Lines Redrawn: African Pavilions and a Biennale in Transition and Disruption.
29 April 2026
Brendon and Suzette Bell-Roberts
The 61st Biennale di Arte Venezia opens this week with a curatorial vision that is both deeply political and sensorially expansive. Helmed by Koyo Kouoh (1967–2025), the late Cameroonian-born curator whose intellectual and institutional imprint reshaped the contours of contemporary African and diasporic art discourse, this edition unfolds as a resonant meditation on memory, resistance, and planetary belonging.
Kouoh’s posthumous curatorial framework, developed prior to her passing, centres on reorienting global narratives through the lens of the Global South. Her practice, long rooted in fostering critical infrastructures across Dakar, Cape Town, and beyond, finds a final and profound articulation in Venice, an exhibition that resists spectacle in favour of depth, foregrounding relational histories over singular authorship.
The Curated Exhibition: A Living Archive
The central exhibition, spanning the Giardini and Arsenale, reads as a living archive, layered, polyphonic, and insistently embodied. Kouoh’s approach dissolves rigid geographies, instead tracing diasporic circulations and shared epistemologies across continents.
The 111 invited participants of this exhibition, among them individual artists, collaborative duos, collectives, and artist-led organisations, hail from many geographies and regions.
Among them is a compelling assembly of African and diasporic practitioners whose works articulate complex engagements with identity, materiality, and historical rupture. These include:
Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons (Cuba), Berni Searle (South Africa), Nandipha Mnthambo (South Africa), Senzeni Marasela (South Africa), Kader Attia (France/Algeria), Billie Zangewa (Malawi/South Africa), Nolan Oswald Dennis (South Africa), Akinbode Akinbiyi (Nigeria/Germany), Sammy Baloji (Democratic Republic of Congo), Ranti Bam (Nigeria), Blacx Starlines KUMASI (Ghana), Seyni Awa Camara (Senegal), Nick Cave (United States), Godfried Donkor (Ghana/United Kingdom), Ayrson Heráclito (Brazil), Nicholas Hlobo (South Africa), Sohrab Hura (India), Alfredo Jaar (Chile), Mohammed Joha (Palestine), Bodys Isek Kingelez (Democratic Republic of Congo), Marcia Kure (Nigeria), Victoria-Idongesit Udondian (Nigeria), Annalee Davis (Barbados), Edouard Duval-Carrié (Haiti), G.A.S. Foundation (Nigeria), Adebunmi Gbadebo (United States), Werewere Liking (Cameroon/Ivory Coast), Georgina Maxim (Zimbabwe), Wangechi Mutu (Kenya/United States), Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute (Kenya), Eustáquio Neves (Brazil), Otobong Nkanga (Nigeria/Belgium), Kambui Olujimi (United States), Ebony G. Patterson (Jamaica), Thania Petersen (South Africa), Johannes Phokela (South Africa), RAW Material Company (Senegal), Issa Samb (Senegal), Amina Saoudi Aït Khay (Algeria), Mmakgabo Mmapula Helen Sebidi (South Africa), Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser (India/United Kingdom), Buhlebezwe Siwani (South Africa), Vera Tamari (Lebanon), Kemang Wa Lehulere (South Africa).
Across installations, textiles, film, sculpture, and performance, these artists collectively interrogate the residues of colonialism, the poetics of migration, and the urgencies of ecological and spiritual repair. The exhibition unfolds as a series of affective encounters, where ancestral memory and speculative futures co-exist in dynamic tension.
National Pavilions: Expanding the Cartography
Beyond the central exhibition, this year’s Biennale is marked by a pronounced presence of African and diasporic narratives across national pavilions, further underscoring Kouoh’s enduring influence.
The 2026 Venice Biennale unfolds against a backdrop of recalibration, one that is as much about the redistribution of visibility as it is about the reconfiguration of power. This year, the proliferation of first-time national pavilions from across the African continent marks a decisive shift in the exhibition’s geopolitical architecture. More than a dozen African nations are represented, many debuting for the first time, in what signals a moment that is both historic and deeply strategic.
For decades, the Biennale has functioned as a barometer of global cultural hierarchies, its national pavilion model reinforcing a cartography of influence rooted in colonial legacies and uneven access to resources. Participation has never been merely about presence; it has been about who has the means to sustain that presence, to return, to build continuity. Against this history, the 2026 edition feels distinctly charged, not only in its expanded representation but in the pressures placed upon the institution itself to reckon with the conditions under which that representation unfolds.
The Morocco Pavilion offers a layered exploration of craft, cosmology, and contemporary abstraction, while Zimbabwe’s presentation foregrounds intergenerational dialogue and land-based memory. Egypt returns with a historically grounded yet forward-looking installation, and Nigeria continues to assert its critical voice within the global arena.
The Democratic Republic of Congo brings a powerful engagement with urbanism and myth, while Brazil, bridging Afro-diasporic histories across the Atlantic, presents a nuanced meditation on race, ritual, and resistance.
Notably, several African nations are making their debut at this edition, including Equatorial Guinea, Sierra Leone, Somalia, and Guinea, with Morocco presenting its first official national pavilion. Elsewhere, the Bahamas, Cameroon, Cuba, Ethiopia, Haiti, Senegal, Uganda, and Tanzania contribute to a dispersed yet interconnected geography of practices. The United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia further extend this geography, while France and Brazil complicate these narratives through projects that engage with migration, identity, and representation.
