The Venice Biennale’s Record African Participation Comes With Caveats

There was a heaviness around the opening celebrations marking the 2026 Biennale, titled “In Minor Keys.” Compounding the psychological weight of so much global angst was the first anniversary of the sudden passing of Koyo Kouoh, the Cameroonian-Swiss curator who was the second African and sixth woman to spearhead the event.

There was no shortage of acknowledgments and tributes. Some appeared in the show itself, like Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons’ four-panel Anatomy of the Magnolia Tree for Koyo Kouoh and her performance in the Poetry Caravan (inspired by griots and Koyo’s poetry caravan from Dakar to Timbuktu in 1999). Offsite commemorations, like Derrick Adams’ mural of Kouoh, Heavy is the head that wears the crown, dotted the city. Heavy indeed is the burden of representation: visitors projected their expectations of an “African Biennale” onto what was, ultimately, a show that looked more broadly to indigeneity, the natural world, and dreaming as refuges for healing and hope.

The history of Africans in Venice is as fraught as it is long. As a hub for maritime travel and global trade, Black Africans appear in 11th-century Venetian art as proof of Byzantium’s geographic reach, especially in paintings that showcased Byzantine influences on diverse peoples. By the 15th-century, an influx of slaves led to increased depiction of Black subjects in Renaissance-era art, ranging from Biblical figures to contemporaneous gondoliers. Even today, the infamous Blackamoor statues remain available for purchase—assuming your home decor taste reflects a yearning for bygone eras of empire, or perhaps a desire to coordinate with your golden toilet.

The Biennale was established in 1895 as a platform for cultural expression by national(ist) participants, framed with language suggesting that such an event would cultivate universal culture and global cooperation. It’s hard to square that with the fact that the first inclusion of African artists wasn’t until 1922. That edition of the Biennale included 33 sculptures taken from ethnographic collections in Florence and Rome, casting the objects as ingenious but primitive. This debut, while significant, was paradoxical, since the anonymized objects came from colonial collections and their reception was limited to what European artists could extract from them (i.e., for how they might inspire the ‘genius’ forms of Euro-centric Modernism).

This 1922 exhibition concludes a timeline mounted in the Central Pavilion as part of this year’s main show: Sammy Baloji’s installation Collection and classification of Kongo objects in Italy 1450–1922. Baloji’s accompanying oversized sculptures are the result of scanning smaller figures and enhancing their forms with additional cubic elements that reference the minerals that continue to be extracted in Congo, pairing the forms of both cultural and natural exploitation that bridge colonial and neocolonial relationships.

In the intervening century, there has been enormous progress when it comes to the representation of African artists in Venice during the Biennale. No Black sub-Saharan artist was included in the main curated show until 1990, when curator Giovanni Carandente selected five artists (El Anatsui and Bruce Onobrakpeya of Nigeria; and Tapfuma Gutsa, Nicholas Mukomberanwa, and Henry Munyaradzi of Zimbabwe) who had been featured in the Studio Museum’s “Contemporary African Artists: Changing Tradition,” curated by Grace Stanislaus. By the turn of the millennium, an intentional refresh saw Harald Szeeman’s 1999 edition make a point of featuring younger artists, as well as more women. While it wasn’t as unusual for “dAPERTutto” to include South African artists, like William Kentridge, Tracey Rose, or Minnette Vari, the addition of artists from elsewhere on the continent, like Ghada Amer and Georges Adéagbo, was more exceptional—and the work was more conceptually challenging than the conservative aesthetic represented by the artists in the 1990 edition.

Soon, a short roster of the same dozen African artists began to be included over the next several editions, and El Anatsui would steal the spotlight in 2007 with Duasa II, making his bottlecap tapestries globally recognizable overnight. But the most significant representation of Black and African voices in the curated show remains Okwui Enwezor’s “All the World’s Futures” (2015)—incidentally where El Anatsui won the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement—followed by Kouoh’s show.

