Koyo Kouoh’s Venice Biennale: How Does a Curatorial Vision Continue After Its Curator?

Reported Explainer | News Analysis

Image disclosure: This is an original editorial illustration, not a documentary photograph, artwork reproduction or exhibition view.

In Minor Keys offers a rare, closely documented test of whether an institution can honor a late curator’s work without mistaking a collective process for a fixed legacy.

This is a records-based analysis of Biennale Arte 2026 and its participating institutions, not a review; it makes no claim of firsthand attendance.

Date line: 13 October 2026

The 61st Venice Biennale is in its final weeks, but its most difficult question arrived before the doors opened. In Minor Keys, the central exhibition conceived by Koyo Kouoh, runs through 22 November although Kouoh died in May 2025. La Biennale says that, with her family’s support, it chose to realize the project as she had defined it.[1] This is not merely a question of tribute. It asks who may speak for a curator when she cannot revise, explain or refuse the terms of her own posthumous presence.

The case is unusually legible because the project was already far advanced. Yet it cannot be reduced to a completed score awaiting performance. A biennial is made through negotiations over works, spaces, language, transport, care and money. Its authorial signature is distributed long before an opening; after a curator’s death, that fact becomes impossible to ignore.

For Venice’s international public—artists, students, collectors, architects, funders and travelers who arrive expecting an index of what contemporary art is doing now—the distinction has consequences. A name above the door is not a guarantee of unbroken intention. It is a proposition about responsibility: who chose the terms, who carried them forward, and where a temporary exhibition’s prestige ends while the work of its artists and institutions continues elsewhere.

The score Kouoh left behind

The Biennale’s record says Kouoh had established the theoretical framework, selected artists and artworks, appointed catalogue writers, determined graphic identity and exhibition architecture, and opened a dialogue with invitees. Her curatorial text reached Biennale president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco on 8 April 2025.[2] This was not a vacant mandate that an institution later filled with a memorial theme. It was a project with intellectual and material decisions already in motion.

The people entrusted with its realization are named: advisers Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Hélène Pereira and Rasha Salti; editor-in-chief Siddhartha Mitter; and research assistant Rory Tsapayi. La Biennale says they continued production with its Visual Arts Department through remote work and sessions in Venice and Dakar.[2] Contemporary reporting in 2025 established that they were Kouoh’s own selected collaborators, not a committee assembled after her death.[3]

That distinction is more than administrative. It locates continuity in relationships rather than in the misleading fantasy that an exhibition can execute itself. The team recalls an April 2025 working session at Dakar’s RAW Material Company, founded by Kouoh, where practices, affinities and organizing motifs were mapped.[4] Kouoh remained the artistic director, but the project’s method was already collective. The question now is not whether the team can impersonate her. It is whether the institution can make their stewardship visible enough to be questioned, credited and understood.

That is why the language of a “vision” needs care. In museum publicity, the word can imply an immaculate idea descending into space. Kouoh’s surviving project suggests a more exact picture: curating as an arrangement of people, sites, practical decisions and forms of address. Her team’s account places Dakar, rather than Venice alone, inside the exhibition’s intellectual geography.[4] The fact is not picturesque background. It identifies RAW Material Company as a working context in which the exhibition’s propositions were tested, and it asks an audience accustomed to treating Venice as the center of the art calendar to look outward.

Schools are not a metaphor

The sharpest material test of that stewardship is the motif Kouoh called “Schools.” The term designates artist-led organizations as a form of institution building, where resources and energy are directed toward a social purpose.[4] Contemporary And identifies six: RAW Material Company in Senegal; Guest Artists Space Foundation in Nigeria; blaxTARLINES KUMASI in Ghana; Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute in Kenya; Denniston Hill in the United States; and lugar a dudas in Colombia.[5]

They should not be read as a decorative chorus of community. Their methods and histories are distinct. In Venice, Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute connects paintings, films and a chronology to Makerere University’s artistic legacy; Guest Artists Space stages exchanges with former residents and collaborators; RAW Material Company occupies the Giardini’s Book Pavilion with films and reading material.[5] The point is not that “learning” is virtuous, but that artist-centred institutions can make conditions for study, discussion, archives, residencies and exchange that an exhibition cannot supply on its own.

