‘Deeply Saddened and Dismayed’: Koyo Kouoh, Curator of 2026 Venice Biennale, Has Died
The Cameroonian‑Swiss curator was the first African woman selected to direct the Venice Biennale and leaves an ‘immense void’ in the art world. Save to My Ocula
Over the weekend, the would-be curator for next year’s Venice Biennale died suddenly in a Swiss hospital on her 58th birthday, leaving a wake of mourners across the art world.
Koyo Kouoh was set to become the first African woman to the biennial since its inception in 1895.
On Sunday, The New York Times reported the Cameroonian-Swiss curator died from recently diagnosed cancer in a hospital in Basel, Switzerland.
Her home institution, Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA) in Cape Town, mourned her passing on Instagram with ‘profound sorrow’ and closed its doors for the day.
Meanwhile, the Venice Biennale remembered Kouoh as someone who ‘worked with passion, intellectual rigour, and vision on the conception and development of the Biennale Arte 2026’ and was ‘deeply saddened and dismayed to learn of the sudden and untimely passing’.
‘Her passing leaves an immense void in the world of contemporary art,’ the fair’s statement said.
Upon her appointment, Kouoh said she hoped to compose an event to ‘carry meaning for the world we currently live in—and most importantly, for the world we want to make’.
In 2014, she told Ocula she entered the arts in the 1980s out of ‘perceived necessity to make Africa-related practices more visible’.
Kouoh later turned her attention to Dakar, Senegal, founding Raw Material Company, the city’s first art centre dedicated to artistic development and exchange, in 2008.
Her celebrated career includes co-curator roles for documenta 12 and 13, and member of the search committee that appointed Adam Szymczyk to direct documenta 14.
As Zeitz MOCAA’s head, Kouoh led exhibitions by African and African diaspora artists like Abdoulaye Konaté, Otobong Nkanga, and Tracey Rose.
From 2022 to 2023, Kouoh’s seminal travelling exhibition, When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting at Zeitz MOCAA, gathered works by 154 artists working from the 1920s to the present to showcase different facets of Black self-representation.
In a review for Ocula, Emmanuel Balogun wrote: ‘As such landmark museum shows do not ordinarily exist in Africa, the choice to democratise visibility for younger painters within and beyond the continent is vital.’ —[O]
Main image: Exhibition view: When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting, Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town (20 November 2022–3 September 2023). Courtesy Zeitz MOCAA. Photo: Dillon Marsh.
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