There is a particular species of Venetian afternoon, somewhere in the long exhale between the tourist crush of the Riva and the first spritz of the evening, when the city stops performing itself and simply sits there, damp and magnificent and slightly the worse for wear, like a dowager who has decided she no longer needs to justify her jewellery. It is in precisely such an afternoon that one arrives at the Giardini this year, and it is precisely such an afternoon that the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia seems to have been designed for. The exhibition is called In Minor Keys. It is quieter than its predecessors. It is also, by some distance, the most African edition in the Biennale’s 131-year history — and it arrives shadowed by a loss that no amount of curatorial ingenuity can quite talk its way around.
Koyo Kouoh, the Cameroonian-Swiss curator who conceived it, died on 10 May 2025, some twelve months before her exhibition opened. She was 57. She had been appointed Artistic Director of the Biennale’s Visual Arts Department in November 2024, the first African woman ever entrusted with the role, and by the time of her death she had already done the essential work: chosen the title, written the theoretical framework, selected the artists, named the catalogue authors, and settled the architecture of the show. What she had not done, and what no one can now do on her behalf, is walk the rooms.
What “In Minor Keys” Means — and Why the Title Is a Provocation
The temptation, on encountering a title like this, is to read it as melancholy. Minor key, minor mood, mourning — the arithmetic seems obvious, particularly given the circumstances. It is also almost entirely wrong.
Kouoh’s curatorial text, which she sent to the Biennale’s president on 8 April 2025 barely a month before her death, is emphatic on the point. Her exhibition was not conceived as commentary on the world’s catastrophes, nor as an escape from them. It was conceived as a return to what she considered art’s actual habitat: the emotional, the sensory, the subjective, the affective. The register she reached for was not the dirge but the free-jazz ensemble — dissonance and cohesion held in the same hand, scale and method scrambled deliberately, the whole thing arranged so that meaning accumulates sideways rather than being announced from a lectern.
Anyone who has spent time with the minor keys in music will recognise the sleight of hand. The minor mode is not sad; it is complicated. It holds grief and ecstasy in the same six notes and refuses to tell you which one you are hearing. That is a considerably more sophisticated organising principle for a global exhibition than the thematic hectoring that has characterised rather too many recent biennials, and it is the reason this edition rewards the slow visitor and punishes the one working from a checklist.
The scenography, by Wolff Architects of Cape Town — appointed by Kouoh herself in early 2025 — takes the threshold as its organising device. Doorways, portals, the charged interval between one world and the next. It is the sort of idea that could easily have curdled into architectural whimsy and does not, largely because it is deployed with unusual generosity toward the individual artist rather than as a signature imposed over the top of everyone.
Koyo Kouoh: The Curator Who Did Not Live to See Her Own Biennale
To understand what this exhibition is, it helps to understand where its author came from — which is to say, not from the conventional pipeline at all.
Kouoh was born in Douala in 1967 and educated in Switzerland, where she trained in banking administration before turning to culture. This is not an incidental detail. Her institutional instincts — the patience with structures, the understanding that an exhibition is a financial object as well as an intellectual one — came from somewhere, and they came from there. In 2008 she founded RAW Material Company in Dakar, a centre for art, knowledge and society that has done more to shape a generation of West African curatorial practice than institutions ten times its size. From 2019 she served as Executive Director and Chief Curator of Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town, arriving at a museum in genuine crisis and leaving it a functioning, respected, internationally serious institution.
The decisive gathering for In Minor Keys took place in Dakar in April 2025, at RAW Material Company, weeks before she died. Her chosen team — advisers Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Hélène Pereira and Rasha Salti, editor-in-chief Siddhartha Mitter, and research assistant Rory Tsapayi — carried the project forward with the full support of her family and the Biennale’s board. One consequence of her death is quietly poignant: the Golden Lions for Lifetime Achievement will not be awarded this year, because Kouoh did not live to name the recipients. The Biennale chose to leave the category empty rather than fill it on her behalf.
Whether the exhibition on the ground is the exhibition she imagined is a question her team have been admirably honest about being unable to answer. Criticism has landed most consistently on the pacing of the Central Pavilion, where multi-artist rooms and sparse solo presentations produce juxtapositions that read as jarring rather than generative. It is a fair complaint. It is also, one suspects, the sort of thing that gets solved in the last three weeks of installation by a curator standing in the room — which is exactly what was not available here.
Thirteen African National Pavilions at the Venice Biennale 2026
The headline number is thirteen. Thirteen African national pavilions, of which four — Guinea, Equatorial Guinea, Sierra Leone and Somalia — are appearing at Venice for the first time in the exhibition’s history.
It is worth pausing on what that actually represents, because the art world’s appetite for celebrating its own progress tends to outrun the evidence. A national pavilion at Venice is not a gesture. It is a commissioner, a curator, a budget, a lease on Venetian real estate at Venetian prices, a shipping and customs operation, an insurance policy, and a six-month staffing commitment. For a ministry of culture operating on the budgets most African ministries of culture operate on, it is a genuinely difficult thing to assemble. Four countries doing it for the first time in the same year is not a coincidence; it is the visible surface of a decade of quiet institutional groundwork.
