A Venice Biennale 2026 It opens to the public on May 9th and runs until November 22nd, restoring the lagoon city to its status as the symbolic capital of contemporary art. Titled In Minor Keys (“In Minor Tones”), this year’s edition, proposes an act of listening in a world marked by wars, inflation, inequality, climate crises, and collective fatigue.

The curatorial project was conceived by the Cameroonian-Swiss curator Koyo Kouoh and will be carried out by the team she chose after her death in May 2025, with the organization emphasizing that the edition will proceed to preserve and disseminate her ideas. The proposal rejects noise as a method and focuses on low frequencies, intimacy, and relationship.

Instead of an exhibition that attempts to explain everything to the visitor, the 2026 Venice Biennale presents itself as a sensory and relational experience capable of slowing down time and creating an "oasis" within the city. The scale also changes: the main exhibition has 111 participants. Individual artists, duos, collectives and organizations, in a selection officially announced today, February 25, 2026.

The Giardini and the Arsenale remain central hubs, but the map expands across Venice into palaces, deconsecrated churches, private foundations, and industrial spaces where the global, the African, and the Lusophone intersect without being reduced to mere labels.

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The idea of ​​In Minor Keys (“in minor keysThis serves as the backbone of the 2026 Venice Biennale. In the framing text submitted to the Biennale presidency in April 2025, Koyo Kouoh described the minor tonality as a musical structure and as an emotional effect, and the team now executing the project maintains that ambition: to exchange the march for the murmur and the totalizing discourse for nuance.

The main exhibition is organized around conceptual themes that function as movements within the same composition: Shrines, processing, Schools, Rest e PerformancesThe nomenclature is not merely decorative. Each motif establishes a type of experience and a way of moving through the city and the artworks.

In the “Shrines,” two spaces in the Central Pavilion pay tribute to Issa Samb and Beverly Buchanan, key figures in Kouoh's vision, in a homage that avoids a retrospective format and prefers the idea of ​​an altar as a meeting place.

“Procession” proposes less linear movements within the exhibition space and engages with Afro-Atlantic and carnival traditions where the body traverses power without asking permission.

“Schools” calls upon artistic organizations and ecosystems as an infrastructure of thought and care, including entities based in Dakar, Lagos, and Nairobi, integrated into the exhibition as living practices and not as footnotes.

“Rest” presents itself as a political argument: to give time back to the visitor and the artist in a world that consumes attention as if it were fuel.

“Performances” completes the circle by bringing the dimension of conviviality and ritual to the center of the community.

The organization confirmed 111 participants for the main exhibition, including individual artists, duos, collectives, and artist-led organizations ranging in age from creators born in the 1940s to those born in the 1990s. The organization also indicated that the exhibition will be held with the team selected by Kouoh.

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If the main exhibition sets the tone, the city provides the resonance. The 2026 Venice Biennale remains anchored in the Giardini and the Arsenale, but insists that limiting the Biennale to these spaces would be to amputate its very nature. The Giardini, with their historic national pavilions, function as a diplomatic showcase and a living archive of European modernity.

The Arsenale, the former naval powerhouse of Venice, now converted into an exhibition space, offers the necessary industrial scale for immersive installations, video, and projects designed specifically for the location. Between the two stretches a network of bridges and passageways where art blends with daily life, compelling the visitor to traverse Venice as if traversing a musical score.

The Biennale will take place from May 9th to November 22nd, with a pre-opening during the week of May 6th to 8th, preceding the formal inauguration. For over six months, Venice will also activate its less predictable margins: deconsecrated churches, cloisters, canal-side palaces, and temporary industrial spaces that will host parallel projects and independent exhibitions.

Neighborhoods like Dorsoduro, Cannaregio, Castello, and San Marco are once again becoming cultural corridors where visitors move from a national pavilion to an independent project, and from an installation in a former convent to a... performance in a courtyard.

Expanded Geography

This expanded geography has direct effects on the city's cultural economy. The Biennial attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors, including industry professionals, curators, collectors, academics, and the general public, and reactivates service chains ranging from hotels to local transportation.

But the symbolic impact is what sustains its global weight: for months, Venice becomes a laboratory where aesthetic trends are tested and where the language of contemporary art is rewritten in real time.

In 2026, the promise is twofold: a more contained scale in the main core and an entire city transformed into a field of experimentation where listening and coexistence replace haste and excess.

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The list of 111 participants, officially announced today, February 25, 2026, confirms a clear geopolitical orientation: the 2026 Venice Biennale seeks a relational cartography where the Global South ceases to be an appendix and becomes the central axis.

The selection brings together individual artists, duos, collectives, and artist-led organizations from multiple geographical locations, chosen by Koyo Kouoh for the affinity between their practices, even when these practices develop far from one another.

