How Koyo Kouoh Shaped the 2026 Venice Biennale

Daniel Mensah

Koyo Kouoh shaped the 2026 Venice Biennale before her death, and she became the first African woman to lead the Biennale since its founding in 1895. The theme she left in place, In Minor Keys, tells you a lot about her curatorial approach. Instead of aiming for spectacle first, she centered subtlety, listening, and forms of attention that are often overlooked in major international exhibitions. Before her death in 2025, Kouoh described her intent to compose an exhibition that “will carry meaning for the world we currently live in—and most importantly, for the world we want to make.”

Lerato Molefe

And that theme matters because it changes how you read the whole exhibition. Rather than treating art as something only grand or dramatic can carry, Kouoh’s framework asks viewers to pay attention to quieter structures, slower rhythms, and the social meaning of forms like rest, processions, schools, and thresholds.

Daniel Mensah

Kouoh was appointed curator in November 2024, and by the time she died in May 2025, she had already established the exhibition’s main framework. She shaped the language of the show, invited participants, and defined the organizing motifs: Shrines, Procession, Schools, Rest or oases, and Thresholds. The exhibition will feature 110 invited participants.

Lerato Molefe

Wait, 110 invited participants, and the motifs are doing the organizing? That matters, because it means the show isn’t just “about” minor keys in some vague poetic sense. Shrines, Procession, Schools, Rest, Thresholds are social forms. They tell you how to move, how to gather, how to learn, how to pause.

Daniel Mensah

Yes. And that’s very Kouoh. She had a way of making curating feel less like arranging objects and more like setting conditions for thought. So when people say her most powerful gesture here may have been restraint, I think that’s right. She wasn’t trying to overpower the audience. She was building a world that asks: can you stay with subtlety long enough for it to become force?

Lerato Molefe

I love that, but I’m also wary of making “quiet” sound soft. Because for a lot of African artists, restraint is not absence. It’s survival, memory, coded speech, ritual, all the ways people hold meaning when power is noisy. A shrine is not decorative. A threshold is not neutral. A procession is not just movement; it can be witness, grief, insistence.

Daniel Mensah

That’s the crucial correction. And it explains the tensions she was working with. One is enchantment versus cynicism. Can art still make room for wonder without pretending the world is innocent? Another is rest versus extraction. In a global art economy that is constantly harvesting novelty, visibility, identity, and labor, rest becomes almost oppositional. Not laziness. Refusal.

Lerato Molefe

Rest versus extraction is going to stay with me. Because African contemporary art gets asked, over and over, to explain itself, represent a continent, heal history, satisfy institutions, and still remain legible to markets. That is a brutal workload for any artist. So when Kouoh places Rest, or oases, inside the Biennale grammar, she’s not adding a cute lounge. She’s saying restoration is part of knowledge.

Daniel Mensah

Which, in fairness, is a radical idea in spaces that often confuse exhaustion with seriousness. And on the world stage, that matters. Kouoh understood Africa’s place in global culture wasn’t secured by volume alone. It required changing what counts as central. If a school can be an artwork, if a procession can be an archive, if a shrine can be a political form, then the terms of attention start to shift.

Lerato Molefe

Maybe. But this is where I push you a little. Venice is still Venice. It rewards scale, drama, the thing people can photograph in three seconds and post before lunch. Can “minor keys” really hold the center of that conversation?

Daniel Mensah

I think they can, but only if we stop imagining the center as a spotlight. Centers can be gravitational. Not flashy -- decisive. Kouoh’s wager, as I read it, was that subtlety can organize an entire field if the thinking is rigorous enough underneath it.

Lerato Molefe

Hm. So not the loudest room at the party, but the room everybody somehow ends up talking about afterward.

Lerato Molefe

Koyo Kouoh’s death in May 2025 raised a practical question: how do you complete an exhibition when the person who shaped it is no longer there? In this case, the answer has been to preserve her framework and carry it forward collectively.

Daniel Mensah

The curatorial team has said it is expanding Kouoh’s vision, not replacing it. That matters because the exhibition’s continuation is tied to places and institutions she helped build, including RAW Material Company in Dakar, which became a point of continuity after her death.

Lerato Molefe

RAW Material Company in Dakar is a concrete example of that continuity. It brings together people who worked with Kouoh to revisit her ideas, clarify the motifs she chose, and decide how to realize them on the ground.

Daniel Mensah

Yes, and collaborative authorship is built into the exhibition logic anyway. If your motifs are Shrines, Procession, Schools, Rest, Thresholds, then no single curatorial ego can dominate without breaking the form. Schools imply transmission. Procession implies collective movement. Thresholds imply relation. The team is, in a sense, using Kouoh’s own structure to carry Kouoh forward.

Lerato Molefe

Performance is important here, not as decoration, but as a way of producing meaning. Processions, rituals, and gatherings can all function as forms of knowledge if the exhibition is designed that way.

Daniel Mensah

That’s well put. And it sharpens what the artists are being invited into. These 110 participants are not just filling a checklist. They’re entering an ecosystem where a shrine might hold memory, a school might model study, a procession might embody public thought. The exhibition becomes less object-first and more relational, without losing seriousness.

Lerato Molefe

There is a real risk that relation and ritual get romanticized in global art spaces. African art is often expected to carry spirituality, community, and performance in a package that looks appealing to institutions and markets.

Daniel Mensah

That is exactly why Kouoh’s framing mattered. Enchantment should not become decoration. The exhibition still has to create friction, thought, and sometimes discomfort, or else those forms lose their meaning.

Lerato Molefe

Carrying her legacy forward does not mean freezing it. It means keeping the work active, and letting the team’s collective process show how her ideas can still generate debate.

Daniel Mensah

I agree. Though I’m still less pessimistic than you about minor keys holding attention. I think global audiences are more exhausted by noise than institutions realize. A show that offers oases, thresholds, shrines, forms of depth rather than saturation, may hit harder precisely because everything else is shouting.

Lerato Molefe

The bigger question is whether African art can refuse spectacle and still stay central in a place like Venice. That is the test Kouoh’s framework puts on the table.

Daniel Mensah

By the time the Biennale opens, that question will have to be answered in practice. And even asking it on Kouoh’s terms changes the conversation.

Lerato Molefe

That’s a good place to leave it.