The Democratic Republic of Congo’s pavilion has drawn the most sustained attention, and deservedly. Titled Simba Moto! Seize the Fire! and curated by the philosopher Nadia Yala Kisukidi, it occupies the Antico Refettorio of the Scuola Grande di San Marco and gathers nine artists, among them Sammy Baloji, Gosette Lubondo and Nelson Makengo — which is to say, three of the most rigorous image-makers working anywhere on the continent, in a room with the acoustics of a sixteenth-century refectory. Equatorial Guinea’s debut, The Forest / The Undergrowth, is installed at the Palazzo Donà dalle Rose under commissioner Paulo Speller and curator Joan Abelló.
A necessary caveat, and one the more thoughtful African critics have been making since opening week: thirteen pavilions do not arrive with thirteen equal levels of institutional support or curatorial rigour, and it does the strong ones no favours to pretend otherwise. Presence is not the same as parity. But presence is where parity starts.
African Artists in the Main Exhibition: Mutu, Nkanga and the Lodestars
Wangechi Mutu has been given something close to the run of the place, and she has taken it. In the Arsenale harbour sits SimbiSiren (2026), a bronze hybrid — part mermaid, part sphinx, part Kongo water spirit, part the aerial root of a Mugumo fig — whose flippered limbs spill over a perforated metal base with the boneless confidence of something that has always lived there. In the Central Pavilion, MothersMound (2026) rises as a knoll shaped like a pregnant body, anchoring one of the very few rooms in the exhibition devoted to a single artist.
Otobong Nkanga’s Soft Offerings to Silenced Voices and to All Who Have Turned to Dust (2026) sits at the entrance to the Central Pavilion, which is to say it is the first serious thing most visitors encounter, and it sets the exhibition’s terms with considerable economy.
The most revealing inclusions, though, are the two artists Kouoh’s team have described as lodestars: the Senegalese artist Issa Samb, founder of the Laboratoire Agit’Art collective and Kouoh’s own mentor, and the American sculptor Beverly Buchanan. Both are dead. Both worked in registers that resisted the market almost as a matter of principle. Placing them at the conceptual centre of the world’s most commercially observed exhibition is a joke of a very high order, and an entirely sincere argument about lineage.
Godfried Donkor: Michael and the Dragon II, and a Debt to Koyo Kouoh
If one wanted a single room in which to understand what Kouoh was building, it might well be Godfried Donkor’s.
Donkor was born in Accra in 1964, is of Asante descent, and divides his life between London and Accra. He is not new to Venice — he represented Ghana at the Biennale as long ago as 2001, at a moment when African representation here was a considerably lonelier business than it is today. His practice runs on archival research and travel in roughly equal measure, tracing the routes and the philosophies of the African diaspora from West Africa to the Americas, and finding their form across collage, ink, paint, paper and embroidery. The recurring subject is Black men as agents of their own destiny rather than objects of somebody else’s history: boxers, bare-knuckle champions, comic-book figures, saints.
For Venice he has unveiled a newly commissioned painting, Michael and the Dragon II (2026), which takes the familiar allegory of the archangel dispatching evil and then declines to let it resolve cleanly: into the composition comes the slave ship, one of Donkor’s persistent motifs, and the moral arithmetic of good triumphing over evil abruptly stops adding up.
It is what hangs alongside it, though, that makes the presentation quietly devastating. With the new painting are three further paintings and four works on paper originally made for The First Day of the Yam Custom: 1817 — Donkor’s 2017 exhibition at Gallery 1957 in Accra, curated by Koyo Kouoh. The source image behind that body of work is widely held to be the earliest recorded depiction of the visual and aesthetic life of the Asante region, and it now resides in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, which is its own small essay on where African material culture ended up.
So the works in Venice are, among other things, a nine-year conversation between an artist and a curator, hung in the exhibition she did not live to open. Donkor sits within what Kouoh conceived as the show’s procession — a motif drawn from the carnivals of the Afro-Atlantic world, gathering Nick Cave, Alvaro Barrington, Ebony G. Patterson, Pio Abad and Big Chief Demond Melancon into the same moving current. Kouoh had wanted, wherever it could be managed, to refuse solid walls altogether; Wolff Architects answered with standing supports, so that a visitor moves through the exhibition rather than around it.
The Line That Runs Through Okwui Enwezor
No account of this Biennale is honest without Okwui Enwezor, who in 2015 became the first African-born curator to direct the Venice Biennale and whose All the World’s Futures remains the template against which politically serious biennials are still measured. Enwezor died in 2019, aged 55.
That two of the most consequential African curators of the modern era both directed a Venice Biennale and both died young is a fact one is obliged to state plainly and then decline to make tidy. There is no lesson in it. There is only the observation that the institutional weight placed on a very small number of shoulders has been considerable, and that the work of widening those shoulders — more curators, more commissioners, more funded institutions on the continent itself — is the actual unfinished business behind the celebratory headline.
What the 2026 Venice Biennale Means for the African Art Market
Collectors reading for signal rather than sentiment should note three things.
