La Biennale di Venezia officially announces the theme of the 61st International Art Exhibition, In Minor Keys, set to open on May 9 and run through November 22, 2026. The announcement, delivered during a press conference on May 27, 2025, at the historic Sala delle Colonne in Ca’ Giustinian, Venice, marks a deeply emotional and pivotal moment for the institution. Just weeks prior, the art world was shaken by the unexpected passing of appointed curator Koyo Kouoh. With the full support of her family and in collaboration with her core team, La Biennale will move forward with the 2026 exhibition entirely under Kouoh’s conceptual framework, preserving and amplifying the vision she had meticulously shaped in the months leading up to her death.

Kouoh’s curatorial proposal, submitted on April 8, 2025, laid out the philosophical and artistic foundation of In Minor Keys, a project she had been intensely developing since her appointment in late 2024. This included the theoretical texts, artist selections, spatial design, visual identity, and catalogue contributions of the exhibition. With deep conviction, La Biennale affirms that the edition will unfold exactly as she intended. Her legacy now lives through a collective effort carried forward by five professional figures she personally selected to accompany her on this curatorial journey: Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Helene Pereira, Rasha Salti, Siddhartha Mitter, and Rory Tsapayi, who together presented the exhibition’s framework during the press conference. The presence of the team underscored Kouoh’s collaborative ethos and their commitment to transmitting her voice and intentions in their most faithful form.

While anticipation builds for the 2026 edition, take a look at the ongoing 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, available here, and the past 2024 Art Biennale, available here.

the announcement was delivered during a press conference on May 27, 2025 | image by Andrea Avezzu

in minor keys unfolds as a collective score

In Minor Keys draws its name and inspiration from a musical structure often associated with melancholy, improvisation, and intimacy but, in the Venice Art Biennale 2026 context, is transformed into a larger metaphor. Kouoh envisioned a constellation of artistic practices that resonate in quieter registers, that dwell in the fugitive and the fragmentary, and that challenge dominant narratives not through spectacle but through poetic persistence. In her words, the exhibition is ‘a polyphonous assembly of art… convening and communing in convivial collectivity, beaming across the void of alienation and the crackle of conflict.’ Grounded in a profound belief in the artist as a vital interpreter of the social and psychic condition, the Biennale proposes not a didactic commentary on global crises, but a sensory, relational, and transformative experience.

Drawing on references from jazz improvisation, Caribbean poetics, and the metaphor of the Creole garden, the exhibition posits artistic practice as both refuge and radical proposition. The ‘minor keys’ emerge as sonic, social, and spatial metaphors for islands of resistance, for oases of care, for frequencies of beauty in spite of tragedy. Kouoh describes a Biennale in which time is reclaimed from acceleration, where art is neither exhausted nor exhausting, but instead nourishing, fortifying, and necessary. As she wrote, ‘There is no choice but to tune in like the jazzman to these imperative mutations.’

preserving and amplifying Koyo Kouoh’s vision | image by Andrea Avezzu, courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

this edition honors profound loss of its curator, Koyo Kouoh

Originally appointed in December 2024, Kouoh (1967 – 2025) had been the first African woman to be named curator of the Venice Art Biennale. She was globally recognized for her intellectual rigor and unwavering commitment to contemporary art as a site of political and cultural reclamation. As executive director and chief curator of Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town since 2019 and the founding artistic director of RAW Material Company in Dakar, she shaped platforms that amplified overlooked narratives and reimagined the infrastructure of contemporary art from the Global South outward.

Kouoh’s previous exhibitions, such as Still (the) Barbarians (Ireland Biennial, 2016) and Dig Where You Stand (Carnegie International, 2018), stood out for their incisive exploration of colonial residues, diaspora, and the possibility of healing through collective memory. Her appointment to Venice was hailed as a defining moment, with Buttafuoco describing her vision as aligned with ‘the most refined, young, and disruptive intelligences.’ Though her death altered the path of the Biennale, her presence continues to echo in the questions the 2026 edition will ask—and in the curatorial sensitivity now required to carry it forward.

portrait of Koyo Kouoh | photo by Mirjam Kluka, courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia

her legacy now lives through a collective effort | image by Andrea Avezzu, courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, president of the Venice Biennale | image by Andrea Avezzu, courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

Siddhartha Mitter, Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Helene Pereira, Rasha Salti, and Rory Tsapayi | image by Andrea Avezzu, courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

the team underscored Kouoh’s collaborative ethos | image by Andrea Avezzu, courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

Padiglione Centrale Giardini | image by Francesco Galli, courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

Padiglione Centrale Giardini | image by Andrea Avezzu, courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

Gaggiandre | image by Andrea Avezzu, courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

Overview Arsenale | image by Andrea Avezzu, courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

project info:

name: Venice Art Biennale 2026 | @labiennale

curator: Koyo Kouoh | @madamekoyo (appointed December 2024, passed away May 2025)

president: Pietrangelo Buttafuoco

dates: May 9th – November 22nd, 2026

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In the United States, Venice Art Biennale 2026 preparations began with an absence — no grant posting, no artist selection, and no official word. For those familiar with the complex process required to mount the United States Pavilion at the world’s preeminent art exhibition, this silence was alarming. In his recent Vanity Fair column, journalist Nate Freeman follows the bureaucratic lapses and ideological shifts that brought the art world to the brink of believing the US might sit this one out for the first time since the Second World War.

