The Venice Biennale has long been a place where Africa appeared only intermittently. A presence that was rare, often mediated through the gaze of others, and at times reduced to a footnote in the grand narrative of contemporary art. For decades, African artists, critics, and curators were compelled to fight a battle that seemed both simple and fundamental: the battle to exist within the field of vision of the global art world. That struggle produced its own figures, controversies, and victories. From the pioneering exhibitions of the 1990s to the work of Okwui Enwezor, the first African curator to direct the Biennale in 2015, the question of visibility became one of the defining threads in the recent history of contemporary African art.
The edition conceived by Koyo Kouoh appears to mark the culmination of that trajectory. Never before, perhaps, have so many African and diasporic artists occupied such a prominent place within the International Exhibition. From Dakar to Nairobi, Lagos to Cape Town, via Accra, Marrakech, and the Black Atlantic, their works traverse the Giardini and the Arsenale as a presence that can no longer be ignored.
Yet as one moves through the exhibition, another question gradually emerges. A question more complex than that of representation. What becomes of African art when visibility ceases to be its primary horizon?
For being seen is not an end in itself. Once the doors have been opened, once dominant narratives have been challenged, once presence has been secured, what remains is the essential question: What new ideas are being produced? What forms are being invented? What narratives are being constructed? What institutions will endure?
Koyo Kouoh’s Biennale may ultimately be less significant for the number of African artists it brings together than for the question it compels us to ask. It invites us to look beyond visibility toward a new moment in which the challenge is no longer simply to occupy a place within the global narrative of art, but to participate in its redefinition.
The scenography of In Minor Keys, conceived by Koyo Kouoh and completed by her team following her untimely death, leaves no doubt about its core intention: to amplify voices from the Global South not through volume or spectacle, but through silence and restraint. A year before her death, in conversation with South African artist Kendell Geers, Kouoh said that the Biennale was a moment of carte blanche — and that she intended to use hers as a “carte noire.”
This logic is visible in the opening gestures at the two main venues. At the Giardini, Nigerian artist Otobong Nkanga has transformed the four monumental columns at the entrance with local bricks and ceramic pots from which climbing plants and aerial roots emerge. This vegetal and earthly intervention signals anchoring, slowness, and a form of resistance through growth rather than rupture.
Just inside the entrance hall, Senegalese artist Seyni Awa Camara’s terracotta figures deepen this register — female forms that speak of fertility, maternity and the continuity of life, as if to insist that any serious conversation must begin with an honest reckoning of where life originates.
At the Arsenale, the visitor is stopped in their tracks by a short poem. If I Must Die by Palestinian writer Refaat Alareer was composed just weeks before he and his family were killed in an Israeli airstrike in December 2023. Beyond the specific context of Gaza, the text reaches the universal: it counters the tragedy of war with the power of memory, storytelling, and stubborn hope even in the darkest circumstances.
A Personal Thread: Homage to Issa Samb
Above the poem hangs a painting by Issa Samb (1945-2017). Samb’s presence across this edition is not curatorial shorthand for African representation — it is something far more intimate. When Koyo Kouoh first traveled to Senegal in the mid-1990’s, filmmaker Sembène Ousmane turned her away, as she was looking to interview him. It was Issa Samb who opened his door. His courtyard in downtown Dakar — a perpetually evolving space where the man himself, his gestures, his objects and his surroundings formed a single living installation — became foundational to how she understood art’s relationship to daily life.
Samb was a radical in the truest sense. He was a co-founder of the Laboratoire Agit’Art in 1974, probably Africa’s first deliberately disruptive artist collective. Working at a moment when most Senegalese artists were state-sponsored and producing work aligned with Senghor’s official négritude, he insisted on creating for the present rather than performing an identity. In 2014, Kouoh gave him his first solo exhibition in London — From the Ethics of Acting to the Empire without Signs. In Venice, that relationship is honoured: footage of performances in Dakar, objects from his courtyard, paintings. A reminder, above everything else, of her core conviction: “people are more important than things.”
What the Work Says — and What It Cannot
Among the most striking experiences are Kaloki Nyamai’s monumental textile paintings, some nearly 12 metres high. Assembled from sewn fabrics, ropes, sisal fibres, and burnt tyre strings, they bring forth multiple Black bodies, often nude. The strength of these works lies in the tension between fragmentation and unity: from a distance they appear coherent and powerful; up close, they reveal complex networks of stitching, scars, and disparate materials.
In an interview with DakArtNews, the Kenyan artist explains that he seeks to reflect on the fractures running through contemporary societies and the possibilities of repair. While his discourse is compelling, visitors are first overwhelmed by the spectacular scale — sometimes at the risk of the deeper narratives of memory and filiation being relegated to the background.
A different, quieter power animates the work of Adebunmi Gbadebo. Her installation at the Giardini stages a dialogue between personal memory and collective history through the materials themselves — ceramic sculptures alongside handmade papers produced from cotton, soil taken from the plantation where her family was enslaved, Black hair…
There is no metaphor here. The materials do not stand in for memory: they are memory, made physical and transmissible, connecting Africa, the Middle Passage and their contemporary afterlives through the logic of matter rather than language.
