Most biennales arrive in the major key — scale, volume, the loud insistence that this is the year that matters. The 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia arrives under a different instruction. Its title, chosen by Koyo Kouoh, is In Minor Keys. The show opened on 9 May and runs through 22 November 2026 at the Giardini and Arsenale, in venues across Venice, and at Forte Marghera. The musical metaphor is not decoration. It is a programme — and, now, an elegy.
Kouoh, born in Douala in 1967, was the first African woman appointed to curate the Venice Biennale. She had directed Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town and founded RAW Material Company in Dakar; she was, for a generation of artists from the continent and its diasporas, a maker of rooms in which their work could be taken seriously without being exoticised. Months after the appointment she was diagnosed with cancer. She died in May 2025, at fifty-seven, before she could walk the finished exhibition. The title and a text she had already written were published soon after. The show that opened a year later is hers, and not only hers: completed by a team that chose fidelity over replacement.
What a minor key asks for
A minor key does not mean smaller ambition. It means a different temperature — the interval that aches rather than resolves, the line that refuses the easy cadence. Kouoh was asking for work that does not shout to be counted, and for a public willing to listen at that lower volume. In a city that has trained biennale visitors to sprint between pavilions, parties and the next photograph, that is almost a political stance. Softness here is not politeness. It is method.
Venice thrives on spectacle; it always has. The risk of any Biennale is that the art becomes an excuse for the social calendar. In Minor Keys pushes against that metabolism. It privileges the half-heard, the peripheral, the work that accumulates rather than detonates. Nick Cave's contribution, conceived with Kouoh and titled in the spirit of her thinking, moves through grief toward something like renewal — figures that merge body, flora and sound, less a statement than an offering. The pitch of the whole exhibition is set by that kind of listening.
Absence as a medium
There is no honest way to write about this Biennale without the empty chair. Kouoh's death is the first time a Venice curator has left midway through preparations for one of the world's most watched exhibitions. The team that finished the show has treated her text and her title as scores rather than drafts. In the official materials, the Shrines and the language of saudade — that Portuguese word for a longing that includes the presence of what is gone — take on a weight the living curator could not have intended and would, one suspects, have recognised. Absence is not a theme pasted on. It is the condition under which the minor key becomes audible.
Reading it again in 2026
By November the stands will come down and the Instagram will move on. What lasts from a Biennale is rarely the loudest room. It is the work that altered the pitch of your looking — that made the next painting, the next alley, the next silence feel differently tuned. We have traced that kind of attention elsewhere in this magazine: in Abramović's empty rooms, in the year's return of the visible hand, in any art that refuses to perform for the feed. In Minor Keys is a bet that art still knows how to do that, if we stop demanding it perform in C major. Through 22 November, Venice is the place to test the bet. Kouoh set the key. The rest is listening.