Venice Biennale Opening Week Puts Koyo Kouoh’s Final Curatorial Vision in Focus
Venice’s opening week has once again turned the Biennale into a citywide field of competing images, arguments, and histories. In the latest Venice special of The Week in Art, Ben Luke and guests examine In Minor Keys, the main exhibition curated by the late Koyo Kouoh and realized by five collaborators, while also tracing the national pavilions, collateral projects, and major museum presentations unfolding across the city.
The episode brings together immediate reactions from Louisa Buck, Jane Morris, and Luke on the central exhibition, which spans more than 100 artists across the Central Pavilion in the Giardini and the Arsenale. Rather than treating the Biennale as a single event, the conversation places it within the larger ecology of Venice itself, where official collateral exhibitions, performances, and institutional shows extend the exhibition’s reach far beyond the main sites.
Luke also speaks with Gabrielle Goliath, whose work for the South African pavilion was canceled and is now being staged in a church in Venice, and with Lubaina Himid, who is exhibiting in the British pavilion in the Giardini. The episode widens further with Saidiya Hartman, whose essays inspired Minor Music at the End of the World at the Goldoni Theatre, a production that includes contributions from Arthur Jafa, Precious Okoyomon, and Okwui Okpokwaseli.
Another segment turns to Official. Unofficial. Belarus., a collateral project by Belarus Free Theatre, as Alexander Morrison speaks with Daniella Kaliada about the team behind it. The episode closes, as these Venice specials often do, with a work of historical weight: Jacopo Tintoretto’s The Last Supper and The Israelites in the Desert, painted for the presbytery of the Basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore in 1591-92.
The pair has just returned to the basilica after a major conservation project funded by Save Venice, and Luke’s conversation with the charity’s Senior Researcher, Gabriele Matino, underscores how the Biennale’s present tense continues to sit beside Venice’s long conservation history. In a city where contemporary art and restoration are never far apart, the episode offers a clear reminder that Venice remains both stage and archive.