Alternative Institutional Models
Beyond individual artists, Kouoh made a decision that may prove this edition’s most quietly radical: she invited institutions. Inside the Ghanaian collective BlaxTARLINES’ pavilion: a weaver is at work alongside books, videos and a map of its collaborations and affiliations over the years — not a finished manifesto but a living record of process. George Buma Ampratwum, a member of the collective that originated from the art department of KNUST in Kumasi, describes BlaxTARLINES as a “radical change in science”.
His colleague Adjo Daiki Apodey Kisser, an artist and lecturer at the same university, emphasises the deliberately unfinished and experimental nature of the project: “This is not to say it’s something we know. We’re testing it out. And maybe rather than choose things that are already done, it’s the attitude of testing it out and assuming that something’s going to work.”
The same commitment to transmission and rootedness runs through the other institutional presences in this edition. The Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute presents paintings by modernists trained at the legendary Makerere Art School — among them Sam Ntiro, Charles Mukiibi and Godfrey Banadda— highlighting the importance of local training, heritage transmission, and community anchoring.
And RAW Material Company, the Dakar-based centre Kouoh herself founded in 2008, contributes Ideal Seeds for Fertile Grounds in the Book Pavilion. Its Curator of Programs, Filly Gueye, offers an articulation of what’s at stake: “It’s a center for art, knowledge and society. And it’s a cycle — it nurtures each other (…) It’s about expanding the idea of how we define art: architecture, cuisine, transdisciplinary — and opening up our perspective in terms of how we engage with art, and who we engage it for.”
Alongside BlaxTarlines, RAW Material Company and the Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute, the exhibition also brought together the G.A.S. Foundation (Nigeria), Lugar a Dudas (Colombia) and Denniston Hill (USA) — a constellation of institutions that, taken together, proposed an alternative map of contemporary art’s centres of gravity.
The Long Struggle for Visibility
Nearly every corner of the African continent has some presence in this edition. This year, fourteen national pavilions from the continent line the Biennale’s geography — among them four first-time entries: Somalia, Sierra Leone, Equatorial Guinea and the Republic of Guinea. One more than the previous edition’s already historic thirteen.
The central exhibition tells a similar story. More than thirty African and diasporic artists contribute work to the international exhibition — a number without precedent. The last time African voices were present in comparable force was 2015, when Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor led All the World’s Futures. That this keeps happening under the same specific conditions — an African curator at the helm — is not a cause for celebration. It is a pattern worth examining with some care.
To understand why, it helps to go back.
The history of African art at Venice is long, and often conflictual. The first encounter dates back to the 13th edition, 1922 with the Exhibition of Black Sculpture, curated by Carlo Anti and Aldobrandino Mochi — the earliest instance in which African artefacts were approached on primarily artistic grounds, rather than as ethnographic specimens to be classified and studied.
Contemporary African art in Venice would not begin to assert itself until the late 1980s, catalysed by the seismic impact of Magiciens de la Terre in Paris in 1989. The following year, Grace Stanislaus of the Studio Museum of Harlem organised African Artists: Changing Traditions in Venice, including among others El Anatsui, Tapfuma Gutsa and Bruce Onobrakpeya. In 1993, the Biennale hosted Incroci del Sud: Affinities (Southern Crossings: Affinities), dedicated to South African artists, alongside Susan Vogel’s Fusion: West African Art at The Venice Biennale — which, even as some critics celebrated it as a step away from the exoticising gaze that had long defined Western presentations of African art, was swiftly and pointedly criticised by Okwui Enwezor as a Western projection onto African art.
The Forum for African Arts was established in 1999/2000 precisely to address the absence of African agency on these international stages. It produced for Venice Authentic/Ex-centric in 2001 and Fault Lines in 2003 — exhibitions that argued for African contemporary art on its own terms rather than as an anthropological curiosity.
In 2007, curator Robert Storr in a gesture as well-meaning as it was revealing, issued an open call for a single African pavilion, as though a continent of then fifty-three countries might be adequately represented by one room. Check List Luanda Pop, drawn from the private collection of Sindika Dokolo and curated by Simon Njami, drew criticism on multiple fronts: the legitimacy of a private collection as continental representative, and the unresolved questions of provenance that came with it.
The single African pavilion experiment was not repeated. It would take another eight years, and a different kind of appointment entirely, before the terms of the conversation changed. In 2015, for the first time, an African curator — Okwui Enwezor, one of the Forum’s founding members — was appointed to lead the Biennale.
In a conversation with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, recorded in the margins of the very Biennale he had curated, Enwezor was explicit about what had first driven him to curatorial practice: “For me as a curator, the question is what can I contribute that is meaningful to the advancement of the discipline. And I thought what was very much lacking within the discipline was the visibility of African and African American Artists.”