The cluster of African debuts is not incidental. It reflects a broader, continent-wide investment in cultural infrastructure, from the expansion of museum ecosystems to the proliferation of biennales, residencies, and private foundations. Countries such as Benin, Ethiopia, Côte d’Ivoire, and Tanzania enter the Venetian stage with projects that are acutely aware of the weight of representation. Their pavilions do not simply introduce artists to an international audience; they articulate national and transnational narratives that resist simplification. What emerges is a complex field of positions, some anchored in historical recuperation, others in speculative futures, many navigating the porous terrain between local specificity and diasporic entanglement.
This expansion is underpinned by a convergence of forces. State-led cultural diplomacy plays a significant role, as governments increasingly recognise the soft power embedded in contemporary art. Alongside this, private patronage and independent curatorial initiatives have become critical in mobilising resources and expertise. The result is a layered ecology of support that enables participation, even as it exposes disparities between nations with established infrastructures and those still building theirs.
Yet the question of visibility remains fraught. To occupy a pavilion in Venice is to enter a system that has historically dictated the terms of recognition. The Biennale’s prestige is inseparable from its exclusions, and participation often requires negotiating institutional frameworks that can both amplify and constrain. This year, those tensions are not only implicit but increasingly visible, surfacing in debates that extend beyond representation into the ethical and political conditions of participation itself.
Several presentations confront this terrain directly. Rather than offering easily legible cultural signifiers, they foreground ambiguity, hybridity, and contradiction. Artists draw on archives disrupted by colonial extraction, reassemble fragments of memory, and engage with material practices that speak to both continuity and rupture. Others turn towards the speculative, imagining futures that exceed the limitations of the present, futures in which African epistemologies are not peripheral but central.
Importantly, the increased presence of African nations does not constitute a unified bloc. The continent’s diversity resists such framing, and the Biennale makes visible the multiplicity of positions that coexist within it. There are pavilions shaped by diasporic perspectives, others rooted in localised contexts, and still others that operate in the interstices between. This heterogeneity complicates any singular reading of African participation, insisting instead on a plurality of voices.
At the same time, the infrastructural realities underpinning these pavilions cannot be overlooked. The cost of participation remains prohibitive, and for many countries, sustaining a presence beyond a debut year presents significant challenges. The risk is that this moment of expansion could prove ephemeral, a surge of visibility that is difficult to maintain without long-term investment. In this sense, the 2026 Biennale is both a culmination and a test, a culmination of years of groundwork, and a test of whether these new presences can be consolidated into enduring platforms.
Curatorially, the Biennale itself gestures towards a more polyphonic understanding of contemporary practice, one that acknowledges the entangled histories and shared urgencies that define the present. However, the national pavilion structure continues to operate according to its own logic, one that often sits uneasily alongside more fluid, transnational approaches to art-making.
Institutional Fractures
Against this already charged backdrop, the Biennale has been further destabilised by an unprecedented institutional rupture. The Venice Biennale’s international jury, comprised of The jury is presided over by Solange Oliveira Farkas, the founder and artistic director of Associao Cultural Videobrasil, and features Zoe Butt, curator and founder of in-tangible institute and artistic director of deCentral, both in Chiang Mai; Elvira Dyangani Ose, curator and artistic director of the Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial; Marta Kuzma, curator and professor at the Yale School of Art; and Giovanna Zapperi, art historian, and professor at the University of Geneva, announced its collective resignation on 30 April, just eight days after issuing a statement outlining its intention to omit Russia and Israel from awards consideration. The Biennale Foundation has confirmed receipt of the jury’s decision.
The short, pointed notice, published via e-flux, arrives as tensions over Russia and Israel’s participation in the national pavilion exhibitions intensify. What began as a principled stance has rapidly escalated into a broader crisis, exposing the fragile boundaries between curatorial autonomy, institutional governance, and geopolitical accountability, tensions that have been building across the lead-up to this edition.
In its 22 April statement, the jury, appointed by Kouoh, asserted its “commitment to the defense of human rights,” declaring a collective decision to “refrain from considering those countries whose leaders are currently charged with crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court.”
At the time, a spokesperson for the Biennale Foundation stated that the jury’s position “represents a natural expression of the freedom and autonomy which La Biennale guarantees.” The subsequent resignation, however, suggests the limits of that autonomy, marking a decisive escalation at a moment when the Biennale is already negotiating profound structural and symbolic shifts.
A Final Gesture, A Continuing Legacy
What the 2026 Biennale ultimately makes clear is that the map is shifting. Not evenly, not without friction, but perceptibly. And within that shift lies an insistence, quiet, resolute, and increasingly impossible to ignore, that the future of contemporary art cannot be written without Africa at its centre.
The 61st Biennale arrives not only as a major international exhibition but as a poignant culmination of Koyo Kouoh’s curatorial philosophy. Her commitment to intellectual rigour, institutional care, and the centring of African and diasporic voices reverberates throughout.
The 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, In Minor Keys by Koyo Kouoh, will run from Saturday 9 May to Sunday 22 November 2026, with previews on 6, 7, and 8 May, across the Giardini and the Arsenale, as well as various locations throughout Venice. With the full support of Kouoh’s family, La Biennale di Venezia has committed to realising the exhibition exactly as she conceived it, preserving and disseminating the depth of her vision and the work she so rigorously pursued.
