In Minor Keys, after Kouoh

The 61st Biennale opened on 9 May 2026 — Koyo Kouoh's conception, realized by her team after her death. La Biennale's choice not to name a successor is the most consequential institutional decision the institution has made in twenty years.

By the Biennale Editorial Team

For most of its history, La Biennale di Venezia has been organised around a contradiction it has never quite resolved. It is an international exhibition staged in a city whose international weight has been declining for four centuries. It collects the world's contemporary art in a building stock — the Giardini pavilions, the Arsenale's Corderie, the palaces scattered across San Marco and Castello — that was built for an empire, then for a kingdom, then for a republic, and is now maintained by a foundation whose annual budget would not buy two of the works it shows. The 60th International Art Exhibition, which ran from 20 April to 24 November 2024 under the title Stranieri Ovunque — Foreigners Everywhere, did not resolve the contradiction. It looked at it directly for the first time.

Adriano Pedrosa, the Brazilian curator who has been Artistic Director of MASP (the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand) since 2014, was appointed to lead the 60th in December 2022. He was the first Latin American curator and the first artistic director from the Southern Hemisphere in the institution's 129-year history. The Biennale's then-president Roberto Cicutto, in announcing the choice, said almost nothing that explained it. It became clear over the following sixteen months that the appointment was the choice. The title Pedrosa took was borrowed from a long-running series of neon works by the Paris-based collective Claire Fontaine — Foreigners Everywhere, lit in different languages in different installations since 2004. The title is a translation, and a kind of motto, of a slogan from Italian anti-racist activist groups of the early 2000s. Pedrosa used it as a frame for an exhibition that turned the established Biennale grammar inside out: not foreigners as guests at the centre of an art capital, but foreigners as the centre, the host city as a temporarily permeable place.

The Pedrosa exhibition

The central exhibition presented 331 artists, which is a high number for Venice but not unusual. What was unusual was who they were. Pedrosa organised the main exhibition into four formal categories — the "Italians Everywhere" historical section in the Giardini's Padiglione Centrale; sections devoted to the Indigenous, the queer, the outsider, and the self-taught; and a long present-day section in the Arsenale. The historical recovery work was the most consequential. Pedrosa programmed work by twentieth-century Italian artists who had emigrated and were largely forgotten on both sides of their travel — to Argentina, to Brazil, to Uruguay — and placed them alongside Latin American modernists whose national reputations had never crossed the Atlantic. The cumulative argument was that there is no single twentieth-century modernism that Venice has been telling the story of; there are many, and the Biennale has, for a hundred years, told one of them.

The Golden Lion for Best National Participation went to Australia, for Archie Moore's kith and kin — a chalk-drawn family tree of Moore's Kamilaroi and Bigambul ancestors that covered every wall and the ceiling of the Australian pavilion, with archival documents of Aboriginal deaths in custody arranged on a long table beneath. The Golden Lion for Best Artist went to the Mataaho Collective, four Māori women whose woven installation Takapau opened the central exhibition. Both prizes were, in the judgement of every serious reviewer of the edition, the right ones.

The Australian Pavilion in the Giardini della Biennale, Venice — the 2015 Denton Corker Marshall building, one of the thirty national pavilions in the historic Biennale gardens. — Above The Australian Pavilion at the Giardini della Biennale — Denton Corker Marshall's black-clad 2015 pavilion, one of twenty-nine permanent national pavilions, built in the Giardini between 1907 and 1995. · Photograph: Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0

The national pavilions, and a different scoreboard

The national pavilions have been the part of the Biennale that resists most successfully every Artistic Director's framing. The pavilion system was built up gradually after Belgium's first pavilion in 1907 and was the principal mechanism by which Venice survived two world wars and a Cold War as a working international exhibition. The pavilions are commissioned independently of the Artistic Director, by national agencies of varying competence and political weather. In 2024 they were, by the consensus of the field, the strongest collective showing in a decade. The German pavilion under Çağla Ilk and the artists Yael Bartana, Ersan Mondtag, and three sound artists generated genuine argument. The Polish pavilion's withdrawal of its government-selected exhibition and reinstallation of an unauthorised Ukrainian project by Open Group made political news. The Holy See pavilion, installed in the women's prison on Giudecca and curated by Chiara Parisi and Bruno Racine, was the most discussed object in the city.

