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<\/p>\nTotal star rating: \u2605\u2605\u2605\u00bd<\/p>\n
The works: \u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605
The show: \u2605\u2605\u2605<\/p>\n
How would Koyo Kouoh have done this? This was the inescapable thought in my head as I negotiated the Central Pavilion in the Giardini and the Arsenale, the two venues for the Venice Biennale\u2019s main exhibition, and their surrounding landscapes. It is also the key consideration for the five curators trusted with bringing the ideas of the Biennale\u2019s artistic director, who died in May 2025, to fruition.<\/p>\n
It feels important to say that however closely they collaborated, however deeply they understood their friend, the squadra di Koyo Kouoh (Koyo Kouoh\u2019s team) can only divine so much about the physical presentation of her \u201cvision, plans and desires\u201d, as they put it. The three \u201cadvisors\u201d\u2014Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie H\u00e9l\u00e8ne Pereira and Rasha Salti\u2014the editor-in-chief, Siddhartha Mitter, and the assistant to Kouoh, Rory Tsapayi, spent a week with her in Dakar, a month before she died. They thrashed out the artist list, the exhibition structure and design, and considered how Kouoh\u2019s multiple themes and \u201cundercurrent priorities\u201d, as they describe them, would be manifested through the show.<\/p>\n
But grappling with the objects and installations, many of them completed since Kouoh\u2019s death, is a different matter\u2014and there is a greater proportion of new art made by the 110 artists in this Biennale that there was in the 2024 exhibition curated by Adriano Pedrosa. Simply, the squadra\u2019s task is impossible.<\/p>\n
That said, I left In Minor Keys feeling that Kouoh\u2019s core concepts palpably did emerge through the two venues. A sense of procession abounds, especially in the Arsenale, where the lengthy enfilade of the Corderie, the former rope-making spaces of the shipyard, naturally lends itself to cavalcade. Among the exhibition\u2019s strongest elements is the presence of sentinels who guide us through the exhibition: witnesses to historical trauma whose resistance often finds joyous expression.<\/p>\n
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Nick Cave\u2019s Amalgam (Origin) (2025) Photo: Marco Zorzanello; Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia<\/p>\n
They begin early in the Giardini with Big Chief Demond Melancon\u2019s Amistad Takeover (2026), a vast orange-feathered \u201csuit\u201d\u2014quite the understatement\u2014made in the Black Masking tradition, whose roots lie in the ceremonial practices brought to the US by enslaved people and informed by encounters with Native Americans. Embedded among the feathers is beadwork depicting the revolt of enslaved people on a Spanish boat in the 19th century. And the sentinels continue right through to the external spaces beyond the Corderie, where the US artist Nick Cave\u2019s Amalgam (Origin) (2025) stands overlooking the Arsenale\u2019s harbour. A vast human-animal-vegetal hybrid body, cast in monochrome bronze, the sculpture is informed by Cave\u2019s career-long project, the \u201cSoundsuits\u201d\u2014exuberant emblems of resistance to racist violence. Based on Cave\u2019s own body, the figure is bedecked in a floral relief, softening its sturdy power stance. From the chest up, the body becomes a tree that hosts a flock of 50 avian species, which Cave calls a \u201cmigration hub\u201d, an evocation of community in the face of oppression. Cave\u2019s work is emblematic of Kouoh\u2019s aim to manifest \u201cjoy, solace, hope, and transcendence\u201d; to counter tragedy\u2014historic and present-day\u2014with beauty and enchantment.<\/p>\n
This is palpable even before entering the Central Pavilion: Otobong Nkanga has rewilded the four pristine Modernist cylindrical columns of the white building by clothing them in brick immediately evocative of the fabric of Venice, on which she has hung glass terraria, clay flower pots and wooden bee hotels. The plants, she hopes, will eventually overwhelm the columns.<\/p>\n
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Visitors looking at Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons’s paintings of Koyo Kouoh and Toni Morrison Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia<\/p>\n
Another key Kouoh theme is the garden, the oasis, again as a space not just of life and beauty, but one of defiance\u2014for instance, in the creole gardens of enslaved people. And following Nkanga, plants germinate and proliferate through the show. Close to clusters of magnolias sculpted by Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, again in glass and ceramic, among other materials, we see Kouoh herself in Campos-Pons\u2019s painting, standing on a branch with the clawed feet of a bird of prey, among the leaves and blooms of magnolias. Alongside her is Toni Morrison, a presiding literary influence on the show, herself given sharp talons.<\/p>\n
Among the many other hybrid figures are those by Wangechi Mutu: near Cave\u2019s figure in the Arsenale harbour is SimbiSiren (2026), a marvellous bronze\u2014part mermaid, part sphinx, part Kongo spirit, part Mugumo tree root\u2014whose flippered limbs drape elegantly over a perforated metal base. In the Central Pavilion, meanwhile, is Mutu\u2019s MothersMound (2026), a knoll in the shape of a pregnant body.<\/p>\n
