Venice Biennale 2026 Presentation Revealing Kouoh’s Vision

A Biennale presentation usually feels like a curtain rise. In 2026, it feels like a collective breath. The Venice Biennale 2026 Presentation, serves as the formal unveiling of Biennale Arte’s 61st edition, titled In Minor Keys, and it also marks an unusually intimate institutional promise: the project will be realized as Koyo Kouoh conceived it.

Kouoh’s appointment carried historic weight, celebrated widely as a breakthrough for the Biennale’s curatorial lineage. Her death on May 10, 2025 shifted the exhibition’s meaning overnight, turning a future facing edition into a living archive of thought, taste, and care. La Biennale’s own statements describe how she worked intensively from mid October 2024 through early May 2025, shaping the theoretical framework, selecting artists and artworks, defining the catalogue direction, and developing both graphic identity and spatial architecture.

The title: In Minor Keys, reads like musical instruction and a political attitude at once. Kouoh’s curatorial text frames the exhibition around listening, relation, and the emotional register of quieter frequencies, with artists positioned as interpreters of our social and psychic condition. It proposes an “archipelago of oases,” spaces that refresh and nourish, where intimacy becomes a form of strength and where attention becomes a kind of ethics.

The February 25 presentation is designed to translate that philosophy into concrete form. According to La Biennale, it will announce the list of artists invited to the International Exhibition, the graphic identity, the exhibition design, and the list of participating countries. Across early pavilion signals, a shared material resonance is already emerging in tune with In Minor Keys: Alma Allen’s stone driven sculptural language for the United States, Lubaina Himid’s painted wood and staged narratives for Britain, and Henrike Naumann’s charged use of found furniture, set to be realized in Venice alongside Sung Tieu.

This sensibility pairs with a growing pull toward archival silence, where artists foreground minor histories and bureaucratic traces that sit beneath official storytelling, echoing Kouoh’s invitation to listen for lower frequencies and intimate oases. For Germany in particular, the pavilion is poised to become a site of pilgrimage, honoring Naumann’s final vision while amplifying Tieu’s rigorous conceptualism through Kathleen Reinhardt’s curatorship.

From there, the exhibition unfolds across Venice from May 9 to November 22, 2026, with preview days from May 6 to May 8, spanning the Giardini, the Arsenale, and other city locations.

If previous Biennales often leaned toward volume and velocity, Venice Biennale 2026: In Minor Keys signals another kind of ambition: resonance. The presentation becomes the first public tuning of that score, inviting the world to meet a Biennale shaped around attention, intimacy, and the radical seriousness of joy.