Complete star score: ★★★½
The works: ★★★★The present: ★★★
How would Koyo Kouoh have executed this? This was the inescapable thought in my head as I negotiated the Central Pavilion within the Giardini and the Arsenale, the 2 venues for the Venice Biennale’s primary exhibition, and their surrounding landscapes. It is usually the important thing consideration for the 5 curators trusted with bringing the concepts of the Biennale’s inventive director, who died in Could 2025, to fruition.
It feels vital to say that nevertheless intently they collaborated, nevertheless deeply they understood their good friend, the squadra di Koyo Kouoh (Koyo Kouoh’s staff) can solely divine a lot in regards to the bodily presentation of her “imaginative and prescient, plans and wishes”, as they put it. The three “advisors”—Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Hélène Pereira and Rasha Salti—the editor-in-chief, Siddhartha Mitter, and the assistant to Kouoh, Rory Tsapayi, spent every week together with her in Dakar, a month earlier than she died. They thrashed out the artist checklist, the exhibition construction and design, and thought of how Kouoh’s a number of themes and “undercurrent priorities”, as they describe them, can be manifested via the present.
However grappling with the objects and installations, lots of them accomplished since Kouoh’s demise, is a distinct matter—and there’s a larger proportion of recent artwork made by the 110 artists on this Biennale that there was within the 2024 exhibition curated by Adriano Pedrosa. Merely, the squadra’s process is inconceivable.
That stated, I left In Minor Keys feeling that Kouoh’s core ideas palpably did emerge via the 2 venues. A way of procession abounds, particularly within the Arsenale, the place the prolonged enfilade of the Corderie, the previous rope-making areas of the shipyard, naturally lends itself to cavalcade. Among the many exhibition’s strongest components is the presence of sentinels who information us via the exhibition: witnesses to historic trauma whose resistance usually finds joyous expression.
Nick Cave’s Amalgam (Origin) (2025) Picture: Marco Zorzanello; Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia
They start early within the Giardini with Huge Chief Demond Melancon’s Amistad Takeover (2026), an enormous orange-feathered “swimsuit”—fairly the understatement—made within the Black Masking custom, whose roots lie within the ceremonial practices dropped at the US by enslaved folks and knowledgeable by encounters with Native People. Embedded among the many feathers is beadwork depicting the revolt of enslaved folks on a Spanish boat within the nineteenth century. And the sentinels proceed proper via to the exterior areas past the Corderie, the place the US artist Nick Cave’s Amalgam (Origin) (2025) stands overlooking the Arsenale’s harbour. An enormous human-animal-vegetal hybrid physique, forged in monochrome bronze, the sculpture is knowledgeable by Cave’s career-long venture, the “Soundsuits”—exuberant emblems of resistance to racist violence. Based mostly on Cave’s personal physique, the determine is bedecked in a floral reduction, softening its sturdy energy stance. From the chest up, the physique turns into a tree that hosts a flock of fifty avian species, which Cave calls a “migration hub”, an evocation of group within the face of oppression. Cave’s work is emblematic of Kouoh’s goal to manifest “pleasure, solace, hope, and transcendence”; to counter tragedy—historic and present-day—with magnificence and enchantment.
That is palpable even earlier than coming into the Central Pavilion: Otobong Nkanga has rewilded the 4 pristine Modernist cylindrical columns of the white constructing by clothes them in brick instantly evocative of the material of Venice, on which she has hung glass terraria, clay flower pots and wood bee inns. The crops, she hopes, will ultimately overwhelm the columns.
Guests taking a look at Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons’s work of Koyo Kouoh and Toni Morrison Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia
One other key Kouoh theme is the backyard, the oasis, once more as an area not simply of life and sweetness, however one in all defiance—as an illustration, within the creole gardens of enslaved folks. And following Nkanga, crops germinate and proliferate via the present. Near clusters of magnolias sculpted by Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, once more in glass and ceramic, amongst different supplies, we see Kouoh herself in Campos-Pons’s portray, standing on a department with the clawed ft of a chook of prey, among the many leaves and blooms of magnolias. Alongside her is Toni Morrison, a presiding literary affect on the present, herself given sharp talons.
Among the many many different hybrid figures are these by Wangechi Mutu: close to Cave’s determine within the Arsenale harbour is SimbiSiren (2026), a marvellous bronze—half mermaid, half sphinx, half Kongo spirit, half Mugumo tree root—whose flippered limbs drape elegantly over a perforated steel base. Within the Central Pavilion, in the meantime, is Mutu’s MothersMound (2026), a knoll within the form of a pregnant physique.
