The Biennale di Venezia 2026 reshapes curatorial priorities, bringing the focus back to current production after several editions primarily dedicated to reinterpreting art history.
How does the main exhibition’s setup change in 2026?
With Koyo Kouoh, the main exhibition, titled “In Minor Keys”, marks a clear reversal compared to the 2022 and 2024 editions. Curated posthumously by a team after her death in 2025, the exhibition brings together 111 artists from around the world, with a selection favoring mid-career contemporary figures and a more balanced geographical distribution.
While Adriano Pedrosa and Cecilia Alemani used the Biennale to expand the historical canon, bringing forgotten authors back to light, Kouoh’s project seems to indicate a new phase. The urgency to rewrite history gives way to a stronger focus on ongoing practices and already active protagonists on the scene.
What is the curatorial idea of “In Minor Keys”?
Kouoh had declared her intention to reject any “orchestral bombast” to focus on more subtle emotional registers, including music and poetry. The list of invitees includes 99 individual artists, five duos, one collective, and, unusually, six artist-led organizations, four of which are based in Africa.
Excluding the organizations, this year’s group consists of 64 women, 48 men, and two artists using neutral pronouns. This structure reflects a sensitivity to gender issues, but without making them the exclusive focus of the exhibition discourse.
How does Kouoh compare to the curators of recent editions?
Data on the age and birthplace of Kouoh’s artists have been compared with those of the main exhibitions curated by Adriano Pedrosa in 2024 (“Foreigners Everywhere”), Cecilia Alemani in 2022 (“The Milk of Dreams”), and Ralph Rugoff in 2019 (“May You Live in Interesting Times”). The analysis provides a surprising picture.
The 2026 exhibition is indeed closer, demographically, to Rugoff’s 2019 edition than to the two subsequent editions. Over 90% of the participants are still alive, with a prevalence of mid-career artists, many of whom are already established in regional contexts but seeking greater international recognition.
Moreover, the exhibition features a much smaller number of participants compared to the 331 artists selected by Pedrosa. This choice can be seen as an implicit response to criticisms of the 2024 edition, deemed too vast, excessively retrospective, and, according to some, inclined towards a tokenistic identity approach.
How is the geography of the artists redistributed?
As the first African woman appointed to lead the main exhibition, Kouoh has set up an almost equal distribution between artists born in Western countries and those originating from the so-called Global South. This balance closely mirrors the structure of Rugoff’s 2019 edition.
In 2022, with Alemani, about 75 percent of the artists came from Europe and North America, while in Pedrosa’s 2024 Biennale, three-quarters of the cast were born in the Global South. The new setup thus positions itself in an intermediate stance, seeking balanced representation without focusing on a single geographical block.
For this analysis, the place of birth was chosen over the place of residence to address the complexity of often nomadic artists’ biographies. However, this criterion does not capture the full nuance of personal journeys: for example, Alvaro Barrington is classified as an artist from the Latin America/Caribbean area because he was born in Venezuela, despite growing up between Grenada and New York and currently living in London.
What is the impact of organizations and collectives?
Artist-led organizations were excluded from the main data set, as they cannot be traced back to a single place of birth. Instead, the five individual members of the collective arms ache avid aeon were counted: four of them were born in New York, thus contributing to increasing the North American share.
Thanks to these presences, the percentage of artists born in North America rises to 25 percent in 2026, compared to just 3 percent recorded in 2024. It is a leap that reshapes the geographical axis of the Biennale compared to the recent past.
Particularly significant is the data concerning Black and Indigenous artists in the North American group: they represent about 43 percent of the participants from this area. Among them stands out the late American artist Beverly Buchanan, known for drawings and sculptures inspired by the vernacular architecture of Black communities in the Southern United States.
What key presences emerge in the North American context?
Buchanan is one of two figures to whom Kouoh dedicates a large installation conceived as a “shrine,” a tribute that critically reinterprets recent memory. Additionally, the exhibition includes works by activist and filmmaker Linda Goode Bryant, Serpent River Ojibwa artist Bonnie Devine, and Big Chief Demond Melancon, known in New Orleans for his elaborate Mardi Gras costumes.
These names help define a North American landscape where performative practices, political engagement, and community visual cultures take on significant weight. In contrast to some previous editions, the focus is not solely on central institutions but extends to traditions rooted in the territories.
Melancon’s position, embodying an imagery linked to the Mardi Gras Indians, shows how the Biennale opens its canon to expressive forms often considered marginal compared to conventional visual arts.
How is the African continent represented?
Former director of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town, Kouoh offers substantial visibility to artists born on the African continent. They constitute 20 percent of the total in 2026, compared to 10 percent in 2024 and 6 and 7 percent in the 2022 and 2019 editions.
Among the cited names are Cameroonian writer and performer Werewere Liking, Kenyan-American painter Wangechi Mutu, and Malawian textile artist Billie Zangewa. Their practices range from theater to sculpture, collage to experimental use of fabric, highlighting the variety of contemporary African research.
This numerical growth translates not only into greater statistical presence but also into a redefinition of the cultural center of the exhibition, more sensitive to the perspectives of the Global South.
What role do Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia play?
Artists originating from Latin America and the Caribbean are 17, accounting for 15 percent of the main cast. The share is lower than the approximately 33 percent of Pedrosa’s edition, in line with his experience leading the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, but still higher than the 9 percent in 2022 and 7 percent in 2019.
The percentage of artists born in East or Southeast Asia drops to 7 percent in 2026, compared to 20 percent in 2019. That said, the overall balance seems to aim more at complementarity between geographical areas than at a concentration on specific regions.
This shift highlights how the new curatorial framework, while not ignoring traditionally marginalized areas, is oriented towards a more calibrated mosaic between artistic centers and peripheries.
How does the Biennale Venezia 2026 prioritize the contemporary?
The 2026 exhibition represents a decisive shift from the recent use of the Biennale as a device for historical rebalancing. If in 2022 and 2024 the deceased occupied a central position, today only four artists have passed away since 2015, with one exception: Marcel Duchamp, who died in 1968.
Considered the father of conceptual art, Duchamp is also the only artist in the exhibition born in the 19th century. In stark contrast, 107 participants out of 111 are living, reaffirming the centrality of current production. This orientation brings Kouoh’s edition closer to Rugoff’s 2019 edition, where all 83 selected artists were alive.
Both Alemani and Pedrosa, on the other hand, had declared their intention to bring to light great deceased figures who remained on the margins of official narratives. In 2022, of the 213 artists invited by Alemani, 44 percent were already deceased; in 2024, the share rose to 64 percent, in line with a strong interest in Modernism and the presence of nearly 50 artists born in the 19th century.
Which generations dominate the scene in 2026?
A more in-depth analysis of ages reveals that 66 living artists were born between 1950 and 1980, that is, between the Boomer and Gen X generations. They represent over 60 percent of the living in the exhibition, compared to 25 percent in 2024 and 35 percent in 2022.
Again, the 2026 edition closely aligns with the 2019 model, when the share of artists born between 1950 and 1980 also reached 60 percent. The data indicates a clear orientation towards already seasoned figures, but still in the prime of their activity.
Among the most notable names of these generations are Nick Cave (born in 1959), Carsten Höller (1961), Alfredo Jaar (1965), and Kader Attia (1970). Alongside them are artists with solid regional careers, such as Godfried Donkor (Accra, 1964), Yoshiko Shimada (Tachikawa, 1959), Daniel Lind-Ramos (Puerto Rico, 1953), and Alice Maher (Tipperary, 1956), for whom the Biennale represents a global debut.
What space is left for the younger and older artists?
Authors born in the Eighties, who make up about a third of the 2026 lineup, maintain a stable presence in the last four editions. In contrast, the share of artists born in the Nineties drops from 16 percent in 2024 to just 4 percent in 2026.
Neither very young nor very old artists find much space in the main exhibition. Only 5 percent of the living were born before 1950; the oldest living artist is Mmakgabo Mmapula Helen Sebidi, born in 1943. By comparison, over 20 percent of the living artists selected by Pedrosa in 2024 were born in the Twenties and Thirties of the 20th century, including Linda Kohen (1923), who passed away in 2024.
The combination of data on age and the presence of deceased artists outlines two distinct curatorial lines: on one side, that of Kouoh and Rugoff, focused on the present; on the other, that of Pedrosa and Alemani, more engaged in a revision of the canon, albeit with different geographical accents.
What does this shift indicate for the future of the Biennale?
The alignment between the Venice Biennale 2026 and the 2019 edition suggests that the race to rewrite art history, a distinctive feature of the early Twenties, is no longer the absolute priority. In its place seems to emerge a more precise attention to balances between generations, origins, and degrees of recognition.
The main exhibition thus returns to embody the traditional objectives of the great lagoon event, still considered by many the most influential event dedicated to contemporary art worldwide. Without focusing exclusively on emerging talents or the “greats” of the past, “In Minor Keys” brings to the forefront a wide range of already mature artists, ready to engage with an increasingly fragmented and competitive international scene.
Overall, the 2026 edition redraws the parameters with which the Biennale can interpret its role: no longer just a tribunal of history, but a privileged observatory of a complex and rapidly changing present.
As expert in digital marketing, Amelia began working in the fintech sector in 2014 after writing her thesis on Bitcoin technology. Previously author for several international crypto-related magazines and CMO at Eidoo. She is now the co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Cryptonomist and Econique.
She is also a marketing teacher at Digital Coach in Milan and she published a book about NFTs for the Italian publishing house Mondadori, while she is also helping artists and company to entering in the sector. As advisor, Amelia is also involved in metaverse-related project such as The Nemesis and OVER.
