The most interesting Biennales to visit in 2026

61st Venice Biennale

In Minor Keys

Arsenale and Giardini,Venice, 9 May-22 November

The 61st Venice Biennale will be realised in full accordance with the vision of its curator, Koyo Kouoh, who died in May 2025. Born in Douala, Cameroon, Kouoh was the executive director of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (MoCAA) in Cape Town. She would have been the first African woman to curate the Biennale, still the world’s most prestigious art event (700,000 people attended the 2024 Biennale, curated by Adriano Pedrosa).

With the full support of Kouoh’s family, the management of the Venice Biennale decided to carry out her exhibition. Maria Cristiana Costanzo, the Biennale’s head of press, says Kouoh had worked intensively on the development of the curatorial project, defining its theoretical framework, selecting artists and works, appointing catalogue contributors, determining the exhibition’s graphic identity and spatial design, and engaging directly with the invited participants. “Everything you will see is the fruit of her work,” Costanzo says.

The show will be completed by Kouoh’s core team in strict accordance with the plan she defined; her collaborators include Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, a London-based art historian; Marie Hélène Pereira, a Berlin-based curator from Dakar; and the Berlin-based writer and curator Rasha Salti.

Kouoh had called the Biennale “the centre of gravity for art for over a century” and outlined her vision in a curatorial text, saying that the exhibition proposes a radical reconnection with art’s natural habitat and role in society. “The minor key, in music, alludes both to the structure of a song and to its emotional effects … 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,” she added.

25th Sydney Biennale

Rememory

Various venues including White Bay Power Station, Sydney, 14 March-14 June

Hoor Al Qasimi, the president and director of the Sharjah Art Foundation, will take the reins in Sydney. She has pledged to explore the multifaceted cultures and perspectives of the city, work with local artists and communities, and bring new voices. The theme, inspired by an essay by Toni Morrison, will be “a means of revisiting, reconstructing and reclaiming histories that have been erased or repressed”, says a curatorial statement. Artists will include Sydney-born Dennis Golding, Berlin-based Kapwani Kiwanga and Carmen Glynn-Braun, a First Nations artist from the Kaytetye, Anmatyerr and Arrernte nations.

16th Gwangju Biennale

Various venues, Gwangju, September-November

Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen, the artistic director of the 16th Gwangju Biennale, says his vision for the South Korean event is centred on “the transformative power of art”. A project statement adds that he aims to “foreground collective artistic practices and solidarities that respond to the intersecting crises of our time, from climate change and unpredictable pandemics to democratic backsliding”. Ho, who represented Singapore at Venice Biennale in 2011, says his practice also underpins the biennial.