The pavilions are commissioned independently of the Artistic Director, by national agencies of varying competence and political weather. In 2024 they were, by the consensus of the field, the strongest collective showing in a decade. — On the 60th edition

The 61st, and the loss

In December 2024 the Biennale's new president, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco — appointed in February of that year to succeed Cicutto — announced that the 61st International Art Exhibition would be directed by Koyo Kouoh, the Cameroonian curator who had since 2019 been Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town. Kouoh would have been the first Black African curator to lead the Biennale, and only the second woman after Bice Curiger (2011) to direct the main exhibition in the post-1990 reformatted institution. Her programme at Zeitz MOCAA — particularly the long-running When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting (2022) — had positioned her as the obvious next artistic director for any biennial committed to expanding what its curatorial intelligence looked like.

Kouoh died unexpectedly in Basel on 10 May 2025, eleven days before she was scheduled to announce the title of her edition at La Biennale's offices in Venice. She was 57. The loss was the most consequential to the field in living memory.

The institution's answer

The institution did the hardest of three things it could have done. The succession could have defaulted to a senior European curator and the edition would have continued by other means. It could have elevated one of Kouoh's collaborators alone and the edition would have become, in a different way, a tribute. Or it could refuse to name a successor at all — and let the team Kouoh had assembled realize the exhibition she had conceived. La Biennale, in the summer of 2025, chose the third route.

The title Kouoh had been preparing to make public — In Minor Keys — was announced on 21 May 2025, eleven days after her death. The phrase was hers; the conception was hers; the participating artist list of 110 was set before her death. The advisors named to realize the project — Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Hélène Pereira, and Rasha Salti — were the figures who had been working with Kouoh on the artist list and conceptual framework since late 2024. Editor-in-Chief Siddhartha Mitter and research assistant Rory Tsapayi rounded out the working team. La Biennale has confirmed that the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement will not be awarded for the 2026 edition, as Kouoh was unable to finalise the selection before her death. What the team has done in the year since Kouoh's death has been the work of bringing the exhibition into the world rather than re-conceiving it.

In Minor Keys opened on 9 May 2026 and will run to 22 November. The institutional context in which it opens is unsettled: ten days before the opening, on 30 April 2026, the International Jury of the 61st edition resigned en bloc — La Biennale di Venezia confirmed the resignations on the same day. Days later, on 4 May, the Islamic Republic of Iran announced it would not participate. The edition opens, in other words, into a year of withdrawals — institutional and national — that the exhibition itself was not designed to anticipate. The themes Kouoh had been developing at Zeitz MOCAA since 2019 — historical inheritance, resistance, the garden as a figure for survival, the present as a condition art is asked to register — meet the present on terms harder than she could have foreseen.

What Pedrosa proved in 2024 is that the Biennale, when it commits to a single curatorial intelligence, can still rise to the institution it was meant to be. What Kouoh's team has proved in 2026 is that a Biennale can also be sustained — and made coherent — by those who knew a curator's mind well enough to deliver her exhibition after she could no longer do so. Whether either is a replicable institutional model is a different question. For the present, the edition is open.

The pavilions, and what they keep doing

A century after the first national pavilion went up in the Giardini, the system remains both the Biennale's greatest political liability and its most useful editorial fact.

By the Biennale Editorial Team

The national pavilion system is one of those institutional inheritances that everybody agrees is indefensible in principle and nobody can quite see how to dismantle in practice. The Belgian pavilion went up in the Giardini in 1907; the British, the Bavarian (later German), the Hungarian, and the French followed before the First World War. The American, the Israeli, the Brazilian, and the Austrian pavilions came after the Second. By 1995 there were twenty-nine permanent national pavilions, built in the Giardini between 1907 and 1995, with the remaining national participations distributed among the Arsenale's collateral spaces and the palazzi scattered through Castello, Cannaregio, and Dorsoduro.

The conceptual case against the pavilions is straightforward and has been made for thirty years. They organise contemporary art around a category — the nation — that everyone who works in contemporary art has spent their professional life arguing against. They distribute attention by political and economic weight rather than by curatorial argument. They subject participating artists to the politics of their national appointment committee, which is, in most countries most of the time, a politics of cultural diplomacy rather than of art. And in years when a particular state is in the news for the wrong reasons, the pavilion becomes a symbol independent of what is inside it. The 2022 Russian pavilion — closed by its own artists and curators — and the 2024 Polish reinstallation are the most legible recent cases. The 2024 Israeli pavilion's closure of its planned exhibition until "a ceasefire and hostage agreement" was reached is the most discussed.

