The Venice Biennale will return this May with its 61st edition and has confirmed the full list of artists for its main exhibition. Notably, the 2026 exhibition is titled In Minor Keys and realizes the vision of the late curator Koyo Kouoh. Following her passing last May, the exhibition will be carried out by advisors she appointed, including Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Helen Pereira, Rasha Salti, her assistant Rory Tsapayi, and critic Siddhartha Mitter. However, there will be no Golden Lion lifetime achievement award this year, as Kouoh had not yet made her selections.
Artist selection and geopolitical context
Among the 111 participants announced, the exhibition brings together individual artists, collaborative duos, collectives and artist-led organizations. By comparison, the 2026 edition is significantly smaller than the 2024 exhibition Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere, which included 331 participants. However, In Minor Keys places greater emphasis on geographic breadth, with a stronger presence of artists from the Global South and a marked increase in living practitioners. At the same time, the announcement follows the withdrawal of South Africa’s Pavilion and the reinstatement of Khaled Sabsabi after the earlier cancellation of his Australian Pavilion presentation. In addition, the artist list includes figures such as Kennedy Yanko, Pauline Oliveros, Nick Cave, Ebony G. Patterson, Alvaro Barrington and Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn.
Curatorial themes and market-facing outlook
The exhibition will be organized around motifs including “Shrines,” “Procession,” “Schools,” “Rest,” and “Performances,” and will explore subtle emotional registers and poetic frequencies of artistic practice, drawing connections to music and verse, the curatorial team explained at a press conference earlier today. As a result, the curatorial structure positions the exhibition around slower cultural rhythms and reflective modes of production.
“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,” Kouoh wrote in a curatorial statement.
“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.”
Finally, the exhibition will open on May 9 and run through November 22, setting the commercial and institutional calendar for one of the sector’s most closely watched global cultural platforms.