One of many few rooms devoted to a single artist, on this case displaying work by Wangechi Mutu Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia
MothersMound is the central piece in a room devoted to Mutu, one in all few within the pavilion. Because of this shortage of solo areas, and the emphasis on multi-artist rooms with generally complicated or jarring juxtapositions, the Central Pavilion is poorly paced. I totally anticipated the 2 late “lodestar artists”— the Senegalese artist Issa Samb, Kouoh’s mentor and the founding father of the artwork collective Laboratoire Agit’Artwork, and the US artist Beverly Buchanan, the creator of sculpted and drawn “shacks”—to be given devoted rooms. As a substitute, their prominence is dulled by dispersal amongst different artists.
Notable in relation to this method is the squadra’s description within the Biennale catalogue of Kouoh’s dedication to artists whose practices are “not essentially uplifted in standard” exhibition codecs and her goal to problem “the structured frameworks of museums, monographic exhibitions and biennials”. The precept of artists’ practices being interspersed and resurfacing via the present is an admirable one. Generally it really works fantastically. However a extra standard construction may conversely have uplifted works that get misplaced in a show that inevitably favours extra bombastic language over some quieter practices—sarcastically, lessening the impression of precisely the minor-key works that the exhibition goals to privilege. The curatorial thesis additionally makes a lot of the thought of offering areas of relaxation within the exhibition. And whereas there are welcome carpeted zones with seating, there’s little repose supplied by the organisation of the artwork itself.
A few of Mohammed Joha’s collages Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia
Take the Palestinian artist Mohammed Joha, who makes lovely and tender collages assembled from on a regular basis detritus like discarded paper and material. Initially showing summary, they the truth is allude to the structure and atmosphere of Gaza. However they, and associated watercolours, are proven in a number of completely different areas, when a solo room would have totally honoured their poignancy and supplied an apt second of pause, given the topic.
To increase the musical metaphor within the title, and on the core of Kouoh’s textual content in regards to the present, we find yourself with an excessive amount of cacophony and too little rhythm and syncopation. Kouoh alluded to adopting the mode of a free-jazz ensemble, however free jazz stands or falls by its self-discipline. Too usually, the Central Pavilion feels aimless. That’s not to say that there aren’t compelling passages. I liked the completely different types of dense accumulation within the works of Tammy Nguyen, Ebony G. Patterson and Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka, as an illustration. However the format lacks the dynamism that may have made many items within the present extra resonant.
The Arsenale fits this method higher, in that the extra ample house permits for extra separation and immersion in artists’ works. Once more, we see Kouoh’s trauma/exuberance dichotomy play out: in Guadalupe Maravilla’s ICE Age Illness Thrower sculptures, as an illustration, the place the artist retraces his childhood journey as an undocumented immigrant—escaping the Salvadoran Civil Conflict for the US—by gathering objects which might be set inside woven, distinctly bodily, chairs. They evoke Central American Acapulco furnishings, with origins in Mayan hammocks. One object devastatingly displays Maravilla’s constellation of symbols and references: a beanie hat with animal ears that replicates the one worn by a younger little one who was infamously detained by immigration and customs enforcement (Ice) officers within the US. The Illness Throwers goal to behave as witnesses to, and guardians in opposition to, this brutality.
Two of the sculptures from Guadalupe Maravilla’s ICE Age Illness Thrower sequence Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia
Stellar, vastly distinctive, areas devoted to Laurie Anderson, Kader Attia, Alfredo Jaar, Walid Raad and Rose Salane, amongst others, all testify to a a lot tauter dramaturgy via the Arsenale. Though there are wayward or unfocused moments, total the juxtapositions are extra dynamic—not least the pairing of two extra hybrid figures, Nicholas Hlobo’s Umrhubuluzi (2010) and Rajni Perera and Marigold Santos’s Efflorescence/The Manner We Wake (2023). The previous is seemingly half mermaid (once more), half lobster, half plant, long-established in rubber and ribbon; the latter a masked deity in polymer clay, Styrofoam and artificial hair looming like a mountain on the coronary heart of an archipelago of atolls occupied by outlandish crops.
That is one other significance of the keys in Kouoh’s title—the cay, or small island. As a multifaceted idea, the exhibition is enormously wealthy. It offers numerous moments of disquiet and delight. Provided that the duty of totally embodying Kouoh’s imaginative and prescient as she would have is certainly inconceivable, it’s laudable that lots of her concepts for In Minor Keys are nonetheless seen and felt—and generally sonorously.
• Venice Biennale 2026: In Minor Keys, Giardini and Arsenale, Venice, 9 Could-22 November
• Curators: Koyo Kouoh after which realised by Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Siddhartha Mit-ter, Marie Hélène Pereira, Rasha Salti and Rory Tsapayi
• Tickets: €30 (concessions out there)
