Despite the sudden death of curator Koyo Kouoh, the 61st edition of the Venice Biennale will be as planned. More importantly, Cristiana Costanzo, the chief press officer of the Biennale, announced today (May 27) at a press conference at CA'Giustinian's historic Sala Delle Colonne that it will still be guided by Kouoh's vision. The 2026 Venice Biennale is titled “Minor Key” thanks in part to the efforts of a multicultural advisory team, with which Kouoh has worked: curators Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Helena Pereira and Rasha Salti and Rasha Salti, as well as critics, critics, and hosts in-Chief Siddharthartha Mitter and Assistans and Assistans and Assistans and Assistans and Assistans and Assistans and Assistans and Assistans and Assistans and Assistans and Assistans and Assistans and Assistans and Assistans and Assistans and Assistans and Assistans and Assistans and Assistans and Assistans and Assistans and Assistans and Assistans and Assistans and Assistans and Assistans and Assistans and Assistans and Assistans and Assistans and Assistans and Assistans and Assistans and Assistans and Assistans and Assistans and Sapssess tsapay.
The Biennale Choice is based on a comprehensive proposal submitted on April 8, which includes a comprehensive proposal for theoretical texts, artist selection, spatial design, visual identity and catalog contributions, and is based on “full support from KOYO KOUOH Family”. “We are realizing her exhibition, as she imagined, as she personally gave me,” added Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, president of the Biennale. “LA BAINNALE is doing it today for 100 years.”
As the music-inspired title suggests, the upcoming version of the artistic framework promises to showcase the intimate and introspective forms of listening, meditation, communication and understanding that can counteract the overwhelming and disorienting oversaturation of our tumultuous times. In Kouoh's words, the exhibition will be “multiple gatherings of art… called and communicated in joyful collectives, full of bondage in the cracks of alienation and conflict.”
According to Rasha Salti, Kouoh envisions a biennial of “Rejecting Orchestra Bombs” that rejects the grandeur of major artistic activities around the world today and the act of social performance. She thinks the Biennale is a call to slow down – “Breathe deeply. Exhale. Put your shoulders down. Close your eyes.”
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“I'm tired. People are tired. We're all tired. The world is tired. Even the art itself is tired,” Kouoh wrote in Rory Tsapayi's 2022 text at the end of the press conference. There is evidence that curators have long been aware of the need to change the production, distribution and experience of art to preserve the impact of today’s world. “Maybe it's time. We need something else,” she wrote. “We need to recover. We need to laugh. We need to live with beauty. We need to play, we need to play with poetry. We need to be with love again. We need to dance. We need to rest and recover. We need to breathe. We need to breathe. We need radicality of joy. Time. The time has come.”
Kouoh's appearance was keenly felt at the press conference, which opened with a video of the curator's smile and continued to respond to her outstanding personality and vision in a way that salutes and reads. The tone became excited when Buttafuoco recalls Kouoh asking her if she could tell her mother that she had been selected to plan the 2026 Biennale.
In a speech after being appointed last December, Kuo expressed her desire to shape an exhibition that “has meaningful to the world we currently live in and, most importantly, to the world we want to create.” For her, artists are visionary people and social scientists who can help us reflect and imagine alternative solutions to a bright future.
The “Little Key” of the Venice Biennale
According to her curatorial approach, she believes that the Biennale is an invitation to listen to secondary sounds and tones, a metaphor for engaging in micro-reality, knowledge and wisdom, ancestral memory and neglected geography, often revealed through personal stories that are surfaced by dominant historical narratives to replay the essence of humanity. As Beckhurst Feijoo explains, the focus is on “sensory, emotional and subjective”, and the upcoming biennial will focus on artists whose practices “flow into society seamlessly” against “the wonder of horror” and global chaos. This curatorial proposition turns the exhibition itself into an exercise in listening to the secondary key (the “Sotto voce” signal of potential change) and as an enabler of such change. The secondary keys are the metaphor of sound, society and space, as their faint but lasting resistance to sound, care and beauty frequencies – invite “find oasis, islands, islands of all biological dignity, islands that are considered by people.”
Today’s meeting shows that the curatorial spirit of the 2026 Venice Biennale is likely to be with other recent biennials, including the Sharjah Biennale (“carrying”) and the Boston Triennial (“exchange”), who are increasingly accepting a multiple exhibition model to collect and cultivate a diverse range of alternatives and gradually develop a diverse knowledge and recruit, and gradually integrate a wide variety of experiences. Microgeography and micro-subsequent extra reality.
All details of the Biennale—including the list of artists invited to the international exhibition, the graphic identity, the exhibition design and the list of participating countries—will be announced on Wednesday, February 25, 2026. In the meantime, several nations have already announced the artists taking over their national pavilions: Henrike Naumann and Sung Tieu for Germany, curated by Kathleen Reinhardt; Yto Barrada (Artist of Moroccan descent recently exhibited sculptures in the open-air atrium of Moma PS1), and 2017 Turner Award winner Lubaina Himid for Grite for Grite. The United States has not revealed its choices yet, and the decision to shaped the Trump administration’s cultural agenda has attracted attention – especially the country may choose which narrative to show on one of the world’s largest, most influential and most influential and influential international art exhibitions.
