The theme for the 61st International Art Exhibition of the La Biennale di Venezia, In Minor Keys, was announced at a press conference earlier today. Set to unfold in Venice from May 9 to November 22, 2026, the biennale's main exhibition will be centred on the poetic, sensory and ethereal ideas contained within the space of these notes. The curatorial framework, conceived by the late curator Koyo Kouoh, was presented by her team of advisors at the behest of her family and the biennale's board of directors. As they noted, the Venice Biennale 2026 will explore the infinitesimal spaces in which minor keys operate, to conceive "an exhibition 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." The allegory of the minor key in music will be used to create a space for quiet resistance through contemporary art.

The press conference was delayed by a week following Kouoh's sudden demise on May 10, 2025. Kouoh's appointment as curator for the 2026 edition came after an illustrious career where she critically engaged with pan-African perspectives as the director of Cape Town’s Zeitz MOCAA and as the founding artistic director of RAW Material Company in Senegal. The Swiss-Cameroonian curator became the first Black woman to lead the Venice Art Biennale when her role was announced in December 2024. To honour her life and practice, the biennale board decided to realise Kouoh's exhibition theme as she conceived it, seeking to preserve and disseminate her ideas.

Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, president of La Biennale di Venezia, said about the decision to carry Kouoh's vision forward, "We have decided to go on, to carry on, being aware that [Kouoh's] gesture is the gesture of a thinker who is whispering also from elsewhere...Her proposal is a whisper, a minor key, a sotto voce, the method through which light can find the right space and expand. And we saw this in the maps, in the precise indication that really moved me personally." Going on to talk about the centrality of art in a world defined by conflict, he stated, "Art, visual art in particular, we know it goes beyond future and present. Art is a dilated time. It is before and after. It is the permanence of a will made of words, made of signs, made of presence in life. Koyo's work is speaking to us, facing the work of curators before her and [those] that will come after her."

Kouoh had hoped that through her curatorship, the biennale would “carry meaning for the world we currently live in—and most importantly, for the world we want to make”, adding to the urgent ideas and call for equitable representation of the 2024 iteration of the festival, Foreigners Everywhere. The 60th edition, by Brazil-based curator Adriano Pedrosa, was a celebration of diverse and plural perspectives, following and making space for the “rich tradition” of “foreigners from all over the world.”

The philosophical framework that will guide the 61st Venice Art Biennale was presented by a team of advisors selected by Kouoh, including Rasha Salti, researcher and curator based between Beirut and Berlin; Marie Hélène Pereira, cultural practitioner and senior curator of performative practices at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, an art historian based in London, and arts writer Siddhartha Mitter. Salti began with an evocative plea to slow down, to take a deep breath in order to be able to confront the anxious present we face. Quoting the author James Baldwin, she noted, "There is a reason after all that some people wish to colonise the moon and others dance before it as an ancient friend." In Minor Keys seeks to remind us that art can sustain and refresh us through terrible times.

The exhibition is envisioned as a sensory experience, as opposed to a didactic framing of the role of art for the contemporary world. As Salti and her peers noted, it will build on the crucial belief Kouoh held, that "artists are the vital interpreters of the social and psychic condition and art is a catalyst of new relations and possibilities" and will foreground those who hold onto hope through their practices of often everyday, minor care. The advisors went on to suggest that the biennale would transform into a a free jazz ensemble, a festival of voices with a common premise: that poetics liberate and people make beauty together. Quoting French author Patrick Chamoiseau and revealing the linkage of jazz music to the Caribbean islands, Mitter stated, "The international exhibition of the 61st Biennale Arte intends neither a litany of commentary on world events, nor an inattention or escape from compounding and continuously intersecting crises. Rather, it proposes a radical reconnection with art's natural habitat and role in society."

Last year, Pedrosa invited those voices normally marginalised from the annals of art history as part of his showcase—spread across the Giardini and the Arsenale. The Venice Art Biennale 2024 included a majority of projects by queer artists, indigenous artists, folk artists and artists from the Global South, the ‘foreigners’ in a Global North ‘majority’. The 60th edition also saw participation from 88 national pavilions, with the Australia pavilion, kith and kin, winning the Golden Lion for national participation. The biennale was not without various contentions, apparent for a platform where fraught geopolitics play out in displays of soft power. The Russia and Israel pavilions remained shut for the duration of the biennale.

For the 2026 biennale, several countries have already announced artists or themes for their national pavilions. Florentina Holzinger will represent Austria, Caroline Dumalin and performance artist Miet Warlop will represent Belgium, Yto Barrada is set to represent France and Lubaina Himid has been tapped for the UK pavilion. With over 10 months to go for the showcase, tensions over representation are already rife. Recently, Creative Australia dropped their representatives, Khaled Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino, citing concerns about Sabsabi's past work, drawing much criticism for this decision.

The press conference ended with a recitation of a poem Kouoh wrote in 2022, which conveys the necessity of her biennale's curatorial theme. It reads, "The world is tired. Even art itself is tired. Perhaps the time has come. We need something else. We need to heal. We need to laugh. We need to be with beauty and lots of it. We need to play. We need to be with poetry. We need to be with love again. We need to dance. We need to make and give food. We need to rest and restore. We need to breathe. We need the radicality of joy. The time has come."