Image: Collection of commemorative pins dedicated to Koyo Kouoh. Photo: Rory Tsapayi
In an essay published by Il Giornale dell'Arte on 17 October 2026, Rory Tsapayi, the youngest member of the team that completed the 61st Venice Biennale Arte, offers a personal account of the year that followed the death of its artistic director, Koyo Kouoh. Tsapayi describes the text as a diary of grief and magic.
Kouoh was appointed artistic director in December 2024 and died unexpectedly on 10 May 2025. With her family's consent, her team went on to realise the exhibition she had conceived, "In Minor Keys", which brings together 110 artists and runs until 22 November. The group, which Tsapayi calls "Koyo's squad", is made up of the curatorial advisers Rasha Salti, Marie Helene Pereira and Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, the managing editor Siddhartha Mitter and Tsapayi, who served as assistant and had studied under Kouoh at Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town.
According to the essay, the artist list, the thematic strands and the title of the exhibition were settled during a week-long retreat in April 2025 at RAW Material Company in Dakar, the centre for art, knowledge and society that Kouoh founded in 2008.
Rather than a chronological report, the text moves through dreams, memories of work trips and shared meals, and small signs that Tsapayi associates with Kouoh's presence: a swift in Marseille, a weaver bird in Dakar, robins in Basel. A recurring thread is the red commemorative pins handed out at her funeral. Tsapayi describes wearing one, inscribed with Kouoh's dates and the words "People are more important than things", together with an indigo dress, to the exhibition's press conferences.
The essay also recalls the press conference for "In Minor Keys" on 6 May, at which Salti described the Biennale as one in which the team stayed with Kouoh's absence while searching for her presence.
The photograph accompanying the essay, taken by Tsapayi, shows a collection of the commemorative pins dedicated to Kouoh.