This is where the rhetoric of care meets its hard edge. A biennial can offer visibility, but visibility is not an operating budget, a lease, staff time or a long relationship with a neighborhood. The ethical question is whether Venice treats these organizations as images of an alternative art world, or directs credit, attention and material support back to their work on terms they control.

The distinction also matters to readers who encounter the Schools in Venice as cultural destinations. The biennial’s visual tempo can make a library, archive, conversation space or residency network appear as one more richly composed installation. Yet the knowledge in these projects was not produced for the Giardini. It was accumulated through sustained local work: convening people, maintaining collections, hosting disagreement and making time for practices that do not yield quickly to the market. In that sense, the Schools are less an argument for an idealized community than a reminder that cultural infrastructure has maintenance costs, political pressures and unequal access to resources.

There is a productive art-historical complication here. The modern exhibition has often displayed its own support structures—archives, study rooms, pedagogical materials—as evidence of institutional reflection. Kouoh’s framing presses further by placing artist-led organizations among the exhibition’s participants. That move grants them visibility, but it cannot erase the asymmetry between a global event with finite dates and organizations designed to endure beyond its season. A successful display should leave their own histories more legible, not absorb them into Venice’s mythology.

Where the continuity breaks and holds

Published criticism has made that tension concrete. In Frieze, Marko Gluhaich describes the Schools as among the motifs most coherently realized, while arguing that critical gestures inside the exhibition cannot dissolve the Biennale’s inherited national-pavilion structure.[6] Ben Eastham, writing in e-flux, finds the opening proposition compelling but judges parts of the main exhibition crowded and diffuse; he contrasts that atmosphere with the historical specificity of Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute’s presentation.[7] These are critics’ assessments, not a substitute for this article’s non-attending view. Together, however, they identify the risk in claiming continuity: a collective can honor a curator’s conceptual grammar without reproducing the exact clarity, scale or rhythm she might have chosen.

That disagreement is productive. It rejects two equally thin stories: that Kouoh’s death made the exhibition impossible, or that a prewritten plan made her absence inconsequential. Fidelity is not freeze-drying. The team’s own text calls the motifs working titles expected to develop.[4] Interpretation was always part of the work.

The critical disagreement also clarifies what audiences can reasonably ask of the team. Neither Frieze nor e-flux supplies a final judgment on a project of this scale; each describes a different relation between an ambitious curatorial premise and the demanding rooms of the Arsenale and Giardini.[6] [7] But their accounts make an important institutional point. A posthumous exhibition should not be shielded from criticism as if critique were an affront to mourning. To take Kouoh’s work seriously is to distinguish between her stated commitments, the team’s production choices and the Biennale’s older structures—not to merge them into a single, unanswerable legacy.

Another disagreement concerns the exhibition’s own memorial language. Reviewing the Giardini, Ocula’s Louise Benson argues that María Magdalena Campos-Pons’s monumental portrait of Kouoh turns an exhibition committed to collectivity toward an individualizing spectacle; in a separate Arsenale review, Zian Chen finds the references to Kouoh less a memorial than an authorship diffused across artists and collaborators.[8] [9] The contrast sharpens the standard for the Biennale’s language around the show: honor Kouoh without allowing commemoration to eclipse the people and institutions whose work carries it forward.

The institutional frame intensifies the problem. The central exhibition shares Venice with 100 National Participations across the Giardini, Arsenale and city, each shaped by other commissioners, budgets and political contexts.[1] Calling the whole event “Kouoh’s Biennale” obscures those arrangements; separating In Minor Keys from them ignores the architecture it must inhabit. Frieze’s account of a work placed outside the Giardini entrance, which calls attention to the exclusions of pavilion representation, is a pointed reminder that the structure is not neutral.[6]

The pressure was not merely historical. On 23 April, the International Jury selected by Kouoh announced that it would not consider countries whose leaders were charged with crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court; a week later, the jury resigned, which La Biennale confirmed.[10] [11] The episode belongs to the institutional setting rather than to Kouoh’s surviving exhibition plan. But it shows how questions of art, nation and representation can become operational within the event, not merely allegorical.