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One of the few rooms dedicated to a single artist, in this case showing work by Wangechi Mutu Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia<\/p>\n
MothersMound is the central piece in a room dedicated to Mutu, one of few in the pavilion. As a result of this scarcity of solo spaces, and the emphasis on multi-artist rooms with sometimes confusing or jarring juxtapositions, the Central Pavilion is poorly paced. I fully expected the two late \u201clodestar artists\u201d\u2014 the Senegalese artist Issa Samb, Kouoh\u2019s mentor and the founder of the art collective Laboratoire Agit\u2019Art, and the US artist Beverly Buchanan, the creator of sculpted and drawn \u201cshacks\u201d\u2014to be given dedicated rooms. Instead, their prominence is dulled by dispersal among other artists.<\/p>\n
Notable in relation to this approach is the squadra\u2019s description in the Biennale catalogue of Kouoh\u2019s commitment to artists whose practices are \u201cnot necessarily uplifted in conventional\u201d exhibition formats and her aim to challenge \u201cthe structured frameworks of museums, monographic exhibitions and biennials\u201d. The principle of artists\u2019 practices being interspersed and resurfacing through the show is an admirable one. Sometimes it works beautifully. But a more conventional structure might conversely have uplifted works that get lost in a display that inevitably favours more bombastic language over some quieter practices\u2014ironically, lessening the impact of exactly the minor-key works that the exhibition aims to privilege. The curatorial thesis also makes much of the idea of providing spaces of rest in the exhibition. And while there are welcome carpeted zones with seating, there is little repose provided by the organisation of the art itself.<\/p>\n
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Some of Mohammed Joha’s collages Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia<\/p>\n
Take the Palestinian artist Mohammed Joha, who makes beautiful and tender collages assembled from everyday detritus like discarded paper and fabric. Initially appearing abstract, they in fact allude to the architecture and environment of Gaza. But they, and related watercolours, are shown in several different spaces, when a solo room would have fully honoured their poignancy and provided an apt moment of pause, given the subject.<\/p>\n
To extend the musical metaphor in the title, and at the core of Kouoh\u2019s text about the show, we end up with too much cacophony and too little rhythm and syncopation. Kouoh alluded to adopting the mode of a free-jazz ensemble, but free jazz stands or falls by its discipline. Too often, the Central Pavilion feels aimless. That is not to say that there are not compelling passages. I loved the different forms of dense accumulation in the works of Tammy Nguyen, Ebony G. Patterson and Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka, for instance. But the layout lacks the dynamism that would have made many pieces in the show more resonant.<\/p>\n
The Arsenale suits this approach better, in that the more ample space allows for more separation and immersion in artists\u2019 works. Again, we see Kouoh\u2019s trauma\/exuberance dichotomy play out: in Guadalupe Maravilla\u2019s ICE Age Disease Thrower sculptures, for instance, where the artist retraces his childhood journey as an undocumented immigrant\u2014escaping the Salvadoran Civil War for the US\u2014by gathering objects that are set within woven, distinctly bodily, chairs. They evoke Central American Acapulco furniture, with origins in Mayan hammocks. One object devastatingly reflects Maravilla\u2019s constellation of symbols and references: a beanie hat with animal ears that replicates the one worn by a young child who was infamously detained by immigration and customs enforcement (Ice) officers in the US. The Disease Throwers aim to act as witnesses to, and guardians against, this brutality.<\/p>\n
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Two of the sculptures from Guadalupe Maravilla\u2019s ICE Age Disease Thrower series Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia<\/p>\n
Stellar, hugely distinctive, spaces dedicated to Laurie Anderson, Kader Attia, Alfredo Jaar, Walid Raad and Rose Salane, among others, all testify to a much tauter dramaturgy through the Arsenale. Although there are wayward or unfocused moments, overall the juxtapositions are more dynamic\u2014not least the pairing of two more hybrid figures, Nicholas Hlobo\u2019s Umrhubuluzi (2010) and Rajni Perera and Marigold Santos\u2019s Efflorescence\/The Way We Wake (2023). The former is seemingly part mermaid (again), part lobster, part plant, fashioned in rubber and ribbon; the latter a masked deity in polymer clay, Styrofoam and synthetic hair looming like a mountain at the heart of an archipelago of atolls occupied by outlandish plants.<\/p>\n
This is another significance of the keys in Kouoh\u2019s title\u2014the cay, or small island. As a multifaceted concept, the exhibition is enormously rich. It provides countless moments of disquiet and delight. Given that the task of fully embodying Kouoh\u2019s vision as she would have is indeed impossible, it is laudable that many of her ideas for In Minor Keys are still seen and felt\u2014and sometimes sonorously.<\/p>\n