Introduction by Koyo Kouoh / by Koyo’s Team

In Minor Keys

[Take a deep breath]
[Exhale]
[Drop your shoulders]
[Close your eyes]

This is an invitation to encounter these words in the immediate physical, meteorological, ambient, and karmic conditions in which they meet you. To shift to a slower gear and tune in to the frequencies of the minor keys. Because, though often lost in the anxious cacophony of the present chaos raging through the world, the music continues. The songs of those producing beauty in spite of tragedy, the tunes of the fugitives recovering from the ruins, the harmonies of those repairing wounds and worlds.

There is a reason, after all, that some people wish to colonize the moon,
and others dance before it as an ancient friend.
— James Baldwin, 1972^[1]

The minor key, in music, alludes both to the structure of a song and to its emotional effects. It is a rich idea, so rich that it quickly overflows its technical definition and spills with metaphor. It summons moods, the blues, the call-and-response, the morna, the second line, the lament, the allegory, the whisper.

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, all portals of improvisation to the elsewhere and the otherwise. The minor keys ask for listening that calls on the emotions and sustains them in return.

The minor keys are also the small islands, worlds amid oceans with distinct and endlessly rich ecosystems, social lives that are articulated, for better and worse, within much larger political forms and ecological stakes. Here, the evocation of the key and the island extends to an archipelago of oases: gardens, courtyards, compounds, lofts, dance floors – the other worlds that artists make, the intimate and convivial universes that refresh and sustain even in terrible times; indeed, especially in terrible times.

Look at the creole garden, you put all species on such a little lick of land:
avocados, lemons, yams, sugarcanes…
plus thirty or forty other species on this bit of land that doesn’t go more than fifty feet
up the side of the hill, they protect each other.
In the great Circle, everything is in everything else.

— Édouard Glissant, 1993^[2]

These are the cues for an exhibition; an exhibition tuned in to the minor keys; an exhibition that invites listening to the persistent signals of earth and life, connecting to soul frequencies. If, in music, the minor keys are often associated with strangeness, melancholy and sorrow, here their joy, solace, hope, and transcendence manifest as well. In the minor keys, sound and sensation are grounding, they hold the cadences, melodies, and silences of resonant worlds that gather and create together a polyphonous assembly of art, convening and communing in convivial collectivity, beaming across the void of alienation and the crackle of conflict.

The 61st edition of the Biennale Arte is grounded in a deep belief in artists as the vital interpreters of the social and psychic condition and catalysts of new relations and possibilities.
The exhibition’s composition is formed by artistic practices that open portals, that refresh and nourish, that prompt relation and relationship, that advance concept and form through networks and schools – understood freely and informally. The intended effect scrambles cohesion and dissonance in the manner of a free-jazz ensemble, or perhaps, at the scale of the Biennale Arte, a festival of ensembles with a common premise: that poetics liberate and people make beauty together. Through, relation, sharing, and transcendence, the artists and practices that operate in this spirit, like jazz, across methods, scales, senses and forms, propose to visitors an exhibitional experience that is more sensory than didactic, renewing rather than exhausting, and fortifying for the work ahead.

Through a visual and meditative procession, the exhibition prompts all senses to interconnect and meander from one universe to the other, rendering visible the possibilities that reside in the in-between spaces and beyond the portals.

... there is no choice but to tune in like jazzmen to these imperative mutations. The jazzman
constantly meditates on the unpredictable, stands within it according to the laws of polyrhythm, and
improvises breathtaking moments. We small-island Caribbeans are not ready,
but we have this resource.
The change will have to be so profound that we will no doubt have to add to the knowledge of jazz,
the old totemisms, animisms, analogisms, and other metaphysics too summarily discarded.
These old-world poems are already precious scores.

— Patrick Chamoiseau, 2023^[3]

In this spirit, the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia intends neither a litany of commentary on world events, nor an inattention or escape from compounding and continuous intersecting crises. Rather, it proposes a radical reconnection with art’s natural habitat and role in society: that is the emotional, the visual, the sensory, the affective, the subjective.

In Minor Keys are sequences of exhilarating journeys that address the sensate and the affective, inviting visitors to marvel, meditate, dream, revel, reflect, and commune in realms where time is not corporate property nor at the mercy of relentlessly accelerated productivity.

After all, it is clear by now that the enduring time of capital and empire maligned local, Indigenous and terrestrial knowledges as chimeric, and dismissed co-constitutive artistic practices as artisanal, intended for decoration or devotional rituals.

