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| Koyo Kouoh - Photo: Mirjam Kluka |
On October 17, 2024, Koyo Kouoh accepted the invitation by Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, President of La Biennale, to become the Artistic Director of the Visual Arts Department for La Biennale's 61st International Art Exhibition in 2026. Her appointment as the first African woman to curate the Venice Art Biennale was publicly reported on December 3, 2024.
On May 10, 2025, Kouoh's sudden passing at the age of 57 due to recently diagnosed cancer was announced. The world of art and culture was stunned.
Just the week before, in an excellent Q&A with Charlene Prempeh of the Financial Times, Kouoh looked very much alive in vibrant photos by Trevor Stuurman. With prescience, she said:
“I do believe in life after death because I come from an ancestral Black education where we believe in parallel lives and realities,” she said. “There is no ‘after death,’ ‘before death’ or ‘during life.’ It doesn’t matter that much. I believe in energies—living or dead—and in cosmic strength.”Kouoh had nearly seven months on Earth to develop her curatorial project. She chose the profound and perfect title, In Minor Keys. The artists and artworks were selected, and her philosophical framework defined.
At the presentation on Tuesday, after an introduction by Biennale spokesperson Cristiana Costanza and President Pietrangelo Buttafuco, who said that Kouoh was "whispering from elsewhere," Kouoh's team took turns reading the text that she had sent to La Biennale on April 8, 2025. By the end, as the audience in the Sala delle Colenne rose to its feet, I had tears in my eyes.
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| In Minor Keys - The Team: Siddartha Mitter, Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Helene Pereira, image of Koyo Kouoh, Rasha Salti, Rory Tsapayi Photo: Cat Bauer |
The philosophical framework that guides Koyo Kouoh's curatorship is simple and divine. Here is the text, in her own words:
La Biennale di Venezia
61st International Art Exhibition
Curatorial Text by Koyo Kouoh
[Take a deep breath]
[Exhale]
[Drop your shoulders]
[Close your eyes]
This is an invitation to encounter these words in the immediate physical, meteorological, ambient,
and karmic conditions in which they meet you. To shift to a slower gear and tune in to the
frequencies of the minor keys. Because, though often lost in the anxious cacophony of the present
chaos raging through the world, the music continues. The songs of those producing beauty in spite
of tragedy, the tunes of the fugitives recovering from the ruins, the harmonies of those repairing
wounds and worlds.
There is a reason, after all, that some people wish to colonize the moon, and others dance before it as an ancient friend.
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| Koyo Kouoh - Photo: Mirjam Kluka |
The minor key, in music, alludes both to the structure of a song and to its emotional effects. It is a
rich idea, so rich that it quickly overflows its technical definition and spills with metaphor. It
summons moods, the blues, the call-and-response, the morna, the second line, the lament, the
allegory, the whisper.
The minor keys refuse orchestral bombast and goose-step military marches and come alive in the
quiet tones, the lower frequencies, the hums, the consolations of poetry, all portals of
improvisation to the elsewhere and the otherwise. The minor keys ask for listening that calls on
the emotions and sustains them in return.
The minor keys are also the small islands, worlds amid oceans with distinct and endlessly rich
ecosystems, social lives that are articulated, for better and worse, within much larger political
forms and ecological stakes. Here, the evocation of the key and the island extends to an
archipelago of oases: gardens, courtyards, compounds, lofts, dance floors — the other worlds that
artists make, the intimate and convivial universes that refresh and sustain even in terrible times;
indeed, especially in terrible times.
Look at the creole garden, you put all species on such a little lick of land:
avocados, lemons, yams, sugarcanes …plus thirty or forty other species on this bit of
land that doesn’t go more than fifty feet up the side of the hill, they protect each other.
In the great Circle, everything is in everything else.
— Édouard Glissant, 1993
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| Koyo Kouoh - Photo: Mirjam Kluka |
These are the cues for an exhibition; an exhibition tuned in to the minor keys; an exhibition that
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.
