Venice

Koyo Kouoh is the curator of the Art Biennale 2026

The board appointed the executive director and chief curator of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town

by editorial staff

3 December 2024

3' min read

Key points

Exhibitions and publications

3' min read

The Board of Directors of la Biennale di Venezia met on Tuesday 5 November and, on the proposal of the president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, resolved to appoint Koyo Kouoh as director of the Visual Arts Sector, with the specific task of curating the 61. International Art Exhibition in 2026.

Koyo Kouoh (Cameroon / Switzerland) has been the executive director and chief curator of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA) in Cape Town, South Africa since 2019. Here her curatorial work has focused on in-depth solo exhibitions of African artists and artists of African descent such as Otobong Nkanga, Johannes Phokela, Senzeni Marasela, Abdoulaye Konaté, Tracey Rose and Mary Evans. She was the founding artistic director of RAW Material Company, a centre for art, knowledge and society in Dakar, Senegal. She was part of the curatorial team of documenta 12 (2007) and documenta 13 (2012). In 2020 he received the Grand Prix Meret Oppenheim, a prestigious Swiss prize that recognises achievements in the fields of art, architecture, criticism and exhibitions. He lives and works between Cape Town, South Africa; Dakar, Senegal; Basel, Switzerland.

"The appointment of Koyo Kouoh as Artistic Director of the Visual Arts Sector is the cognition of a broad horizon of vision in the dawning of a day full of new words and new eyes," explains Biennale President Pietrangelo Buttafuoco. Her gaze as curator, scholar and protagonist on the public scene meets, in fact, the most refined, young and disruptive intelligences. With her here in Venice, La Biennale confirms what it has been offering the world for over a century: to be the home of the future."

"The International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale has been the centre of gravity of art for more than a century," Koyo Kouoh is convinced. "Artists, art and museum professionals, collectors, gallerists, philanthropists and an ever-growing public gather in this mythical place every two years to catch the pulse of the zeitgeist. It is a unique honour and privilege to follow in the footsteps of illustrious predecessors in the role of artistic director and create an exhibition that I hope will be meaningful for the world we currently live in and, more importantly, for the world we want to build. Artists are the visionaries and social scientists that allow us to reflect and project in ways that only this profession allows."

Exhibitions and Publications

Koyo Kouoh has organised significant exhibitions such as 'Body Talk: Feminism, Sexuality and the Body in the Works of Six African Women Artists', which premiered at Wiels in Brussels, Belgium in 2015. She curated Still (the) Barbarians, the 37th EVA International, the Biennial of Ireland in Limerick in 2016 and participated in the 57th Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with the extensively documented exhibition project 'Dig Where You Stand' (2018), an exhibition within an exhibition, drawn from the collections of the Carnegie Museums of Art and Natural History. He curated the Education and Art Programme of 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair in London and New York 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 the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, Russia, and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin (2015-2018).

Active in the critical field of the art community from a pan-African and international perspective, Kouoh boasts a long list of publications, including 'When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting' (2022), released on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition opening at Zeitz MOCAA in November 2022; 'Shooting Down Babylon' (2022), the first monograph on 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! Issa Samb and The Undecipherable Form" (2013) and "Condition Report on Building Art Institutions in Africa" (2012), to name a few.