Historically, the process begins at least eighteen months in advance with the opening of a grant application portal. By early spring 2025, with just twelve months to go, the portal had still not launched. Many in the museum world feared that the United States’ Biennale submission was already impossible to mount. Veteran curators like Kathleen Ash-Milby, who co-commissioned artist Jeffrey Gibson’s 2024 pavilion, shared concern that even if the portal were to open imminently, there would be no time left to plan, fundraise, and install a world-class exhibition in the Giardini.

Nate Freeman reported that behind the bureaucratic lag was a deeper unease tied to changes in the federal agencies responsible for the pavilion. The Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA), head the State Department branch overseeing cultural exchange, remained without a permanent assistant secretary. Its interim leadership, now under Trump-aligned figure Darren Beattie, raised new concerns about the ideological criteria shaping this year’s selection process. Historically apolitical on paper, the pavilion has now become a subtle battleground for defining what ‘American values’ in art might look like under a changing administration.

‘the space in which to place me,’ Jeffrey Gibson, US Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2024 | image © Timothy Schenck

portal opens with new ideological requirements

When the portal finally went live — curiously just hours after Freeman’s inquiries to the State Department on Wednesday, April 30th — the new guidelines revealed dramatic edits. Gone is the 2023 emphasis on ‘equity and underserved communities.’ In its place is a directive that chosen artists must ‘advance international understanding of American values,’ with language echoing policy preferences from Trump’s first term. This shift signaled a narrowing of the selection pool and a sharp pivot from the expansive, inclusive mission that defined past pavilions — and once defined the American spirit.

Also new were stipulations for ‘monitoring site visits,’ suggesting close oversight of curatorial autonomy, alongside ambiguous definitions of what constitutes a ‘non-political’ project. Where previous language encouraged representing the diversity of American life, the updated text now states that applicants must not ‘operate any programs promoting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion that violate any applicable anti-discrimination laws.’ Freeman’s reporting highlights how such language reshapes the international image the US intends to project.

With the application window’s late opening, Nate Freeman suggests the process is running on adrenaline. Past curators are already warning that the shortened timeframe may preclude a nuanced or ambitious presentation. What should be an eighteen-month endeavor now risks becoming a rushed, reactive exhibition shaped more by political conditions than curatorial vision.

‘the space in which to place me,’ Jeffrey Gibson, US Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2024 | image © Timothy Schenck

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The Board of La Biennale di Venezia announces Koyo Kouoh as the curator of the Venice Art Biennale 2026, the 61st edition of the International Art Exhibition, succeeding the 2024 curator, Adriano Pedrosa. She has been the executive director and chief curator of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA) in Cape Town since 2019, and before taking on the appointment, she was the founding artistic director of RAW Material Company, which is a center for art, knowledge, and society in Dakar, Senegal.

The Board met on November 5th, and the appointment of Koyo Kouoh as the Venice Art Biennale 2026 curator followed after the recommendation of President Pietrangelo Buttafuoco. He comments that by appointing Koyo Kouoh as the director of the Visual Arts Sector, the international art exhibition recognizes fresh beginnings. ‘Her perspective as a curator, scholar, and influential public figure meets with the most refined, young, and disruptive intelligences. With her here in Venice, La Biennale confirms what it has offered the world for over a century: to be the home of the future,’ the President says in a statement.

portrait of Koyo Kouoh | photo by Mirjam Kluka, courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia

61st international art exhibition takes place in 2026

Venice Art Biennale 2026 is only one of the many exhibitions that Koyo Kouoh has curated. Before it, the Cameroonian-born curator brought Still (the) Barbarians, 37th EVA International, and the Ireland Biennial in Limerick in 2016 to life. She participated in the 57th Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States, with the exhibition project Dig Where You Stand (2018), where she drew from the collections of the Carnegie Museums of Art and Natural History. She has also served as the curator of the educational and artistic program of the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair in London, UK, and New York, US, between 2013 and 2017.

Upon the appointment as the Venice Art Biennale 2026 curator, Koyo Kouoh says it’s a once-in-a-lifetime honor and privilege to take on the role as the artistic director of the international art exhibition. She considers it high regard to be able to compose an exhibition she hopes can carry meaning for the present world and ‘most importantly, for the world we want to make. I am deeply thankful to La Biennale’s Board and particularly its President, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, for entrusting me with this momentous mission, and I look forward to working with the entire team,’ the 2026 curator says. So far, the theme for the Venice Art Biennale 2026 is yet to be announced.

Koyo Kouoh is Venice Art Biennale 2026’s curator

US Pavilion by Jeffrey Gibson during Venice Art Biennale 2024 | photo by Timothy Schenck | read here

Creole Pavilion by Sol Calero during 2024 edition | image © Andrea Rossetti, courtesy the artist and ChertLüdde Berlin, Crèvecœur Paris, Francesca Minini Milan | read here

Holy See Pavilion during the 2024th edition | image courtesy of Holy See’s Dicastery for Culture and Education | read here

Ewa Juszkiewicz, Portrait in Venetian Red (after Élisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun), oil on canvas, 190 x 140 cm, 2024. Courtesy Ewa Juszkiewicz and Almine Rech | read here

Manal AlDowayan, Shifting Sands: A Battle Song, 2024 | photo by venicedocumentationproject, courtesy of the Visual Arts Commission, the Commissioner for the National Pavilion of Saudi Arabia | read here

project info:

name: Venice Art Biennale 2026 | @labiennale

curator: Koyo Kouoh | @madamekoyo

president: Pietrangelo Buttafuoco

portrait photography: Mirjam Kluka | @mirjamkluka

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