In the minor keys, sound and sensation are grounding, they hold the cadences, melodies, and
silences of resonant worlds that gather and create together a polyphonous assembly of art,
convening and communing in convivial collectivity, beaming across the void of alienation and the
crackle of conflict.
The 61st edition of the Biennale Arte is grounded in a deep belief in artists as the vital interpreters
of the social and psychic condition and catalysts of new relations and possibilities.
The exhibition’s composition is formed by artistic practices that open portals, that refresh and
nourish, that prompt relation and relationship, that advance concept and form through networks
and schools — understood freely and informally.
The intended effect scrambles cohesion and dissonance in the manner of a free-jazz ensemble, or
perhaps, at the scale of the Biennale Arte, a festival of ensembles with a common premise: that
poetics liberate and people make beauty together.
Through relation, sharing, and transcendence, the artists and practices that operate in this spirit,
like jazz, across methods, scales, senses and forms, propose to visitors an exhibitional experience
that is more sensory than didactic, renewing rather than exhausting, and fortifying for the work
ahead.
Through a visual and meditative procession, the exhibition prompts all senses to interconnect and
meander from one universe to the other, rendering visible the possibilities that reside in the in-
between spaces and beyond the portals.
...there is no choice but to tune in like jazzmen to these imperative mutations.
The jazzman constantly meditates on the unpredictable, stands within it according to the
laws of polyrhythm, and improvises breathtaking moments.
We small-island Caribbeans are not ready, but we have this resource.
The change will have to be so profound that we will no doubt have to add to the knowledge of jazz, the
old totemisms, animisms, analogisms, and other metaphysics too summarily discarded.
These old-world poems are already precious scores.
— Patrick Chamoiseau, 2023
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| Koyo Kouoh - Photo: @Mehdl Berkler |
In this spirit, the international exhibition of the 61st Biennale Arte intends neither a litany of
intersecting crises. Rather, it proposes a radical reconnection with art’s natural habitat and role in
society: that is the emotional, the visual, the sensory, the affective, the subjective.
In Minor Keys are sequences of exhilarating journeys that address the sensate and the affective,
inviting visitors to marvel, meditate, dream, revel, reflect, and commune in realms where time is
not corporate property nor at the mercy of relentlessly accelerated productivity.
After all, it is clear by now that 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.
The ‘civilizing mission’ flattens all with condescending contempt, and in the contemporary era
entire societies and ecologies are regarded as collateral damage in the headstrong pursuit of
growth supported by ruthlessness and greed. In refusing the spectacle of horror, the time has come
to listen to the minor keys, to tune in sotto voce to the whispers, to the lower frequencies; to find
the oases, the islands, where the dignity of all living beings is safeguarded.
The exhibition posits that such radical shifts are taking place — indeed, have been underway all
along — in the minor keys, and the artists, poets, performers, and filmmakers whom the exhibition
will convene are grounded in their commitments to realizing them. Artists are channels to and
between the minor keys and listening to, rather than speaking for them is at the core of the
curatorial conceit.
The exhibition In Minor Keys stands as a collective score composed together with artists who have
built universes of imagination. Artists who work at the boundaries of form, and whose practices
can be thought of as intricate melodies to be heard both collectively and on their own terms. These
are artists whose practices seamlessly bleed into society.
Artists who accommodate daily life as part of a logical and aesthetically consistent relation of
parts. Artists who are exceedingly generous and hospitable to life.
In our myths, in our songs, that’s where the seeds are.
It is not possible to constantly hone on the crisis.
You have to have the love and you have to have the magic, that’s also life.
— Toni Morrison, 1977
1 James Baldwin, No Name in the Street (New York: Dial Press, 1972).
2 Edouard Glissant, Tout-monde (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 208; translated by Eric Prieto, 2010.
3 Patrick Chamoiseau, 'We Caribbeans are not ready but have the resources to adapt to unavoidable
climate mutations,' Le Monde, June 29 2023.
4 Toni Morrison interviewed by John Callaway, WTTW, Chicago, 1977.
Ciao from Venezia,
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