The “civilising mission” flattens all with condescending contempt, and in the contemporary era entire societies and ecologies are regarded as collateral damage in the headstrong pursuit of growth supported by ruthlessness and greed. In refusing the spectacle of horror, the time has come to listen to the minor keys, to tune in sotto voce to the whispers, to the lower frequencies ; to find the oases, the islands, where the dignity of all living beings is safeguarded.

The exhibition posits that such radical shifts are taking place – indeed, have been underway all along – in the minor keys, and the artists, poets, performers, and filmmakers whom the exhibition will convene are grounded in their commitments to realising them. Artists are channels to and between the minor keys and listening to, rather than speaking for them is at the core of the curatorial conceit.

In Minor Keys stands as a collective score composed together with artists who have built universes of imagination. Artists who work at the boundaries of form, and whose practices can be thought of as intricate melodies to be heard both collectively and on their own terms. These are artists whose practices seamlessly bleed into society. Artists who accommodate daily life as part of a logical and aesthetically consistent relation of parts. Artists who are exceedingly generous and hospitable to life.

In our myths, in our songs, that’s where the seeds are. It is not possible to constantly hone on the crisis.
You have to have the love and you have to have the magic, that’s also life.
— Toni Morrison, 1977^[4]

Under the watch of a mango tree

Music came before the keys, and before music came poetry. Koyo was not the sort to memorise verse to recite in an assembly, but poetry was to her the guiding light of a curatorial gesture, the raw material for minting a title, and the fodder for structuring a conceit. Like griots, soothsayers, or mediums, poets see beyond eyesight, measure time beyond calendar conventions; they chiefly consider deeds, forgive failures, and believe in repair. Koyo shepherded us while crossing the globe, and after months of meeting online to discuss artists, practices and projects, she convened us in Dakar, at the base camp she established with grace and wit, namely, RAW Material Company.

We gathered in April, for an intense week of work, from morning to evening, without respite. Recalling that week is like remembering a rehearsal for a musical performance: she was our conductor, and while each of us arrived with a finely-tuned instrument, it took those few days for us to tune to one another. She composed as we improvised. The intensity of our collective focus was taxing, but it was also so exhilarating that we felt the license to dream, to fantasise, to soar.

We worked in the courtyard of RAW Material Company, under the sheltering shade of the straw roof. A prolific mango tree, its branches cambered from the weight of ripening fruit, watched. The first morning, as Koyo stepped into the courtyard, beaming with her inimitable smile, she picked up the mangoes that had fallen, washed them and bit into one gleefully. The second morning, emboldened by her delight, we imitated her. It seemed ungracious to refuse the tree’s offering. After that, our discussions were often interrupted by the thudding sound of mangoes falling into the courtyard. Or perhaps: We became attentive to the fruits falling and to the tree. We noted that fruit fell when the name of an artist was spoken. This happened often enough that when a name was spoken and no fruit fell, we paused, in expectation.

This anecdote will stay with us until we each leave to meet Koyo. Like all anecdotes, it points to the ineffable: that which escapes logic, language, systems, category; the dimension beyond reason in which we forge meaning from our lived experience. Opening oneself to the ineffable is tuning one’s senses to the minor keys.

That week in Dakar was the edifying week that defined the 61st International Art Exhibition. We mapped practices and projects, we identified resonances, affinities, synchronicities and conversations, we extracted motifs to structure the exhibition and pillars on which to draw it. Notions like enchantment, seeding, commoning, and generative practices that invite collectivities, emerged organically. On the last day of our convention, after reckoning that we had accomplished the most daunting milestone, Koyo assigned missions to each of us. The exhibition had found its manifest forms, it was no longer intention, nor abstraction. We could hear the music she so gracefully composed with us, under the generous guardianship of the mango tree.

Conceptual motifs of the exhibition

The 111 invited participants of this exhibition – among them, individual artists, collaborative duos, collectives, and artist-led organisations – hail from many geographies and regions. But rather than offer statistics, we underline Koyo’s interest in resonance, affinity, and imagining confluence where artists may have worked without direct acquaintance. In looking to artists working in Salvador, Dakar, San Juan, Beirut, Paris, or Nashville, for example, Koyo sought to envision how their ingenuity, breadth of material experimentation, and visionary ideas bear connections to other artists and movements in simultaneity. In this spirit, In Minor Keys expands upon Koyo’s relational geography of encounters with artists over her lifetime.

