Previous artistic directors have found themselves ripe for a panning. Martin Herbert wonders what will happen to Koyo Kouoh’s In Minor Keys, if anything at all
In 2007, in the runup to the 52nd Venice Biennale, I interviewed that edition’s artistic director, Robert Storr, to get a sense of his intentions for the show. After explaining what his title Think with the Senses – Feel with the Mind meant (to him, at least), the American curator/writer confessed he was, frankly, expecting critics to rake him over the coals for his exhibition: such trial-by-fire being customary for the Biennale’s curators. This is known, of course, as getting your defence in early, with the foreknowledge that you can’t please everyone. Fortunately for the rest of us, Storr’s apparent preparedness didn’t stop him from being triggered – after the reviews came in – into a schadenfreude-rich exchange of escalating pomposities in Artforum with several curators who downright hated his show or, for their own ideological reasons, wanted to say they had. Storr, sporting accordingly scorched laurels, has mostly been quiet since.
In recent years, it’s become a little less typical for Venice’s artistic directors to be so routinely criticised. Biennales have sometimes found critical favour (eg Cecilia Alemani’s The Milk of Dreams, 2022) and sometimes not (eg Christine Macel’s conservative Viva Arte Viva, 2017, or Adriano Pedrosa’s stew of marginalisation Foreigners Everywhere, 2024). It’s usually hard to anticipate accurately the response to the main show – the international exhibition, the central plank of a Venice director’s vision – at least in terms of positivity or negativity. For the 61st edition of the event, however, maybe we can take an educated guess.
In May 2025, just before she was due to announce her edition’s theme, artistic director Koyo Kouoh died of cancer, aged fifty-seven. The show about to open, In Minor Keys, based on the prodigious Swiss-Cameroonian curator’s drafted exhibition concept and brought to fruition by others, takes up an expansive, even polyphonic musical metaphor. Listening to minor-ness, according to Kouoh, has widespread implications. She writes in terms of tuning into ‘soul frequencies… the persistent signals of earth and life’; makes analogies with Édouard Glissant’s cultural theory of archipelagoes; suggests the show might function like a dissonant free-jazz ensemble.
It also seems fairly clear what the show is not intended to be: ‘neither a litany of commentary on world events, nor an inattention or escape from compounding and continuous intersecting crises’. The suggestion here is that Kouoh, the first African woman to direct the Venice Biennale, strategised up front to dodge some of the pitfalls of previous shows with her international exhibition, while leaning into a conceptual spaciousness that could accommodate a wide variety of practices. The result – if only based on reading the premise against the grain, rather than thinking of Kouoh’s sterling track record – might also be a hodgepodge taped together by poetics. If any of that happens to be apparent beyond the variables of subjective reception, though, how will it be received?
There isn’t really any precedent for posthumous exhibitions of this scale. The closest might be Okwui Enwezor’s Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America, which opened at New York’s New Museum in 2021, two years after his death: Enwezor conceived the project, pinned to racist violence in the US, in 2018; the show, again, was completed by curatorial advisers. Notwithstanding the gravity of the theme, the reviews were uniformly admiring; only the artist/writer Hannah Black had substantive issues, and even there she wasn’t speaking ill of the dead; her problems were with the show’s apparent departures from Enwezor’s original concept and the fact that, due to his death, the show couldn’t respond to recent events.
It’s perhaps notable that in the upcoming Venice Biennale’s publicity materials, Kouoh’s name is highly – indeed, seemingly unusually – prominent. This serves as a tribute, of course, but also entwines the show itself strongly with its late and lamented curator, inching towards cult-of-personality territory. As such, if you’re critiquing the show, you’re implicitly – as Storr understood – critiquing the person, who in this case has not only tragically passed but is not there to defend herself. (Such might also apply to the other elegy for an artistic loss in this year’s edition, Henrike Naumann’s exhibition in the German Pavilion, prepared before her passing in February.) In terms of sensitivity and respect, maybe little can be said that’s not positive about an exhibition by a deceased curator, except to point out where her vision has not been honoured; which, also tragically, means that however considerable a show’s own merits, it’s not necessarily being judged by them.
One anticipates that there still will be criticality around this Venice, since it’s not like there aren’t things to question about the wider event, given the evolving narrative around the participation of Russia and Israel, related boycotts, the intended withdrawal of EU funding. Questions will probably be raised, once again, about the relevancy of the biennial model. Yet active critical discourse – one of the few upsides of this increasingly problematic Biennale – may not be applied to Kouoh’s own show. If that’s the case, it will surely be at least in part because the latter does indeed look highly promising, its 110 artists seemingly chosen to emphasise pointed resonances between geographically distant practices; to underscore the curator’s longstanding support for women and African artists; and – not unimportantly – to steer decisively away from recent editions’ gravitation towards deceased artists or practices on the margins of art. But if, on the other hand, In Minor Keys has discussable faults, will readers hear about them, will visitors focus on them? We’re about to find out.
The 61st Venice Biennale runs 9 May through 22 November 2026
