From fractured narratives and subdued atmospheres to institutional tension and political unrest, In Minor Keys unfolds as a Biennale suspended between poetic ambition and curatorial disorientation.
In Minor Keys is a Biennale conceived, in keeping with curator Koyo Kouoh’s vision, in a minor register. It turns away from the monumental and declarative modes traditionally associated with the large-scale international exhibition in order to embrace quieter, more oblique, and more nuanced forms of listening, relation, attentiveness to excluded genealogies, and slower temporalities. With its overt borrowing from musical vocabulary, the title announces an anti-heroic curatorial stance: an exhibition that privileges introspection, reflection, and a sensitive attunement to the world — and above all to its margins — over the construction of emphatic statements. Yet this very premise, compelling as it is in theory, seems to have produced, at least in part, a Biennale that feels restrained.
It should be acknowledged that In Minor Keys had to contend with a decisive absence: the death of Koyo Kouoh in 2025, after she had already defined the exhibition’s title, artists, theoretical framework, and overall structure, which was subsequently carried forward by the team that continued her work. But it would be too easy to read the exhibition simply as a project maimed by fate, or as the inevitably incomplete outcome of a vision cut short. Mourning matters, and it matters profoundly. Still, it does not fully account for the sense of discontinuity and disorientation that accompanies one’s passage through the Giardini and the Arsenale.
The promise of a quieter, more oblique approach — conceived as an active contribution to world-making, and perhaps also as a form of resistance and renewal in difficult times — immediately struck me as compelling, not least because it seemed so necessary in a present marked by violence, polarization, and ongoing trauma. Yet in the end, this minor key is never fully realized in the exhibition. Instead, it gives way to a curatorial weakness that leaves the show less incisive, as its dispersal of focus produces not complexity so much as confusion.
If one wants to draw from this exhibition a reflection that extends beyond the field of art, one is led to ask whether, in a present dominated by forceful positions, openly declared conflicts, and crises that demand continual acts of alignment, a counterproposal grounded in a different posture can truly hold. Perhaps the point is precisely that In Minor Keys registers a genuine need of our time: the desire to step outside the regime of things as they are, beyond spectacularization, rhetoric, incessant enunciation, and the assumption that relevance must necessarily coincide with force. Yet it is precisely in attempting to inhabit this alternative posture at the curatorial level that the exhibition encounters difficulty, never fully translating it into a convincing spatial and formal language. As a result, the intuition from which the entire project emerges remains more persuasive as a theoretical proposition than as an actual exhibition experience.
At the Giardini, In Minor Keys opens with Otobong Nkanga’s intervention on the exterior columns of the Central Pavilion, clad in brick, glass terrariums, terracotta vessels, and bee shelters, as if vegetal and organic matter might slowly insinuate itself into the modernist order of the architecture. By acting upon the building’s monumental character, the work seems to suggest that even a platform like the Biennale — a paradigmatic site of power, Eurocentric in structure, a machine of visibility and consecration — might be traversed by other forms of life, other temporalities, another way of inhabiting space. In this sense, it offers a perfect premise.
The exhibition then unfolds through two relatively successful opening rooms. In the first, Seyni Awa Camara’s sculptures are especially striking. The heir to a long lineage of potters from Lower Casamance, Senegal, Camara populates the space with beings of silent intensity. Neither fully animal nor fully human, with protruding eyes and broad, flat feet, these figures seem to inhabit a threshold between dream and wakefulness.
In the second room, María Magdalena Campos-Pons’s large-scale tribute, Anatomy of the Magnolia Tree for Koyo Kouoh and Toni Morrison (2026), emerges as one of the most declarative yet also most emotionally calibrated works in the exhibition’s opening sequence. Large vertical panels form a kind of paper mural in which the figure of Koyo Kouoh, wrapped in a long dark mantle, appears beside Toni Morrison. Between them, magnolia branches rendered in watercolor, ink, and gouache spread across the wall like a vegetal weave that is at once fragile and solemn.
The magnolia, emblematic of the American South, reappears before the mural in the form of floral sculptures in glass and resin, arranged on pedestals like votive presences. A sound composition by Kamaal Malak, built from bass frequencies and synthesizers, completes the installation. The work thus makes explicit its homage to Black women whose interiority, memory, and transmission of knowledge became forms of cultural and intellectual force.In Minor Keys is a Biennale conceived, in keeping with curator Koyo Kouoh’s vision, in a minor register. It turns away from the monumental and declarative modes traditionally associated with the large-scale international exhibition in order to embrace quieter, more oblique, and more nuanced forms of listening, relation, attentiveness to excluded genealogies, and slower temporalities. With its overt borrowing from musical vocabulary, the title announces an anti-heroic curatorial stance: an exhibition that privileges introspection, reflection, and a sensitive attunement to the world — and above all to its margins — over the construction of emphatic statements. Yet this very premise, compelling as it is in theory, seems to have produced, at least in part, a Biennale that feels restrained.