Koyo saw several conceptual motifs guiding the exhibition. These were not abstractly determined but rather sifted from a reservoir of art that acts deeply on the soul and mind – one of Koyo’s words for artists who worked in this way was galactic. They brought into focus a compositional method for the exhibition, which is not organised according to sections but rather in respect of undercurrent priorities. Among these are “Shrines” – in which prominence is given to the practices of two lodestar artists while exceeding a retrospective impulse; processional assemblies; enchantment in the face of cynicism about what art can do; spiritual and physical rest opened up by the oases – the keys or small islands of artists’ universes; and finally, Koyo’s commitment to artist-centred institution building or “Schools”, in which energy and resource is directed towards a social purpose. These strands leap from practice to practice, snaking an intergenerational path to build across the sites of In Minor Keys.

The motifs carried working titles with the understanding that they would develop in time, yet it wasn’t long before they reached the shores of our collaborators, reverberating with reference points that Koyo had shared. Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude were two such touchstones that Koyo offered, as inspiration and gift: texts that connect in their evocation of thresholds between lifeworlds and temporalities. In Beloved, Sethe’s decision to remain at 124 Bluestone Road – a house haunted by her child who died at Sethe’s hands, to spare her from a life of enslavement – sees the protagonist dare to give form to a history when “remembering seemed unwise”. Or consider the image, in One Hundred Years… of a trickle of blood that crosses domestic thresholds, turns corners, and moves across the parlour to arrive at the feet of the character Úrsula, carrying details of the adjacent yet distinct worlds of her neighbours. In both novels, magical realism deepens rather than distracts from an emotional register.

Wolff Architects, in Cape Town, were appointed by Koyo in early 2025 to realise the design and scenography for In Minor Keys. Following these literary cues, the team honed in on the transformative spatial power of the threshold as a portal to alternative comprehension and experiences, if we follow the invitation there. The intelligence of their design is its generosity to each artist’s universe and to the sensorial experience that can open up between constellations of practices. In the Central Pavilion at the Giardini and in the Arsenale, thresholds are marked via sweeping indigo banners that meet the rafters and graze the floor, calming the senses at the dénouement of one phase and signalling the opening of another.

Sala Chini, which leads visitors to the core of the Central Pavilion, announces the vocabulary of the Shrines, which Koyo envisaged as tributes to two incandescent worldmakers: Issa Samb (1945–2017) and Beverly Buchanan (1940–2015). An artist, poet, playwright, and co-founder of the revolutionary collective Laboratoire Agit’Art in Dakar, Samb was an enduring presence, mentor, and inspiration for Koyo, who honoured his practice and life philosophy in international projects. Buchanan’s artmaking, which Koyo encountered more recently and that moved her deeply, encompassed subtle and confronting readings of locations and communities through anti-monumental approaches to land art and public sculpture, which she often placed in sites of charged memory. Both artists recognised the significance of art as generative, surpassing mere objecthood, and evading conventional preservation. There was a fugitivity to their methods, confounding expectation through their multifarious bodies of work and operating in spaces that didn’t always embrace their abundant thought. Koyo described Samb’s practice as “certainly comprehensible, yet at the same time it is cryptic, evanescent, and elusive of simplistic or superficial interpretative frameworks”[5].

Prominent presentations of Buchanan and Samb will build across a “simultaneity of forms and actions” and extend to devoted sections in the In Minor Keys catalogue. The Shrines, with their associations of ecstatic visitation, testaments to love, and an absent presence (what the word saudade ventures close to) take on greater significance and responsibility following Koyo’s passing. 

The motif of procession draws on the choreographies of self-organised assemblies, moving across carnivals and similar gatherings across the Afro-Atlantic world through the practices of Big Chief Demond Melancon, Nick Cave, Alvaro Barrington, Daniel Lind-Ramos, and Ebony G. Patterson, among others, to seasonal or spiritual celebration, and mourning. These are embodied gatherings where joining the crowd, rather than observing, is requisite and implied. Their purpose may range from circadian celebration to rituals formed in diasporan centres and peripheries, or in communion between the living and the ancestors. Koyo desired for this exhibition to refuse solid walls where possible; the works were to stand in their power, rather than be brought into relief by their backdrop. The intention was to propose a way of journeying through the exhibition. With Wolff Architects, we extrapolated a processional vocabulary, which as a result imbues the artworks and their standing supports with animacy. Moving through the exhibition, visitors are invited to become part of this assembly.

