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The 61st Venice Biennale opens on 9 May with a phrase its late curator left behind. “The minor keys refuse orchestral bombast and goose-step military marches,” Koyo Kouoh wrote, “and come alive in the quiet tones, the lower frequencies, the hums, the consolations of poetry.” Kouoh died on 10 May 2025, almost exactly a year before the show she had been building would open. The Biennale is proceeding with her vision, supported by her family and a team of curatorial advisers — and In Minor Keys now reads as an instruction to look past the loudest pavilions toward the quieter ones. Across 100 national participations and 31 collateral events, this guide picks seven projects that take Kouoh’s instruction to the letter: four debut or first-time presentations, a stateless pavilion shaped by language, a Bulgarian “fictional research lab,” and a Finnish composition for wind and recorders.

Bulgaria — The Federation of Minor Practices

Sala Tiziano, Centro Culturale Don Orione Artigianelli

Few pavilions name the Biennale’s theme more directly. Curated by Martina Yordanova for commissioner Dessislava Dimova, Bulgaria’s pavilion stages itself as the headquarters of a fictional research lab dedicated to “post-sovereign, care-oriented political imagination.” Four artists — Gery Georgieva, Maria Nalbantova, Rayna Teneva, and Veneta Androva — contribute films on disinformation, identity, the entanglements of labour and violence, and ecological repair. The films sit inside an interactive, game-based environment that the curators describe as a “space of suspension.” The whole gesture is what minor practices look like in 2026: not the abandonment of politics, but politics rerouted through quieter forms — fiction, repair, suspension, play. Find the pavilion at bulgarianpavilionvenice.art.

Ecuador — Castello 1636/A

Tawna and Óscar Santillán, curated by Manuela Moscoso

Ecuador arrives in Venice with its first state-administered pavilion, commissioned by Stephanie García Albán of MAAC, with Manuela Moscoso (Executive Director of CARA, New York) curating works by the Tawna collective and Óscar Santillán. The pavilion rejects the souvenir-shop nationalism that often accompanies smaller national presentations — Tawna’s anti-colonial, process-based practice in particular insists on slowness and refusal — and treats the show as the opening chapter of a long-term institutional commitment, not a one-off appearance. We’ve published the full conversation with the curatorial team on what it actually takes to get a pavilion to Venice. The pavilion lives at pavilionofecuador.art.

El Salvador — Cartographies of the Displaced

Palazzo Mora · J. Oscar Molina, curated by Alejandra Cabezas

El Salvador’s first national pavilion is anchored by sculptor J. Oscar Molina’s Children of the World — figures cast in concrete, copper, and bronze that materialise displacement as something heavier than a single act of leaving. Curator Alejandra Cabezas and commissioner Astrid Bahamond, PhD frame migration as a “sustained condition,” and the work attends to both the global scale of movement and the internal dislocations specific to El Salvador: the children inside the country who never crossed a border but who carry displacement anyway. In a Biennale year that includes high-decibel pavilions on national identity, this is the version that takes the assignment quietly, in cast metal. See elsalvadorpavilion.art.

Yiddishland Pavilion — The Words That Fit My Mouth

Ghetto Vecchio, Cannaregio (May 7–31) · Arsenale Nord, Castello (July 16 – September 16)

The most editorially radical project in this guide isn’t a national pavilion at all. The Yiddishland Pavilion — initiated and curated by artist Yevgeniy Fiks and curator Maria Veits — describes itself as “a conceptual, independent, non-national pavilion” shaped by historical and contemporary Yiddish experiences. This is its third Biennale-adjacent iteration since 2022; this year, The Words That Fit My Mouth gathers Arndt Beck, Laila Abd Elrazaq, Liliana Farber, and Masha Shprayzer, with performative interventions by Eliana Pliskin Jacobs and a public installation, Nabatele, by Anna Kamyshan at Arsenale Nord. The premise: a country can be a language. The programme deals with what can be spoken, what resists articulation, and what remains “unfitting” between languages. In the architecture of an event built on national pavilions, a stateless pavilion is a quietly seditious form. Partners include Jewish Renaissance, the Montreal Jewish Museum, and Venezia Contemporanea. The full programme: yiddishlandpavilion.art.

