This year’s Venice Biennale, the world’s most prestigious art exhibition, is a landmark.
For the first time in its history, it opens under a vision shaped by an African woman: the late Cameroonian curator Koyo Kouoh.
She died last year before her show could be installed, but her lineup puts artists from Africa and its diaspora at the heart of the conversation.
That is, if the political fight over Russia and Israel doesn’t steal the spotlight.
Hours into the press preview, the tensions simmering for weeks boiled over.
Protesters from the Russian feminist collective Pussy Riot, in pink balaclavas and brandishing banners, pushed through reporters and art-world insiders to scream anti-Putin slogans in front of the Russian pavilion, flanked by police, with the pro-Kremlin art team peering out from behind locked doors.
“It’s surprising to me that Europe still opens doors for Russian propaganda,” said Pussy Riot founding member Nadya Tolokonnikova. “It’s not about free speech, it’s not about being against censorship. If the Venice Biennale really cared about censorship, they would work with artists who are currently incarcerated” for opposing the invasion of Ukraine.
Tensions over admitting Russia
It was the latest protest in a fraught lead-up to this year’s Biennale.
The 61st edition opens to the public on Saturday, and for the first time ever, it will begin without a jury after all five jurors resigned last week.
Italian Culture Minister Alessandro Giuli had warned them he was sending inspectors to investigate their decision to withhold prizes from countries whose leaders face International Criminal Court charges of crimes against humanity: Russia, over Ukraine, and Israel, over Gaza.
The Biennale Foundation told the jurors they could be personally liable for damages in a lawsuit threatened by Israel’s pavilion artist.
The dispute began in March when Biennale president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, appointed by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s government, confirmed Russia would return to the event for the first time since its 2022 invasion of Ukraine. He insisted the exhibition is open to every country Italy recognizes, rejecting “any form of exclusion or censorship of culture and art.”
The pro-Ukraine Meloni was unhappy with the decision but said the Biennale is independent.
The European Commission said it would move to revoke a grant of two million euros ($3 million Cdn), citing a breach of European Union sanctions. And Ukraine imposed its own sanctions on five Russians connected to the pavilion.
The Russian show opened during previews this week but will close to the public for the duration of the Biennale — and be pulled from the official catalogue.
Gaza another flashpoint at exhibition
Without a jury, visitors will choose the winners of two “Visitors’ Lions” prizes: one for best participant in the main exhibition and the other for best national pavilion. The awards ceremony itself has been moved from opening day to the fall, and the fate of the main Golden Lion remains unclear.
Israel, the other country snubbed by the outgoing jury, has Giuli’s support. Its pavilion artist, Romanian-born sculptor Belu-Simion Fainaru, has threatened legal action, saying he opposes “discrimination, racism, and boycotts in all their forms.”
Gaza has triggered another flare-up. Health officials say more than 70,000 Palestinians have been killed, much of the enclave’s infrastructure has been destroyed and most of the population of about two million has been displaced by the Israeli military since October 2023, following attacks by the militant group Hamas on Israel that killed about 1,200 people.
South African artist Gabrielle Goliath’s video installation Elegy was pulled from her country’s pavilion by Culture Minister Gayton McKenzie, who called it too divisive and pro-Palestinian. Goliath’s legal challenge was dismissed. Her work will show in a Venice church while South Africa’s pavilion sits empty.
Yet in this context of political discord, Koyo Kouoh’s central show, called In Minor Keys, provides a remarkably intimate, grounded and generous display of artworks from across Africa and beyond.
Kouoh, who died of cancer at age 57 in May 2025, had spent her career building the institutional weight of African contemporary art. She founded the arts centre RAW Material Company in Dakar, Senegal, before heading Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town, Africa’s most important museum of contemporary art.
The vision she completed includes artworld superstars such as Kenyan American Wangechi Mutu, whose sculptures have shown outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and at Villa Borghese in Rome; Congolese photographer Sammy Baloji; and Senegalese ceramicist Seyni Awa Camara, who died in January at the age of 81.
African artists highlighted
Among the lesser-known artists Kouoh championed is Kenyan painter Kaloki Nyamai, who creates towering canvases in a Nairobi warehouse with 10-metre-high walls.
Nyamai’s background in documentary film shows in the fragmentary time lapses of his figures. He treats paint as sculpture, layering acrylic with sisal rope, photo transfers and yarn pulled from burnt rubber tires. The stitching, he said, is a kind of suturing — a way of tying back together what colonial history dismembered and what family history lost along the way.
On being part of a Biennale that puts African art at the centre, Nyamai said: “This is like the keys being found to a small door that is being opened. It’s a glimpse into how much great work there is in Africa, and there is so much, even just in Kenya.”
Nyamai said African artists are increasingly creating their own spaces through museums, residencies and artist-run institutions. Collectors, he notes, still come mostly from Nigeria, with its wealth and long collecting tradition, but even collecting is spreading throughout the continent.
Where Nyamai works on a monumental scale, others in Kouoh’s roster work intimately.
South African textile artist Billie Zangewa, who was born in Malawi but is based in Johannesburg, hand-stitches small, luscious silk collages of everyday moments: a mother and son gardening, a young woman sitting by a pool, a brother peeping out of his door for a morning greeting.
She sees her works as fitting Kouoh’s “minor keys” theme, a gentle chord in the music of the larger body of African work.
“We’re often hustling, focused on all the negative things in the world that make us stressed about our future,” Zangewa said. “So it’s great for people to view my work and think, ‘Oh, I don’t have to think about all those hard things right now.'”
Nigerian visual artist Marcia Kure, also in Kouoh’s lineup, has installed a series of Hair Jackets, shamanistic, high-fashion figures that look as if they could take flight.
The jackets are carved wood covered with hundreds of synthetic hair braids, an expression of her interest in how natural and industrial materials “co-produce” one another.
Kure, who was part of a show Kouoh curated in 2024, called this Biennale poignant and emotional.
“This is so important for us,” she said. “Being with other African artists on this platform, the Venice Biennale, is a remarkable feat.”
Kure said her hope is that Kouoh’s vision and care will give new generations the courage and permission to make art when resistance feels overwhelming.
