Venice Biennale 2026 Opens With Tribute to Koyo Kouoh and a Hard Look at African Representation
The 2026 Venice Biennale began with a mood that was anything but celebratory. Titled “In Minor Keys,” the exhibition opened on the first anniversary of the death of Koyo Kouoh, the Cameroonian-Swiss curator who became the second African and sixth woman to direct the Biennale. Her absence shaped the atmosphere of the opening days, and her presence was felt in works scattered across the city and inside the exhibition itself.
Among the most direct tributes was Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons’ “Anatomy of the Magnolia Tree for Koyo Kouoh,” a four-panel work tied to her performance in the Poetry Caravan, which draws on griot traditions and Kouoh’s own 1999 journey from Dakar to Timbuktu. Offsite, Derrick Adams contributed a mural of Kouoh, “Heavy is the head that wears the crown,” extending the memorial beyond the exhibition grounds.
Yet the Biennale’s curatorial frame was not limited to mourning. Visitors who arrived expecting a narrowly defined “African Biennale” encountered a broader set of concerns: indigeneity, the natural world, and dreaming as forms of healing and endurance. That shift matters because the Biennale’s relationship to African artists has long been shaped by colonial history, uneven inclusion, and delayed recognition.
The first inclusion of African artists in the Biennale’s main history came in 1922, when 33 sculptures from ethnographic collections in Florence and Rome were presented as objects of ingenuity, but also as artifacts filtered through a colonial lens. African artists did not appear in the main curated show until 1990, when Giovanni Carandente selected five artists from the continent, including El Anatsui and Bruce Onobrakpeya of Nigeria, and Tapfuma Gutsa, Nicholas Mukomberanwa, and Henry Munyaradzi of Zimbabwe.
This year, one of the clearest historical interventions is Sammy Baloji’s installation “Collection and classification of Kongo objects in Italy 1450–1922” in the Central Pavilion. The work traces a timeline of collecting and classification while pairing it with oversized sculptural forms derived from scanned figures and cubic additions that evoke the minerals still extracted from Congo. The result is a pointed meditation on cultural and natural extraction, and on the colonial and neocolonial systems that continue to shape both.
The Biennale’s history suggests that representation alone is never the full story. What matters, increasingly, is who gets to frame the terms of visibility — and what kinds of histories the exhibition is willing to confront.
VeniceBiennale KoyoKouoh AfricanArt ContemporaryArt ArtHistory SammyBaloji