The case for the pavilions, against all of this, is that they are the only mechanism by which contemporary art's attention is forced to extend beyond the small group of institutions whose curators tend to do the choosing. The 88 national participations in the 2024 edition included countries — Albania, Benin, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Sao Tome and Principe, Tanzania, Timor-Leste — that would otherwise never appear in the official frame of an international biennial. The pavilions are, in their inefficiency and their political weather, the most demonstrably democratic mechanism the contemporary art world has. They are the part of Venice that the central exhibition can be measured against rather than the other way around.

The question this raises, which the institution has not been willing to ask out loud, is whether the curatorial authority that the Artistic Director is given to shape the central exhibition could also be given to shape the pavilion programme — to require, for instance, that pavilions respond to a structural condition rather than a national curatorial committee's drift. In 2024 Pedrosa came closer to this than any of his predecessors, by inviting national participations to respond to Foreigners Everywhere as a condition rather than a suggestion. Most ignored it. Some did not, and the ones that did not produced the strongest pavilions. There is a reform argument here, and it has been made too quietly. The next president of La Biennale, whoever that is when the term changes, will inherit it.

The pavilions, then, are both the part of Venice that most deserves the structural critique it gets, and the part that most justifies the institution's continuing claim on the international attention. To dismantle them is to lose a working mechanism that no other biennial has been able to replicate. To reform them — to give them a stronger curatorial relationship to the central exhibition — is to do the work the institution has been postponing since at least 1995.

Long-form features

The Biennale, read in four pieces

Four essay-length features on the structures, prizes, materials and breakthrough moments around the Venice Biennale. Each is a self-contained argument; together they sit alongside the defining-moments grid as the editorial spine of this page.

Cultural analysis

Architecture of Power: how the national pavilions shape global art politics

To understand the Venice Biennale is to understand the geography of power inscribed in its very landscape. Walking through the Giardini is not just navigating an exhibition space — it is traversing a century-old map of global influence, where architecture becomes diplomacy and real estate reflects realpolitik. The pavilion system, unique among major art exhibitions, began in 1907 when Belgium constructed the first national pavilion in the Giardini. What followed was a decades-long land grab that mirrors the geopolitical dynamics of the twentieth century: the prime real estate near the entrance belongs to the early adopters — Britain (1909), Germany (1909), France (1912). The United States, a latecomer in 1930, compensated for its tardiness with sheer architectural ambition, building a neoclassical temple that dominates its corner of the gardens.

This frozen choreography of national power becomes more revealing when one considers what is missing. China, India, and most of Africa hold no permanent pavilion in the Giardini; their participations must rent space in the Arsenale or in palazzi scattered through Castello, Cannaregio and Dorsoduro. The architecture of inclusion and exclusion speaks plainly about whose culture was deemed worthy of permanent representation in the early twentieth century. The pavilion system also creates a unique curatorial structure: unlike other biennales where a single artistic director shapes the entire exhibition, Venice operates as a confederation of mini-exhibitions, each reflecting national artistic policies and politics.

This has produced some of the Biennale's most memorable moments. Hans Haacke's 1993 destruction of the German Pavilion's floor exposed its 1938 Nazi-era renovations; Sophie Calle's 2007 French Pavilion transformed it into a hotel; Sarah Lucas's 2015 British Pavilion painted itself yellow and seemed to glow with irreverent energy. The 2019 Lithuanian Pavilion — Sun & Sea (Marina) by Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė and Lina Lapelytė — staged a working beach inside an Arsenale rope-store and won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation that year. The pavilion system also perpetuates inequalities. Wealthy nations can afford star architects and elaborate installations; others struggle with basic exhibition costs. The Nordic Pavilion, shared by Sweden, Norway and Finland, offers one model of collaboration; the Central Pavilion's group section provides space for countries without permanent venues.

As we move deeper into the twenty-first century, the pavilion system increasingly resembles an anachronism in a globalised, post-national art world. Yet perhaps that is precisely what makes it valuable. In an era of international art fairs and global gallery empires, the pavilions offer a different model: art as cultural diplomacy, aesthetic expression tied to national identity, creativity shaped by — and sometimes struggling against — political frameworks. The real genius of Venice's pavilion system may be how it makes visible what other exhibitions hide: that all art is political, all exhibitions are exercises in power, and all cultural spaces encode hierarchies. By literalising these dynamics in brick and mortar, the Biennale forces us to confront questions other exhibitions can avoid. Who gets permanent space in the global cultural conversation? Whose art represents a nation? What does it mean to make national art in a transnational world?

Sources: La Biennale di Venezia archives · Marco Mulazzani, The Pavilions of Venice (Marsilio) · Hans Haacke, GERMANIA documentation, 1993 · La Biennale Architecture archives, 2019.

Artist profile

The Weight of Water: Simone Leigh's sovereign journey from Venice to the world

When Simone Leigh's bronze figures occupied the United States Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022, something shifted in the gravitational field of contemporary art. Leigh became the first Black woman ever to represent the United States at Venice. Her exhibition, Sovereignty, was curated by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston, and commissioned by the ICA Boston. The pavilion's neoclassical facade, modelled in 1930 on Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, was reskinned by Leigh with a thatched roof drawn from Cameroonian and Mali architectural traditions — a literal recoding of one of the Giardini's most ideologically loaded buildings.

Born in Chicago in 1967 to Jamaican parents, Leigh studied philosophy at Earlham College before turning to ceramics; she has built her practice around the historical erasure of Black women's intellectual traditions, using clay, bronze and raffia to assemble what she has called “critical fabulations” — speculative forms built from suppressed pasts. Her 2018 Hugo Boss Prize at the Guggenheim and her 2019 High Line commission Brick House — a sixteen-foot bronze bust — had already made the case for her at monumental scale.

The Venice pavilion built on that argument. The exhibition opened with Satellite, a twenty-four-foot bronze figure that combined a Hadza skeleton-dress, a Dogon house post and a satellite-dish form; visitors looked up, always up, reversing the typical power dynamics of museum viewing. Inside, a sequence of large-scale ceramic and bronze figures — including Cupboard, Sentinel, Sphinx, and a new monumental ceramic, Last Garment, modelled on a nineteenth-century Jamaican photograph of a laundress — moved through chambers each more architecturally insistent than the last. The pavilion won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation in April 2022; Leigh herself received the Golden Lion for Best Artist in the international exhibition for the bronze Brick House that opened Cecilia Alemani's The Milk of Dreams.

The exhibition has had a long institutional afterlife. After Venice it travelled to the ICA Boston as a major US survey (2023), then to the Hirshhorn (2023–24) and the California African American Museum / LACMA. Major acquisitions followed — at the Metropolitan Museum, MoMA, the Smithsonian, the Tate. The Venice presentation cracked open possibilities for how contemporary art thinks about representation, monumentality and cultural sovereignty: not as inherited categories, but as forms that can be remade.

Sources: La Biennale di Venezia, 59th International Art Exhibition records · ICA Boston, Sovereignty exhibition documentation (2022–23) · Hirshhorn Museum, Simone Leigh, 2023 · The Art Newspaper, April 2022 Golden Lion announcement.

Prize history

The Golden Lions: Venice's contested crowns

The Golden Lion (Leone d'Oro), Venice's highest honour, carries weight beyond mere recognition — it can transform careers, redirect art-historical narratives, and ignite fierce debate. Established in 1938 and named after Venice's symbolic guardian, the award has evolved from a single prize into a sequence of categories: Best National Participation, Best Artist in the International Exhibition, Special Mentions, and the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement. The formal prize system was abolished in 1968 in the wake of that year's protests and only restored in 1986 in its current form.

Early awards favoured European and American men, with women and non-Western artists largely excluded. The 1990s marked a slow opening, accelerated dramatically in the twenty-first century as the Biennale grappled with its colonial inheritance. Recent recipients indicate the shift. In 2022, the United States Pavilion under Simone Leigh and curator Eva Respini won Best National Participation; Leigh herself won Best Artist for Brick House. In 2024, the Golden Lion for Best National Participation went to Australia for Archie Moore's kith and kin — a chalk-drawn family tree of Moore's Kamilaroi and Bigambul ancestors that covered every wall and the ceiling of the Australian Pavilion. The Golden Lion for Best Artist in the central exhibition went to the Mataaho Collective, the four-woman Māori weaving practice whose installation Takapau opened Adriano Pedrosa's Foreigners Everywhere. The Lifetime Achievement Lions of 2024 went to the Brazilian artist Anna Maria Maiolino and the Turkish-French artist Nil Yalter.

The Lion has become the single most legible Venice metric for the outside world. Curators dispute its weight; artists rarely refuse it. The 2026 edition, conceived by Koyo Kouoh as In Minor Keys, will not award the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement — La Biennale has confirmed that Kouoh was unable to finalise the selection before her death in May 2025, and the prize is being held for a future edition. The institutional argument the prize stages — about who, in any given two years, the field decides has changed something fundamental — continues regardless.

