Though the past few editions of the Venice Biennale have focused on rewriting art history with the inclusion of many overlooked historical artists, the 2026 edition suggests a shift back to the present.
Koyo Kouoh’s “In Minor Keys,” realized posthumously after her death in 2025 by a team of curators, brings together 111 artists from around the world. Analysis of the lineup shows a clear pivot toward contemporary, mid-career figures and a rebalanced global spread, hinting that the urgency to expand the canon may be giving way to a renewed focus on the now.
Kouoh’s stated aim for “In Minor Keys” is to refuse “orchestral bombast,” highlighting instead the subtler emotional frequencies made possible by the arts, including music and poetry. The artist list breaks down into 99 individuals, five artist duos, one collective, and, unusually, six artist-led organizations, of which four are based in Africa. Excluding the organizations, this year’s cohort is made up of 64 women, 48 men, and two artists who use they/them pronouns.
Data on the age and birthplace of artists in Kouoh’s exhibition was compared with that of her recent predecessors: Adriano Pedrosa, who curated “Foreigners Everywhere” in 2024, Cecilia Alemani, curator of 2022’s “The Milk of Dreams,” and Ralph Rugoff, who curated “May You Live In Interesting Times” in 2019.
Koyo Kouoh. Photo: © Mirjam Kluka.
The standout finding is that, demographically, Kouoh’s artist list has more in common with Rugoff’s 2019 exhibition than with the two intervening editions. While Alemani and Pedrosa both sought to expand the historical canon by foregrounding artists who have long been overlooked because they were women or from the Global South, Kouoh shifts the focus back to contemporary practice. With more than 90 percent of participants still living, the exhibition emphasizes a mix of established and under-recognized mid-career figures with strong regional profiles who are poised for broader international visibility.
Featuring significantly fewer artists than Pedrosa’s 331, this approach may also be read as a response to critiques of the previous edition, including that it was too expansive and overly retrospective, and that its focus on identity felt tokenistic.
A detailed analysis of the data offers further insight into what to expect from “In Minor Keys.”
Visitors enter the Venice Biennale’s Central Pavilion during the 59th International Art Exhibition (Biennale Arte) on April 20, 2022 in Venice, Italy. Photo: Stefano Mazzola/ Getty Images.
The Global Picture
As the first African woman to curate the Venice Biennale, Kouoh’s appointment broke new ground. The data shows that she has struck a roughly 50/50 balance between artists born in the West and those born in the Global South, a distribution that most closely resembles Rugoff’s exhibition in 2019. By contrast, Alemani’s 2022 exhibition had included a much larger share of artists born in Europe and North America, around 75 percent, while three quarters of the artists in Pedrosa’s edition were born in the Global South.
This snapshot of the artists’ geographical spread has been calculated based on where they were born, rather than where they live, an approach that addresses the complexity of classifying itinerant artists but fails to capture plenty of nuance. For example, Alvaro Barrington, who was born in Venezuela, grew up in Grenada and New York, and now lives in London, is classified as an artist from Latin American and the Caribbean for the purposes of this analysis.
Artist-led organizations have been removed from the dataset because they are not individuals with a birthplace. However, the five individual members of collective arms ache avid aeon, of which four were born in New York, have been included, helping to bolster the presence of artists from North America, which has risen to 25 percent in 2026, from just 3 percent in 2024.
Notably, Black and Indigenous artists account for roughly 43 percent of all North American artists this year. The late American artist Beverly Buchanan, who is best known for drawings and sculptures that explore the vernacular architecture used by Black communities in the American South, is one of two artists that Kouoh has chosen to honor with a prominent, extended display described as a “shrine.” The exhibition also includes works by activist and filmmaker Linda Goode Bryant, Serpent River Ojibwa installation and performance artist Bonnie Devine, and Big Chief Demond Melancon, a New Orleans-based artist known for his elaborate Mardi Gras suits.
Artist Demond Melancon poses for a portrait in his Jahdefender Mardi Gras Indians suit on April 26, 2022 in New Orleans, Louisiana. Photo: Joshua Lott/ The Washington Post via Getty Images.
Kouoh, who helmed the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town before her death, has also unsurprising shone a light on African-born artists. They make up 20 percent of the artists included this year, up from 10 percent in 2024 and just 6 percent and 7 percent in 2022 and 2019, respectively. Some notable names include the Cameroonian writer and performer Werewere Liking, Kenyan-American painter Wangechi Mutu, and Malawian textile artist Billie Zangewa.
