The 61st International Art Exhibition, titled In Minor Keys, will be produced by La Biennale di Venezia, with the contributions of professionals selected and directly involved by Curator Koyo Kouoh. The exhibition will run from Saturday, 9 May to Sunday, 22 November 2026, with previews on 7, 8, and 9 May, across the Giardini, the Arsenale, and various venues throughout Venice.

The curatorial team includes advisors Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Hélène Pereira, and Rasha Salti; editor-in-chief Siddhartha Mitter; and assistant Rory Tsapayi. Between mid-October 2024 and early May 2025, Kouoh and her team worked intensively to shape the exhibition’s vision—developing its theoretical framework, selecting the participating artists and artworks, commissioning catalogue authors, defining its graphic identity and exhibition architecture, and engaging in close dialogue with the invited artists.

The exhibition’s title and curatorial framework, originally scheduled for release on 20 May 2025, were announced instead on 27 May, following the sudden passing of Koyo Kouoh on 10 May 2025—a loss felt deeply across the global art and cultural communities.

With the full support of Kouoh’s family, La Biennale di Venezia is committed to realizing In Minor Keys exactly as the curator conceived it. This commitment also honors her extraordinary vision, preserving, amplifying, and widely sharing the ideas and work she so passionately pursued to the very end.

In Minor Keys invites audiences into a sensory and emotional realm, where quiet frequencies, poetic gestures, and intimate worlds offer a counterpoint to the dominant noise of global crisis and spectacle. Kouoh embraces the metaphor of the “minor keys”—in music, feeling, geography, and social practice—as a space of resilience, resistance, and relation.

Drawing on the insights of thinkers such as James Baldwin, Édouard Glissant, and Toni Morrison, Kouoh convenes a constellation of artists who work through improvisation, generosity, and collective imagination. These artists move beyond spectacle, grounding their practices in the blues, the whisper, the island, the courtyard, the creole garden—those “small keys” that hold immense spiritual, cultural, and ecological power.

Rather than comment on global crises, In Minor Keys proposes a radical re-tuning: a return to the sensate, affective, and subjective dimensions of art. It positions art not as escape, but as reconnection—to soul frequencies, to community, and to the Earth.

The exhibition unfolds as a visual and meditative procession, opening portals between disciplines, generations, and geographies. It proposes a polyphonic assembly that celebrates artistic imagination as a force for healing, relation, and transformation.

All remaining details of the project—including the full list of invited artists, the graphic identity, exhibition design, and Participating Countries—will be announced at the official presentation in Venice on Wednesday, 25 February 2026.