Carnival also creates temporal disjuncture from an incumbent system – a stitch in time where relations of power are momentarily subverted and scrambled: the Carnivalesque. Drawn into the realm of art practice, this subversion of power agitates and lateralises art history, classical literature, and archetypes in the work of Johannes Phokela, Tammy Nguyen, Buhlebezwe Siwani, Sammy Baloji, and Godfried Donkor, among others. A similar disjuncture, productive and liberatory, is exercised on visual and material histories by artists including Bubu de la Madeleine, Yoshiko Shimada, Alan Phelan, Walid Raad, Sawangwongse Yawnghwe, Raed Yassin, Pio Abad, Avi Mograbi, Nina Katchadourian, Alice Maher & Rachel Fallon, Guadalupe Rosales, Carrie Schneider, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn, Sofía Gallisá Muriente, Natalia Lassalle-Morillo, Kaloki Nyamai, Marcia Kure, Thania Petersen, as well as the project arms ache avid aeon: Nancy Brooks Brody, Joy Episalla, Zoe Leonard, Carrie Yamaoka, fierce pussy, and Jo-ey Tang. Using methods that range from the transhistorical, speculative, irreverent, and rigorously exacting, they perform work that is less archival than counter-archival, in some cases capering with symbols, icons, and styles to amplify the antagonisms of dominance and pay tribute to unsung heroes and heroines.

The focus on Schools points to key ecosystems and networks built and sustained by artists, and which carry a clear sense of both localism and transnationalism, in generative symbiosis. These are represented by Denniston Hill (Southern Catskills, New York), blaxTARLINES KUMASI (Kumasi, Ghana), G.A.S. Foundation (Lagos/Ijebu Ode, Nigeria), lugar a dudas (Cali, Colombia), Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute (Nairobi, Kenya), and RAW Material Company (Dakar). What connects these homegrown institutions is an ethos to convene, share knowledge, to stay a while, to take apart, to sow seeds of intent, and build centres that proliferate without the intervention of commercial markets. As an edifying and influential grassroots ‘school’ builder, Koyo sought for the exhibition to make space for those hybrid havens that are a font of learning and creative transmission, and have played a pivotal role in shaping artists. In developing the exhibition, the nomenclature of Schools took hold for these organisations because, regardless of whether they provide diplomas or not, they are fundamental places of knowledge and regeneration. Their presentations – nestled within the wider constellation of participants – are inherently collaborative and will encompass the work of other artists, but the organising framework is the School’s ethos and defining methods.

The plantation, the settlement, the ruinous flood, the quarry, the fire – and the profound memory of geology that absorbs their violences – reach across the work of Dawn DeDeaux, Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Senzeni Marasela, Adebunmi Gbadebo, Berni Searle, Alfredo Jaar, Kemang Wa Lehulere, Kennedy Yanko, and Torkwase Dyson, among others. They are conjured in Annalee Davis’s prayer to the extinct Eskimo Curlew, last seen in her native Barbados; in the elements at risk of disappearance from Palestine’s natural realm that Vera Tamari iconicises for perennity; or in Michael Joo’s millennia-old “crinoids”, which incarnate lives mineralised under the weight of time, whispering secret stories. In these instances, artists employ radical pedagogies, geared to liberation, to engage with seismic events that refuse to settle or go quietly – and contend with their trace.

One such liberatory space revisited by artists in the exhibition is the creole garden – a site of enclosure but also self-reliance – and its counterpart, the courtyard. These spaces, where material and imaginative freedom arises dialectically amid constraint, have been the subject of rich analytic and poetic inquiry, notably in Black and Caribbean studies. Within the exhibition, they emerge as a guiding concept through both indoor and outdoor presentations, in the work of Ayrson Heráclito, Edouard Duval-Carrié, Wangechi Mutu, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons & Kamaal Malak, Werewere Liking, Florence Lazar, Otobong Nkanga, Sabian Baumann, Theo Eshetu, Carolina Caycedo, Carsten Höller, and Sandra Knecht. From Duval-Carrié’s Vodou Pantheon to Heráclito’s Juntó, many gardens are nurtured in the tradition of créolité. For the Martinican poet Monchoachi, the traditional lakou is considered as “the place of exchange… the place from which speech unfolds from different and keeps it gathered and in harmony”. In this spirit, the exhibition cultivates both experiential and metaphorical gardens as places of repose and reconnection. In the Giardini, Linda Goode Bryant’s Still Life sets the ground for a new farm, tended to by formerly incarcerated women throughout the duration of the exhibition. These instantiations of the creole garden orient us to the non-human living: the world of plants, waters, wind, animals, birds, and spirits which inhabit all spaces. If Wardha Shabbir’s paintings hail the lusciousness of flora, Hala Schoukair’s kinetic compositions draw inspiration from their microscopic make-up, while Uriel Orlow tracks their errancy across continents.

