The Venice Biennale 2026
“Art is a space for connection, imagination, and sharing.” — Koyo Kouoh, curator of the 2026 Venice Biennale and head of Zeitz MOCAA
Venice has a way of making everything feel charged with meaning. With the light off the water, there is a sense that centuries of beauty are with you as you step forward into something entirely new. Nowhere does that feeling come alive more fully than during the Venice Biennale Arte, the world’s oldest and most prestigious international art exhibition. This year, the 61st edition is titled In Minor Keys and opened its doors to the public on May 9th, 2026. It runs through November 22nd.
A Vision Born from Quiet Strength
The 2026 exhibition was conceived by the late Koyo Kouoh, the Cameroonian-born curator and director of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa. Kouoh passed away in May 2025 just months into her tenure. The title she chose is at once musical and geographical, evoking what Kouoh described as “the quiet tones, the lower frequencies, the hums.” It also refernces small islands, intimate spaces, and the kinds of voices that often go unheard in the grand sweep of art history. Her curatorial team, working from her notes and finalized artist list, carried the project across the finish line in tribute to her remarkable vision.
It is a concept that asks us to slow down and to listen differently.
What to Expect at the 2026 Venice Biennale
The main exhibition unfolds across the Biennale’s signature venues, the Giardini and the Arsenale, with additional satellite events dispersed through Venice’s historic center and beyond. The sheer scale of it is staggering, and the variety is wonderful. The exhibition includes textile works, assemblage sculptures, video installations, site-specific interventions, and more. This edition features contributions from artists around the world, each responding in their own way to Kouoh’s call for a radical reconnection with art’s role in society. It is emotional, sensory, and deeply human.
Among the standouts drawing attention are Daniel Lind-Ramos, whose hulking sentinel figures assembled from objects recovered after hurricanes in his native Puerto Rico pulse with quiet spiritual power, and Rose Salane, whose coolly conceptual Panorama 94 traces the histories of rings found on New York public transit. Georgina Maxim’s textile shrine, embedded with fragments of books, and Sandra Knecht’s relocated Swiss apiary installed inside the Arsenale offer two very different registers of intimacy and memory. The breadth is remarkable.
The national pavilions are, as always, a world unto themselves. Sung Tieu’s transformation of the German Pavilion destabilizes the imposing fascist-era architecture with a mosaic façade drawn from her childhood housing project in East Germany. It is being widely celebrated. The Lithuanian Pavilion’s Eglė Budvytytė offers a hypnotic three-channel video installation of figures moving as if possessed by an eerie, incantatory soundtrack. And in one of the exhibition’s most poignant stories, South African artist Gabrielle Goliath staged her moving video work Elegy independently at the 17th-century Chiesa di Sant’Antonin, where the Baroque setting amplifies its lamentation of women lost to racial and gendered violence.
The Numbers Speak for Themselves
The enthusiasm for this edition is unmistakable. On opening day alone, approximately 10,000 visitors came through the Giardini and Arsenale. This is a 10% increase over the 2024 opening. During the four pre-opening preview days, nearly 28,000 attendees passed through, with over 3,700 journalists from around the world in attendance. Venice, as it always does during Biennale season, became the center of the art universe.
Plan Your Visit
The Biennale runs through November 22, 2026, giving you plenty of time to plan a trip. We always recommend allowing several full days, plus time to wander into the collateral exhibitions tucked into palaces and churches across the city. Check the official Biennale website for tickets, opening hours, and the full program of events.
In Minor Keys is an invitation to listen more carefully to art, to history, and to Venice itself.