Venice Biennale setpiece
The 61st Venice Biennale — titled “In Minor Keys” and curated by Koyo Kouoh — has its public run set for May 9 through November 22, making it one of the year’s biggest contemporary-art moments. (The program will span the Giardini, the Arsenale and sites across Venice and includes 111 artists, 99 national participations and 31 collateral events, underscoring its scale.) ( )
Venice’s biggest art show this year is also a posthumous one: the 2026 International Art Exhibition will open on May 9 and run until November 22 carrying out the plan left by Koyo Kouoh, the curator La Biennale appointed on November 5, 2024. Kouoh died on May 10, 2025, before she could stage the exhibition herself, and La Biennale decided to proceed “in full accordance” with the project she had already defined. That choice turned a normal curator announcement into something closer to the completion of an unfinished score. The scale is the first thing to understand. The main exhibition alone has 111 invited participants, while the wider event includes 99 national participations and 31 collateral events spread across Venice. That is why the Biennale works less like a single museum show and more like a temporary city-state for art. The core exhibition sits in the Giardini and the Arsenale, but countries also mount their own pavilions and outside institutions stage parallel shows across the lagoon. Kouoh’s title, “In Minor Keys,” comes from music, where a minor key usually carries tension, melancholy, softness, or introspection instead of triumph. Her curatorial text asks visitors to “shift to a slower gear” and listen for quieter frequencies inside a noisy present. That tone fits Kouoh’s career. Before Venice, she built Raw Material Company in Dakar and then led the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town, two institutions known for treating art as part of public thought rather than luxury display. The 111 invited artists were selected from many regions, and the Biennale says the list includes individual artists, duos, collectives, and artist-led organizations rather than only solo stars. That makes the show read less like a greatest-hits wall and more like a conversation assembled across geographies. The team finishing the exhibition is also Kouoh’s own. La Biennale says the project is being realized with advisors Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Hélène Pereira, and Rasha Salti, with Siddhartha Mitter as editor-in-chief and Rory Tsapayi as research assistant. So the real story is not just that Venice has another oversized art season on the calendar. It is that one of the art world’s most powerful platforms is spending six months presenting a dead curator’s final argument, almost exactly as she left it.