This is the historical pressure beneath Venice’s annual glamour. The national pavilion system turns cultural representation into an architectural map of states, foundations and diplomatic ambitions; the central exhibition moves through and beside that map rather than standing outside it. Kouoh’s attention to resonance across far-apart practices offers one way of resisting a purely national reading.[4] Still, it cannot dissolve the borders, commissioning systems or public narratives that organize the larger event. The sharpest measure of the Biennale’s generosity is therefore not its claim to globality, but how precisely it names the limits of the frame it occupies.

Even the public record requires vigilance. La Biennale’s main page lists 110 invited participants, while the team’s introduction names 111.[1] [4] The discrepancy may be minor, but exact credit and accurate lists are not marginal matters in a project whose continuity depends on trust.

The record that should remain

Before 22 November, readers can watch how the Biennale credits Kouoh’s team, the artists, Wolff Architects and the Schools; whether the organizations’ own accounts remain primary; and whether post-closure documentation distinguishes Kouoh’s finished decisions from later production choices. Those practices will say more about institutional care than ceremonial language can.

No team can replace Kouoh. The more searching standard is whether a major exhibition can preserve the relations through which she worked while admitting that the work has changed because she is gone. In Minor Keys places that standard in public. Its afterlife will depend as much on attribution, sustained support and institutional memory as on the temporary display. Venice will close; the more meaningful record will be the one its institutions, collaborators and visitors carry back into the places where this work began.

Sources & records

1. https://www.labiennale.org/en/art/2026 "La Biennale di Venezia: Biennale Arte 2026 official project page"

2. https://www.labiennale.org/en/news/biennale-arte-2026-minor-keys-0 "La Biennale di Venezia: Biennale Arte 2026—In Minor Keys project record"

3. https://www.artforum.com/news/2026-venice-biennale-hew-to-late-curator-koyo-kouoh-vision-1234731367/ "Artforum: 2026 Venice Biennale will hew to late curator Koyo Kouoh’s vision"

4. https://www.labiennale.org/en/art/2026/introduction-koyo-kouoh-koyo%E2%80%99s-team "La Biennale di Venezia: Introduction by Koyo Kouoh and Koyo’s Team"

5. https://contemporaryand.com/en/c-and-magazine/texts/in-minor-keys-schools-at-the-61st-venice-biennale "Contemporary And: In Minor Keys Schools at the 61st Venice Biennale"

6. https://www.frieze.com/article/venice-biennale-2026-review-giardini-central-pavilion "Frieze: In Minor Keys review—its best moments live in the institutions Koyo Kouoh built"

7. https://www.e-flux.com/criticism/6782422/61st-venice-biennale-in-minor-keys "e-flux Criticism: 61st Venice Biennale, In Minor Keys"

8. https://ocula.com/magazine/opinion/in-minor-keys-venice-koyo-kouoh-review-giardini/ "Ocula: In the Giardini, In Minor Keys Calls Attention to Humanity, Rather Than Humans"

9. https://ocula.com/magazine/opinion/koyo-kouohs-arsenale-exhibition-review/ "Ocula: Koyo Kouoh Reframes the Global South at the Arsenale"

10. https://www.e-flux.com/notes/6783485/statement-of-intention-by-the-international-jury-of-the-61st-international-art-exhibition-in-minor-keys-of-la-biennale-di-venezia "International Jury: Statement of Intention for In Minor Keys"

11. https://www.labiennale.org/en/news/resignations-%C2%A0international-jury%C2%A0-biennale-arte-2026 "La Biennale di Venezia: The resignations of the International Jury of Biennale Arte 2026"