There is a moment, in the long processional drift of the Arsenale, when the crowd thins and one arrives at a wall of Godfried Donkor’s work and understands that the exhibition has been quietly building toward this the entire time. It is not the loudest room in Venice. It may be the one that stays with you longest.
Donkor is one of the 111 invited participants in the 61st Venice Biennale, In Minor Keys, the exhibition conceived by Koyo Kouoh before her death in May 2025. His presence there is not incidental to that fact. It is, in a sense, the whole point.
Who Is Godfried Donkor? The Ghanaian-British Artist’s Long Route to Venice
Godfried Donkor was born in Accra in 1964, is of Asante descent, and has spent his working life between London and Ghana. He is best known as a collagist, though the description undersells him: the practice runs across paper, ink, paint and embroidery, and is held together less by medium than by a research habit. Archives and travel are equal partners in the work. He goes and looks, then he goes and reads, and the two produce a kind of field note that is at once literal and invented — a kinship traced across the Atlantic that is part documented fact and part necessary fiction.
The recurring subject is the Black man as an agent of his own destiny rather than the object of somebody else’s account. Boxers appear constantly: Jack Johnson, Muhammad Ali, bare-knuckle champions retrieved from the eighteenth century. Powerman (2022) and Superman vs. Muhammad Ali (2022), both in oil and acrylic, pull their imagery straight out of comic books, which is a sly way of pointing at how thin the line runs between heroic myth-making and the merchandising of a body.
The Biennale’s own catalogue text puts it more precisely than most criticism manages: Donkor’s compositions hold vulnerability, collective conviviality and the archive in the same frame, and propose a Black masculinity that absorbs the restrictive stereotypes rather than pretending they are not there — one that values emotional intelligence over silent endurance.
Venice is not new territory. Donkor represented Ghana at the Biennale in 2001, a quarter of a century ago, when African representation in the city was a far lonelier proposition than it is in a year of thirteen African national pavilions. That he is now in the main exhibition rather than a national one is its own small measure of how the machinery of legitimation has shifted.
Michael and the Dragon II (2026): The Allegory That Refuses to Resolve
The newly commissioned work for Venice is Michael and the Dragon II (2026), following Michael & the Dragon (2025), which mythologised an eighteenth-century Black bare-knuckle champion.
The iconography is among the most familiar in Western art: the archangel Michael, sword raised, dispatching the dragon. Good over evil, resolved, framed, hung above an altar. It is a composition that has done reassuring work in European churches for six centuries.
Donkor puts a slave ship in it.
The vessel is one of his persistent motifs, and its arrival does something quite specific to the allegory: it does not invert the moral scheme so much as jam it. Which figure is the dragon in a composition that includes a ship built for the industrial transport of human beings, financed by Christian nations, blessed by the same church that commissioned the archangel? The painting declines to say. It simply holds the two iconographies in the same rectangle and lets the viewer do the arithmetic, and the arithmetic does not come out clean.
The First Day of the Yam Custom: 1817 — and the Kouoh Connection
Hung with the new painting are three further paintings and four works on paper. They were not made for Venice. They were made in 2017, for an exhibition at Gallery 1957 in Accra called The First Day of the Yam Custom: 1817 — curated by Koyo Kouoh.
The title refers to an image from 1817 that is widely regarded as the earliest recorded depiction of the visual and aesthetic life of the Asante region: the ceremonial procession, the textiles, the umbrellas, the sheer organised splendour of a court that European accounts of the period were generally not inclined to credit. The image now hangs in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, which is either an irony or simply an accurate map of where African material culture came to rest.
Donkor’s reworking of it stages a conversation between the archive and its afterlife: historical record on one side, sociological inquiry on the other, and the unequal histories binding Africa to Europe running down the middle.
What this means, practically, is that the Donkor wall in Venice is a nine-year exchange between an artist and a curator, installed in the exhibition that curator conceived and did not live to open. Kouoh selected the artists for In Minor Keys herself before her death in May 2025. Choosing Donkor meant choosing, among other things, to bring her own 2017 curatorial work into the Giardini and the Arsenale — not as a footnote, but hanging on the wall.
Whether she intended the gesture to read as autobiographical is unknowable and probably beside the point. It reads that way regardless.
Donkor and the Procession: How the Work Sits Within In Minor Keys
Kouoh organised her exhibition around several recurring motifs, and Donkor belongs to the one she called the procession — a structure borrowed from the carnivals of the Afro-Atlantic world, which gathers him alongside Nick Cave, Alvaro Barrington, Ebony G. Patterson, Pio Abad and Big Chief Demond Melancon.
The choice is architectural as much as thematic. Kouoh wanted, wherever it could be managed, to refuse solid walls; Wolff Architects of Cape Town answered with standing supports, so that a visitor moves through the exhibition in something closer to a parade than a gallery circuit. For an artist whose central source image is a ceremonial Asante procession from 1817, being placed inside a processional structure is not a curatorial coincidence. It is a rhyme.
Where Else to See Godfried Donkor in 2026
Venice is not the only place to catch him this year. Donkor opened his first UK solo exhibition at Firstsite in Colchester on 23 May 2026, running to 30 August — which, for anyone reading this in early August, leaves a narrow but real window. He also features in the group exhibition Tirailleurs: Trials and Tribulations. He is represented by Gallery 1957, which has galleries in Accra and London.
For collectors, the sequence is worth reading carefully: a Venice main-exhibition presentation, a first institutional solo in Britain, and a group show, all landing inside twelve months. That is what a market inflection looks like from the outside while it is happening.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Godfried Donkor in the Venice Biennale 2026?
Yes. He is among the 111 invited participants in the main exhibition, In Minor Keys, curated by the late Koyo Kouoh and running from 9 May to 22 November 2026.
What is Godfried Donkor showing in Venice?
A newly commissioned painting, Michael and the Dragon II (2026), together with three paintings and four works on paper originally made for his 2017 Gallery 1957 exhibition The First Day of the Yam Custom: 1817.
Has Godfried Donkor shown at the Venice Biennale before?
He represented Ghana at the Venice Biennale in 2001, twenty-five years before this appearance in the main exhibition.
What is Donkor’s connection to Koyo Kouoh?
Kouoh curated his 2017 exhibition at Gallery 1957 in Accra, and later selected him for the 2026 Venice Biennale. Works from that 2017 show hang in Venice alongside his new commission.
Which gallery represents Godfried Donkor?
Gallery 1957, which operates in Accra and London, and which announced his Biennale participation.
Read the full guide to the 61st Venice Biennale and the most African edition in its 131-year history.
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