Koyo Kouoh, the celebrated Cameroonian-born curator behind a number of the most important exhibitions of African modern artwork in current many years, has died unexpectedly on the age of 57.
Kouoh’s loss of life comes simply months after being appointed curator of the 2026 Venice Biennale—making her the second African-born curator to steer the storied exhibition, following Okwui Enwezor’s groundbreaking version in 2015.
The Venice Biennale introduced her passing on Saturday, describing her as a determine of “ardour, mental rigor, and imaginative and prescient.” The theme and title of her exhibition, which she had been growing since her appointment in December 2024, have been set to be unveiled in Venice in lower than two weeks.
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Kouoh was extensively admired for her dedication to increasing the worldwide narrative of latest artwork past the the US and Europe, and specifically for her concentrate on African artwork. Since 2019, she had been government director and chief curator of the Zeitz Museum of Modern African Artwork (Zeitz MOCAA) in Cape City, South Africa—an establishment that she helped form right into a essential platform for artists from throughout the continent and its diaspora.
She helped the establishment achieve worldwide consideration with reveals equivalent to 2022’s “When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Portray,” which has been extensively considered the defining present on its topic. Three years on, the present continues to be touring. Having journeyed far past South Africa, it may at the moment be seen on the Bozar arts heart in Brussels.
Kouoh was additionally dedicated to fostering artwork scenes inside Africa, most notably inside Senegal. In 2008, she based RAW Materials Firm in Dakar, an impartial artwork heart that’s now thought-about one of many prime artwork areas inside West Africa.
“I wished to essentially mirror on artwork, on inventive observe, and to contribute to the understanding of inventive observe as its personal system of thought and as a mechanism for collaborating in visible tradition, society, politics,” she told Artforum in 2016, describing her option to open RAW Materials Firm. “I wished to think about it as a method for proposing, speculating, investigating, exploring, experimenting. As a curator, I’m eager about essential inventive practices and the way they play out in society, notably societies like ours. I consider that context defines just about all the pieces that we do.”
She was acutely attentive to the ways in which prevailing narratives for African artwork have been outlined—and of who has outlined them. In her Artforum interview, Kouoh described herself as a part of a “second era” of African curators that rebelled in opposition to what she described as “advocacy curating” seen within the West. Although she praised the work finished by Okwui Enwezor, Olu Oguibe, and others within the US and Europe, she wished to create reveals of African artwork for African folks.
“For me,” she mentioned, “working in Dakar, you will need to have interaction with the concepts and points that concern our area right here first—to mirror on them and analysis them, write about them, present them—and to share them with the world solely secondarily.”
And but, she did simply that, engaged on two editions of Documenta (in 2007 and 2012), organized Eire’s EVA Worldwide biennial, and doing a show-within-a-show for the 2018 version of the Carnegie Worldwide, an esteemed recurring present that takes place on the Carnegie Museum of Artwork in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
All of this work, whether or not happening inside Africa or past it, was a type of institution-building. “It is vitally vital to construct establishments versus careers,” she told ARTnews in 2019, “as a result of these establishments will depart a legacy that promotes information.”
Koyo Kouoh was born in Douala, Cameroon, in 1967. Although she moved to Zurich when she was 13 and would go on to spend greater than decade in Switzerland, learning banking and enterprise administration there. However she by no means forgot her roots in Cameroon. She spoke in interviews of the ladies in her household who had preceded her: her grandmother, a seamstress whose work gave her “entry to creativity”; her great-grandmother, who was compelled right into a polygamous marriage when she was nonetheless a teen.
“My great-grandmother solely had her fingers and her mind to lift her 4 kids,” Kouoh instructed ARTnews. “That is the household I come from. That’s the essence of my feminism.”
Koyo Kouoh
Dave Southwood for ARTnews
Through the ’90s, following a divorce and the beginning of her son Djibril, she started to shift her consideration to a brand new area of labor. (She raised Djibril as a single mom and would go on to undertake three extra kids.) Impressed by Margaret Busby’s Daughters of Africa, a 1992 anthology of writings by girls of African descent, she began—“in a really shy method,” she as soon as mentioned—to undertake editorial work. She edited Töchter Afrikas, a German-language anthology of her personal, and he or she initiated longstanding connections with African artists of all types. One even took her to Dakar, town with which she launched a longstanding dedication: the Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène, whom she was assigned to profile. She relocated to Dakar for good in 1996.