Can an exhibition on the scale of the International Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia offer a place to rest your body, as well as refuse the encyclopedic impulse to compulsively see and name? In the poem “The Unknown Hour”, Ben Okri writes: “We stayed in the garden long / Enough for celestial history / To ripen, the slow completion / of the cosmic task”. What ripens in the decision to stay a while in the presence of an artwork, to listen to the layering of voice, or to move with the projections that dance across a painting? Reminders to rest, slow down, and breathe deeply from the gut were vital to Koyo. The introduction of rest spaces to the exhibition will enable contemplative pause. But this call is internalised as well in a range of installations that invite reverie, solemnity, devotion, and wonder including those by Mohammed Z. Rahman, Khaled Sabsabi, Cauleen Smith, Kader Attia, Laurie Anderson, Pauline Oliveros, Manuel Mathieu, Tsai Ming-liang, Éric Baudelaire, Nicholas Hlobo, Dan Lie, Guadalupe Maravilla, and Himali Singh Soin & David Soin Tappeser. These projects invite slowing down through the wash of the multisensory. A song, a smell, a touch; a low meditative hum, a repeated physical motion; a fermata, or pause, in a written score; all these become prompts to tune into granular changes within and around us, and thus, as Oliveros put it, become “changed by the listening”.

Koyo was drawn to practices that manifested these motifs and alchemised them beyond thematisation in the mode that she often called enchantment. This expanse of feeling presents itself at shifting scales in the poetics of daily life. Thus, artists including Bodys Isek Kingelez, Akinbode Akinbiyi, Eustaquio Neves, Rose Salane, Mohammed Joha, Victoria-Idongesit Udondian, and Philip Aguirre y Otegui address rhythms and physical and metaphysical infrastructures of urban existence, while the slippage between quotidian, natural and cosmic scales manifests itself in the practice of artists including Billie Zangewa, Sohrab Hura, Georgina Maxim, Ranti Bam, Bonnie Devine, Mmakgabo Mmapula Helen Sebidi, rana elnemr, Amina Saoudi Aït Khay, Seyni Awa Camara, Tabita Rezaire, Léonard Pongo, Kambui Olujimi, Hagar Ophir, Celia Vásquez Yui, Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka, Leonilda González, and Rajni Perera & Marigold Santos.

As visitors move through In Minor Keys, they encounter a number of oases that evoke, for instance, Issa Samb’s former courtyard (La Cour) on Rue Jules Ferry in downtown Dakar; Marcel Duchamp’s last studio, where he worked for twenty years on the same installation; Werewere Liking’s Village Ki-Yi M'Bock in Abidjan; Yo-E Ryou’s Unlearning Space on Jeju Island; or the 1990s Zurich itinerant network of rogue parties organised under the name of Parfumerie (with Clarissa Herbst & Dominique Rust). These installations involve different media and thematics but together convoke the exhibition’s atmosphere. Koyo’s preoccupation is also her legacy: a deep concern and investment in artistic practices that are generative and generous, that invite collaboration, alchemise, and radiate back to the ways we are human together.

Performance and Invocation

The performances of In Minor Keys centre the body as a site of knowledge and memory, as well as a political vessel for collective resistance and healing. The call is to breathe and listen to the music that resides in the water, air, fire, and earth. Movement, sound, forms of wandering, and other poetic gestures will counter proscenium staging, instead directly connecting with the spaces of the exhibition, its visitors, and extending into the Giardini della Biennale and Giardino delle Vergini at the Arsenale.

A procession of poets will take place in the Giardini della Biennale, inspired by Koyo’s Poetry Caravan, a voyage she undertook with nine African poets from Dakar to Timbuktu in 1999. The performance honours her memory and opens a space for poetry and storytelling. It pays homage to the griots; those who seek the source; those who, in Koyo’s words, “have carried salt and gold on the backs of the camels, in the desert, and in the canoes, in fulfillment of the human dream to spread the wings of knowledge and power. They joined those who for centuries carried the stories of the people and their lives”.

