In music theory, the minor key is not a diminished version of the major. It is a parallel system—one that organizes affect through different intervallic relations.

As Kouoh herself put it: “The world is tired. Art itself is tired. Maybe it’s time. We need something else—healing, laughter, being with beauty, play, poetry.”

What she proposes is not a theme, but a shift in register—a deliberate re-tuning. A structural turn toward affect, perception, and poetics, carrying with it a certain possibility—perhaps even a feminine—or maternal—energy.

From 111 artists in the central exhibition and 99 national pavilions, we isolate eight positions—nine names. These women work across different materials and problematics: power, memory, the body, systems, care, narrative, technology.

They are not aligned. Their practices hold internal tensions: structure versus body, system versus relation, the everyday versus the cosmic, archival silence versus sonic intrusion.

It is precisely this dissonance that binds them. Together, they circle a shared question:

In a world increasingly structured, accelerated, and classified, how do we learn again to perceive, to remember—and to make the future?

01 Power

Koyo Kouoh (1967–2025, Cameroon)

From the margins, at the center

Kouoh has no artworks in the exhibition, yet she is its most decisive author.

Born in Cameroon and raised in Geneva, she moved between continents, languages, and epistemologies. She did not enter the art world through academies, but through cultural organizing, publishing, and transnational networks—constructing a position outside inherited power structures.

In Dakar, she founded RAW Material Company—less an institution than a site of knowledge production, where exhibitions, lectures, and debates coexisted.

Later, as Executive Director of Zeitz MOCAA, she confronted a structural dilemma: when African art enters the global system, is it being seen—or reformatted?

Her answer was not resistance, but reconfiguration. No singular narrative, no unified “Africanity”—only multiplicity, contradiction, and coexistence.

In the Biennale’s 130-year history, Black curators have been rare. As a Black woman from sub-Saharan Africa in the chief curator position, she became the first to hold it. This is more than a symbolic appointment. It marks a structural shift.

Who defines the terms of contemporary art? Whose perspective becomes universal?

She did not sidestep power. She redistributed it.

Her curatorial method was one of field-building—placing voices in relation, allowing friction, refusing resolution.

In May 2025, she passed away.

The Biennale thus begins as both exhibition and elegy. Her thinking remains embedded—in texts, in spatial logic, in the artists gathered here.

02 Archive

Zoe Leonard (b. 1961, USA)

The everyday as historical ground

Zoe Leonard photographs storefronts, worn garments, street corners—what passes unnoticed.

Coming of age during the AIDS crisis in 1980s New York, she witnessed how history disappears when unrecorded. Her response was persistence: photographing, collecting, archiving over decades.

Repetition becomes method. The everyday becomes stratified time. Each image, a sediment layer.

As part of the collective “arms ache avid aeon,” her presence also questions authorship itself.

03 Perception

Laurie Anderson (b. 1947, USA)

Sound as a reorganization of perception

Laurie Anderson works across music, performance, and technology.

Her 1981 piece O Superman unexpectedly reached the UK charts, yet she remained outside the mainstream.

Using voice modulation, projection, and text, she transforms sound into spatial experience.

In her work, listening is never passive—it is restructuring.

04 System

Henrike Naumann (1984–2026, Germany) & Sung Tieu (b. 1987, Vietnam/Germany)

An Unfinished Collaboration, an Exhibition About Absence

Henrike Naumann reconstructs interiors shaped by ideology—rooms where history lingers in furniture, arrangement, and atmosphere.

Sung Tieu examines systems through documents, sound, and administrative language, exposing how structures govern life.

Together, they approached the same question from opposite directions: one through lived space, the other through institutional logic; one working through the visible everyday, the other through invisible mechanisms—one unsettling in its softness, the other suffocating in its calm.

In February 2026, Naumann passed away.

05 Body

Adebunmi Gbadebo (b. 1992, USA)

The body as evidence

Adebunmi Gbadebo works with human hair collected from Black communities.

Black women’s hair has historically been taken—shaved, hidden, or marked as uncivilized. Gbadebo’s choice is not aesthetic but evidentiary.

Hair becomes an archive—carrying memory, identity, and history erased from written records.

06 Care

Natalia Lassalle-Morillo (with Gloria Morillo, b. 1991, Puerto Rico)

Care as method

Natalia Lassalle-Morillo collaborates with her mother, treating care as a form of knowledge production.

What if care itself is a form of creation?

07 Narrative

Sofía Gallisá Muriente (b. 1986, Puerto Rico)

The image as a site of power

Sofía Gallisá Muriente works with archival footage—not to preserve it, but to question it.

Through fragmentation and interruption, she reveals that images do not merely record reality—they produce it.

08 Healing

Tabita Rezaire (b. 1989, born in France, working across the Caribbean and Africa)

Decolonizing the digital

Tabita Rezaire explores the entanglement of technology, colonial history, and spirituality.

Her work proposes alternative modes of connection—where digital systems and ancestral knowledge are renegotiated.

Conclusion

The minor key is not an ending—it is a frequency.

Across Venice, these nine women articulate different conditions of the present. Their practices form both the legacy of Koyo Kouoh and its continuation.

The music persists.
Not loud, not dominant—but continuous.

The minor key is not weakness.
It is another structure of feeling.

It does not demand to be heard.
But it cannot be ignored.