Venice Biennale scale revealed

The 2026 Venice Biennale’s main exhibition is taking shape as one of the event’s biggest international lineups, with 111 participants announced for *In Minor Keys*. (labiennale.org) La Biennale di Venezia said the 61st International Art Exhibition will run from May 9 to November 22, 2026, with preview days on May 6, 7 and 8. The show will unfold at the Giardini, the Arsenale and other sites across Venice. (labiennale.org) The official English-language artist announcement describes 110 invited participants, including individual artists, duos, collectives and artist-led organizations, from “many different geographies and regions.” The Italian-language version of the same announcement puts the total at 111 participants. (labiennale.org 1) (labiennale.org 2) That count matters because the Biennale’s central exhibition is the curated core of one of the art world’s largest recurring events, alongside national pavilions and collateral shows. La Biennale said the 2026 edition will also include 100 National Participations and 31 Collateral Events. (labiennale.org) Dawn DeDeaux is part of that main exhibition roster, placing the New Orleans artist inside a show built to span cities, regions and artistic traditions rather than a single school or market. La Biennale’s curatorial materials place her work in a sequence of artists engaging themes including plantation history, settlement, flood, fire and geological memory. (labiennale.org) The 2026 exhibition was conceived by Koyo Kouoh, the Cameroon-born curator and museum leader whom La Biennale named artistic director of the Visual Arts Department in November 2024. The institution said Kouoh completed the exhibition’s framework, artist selection, catalogue authors and spatial design before her death in May 2025. (labiennale.org) La Biennale said it chose to carry out Kouoh’s exhibition with the support of her family and the team she assembled, including Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Hélène Pereira, Rasha Salti, Siddhartha Mitter and Rory Tsapayi. The title, *In Minor Keys*, comes from Kouoh’s curatorial text dated April 8, 2025. (labiennale.org) In her introduction, Kouoh framed the show around “the blues, the call-and-response, the morna, the second line, the lament, the allegory, the whisper,” tying music, mood and collective memory to the exhibition’s structure. That language helps explain why artists from places as far apart as Salvador, Dakar, San Juan, Beirut, Paris and Nashville appear in the same exhibition map. (labiennale.org 1) (labiennale.org 2) By the time preview week opens in Venice on May 6, 2026, DeDeaux and the rest of the invited roster will be entering a platform that La Biennale has run since 1895. This year’s numbers show how expansive that platform remains before a single pavilion door opens. (labiennale.org)