Field Notes
The 61st International Art Exhibition opened in Venice on 9 May and runs until 22 November, and to walk it is to encounter a kind of authorship rarely seen: complete, deliberate, and posthumous. Koyo Kouoh, the Cameroonian-born curator who led Cape Town's Zeitz MOCAA, died in May 2025, weeks before her appointment was to become a triumph. She had already done the work. The title, the theoretical text, the artist list, the design, the catalogue structure — all delivered to the Biennale a month before her death.
What La Biennale chose to do with that inheritance is the quiet drama of this edition. With her family's support, the institution mounted the show as she conceived it rather than handing the brief to a successor. The result feels less like a tribute than an act of fidelity, which is harder and rarer.
An exhibition finished by absence rather than committee.
"In Minor Keys" gathers 110 participants — individual artists, duos, collectives, artist-led organisations — drawn from a deliberately wide map of geographies. The register Kouoh named is musical and political at once: the minor key as the place where feeling, dissent and tenderness live, away from the major chord's certainty. It is an argument against the spectacle that large biennials usually reward.
We would give the Giardini and the Arsenale a full day each, and resist the temptation to treat the city's scattered satellite venues as overflow; they are not. Go early, before the heat settles on the Arsenale's brick, and let the show's deliberate quietness do its work. It will not shout at you. That, in the end, is the point of a minor key — and the last instruction left by the woman who scored it.