In Dakar, she met artist Issa Samb, who cofounded the artwork collective Laboratoire Agit’Artwork with filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty, painter El Hadji Sy, and playwright Youssoupha Dione. “However other than the work Samb did, and the discourse he supported at his studio,” Kouoh instructed Artforum, “there was actually nowhere to debate artwork the way in which I believe it needs to be mentioned—which is to say, in an analytic and social method.” She wished to vary that, although she by no means forgot the work undertaken by Samb, whose artwork she surveyed for the Workplace for Modern Artwork Norway in Oslo in 2013.
Kouoh turned identified internationally partly because of the 2 editions of Bamako Encounters, the Malian pictures biennial, that she organized with Simon Njami. Njami instructed ARTnews in 2019, “She had a will, a driving pressure to vary issues, and all the alternatives she made have been proper—with out compromising. She’s not a complainer sort. When one thing is mistaken, she tries to seek out the way in which to repair it.”
RAW Materials Firm was established in 2008 as a riposte to the state-run artwork areas in Senegal. It was impartial, and most of its workers was girls. Progress got here slowly: RAW Materials Firm didn’t inaugurate a brick-and-mortar location open to the general public till 2011. At the moment, it has galleries, a library, studios, a residency program, and numerous different assets for the native artwork scene. It has been a vital area inside Senegal and a mannequin for artwork areas which have cropped up elsewhere.
Kouoh was “an actual pressure, a supply of heat, generosity and intelligence,” RAW Materials Firm mentioned in an announcement at present. “She at all times affirmed that individuals have been extra vital than issues and at present we really feel her absence deeply.”
She arrived at Zeitz MOCAA, the Cape City museum based by collector Jochen Zeitz and David Inexperienced, in 2019 because the establishment confronted controversy. Its earlier director, Mark Coetzee, had been ousted amid allegations of racist remarks and sexual harassment. Kouoh was decided to show across the museum’s fame, and he or she did simply that.
“There was a sense that we can’t let this fail,” she told the New York Times. “The dimensions and ambition of Zeitz MOCAA is exclusive on the continent and somebody needed to take duty and make this museum stay as much as its rightful ambitions.”
She reorganized the whole assortment and rethought the museum’s programming, with a brand new emphasis on retrospectives. Accordingly, she organized reveals equivalent to a 2022 retrospective for Tracey Rose, her longtime good friend, and “When We See Us,” her survey of Black figurative portray staged that very same 12 months. Each of these reveals have gained widespread reward, specifically “When We See Us,” which established an formidable lineage of painters that was intergenerational and cross-national. That lineage included Moké, a Conoglese self-taught artist identified for portray the hustle and bustle of Kinshasa; Amy Sherald, an American extensively often known as Michelle Obama’s portraitist; and Thebe Phetogo, a younger Botswanan artist who has critically taken up the very notion of the Black determine in work made with shoe polish.
Kouoh’s loss of life comes as she was to tackle the Venice Biennale, in what would’ve been her biggest venture thus far. She was the second-ever African-born curator to prepare the world’s largest artwork exhibition, after Enwezor, and one in all just some girls ever to curate it. The way forward for her Biennale was unclear as of Saturday; a theme has not but been detailed for her present.
She had spoken in current interviews of eager to proceed bringing African artwork to the remainder of the world. In 2020, she mirrored on having helped launch the 1-54 Modern African Artwork Truthful in 2014. “1-54 was a terrific and obligatory political interlude in my skilled trajectory by way of being concerned with an artwork truthful,” she instructed Artwork Basel, “and I consider the post-COVID-19 future will deliver new types of relations by which the interdependence of the artwork business will come extra to the fore.”
However she remained fastidiously attuned to the wants of the African continent. In her Artforum interview, she described “first-and-only syndrome,” which she described as: “every time an African particular person achieves one thing, we at all times hear that he’s the one African or she is the one African, or she is the primary African or he’s the primary African. It’s at all times extraordinary.” The syndrome had formally been “challenged,” she mentioned, including, “It means we’re speaking to ourselves now, which is the place the true discussions start.”
