Cameroonian art curator aged 57 up to the career

Koyo Kouoh, who died at the age of 57, was one of the main figures in the art world and a fierce defender of African creatives.

Curator from Cameroon, Kouoh had lived up to his career.

She was to become the first African woman to direct the Venice Biennale of next year, one of the most prestigious contemporary art events in the world, and led one of the greatest contemporary art museums in Africa.

The cause of the unexpected death of Kouoh has not yet been made public. The curator died in Switzerland, according to reports.

South African artist Candice Breitz described Kouoh as “beautifully intelligent, energetic and tremendously endless”.

Otobong Nkanga, a Nigerian visual artist, described the late curator a source of heat, generosity and radiance “.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni also talked about the impact of Kouoh, saying that his passage “leaves a void in the world of contemporary art”.

Kouoh’s colorful life began in 1967, when she was born in Cameroon, a central African country with a rich artistic heritage.

She grew up in the largest city in the country, Douala, before moving to Switzerland at the age of 13.

There, she studied business administration and banking services, but, in a pivotal moment, chose not to continue finance as a career.

“I am fundamentally not interested in profit,” she said in an interview in 2023 with the New York Times.

Rather than relying on his diploma, Kouoh helped migrant women as a social worker and has started immersing herself in the art world.

She gave birth to her son in Switzerland in the 90s, an experience she described as “deeply transformative”. She was going to adopt three other children.

Fed up with life in the Swiss city of Zurich, Kouoh returned to Africa in 1996.

She worked as a curator in the Senegalese capital Dakar, before founding the Société de raw materials, a large hub of independent art.

Last week, and six years in her role as director of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in South Africa, Kouoh thought about his love for Dakar.

“Dakar made me who I am today,” she told Financial Times.

“This is the place where I became an adult professionally, where I really became a curator and an exhibition manufacturer … I am in CAP now but, mentally, I live in Dakar. It is the one and only place for me.”

When Kouoh took the first job in Zeitz, the largest museum of contemporary art in Africa, the institution was in crisis.

Founding director Mark Coetzee had been suspended in 2018 following staff harassment allegations and then resigned.

Kouoh was largely credited with having transformed Zeitz’s fortune, leading it through the scandal, as well as the cocovio pandemic.

“For me, it has become a duty to save this institution,” she told the world of art: and if …?! podcast.

“I was convinced that Zeitz’s failure, if he had failed would have been the failure of all of us African art professionals in the field, in a way indirectly.”

As Director and Curator of Zeitz, Kouoh supervised a certain number of acclaimed exhibitions, especially when we see ourselves: a century of black figuration in painting. The show, which brings together works by black artists from the last century, is currently exhibited in Brussels.

In a statement announcing the “sudden” death of Kouoh, Zeitz expressed his “deep pain” and declared that, out of respect, the museum would be closed “until further notice”.

In his interview with the Financial Times last week, Kouoh challenged the idea that death would end his efforts.

“I believe in life after death, because I come from an ancestral black education where we believe in life and parallel realities,” she said.

“There is not” after death “,” before death “or” during life “. It doesn’t have much. I believe in energies – living or dead – and cosmic strength.”