The real landmark showcases of art from the continent, however, have tended to be hosted as collateral events. In 1993, the now-defunct Museum for African Art organized “Fusion: West African Artists at the Venice Biennale” and published a catalog featuring interviews between the show’s living artists and American critic Thomas McEvilley. This show responded directly to the much-criticized exoticism of the Centre Pompidou’s 1989 “Magiciens de la terre,” an exhibition that claimed to put artists from the Global South (“peripheries”) in meaningful dialogue with Euro-American artists (“centers”). And as Szeeman mounted his 1999 Biennale, El Anatsui founded the Forum for African Arts, a foundation with the mission of establishing a more visible platform for contemporary African artists, as manifested through the visions and voices of African curators. Scholars Salah Hassan and Olu Oguibe would curate the forum’s first show, “Authentic/Ex-centric: Conceptualism in Contemporary African Art,” at a central Venetian venue in 2001. The exhibition was a watershed moment: The show launched the careers of a half dozen artists who would go on to be leading voices for African and Afro-diasporic art, including Yinka Shonibare, Berni Searle, Godfried Donkor, and Campos-Pons. The latter three are all included in Koyo’s “In Minor Keys.”

During an opening week program this past spring, on the show’s 25th anniversary, Hassan recounted the revolutionary quality of the artists in their show, noting with humor—and fatigue—how one European visitor walked through the entire exhibition then caught him at the front door, asking: “Excuse me, do you know where the show of African artists is?” Shonibare’s mannequins, clad in Afro-print spacesuits, hadn’t registered with some audiences because of the strength of their perception of African art as never more than stylized masks or drums and spears. The forum’s 2003 follow-up show, “Fault Lines: Contemporary African Art and Shifting Landscapes,” by Gilane Tawadros was equally groundbreaking for its sensitive curation and challenging of audiences’ reductive understanding of “African” aesthetics.

AT THE VENICE BIENNALE, the curated exhibition is only half the story—audiences also have to grapple with national pavilions, those scores of exhibitions curated by recognized government entities, often with nationalist flair. Following the massive success of the inaugural 1895 and 1899 editions of the Biennale, which welcomed 200,000 and 300,000 visitors respectively, the Central Pavilion became the nucleus for an array of national pavilions in the surrounding Giardini. But it was not until 1952 that Egypt became the first—and only—African nation with a permanent pavilion.

While not technically a pavilion, South Africa also had a national presence, exhibiting in the “Foreign Halls” (Sale straniere) from 1950 to 1968 and showing its first Black artists in 1966; it was subsequently excluded for its Apartheid policies until 1993. South Africa has maintained a pavilion in the Arsenale since 2011, though it was notably absent yet again this year when the government pulled its support for Gabrielle Goliath’s Elegy, a video installation featuring haunting laments for the loss of vulnerable people, including Palestinian poet Heba Abunada. Goliath quickly pivoted and showed the work in a church, which became a touchstone of this year’s Biennale, while the South African pavilion sat empty.

Beyond the early Egyptian and South African presentations, there was the short-lived African Pavilion, an initiative of Robert Storr’s 2007 edition, “Think with the Senses, Feel with the Mind.” In an attempt to foreground contemporary African art beyond the pieces selected for his show, he invited a jury of five experts to select a proposal for an African Pavilion to be situated in the Arsenale. The jury selected the collection of Congolese businessman Sindika Dokolo, impressed with his patronage. The decision was fraught (Why one pavilion for an entire continent? Doesn’t this reify harmful notions of Africa as a monolith?), especially given that the display included work by non-African/Afro-diasporic artists, including Andy Warhol, Miquel Barceló, and Alfredo Jaar. They displayed an African collection of contemporary art rather than a collection of contemporary African art.

While the initiative was thankfully not repeated, the last fifteen years have witnessed a proliferation of African nations mounting their pavilions throughout the city (no permanent pavilions have been added in the Giardini since South Korea in 1995, though Qatar is poised to change that), since the Arsenale is a compact space and real estate is at a premium, so they tend to find a palazzo elsewhere. But even with participation from 13 African nations, tying the record set in 2024—a record that would have been exceeded if South Africa or Uganda hadn’t pulled out at the last minute— chronic concerns plague the caliber of this representation.

