Koyo Kouoh, the celebrated Cameroonian-born curator behind among the most vital exhibitions of African modern artwork in current many years, has died unexpectedly on the age of 57.
Kouoh’s demise comes simply months after being appointed curator of the 2026 Venice Biennale—making her the second African-born curator to guide 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 creating since her appointment in December 2024, have been set to be unveiled in Venice in lower than two weeks.
Kouoh was extensively admired for her dedication to increasing the worldwide narrative of latest artwork past the the US and Europe, and particularly for her give attention to African artwork. Since 2019, she had been government director and chief curator of the Zeitz Museum of Up to date African Artwork (Zeitz MOCAA) in Cape City, South Africa—an establishment that she helped form right into a crucial platform for artists from throughout the continent and its diaspora.
She helped the establishment acquire worldwide consideration with exhibits akin to 2022’s “When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Portray,” which has been extensively thought to be the defining present on its topic. Three years on, the present remains to be touring. Having journeyed far past South Africa, it may well at present 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 unbiased artwork heart that’s now thought-about one of many prime artwork areas inside West Africa.
“I needed to actually mirror on artwork, on inventive follow, and to contribute to the understanding of inventive follow as its personal system of thought and as a mechanism for taking part in visible tradition, society, politics,” she told Artforum in 2016, describing her option to open RAW Materials Firm. “I needed to consider it as a way for proposing, speculating, investigating, exploring, experimenting. As a curator, I’m desirous about crucial inventive practices and the way they play out in society, notably societies like ours. I imagine that context defines just about the whole lot 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 carried out by Okwui Enwezor, Olu Oguibe, and others within the US and Europe, she needed to create exhibits of African artwork for African individuals.
“For me,” she stated, “working in Dakar, it is very important interact 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 necessary to construct establishments versus careers,” she told ARTnews in 2019, “as a result of these establishments will depart a legacy that promotes data.”
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, finding out 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 pressured right into a polygamous marriage when she was nonetheless an adolescent.
“My great-grandmother solely had her fingers and her mind to lift her 4 kids,” Kouoh advised ARTnews. “That is the household I come from. That’s the essence of my feminism.”
Through the ’90s, following a divorce and the beginning of her son Djibril, she started to shift her consideration to a brand new subject 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 ladies of African descent, she began—“in a really shy means,” she as soon as stated—to undertake editorial work. She edited Töchter Afrikas, a German-language anthology of her personal, and she or he initiated longstanding connections with African artists of all types. One even took her to Dakar, the 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 aside from the work Samb did, and the discourse he supported at his studio,” Kouoh advised Artforum, “there was actually nowhere to debate artwork the best way I believe it needs to be mentioned—which is to say, in an analytic and social means.” She needed to vary that, although she by no means forgot the work undertaken by Samb, whose artwork she surveyed for the Workplace for Up to date Artwork Norway in Oslo in 2013.
Kouoh grew to become recognized internationally partly because of the 2 editions of Bamako Encounters, the Malian images biennial, that she organized with Simon Njami. Njami advised ARTnews in 2019, “She had a will, a driving power 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 fallacious, she tries to search out the best way to repair it.”
RAW Materials Firm was established in 2008 as a riposte to the state-run artwork areas in Senegal. It was unbiased, and most of its workers was ladies. Progress got here slowly: RAW Materials Firm didn’t inaugurate a brick-and-mortar location open to the general public till 2011. Right this 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 power, a supply of heat, generosity and intelligence,” RAW Materials Firm stated in an announcement in the present day. “She all the time affirmed that folks have been extra necessary than issues and in the present day 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 popularity, and she or he did simply that.
“There was a sense that we can not 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 accountability and make this museum reside 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 exhibits akin to a 2022 retrospective for Tracey Rose, her longtime pal, and “When We See Us,” her survey of Black figurative portray staged that very same yr. Each of these exhibits have gained widespread reward, particularly “When We See Us,” which established an bold lineage of painters that was intergenerational and cross-national. That lineage included Moké, a Conoglese self-taught artist recognized for portray the hustle and bustle of Kinshasa; Amy Sherald, an American extensively generally 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 demise comes as she was to tackle the Venice Biennale, in what would’ve been her best undertaking thus far. She was the second-ever African-born curator to arrange the world’s greatest artwork exhibition, after Enwezor, and certainly one of only a few ladies 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 Up to date African Artwork Honest in 2014. “1-54 was a fantastic and vital political interlude in my skilled trajectory by way of being concerned with an artwork truthful,” she advised Artwork Basel, “and I imagine the post-COVID-19 future will deliver new types of relations by means of which the interdependence of the artwork trade 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: “each time an African individual achieves one thing, we all the time 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 all the time extraordinary.” The syndrome had formally been “challenged,” she stated, including, “It means we’re speaking to ourselves now, which is the place the true discussions start.”