En route from Dakar to Timbuktu, the poets recited and incanted to comprehend the terrain they traversed, to assuage fatigue and dispel danger. In the gardens of Venice, poets will assemble to form a chorus vested with the power of the word, the groundswell of recital and spiritual healing.

In all beginnings there are words. Words are bridges to the other. Words are a revelation to oneself.
Words hang in the air, move from tongues to ears au gré des vents, words penetrate the soil
as clandestine fertiliser, their sounds, rhythms and melodies perfuming the air.
––Koyo Kouoh, 2000^[6]

Applied Arts Pavilion, Arsenale

Gala Porras-Kim was selected by Kouoh for the Applied Arts Pavilion in the Arsenale, developed in collaboration with the Victoria and Albert Museum. Porras-Kim’s practice engages the complex relationships between cultural artefacts, museums, and the institutional conventions that classify and narrativise their place within history. The artist’s project will bring together drawings, sculptures, and video that reflect her ongoing engagement with frameworks of conservation and the processes by which different actors in the museum field, including conservators and curators, shape the meaning and function of cultural objects. In so doing, Porras-Kim’s investigations resonate with the exhibition’s looking aslant at the archive.

Forte Marghera, Mestre

At Forte Marghera, artists Temitayo Ogunbiyi, Uriel Orlow, and Fabrice Aragno extend the proposition of In Minor Keys to the mainland with projects that invite wandering, play, interaction, and relaxation. On the lawns, Ogunbiyi’s undulating sculpture offers visitors a place to lay down and reflect, while Orlow’s botanical maps look at La Biennale through the prism of plants. Inside the historic fort building, Aragno presents a radical reinterpretation of Jean-Luc Godard’s The Image Book, expanding the moving image into three dimensions.

Visual Identity

The visual identity for In Minor Keys, along with the catalogue design, have been created by Clarissa Herbst and Alex Sonderegger, following Koyo’s selection of Herbst, with whom she had a long connection dating to the Zurich alternative scene in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The design draws on komorebi, the Japanese term that designates the shifting and dappled effect of light filtered through leaves, to convey, for example, the relief found under the shade of a tree. Declined in shades of grey with subtle tonal gradients that balance evanescence and permanence, expressed on posters, signage, and moving textile banners, the design aims for clarity and impact while connoting natural and cosmic modes of perception.

Catalogue

It was important to Koyo that the catalogue for In Minor Keys stand not only as a robust contribution to the archive, but also as an exemplar of the collaborative, cross-disciplinary, and intuitive mode of making that she convened across formats and settings. In the catalogue, this has meant, first and foremost, centring artists, with four-page spreads that afford space for a substantive short essay (with a concise version in the short guide), as well as studio, sketch or process images that convey the ideas and worklife behind what is on view. Artists were invited to propose writers on their practice, resulting in an ensemble of over 100 authors, with texts that vary in approach and voice but benefit from closeness and insight.

The catalogue features eight essays that address thematics, composition, motifs or constellations of practices in the exhibition, as well as issues in the making of a major international biennial in the present time. These original essays have been contributed by Tandazani Dhlakama, Adrienne Edwards, Stefanie Hessler, Miguel A. López, Hélio Menezes, Wanda Nanibush, Oluremi C. Onabanjo, and Françoise Vergès. The book features, as well, five “Invocations” – original literary interventions that do not directly address the exhibition and its contents but are prompted by its moment, its theme, and its circumstances. These texts are authored by Ken Bugul, Teju Cole, Natalie Diaz, Frieda Ekotto, and Abdaljawad Omar.

A section of the book is devoted to the Schools: It features texts from each School as well as images and original texts that address their method and their exhibition presentation. Issa Samb and Beverly Buchanan receive extended sections as well, continuing the impulse of the Shrines to think with their practice and legacy beyond a retrospective model. For Samb, this includes a text by Simon Njami and a dialogue between Koyo and Samb; for Buchanan, interventions by Patricia Ekpo, Park McArthur and Jennifer Burris, and a conversation between Lucy Lippard and Lowery Stokes Sims; along with notes and drawings by each artist. Together, the catalogue – like the exhibition in its totality – operates in the manner that Koyo set forth and exemplified: rigorous yet plural, intuitive yet intentional, it is determinedly polyvocal yet entirely hers.