Koyo Kouoh, the celebrated Cameroonian-born curator behind among the most vital exhibitions of African up to date artwork in current a long time, has died unexpectedly on the age of 57.
The New York Instances reported on Sunday that she died the day earlier than in a hospital in Basel, Switzerland, and that the trigger was most cancers. Her husband, Philippe Mall, instructed the Instances that she had solely only in the near past obtained her analysis.
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 guide the storied exhibition, following Okwui Enwezor’s groundbreaking version in 2015.
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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, had been set to be unveiled in Venice in lower than two weeks.
Kouoh was broadly admired for her dedication to increasing the worldwide narrative of up to date artwork past the the US and Europe, and particularly for her give attention to African artwork. Since 2019, she had been govt 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 essential platform for artists from throughout the continent and its diaspora.
She helped the establishment achieve worldwide consideration with reveals similar to 2022’s “When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Portray,” which has been broadly thought to be the defining present on its topic. Three years on, the present continues to be touring. Having journeyed far past South Africa, it could actually at present be seen on the Bozar arts middle 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 middle that’s now thought of one of many high artwork areas inside West Africa.
“I wished to essentially replicate on artwork, on creative observe, and to contribute to the understanding of creative observe as its personal system of thought and as a mechanism for collaborating in visible tradition, society, politics,” she instructed Artforum in 2016, describing her option to open RAW Materials Firm. “I wished to think about it as a way for proposing, speculating, investigating, exploring, experimenting. As a curator, I’m concerned with essential creative practices and the way they play out in society, significantly societies like ours. I imagine that context defines just about every part 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 technology” of African curators that rebelled in opposition to what she described as “advocacy curating” seen within the West. Although she praised the work executed by Okwui Enwezor, Olu Oguibe, and others within the US and Europe, she wished to create reveals of African artwork for African individuals.
“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 replicate 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 the curatorial groups of two editions of Documenta (in 2007 and 2012), organizing 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 rather necessary to construct establishments versus careers,” she instructed ARTnews in 2019, “as a result of these establishments will go away 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, learning banking and enterprise administration there, she 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 boost 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
In the course of the ’90s, following a divorce and the delivery 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 means,” she as soon as mentioned—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 every kind. 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 aside from the work Samb did, and the discourse he supported at his studio,” Kouoh instructed Artforum, “there was actually nowhere to debate artwork the best way I feel it must be mentioned—which is to say, in an analytic and social means.” She wished to alter 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 turned recognized internationally partially 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 power to alter issues, and all the alternatives she made had been proper—with out compromising. She’s not a complainer sort. When one thing is mistaken, she tries to seek 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 impartial, and most of its employees was girls. Progress got here slowly: RAW Materials Firm didn’t inaugurate a brick-and-mortar location open to the general public till 2011. As we speak, it has galleries, a library, studios, a residency program, and numerous different assets for the native artwork scene. It has been an important 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 mentioned in an announcement right this moment. “She at all times affirmed that individuals had been extra necessary than issues and right this moment 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’t let this fail,” she instructed the New York Instances. “The size and ambition of Zeitz MOCAA is exclusive on the continent and somebody needed to take accountability and make this museum stay as much as its rightful ambitions.”
She reorganized your complete assortment and rethought the museum’s programming, with a brand new emphasis on retrospectives. Accordingly, she organized reveals similar to a 2022 retrospective for Tracey Rose, her longtime buddy, and “When We See Us,” her survey of Black figurative portray staged that very same yr. Each of these reveals have gained widespread reward, particularly “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 recognized for portray the hustle and bustle of Kinshasa; Amy Sherald, an American broadly 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 loss of life comes as she was to tackle the Venice Biennale, in what would’ve been her best mission to this point. She was the second-ever African-born curator to prepare the world’s greatest artwork exhibition, after Enwezor, and one in every of only a few 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 desirous 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 Truthful in 2014. “1-54 was an important and vital political interlude in my skilled trajectory when it comes to being concerned with an artwork truthful,” she instructed Artwork Basel, “and I imagine the post-COVID-19 future will deliver new types of relations by 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: “at any time when 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.”
Replace, 5/11/25, 11:55 a.m.: This text has been up to date to incorporate Kouoh’s reported reason behind loss of life.