Three more in minor keys

Three further pavilions extend the same frequency.

Democratic Republic of Congo — Simba Moto! Seize the fire! Saisis le feu!

Old Refectory, Scuola Grande di San Marco

The DRC’s first-ever pavilion is curated by Nadia Yala Kisukidi for commissioner Cindy Makiana and gathers nine artists, including Sammy Baloji and Léonard Pongo — both of whom also appear in Kouoh’s main exhibition — alongside Arlette Bashizi, Patrick Bongoy, Damso, Gosette Lubondo, Nelson Makengo, Aimé Mpané, and Géraldine Tobé. The trilingual title (Lingala, English, French) is itself a statement about what counts as Congolese voice.

Morocco — Asǝṭṭa

Arsenale · Amina Agueznay, curated by Meriem Berrada

Morocco’s first national pavilion takes its title from an Amazigh word for ritual weaving. Amina Agueznay’s monumental installation routes through the country’s artisanal practice and the slow transmission of craft as a form of knowledge — a vocabulary of inheritance rather than national identity. Berrada and Agueznay have collaborated since 2018, and the pavilion is built on those years rather than on the months between announcement and opening. It is craft as long-form thinking.

Finland — Aeolian Suite

Aalto Pavilion, Giardini · Jenna Sutela, curated by Stefanie Hessler

Closing the theme on its most literal note, Jenna Sutela’s Aeolian Suite turns the Aalto Pavilion — celebrating its 70th anniversary this year — into a windscape of recorders (alto, basset, contrabass), wind machines, meteorological data, and recordings of winds from Venice and Helsinki, performed in part by a children’s woodwind orchestra. A piece in actual minor keys, played quietly, by children and the weather.

One night only — Cicciolina’s Dream

6 May · in concert with Maja Malou Lyse’s Things to Come at the Danish Pavilion · presented by TRAUMA

On the first night of preview week, before the formal openings settle into their routine, Cicciolina’s Dream unfolds as a single companion event to Maja Malou Lyse’s Things to Come at the Danish Pavilion. The evening is presented by TRAUMA — the Berlin platform that closed its seven-year experimental venue in late 2024 and reopened the following year as a non-profit gGmbH, scaling its post-club practice into something institutional. Botanical scenography by Studio Linné, a live performance by Ilona Staller — Cicciolina returning to Venice to host and to perform a selection from her Italo-disco repertoire. Strictly invitation-only, the address withheld until 48 hours before. A minor key in pop register, sung by an icon of the major mode. Find the night at trauma.art.

Aperitivo and code — A MoAa Salon at Ca’ di Dio

7 May · a sunset salon and aperitivo at Ca’ di Dio · presented by MoAa, the Museum of Artificial Art

The next evening, the Los Angeles–based Museum of Artificial Art (MoAa) moves the conversation to the courtyard of Ca’ di Dio, on the Castello waterfront — a sunset salon and aperitivo opening with a preview of New Materialities, MoAa’s upcoming exhibition. The pairings — Joy Fennell, Dai, Maddy Minnis, Parallel.fbx and Zach Lieberman, working into textiles, ceramics, metal, and site-specific architecture — reactivate LACMA’s 1960s Art & Technology program for the AI present. Less a party than a working hypothesis: that computational practice still needs a physical body to argue with. Find the salon at moaa.art.

Coda

The seven pavilions above don’t share a region, a budget, or a relationship to the state. What they share is what Kouoh’s phrase asks for: a refusal of orchestral bombast in favour of something closer to a hum. Three are first-time pavilions, one isn’t a country at all, one is a literal score for wind, and all of them — at a Biennale that returns again and again to questions of who gets to speak — are pavilions that listen as much as they speak. Preview week begins 6 May; the exhibition runs through 22 November. Pack good shoes.

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