Two years ago, Cecilia Alemani’s Milk of Dreams at the 59th Venice Biennale made history by featuring a record number of artists from marginalised backgrounds, including queer and Indigenous creators. It was hailed as a watershed moment for the world’s oldest international art exhibition. But the question that lingered after the crowds dispersed was whether the shift would endure, or whether it would be absorbed into the art world’s familiar pattern of performative inclusion followed by institutional amnesia. The 61st edition, In Minor Keys, which opened on 9 May 2026 and runs until 22 November, provides a resounding answer – and it does so under circumstances nobody could have predicted.
A Vision Completed from Beyond
The story of In Minor Keys begins with a death. Koyo Kouoh, the Cameroonian-Swiss curator who became the first African woman appointed to helm the Venice Biennale, died of liver cancer on 10 May 2025, aged 57, just ten days before she was due to present her curatorial concept. She had been working intensely since her appointment in November 2024, defining the exhibition’s theoretical framework, selecting 110 participants, and establishing dialogues with artists across continents. In a decision that was both unprecedented and deeply moving, La Biennale di Venezia – with the full support of Kouoh’s family – chose to realise the exhibition exactly as she had conceived it.
“In Minor Keys” is the title Kouoh chose, drawn from her curatorial text sent to the Biennale’s president on 8 April 2025. In it, she wrote: “This exhibition is tuned in to the minor keys and invites listening to the persistent signals of earth and life, connecting to soul frequencies. If, in music, the minor keys are often associated with strangeness, melancholy and sorrow, here their joy, solace, hope, and transcendence manifest as well.” The metaphor is deliberate. Minor keys, in music, are not lesser keys – they are registers of emotional depth that major keys cannot access. Kouoh saw in them an analogy for the artists she wanted to convene: those working at the margins, in the under-heard frequencies, whose practices “seamlessly bleed into society.”
Her team – advisors Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Hélène Pereira, and Rasha Salti; editor-in-chief Siddhartha Mitter; and research assistant Rory Tsapayi – has carried the project forward with fidelity to her vision. The exhibition opened on schedule at the Giardini, the Arsenale, and Forte Marghera, drawing approximately 10,000 visitors on its first day, a 10 per cent increase over the 2024 edition.
Queer Voices at the Forefront
Among the most significant inclusions in In Minor Keys is the collaborative project arms ache avid aeon: fierce pussy amplified, Chapter Nine, conceived by curator Jo-ey Tang in collaboration with founding members of the New York-based lesbian art collective fierce pussy: Nancy Brooks Brody (1962–2023), Joy Episalla, Zoe Leonard, and Carrie Yamaoka. The collective formed around queer and AIDS activism in 1991, and their presence at the Biennale represents a direct line from the grassroots urgency of early-1990s queer resistance to the institutional spaces of 2026.
Chapter Nine gathers works spanning 1991 to 2026, reconsidered “amid climate collapse and a global authoritarian turn,” as the Biennale’s official description states. Leonard’s photography interrogates mechanisms of surveillance and control; Episalla transmutes photographic paper through chemical baths and brackish water, harnessing “the generative power of damage”; Yamaoka works with reflective mylar and black vinyl in gestures toward social erasure. For the artists, marginal spaces and precarious ruins offer potential for metamorphosis. Two additional fierce pussy projects during the Biennale reclaim public spaces as sites of inclusion – a provocation in a city that, just days before the opening, reportedly censored the collective’s posters referencing trans people.
The inclusion is not tokenistic. Kouoh’s curatorial text explicitly names the collective alongside artists such as Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Alice Maher and Rachel Fallon, and Guadalupe Rosales – practitioners whose work engages with queer identity, gendered labour, and the politics of visibility. The Biennale, under this vision, does not merely exhibit queer art; it positions queer perspectives as structurally integral to how we read the contemporary world.
Indigenous and Decolonial Practice Takes Centre Stage
If the 2024 edition introduced a critical mass of Indigenous voices, the 2026 edition deepens and formalises their presence. Buhlebezwe Siwani, a South African artist, activist, iNyanga (traditional healer), and iSangoma (diviner), features prominently in In Minor Keys. Siwani’s practice – spanning photography, video, performance, sculpture, and experimental painting – interrogates the patriarchal framing of the Black female body within South African contexts. As a Sangoma who works in the space between the living and the dead, her art merges ancestral ritual with contemporary political urgency. Her recent solo exhibition Intsomi at No Man’s Art Gallery in Amsterdam and her inclusion in Tate Modern’s A Clearing in the Forest (2022) have established her as one of the most compelling voices at the intersection of Indigenous spirituality and contemporary art.
The Biennale also features Georgina Maxim, a Zimbabwean artist who works with textiles, discarded clothing, and handwritten text. Her ongoing installation Borrowed Books and Underlined Statements (2023–2026) comprises red stitched fabric panels bearing fragments of text – a meditation on memory and the accumulation of meaning through repetition. Werewere Liking, the Cameroonian-born artist known for her work across painting, sculpture, and performance, brings a decolonial lens to questions of cultural heritage.
