Venice Biennale 2026: Koyo Kouoh’s Final Exhibition Finds Politics in the Landscape
The 2026 Venice Biennale arrives under unusual pressure, but the most consequential absence is also the most defining presence. Koyo Kouoh, who died one year before the exhibition opened, had already shaped the central show, titled “In Minor Keys,” and written its curatorial text. Five advisers — Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Siddhartha Mitter, Marie Hélène Pereira, Rasha Salti, and Rory Tsapayi — known in the catalog as La Squadra di Koyo, carried her vision into the Giardini’s Central Pavilion, the Arsenale, and the outdoor spaces around them.
The result is a sprawling exhibition of 110 artists and collectives that treats contemporary life as both unstable and strangely luminous. Kouoh wrote that the project was meant to avoid becoming either a simple commentary on world events or an escape from them. Instead, the exhibition holds crisis and beauty in the same frame, often through the language of gardens, earth, roots, and plant life.
That emphasis is not decorative. It is structural. The catalog essays by Biennale president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco and La Squadra both recall meetings with Kouoh beneath trees, and the exhibition repeatedly returns to the creole garden, a concept associated with Édouard Glissant. Across the venues, nature appears as material, subject, and witness: paintings of flora, sculptures made with earth, and sound and video works that register the rhythms of the natural world.
Otobong Nkanga’s facade installation at the Central Pavilion is among the clearest examples. She has wrapped the building’s four columns in bricks and inserted plants whose vines are expected to overtake the structure by the end of the Biennale in November. Nearby, Uriel Orlow’s “Dedication II” (2021/2026) projects tree roots alongside scrolling text while a wooden platform vibrates beneath viewers, as if the ground itself were speaking. In “Reveries of Collective Walkers (Reading to Plants),” Orlow invites visitors to read aloud to plants, collapsing the distance between audience and environment.
Other works extend the exhibition’s political reach. Mohammed Joha’s “No Shelter 12-29” (2025) responds to the destruction of Gaza’s land since 2023. Ebony G. Patterson’s “…fester…” (2023) uses floral fabric to conceal red-painted hands and black thorns, turning beauty into a carrier of colonial violence. Elsewhere, artists including Dan Lie, Wardha Shabbir, Seyni Awa Camara, Célia Vásquez Yui, Sabian Baumann, and Manuel Mathieu deepen the show’s attention to survival, memory, and the archive.
What emerges is not a retreat into pastoral calm, but a more difficult proposition: that resilience can be cultivated, and that celebration may itself be a survival strategy. In Kouoh’s hands, the landscape becomes a way to think about history without surrendering to it.
