Koyo Kouoh has been named the curator of the 61st Venice Biennale, which will take place in 2026. She is the first African woman to helm the illustrious exhibition. In her current role as executive director and chief curator of Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA) in Cape Town, she has played a pivotal role in championing contemporary African art on the global stage.
This high-profile appointment is the first indication of what the public can expect from the Biennale under the leadership of president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, a notorious right-wing journalist who was controversially appointed late last year with the backing of far-right leader Giorgia Meloni.
Kouoh has headed Zeitz MOCAA since 2019, where her landmark achievement was the 2022 exhibition and publication “When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting.” Spotlighting work from the past 100 years by artists from Africa and the global African Diaspora, it was the biggest exploration of Black self-representation and subjectivities to date. Kouoh has also placed an instrumental role in supporting the practices of artists like Tracey Rose, for whom she prepared the first major monograph, Otobong Nkanga, Johannes Phokela, and Abdoulaye Konaté.
In a statement, Kouoh described the biennial as “mythical.”
“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,” she said.
Speculation had been rife that Buttafuoco’s presidency may herald a new, more conservative era for Venice Biennale, which remains the world’s premier stage for contemporary art and a major asset for Italy’s cultural scene. To emphasize that this will not be the case, Buttafuoco said Kouoh’s appointment “confirms what [the Biennale] has offered the world for over a century: to be the home of the future.”
“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,” he added. “Her perspective as a curator, scholar, and influential public figure meets with the most refined, young, and disruptive intelligences.”
Born in Cameroon in 1967, Kouoh was raised in Zurich, Switzerland and now lives between Cape Town, South Africa, Dakar, Senegal, and Basel, Switzerland. In 2007 and 2012 she joined the curatorial teams for documenta 12 and 13 in Kassel, Germany. Since 2009, she has been the co-founding artistic director of Raw Material Company art center in Dakar.
Between 2013 and 2017, Kouoh was curator of the artistic program of 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair. During that time she also worked on institutional shows, most notably curating the survey show “Body Talk: Feminism, Sexuality and the Body in the Works of Six African Women Artists” at Wiels in Brussels, Belgium in 2015.