The first is that Venice does not set prices, but it sets attention, and attention is the raw material from which prices are eventually manufactured. Artists given significant Biennale real estate tend to see institutional acquisition interest move first and auction results follow at a lag of eighteen months to three years. Mutu and Nkanga were already established; the artists to watch are the ones in the DRC and first-time pavilions whose names are new to the international circuit.
The second is that this edition’s deliberate turn away from the didactic and toward the sensory cuts against the market’s recent appetite for work that explains its own politics on the label. Whether that shifts collecting behaviour or merely produces a season of critics saying it should is genuinely unclear.
The third is that the infrastructure story matters more than the artist story. Four debut African pavilions means four ministries that now have institutional muscle memory for doing this. That compounds.
Visiting the Venice Biennale 2026: Dates, Venues and Practical Notes
The exhibition runs from Saturday 9 May to Sunday 22 November 2026, with the awards ceremony on the closing day. The two principal venues are the Giardini and the Arsenale, supplemented by Forte Marghera and some forty-six national participations scattered across the city, plus around thirty collateral events.
A word of advice from bitter experience: the pavilions distributed across Venice proper are where a disproportionate amount of the interesting African work sits this year, including the DRC. They are also the ones most commonly skipped by visitors who have exhausted themselves in the Arsenale by two in the afternoon. Give the city pavilions their own day. Wear the shoes you would wear to walk, not the shoes you would wear to be photographed.
Rest spaces have been built into the main exhibition by design — a deliberate provision for contemplative pause rather than an afterthought. Use them. This is not a show that rewards forced march.
Frequently Asked Questions About the Venice Biennale 2026
When is the Venice Biennale 2026 and how long does it run?
The 61st International Art Exhibition runs from 9 May to 22 November 2026. The pre-opening took place on 6, 7 and 8 May, and the awards ceremony is scheduled for the closing day, 22 November.
Who curated the Venice Biennale 2026?
Koyo Kouoh, the Cameroonian-Swiss curator, was appointed Artistic Director in November 2024 and conceived the exhibition in full before her death on 10 May 2025. It was realised by a team she selected herself: Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Hélène Pereira and Rasha Salti as advisers, with Siddhartha Mitter as editor-in-chief and Rory Tsapayi as research assistant.
What does “In Minor Keys” mean?
The title refers to a musical register rather than a mood of sadness. Kouoh’s framework proposed a return to art’s sensory, emotional and subjective dimensions, structured less like a thesis and more like a free-jazz ensemble in which dissonance and cohesion coexist.
How many African countries have national pavilions at the 2026 Venice Biennale?
Thirteen African countries are presenting national pavilions. Four of them — Guinea, Equatorial Guinea, Sierra Leone and Somalia — are participating for the first time in the Biennale’s history.
Which African artists are showing in the main exhibition?
Among the most prominent are Wangechi Mutu, with the bronze SimbiSiren in the Arsenale harbour and MothersMound in the Central Pavilion, and Otobong Nkanga, whose installation opens the Central Pavilion. The late Senegalese artist Issa Samb, Kouoh’s mentor, features as one of the exhibition’s two lodestar figures.
Is Godfried Donkor showing at the Venice Biennale 2026?
Yes. The Ghanaian-British artist is among the 111 invited participants in the main exhibition, presenting a newly commissioned painting, Michael and the Dragon II (2026), together with three paintings and four works on paper first made for The First Day of the Yam Custom: 1817, his 2017 Gallery 1957 exhibition curated by Koyo Kouoh. Donkor previously represented Ghana at the Biennale in 2001.
Why were no Golden Lions for Lifetime Achievement awarded in 2026?
Kouoh died before she was able to nominate recipients, and the Biennale elected to leave the category unawarded for this edition rather than select on her behalf.
Was Koyo Kouoh the first African curator of the Venice Biennale?
She was the first African woman to hold the role. The Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor was the first African-born curator to direct the exhibition, at the 56th edition in 2015.
Continue Reading
- The 13 African Pavilions at the Venice Biennale 2026 — Including the One Standing Empty
- Godfried Donkor at the Venice Biennale 2026: Michael and the Dragon II and the Koyo Kouoh Commission
- Koyo Kouoh: The Curator Who Built Two Institutions and Designed a Biennale She Never Saw
A Closing Note
There is an argument, made in good faith by people who have watched this cycle before, that a single African-led Biennale changes very little — that the machinery of legitimation grinds on regardless, that the celebration is louder than the shift, and that in two years the conversation will have moved to whatever the next appointment happens to signify. The argument is not wrong. It is merely incomplete.
What Kouoh built into this exhibition, and what her team have carried through with real fidelity, is the proposition that African artists need not perform their Africanness for a Western audience in order to be legible — that complexity, opacity and outright refusal are available to them as artistic positions, and that an exhibition can be organised around sensation rather than explanation without being frivolous. That proposition does not expire on 22 November. It is the sort of thing that lodges in the practice of everyone who saw it, and surfaces, in altered form, a decade later.
Which is, when you think about it, precisely how a minor key works.
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