The 2026 Venice Biennale will commemorate Koyo Kouoh’s enduring legacy in musical terms, showcasing intimate and introspective forms of listening and contemplation amidst a polyphonic assembly of art.
The 61st edition of the Venice Biennale will proceed as planned despite the sudden passing of curator Koyo Kouoh. Instead, it will be guided by her vision, which was already being realized with the support of a multicultural team of advisors.
Koyo Kouoh is a Cameroonian art curator, writer, and educator.
Born in 1968, he has been instrumental in shaping the contemporary art scene in Africa.
With a focus on curatorial practice, 'curatorial practice' Kouoh has organized numerous exhibitions and projects that explore the intersection of art, politics, and culture.
He is the founder of CAMH (Centre for Contemporary Art and Culture) in Douala, Cameroon, which serves as a platform for artistic innovation and exchange.
Kouoh’s artistic framework for the upcoming edition promises to showcase intimate and introspective forms of listening, contemplation, exchange, and understanding that can counter the overwhelming oversaturation of our turbulent times. The title ‘In Minor Keys‘ suggests an emphasis on sonic, social, and spatial metaphors for attending to faint but enduring voices of resistance, frequencies of care, and beauty.
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.
True to her curatorial approach, Kouoh 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. The upcoming Biennale will spotlight artists whose practices seamlessly bleed into society, standing in opposition to the spectacle of horror and global chaos.
The curatorial ethos of the 2026 Venice Biennale is likely to align with that of other recent biennials, including the Sharjah Biennial (‘to carry‘) and the Boston Triennial (‘Exchange‘), which have increasingly embraced a polyphonic 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.
Established in 1895, the Venice Biennale is a premier international art exhibition held every two years.
It features a wide range of artistic disciplines, including painting, sculpture, architecture, and performance art.
The event takes place in various venues across Venice, Italy, with the main exhibitions located at the Giardini and Arsenale sites.
The Biennale attracts millions of visitors from around the world, making it one of the most attended art events globally.
All details of the Biennale, including the list of artists invited to the international exhibition, graphic identity, exhibition design, and participating countries, will be announced on February 25, 2026. Several nations have already announced their picks, including Henrike Naumann and Sung Tieu for Germany, Yto Barrada for France, and 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.
The Trump administration, led by President Donald Trump from 2017 to 2021, implemented several key policies and initiatives across various sectors.
Notable policies include tax reform, aimed at reducing corporate and individual tax rates, and healthcare reform, which sought to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act.
The administration also took a hardline stance on immigration, implementing travel bans targeting certain countries and increasing border security measures.
Additionally, Trump withdrew from several international agreements, including the Paris Climate Accord and the Iran nuclear deal.
Kouoh’s presence was acutely felt at the press conference, which opened with a video of her smiling and continued with tributes and readings that echoed her remarkable personality and vision. The tone grew emotional when the Biennale’s president recalled Kouoh asking whether she could tell her mother upon learning she had been selected to curate the 2026 Biennale.
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 who could help us reflect on and imagine alternative solutions for a better future.
