Breathing together

In the text by Koyo Kouoh, which La Biennale di Venezia has chosen to honor as an intellectual testament, there is a passage that reads like an invitation: to slow down, listen, and attune to minor keys. This is where the 61st International Art Exhibition – In Minor Keys begins anew, now realized after the curator’s untimely passing in May 2025 by the team she had selected. The most evident novelty is not a change of direction, but fidelity to the path she had already traced. The project was neither reformulated nor reinterpreted: the theoretical framework, the list of artists, the spatial design, and the graphic identity had already been defined. In Dakar, under the mango tree of the RAW Material Company (the arts center she founded), Kouoh had outlined a relational geography built on resonances rather than representations, and her collaborators worked for months to preserve that score without transforming it into a monument.

A total of 111 artists were invited, a constellation of names that rejects orchestral clamor in favor of whisper, oasis, and rest. The exhibition does not proceed in sections but through subterranean currents leading to a suspended sense of time. In “Shrines” (Altars), the works of Issa Samb and Beverly Buchanan – generative figures and constant reference points for the curator – offer themselves as places of presence within absence, evoking saudade and the generative gesture of art, in dialogue with artists such as Johannes Phokela, Tammy Nguyen, and Buhlebezwe Siwani. The journey moves like a procession marked by Afro-Atlantic carnivals and rituals, crossing practices such as those of Big Chief Demond Melancon, Nick Cave, Daniel Lind-Ramos, or Ebony G. Patterson, inviting visitors to join in the movement. “Schools”, on the other hand, focuses on institutions like RAW Material Company, G.A.S. Foundation, and the Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute – learning ecosystems that weave together art and social responsibility. The ideal space in Kouoh’s envisioned universe is the Creole garden, an oasis of material and immaterial freedom interpreted by artists such as Ayrson Heráclito, Edouard Duval-Carrié, Werewere Liking, and Wangechi Mutu, while performances by Laurie Anderson, Pauline Oliveros, Tsai Ming-liang, and Guadalupe Maravilla transform the body into a vessel of memory, resistance, and healing.

Literary echoes are also present, from Toni Morrison’s Beloved to Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, indicating a crossing of thresholds – temporal and emotional – where magical realism heightens, rather than softens, the emotional temperature. Even the exhibition design by Wolff Architects contributes to countering noise, working on thresholds through large indigo panels that mark transitions between different constellations of works, fostering a more sensory than encyclopedic experience.

In this edition, no Golden Lions for lifetime achievement will be awarded: Kouoh did not have the time to nominate them. An absence that becomes part of the score itself, in an edition that rejects noise and listens – precisely – to minor keys.

Featured image: Koyo Kouoh © Mirjam Kluka