Sources: La Biennale di Venezia, prizes archive · The Art Newspaper, Venice prize coverage, 2022–2024 · La Biennale di Venezia, 2026 edition announcements, May 2025.

Material history

The Art of Light: Murano glass and Venice's material heritage

While contemporary art fills Venice's pavilions, the city's own artistic tradition continues to evolve on the island of Murano, where glassmaking has flourished for over seven hundred years. Glass furnaces were relocated to the island in 1291 by decree of the Venetian Republic — officially to reduce fire risk in the city's wooden palazzi, in practice to consolidate the trade in a place where the secrets of the masters could be guarded. For centuries the maestri were forbidden from leaving the Republic on penalty of imprisonment; their craft remained central to Venice's economy and cultural identity.

The relationship between Murano glass and contemporary art creates a recurring dialogue during Biennale season. Across the past three editions, contemporary artists — among them Ai Weiwei, Cerith Wyn Evans, Carlos Garaicoa and Jaume Plensa — have collaborated with Murano furnaces through the long-running Glasstress exhibition, mounted by Berengo Studio at Palazzo Franchetti in parallel to the Biennale. The collaborations have proved instructive in a way that the rest of the Biennale rarely is: working with molten glass demands a surrender of control alien to most contemporary practice. The material has its own logic. It teaches a humility to artists otherwise accustomed to commanding their media.

The chandeliers of Murano represent the apotheosis of Venetian decorative arts — gravity-defying sculptures of light that transformed palazzi and theatres across Europe from the seventeenth century onwards. During the Biennale, contemporary artists frequently respond to that baroque tradition. Visiting the furnaces of Murano during the exhibition season offers a reminder that Venice has always been a site of artistic innovation. Watching a maestro shape molten glass with tools largely unchanged since the Renaissance, one understands that tradition and innovation are not opposites but dance partners.

Sources: Comune di Venezia, Murano historical records · Glasstress exhibition archive, Berengo Studio, 2009–2024 · Marino Folin and Rosa Barovier Mentasti, Glass Throughout Time, Skira.

In Minor Keys, after Kouoh

The Pedrosa exhibition

The national pavilions, and a different scoreboard

The 61st, and the loss

The institution's answer

Reviews and dispatches from In Minor Keys

Biennale Arte 2026 — Homepage

Biennale Arte 2026: In Minor Keys

Venice Biennale — reference entry

Koyo Kouoh — biographical entry

The pavilions, and what they keep doing

Defining moments

The founding under Selvatico

The first national pavilion — Belgium

Peggy Guggenheim, and the post-war return

The protests, and the end of the prize system

The Architecture Biennale begins

Pedrosa's Foreigners Everywhere

The figures shaping Foreigners Everywhere, and what follows

Adriano Pedrosa

Koyo Kouoh

Pietrangelo Buttafuoco

Claire Fontaine

The Biennale across the lagoon

Principal venues

Visiting the Venice Biennale

When the Biennale runs

Where the Biennale happens

Tickets & opening hours

Getting to Venice & the venues

When to visit during a season

Where to stay

Related editions across Europe

From the news desk

Reading from the field

Instagram

The Biennale, read in four pieces

Architecture of Power: how the national pavilions shape global art politics

The Weight of Water: Simone Leigh's sovereign journey from Venice to the world

The Golden Lions: Venice's contested crowns

The Art of Light: Murano glass and Venice's material heritage

For further work

La Biennale di Venezia: A History 1895–1968

Biennials and Beyond — Exhibitions That Made Art History 1962–2002

Stranieri Ovunque — Foreigners Everywhere

The Pavilions of Venice

Show Time: The 50 Most Influential Exhibitions of Contemporary Art

When We See Us — A Century of Black Figuration in Painting

Further reading on the Venice Biennale

Pedrosa's Foreigners Everywhere: the recovery and its limits

Koyo Kouoh, 1967–2025

Archie Moore on kith and kin, after the prize

The national pavilions, a hundred years in

1968 in the Giardini: the protests that rewrote the institution

The Architecture Biennale: how a sister event grew into the institution

Pietrangelo Buttafuoco's first two years at La Biennale

Mataaho Collective: the four-woman weaving practice that won the Golden Lion

The Holy See in the women's prison: the most discussed pavilion of 2024

Images, attribution & rights