In Memoriam
IN MEMORIAM
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 make and give food
We need to rest and restore
We need to breathe
We need the radicality of joy
The time has come.
Koyo Kouoh, November 2022
VENICE BIENNALE
61ST INTERNATIONAL ART EXHIBITION
IN MINOR KEYS
[Take a deep breath]
[Exhale]
[Drop your shoulders]
[Close your eyes]
This is an invitation to encounter these words in the immediate physical, meteorological, ambient, and karmic conditions in which they meet you. To shift to a slower gear and tune in to the frequencies of the minor keys. Because, though often lost in the anxious cacophony of the present chaos raging through the world, the music continues. The songs of those producing beauty in spite of tragedy, the tunes of the fugitives recovering from the ruins, the harmonies of those repairing wounds and worlds.
There is a reason, after all, that some people wish to colonize the moon, and others dance before it as an ancient friend.
James Baldwin, 19721James Baldwin, No Name in the Street (Nueva York: Dial Press, 1972).
The minor key, in music, alludes both to the structure of a song and to its emotional effects. It is a rich idea, so rich that it quickly overflows its technical definition and spills with metaphor. It summons moods, the blues, the call-and-response, the morna, the second line, the lament, the allegory, the whisper.
The minor keys refuse orchestral bombast and goose-step military marches and come alive in the quiet tones, the lower frequencies, the hums, the consolations of poetry, all portals of improvisation to the elsewhere and the otherwise. The minor keys ask for listening that calls on the emotions and sustains them in return.
The minor keys are also the small islands, worlds amid oceans with distinct and endlessly rich ecosystems, social lives that are articulated, for better and worse, within much larger political forms and ecological stakes. Here, the evocation of the key and the island extends to an archipelago of oases: gardens, courtyards, compounds, lofts, dance floors — the other worlds that artists make, the intimate and convivial universes that refresh and sustain even in terrible times; indeed, especially in terrible times.
Look at the creole garden, you put all species on such a little lick of land:
avocados, lemons, yams, sugarcanes… plus thirty or forty other species on this bit of
land that doesn’t go more than fifty feet up the side of the hill, they protect each other.
In the great Circle, everything is in everything else.
Édouard Glissant, 19932Édouard Glissant, Tout-monde (París: Gallimard, 1993), 208; translated by Eric Prieto, 2010.
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.
The 61st edition of the Biennale Arte is grounded in a deep belief in artists as the vital interpreters of the social and psychic condition and catalysts of new relations and possibilities.
The exhibition’s composition is formed by artistic practices that open portals, that refresh and nourish, that prompt relation and relationship, that advance concept and form through networks and schools — understood freely and informally.
The intended effect scrambles cohesion and dissonance in the manner of a free-jazz ensemble, or perhaps, at the scale of the Biennale Arte, a festival of ensembles with a common premise: that poetics liberate and people make beauty together.
Through, relation, sharing, and transcendence, the artists and practices that operate in this spirit, like jazz, across methods, scales, senses and forms, propose to visitors an exhibitional experience that is more sensory than didactic, renewing rather than exhausting, and fortifying for the work ahead.
Through a visual and meditative procession, the exhibition prompts all senses to interconnect and meander from one universe to the other, rendering visible the possibilities that reside in the in-between spaces and beyond the portals.
…there is no choice but to tune in like jazzmen to these imperative mutations.
The jazzman constantly meditates on the unpredictable, stands within it according to the laws of polyrhythm, and improvises breathtaking moments. We small-island Caribbeans are not ready, but we have this resource.
The change will have to be so profound that we will no doubt have to add to the knowledge of jazz, the old totemisms, animisms, analogisms, and other metaphysics too summarily discarded. These old-world poems are already precious scores.
Patrick Chamoiseau, 20233 Patrick Chamoiseau, ‘We Caribbeans are not ready but have the resources to adapt to unavoidable climate mutations,’ Le Monde, June 29 2023.
