Following the untimely passing of appointed curator Koyo Kouoh on May 10, 2025, La Biennale di Venezia announced that the exhibition would be realised according to the project she had defined, with the support of her family and of the curatorial-editorial team she had chosen. Advisors, editors, and collaborators will ensure fidelity to her original vision. In Minor Keys is an invitation to rethink our relationship with time, nature, community, and ourselves. It is an experience that may restore to this edition of the Biennale a more human and contemplative dimension, one capable of embracing the plurality of voices, stories, and sensibilities that so often remain at the margins.
In Minor Keys gives form to the relational geography imagined by Koyo Kouoh: a constellation of artists, collectives, and organisations from diverse contexts, brought together not through statistical logic but through resonances, affinities, and poetic proximities. The exhibition unfolds through motifs that run beneath the surface: Shrines, a tribute to Issa Samb and Beverly Buchanan; processions, creole gardens, schools, oases, and spaces of rest, conceived as places of passage, listening, and regeneration. Inspired by two novels, Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, the exhibition design by Wolff Architects works with the threshold as an opening onto other forms of knowledge. What emerges is an exhibition to be inhabited slowly, where art becomes a generative practice, a collective gesture, and a possibility for transformation.
Alongside the central core of the 111 artists of In Minor Keys, presented at the Giardini and the Arsenale, the Biennale Arte also unfolds through the autonomous projects of 99 National Participations, hosted at the Giardini, the Arsenale, and in various venues across the city, as well as 31 official Collateral Events, also presented in different locations throughout Venice.
During the months of the Biennale, Venice is further transformed into a mosaic of off-Biennale exhibitions, a vibrant kaleidoscope of contemporary art in its many expressions and forms, involving cultural institutions large and small, foundations, collections, and galleries.
Every year, Venezia News publishes TheBAG – Biennale Arte/Architettura Guide, a magazine dedicated to the event that over time has become a recognised and valued point of reference for anyone visiting the Venice Biennale. Alongside interviews and in-depth features, the guide brings together descriptions and geolocations of all exhibitions, including National Participations, Collateral Events, and exhibitions beyond the Biennale, as well as a section featuring profiles of the artists in the main exhibition. Published in both Italian and English, TheBAG is available in print, on newsstands in Venice and the surroundings, together with the current issue of Venezia News, and online on the dedicated TheBAG website.
Featured image: Koyo Kouoh – © Mehdi Benkler, BAK
