In Minor Keys: A View from the 61st Venice Biennale

Much has been problematised of In Minor Keys, the main exhibition of the Venice Biennale 2026, which was executed by a curatorial team of five in the absence of its convenor, Koyo Kouoh (1967-2025). What occupies the large spaces of the Giardini and Arsenale was never
intended to be a conventional ‘exhibition,’ with clear themes, sections, or messages to convey, but rather a means of representing ‘harmony without homogenisation,’ in the words of the Biennale’s editor-in-chief, Siddhartha Mitter. In practice, the viewer or participant is confronted with a series of sprawling salon hangs, in which artists are unevenly represented, and the connections between their works and practices are not always evident.

Moving through this curatorial offering requires embracing a sense of associative
disorientation which can itself disrupt settled perspectives and positions. The strong representation of artists from Ireland, for example, may surprise some of those who presume Kouoh’s practice as exclusively centred on the ‘Global South’. Alice Maher, whose works feature throughout the Giardini and Arsenale, is one of many artists who encountered Kouoh during her directorship of the 38th edition of EVA International, Ireland’s biennial of contemporary art in Limerick, in 2016. (A publication marking the tenth anniversary of Still (the) Barbarians, in tribute to Kouoh, will be available in the summer.) Yet this overwhelming exhibition more likely leads its viewers to seek out that which is clear, simple, and familiar – explaining, perhaps, the popularity of Alfredo Jaar’s ‘precise’ installation, The End of the World
(2026), a four-centimetre-square cube comprised of minerals like cobalt, lithium, and copper, which condenses complex questions of extractivism and human rights violations into something much more easily consumed.

The lack of structure in the main exhibition – and the work it demands of the individual in simply orienting it – detracts from the individual practices on display, contradicting Kouoh’s artist-led approach. Artworks, more than curation, should be worked at by their viewers. The mezzanine space in the Giardini is one exception, hosting a constellation of artists working across mediums who play with ideas of home and refuge. To Hammad Nasar’s neat summary of that room – of ‘everyday life on empty cardboard boxes (Sohrab Hura); unreliable narrations of Yasser Arafat’s nightly changing beds (Walid Raad); and evocative landscapes of Gaza constructed from discarded materials (Mohammed Joha)’ – I add Vera Tamari
’s forty-year exploration of trees and seeds in Palestine, Amina Saoudi Aït Khay and Annalee Davis’ ‘domestic’ textiles, and, downstairs, Manuel Mathieu’s fleshy torn canvasses, more recent testaments to the wider context of violence and displacement in which the Biennale functions.

What is more striking, however, is how closely the national pavilions and other collateral and institutional exhibitions – intentionally, or not – have chimed with Kouoh’s theme. In the Arsenale, Albania’s Genti Korini brings together live acting, puppetry, and an original sonic score in a video installation staged in zaum, an experimental language without grammatical or syntactic ru
les created by the early twentieth-century Futurist
avant-garde. Above its whispering tones rises the sound of Taus Makhacheva’s Dear R., R., K., S., M., A., C., S., K., I., G., L., A., A., L., P., G., E., J., D., M., C., B., O., F., F., R., D., M., E., L., I., F., L., A., M., T., K., K., L., P., F., V., A., L., L. (2018/2026) from the room below, where a chorus of 52 speakers relate apologies and excuses for belated responses, the artist’s humorous take on the demand for constant communication (United Arab Emirates). ‘Minor’ and ‘minoritised’ languages are also
explored in a plurality of ways throughout the Biennale. In Castello’s Istituto Santa Maria della Pietà, Manon Awst and Dylan Huw’s Sownd lends its title from a Cymraeg/Welsh word meaning both ‘stuck’ and ‘foundationally sound,’ which the artists use as an entry point into the wetland landscapes of both Wales and Venice.

Other artists listen to similar ecologies through the medium of film. They include Eglė Budvytytė (Lithuania), who travels to locations including Apulia near Grotta Scaloria, the site of a Neolithic water cult excavated by archaeologist Marija Gimbutas in the late 1970s; Maria Nalbantova (Bulgaria), exploring environmental care in the context of the Dragoman Marsh; and Anca Benera and Arnold Estefán (Romania), whose Pavilion Black Seas—Scores for the Sonic Eye is described as
a living oceanographic archive,
supported in part by the Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts (SAVA), an
interdisciplinary research project based at the University of East Anglia. These exhibitions should be perceived as part of a wider ‘wetland turn’ in artistic and academic discourses;
’swamps are cool,’ says Pietro Consolandi, researcher, artist, and co-curator of Nature Speaks: Listening for Rights of Nature in Venice and Europe at Ocean Space.

As a cultural worker in the Giardini during the opening, however, I observed the environmental cost of staging such ‘ecological art’, with the import of sacks marked ‘decorative soil’, hundreds of potted plants, and the raising of dust through ongoing construction (including of the Qatari Pavilion, the first new permanent national pavilion built in the Giardini in 30 years). In this context of excess, the simplest interventions have the greatest impact. In the Arsenale, Slovenia’s Nonument Group recycle materials from the Architecture Biennale in 2025 to create their discipline-defying Soundtrack for an Invisible House, a multi-vocal story of a small mosque built for Bosnian Muslim soldiers on the Isonzo Front during World War I. In the Giardini, Abbas Akhavan’s Entre chien et loup reimagines the architecture of the Canadian Pavilion as a Wardian case, used to transport and traffic
plants throughout the British Empire. In collaboration with the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew Gardens and the University of Padua – and neighbouring Lubaina Himid’s painterly construction of a day in the English countryside (Great Britain) – Akhavan has cultivated a ‘satellite garden’ of the Waterlily House in London, while it is closed for renovation. This presentation in Venice, along with a formative exhibition at Mount Stuart in Scotland in 2022, could constitute the roots of more substantial UK presentations
in the
future.