In this spirit, the international exhibition of the 61st Biennale Arte intends neither a litany of commentary on world events, nor an inattention or escape from compounding and continuous intersecting crises. Rather, it proposes a radical reconnection with art’s natural habitat and role in society: that is the emotional, the visual, the sensory, the affective, the subjective.
In Minor Keys are sequences of exhilarating journeys that address the sensate and the affective, inviting visitors to marvel, meditate, dream, revel, reflect, and commune in realms where time is not corporate property nor at the mercy of relentlessly accelerated productivity.
After all, it is clear by now that the enduring time of capital and empire maligned local, Indigenous and terrestrial knowledges as chimeric, and dismissed co-constitutive artistic practices as artisanal, intended for decoration or devotional rituals.
The ‘civilizing mission’ flattens all with condescending contempt, and in the contemporary era entire societies and ecologies are regarded as collateral damage in the headstrong pursuit of growth supported by ruthlessness and greed. In refusing the spectacle of horror, the time has come to listen to the minor keys, to tune in sotto voce to the whispers, to the lower frequencies; to find the oases, the islands, where the dignity of all living beings is safeguarded.
The exhibition posits that such radical shifts are taking place — indeed, have been underway all along — in the minor keys, and the artists, poets, performers, and filmmakers whom the exhibition will convene are grounded in their commitments to realizing them. Artists are channels to and between the minor keys and listening to, rather than speaking for them is at the core of the curatorial conceit.
The exhibition In Minor Keys stands as a collective score composed together with artists who have built universes of imagination. Artists who work at the boundaries of form, and whose practices can be thought of as intricate melodies to be heard both collectively and on their own terms. These are artists whose practices seamlessly bleed into society.
Artists who accommodate daily life as part of a logical and aesthetically consistent relation of parts. Artists who are exceedingly generous and hospitable to life.
In our myths, in our songs, that’s where the seeds are.
It is not possible to constantly hone on the crisis.
You have to have the love and you have to have the magic, that’s also life.
Toni Morrison, 19774Toni Morrison interviewed by John Callaway, WTTW, Chicago, 1977.
Koyo Kouoh – Biography
Koyo Kouoh was born in Duala (Cameroon) on 24 December 1967. She studied in Zurich, where her family settled when she was thirteen. Her parents encouraged her to study economics, and she worked in the financial sector for a time before turning to the cultural field, initially devoting herself to literature and cinema. In 1995, she travelled to Dakar to interview filmmaker Ousmane Sembène. She returned a year later to settle there permanently. «Returning to Cameroon seemed redundant to me» —she explains—. «Senegal was more cosmopolitan. I was also interested in Islam». Between 1998 and 2002, she coordinated the cultural programme at the Gorée Institute. From 2001 onwards, she was also guest curator of the African Photography Encounters in Bamako, directed by Simon Njami. In 2003, she collaborated with the Dakar Biennale.
In 2011, she founded RAW Material Company in Dakar, an art centre conceived as both an exhibition space and a place for thought and debate. She also curates the 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair in London. She was part of the curatorial team for Documenta 12 (2007) and Documenta 13 (2012). In 2010, she participated in Brussels as co-curator of the Géo-graphics exhibition. She is also associate curator of the Salon Urbain de Douala (SUD), an art festival held in Cameroon.
Throughout her career, she has organised numerous international exhibitions and written about contemporary African art. In 2019, she was appointed director of the Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town, considered the most important contemporary art museum in southern Africa. In July 2022, she stated in an interview with Jeune Afrique: «It is not up to us to deconstruct Euro-American prejudices about Africa». Her latest exhibition is the major retrospective When We See Us, presented at the Kunstmuseum in Basel and Bozar (Brussels). In 2024, she was appointed curator of The 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, becoming the first African woman to hold this position.
She died at the age of 57 in Basel (Switzerland) on 10 May 2025, one year before the biennale was held.