{"id":7634,"date":"2025-05-27T18:00:11","date_gmt":"2025-05-27T18:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2025\/05\/27\/venice-biennale-2026-will-proceed-with-koyo-kouohs-in-minor-keys\/"},"modified":"2025-05-27T18:00:11","modified_gmt":"2025-05-27T18:00:11","slug":"venice-biennale-2026-will-proceed-with-koyo-kouohs-in-minor-keys","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2025\/05\/27\/venice-biennale-2026-will-proceed-with-koyo-kouohs-in-minor-keys\/","title":{"rendered":"Venice Biennale 2026 Will Proceed With Koyo Kouoh\u2019s \u201cIn Minor Keys\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
The central pavilion, which last year hosted \u201cKapewe Pukeni\u201d by MAHKU (Movimento dos Artistas Huni Kuin). Photo by AVZ. Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The 61st edition of the Venice Biennale will proceed as planned, despite the sudden passing of curator Koyo Kouoh<\/a>. More importantly, it will still be guided by Kouoh\u2019s vision, Cristiana Costanzo<\/a>, the Biennale\u2019s lead press officer, announced today (May 27) at a press conference at the historic Sala delle Colonne in Ca\u2019 Giustinian. Titled \u201cIn Minor Keys,\u201d 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<\/a>, Marie Helena Pereira<\/a> and Rasha Salti<\/a>, critic and editor-in-chief Siddhartha Mitter<\/a>, and assistant Rory Tsapayi<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n<\/section>\n

The Biennale chose to move ahead with Kouoh\u2019s 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\u2014with the \u201cfull support of Koyo Kouoh<\/a>\u2019s family,\u201d Costanzo said. \u201cWe are realizing her exhibition as she designed it, as she imagined it, as she gave it to me personally,\u201d added Pietrangelo Buttafuoco<\/a>, the Biennale\u2019s president. \u201cLa Biennale is doing today what it has been doing for 100 years.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s words, the exhibition will be \u201ca polyphonous assembly of art\u2026 convening and communing in convivial collectivity, beaming across the void of alienation and the crackle of conflict.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to Rasha Salti, Kouoh envisioned a biennial that \u201crefuses orchestral bombast,\u201d rejecting both the grandiosity of today\u2019s major global art events and society\u2019s performative behaviors. She imagined the Biennale as a call to decelerate\u2014to \u201ctake a deep breath. Exhale. Drop your shoulders. And close your eyes.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

SEE ALSO: <\/i><\/b>Guglielmo Castelli Explores Longing and Theatricality in His S\u00e3o Paulo Debut<\/i><\/b><\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cI am tired. People are tired. We are all tired. The world is tired. Even art itself is tired,\u201d wrote Kouoh in a 2022 text read by Rory Tsapayi near the end of the press conference. It\u2019s 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\u2019s world. \u201cPerhaps the time has come. We need something else,\u201d she wrote. \u201cWe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kouoh\u2019s 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In a speech following her appointment last December, Kouoh expressed her desire to shape an exhibition that would \u201ccarry meaning for the world we currently live in and, most importantly, for the world we want to make.\u201d For her, artists were visionaries and social scientists\u2014figures capable of helping us reflect on and imagine alternative solutions for a better future.<\/p>\n

A Venice Biennale \u201cIn Minor Keys\u201d<\/h3>\n

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 \u201cthe sensory, the affective and the subjective,\u201d as Beckhurst Feijoo explained, the upcoming Biennale will spotlight artists whose practices \u201cseamlessly bleed into society,\u201d standing in opposition to the \u201cspectacle of horror\u201d and global chaos. This curatorial proposition turns the exhibition itself into an exercise in listening to the minor keys (\u201cthe sotto voce\u201d 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\u2014an invitation \u201cto find the oases, the islands, where the dignity of all living beings is regarded.\u201d<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s conference indicated that the curatorial ethos of the 2026 Venice Biennale will likely align with that of other recent biennials, including the Sharjah Biennial (\u201cto carry\u201d)<\/a> and the Boston Triennial (\u201cExchange\u201d), 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.<\/p>\n

All details of the Biennale\u2014including the list of artists invited to the international exhibition, the graphic identity, the exhibition design and the list of participating countries\u2014will be announced on Wednesday, February 25, 2026. In the meantime, several nations have already announced the artists taking over their national pavilions: Henrike Naumann<\/a> and Sung Tieu<\/a> for Germany, curated by Kathleen Reinhardt<\/a>; Yto Barrada<\/a> (an artist of Moroccan descent who recently exhibited a sculpture in MoMA PS1\u2019s open-air atrium) for France, and 2017 Turner Prize winner Lubaina Himid<\/a> 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<\/a> might shape the decision\u2014particularly what kind of narrative the country might choose to present at one of the world\u2019s largest, most influential and most political international art exhibitions.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n