Venice Biennale Names 111 Artists For Koyo Kouoh's Posthumous Exhibition

The Venice Biennale, the world's most important art exhibition, has officially named the 111 artists participating in its 2026 edition.

Opening to the public on May 9 and running through November 22, this year's Biennale, the 61st edition to date, is an unusual one: its curator, Koyo Kouoh, died suddenly last year during the making of the exhibition, a first in the 131-year history of this storied exhibition. To see through her vision, she appointed a set of advisers that includes curators Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Helene Pereira, and Rasha Salti; Siddartha Mitter, a critic who will serve as the editor of written materials; and Rory Tsapayi, who will act as an assistant to the team.

Kouoh's Biennale is titled“In Minor Keys” and appears to focus on art with a decidedly understated vibe-a sensibility all the more notable in a world riven by violence and tension.

“The minor keys refuse orchestral bombast and goose-step military marches and come alive in the quiet tones, the lower frequencies, the hums, the consolations of poetry, all portals of improvisation to the elsewhere and the otherwise,” Kouoh wrote in a text that quotes from thinkers such as Édouard Glissant, Toni Morrison, and Patrick Chamoiseau.“The minor keys ask for listening that calls on the emotions and sustains them in return.”

The Biennale tends to be treated as a weather vane for art-making, with the show often viewed as a means of divining which way the artistic headwinds are blowing. It comprises a main exhibition organized by a selected curator and a set of national pavilions that stand independently of that show.

There is typically little to no crossover between the main exhibition and the pavilions, though this year, there is one artist exhibiting in both sectors. That person is Khaled Sabsabi, who is representing Australia following a tumultuous process that saw his pavilion canceled over controversy over his past work, then reinstated months later.

While most Biennales award Golden Lions for Lifetime Achievement, this one will not because Kouoh did not select the winners herself prior to her passing, the Biennale said.

Ebony G. Patterson,...fester..., 2023 the artist, Monique Meloche Gallery, and New York Botanical Garden

Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, president of the Biennale, said in a statement that Kouoh's show stood as“an exhibition permeated with spirit, with a sacredness that puts the person, the human being, back at the heart of things, rediscovering the sense of being in the world by reacquiring a sense of proportion with respect to all earthly elements, and by looking to the sky once more. Koyo Kouoh's journey is one that reappraises human relationships, starting from people's own backyards. The little things, which are also great ones.”

Founded in 1895, the Biennale has historically functioned as a picture of the international art scene as it stands currently. But the past two editions, curated by Cecilia Alemani and Adriano Pedrosa in 2022 and 2024, respectively, also turned a focus on the past by featuring a heaping of dead artists who made significant, if often under-recognized, contributions to art history.

Alemani and Pedrosa's editions both numbered more than 200 artists each, but Kouoh's edition is comparatively much smaller, with just 111 artists. And unlike Pedrosa's Biennale, where 55 percent of the participants were dead, this time the focus is predominantly on living artists.

Tammy Nguyen, Love Justice, You Rulers of the Earth, 2025 Studio Kukla/Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London

Still, two dead artists act as guiding lights for the show. In what Salti called a“shrine” in the Central Pavilion, Issa Samb and Beverly Buchanan, of Senegal and the US, respectively, will receive large-scale presentations. Samb, as Salti noted, was a“lifelong mentor” to Kouoh, whose work she credited with inspiring her to form with Raw Material Company, an art space in Dakar that she intended as a response to the state-run institutions in Senegal.

In Tuesday's press conference, the advisers to Kouoh's show recalled meeting at Raw Material Company in April 2025, not long before her passing in May of that year. Pereira said that each curator was assigned daily“missions” by Kouoh, and that they met in the space's courtyard to discuss artists for the show. Fruit fell around them as artist's names were spoken, Pereira said, and the curators developed a ritual of eating the mangoes that had dropped, following Kouoh's lead.

Werewere Liking, Les pendues aux temps I, 1978 Galerie Cécile Fakhoury

“She was our conductor, and while each of us arrived with a finely tuned instrumented, it took a few days for us to attune to one another,” Pereira said on Tuesday.“She composed while we improvised.”

Beckhurst Feijoo noted that the resultant show“is not organized according to sections but according to priorities.” Novels by Toni Morrison and Gabriel García Márquez-Beloved and One Hundred Years of Solitude, respectively-were“touchstones,” they said.“In both novels, magical realism deepens rather than distracts from an emotional register.” Such an impulse will be also evinced by the exhibition itself, which the curators promised would contain as few dividing partitions as possible.

Hagar Ophir, Bound with the Living (detail), 2024 Moritz Gansen

The programming includes live events such as a procession of poets, something that Mitter said was an allusion to a“Poetry Caravan” event once led by Kouoh herself between Dakar and Timbuktu.

The Biennale can be an overwhelming endeavor, with a show so big that it can often require multiple days to take it all in. Tsapayi said that there will be“rest spaces” throughout the main exhibition, to allow for the opportunity for“contemplative pause” in keeping with the show's ethos.

Tsapayi said that that pause“prompts to tune into granular changes in and around us and, as Pauline Oliveros puts it, become engrained to listening.”

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