The 61st International Art Exhibition, titled In Minor Keys, produced by La Biennale di Venezia, with the contributions of professionals selected and directly involved by Curator Koyo Kouoh, is set to follow Kouoh’s vision. In Minor Keys marks a return to the sensory, affective and subjective dimensions of art. The curatorial team includes advisors Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Hélène Pereira, and Rasha Salti; editor-in-chief Siddhartha Mitter; and assistant Rory Tsapayi.
Between mid-October 2024 and early May 2025, Kouoh and her team worked intensively to shape the exhibition’s vision—developing its theoretical framework, selecting the participating artists and artworks, commissioning catalogue authors, defining its graphic identity and exhibition architecture and engaging in close dialogue with the invited artists. The exhibition’s title and curatorial framework, originally scheduled for release on the 20th of May 2025, were announced instead on the 27th of May 2025, following the sudden passing of Koyo Kouoh on the 10th of May 2025—a loss felt deeply across the global art and cultural communities. With the full support of Kouoh’s family, La Biennale di Venezia is committed to realising In Minor Keys exactly as the curator conceived it. This commitment also honors her extraordinary vision, preserving, amplifying and widely sharing the ideas and work she so passionately pursued to the very end.
In Minor Keys invites audiences into a sensory and emotional realm, where quiet frequencies, poetic gestures, and intimate worlds offer a counterpoint to the dominant noise of global crisis and spectacle. Kouoh embraces the metaphor of the “minor keys”—in music, feeling, geography and social practice—as a space of resilience, resistance and relation. Drawing on the insights of thinkers such as James Baldwin, Édouard Glissant and Toni Morrison, Kouoh convenes a constellation of artists who work through improvisation, generosity as well as collective imagination. These artists move beyond spectacle, grounding their practices in the blues, the whisper, the island, the courtyard, the creole garden—those “small keys” that hold immense spiritual, cultural and ecological power.
Rather than comment on global crises, In Minor Keys proposes a radical re-tuning: a return to the sensate, affective and subjective dimensions of art. It positions art not as escape, but as reconnection—to soul frequencies, to community and to the Earth. The exhibition unfolds as a visual and meditative procession, opening portals between disciplines, generations, and geographies. It proposes a polyphonic assembly that celebrates artistic imagination as a force for healing, relation and transformation.
All remaining details of the project—including the full list of invited artists, the graphic identity, exhibition design and Participating Countries—will be announced at the official presentation in Venice on Wednesday the 25th of February 2026. The exhibition will run from Saturday the 9th of May to Sunday the 22nd of November 2026, with previews on the 7th, 8th and 9th of May across the Giardini, the Arsenale and various venues throughout Venice.
