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As Venice Biennale 2026 unfolds under the late Koyo Kouoh's theme, “In Minor Keys,” a record number of African pavilions are asserting their presence across the city.
Over the next six months, the city of Venice retracts and is replaced by a doppelgänger known as the Venice Biennale, which maps itself by its own spatial logics. The closer a country’s pavilion is to the main exhibition sites of Giardini and Arsenale, the greater the power of the State. The larger the palazzo (where the grandest collateral events are hosted), the more powerful the artist. Such cartographies of proximity and power are especially visible across fourteen African pavilions – the most ever – which are largely spread off-site, dotting the centre and edges of the city. They include Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, Guinea, Morocco, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe.
This year, Venice is activated under the title “In Minor Keys,” the theme selected by the beloved Cameroonian-Swiss curator Koyo Kuouh for the 61st Biennale Arte in a project ultimately stewarded by “Koyo’s Team,” the group of curators, researchers and writers who cultivated the seeds and flowerings of the exhibition after Kuouh’s passing in 2025. “[Koyo] always made it clear that we are at the centre wherever we are, and that we make our own centres,” Rory Tsapayi, one of the Biennale’s curators, told us.
“I am on a team of people whose lives and lineages span Lebanon, Senegal, Britain, Spain, France, Ireland, the US, and India, not to mention an extended team in South Africa, Switzerland and Japan; this is a team of many worlds and many centres. That's a sort of mandate or agenda, I suppose, to make an exhibition that's more attentive to life and lifeworlds than to specific geographies or identities. Moreover, there has always been a mandate to make an exhibition that feels like something, an exhibition experienced in a sensory and emotional register rather than a didactic or discursive one,” Tsapayi said.
The curatorial text for “In Minor Keys” opens with a meditation: “Take a deep breath. Exhale. Drop your shoulders. Close your eyes.” It’s a provocation that has clearly inspired many national pavilions of Africa and its diaspora to listen intimately and attune oneself to richer frequencies of the soul. Tanzania, in Venice for the second time, responds to Koyo’s call with “Minor Frequences: The Inner Life of a Nation,” featuring Tanzanian artists Tura Gyindo, Amani Abeid, Valerie Amani, and Lazaro Samuel.
A highlight is Tura Gyindo’s large-scale hung works constructed from loofah, a material she cultivates at her family farm back in Dar es Salaam. The exhibition was inaugurated with a rousing speech by Tanzanian curator Lorna Mashiba. “For many years, conversations surrounding contemporary African art have often centred around a few familiar narratives and geographies,” Mashiba said. “Tonight, Tanzania enters that conversation not as an observer, but as a contributor, offering its own visual language, sensitivities, memories and inner worlds.” She later told AD: “This pavilion is not only an exhibition but an act of presence. It is a statement that Tanzanian artists belong within the global contemporary discourse, not someday, but now.”
Another must-see is the Bahaman pavilion in Dorsoduro, which returns to Venice after a 13-year hiatus. Entitled “Another Man’s Yard…,” the exhibition is a powerful posthumous dialogue between John Beadle, who passed away in 2024, and Lavar Munroe.
Highlights include a half-sunken ship, pulled under by tentacles of braided rope by Beadle, and a masterpiece 11-panel mixed media painting by Munroe on the top floor. The potency of this lovely exhibition is a testament to the endurance of African craft, gesture, and ingenuity wherever the Black body lands – an impulse solidified in salty creole and local grit, even in Africa’s colonial estuaries. After all, not all African pavilions are from Africa. Look across the Atlantic, too.
This year, the South African pavilion stands empty – but her echoes reverberate loudly nearby. Gabrielle Goliath, who was set to represent South Africa until she was removed, presents a masterful exhibition off-site at the Church of Sant'Antonin. Entitled “Elegy,” the artwork involves a rotating cast of woman singers holding a single note for an hour across a 7-channel video installation. Without state funding, the exhibition will be up for just three months, but the new setting is to the artwork’s benefit. Staged in a 4th-century church, the improvised location adds new resonances, lifting each player’s voice to gospel heights. In her wall text, Goliath elaborates, “These poems surface an entanglement of hurts, from femicide in South Africa, to genocide in Namibia, and now, still, in Gaza.” It’s astounding that this one line got Goliath removed from representing her country.
Also read: A Syrian Pavilion for the Venice Biennale Mourns Palmyra’s Destroyed Funerary Towers
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Of course, how a country promotes or undermines artistic expression is aligned with the State’s own goals, be they touristic, propagandistic, or an exertion of soft power. It is essential, then, to consider what public face national pavilions hope to show and how their artists are selected and legitimised. Repressive states endeavour to appear contemporary. Patriarchal regimes put forth women artists. Bullies on the world stage just want you to look the other way. And some nation-states, though present, are silenced or sidelined altogether.
This has come to a head at the Somali pavilion, which critics allege features only diasporic Somalians, with no input from local arts organisations. But if you look closely enough at the artist list of many countries, similar issues become apparent. Often understood but rarely discussed is the difficulty of getting to Venice in the first place. In places where basic societal needs are unmet, art and culture become a luxury. And once you get to Venice, some countries must deal with unscrupulous landlords and gatekeepers who coerce pavilions to include outside artists and foreign curators – at the expense of featuring real artistic voices from the country, highlighting the struggles and sacrifices it takes for some just to be seen and heard at all.
Outside the international exhibition, pavilions, and collateral events, the biennale unfolds in digital and psychic spaces, too, like in the WhatsApp group “Black and Brown in Venice.” Originally founded in 2024 as a place to share information on exhibitions, parties, and other events, the group has since become an active global support network for art industry professionals from and of the majority world.
“Some of the most important cultural formations amongst Black and Brown communities happen outside official structures: in WhatsApp groups, dinners, side conversations, shared taxis, voice notes and late-night gatherings,” said Bolanle Tajudeen, the founder of Bolanle Contemporary and Black Blossoms School of Art & Culture, who started the group. “Those spaces often carry more honesty, strategy and care than the institutions themselves. [Our group] answered Koyo’s call in its own way because it created a space where people could hold both beauty and difficulty simultaneously. It is about joy, but also survival. About access, but also protection.”
This probably explains why my favourite pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2026 was Cameroon, who is participating at the Biennale for the first time. Artwork highlights include haunted sculptures by Beya Gille Gacha, palm and textile wall hangings from Bienvenue Fotso, and an ecstatic three-channel video from Jail Time, whose art practice involves hosting musical recording sessions with imprisoned people. Housed in a seemingly abandoned space, at the edges of Cannaregio off Fondamente Nove, the pavilion’s opening was the closest thing to a rave in Venice. The afterparty was open-to-all with no guestlist, offering up a rotating cast of DJs, including Vidou from Jail Time Records and musicians from Uganda’s revered Nyege Nyege festival. In these late hours, it was dialogue and questioning and so much dancing – sweaty and syncopated, bodies packed tightly like bouncing atoms, a gathering marked by that impregnable spiritual impulse that’s transmitted from a motherland across vast oceans in the polyrhythms that come out of the talking drum, through to today’s MPCs, Technics DJ decks and sound systems.
These were the moments where the vision of Koyo and Koyo’s Team met the body. It was then that I understood the potentiality of what happens when you convene some of the world’s greatest minds to feel together. A perfect moment. Until the cops shut it down.
