After accepting the Venice Biennale's invitation to curate the 61st International Art Exhibition in October 2024, Koyo Kouoh worked intensively on the curatorial project. By the beginning of May 2025, she had already defined the theoretical framework, selected the participating artists and started a dialog with them about the selection of artworks. The authors of the catalog, the graphic identity of the exhibition and the exhibition architecture had also already been determined.

All of this was to be presented by Koyo Kouoh at a press conference on May 20, but she died unexpectedly ten days earlier, on May 10, 2025.

The Venice Biennale then decided, with the full support of Koyo Kouoh's family, to realize the exhibition according to her plans, "with the further purpose of preserving, enhancing and widely disseminating her ideas and the work she pursued with such dedication to the very end."

At a press conference on 27 May 2025, a team that Koyo Kouoh herself designated presented her concept, the advisors Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Helene Pereira and Rasha Salti, the editor-in-chief Siddhartha Mitter and the assistant Rory Tsapayi.

Venice Biennale Press Conference, 27 May 2025
From left to right: Siddhartha Mitter (editor-in-chief), Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Helene Pereira and Rasha Salti (team of advisors), Rory Tsapayi (assistant).

In the curatorial text that Koyo Kouoh sent to the President of the Biennale on 8 April 2025, she proposed for the 61st International Art Exhibition, "to shift to a slower gear and tune in to the frequencies of the minor keys. Because, though often lost in the anxious cacophony of the present chaos raging through the world, the music continues. The songs of those producing beauty in spite of tragedy, the tunes of the fugitives recovering from the ruins, the harmonies of those repairing wounds and worlds."

In her poetic text, Koyo Kouoh wrote further, "The minor keys refuse orchestral bombast and goose-step military marches and come alive in the quiet tones, the lower frequencies, the hums, the consolations of poetry, all portals of improvisation to the elsewhere and the otherwise". Most important to her is that "minor keys ask for listening that calls on the emotions and sustains them in return."

The 61st international art exhibition will be tuned in to the minor keys "that invites listening to the persistent signals of earth and life, connecting to soul frequencies. If, in music, the minor keys are often associated with strangeness, melancholy and sorrow, here their joy, solace, hope, and transcendence manifest as well."

Koyo Kouoh's vision for the exhibition is based on a deep trust in artists "as the vital interpreters of the social and psychic condition and catalysts of new relations and possibilities." Her Venice Biennale 2026 is not intended to be "a litany of commentary on world events, nor an inattention or escape from compounding and continuous intersecting crises. Rather, it proposes a radical reconnection with art’s natural habitat and role in society: that is the emotional, the visual, the sensory, the affective, the subjective."

In Minor Keys, curatorial text

Koyo Kouoh - biographical data

(From Venice Biennale press information, 27 May 2025)

Like for all Venice Biennials since 2001, we will publish an extensive Special about the 61st International Art Exhibition in 2026. In the meantime, see:
Venice Biennale Special 2024