Koyo Kouoh's Venice plan continues

The Venice Biennale is basically trying something it has never had to do before. Its 2026 main exhibition is moving ahead without the curator who conceived it, because Koyo Kouoh died on May 10, 2025, almost exactly a year before opening. But the institution did not scrap the show. Instead, with her family’s support, it decided to realize the exhibition she had already mapped out — title, artist list, catalogue structure, graphic identity, and exhibition architecture included. (labiennale.org) ### What exactly is continuing? The central exhibition is called *In Minor Keys*, and it is still scheduled to run from May 9 to November 22, 2026, with preview days on May 6, 7, and 8. La Biennale says Kouoh had already developed the project’s theoretical framework and selected the artists and artworks before her death. That matters because this is not a vague (labiennale.org)ion, completed from a plan she had already delivered, including a curatorial text sent on April 8, 2025. (labiennale.org) ### Who is finishing the work? The people carrying it through are the team Kouoh herself chose: Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Hélène Pereira, and Rasha Salti as advisers, Siddhartha Mitter as editor-in-chief, and Rory Tsapayi as research assistant. The Biennale has been explicit about that structure from the start. In other words, the final build is (labiennale.org)ecuted by collaborators already inside Kouoh’s process. (labiennale.org) ### What did Kouoh leave behind? Quite a lot, turns out. The Biennale says she had already chosen the exhibition title, defined the spatial layout, designated catalogue authors, and opened dialogue with invited artists. A key working meeting happened in Dakar in April 2025 at RAW Material Company, the art center she founded. By February 2026, the Bi(labiennale.org)ganizations for the posthumous show. (labiennale.org) ### What is *In Minor Keys* trying to do? Kouoh’s text frames the exhibition around quieter registers — listening, intimacy, poetry, low frequencies, and forms of repair that resist spectacle. She contrasts those “minor keys” with bombast and militarized noise. The point is not smallness for its own sake. It is attention — to grief, survival, relati(labiennale.org)he exhibition also reads, inevitably, as a memorial shaped by her own absence. (labiennale.org) ### What changed because she died? Some parts of the Biennale machinery could continue. Some could not. The clearest example is the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, which will not be awarded in 2026 because Kouoh did not finalize the honorees herself. But other decisions she had already made are still being used — even the international jury announced on April 22, 2026 was selected by Kouoh before her death. (labiennale.org) ### Why is authorship the hard part? Because exhibitions are not just checklists. A curator keeps shaping meaning through late-stage edits — placement, pacing, omissions, emphasis, tone in the room. Kouoh left a detailed blueprint, but a blueprint is not the same thing as being alive to adjust it. So the Biennale’s solution is a kind of stewar(labiennale.org)unless production absolutely requires it. That is probably the closest the institution can get to fidelity now. (labiennale.org) ### Why does this matter beyond Venice? Because Venice is still the art world’s biggest stage, and this edition is now a test case for how institutions handle unfinished work by major cultural figures. Kouoh was the first African woman appointed to curate the Biennale, and her exhibition is arriving not as a replacement program but as a posthumous r(labiennale.org)art contemporary art survey, one part argument about legacy, care, and who gets to carry a vision across the line. (ocula.com) ### Bottom line? The show is going on, but not in the usual way. Venice is treating Koyo Kouoh’s plan as finished enough to honor and incomplete enough to require careful guardianship. If it works, *In Minor Keys* will feel less like a substitute and more like a final statement delivered by a team that knew exactly what she meant. (labiennale.org)