I’m having difficulty settling on my first impressions of “In Minor Keys,” the main exhibition at the 61st Venice Biennale, which opens to the public on Saturday. I’m torn between a lot of different feelings. Which maybe makes sense, because the world is in escalating chaos, and the biennial itself is being torn by it from all sides.
The most dramatic symbol of this state of affairs is the festival jury resigning last week over matters that seem at once politically clear (controversy over its public statement saying that Israel and Russia would not be considered for prizes) and so byzantine that no one really understands what happened. The result is that the biennale’s juried prize has been replaced by a Eurovision-style people’s choice award.
In addition, the 61st biennale opens with the burden of having lost its curator. The much-admired Cape Town–based curator Koyo Kouoh died suddenly of cancer while putting it together last year, leaving her community bereft. (A team of five collaborators has completed the exhibition using her plans.) That loss means that “In Minor Keys” will be judged as a tribute to her but also haunted by the question of how different it would have been had she been around to respond to the moment.
I find plenty to like. I like the giant, detailed red feathered costume-cum-sculpture created by Big Chief Demond Melanchon, of New Orleans, which opens the freshly renovated Central Pavilion. I love the density of Tammy Nguyen‘s painting, swirling with colors and crisp symbols, at the crowded back of that space.
I think Guadalupe Maravilla’s arcing, throne-like assemblages in the Arsenale are powerful. The display of gleaming metal sculptural by Afro-Brazilian artist Ayrson Heráclito, with their accompanying ink sketches mapping out how he permutes them out of varying combinations of spiritual symbols, is potentially star-making.
Kouoh’s work homed in on artists from Africa specifically, which is what gives the show its greatest specificity. Among the things to remember will be the section focused on painter Michael Armitage‘s foundation, the Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute, with paintings by a host of 20th-century artists with vivid figurative styles, like Josephine Alacu, Godfrey Banadda, and Peter Mulinda. The gesture is a slightly more focused, East African version of the big display of historical non-Western figurative art from Adriano Pedrosa‘s 2024 biennial, “Foreigners Everywhere.”
While there are many specific discoveries, I have to admit that when I first read the list of about 110 artists and collectives, and again when I first walked through the big show yesterday, I felt a sense of déjà vu. The team’s introductory statement promised art concerned with “thresholds between lifeworlds and temporalities,” with “experiential and metaphorical gardens,” with “collective resistance and healing.”
And in the vast, densely packed exhibition spaces of the Central Pavilion and Arsenale, you find many works conjuring healing spirits or mournful rites, or trying to look like devotional objects. Much clay, and textile, and assemblage from charged materials. A lot of focus on sound as a pathway to embodied experience. So much painting and sculpture conjuring hybridized mythic bodies. Many works about artists’ family histories. Many works about colonialism and the afterlives of slavery. Unbelievable amounts of work about plants, and water, and farming.
Having just written about the last four years of biennials, I can tell you this is a concentration of basically all the themes at the heart of the recent global conversation. The minor key of this show is the major key of recent art history.
The global dominance of this climate of work is owed to a meeting of pressure currents: demands for representation by the Global South (what legendary Bangladeshi photographer Shahidul Alam calls the “Majority World”) and the Global North’s time-honored habit of looking to non-Western wisdom in its own moments of spiritual crisis. It’s worth emphasizing that this is a style, not the style of anything. There’s plenty of art from the Global South that is not of the style you see here—that is, for instance, more outspoken documentary realism, or that references global consumer culture. (Ghanian painter Godfried Donkor‘s paintings stick out as an exception on that front, though the pop culture they reference is half-century-old U.S. comics, so we’re still a bit at a remove from the present.)
Meanwhile, “In Minor Keys” gives you heaping doses of Nick Cave and Wangechi Mutu, two artists who have been at the apex of international mainstream visibility for a long time. Both work in different ways in the hybrid-bodied, craft-adjacent, ritual-inspired idiom that defines the show’s picture of what matters now in global art.
Prominently located in the big main gallery of the Central Pavilion, there’s a wall-filling painting by María Magdalena Campos-Pons. It pairs a huge portrait of Koyo Kouoh with the late Nobel Prize–winning novelist Toni Morrison, turning them both into beaming saints. They are surrounded by giant magnolias, meant to symbolize the American South and thus Kouoh’s advocacy for Black women. The blooms are both painted and rendered in ceramic sculptural form dotted in the space in front.
