This post was originally published on artnews.com
Koyo Kouoh, the celebrated Cameroonian-born curator behind some of the most significant exhibitions of African contemporary art in recent decades, has died unexpectedly at the age of 57.
Kouoh’s death comes just months after being appointed curator of the 2026 Venice Biennale—making her the second African-born curator to lead the storied exhibition, following Okwui Enwezor’s groundbreaking edition in 2015.
The Venice Biennale announced her passing on Saturday, describing her as a figure of “passion, intellectual rigor, and vision.” The theme and title of her exhibition, which she had been developing since her appointment in December 2024, were set to be unveiled in Venice in less than two weeks.
Kouoh was widely admired for her commitment to expanding the global narrative of contemporary art beyond the the US and Europe, and in particular for her focus on African art. Since 2019, she had been executive director and chief curator of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art (Zeitz MOCAA) in Cape Town, South Africa—an institution that she helped shape into a critical platform for artists from across the continent and its diaspora.
She helped the institution gain international attention with shows such as 2022’s “When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting,” which has been widely regarded as the defining show on its subject. Three years on, the show is still traveling. Having journeyed far beyond South Africa, it can currently be seen at the Bozar arts center in Brussels.
Kouoh was also committed to fostering art scenes within Africa, most notably within Senegal. In 2008, she founded RAW Material Company in Dakar, an independent art center that is now considered one of the top art spaces within West Africa.
“I wanted to really reflect on art, on artistic practice, and to contribute to the understanding of artistic practice as its own system of thought and as a mechanism for participating in visual culture, society, politics,” she told Artforum in 2016, describing her choice to open RAW Material Company. “I wanted to think of it as a means for proposing, speculating, investigating, exploring, experimenting. As a curator, I’m interested in critical artistic practices and how they play out in society, particularly societies like ours. I believe that context defines pretty much everything that we do.”
She was acutely attentive to the ways that prevailing narratives for African art have been defined—and of who has defined them. In her Artforum interview, Kouoh described herself as part of a “second generation” of African curators that rebelled against what she described as “advocacy curating” seen in the West. Though she praised the work done by Okwui Enwezor, Olu Oguibe, and others in the US and Europe, she wanted to create shows of African art for African people.
“For me,” she said, “working in Dakar, it is important to engage with the ideas and issues that concern our region here first—to reflect on them and research them, write about them, show them—and to share them with the world only secondarily.”
And yet, she did just that, working on the curatorial teams of two editions of Documenta (in 2007 and 2012), organizing Ireland’s EVA International biennial, and doing a show-within-a-show for the 2018 edition of the Carnegie International, an esteemed recurring show that takes place at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
All of this work, whether taking place within Africa or beyond it, was a form of institution-building. “It is very important to build institutions as opposed to careers,” she told ARTnews in 2019, “because those institutions will leave a legacy that promotes knowledge.”
Koyo Kouoh was born in Douala, Cameroon, in 1967. Though she moved to Zurich when she was 13 and would go on to spend more than decade in Switzerland, studying banking and business administration there, she she never forgot her roots in Cameroon. She spoke in interviews of the women in her family who had preceded her: her grandmother, a seamstress whose work gave her “access to creativity”; her great-grandmother, who was forced into a polygamous marriage when she was still a teenager.
“My great-grandmother only had her hands and her intellect to raise her four children,” Kouoh told ARTnews. “This is the family I come from. That is the essence of my feminism.”
During the ’90s, following a divorce and the birth of her son Djibril, she began to shift her attention to a new field of work. (She raised Djibril as a single mother and would go on to adopt three more children.) Inspired by Margaret Busby’s Daughters of Africa, a 1992 anthology of writings by women of African descent, she started—“in a very shy way,” she once said—to undertake editorial work. She edited Töchter Afrikas, a German-language anthology of her own, and she initiated longstanding connections with African artists of all kinds. One even took her to Dakar, the city with which she launched a longstanding commitment: 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 art collective Laboratoire Agit’Art with filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty, painter El Hadji Sy, and playwright Youssoupha Dione. “But apart from the work Samb did, and the discourse he supported at his studio,” Kouoh told Artforum, “there was really nowhere to discuss art the way I think it should be discussed—which is to say, in an analytic and social way.” She wanted to change that, though she never forgot the work undertaken by Samb, whose art she surveyed for the Office for Contemporary Art Norway in Oslo in 2013.
Kouoh became known internationally in part thanks to the two editions of Bamako Encounters, the Malian photography biennial, that she organized with Simon Njami. Njami told ARTnews in 2019, “She had a will, a driving force to change things, and all the choices she made were right—without compromising. She’s not a complainer type. When something is wrong, she tries to find the way to fix it.”
RAW Material Company was established in 2008 as a riposte to the state-run art spaces in Senegal. It was independent, and most of its staff was women. Progress came slowly: RAW Material Company did not inaugurate a brick-and-mortar location open to the public until 2011. Today, it has galleries, a library, studios, a residency program, and countless other resources for the local art scene. It has been a crucial space within Senegal and a model for art spaces that have cropped up elsewhere.
Kouoh was “a real force, a source of warmth, generosity and intelligence,” RAW Material Company said in a statement today. “She always affirmed that people were more important than things and today we feel her absence deeply.”
She arrived at Zeitz MOCAA, the Cape Town museum founded by collector Jochen Zeitz and David Green, in 2019 as the institution faced controversy. Its previous director, Mark Coetzee, had been ousted amid allegations of racist remarks and sexual harassment. Kouoh was determined to turn around the museum’s reputation, and she did just that.
“There was a feeling that we cannot let this fail,” she told the New York Times. “The scale and ambition of Zeitz MOCAA is unique on the continent and someone had to take responsibility and make this museum live up to its rightful ambitions.”
She reorganized the entire collection and rethought the museum’s programming, with a new emphasis on retrospectives. Accordingly, she organized shows such as a 2022 retrospective for Tracey Rose, her longtime friend, and “When We See Us,” her survey of Black figurative painting staged that same year. Both of those shows have gained widespread praise, in particular “When We See Us,” which established an ambitious lineage of painters that was intergenerational and cross-national. That lineage included Moké, a Conoglese self-taught artist known for painting the hustle and bustle of Kinshasa; Amy Sherald, an American widely known as Michelle Obama’s portraitist; and Thebe Phetogo, a young Botswanan artist who has critically taken up the very notion of the Black figure in paintings made with shoe polish.
Kouoh’s death comes as she was to take on the Venice Biennale, in what would’ve been her greatest project to date. She was the second-ever African-born curator to organize the world’s biggest art exhibition, after Enwezor, and one of just a few women ever to curate it. The future of her Biennale was unclear as of Saturday; a theme has not yet been detailed for her show.
She had spoken in recent interviews of wanting to continue bringing African art to the rest of the world. In 2020, she reflected on having helped launch the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair in 2014. “1-54 was a great and necessary political interlude in my professional trajectory in terms of being involved with an art fair,” she told Art Basel, “and I believe the post-COVID-19 future will bring new forms of relations through which the interdependence of the art industry will come more to the fore.”
But she remained carefully attuned to the needs of the African continent. In her Artforum interview, she described “first-and-only syndrome,” which she described as: “whenever an African person achieves something, we always hear that he is the only African or she is the only African, or she is the first African or he is the first African. It is always extraordinary.” The syndrome had officially been “challenged,” she said, adding, “It means we are talking to ourselves now, which is where the real discussions begin.”