The official Biennale website highlights examples of this arc of encounters by citing artists working in cities such as Dakar, Beirut, Paris, Nashville, San Juan, and Salvador, invited to imagine convergences without the need for direct affiliation.

Among the confirmed names for the main exhibition are artists associated with investigations into territory, body, memory, and spirituality. The Biennial includes, for example, Otobong Nkanga, Wangechi Mutu, Torkwase Dyson, Ebony G. Patterson, Álvaro Barrington, Nick Cave, and Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn, among many others.

The structure of the exhibition is not intended to create a showcase of passports, but a set of connections where materials, rhythms, and rituals interact with each other.

This is why organizations and platforms such as Raw Material Company in Dakar, GAS Foundation in Lagos, and Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute, fit into the logic of "Schools" as training and care infrastructures at the very heart of the event.

World Debate

Some cases illustrate how the global debate enters the Biennial through concrete stories without the exhibition becoming an instrument of propaganda.

The participation of Australian artist Khaled Sabsabi, for example, gained international prominence for appearing both in the national pavilion and in the main exhibition after a controversial process in Australia with works inspired by spiritual practice and the experience of migration.

The Biennial welcomes journeys marked by displacement and belonging, and uses them to construct a less didactic and more sensory experience aligned with the spirit of In Minor KeysThe result is a concentrated portrait of contemporary production that prefers density to accumulation and exchanges noise for detail.

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The African focus of the 2026 Venice Biennale is not a byproduct of the biography, but rather an integral part of its grammar.

Koyo Kouoh was appointed artistic director of the Department of Visual Arts with the mission of curating the 61st edition, and the Biennale itself acknowledges that the project was developed intensively between the autumn of 2024 and the beginning of May 2025, when the curator defined the theoretical framework, selected artists, and outlined the graphic identity and spatial design.

His death in May 2025 transformed the edition into an act of continuity and institutional responsibility, and the organization stated that it would move forward to preserve and disseminate his ideas. This continuity is expressed in the centrality of the Global South and in the way the exhibition integrates African schools, platforms, and networks as agents of thought.

When “Schools” calls upon organizations like Raw Material Company or GAS Foundation, the gesture is not merely programmatic: it is an affirmation that the production of knowledge and community in Dakar, Lagos, or Nairobi has the status of cultural architecture and not of a “periphery” visited on excursions.

The continent also emerges through the variety of sonic references and rituals evoked by the concept of "in minor keys," encompassing laments, calls and responses, and forms of joy that survive violence and displacement.

The African Presence

In the national pavilions, the African presence takes shape and vies for space. Morocco participates in the Arsenale with the artist Amina Agueznay, while Zimbabwe confirms a group of five artists under the organization of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe.

The Biennial also hosts debates that address contemporary cultural politics, as seen in the South African case that went to court when the selection of an artist to represent the country was challenged for political reasons before the deadline for confirming the pavilion.

These episodes remind us that Venice continues to be the stage where art and power clash unfiltered. In 2026, the curatorial proposal attempts to respond not with slogans, but with spaces for conviviality, rest, and beauty capable of sustaining life in difficult times.

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The Portuguese-speaking world enters the 2026 Venice Biennale with clear signs of diversity and authorial affirmation. Portugal, through the Directorate-General for the Arts, confirmed the selection of artist Alexandre Estrela to officially represent the country with the project... Red Sky Falls, curated by Ana Baliza and Ricardo Nicolau, and scheduled to be presented between May 9 and November 22 at the Fondaco Marcello.

The choice brings the Portuguese representation in line with the motto In Minor Keys, not as a literal translation, but as a search for resonances between image, time and space in an edition that is defined by listening and sensory experience.

Brazil presents artists Rosana Paulino and Adriana Varejão at the Giardini, in a pavilion that aims to combine historical research with incisive artistic language. The Brazilian presence also extends to the main exhibition through names like Ayrson Heráclito and Eustáquio Neves, expanding the Afro-Atlantic dialogue between rituals, memory, and archives.

Timor-Leste is participating with Veronica Pereira Maia, Etson Caminha and Juventino Madeira, curated by Loredana Pazzini-Paracciani and with preparation overseen by Timorese cultural authorities.

Their presence reinforces the transcontinental dimension of the Portuguese language in an event that values ​​relational geographies and affinities between practices separated by oceans.

Viewed as a whole, the Lusophone cartography in this edition shows that the shared language does not produce uniformity and exposes frictions between memory and future, between the archive and the gesture, between politics and intimacy.

The Venice Biennale 2026 thus becomes a space where colonial legacies and contemporary continuities are not treated as a distant theme, but as living matter that permeates the body, the landscape, and language.