{"id":646280,"date":"2026-05-04T02:20:38","date_gmt":"2026-05-04T02:20:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/646280\/"},"modified":"2026-05-04T02:20:38","modified_gmt":"2026-05-04T02:20:38","slug":"venice-biennale-2026-how-do-you-critique-a-posthumous-exhibition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/646280\/","title":{"rendered":"Venice Biennale 2026: How Do You Critique a Posthumous Exhibition?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Previous artistic directors have found themselves ripe for a panning. Martin Herbert wonders what will happen to Koyo Kouoh\u2019s In Minor Keys, if anything at all<\/p>\n

In 2007, in the runup to the 52nd Venice Biennale, I interviewed that edition\u2019s artistic director, Robert Storr, to get a sense of his intentions for the show. After explaining what his title Think with the Senses \u2013 Feel with the Mind meant (to him, at least), the American curator\/writer confessed he was, frankly, expecting critics to rake him over the coals for his exhibition: such trial-by-fire being customary for the Biennale\u2019s curators. This is known, of course, as getting your defence in early, with the foreknowledge that you can\u2019t please everyone. Fortunately for the rest of us, Storr\u2019s apparent preparedness didn\u2019t stop him from being triggered \u2013 after the reviews came in \u2013 into a schadenfreude-rich exchange of escalating pomposities in Artforum with several curators who downright hated his show or, for their own ideological reasons, wanted to say they had. Storr, sporting accordingly scorched laurels, has mostly been quiet since.<\/p>\n

In recent years, it\u2019s become a little less typical for Venice\u2019s artistic directors to be so routinely criticised. Biennales have sometimes found critical favour (eg Cecilia Alemani\u2019s The Milk of Dreams<\/a>, 2022) and sometimes not (eg Christine Macel\u2019s conservative Viva Arte Viva, 2017, or Adriano Pedrosa\u2019s stew of marginalisation Foreigners Everywhere<\/a>, 2024). It\u2019s usually hard to anticipate accurately the response to the main show \u2013 the international exhibition, the central plank of a Venice director\u2019s vision \u2013 at least in terms of positivity or negativity. For the 61st edition of the event<\/a>, however, maybe we can take an educated guess.<\/p>\n

\"\"The Milk of Dreams, 59th Venice Biennale, 2022, featuring works by Ruth Asawa. Photo: Roberto Marossi. Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia <\/p>\n

\"\"Foreigners Everywhere, 60th Venice Biennale, 2024. Photo: Marco Zorzanello. Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia <\/p>\n

In May 2025, just before she was due to announce her edition\u2019s theme, artistic director Koyo Kouoh died of cancer<\/a>, aged fifty-seven. The show about to open, In Minor Keys<\/a>, based on the prodigious Swiss-Cameroonian curator\u2019s drafted exhibition concept and brought to fruition by others, takes up an expansive, even polyphonic musical metaphor. Listening to minor-ness, according to Kouoh, has widespread implications. She writes in terms of tuning into \u2018soul frequencies\u2026 the persistent signals of earth and life\u2019; makes analogies with \u00c9douard Glissant\u2019s cultural theory of archipelagoes; suggests the show might function like a dissonant free-jazz ensemble.<\/p>\n

It also seems fairly clear what the show is not intended to be: \u2018neither a litany of commentary on world events, nor an inattention or escape from compounding and continuous intersecting crises\u2019. The suggestion here is that Kouoh, the first African woman to direct the Venice Biennale, strategised up front to dodge some of the pitfalls of previous shows with her international exhibition, while leaning into a conceptual spaciousness that could accommodate a wide variety of practices. The result \u2013 if only based on reading the premise against the grain, rather than thinking of Kouoh\u2019s sterling track record \u2013 might also be a hodgepodge taped together by poetics. If any of that happens to be apparent beyond the variables of subjective reception, though, how will it be received?<\/p>\n

\"\"left to right Rory Tsapayi, Siddhartha Mitter, Marie H\u00e9l\u00e8ne Pereira, Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo and Rasha Salti, the curatorial team fulfilling In Minor Keys. Photo: Andrea Avezzu. Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia<\/p>\n

There isn\u2019t really any precedent for posthumous exhibitions of this scale. The closest might be Okwui Enwezor\u2019s Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America, which opened at New York\u2019s New Museum in 2021, two years after his death: Enwezor conceived the project, pinned to racist violence in the US, in 2018; the show, again, was completed by curatorial advisers. Notwithstanding the gravity of the theme, the reviews were uniformly admiring; only the artist\/writer Hannah Black had substantive issues<\/a>, and even there she wasn\u2019t speaking ill of the dead; her problems were with the show\u2019s apparent departures from Enwezor\u2019s original concept and the fact that, due to his death, the show couldn\u2019t respond to recent events.<\/p>\n

\"\"Koyo Kouoh. Photo: Mirjam Kluka<\/p>\n

It\u2019s perhaps notable that in the upcoming Venice Biennale\u2019s publicity materials, Kouoh\u2019s name is highly \u2013 indeed, seemingly unusually \u2013 prominent. This serves as a tribute, of course, but also entwines the show itself strongly with its late and lamented curator, inching towards cult-of-personality territory. As such, if you\u2019re critiquing the show, you\u2019re implicitly \u2013 as Storr understood \u2013 critiquing the person, who in this case has not only tragically passed but is not there to defend herself. (Such might also apply to the other elegy for an artistic loss in this year\u2019s edition, Henrike Naumann\u2019s exhibition in the German Pavilion, prepared before her passing in February<\/a>.) In terms of sensitivity and respect, maybe little can be said that\u2019s not positive about an exhibition by a deceased curator, except to point out where her vision has not been honoured; which, also tragically, means that however considerable a show\u2019s own merits, it\u2019s not necessarily being judged by them.<\/p>\n

One anticipates that there still will be criticality around this Venice, since it\u2019s not like there aren\u2019t things to question about the wider event, given the evolving narrative around the participation of Russia and Israel<\/a>, related boycotts, the intended withdrawal of EU funding<\/a>. Questions will probably be raised, once again, about the relevancy of the biennial model. Yet active critical discourse \u2013 one of the few upsides of this increasingly problematic Biennale \u2013 may not be applied to Kouoh\u2019s own show. If that\u2019s the case, it will surely be at least in part because the latter does indeed look highly promising, its 110 artists seemingly chosen to emphasise pointed resonances between geographically distant practices; to underscore the curator\u2019s longstanding support for women and African artists; and \u2013 not unimportantly \u2013\u00a0to steer decisively away from recent editions\u2019 gravitation towards deceased artists or practices on the margins of art. But if, on the other hand, In Minor Keys has discussable faults, will readers hear about them, will visitors focus on them? We\u2019re about to find out.<\/p>\n

The\u00a061st Venice Biennale<\/a>\u00a0runs 9 May through 22 November 2026<\/p>\n

Martin Herbert<\/a>Opinion<\/a>April 29, 2026artreview.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Previous artistic directors have found themselves ripe for a panning. Martin Herbert wonders what will happen to Koyo…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":646281,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,49,48,356,75],"class_list":["post-646280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-design","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/646280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=646280"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/646280\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/646281"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=646280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=646280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=646280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}