A tribute to a different aspect of Kouoh can be found in the outbuilding behind the Arsenale, almost the last thing you reach, by the Swiss team of Clarissa Herbst and Dominique Rust. Ostensibly, it’s a shrine to the Zurich club scene that centered on a place called the Parfumerie in the 1980s and ‘90s. Mirror balls, club flyers, and colored lights comprise a neat little installation to good times past.
The wall label notes that Kouoh, who was born in Cameroon but spent her formative years in Switzerland, worked the bar at the original Parfumerie. It says she was inspired by its grassroots spirit to think about what artist-run organizations could be. Even if I find the habit of using lost nightlife spots as found objects yet another recent biennial cliché, the installation gives a sense of the complex pathways of Kouoh’s inspirations, and an identity formed by multiple geographic and aesthetic poles.
The top note of the show is so overpowering that you can miss some of its important nuances. A subdued but clear theme of “In Minor Keys” is the productive repurposing of the legacies of artists from the Euro-American modern-art canon. The show begins in the Central Pavilion with prominent “shrines” to Senegalese artist Issa Samb (1945–2017) and Black American artist Beverly Buchanan (1940–2015). But nearby, a side-gallery display is devoted to Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968). It unexpectedly frames him not as the founder of conceptual art, but as a role model of “institutional care” because of the detailed instructions he left behind for staging his last work, Étant donnés (1946–66). (Duchamp, incidentally, also features on an imagined guest list in the Parfumerie installation, alongside Grace Jones, Dante Alighieri, and Kouoh herself.)
Elsewhere in the same building, Lebanese artist Raed Yassin’s “Warhol in Arabia” project riffs on, and fabulates from, an anecdote about late-period Andy Warhol going to Kuwait in 1977.
You can read such curatorial gestures as trying, gingerly, to find a way to a more complex idea of identity than is allowed for in a style of thinking that expects artists to speak for and to the struggles of whichever community they represent. (You really feel this mindset in the wall labels, which, despite being written by a variety of writers, some famous, spend paragraphs explaining who the artist is before just telling you what you are looking at—but let’s not dwell on labels).
The curatorial statement Kouoh left behind speaks of turning the page on “didactic” art, of valuing work as “neither a litany of commentary on world events, nor an inattention or escape from compounding and continuous intersecting crises.” This, I take it, was her way of responding to the backlash to the identity-based themes of the recent past, while holding onto her advocacy as one of the most visible and well-connected curators in Africa. It so happens that this move towards mood, too, was on trend. Most biennials (including the recent Whitney Biennial) are emphasizing “atmosphere” now—less a big change in art style, to my eyes, and more a change in rhetoric, stepping back from the idea of artistic consciousness-raising as direct political change, which emerged post-2020.
Another thing I noticed, in my project looking at the top artists of the last four years of global biennials, is that they were mainly from Africa and its diaspora or Middle Eastern with a focus on criticism of Israel. “In Minor Keys” ratifies this international trend, as well. But it’s also the source of a final tension you have to mention, even in a post meant to be a first impression.
The curating has made it pretty much impossible to comment honestly on this show without mentioning Palestine. A poem about Gaza, “If I Must Die” by Rafaat al-Areer, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza in December 2023, is the very first thing you see on entering the Arsenale.
Going in, you will find, among other things, a work by the Israeli filmmaker Avi Mograbi. The title of that work, Between a river and a sea (2026), is itself a provocation when it comes to political speech in the U.S., the U.K., and Germany. Among other things (too complex to detail), Mograbi’s multi-channel video installation shows a desktop, scrolling through listings of doctors offices that existed in Gaza before the 2023 war. “We do not know if any of the listed businesses are still operating, but we do know that the area has been completely devastated,” the wall text for Mograbi’s piece says, pointedly referring to “the ongoing Nakba that began in 1948.”
You could call this work about mood and atmosphere, but it’s also pretty blunt. In a different way, a suite of gentle-seeming watercolor landscapes of Gaza painted in 2025 and 2026 by the expat Gazan artist Mohammed Joha is blunt. They are lovely—but I doubt they would be in the Venice Biennale except as a statement of curatorial solidarity.
With Gaza reduced to rubble and now the U.S.-Israel war in Iran and Lebanon, I knew the 61st Biennale would make visible the further collapse of Western cultural authority. I just assumed this would happen outside, in the national pavilions, since this main show was curated a whole year ago. It turns out that this collapse is so total that it reaches into the main galleries too, where the tone of retrospection breaks down and the present breaks in.
The 61st Venice Biennale, “In Minor Keys,” is open in Venice, May 9–November 22, 2026.