandiosity of today’s major global art events and society’s performative behaviors. She imagined the Biennale as a call to decelerate—to “take a deep breath. Exhale. Drop your shoulders. And close your eyes.”
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“I am tired. People are tired. We are all tired. The world is tired. Even art itself is tired,” wrote Kouoh in a 2022 text read by Rory Tsapayi near the end of the press conference. It’s evidence that the curator had long been aware of the need for a shift in how art is produced, circulated and experienced for it to retain impact in today’s world. “Perhaps the time has come. We need something else,” she wrote. “We need to heal. We need to laugh. We need to be with beauty, and lots of it. We need to play, we need to be with poetry. We need to be with love again. We need to dance. We need to rest and restore. We need to breathe. We need the radicality of joy. The time has come.”
Kouoh’s presence was acutely felt at the press conference, which opened with a video of the curator smiling and continued with tributes and readings that echoed her remarkable personality and vision. The tone grew emotional when Buttafuoco recalled Kouoh asking whether she could tell her mother upon learning she had been selected to curate the 2026 Biennale.
In a speech following her appointment last December, Kouoh expressed her desire to shape an exhibition that would “carry meaning for the world we currently live in and, most importantly, for the world we want to make.” For her, artists were visionaries and social scientists—figures capable of helping us reflect on and imagine alternative solutions for a better future.
A Venice Biennale “In Minor Keys”
True to her curatorial approach, she conceived the Biennale as an invitation to listen to minor voices and tonalities, a metaphor for attending to microrealities, alternative forms of knowledge and wisdom, ancestral memories and overlooked geographies, often revealed through personal stories eclipsed by dominant historical narratives to rediscover the essence of being human. With an emphasis on “the sensory, the affective and the subjective,” as Beckhurst Feijoo explained, the upcoming Biennale will spotlight artists whose practices “seamlessly bleed into society,” standing in opposition to the “spectacle of horror” and global chaos. This curatorial proposition turns the exhibition itself into an exercise in listening to the minor keys (“the sotto voce” signals of potential change) and to artists as agents of that change. The minor keys are sonic, social and spatial metaphors for attuning to faint but enduring voices of resistance, to frequencies of care and beauty—an invitation “to find the oases, the islands, where the dignity of all living beings is regarded.”
Today’s conference indicated that the curatorial ethos of the 2026 Venice Biennale will likely align with that of other recent biennials, including the Sharjah Biennial (“to carry”) and the Boston Triennial (“Exchange”), which have increasingly embraced a polyphonous exhibition model as a platform to gather, preserve and amplify alternative forms of knowledge, more intimate modes of sense-making, ancestral memory and decentered micro-geographical and micronarrative realities.
All details of the Biennale—including the list of artists invited to the international exhibition, the graphic identity, the exhibition design and the list of participating countries—will be announced on Wednesday, February 25, 2026. In the meantime, several nations have already announced the artists taking over their national pavilions: Henrike Naumann and Sung Tieu for Germany, curated by Kathleen Reinhardt; Yto Barrada (an artist of Moroccan descent who recently exhibited a sculpture in MoMA PS1’s open-air atrium) for France, and 2017 Turner Prize winner Lubaina Himid for Great Britain. The U.S. has yet to reveal its pick, and concerns have been raised over how the cultural agenda of the Trump administration might shape the decision—particularly what kind of narrative the country might choose to present at one of the world’s largest, most influential and most political international art exhibitions.