After Curator's Death, Venice Biennale Will Realize Her Vision

New York Times

5 days ago

The organizers of the Venice Biennale announced on Tuesday that next year's edition would go ahead as planned, despite the sudden death this month of Koyo Kouoh, the curator who was overseeing its main exhibition.
Kouoh died of cancer on May 10, just days before she was scheduled to reveal the title and theme of the event.
Cristiana Costanzo, a Biennale spokeswoman, told reporters at a news conference in Venice that next year's edition would run from May 9 through Nov. 22, and that a team of curators, art historians and editors who had been working with Kouoh would deliver her exhibition 'as she conceived and defined it.'
Kouoh had been preparing the exhibition for almost seven months, Costanzo said: Working with a five-member team, she had selected some of the participating artists and artworks, and given it a title, 'In Minor Keys.'
During Tuesday's news conference, members of the team used Kouoh's words to present her plan.
Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, an art historian from the team, said that Kouoh had wanted her Biennale to be 'neither a litany of commentary on world events, nor an inattention or escape from compounding and continuously intersecting crises.' Instead, Beckhurst Feijoo said, Kouoh had wanted to present 'a radical reconnection with art's natural habitat and role in society — that is the emotional, the visual, the sensory, the affective, the subjective.'
Another team member, Marie Helene Pereira, a curator, explained the exhibition title. 'If in music, the minor keys are often associated with strangeness, melancholy and sorrow,' she said, in Kouoh's exhibition, they would also be associated with 'joy, solace, hope and transcendence.'
The team did not reveal the names of the artists who would appear in the show, although it said the main exhibition would include poetry and film. Costanzo said the Biennale would announce the full list of participating artists on Feb. 25, 2026.
In the lead-up to this announcement, the Venice Biennale curator usually spends months traveling the world, visiting artists' studios as the roster comes together. The presentation on Tuesday took place in front of a slide show of photographs that Kouoh and her team had taken on such journeys, including many that appeared to have been taken in Africa, Asia and South America.
Kouoh's team did not refer to the images during the presentation, but Costanzo said later in an email that 'the slide show was intended to communicate moods around the conceptualizing of the exhibition.'
All five members of Kouoh's team were unavailable for interview, Costanzo said.
First held in 1895, the Venice Biennale is one of the art world's most important events, and every edition includes a large-scale group show, organized by a curator, alongside dozens of national pavilions that participating countries stage independently.
When the Biennale's organizers asked Kouoh to oversee the main exhibition, she was the first African woman to receive such an invitation. She had made a name for herself as the chief curator of the Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town, though she also worked on the curatorial teams of several major international exhibitions, including two editions of Documenta in Germany. She was 57 when she died.
In an interview with The New York Times in December, Kouoh said that she had wanted to make an 'artist-centered' exhibition that 'really speaks to our times.' She added: 'The artists will define where we go.'
Tuesday's presentation ended with a reading of a poem that Kouoh wrote in 2022 and had wanted to present at the news conference. 'I am tired, people are tired, we are all tired,' her poem began: 'Even art itself is tired.'
'We need to be with beauty,' Kouoh wrote, 'and lots of it.'