A record number of African and diasporic artists were shown that year. The goal had been reached. And that is precisely where the real difficulty begins.
The Post-Visibility Blues
There is something particular about the moment when a long-pursued goal is finally achieved. What tends to follow is not satisfaction but vertigo: the sudden exposure of all the questions that visibility was keeping at bay.
Enwezor was right in 2015. The visibility was missing. His argument was necessary, his contribution real and lasting. But we are in 2026, and visibility, as an answer, has run its course. We are living in the post-visibility blues.
The infrastructure no longer supports the old argument. The past two decades have produced an ecosystem of platforms dedicated to contemporary African art that simply did not exist before: FNB Joburg Art Fair, Investec Cape Town Art Fair, 1-54 in London, New York and Marrakech, Art X Lagos — launched by Tokini Peterside in 2016 as the first major international art fair on Nigerian soil — AKAA in Paris, marking its tenth edition in October 2025, and Africa Basel, which entered the market in June 2025 at the height of Art Basel week.
Add to this the continent’s own biennials — Dak’Art foremost among them — and the claim that African artists lack visibility becomes increasingly difficult to sustain.
The real questions now are harder. Not are we visible? but: what authority do we exercise? What is the substance of what we bring? Who controls the narratives? What new aesthetic territory are we claiming? How does the work move beyond the endless archaeology of historical wounds — however real those wounds remain? How does art become a proposition for what is yet to come?
The current Biennale offers one partial answer — and one uncomfortable revelation.
Expanding The Minors
There is a correlation that this edition makes visible despite itself: the outsized presence of African and diasporic artists in In Minor Keys is inseparable from the fact that Koyo Kouoh was African. As it was in 2015, with Enwezor. This should not surprise us, but it should give us pause.
This correlation undoubtedly enriches perspectives and embraces the multiplicity of ways of being in the world. Yet it also exposes the limits of what a single appointment can achieve. It would have been a different kind of achievement entirely if a curator from Iceland, Japan or Koweit had made the same choices.
As long as African representation at Venice depends on an African being in the room, it remains contingent, fragile, reversible. The proof is immediate: Viva Arte Viva, curated by Christine Macel in 2017 — the very edition that followed Enwezor’s record-breaking inclusion of African artists — featured a negligible number of African artists.
Which brings us to the question this year’s theme raises. In Minor Keys invites us to think carefully about what minor actually means. Several artists in the international exhibition are not, by any reasonable measure, marginal voices. Their presence in Venice is not a discovery — it is a confirmation.
Koyo Kouoh’s achievement cannot be measured solely by the number of African and diasporic artists present in Venice. It can also be measured by the possibility of finally setting aside the question that occupied several generations before her. Visibility was for a long time an urgency — a genuine one, hard-won and necessary. But it cannot remain an horizon indefinitely.
Out of the Blues: The Work That Remains
Visibility, ultimately, is a vanity metric. It counts bodies and headlines, but says little about depth, memory, or endurance. The real question is no longer whether African art is seen in Venice, but whether it is deeply rooted on the continent. For too long, the most significant exhibitions and discourses on contemporary African art have been shaped in Paris, London, New York, or Kassel.
No matter how many African artists appear in Venice, this structural imbalance cannot be resolved by international visibility alone. What matters is slower, less glamorous work: building robust institutions on African soil, securing genuine state commitment to cultural infrastructure, and understanding that art cannot thrive in conditions of economic precarity. The most dynamic art markets on the continent — Nigeria, South Africa, Morocco — are not coincidentally its most advanced economies. Culture and development do not run on parallel tracks. They are the same track.
Koyo Kouoh understood this deeply. RAW Material Company in Dakar was never conceived as a stepping stone to Venice. It was the work itself — built patiently, locally, for a community. Venice came later. The roots came first. This is the model worth scaling: not the claim “we are here too,” but an affirmative practice whose centre of gravity lies within the continent. When this shift occurs at scale, international visibility will no longer be a goal to chase, but a natural consequence.
The post-visibility blues ends not with louder demands for recognition, but with the quiet, difficult, and unglamorous labour of building something that knows its own value — with or without the approval of the Giardini.
It is Issa Samb himself who, in his 1989 text Criticism of Representation (in Antholology of Contemporary Fine Arts in Senegal), articulated this vision most clearly:
“If art is a kind of developer, it needs no justification and no arena for ‘speeches of evidence’. Art itself should be a place for revealing the diversity of truth; it allows us to feel the pulse of the presence whose rhythm is stronger than our lust for power.”
Read also
We Will Not Forget: How African Artists Confront the Post Colonial Legacy
The State of Contemporary African Art Today: Dr. Ibou Diop’s Critical Perspective
A Visit to Seyni Awa Camara in Her Home in Bignona, Casamance
Enough Praise, Not Enough Judgment: Dr. Célestin Koffi Yao Calls for Art to Be Put on Trial
Bridging Africa and The World Through Contemporary Art 
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