In Minor Keys and legacies held in common

“And quite frankly, I am tired, people are tired. We are all tired. The world is tired. Even art itself is tired. Perhaps the time has come. We need something else. We need to heal. We need to laugh. We need to be with beauty, and lots of it. We need to play, we need to be with poetry. We need to be with love again. We need to dance. We need to rest and restore. We need to breathe. We need the radicality of joy. The time has come.” – Koyo Kouoh

Words that ring particularly powerful these days as the art world prepares for the 61st Venice Biennale, conceived by the late Koyo Kouoh and overshadowed not only by her sudden passing but also by the sudden passing of Henrike Naumann, one of the artists chosen to show at the German Pavilion. Losses that lead to reflections about the legacies left behind by these two influential women, and about how Kouoh’s curatorial concept In Minor Keys might help us bring some groundedness into the cacophony.

Madame Koyo, as she was known to many in the art world, passed away on 10th May 2025. In fact, the opening days of the upcoming Venice Biennale coincide closely with its first anniversary: the preview begins on 6th May, with its public opening on 9th May 2026. It is the iteration Koyo Kouoh was meant to curate. She died at 57, shortly after a cancer diagnosis.

Koyo Kouoh, born in Cameroon, raised in Switzerland, and until her death executive director and chief curator of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town, was a figure who reshaped not only institutions but the relational fabric around them. I remember her inaugural speech at Zeitz MOCAA in June 2019, and the question she posed: What is a museum? She urged the (art) community to come together actively in the ongoing redefinition of itself. What struck me most – and what has surfaced in nearly every conversation around her since – is a style of leadership that redefined conventional ideas of leadership. Although she stood at the hierarchical top of a system, a chain of command, she continuously not only made space but held space for others. As Beata America, assistant curator at the museum, remembers: “Koyo was incredibly inclusive and democratic. No one’s voice was more important than another’s. From the curatorial assistant to the senior curator, she always wanted to hear what you had to say. And I think that’s also very indicative of her curatorial practice overall – everyone’s voice was important.”

Kouoh’s curatorial concept for this iteration of the Venice Biennale – In Minor Keys – proposes attention to the subtle registers in which minor keys operate: ”These are the cues for an exhibition; an exhibition tuned in to the minor keys; an exhibition that invites listening to the persistent signals of earth and life, connecting to soul frequencies. If, in music, the minor keys are often associated with strangeness, melancholy and sorrow, here their joy, solace, hope, and transcendence manifest as well. In the minor keys, sound and sensation are grounding, they hold the cadences, melodies, and silences of resonant worlds that gather and create together a polyphonous assembly of art, convening and communing in convivial collectivity, beaming across the void of alienation and the crackle of conflict”, reads an excerpt of her concept. Under the stewardship of her team: Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Hélène Pereira, Rasha Salti, Siddhartha Mitter, and Rory Tsapayi – the exhibition will be produced in her name, with her ideas rendered: a continuing legacy.

Another shock to the art world came on 14 February: the passing of Henrike Naumann after a too-late cancer diagnosis, the artist selected alongside Sung Tieu by curator Kathleen Reinhardt to represent Germany at the Biennale. Naumann’s work moves through political rupture using interiors and everyday aesthetics, tracing ideological and bureaucratic systems through immersive installations. She was 41. Also here, her work will be shown in her name, with her ideas as the statement by the artists’ partner Clemens Villinger reads: “The exhibition in Venice was and is being realised in the same way that her career began: as a Gemeinschaftswerk, a collaborative effort, guided by Henrike’s artistic vision.”

The aspect of the “lower frequencies”, as Kouoh noted in her curatorial concept, resonates with reflections on the practices of these two women. However distant their practices within a linear reading, what draws them together is these lower frequencies: an attention to spaces that hold multitude and contemplation, that hold the difficult-to-articulate, and the allowance to redefine what was thought unbreakable. In Naumann’s expansive installations, meticulous depictions of domestic interiors, of ideological symbols of local memory, of social identities rendered in a reality so sterile it did not look real – but it was real – the ideas of self connected to a specific design language, the connection to violent belief systems of Germany’s recent past and their warning signs embedded within, not to repeat this history. Very particular, yet unearthing universal allegories.

The lower frequencies that have been major in Kouoh’s practice – curatorial and as a leader – hold space for a community to come together, to imagine together, to design spaces and methodologies that – although often within the seemingly unchangeable rigid structures of art institutions – have persevered and, instead of that what destroys in order to change, gently, meticulously introduced an alternative to what was practiced.

Both Kouoh and Naumann died too soon. Although death is part of life, their work, their legacies feel robbed of so much more they could have created. This is not to compare two women of extraordinary practices – they stand in their respective power – but to think about legacy beyond the living: whom we entrust with ideas once their originators are gone; how not to fall into blind nostalgia, but to continue in their spirit. It is this moment of reckoning when things end too soon, too fast, without time to translate a living legacy in matter and material into a continuation. How this unfolds – in the main exhibition conceptualised by Kouoh, realised by her collaborators, or in Naumann’s art presented at the German Pavilion – we will experience at the Biennale and presumably see in many other conversations and encounters to come.

There is this moment I find in Henrike’s installations: environments so precise they suspend us between recognition and unease – the space for speculation. The work happens in that interval – between viewer and constructed world. Kouoh cultivated such intervals too, not through objects but through institutional space: the moment between people, between positions, between possibilities long enough for recognition, for softness, for joy to take place.

In Minor Keys, perhaps, we listen for how such joy continues – held, shared, and carried forward.

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Koyo Kouoh (1967–2025) was a Cameroonian-Swiss curator and cultural producer, recognised as a leading voice in African contemporary art. She was the Director and Chief Curator of Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town and the founder of RAW Material Company in Dakar. She was named curator of the 2026 Venice Biennale before her death.

Henrike Naumann (1984–2026) was a German installation artist. She became known for her furniture installations, often made from 1990s wall units. In her work, she explored the relationship between furniture and interior design and political and social issues.

The 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia – In Minor Keys by Koyo Kouoh – will run from 9 May to 22 November 2026 (preview 6, 7, 8 May) at the Giardini and the Arsenale venues, and in various locations around Venice.