It’s the art world’s most important art exhibition. But for 2026, the Venice Biennale arrives carrying unusual baggage. Koyo Kouoh was announced in 2024 as the curator—the first African woman to hold the role—for the 61st edition of the main show, which opens this week and runs through November. A tour de force, she had built her name connecting the international art world to artists and institutions from Africa and the Global South.
She passed away suddenly in 2025, leaving behind an artist list and a theme—“In Minor Keys”—for the five members of her curatorial team to execute. The curatorial text frames the show through a musical metaphor (a “minor key” refers to a somber musical mood) to explore the subtle and atmospheric power of art today. Despite this framing, the exhibition contains little music or sound work. The whispered rhythms and subtle melodies it references appear most clearly in human bonds across generations and in the raw materials extracted from contested land. For example, in Theo Eshetu’s Garden of the Broken Hearted (2026), a real olive tree rotates on a pedestal to the sound of tinkling chimes, like a poignant ballerina in a jewelry box.
The show is unavoidably tinged with loss, and the strangeness of living under the knowledge of certain death. Cut flowers, a perfect metaphor for blooming but stunted potential, recur throughout: from Dan Lie’s flower garlands in Ephemeral temple for decaying beings (2026), which give off strong vegetal whiffs, to Eric Baudelaire’s five-channel video of a commercial flower factory, Death Passed My Way and Stuck This Flower in my Mouth (2026).
“In Minor Keys” offers many such satisfying, quiet echoes that connect between rooms—and yet it’s hard to find a resounding message. Perhaps that is the point. In a moment of chaos on all sides, the quieter modes of human connection may be all we have left.
Here are six artists’ works that define the 2026 Venice Biennale.
Cauleen Smith, The Wanda Coleman Songbook, 2024
While “In Minor Keys” is not organized around themes, poetry is a recurring motif—blue hangings printed with poems by writers and artists such as Palestinian poet Refaat al-Areer and artist Big Chief Demond Melancon (whose artwork opens the Giardini) appear throughout the Arsenale. American multimedia artist Cauleen Smith’s installation The Wanda Coleman Songbook (2024) crystallizes these threads—an experimental four-channel video and installation paying homage to its namesake poet.
Huge screens enclose two sofas cozily huddled atop layers of Turkish rugs. The films are hazy and memory-laden, portraying the sights and sounds of Los Angeles—seagulls, dog walkers, and a close-up of the Hollywood sign—interspersed with shots zooming in on the pages of Coleman’s poetry books. Known as the unofficial poet laureate of L.A., Coleman wrote with clear-eyed lucidity about the realities of L.A.’s poor and Black communities, with humor that shadows the unflinching content. Her books are also displayed in a glass case in the installation.
Lyrical reworkings of her jazz- and blues-inspired poetry by contemporary musicians play through the speakers while a scent designed to recreate the smell of Griffith Park drifts through the space.
Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Anatomy of the Magnolia Tree for Koyo Kouoh and Toni Morrison, 2026
Kouoh’s presence is felt throughout the show, but this work by Cuban American artist Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons pays direct tribute.
Huge vertical panels form a kind of delicate paper mural portraying the curator in a long dark cloak alongside the author Toni Morrison. Stalks of magnolia weave between them in delicate watercolor, ink, and gouache, sprawling across an entire wall near the Giardini’s entrance. Morrison, the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature, was a crucial inspiration for this Biennale: a quote from her essay “The Site of Memory” hangs from a banner in the Arsenale.
A symbol of the American South, the magnolia in the panels is also recreated in glass and resin flower sculptures arranged on seven plinths in front of the mural. The luxuriant blooms’ gold-and-red leaves droop and curl, a stunning tribute to these women’s advocacy. A 15-minute score by Kamaal Malak, layering bass and synth, accompanies the work.
The installation honors the gigantic impact of these Black women who worked to make quiet interiority the star of the show, placing them on the center stage themselves.
Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Ruinous, 2026
Throughout “In Minor Keys,” artists work in subtext, a theme that is at the heart of Tiona Nekkia McClodden’s new suite of works, all centered around the new two-channel video, Ruinous (2026). The two screens are placed apart from each other like stereo speakers framing the rest of the room. On them, McClodden plays an abstract painter—a character loosely based on herself, per the wall text—contemplating a painting she has mixed feelings about.
The viewer watches from behind the artist as she gazes at the canvas, narrating; her face stays unseen. On the other screen, a tenuous narrative of queer longing and family unfolds in a restaurant, centering around the theme of scarring.
Pleasure and pain seem to intertwine in these images: hurt and rejection are threaded with flashes of joy, like a halo of light around a beloved’s head. Alongside the videos are several sculptural works (also props in the film): a delicate chainmail head covering embroidered with 24-karat gold thread, and an épée sword mounted in a custom box titled The Giver of Scars (2026). Behind them hang three small leather canvases, scratched and sliced, raw and alive. Together, the installation captures the intense poetic rush of being alive through it all—the depth of longing and the way it marks us, sometimes forever.
Alfredo Jaar,The End of the World, 2023–24
Critical minerals— such as rare earth minerals—are the unseen sacred objects of modern Western economies, essential to everything from solar panels to semiconductors to batteries.
Chilean artist and architect Alfredo Jaar makes that reverence material: an extra-long room flooded with eye-popping red light, a single pedestal at the far end.
Inside the small glass box is a tiny, four-centimeter cube of thin-layered metals, each described on a wall label according to its uses and the geopolitical web it plays a role in. Like a radioactive church aisle, the artwork conjures the toxic violence these materials are linked to: the wars and global tensions they help create.
The long walk to reach these tiny deposits is one of the Biennale’s boldest reminders of the political volatility of the present. It’s an unmissable image of how minuscule elements of contemporary geopolitics, as recent trade escalations have shown, can have an outsized impact on everyday life.
Walid Raad, Postscript to the Arabic Edition, 1938–2025
At the end of the Lebanese Civil War in 1990, the country’s militias sold off their weapons. The readiest customers were combatants in the Balkans. When fighters opened their pallets full of weapons, they discovered something surprising: Their slatted undersides were painted with copies of famous Turkish and Arabic paintings. In the Arsenale, several of these pallets stand upright in Lebanese artist Walid Raad’s installation, their painted undersides exposed. The pallet paintings appear exactly as they were unloaded into a Ljubljana, Slovenia, warehouse—tarpaulins for a backdrop, duct tape, and A4-printed DIY notations giving an ad-hoc impression of a show mid-install.
As with much of Raad’s work, it’s a clever reframing of fiction, anecdote, and geopolitical complexities. Within “In Minor Keys,” the piece becomes a striking example of how art historical influence travels along unexpected paths—and surfaces in the least expected places.
Kaloki Nyamai, Kwata Kau, Ithyonze nitwavika vaa, and Ithyonze nitwavika vaa, all 2026
The vast, curtain-like paintings of Kaloki Nyamai are unmissable as visitors move through the Arsenale. Sewn together from horizontal strips, the works are built up in rough layers of splattered, bright paint, their surfaces studded with oversized faces and bodies stitched through with hairy tufts of yarn—a symbol of deep social connection in Nyamai’s home region of Kitui, Kenya.
In a triangular installation of new works—Kwata kau, Ithyonze nitwavika vaa, and Ithyonze nitwavika vaa II (all 2026)—Nyamai portrays crowds of people, visible only in their raised arms against the dense, layered surface.
Hung so the viewer can walk around all sides, the paintings reveal the hems and details that hold them together. Kwata kau is painted on both sides; up close, the figures’ faces almost disappear. Textiles carry a generational charge for Nyamai: his mother is a textile artist, and he cites his grandmother’s storytelling as an inspiration. The works hold the breadth of community and the closeness of family all in one.
