Listening to the invisible

In Minor Keys is the title of the Biennale Arte 2026, based on the curatorial project left by Koyo Kouoh. Her sudden passing on May 10th profoundly moved the art world, which now gathers around a vision that is as poetic as it is political. La Biennale has decided to honor her memory by realizing the exhibition exactly as she envisioned it, with the support of her family and the team who worked alongside her: Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Helene Pereira, Rasha Salti, Siddhartha Mitter, and Rory Tsapayi.

In Minor Keys: Koyo Kouoh’s curatorial legacy

Kouoh began working on the exhibition in the fall of 2024, meticulously defining its structure and content while establishing key collaborations with artists, scholars, and curators. The result is a curatorial concept that, as she wrote, “invites us to listen to the persistent signals of the earth and of life,” tuning in to the minor keys – those emotional, sensorial, and affective frequencies that elude the dominant frenzy. In her curatorial statement, In Minor Keys becomes a lens through which to explore the human condition via sounds, gestures, and practices that move in a low register: the blues, courtyard dances, Creole gardens, art spaces as sanctuaries. This is not a “minor” exhibition, but an ode to complexity, to cultural layering, to forms of improvisation and repair. Kouoh does not propose a show that comments on the world, but one that moves through its margins – favoring the sensitive over the conceptual, the encounter over the narrative, poetry over pedagogy. The artists involved – whose practices will be announced in February, 2026 – are conceived as custodians of radical knowledge, capable of generating beauty and awareness even amid crisis. In an era when the rhetoric of productivity and progress tends to smother the most fragile and vital forms of existence, In Minor Keys reminds us that there are still places and languages where solidarity, slowness, and wonder are nurtured. And that, as Toni Morrison wrote, “you have to have love, and you have to have magic – this too is life.”

Featured image: “In Minor Keys” press presentation, May 27, 2025, Sala delle Colonne, Ca’ Giustinian
Ph. Andrea Avezzù – Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia