In Minor Keys, Africa Speaks at Full Volume

The 2026 Venice Biennale is, on paper, the most African edition in the exhibition's 131-year history. But what does that actually mean — and who does it serve?

Venice, Giardini — opening week, 61st Biennale Arte | Image: Courtesy Art Report Africa

Africa indeed speaks at volume at the 61st Venice Biennale. Thirteen African national pavilions. Four of them — Guinea, Equatorial Guinea, Sierra Leone, Somalia — debuting on this stage for the first time. Anyone who has spent serious time tracking the slow, grinding machinery of how African art gets legitimised globally will understand why this number lands the way it does. It is not small. It is also not enough on its own. But it is real, and it is here.

13

AFRICAN NATIONAL

4

DEBUT AFRICAN PAVILIONS

99

TOTAL NATIONAL

The other fact that structures everything at this Biennale — and I mean everything— is that Koyo Kouoh is not here to see it. The Cameroonian-Swiss curator, former director of Zeitz MOCAA, the first African woman appointed to lead the Venice Biennale in its 131-year history, died in May 2025. The exhibition she built, In Minor Keys, was carried to completion by her team: Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Hélène Pereira, Rasha Salti, Siddhartha Mitter, and Rory Tsapayi. You feel her presence in every room that gets it right. You feel her absence in every room that almost does.

In Minor Keys. It is four words that do the work of a manifesto. Kouoh's curatorial argument was straightforward: slow down & pay attention to what lives at the margins. Don't mistake spectacle for substance. In music, a minor key is not a lesser key — it carries a different weight, one that asks more of the listener. Apply that logic to the politics of who gets included, collected, shown, theorised, and the implications become uncomfortable quickly.

Because what has historically been treated as minor in the art world's accounting? African artists. Artists from the Global South. Work that doesn't fit Western acquisition logic. Work that doesn't translate easily into fair-booth shorthand. Kouoh knew this. She spent her career building infrastructure against it — the Raw Material Company in Dakar, the exhibitions at documenta, the vision she brought to Zeitz MOCAA — long before anyone outside West Africa was paying attention. In Minor Keys is a worldview, expressed over a lifetime, arriving posthumously in the most European art venue on earth.

Venice, Arsenale — opening week, 61st Biennale Arte | Image: Courtesy Art Report Africa

The pavilions worth your time — and your scrutiny

Not every one of the thirteen pavilions arrives with equal institutional support or curatorial rigour, and pretending otherwise would be a disservice. Here are some that welcomed an audience...

Democratic Republic of Congo | Simba Moto! Seize the Fire! Saisis le feu!

Curated by philosopher and scholar Nadia Yala Kisukidi, the DRC pavilion at the Antico Refettorio of the Scuola Grande di San Marco brings together nine artists including Sammy Baloji, Gosette Lubondo, and Nelson Makengo. The Pavilion stages Congolese contemporary practice inside urgent conversations about material memory and political imagination — the kind that doesn't let you forget that "contemporary" in Kinshasa means something categorically different from "contemporary" in Basel. Kisukidi is one of the sharpest curatorial minds working on the continent right now, and this commission shows it.

Democratic Republic of Congo— opening week, 61st Biennale Arte | Image: Courtesy Art Report Africa

Morocco | Asəṭṭa

Morocco has secured a slot in the Arsenale itself — rare for an African pavilion, and significant. The solo presentation by Amina Agueznay, curated by Meriem Berrada, works in woven material and sculptural form. Agueznay's practice pulls from craft knowledge without romanticising it: she treats the loom as a political instrument, the textile as a record. In a Biennale themed around subtlety and attentiveness, she may be the most precisely calibrated artist in the entire African contingent.

Cameroon | NZƏṄDA

Curated by Beya Gille Gacha and bringing together an ensemble of artists spanning performance, sound, and installation, Cameroon's pavilion at Palazzo Canal is loose, alive, and deliberately unresolved. It also carries an extra weight this year: Kouoh was Cameroonian. Her absence is felt in the room whether the work names it or not.

Ethiopia | Shapes of Silence

A solo presentation by Tegene Kunbi at Palazzo Bollani. Kunbi's canvases work in thick, textured pigment — they feel geological, like cross-sections of compressed time. In a building of such overwhelming architectural presence, the decision to give a single artist the whole space was a risk. It pays off.

Ethiopian Pavilion— opening week, 61st Biennale Arte | Image: Courtesy Art Report Africa

Senegal | « WURUS » — What the Earth Provides Us With

Exhibited by Caroline Gueye at Palazzo Navagero, the Senegal pavilion grounds itself in land, material, and ecological sustenance. There is something refreshing about a pavilion that refuses the anxiety of innovation — that instead asks what the earth gives, what has always been enough.

What Koyo Kouoh built, and what it demands of us

I keep returning to the Poetry Caravan. In 1999, Koyo Kouoh undertook a journey from Dakar to Timbuktu with nine African poets. That journey has been restaged at this Biennale as a poetic procession through the Giardini — a tribute to her legacy, her team writes. It is an act of love and an act of mourning at the same time.

What Kouoh understood is that the work of building a serious infrastructure for African art is slow, cumulative, relational work. The Raw Material Company in Dakar. The exhibitions she built at documenta. The thinking she brought to Zeitz MOCAA. The theme she chose for Venice: In Minor Keys. All of it pointed in the same direction — toward an art world that does not require African artists to perform their Africanness for Western consumption, that has space for complexity, contradiction, opacity, and refusal.

Venice 2026 is the most African Biennale in history. That matters enormously. But history is also asking a harder question: what do we build after the flags come down and the boats go back across the lagoon?

The answer, I think, begins at home. In Lagos. In Dakar. In Accra and Kinshasa and Addis. In the galleries, the collections, the art schools, the journals, the critical infrastructure that makes it possible for an artist to develop a practice over ten years without depending on a single international fair to validate their existence. Venice is the room where Africa announced itself. What comes next is the question that will define the decade.

Sunshine Alaibe is a Lagos-based writer and critic covering African contemporary art.