With the 2026 Venice Biennale wrapping up its professional previews and officially opening to the public on Saturday, a new foundation dedicated to Koyo Kouoh—the curator of the Biennale’s main exhibition who passed away a year ago—has been announced.
Based in Basel, Switzerland, where Kouoh lived for part of her life, the Koyo Kouoh Foundation “continues and structures the work initiated by Koyo Kouoh” with the goal of keeping “a tradition alive, rather than turning it into a still image,” according to the foundation’s website. “It is based on the idea that art is not neutral and that history, power, access, and the conditions in which artists and curators can think, make, and share their work all shape cultural production.”
The site adds, “It’s important to know that culture isn’t secondary. It’s structural.”
As part of its work, the foundation will support emerging and established organizations and curators in both Africa and internationally, including RAW Material Company, the Dakar-based arts and research organization Kouoh founded in 2008.
Per the website, the foundation “functions as a platform for resources, funding, and structural support for those contributing to contemporary African cultural production globally,” which includes spaces for the research, education, production, and circulation of “practices that have been pushed to the edges, moved, or ignored in the past.”
In addition to its support of curators more broadly, the foundation is planning to establish the Koyo Kouoh Prize, which will “support and recognize artists, curators, researchers, cultural practitioners, and institution builders whose work reflects the values of critical thought, structural imagination, and transformative cultural practice,” as well as creating a long-term home for the Koyo Kouoh Collection, which will house “art, archives, research, and cultural contributions that are in line with Koyo Kouoh’s values, conversations, and legacy,” per the website. The foundation is asking for financial support for both projects, adding that it welcomes “real conversations with people who want to help it grow.”
The foundation is led by saxophonist and composer Philippe Mall, Kouoh’s partner of 17 years who serves in the role as president. It also includes artist Alfredo Jaar; Adrienne Edwards, senior curator and associate director of curatorial programs at the Whitney Museum; Kate Fowle, director of arts programs for the Hearthland Foundation; and Josef Helfenstein, the former director of the Kunstmuseum Basel.
At the time of her death, Kouoh was at work on “In Minor Keys,” the main exhibition for the 2026 Biennale, which focuses on art as a life-sustaining strategy. She was also the executive director and chief curator of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town, South Africa, where her curatorial credits included the 2022 exhibition “When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting.” She had previously served on the curatorial teams of Documenta 12 and Documenta 13 in 2007 and 2012, respectively, and she had curated six editions of the EVA International, the Ireland Biennial.
In a video on the site’s homepage that serves to ground the foundation’s work, Kouoh says, “For me, creating exhibitions is like a journey; it’s teamwork over time. Curating is 20% research, intellect, and critique, and 80% organization, coordination, and logistics.
