Venice Biennale Opens With a Tribute to Koyo Kouoh and a Dense, Devotional Main Show
The 61st Venice Biennale arrives carrying more than the usual curatorial ambition. Its main exhibition, In Minor Keys, was completed after curator Koyo Kouoh died of cancer while organizing it, leaving five collaborators to finish the project from her plans. The result is an exhibition that functions not only as a major international survey, but also as a memorial shaped by absence.
That emotional charge is amplified by the event’s recent turmoil. The festival jury resigned after controversy over a statement that Israel and Russia would not be considered, and the biennale’s juried prize was replaced by a people’s choice award. Against that backdrop, the exhibition’s tone feels especially weighted: reflective, crowded, and at times almost funereal in its attention to ritual and repair.
There is much to take in. In the freshly renovated Central Pavilion, Big Chief Demond Melanchon’s large red feathered costume-sculpture makes an immediate impression, while Tammy Nguyen’s painting, dense with color and crisp symbols, rewards slower looking. In the Arsenale, Guadalupe Maravilla’s arcing, throne-like assemblages and Ayrson Heráclito’s gleaming metal sculptures suggest a show deeply invested in transformation, spiritual charge, and the body as a site of memory.
Kouoh’s focus on artists from Africa gives In Minor Keys its clearest specificity. A section centered on Michael Armitage’s Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute brings together historical figurative painters including Josephine Alacu, Banadda Godfrey, and Peter Mulinda. That section feels like a more focused East African counterpart to Adriano Pedrosa’s 2024 biennial, Foreigners Everywhere, though the comparison also underscores how quickly certain curatorial languages have become familiar.
Indeed, the exhibition is striking less for any single thesis than for the density of its recurring concerns. Healing, spirituality, colonialism, slavery, plants, water, farming, family history, sound, and hybrid mythic bodies appear again and again. The materials are equally insistent: clay, textile, assemblage, paint, and sculptural forms that seem to hover between object and offering.
The show’s breadth includes works by Nick Cave, Wangechi Mutu, and María Magdalena Campos-Pons, among others, but its larger argument is broader still. It reflects the dominant themes of recent global art with unusual clarity, suggesting that the minor key of this biennale is, in fact, the major key of the moment. What remains to be seen is whether that convergence reads as diagnosis, tribute, or both.
