Koyo Kouoh’s Venice Biennale points back to living artists — and away from spectacle
The 2026 Venice Biennale is taking shape as a quieter, more contemporary proposition than recent editions. In “In Minor Keys,” the posthumously realized exhibition curated by Koyo Kouoh, the artist list tilts decisively toward living practitioners, with more than 90 percent of participants still active today. The result is a roster that feels less like a historical survey than a snapshot of current artistic production across regions and generations.
The exhibition includes 111 artists in total: 99 individuals, five artist duos, one collective, and six artist-led organizations. Excluding the organizations, the cohort comprises 64 women, 48 men, and two artists who use they/them pronouns. Kouoh’s stated aim was to resist “orchestral bombast” and instead foreground the subtler emotional registers made possible by art, music, and poetry.
That curatorial intention is reflected in the data. Compared with the Biennale editions organized by Cecilia Alemani in 2022, Adriano Pedrosa in 2024, and Ralph Rugoff in 2019, Kouoh’s selection most closely resembles Rugoff’s in demographic terms. Alemani and Pedrosa both expanded the canon by centering artists long overlooked because they were women or from the Global South. Kouoh, by contrast, shifts the emphasis back toward contemporary practice, with established and under-recognized mid-career artists who already have strong regional profiles and may be poised for wider international attention.
The geographic spread is notably balanced. Roughly half of the artists were born in the West and half in the Global South, a distribution that again aligns most closely with Rugoff’s 2019 edition. By comparison, Alemani’s exhibition leaned heavily toward artists born in Europe and North America, while Pedrosa’s 2024 edition placed a much larger share of artists in the Global South.
The analysis also shows a marked rise in North American representation, which now accounts for 25 percent of the 2026 exhibition, up from 3 percent in 2024. Within that group, Black and Indigenous artists make up roughly 43 percent. Among the artists singled out for extended display is the late American artist Beverly Buchanan (1940–2015), whose drawings and sculptures explored the vernacular architecture of Black communities in the American South. The exhibition also includes work by Linda Goode Bryant, Bonnie Devine, and Big Chief Demond Melancon.
Africa remains central to Kouoh’s vision. African-born artists account for 20 percent of the exhibition, while artists from Latin America and the Caribbean make up 15 percent of the main show. For a Biennale led by the first African woman ever appointed to curate the event, the numbers suggest a deliberate recalibration: less emphasis on breadth for its own sake, and more on a finely tuned global field of artists working now.
