Beyond Visibility: A Method of Inquiry

26 Feb 2026

African Art in Venice Forum 2026

African Art Dialogues and Strauss & Co announce a special collaboration with the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art at the 2026 edition of the African Art in Venice Forum, hosted during the opening week of the 61st Venice Biennale. 

The opening breakfast, on Tuesday 5 May 2026, at Hotel Monaco & Grand Canal, Venice, will bring together artists, curators, scholars, collectors, and institutional representatives. This will be followed by the African Art in Venice Forum, a day of talks and moments of encounter and exchange. 

“The Forum recognises the lack of African country pavilion representation at the Biennale and therefore creates a space of coming-together for artists, curators and art enthusiasts from Africa and its diasporas dedicated to dialogue and shared inquiry,” says Kate Fellens, Head of International Business Development at Strauss & Co. 

The 2026 edition of the Forum is themed around Beyond Visibility: A Method of Inquiry. 

“African art is approached not as a closed or segmented field, but as a living and evolving one, shaped by overlapping temporalities, multiple cultural affiliations, and practices that often resist fixed categorisation,” explains Neri Torcello, founder and co-head of African Art in Venice Forum. 

The Forum approaches visibility as a scholarly framework, a point of departure rather than an endpoint. At a time when the international art world is increasingly centering narratives from across the globe, this method of inquiry asks what visibility makes possible and how listening to different perspectives enriches our understanding of African art history.

“The National Museum of African Art seeks to serve as an artist-centered platform for discussions about the meanings of ‘Africa’ and ‘art,’” said Kevin D. Dumouchelle, curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art. “As such, we could not be more delighted to support the African Art in Venice Forum, which has built a global reputation as a place in which conversations about African creative achievement occur under the eyes of the global art world.”

Working alongside exhibitions and curatorial research, the African Art in Venice Forum extends the conversations initiated within institutional contexts into a broader discourse. 

“In doing so, it affirms Beyond Visibility as a method of inquiry—one that values collaboration, sustained dialogue, and mutual listening as essential tools for engaging African art in the present,” concludes Neri Torcello.

Further details on the Forum’s program will be announced shortly. Details of previous Forum talks and speakers can be found on https://www.aavforum.com/