Koyo Kouoh, director and chief curator of Zeitz MOCAA, has been appointed to curate the main exhibition of the 61st Venice Biennale, which will open in spring 2026.
Koyo Kouoh. Courtesy of La Biennale.
The Board of La Biennale di Venezia with its president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco appointed Koyo Kouoh as Director of the Visual Arts Department, with the specific task of curating the 61st International Art Exhibition to be held in 2026.
Koyo Kouoh (Camerun / Switzerland) is the Executive Director and Chief Curator of Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA) in Cape Town since 2019. Prior to this appointment, she was the founding Artistic Director of RAW Material Company, a centre for art, knowledge and society in Dakar, Senegal, as well as part of the curatorial teams for documenta 12 (2007) and documenta 13 (2012). Kouoh is the recipient of the Grand Prix Meret Oppenheim 2020, the Swiss Grand Award for Art that honours achievements in the fields of art, architecture, critique, and exhibitions. She lives and works alternately in Cape Town, South Africa; Dakar, Senegal; and Basel, Switzerland.
“The International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia has been the center of gravity for art for over a century. Artists, art and museum professionals, collectors, dealers, philanthropists and an ever-growing public converge on this mythical site every two years to feel the pulse of the Zeitgeist“, says Koyo Kouoh, and adds „it is a once-in-a-lifetime honor and privilege to follow in the footsteps of luminary predecessors in the role of Artistic Director, and to compose an exhibition that I hope will carry meaning for the world we currently live in — and most importantly, for the world we want to make. Artists are the visionaries and social scientists who allow us to reflect and project in ways afforded only to this line of work. I am deeply thankful to La Biennale’s Board and particularly its President, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, for entrusting me with this momentous mission, and I look forward to working with the entire team”.
“The appointment of Koyo Kouoh as the director of the Visual Arts Sector is the acknowledgment of a broad horizon of vision at the dawn of a day profuse with new words and eyes. Her perspective as a curator, scholar, and influential public figure meets with the most refined, young, and disruptive intelligences. With her here in Venice, La Biennale confirms what it has offered the world for over a century: to be the home of the future”, says president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco.
Koyo Kouoh has organised meaningful and timely exhibitions such as Body Talk: Feminism, Sexuality and the Body in the Works of Six African Women Artists, first shown at Wiels in Brussels, Belgium in 2015. She curated Still (the) Barbarians, 37th EVA International, the Ireland Biennial in Limerick in 2016 and participated in the 57th Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States, with the deeply researched exhibition project Dig Where You Stand (2018), a show within a show, drawn from the collections of the Carnegie Museums of Art and Natural History. She has served as Curator of the Educational and Artistic Programme of 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair in London, UK and New York, US, from 2013 to 2017.
She was the initiator of the research project Saving Bruce Lee: African and Arab Cinema in the Era of Soviet Cultural Diplomacy, co-curated with Rasha Salti at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, Russia, and Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, Germany (2015-2018).
Active in the critical field of the arts community in a pan-African and international scope, Kouoh has a remarkable list of publications under her name, including When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting (2022), which accompanied the eponymous show that opened at Zeitz MOCAA in November 2022; Shooting Down Babylon (2022), the first monograph of the work of South African artist Tracey Rose; Breathing Out of School: RAW Académie (2021); Condition Report on Art History in Africa (2020); Word!Word?Word! Issa Samb and The Undecipherable Form (2013); and Condition Report on Building Art Institutions in Africa (2012), to name a few.
During her tenure at Zeitz MOCAA, her curatorial work focuses on in-depth solo exhibitions by African and African-descent artists. As such, she has organised exhibitions with Otobong Nkanga, Johannes Phokela, Senzeni Marasela, Abdoulaye Konaté, Tracey Rose, and Mary Evans.
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