Koyo Kouoh (1967-2025)
160May 13, 2025
Cameroon-born curatorKoyo Kouoh, the first African woman chosen to curate the Venice Biennale, died on May 10 in a hospital in Basel. She was fifty-seven. News of her death, which came just days before she was set to announce the title and theme of the upcoming 2026 Biennale, was initially announced by the event’s organizers. Kouoh’s husband, Philippe Mall, who survives her along with her son, Djibril Schmed, told theNew York Timesthat she died of cancer, with which she had only recently been diagnosed. Kouoh, who often said she had never intended to become an art world figure, was known for her transformative leadership of Cape Town’s Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (MOCAA), one of the continent’s largest contemporary art museums, and for her unflagging efforts in promoting the work of African artists, including Abdoulaye Konaté, Otobong Nkanga, Johannes Phokela, and Tracey Rose. “I see curatorial work as a practice of mediating, a practice of unearthing, of translating,” she toldArtforum’s Phoebe Roberts in 2024. “I see my role as being at the service of artists first and foremost; I’m fascinated by the minds of artists, what drives them, what preoccupies them, what makes them think and do what they do. It’s about humanity at the end of the day,” she concluded. “It’s about people.”
Koyo Kouoh was born on December 24, 1967, in Douala, Cameroon, the country’s largest city and economic hub. At thirteen, she moved to Switzerland, where she went on to study business administration and banking. Discovering that a financial career did not appeal to her—“I am fundamentally uninterested in profit,” she told theNew York Times’s Roslyn Sulcas in 2023—she took a job as a social worker assisting migrant women, while writing cultural articles on the side and spending time among the local arts demimonde. In 1995, having determined that she did not want to raise her young son in Europe, she moved to Dakar. “It’s the place I came of age professionally, where I really became a curator and an exhibition-maker,” she told theFinancial Times’s Charlene Prempeh earlier this month. “Dakar made me who I am today.”
In Dakar, Kouoh coordinated cultural programs at the Gorée Institute from 1998 to 2002 and between 2000 and 2004 collaborated with the Dakar Biennale. As well, she co-curatedLes Rencontres Africaines de la Photographiein Bamako in 2001 and 2003. In 2008, she founded Raw Material Company, a platform for critical exchange and artistic practice that in 2011 evolved into an independent art hub hosting artist residencies. Kouoh’s career as an independent curator continued to flower as she served on the curatorial teams of Documenta 12 and 13, organized the inaugural educational and artistic program of the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, and curated the 2016 EVA International, Ireland’s contemporary art biennial. Her curatorial style was shaped by her desire not just to elevate contemporary African art within the international scene but to free it from the strictures and expectations that frequently attended its presentation outside and even inside the continent that spawned it. “I have grown beyond the idea of Africa as a geographical region,” she toldOcula’s Stephanie Bailey in 2014, “and rather, treat it as a mindset to give it a mental space that can be inhabited by anyone interested in the idea of Africa.”
In 2019, Kouoh was tapped to serve as director of Zeitz MOCAA, which was then in crisis following the resignation of its founding director, Mark Coetzee, who had been accused of harassing his employees. Recognizing the value of the museum, Kouoh embarked on a campaign to integrate it within both the local and international community, with tremendous success. Among the exhibitions the institution mounted under her leadership were a Tracey Rose retrospective that traveled to the Queens Museum, New York, in 2024 and “When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting,” which traveled to Bozar, Brussels, where it is on view through August 10. “I believe there is something that fundamentally connects Black people across the globe,” she told Roberts, speaking of the figuration retrospective. “That thing cannot necessarily be named or even represented. It is certainly not something that I can personally name; I just know it and I feel it. Some people call itsoul. But I believe that even soul can’t fully encapsulate that depth of kinship.”
Kouoh’s appointment as curator of the 2026 Venice Biennale had generated whatBlack Art Magazinecharacterized as a “palpable sense of excitement.” The event’s organizers in astatementacknowledged that her passing has left “an immense void in the world of contemporary art and in the international community of artists, curators and scholars who had the privilege of knowing and admiring her extraordinary human and intellectual commitment.” It is not yet known whether her plan for the Biennale will be carried out. Though her death came as a shock to many, Kouoh seemed to have had mortality on her mind during her interview withFT’s Prempeh, one of her last.
“I do believe in life after death because I come from an ancestral Black education where we believe in parallel lives and realities,” she said. “There is no ‘after death,’ ‘before death’ or ‘during life.’ It doesn’t matter that much. I believe in energies—living or dead—and in cosmic strength.”