It should be acknowledged that In Minor Keys had to contend with a decisive absence: the death of Koyo Kouoh in 2025, after she had already defined the exhibition’s title, artists, theoretical framework, and overall structure, which was subsequently carried forward by the team that continued her work. But it would be too easy to read the exhibition simply as a project maimed by fate, or as the inevitably incomplete outcome of a vision cut short. Mourning matters, and it matters profoundly. Still, it does not fully account for the sense of discontinuity and disorientation that accompanies one’s passage through the Giardini and the Arsenale.
The promise of a quieter, more oblique approach — conceived as an active contribution to world-making, and perhaps also as a form of resistance and renewal in difficult times — immediately struck me as compelling, not least because it seemed so necessary in a present marked by violence, polarization, and ongoing trauma. Yet in the end, this minor key is never fully realized in the exhibition. Instead, it gives way to a curatorial weakness that leaves the show less incisive, as its dispersal of focus produces not complexity so much as confusion.
If one wants to draw from this exhibition a reflection that extends beyond the field of art, one is led to ask whether, in a present dominated by forceful positions, openly declared conflicts, and crises that demand continual acts of alignment, a counterproposal grounded in a different posture can truly hold. Perhaps the point is precisely that In Minor Keys registers a genuine need of our time: the desire to step outside the regime of things as they are, beyond spectacularization, rhetoric, incessant enunciation, and the assumption that relevance must necessarily coincide with force. Yet it is precisely in attempting to inhabit this alternative posture at the curatorial level that the exhibition encounters difficulty, never fully translating it into a convincing spatial and formal language. As a result, the intuition from which the entire project emerges remains more persuasive as a theoretical proposition than as an actual exhibition experience.
After these first two rooms, however, the exhibition seems to slip into visual overload, into an accumulation of works that gives way to increasing indeterminacy. There is certainly no shortage of compelling works, nor of themes. And yet one is left with the sense of an exhibition in which it becomes difficult to grasp the thread, an exhibition whose considerable richness is not always matched by an equally lucid formal articulation.
The Arsenale, by contrast, finds a stronger rhythm. Already at the entrance, Refaat Alareer’s text lends the exhibition a political gravity that is difficult to evade. The words accompanying In Minor Keys—“the songs of those who continue to generate beauty despite tragedy, the melodies of fugitives resurfacing from ruins, the harmonies of those trying to repair wounds and worlds”—open onto elsewhere and onto the possibility of an otherwise. Poetic texts scattered along the route suggest possible interpretive keys to the works, within a dense constellation of artists and projects, many of them emphatically installation-based. The Arsenale does not entirely resolve the estrangement that shadows In Minor Keys, but it at least transforms it into a more rhythmically structured and compelling experience. One leaves intrigued, still disoriented, but with the sense that here the Biennale more successfully holds its ambitions together.
Rather than offering a clear direction, this Biennale conveys a sense of being at the mercy of events, caught in a world that has grown increasingly chaotic and from which we no longer quite know how to extricate ourselves. One might object, of course: what direction can an exhibition really provide today—especially one so institutional, so entangled with structures of power—in a world already adrift? The point, in fact, is not only that the exhibition struggles to organize an internal trajectory. It is that the context of this edition ended up exceeding the exhibitionary apparatus itself, exposing many of its limitations. Rarely has the Biennale appeared so openly traversed by the world and its conflicts as it did this year: during the preview days, protests followed one another against the presence of Russia and Israel; the Russian Pavilion was temporarily closed after Pussy Riot’s action; a significant twenty-four-hour strike, also promoted by the Art Not Genocide Alliance, was called against Israeli participation; and numerous pavilions closed in protest. The Biennale also had to reckon with the resignation of the international jury, officially announced on April 30. This was followed by the withdrawal of more than seventy artists from prize competition, in solidarity with the resigning jury and as a gesture of dissent against the overall structure of the edition, striking at the heart of the Biennale’s traditional system of legitimation.
In this context, the present asserted itself within the Biennale so forcefully that, in many respects, the exhibition seemed overshadowed by the very historical conflicts and pressures bearing down on it. With its increasingly anachronistic national pavilions, the Biennale appeared openly challenged in the very terms through which it confers legitimacy, signalling a broader crisis in the institutional framework that sustains it.
Venice, with its exhausted yet still splendid machinery, thus became the ideal setting for a condition of disorientation: not in the pleasurable sense of exploratory drift, but in the sense of finding oneself amid chaos, still lacking the tools to imagine a way out of the present impasse.
Text by Giulia Zompa
Credits: Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia and the Pavilions
