Koyo Kouoh, the famous Origin of Cameroonians behind some of the most important exhibitions of African contemporary art in recent decades, has unexpectedly died at the age of 57.
The death of Kouoh comes just a few months after being appointed conservative of the Venice Biennale in 2026, which made her the second conservative born African to direct the legendary exhibition, after the revolutionary edition of Okwui Enwezor in 2015.
The Venice Biennale announced its death on Saturday, describing it as a figure of “passion, intellectual rigor and vision”. The theme and title of her exhibition, which she had developed since her appointment in December 2024, was to be unveiled in Venice in less than two weeks.
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Kouoh was widely admired for his commitment to extend the global account of contemporary art beyond the United States and Europe, and in particular to focus on African art. Since 2019, she was executive director and chief commissioner of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art (Zeitz Mocaa) in Cape Town, in South Africa – an institution which she helped to transform into a critical platform for artists from all over the continent and her diaspora.
She helped the institution attract international attention with shows such as “When we rect us: a Century of Black Figuration in Painting”, which was largely considered the decisive spectacle on its subject. Three years later, the show is still traveling. After having traveled far beyond South Africa, he can currently be seen at the Bozar Arts Center in Brussels.
Kouoh is also committed to promoting art scenes in Africa, especially in Senegal. In 2008, she founded Rid Material Company in Dakar, an independent art center which is now considered one of the best artistic spaces in West Africa.
“I really wanted to think about art, artistic practice and to contribute to the understanding of artistic practice as its own system of thought and as a mechanism of participation in visual culture, society, politics,” she said Artforum In 2016, describing his choice to open a company of raw materials. “I wanted to think about it as a way to propose, speculate, investigate, explore, experiment. As a curator, I am interested in critical artistic practices and the way they play in society, especially societies like ours. I believe that this context defines almost everything we do. ”
It was extremely attentive to the way in which the accounts in force for African art were defined – and from which them defined them. In her Artforum Interview, Kouoh described himself as part of a “second generation” of African conservatives who rebelled against what she described as an “plea organization” observed in the West. Although she praised the work accomplished by Okwui enwezor, Oli Oguibe and others in the United States and Europe, she wanted to create African art shows for Africans.
“For me,” she said, “by working in Dakar, it is important to engage with the ideas and problems that concern our region here first – to reflect and search, to write about them, to show them – and to share them with the world only secondarily.”
And yet, she did exactly that, by working on the conservation teams of two Documenta editions (in 2007 and 2012), by organizing the international biennial of Ireland, and by making a show with a recurring 2018 edition at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, in the penis.
All this work, whether in progress in Africa or beyond, was a form of institution’s construction. “It is very important to build institutions as opposed to careers,” she said Artnews In 2019, “because these institutions will leave an inheritance that will promote knowledge”.
Koyo Kouoh was born in Douala, Cameroon, in 1967. Although she moved to Zurich at the age of 13 and would continue to spend more than a decade in Switzerland, studying the bank and the business administration there, she has never forgotten her roots in Cameroon. She spoke in interviews with the women of her family who had preceded her: her grandmother, a seamstress whose work gave her “access to creativity”; Her great-grandmother, which was forced in a polygamous wedding when she was still a teenager.
“My great-grandmother had only his hands and intellect to raise his four children,” Kouoh said Artnews. “This is the family I come from. It is the essence of my feminism. ”
Koyo Kouoh
Dave Southwood for Artnews
During the 1990s, after a divorce and the birth of her son Djibril, she began to move her attention to a new field of work. (She raised Djibril as a single mother and would continue to adopt three other children.) Inspired by Margaret Busby African girlsAn anthology of the writings of 1992 by women of African origin, it began – “in a very timid way,” she said one day – to undertake editorial work. She edited Töchter AfrikasHer own German language anthology, and she has initiated long -standing ties with African artists of all kinds. We even took her to Dakar, the city with which she launched a long -standing commitment: the Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène, which she was assigned to the profile. She moved to Dakar for good in 1996.
In Dakar, she met the artist Issa Samb, who co -founded the Art Laboratory collective acts with the filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambesy, the painter El Hadji Sy and the playwright Youssoupha Dione. “But apart from the work that Samb has done, and the speech he supported in his studio,” Kouoh said Artforum“There was really nowhere to discuss the art of the way I think it should be discussed – which must say, in a analytical and social way.” She wanted to change this, although she had never forgotten the work undertaken by Samb, whose art questioned for the office for contemporary art Norway in Oslo in 2013.
Kouoh has become known internationally in part thanks to the two editions of Bamako Encounters, the Biennale of Malian photography, which she organized with Simon Njami. Njami said Artnews In 2019, “she had a will, an engine to change things, and all the choices she made were correct – without compromising. It is not a type of complainant. When something is wrong, she tries to find a way to repair it. ”
The Société de raw materials was created in 2008 as a response in the art spaces managed by the State in Senegal. It was independent and most of its staff were women. The progress has come slowly: the Société de Métières raw materials did not inaugurate a site of brick and mortar open to the public until 2011. Today, it has galleries, a library, studios, a program of residence and countless other resources for the local artist. It was a crucial space in Senegal and a model for art spaces that arose elsewhere.
Kouoh was “a real strength, a source of heat, generosity and intelligence,” said the Société de raw materials today in a press release. “She always said that people were more important than things and today we feel her absence deeply.”
She arrived in Zeitz Mocaa, the CAP museum founded by collector Jochen Zeitz and David Green, in 2019, when the institution was faced with controversy. Its previous director, Mark Coetzee, had been ousted in the midst of allegations of racist remarks and sexual harassment. Kouoh was determined to reverse the reputation of the museum, and she did that exactly.
“There was a feeling that we cannot let it fail,” she said to New York Times. “The scale and ambition of Zeitz Mocaa are unique on the continent and someone had to assume responsibilities and ensure that this museum is up to its legitimate ambitions.”
It has reorganized the entire collection and has redesigned the museum’s programming, with a new emphasis on retrospectives. Consequently, she organized shows such as a retrospective in 2022 for Tracey Rose, her longtime friend and “When We Rehat Us”, her survey on black figurative painting staged the same year. These two shows were largely complimentary, especially “when we see each other”, which established an ambitious line of painters who was intergenerational and transnational. This line included Moké, an self -taught conoglese artist known for painting the bustle of Kinshasa; Amy Sherald, an American who is well known as the portrait painter of Michelle Obama; And Thebe Phetogo, a young Botswan artist who criticizes the very notion of the black figure in a critical way in the paintings made with polishing.
Kouoh’s death comes when she had to face the Venice Biennale, in what would have been her biggest project to date. She was the second conservative born African to organize the largest art exhibition in the world, after Enwezor, and one of the few women to implement it. The future of his biennial was not clear on Saturday; A theme has not yet been detailed for its program.
She had spoken in recent interviews to want to continue to bring African art to the rest of the world. In 2020, she thought about having helped launch the contemporary African art fair 1-54 in 2014. “1-54 was a great political interlude necessary in my professional trajectory in terms of involvement in an art fair,” she told Art Basel, “and I believe that the artistic industry will be more important.”
But she was carefully listening to the needs of the African continent. In her interview Artforum, she described the “first and only syndrome”, that she described as: “Whenever African person realizes something, we always hear that he is the only African or that she is the only African, where she is the first African or he is the first African. It’s always extraordinary. ” The syndrome had been officially “challenged,” she said, adding: “It means that we are talking about it now, this is where the real discussions are starting.”