Seventeen of the artists—or 15 percent—in this year’s main exhibition hail from Latin America and the Caribbean. That’s down from around 33 percent in Pedrosa’s edition, which reflected his area of expertise as the director of Brazil’s São Paulo Museum of Art. Still, the share of Latin American and Caribbean artists this year is still higher than the 2022 edition (9 percent) and 2019 edition (7 percent). Meanwhile, the proportion of artists born in East or South East Asia has fallen to 7 percent this year, compared to 20 percent in 2019.
Contemporary Comeback
Kouoh’s exhibition marks a clear break with the recent trend toward using the Biennale’s main exhibition to redress historical imbalances. Whereas deceased artists had a prominent presence in both the 2022 and 2024 exhibitions, 107, or more than 90 percent, of the exhibition’s artists this year are still alive. Of the few late artists included, all have died recently, since 2015, with the exception of Marcel Duchamp, who died in 1968. Considered the father of conceptual art, he is the only artist included in the exhibition that was born in the 19th century. Kouoh’s embrace of the contemporary aligns most closely with that of Rugoff in 2019, when all 83 selected artists were still living.
By contrast, both Alemani and Pedrosa, in 2022 and 2024, made it part of their mission to spotlight the late greats who they believed had been unfairly overlooked. Of the 213 artists included in Alemani’s 2022 exhibition, 44 percent were deceased; that figure increased to 64 percent in Pedrosa’s show, which reflected a pronounced engagement with Modernism, given that nearly 50 artists were born in the 19th century. (The 2024 dataset did not include some 40 living artists who exhibited in 2024 as part of curator Marco Scotini’s Disobedience Archive, since the information provided about these participants was incomplete.)
Looking more closely at the ages of living artists in this year’s exhibition, 66 were born between 1950 and 1980, which roughly encompasses members of the Boomer and Gen X generations. They account for over 60 percent of the living artists on view, up from just 25 percent in 2024 and 35 percent in 2022. Once again, however, this distribution aligns closely with that of Rugoff’s in 2019, when the artists born between 1950 and 1980 was also 60 percent.
The prevalence of these Gen X and Boomer artists this year can be partly accounted for by a healthy presence of already well-established contemporary stars, including Nick Cave (b. 1959), Carsten Höller (b. 1961), Alfredo Jaar (b. 1965), and Kader Attia (b. 1970). Other artists from these generations have achieved substantial regional success over several decades, such as Godfried Donkor, born in Accra, Ghana in 1964; Yoshiko Shimada, born in Tachikawa, Japan in 1959; Daniel Lind-Ramos, born in Puerto Rico in 1953; and Alice Maher, born in Tipperary, Ireland in 1956. The Biennale marks their global debut.
Artists born in the 1980s, accounting for around a third of the 2026 cohort, have enjoyed consistently strong representation across all four main exhibitions. Meanwhile, inclusion of artists born in the 1990s has dropped off from 16 percent in 2024 to just 4 percent in 2026.
Puerto Rican artist Daniel Lind-Ramos poses with his assemblage titled Wardrobe of Conscience (2013) at the VIP preview of the 2018 PRIZM Art Fair in the Dupont Building on December 3, 2018 in Miami, Florida. Photo: Sean Drakes/ Getty Images.
Neither very young or elderly artists are well-represented in the main exhibition this year. Just 5 percent of Kouoh’s living artists were born before 1950, with the oldest living artist being Mmakgabo Mmapula Helen Sebidi, who was born in 1943. By contrast, over 20 percent of Pedrosa’s living artists were born in the 1920s and 1930s, including his oldest living artist Linda Kohen, who was born in 1923 and died earlier this year.
Combining the two previous charts provides an even clearer impression of these differences. The inclusion of deceased artists further evinces two distinct approaches to the main exhibition that have been taken in recent years: that of Kouoh and Rugoff and that of Pedrosa and Alemani (albeit with a different geographical focus). This alignment of the 2026 exhibition with that of 2019 may suggest that the rush to reassess the art historical canon that defined the early 2020s is no longer a guiding priority for curators.
Kouoh’s exhibition marks a return to the traditional aims of the Venice Biennale’s coveted main exhibition, which is still widely considered to be the world’s most prestigious contemporary art event. While not predominantly a platform for young, still-emerging artists, or for historical greats, “In Minor Keys” promises to introduce us to a wide array of established names who are ready for their moment on the global stage.