Perhaps most symbolically significant is the return of India’s national pavilion after a seven-year absence. Curated by Dr Amin Jaffer, Geographies of Distance: remembering home features five artists who work with organic materials and techniques traditional to India. The inclusion of Skarma Sonam Tashi, who draws on Ladakhi Buddhist traditions, and Alwar Balasubramaniam, who uses soil and clay from rural Tamil Nadu, signals a deliberate engagement with Indigenous material practices. Seven countries are participating for the first time: Guinea, Equatorial Guinea, Nauru, Qatar, Sierra Leone, Somalia, and Vietnam. El Salvador also debuts with its own pavilion.
Khaled Sabsabi and the Politics of Belonging
No story at the 2026 Biennale encapsulates the tension between institutional power and marginalised identity more acutely than that of Khaled Sabsabi. The Lebanese-born, Sydney-based artist was originally appointed to represent Australia in February 2025, only to be dropped six days later amid a political firestorm over earlier works that critics claimed glorified terrorism. The decision triggered a wave of resignations from Creative Australia’s visual arts department and board, and an external review found the arts body “unprepared for the risk of controversy in an atmosphere of antisemitism and Islamophobia.” Sabsabi was reinstated in July 2025.
In February 2026, it was announced that Sabsabi would not only occupy the Australia Pavilion but had also been invited by Kouoh to participate in the main exhibition – making his appearance in both a “major historic first for an Australian artist,” according to Creative Australia. His Australia Pavilion installation, conference of one’s self, draws on the twelfth-century Sufi poem The Conference of the Birds and invites audiences to trace seven levels of doubt, love, knowledge, loss, learning, and unlearning. “For us, it’s always been about the work,” Sabsabi told The Art Newspaper. “It was our only way to see through everything and remain fixated and focused on making the work.”
Sabsabi’s double appearance – in the national pavilion and the central exhibition – is a rare convergence that speaks to the Biennale’s capacity to hold space for artists whose very presence is an act of political defiance.
Decolonising the Archive
A quieter but equally radical thread running through In Minor Keys is its interrogation of institutional memory. Gala Porras-Kim, the Colombian-Mexican artist, was selected for the Applied Arts Pavilion in the Arsenale, developed in collaboration with the Victoria and Albert Museum. Her practice investigates the complex relationships between cultural artefacts, museums, and the institutional conventions that classify and narrativise their place within history – a pointed intervention within the Biennale’s own archive-heavy Giardini.
Kouoh’s curatorial text makes the decolonial frame explicit: “The enduring time of capital and empire maligned local, Indigenous and terrestrial knowledges as chimeric, and dismissed co-constitutive artistic practices as artisanal, intended for decoration or devotional rituals.” By framing Indigenous and queer practices not as corrective additions to a Western canon but as autonomous epistemologies, In Minor Keys challenges the very architecture of how the Biennale categorises and values artistic production.
Protest and the Limits of the Platform
The Biennale’s commitment to amplifying marginalised voices has not been without friction. On 8 May 2026, the day before the public opening, several national pavilions temporarily closed as part of a strike organised by the Art Not Genocide Alliance (ANGA), protesting the inclusion of the Israeli pavilion amid the ongoing war in Gaza. The protests underscored the Biennale’s position as a site where global political tensions are not merely reflected but actively contested. An exhibition conceived around listening to “minor keys” – to the quiet, the under-heard, the suppressed – has become a stage for some of the loudest geopolitical disagreements of the moment. Kouoh anticipated this. In her curatorial text, she referenced the griots – West African oral historians who “carried salt and gold on the backs of the camels.” The Biennale, under her framework, is not a sanctuary from conflict but a space where conflict is metabolised through art.
A Legacy in Motion
The 61st Venice Biennale is, by any measure, a memorial. It is also, paradoxically, one of the most forward-looking editions in the exhibition’s 131-year history. Kouoh’s posthumous vision has produced an exhibition that refuses the false choice between mourning and action, between looking backward and looking forward. With 110 participants from dozens of geographies, seven new national pavilions, and a curatorial framework that centres Indigenous knowledge systems and queer lifeworlds as essential rather than peripheral, In Minor Keys does not merely include marginalised voices – it reorganises the frequency at which the entire exhibition listens.
As the Biennale continues through November, the question is no longer whether the art world can accommodate difference. The question is whether institutions will have the courage to follow where artists like Siwani, fierce pussy, Sabsabi, and Porras-Kim are leading – into registers of experience that the major keys of capital and empire have long sought to silence.
Koyo Kouoh (24 December 1967 – 10 May 2025). In Minor Keys runs until 22 November 2026 at the Giardini, the Arsenale, and various locations across Venice. For tickets and information, visit labiennale.org.
This article draws on reporting by The Art Newspaper, ARTnews, The Guardian, and La Biennale di Venezia’s official press materials.