Many more of those exhibiting at the Biennale in 2026 are already well-established within British institutional and commercial circles, notably Gala Porras Kim, Himali Singh Soin & David Soin Tappeser (hylozoic/desires), Mona Hatoum, and
Monira Al Qadiri – re-presenting a body of work commissioned for Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture –
and Michael Armitage, who receives a substantial solo exhibition at the Pinault Collection’s Palazzo Grassi. The occasion of the Biennale can offer an opportunity to present something unexpected; Resonance at Vanderbilt in Venice, for example, includes photographs of Frank Bowling’s mother, displayed for the very first time in public alongside reproductions of his so-called ‘mother's house paintings’. It can also serve to preview. Alongside Armitage’s vast exhibition at Palazzo Grassi is a very small taster of Amar Kanwar’s remarkable and poetic film installations, which will run through the Serpentine North Gallery in September 2026.

There is, of course, much to be found by venturing even a little beyond Venice. Isaac Julien presents three exhibitions across the region, including his first major retrospective in Italy, at gres art 671 in Bergamo. The tenth edition of the Biennale Gherdëina, curated by Samuel Leuenberger, is underway at the Dolomites in Urtijëi (Ortisei), just a few hours from Venice by train. (Future) Paradise Gardens includes artists Augustas Serapinas, whose first UK exhibition, Physical Culture, has just opened at Nottingham Contemporary, and Lydia Ourahmane, who is concurrently exhibiting with Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation in Venice.

’The minor keys refuse military marches,’ evoked Rasha Salti, one of the members of the curatorial team, in a press conference preceding the Biennale. However, it is impossible to share my reflections on the opening without reflecting on my experiences as a cultural worker, within the context of cancellations and censorship,
the 24-hour cultural strike organised by the Art Not Genocide Alliance (ANGA), and increased security and police presence throughout Venice. Encountering some of the Biennale’s most critical works at its gates – Zhanna Kadyrova’s Origami Deer, which has travelled from Donetsk Oblast in Ukraine, and fierce pussy’s abstracted Palestinian flag – was in direct contrast to much of the work, and interpretations of the work, on view inside. To the exceptions I have mentioned above, I add Verónica Pereira Maia’s remarkable Tais Don (1994-1999), a woven textile which commemorates the 271 victims of a massacre at the Santa Cruz cemetery in 1991 (Timor Leste, Arsenale), and the 100 hand-stitched embroideries of Gaza—No Words—See the Exhibit at Palazzo Mora.

As a cultural worker (and Fellow), however, I have also had the rare privilege of time with works, which I dedicated above all to Fondazione In Between Art Film. This regular collateral event of the Biennale at the Complesso dell'Ospedaletto – whose wider commissions extend to Camden Art Centre – has been central to my Biennale itinerary since the presentation of Saodat Ismailova’s Melted into the Sun (2024). This year’s exhibition, Canicula, is no exception, and includes by far the standout work of the Venice Biennale: Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s 450XL: The Story of a Fugitive Sound (2026), which examines a sonic attack on a silent vigil in Belgrade in March 2025. This remarkable installation, soon-to-be accompanied by a catalogue essay by Dubravka Sekulic, has brought to others’ attention the ongoing student-led struggle against corruption in a region of Europe still perceived at its peripheries – efforts which, despite numerous gatherings organised by diasporic activists, including outside cultural spaces such as Tate Modern in London, have received relatively little acknowledgement in the UK. Abu Hamdan’s moving installation indicates the capacity of art in collective action, and platforming ‘minoritised’ perspectives –an ambitious work which anticipates a number of forthcoming projects in the UK at Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) 2026, the Barbican, and Gasworks (where his organisation Earshot are recipients of a three-year Studio Bursary).

In Minor Keys is not a Venice Biennale exhibition, but one created for some (imagined) community of viewers who too can sit with and return to its works over time. This is a hopeful intention, but one which bears little weight with respect to the true function of the Biennale today. As The Art Newspaper’s Kabir Jhala notes, the profiles of Pio Abad, Alvaro Barrington and Precious Okoyomon experienced a significant boost in Frieze New York, the annual art fair which opened the week after the Biennale, simply because of their inclusion as Invited Artists, regardless of the exhibition’s critical reception. Understanding the Biennale’s relation to the contemporary art market – along with the legitimation of nation-states, and the destruction of the Venice Lagoon, expressed by Antonia Majaca in an essential article published after the resignation of the international jury – are major keys to thinking about its impact more widely.

Jelena Sofronijevic, Independent curator, writer and researcher; producer of the EMPIRE LINES podcast

In Minor Keys: 61st International Art Exhibition
La Biennale de Venezia
May 5 – Nov 22 2026