If you are thinking about booking one of our vacation rentals in Venice to plan a city break this autumn and you are an art-lover, then you’ll be happy to note that the Venice Biennale’s art exhibitions and events continue right up until the closing awards ceremony on the 22nd of November 2026, giving you plenty of time to check it out!
Opened back in May, the Biennale Arte 2026 is the 61st edition of the event and is titled, In Minor Keys, by Koyo Kouoh. Held at the Giardini, the Arsenale, and in a variety of other venues across Venice, it also celebrates the life, work, and message of Kouoh, who died prematurely in May 2025, before the exhibition could take place. With the full support of her family, La Biennale di Venezia decided to proceed with the event under the direction of a team put together by the curator herself including Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Hélène Pereira and Rasha Salti, Siddhartha Mitter, and Rory Tsapayi. As she had been nominated in 2024, the curator had already developed much of the project and had chosen artists and works, defined the theoretical framework, decided on the exhibition style and graphic identity of the event, and more.
Of the exhibition, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, President of La Biennale di Venezia, notes that, “The pages of In Minor Keys... offer a striking insight into her curatorial practice and spell out a crystal-clear notion of her own concept of an exhibition. Koyo presents us with this concept through the very idea of sowing seeds, and it is through her teachings that her team and La Biennale di Venezia now offer it to the world. It is an exhibition permeated with spirit, with a sacredness that puts the person, the human being, back at the heart of things, rediscovering the sense of being in the world by reacquiring a sense of proportion with respect to all earthly elements, and by looking to the sky once more. Koyo Kouoh’s journey is one that reappraises human relationships, starting from people’s own backyards. The little things, which are also great ones. The human dimension, the benchmark of everything, which a part of the world, yet one the most opulent and overdeveloped world – identified in the name ‘West’ – has long since lost sight of, misplaced. Thus, from the powerhouse of Africa, and from one of its leading voices, comes a whisper that leads us back to authenticity, acknowledging that the greatest happiness lies in the use of our own hands – a revelation that brings us back to the Earth, to our bodies and our senses. To a humility towards what is greater than us and what cannot be explained but merely intuited”.
110 artists from all over the world – from Dakar to Beirut, Paris to Nashville – were invited as participants, including individuals, duos, collectives, and artist-led organisations. Literary references run through the exhibition as sources of inspiration, with Beloved by Toni Morrison and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, as two major touchstones. Key artists on display include Issa Samb and Beverly Buchanan and major themes include processions (inspired by carnivals and Afro-Atlantic gatherings), schools of art, the plantation, colonial settlement, environmental disaster, rest, contemplation, and more. In addition to the works on display, a program of performances is key to the event, including a procession of poets in the Giardini della Biennale, inspired by Kouoh’s Poetry Caravan in 1999.
With plenty of opportunities still to engage in this year’s dynamic, celebratory, and revelatory (and highly controversial) Biennale Arte exhibition this autumn, it is an ideal time to book a holiday rental in Venice and to take in all that this romantic city of art and culture has to offer...