Zimbabwe, for its part, consistently participates with quality work, typically by artists active in its capital, Harare. Its success is thanks in large part to curator Raphael Chikukwa of the National Art Gallery of Zimbabwe, a stalwart figure on the scene. Meanwhile, while Ghana and Nigeria had stellar pavilions in recent years, both were absent this year. Readers may recall the scandal that plagued the Kenya pavilions as Kenyan artists decried the takeover of their pavilion by Chinese and Italian artists in 2013 and 2015—though some did indeed live and work in Kenya. Let’s be clear: there are people of several races and ethnic backgrounds living in Kenya, some even of multiple-generation heritage. Are there meaningful ways to engage those complex, multicultural narratives and could they be selected to represent that nation at the Biennale? Of course. However, that’s not what happened for these Kenya pavilion exhibitions, where a majority of Chinese and Italian artists were exhibited without sufficient context to justify their inclusion.

Historically, the de facto format of most pavilions, African or otherwise, is a solo show by an artist whose work has some resonance with the host nation’s heritage. But not too reductively: an overly patriotic exhibition highlighting cliché tropes of national identity would be laughed off. However, a problematic trend (exemplified by Kenya) has emerged: an insidious usurping of African pavilions with large group shows of artists who have minimal connection to historical local heritage and/or who lack meaningful contribution to national culture in the present.

IT BRINGS ME no joy to reveal that the much-hyped presence of African national pavilions in 2026 also belies the insidious nature of the art market. First-time participations from Equatorial Guinea, Guinea, and Sierra Leone—as well as a second go-around for Tanzania—do little to serve the African artists active in those spaces, or even those who live abroad but have heritage from those nations. These pavilions are primarily exhibiting artists both from and active in Italy, China, or Spain. The catalog for Equatorial Guinea describes how “cultural intermingling” shows goodwill between nations, and Sierra Leone’s introductory text describes how their project “engage[s] in dialogue.” But whether the shared platform was requisite for these pavilions to receive European donor funding or the African ministers received a kickback to stamp the pavilion with their country’s name, none of it matches the format or messaging of the other national pavilions.

Outside of their own nation’s pavilions, Italian and Chinese artists are not prominently featured as curators or exhibitors for any other national pavilions outside the African subset. There is a long history, outlined above, of non-African actors continuously misshaping or even exhibiting on behalf of African spheres. Even Somalia’s debut pavilion had an Italian co-curator listed for the project, though thankfully only Somali artists were included. Yet even that was contentious with the Somali art community, since all three selected artists are currently living in the diaspora—symptomatic of tensions between locally-active artists versus those Afro-descent artists who may have dual citizenship and/or mixed-race heritage, operating from privileged cities and spaces. And beyond these challenges, the planned Uganda pavilion did not manifest; Cameroon’s location is listed incorrectly in all Biennale publications/maps; and the Seychelles ‘pavilion’ is a single sculpture tucked into a nook.

But lest we get stuck in the mire, I do want to affirm: there are many bright spots amid all this African participation, beyond the panoply of voices Koyo included in the main exhibitions.Senegal and Ethiopia have returned for a second edition (and both with African curators), offering a modest installation by Caroline Gueye, and a dazzling installation of paintings by Tegene Kunbi, respectively. (Incidentally, both artists were prize-winners at previous Dakar Biennales, still the go-to barometer for African and Afro-diasporic artists). And the Democratic Republic of the Congo had a thoughtful group show of nine artists, where even the architecture of the installation was intentionally curated into its environs, offering an example of what is possible with the right vision, team, and funding.

As discouraging as it can be to consider the chronic structural issues—namely, the imbalance of representation and the crushing market pressures—these factors only underscore the resilience of African curators and artists who’ve built the legacy that led to Koyo’s accomplishments with “In Minor Keys.” For nearly a century, from 1922 to 2026, African voices have helped define global contemporary art in Venice, even as they have too often faced a familiar dynamic of extraction—a system still asking what Africa can (or should) do for the art world, rather than what the art world might offer in return.