Koyo Kouoh, Curator of the 2026 Venice Biennale, Has Died Aged 57

Curator Koyo Kouoh, executive director and chief curator of Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art in Cape Town (Zeitz MOCAA), has died at the age of 57. She was tapped to curate the next Venice Biennale, which will open on May 9, 2026.

Born in Douala, Cameroon, in 1967, Kouoh moved to Switzerland at the age of 13, where she lived for more than a decade. In her early 20s, she studied business administration and banking before turning her attention to writing and editing. Inspired by Daughters of Africa (1992), an anthology of writing by women of African descent, she co-edited the German language equivalent Töchter Afrikas, which was published in 1994.

After moving to Dakar, Kouoh became involved in contemporary art. She served as co-curator, alongside Simon Njami, of the photography biennale ‘Bamako Encounters’ in 2001 and 2003, before founding RAW Material Company – an artist residency and exhibition space – in 2008. ‘Dakar made me who I am today,’ Kouoh said in an interview with The Financial Times earlier this month. ‘It’s the place I came of age professionally, where I really became a curator and an exhibition-maker.’

In addition to her work at RAW, Kouoh held several international roles, including curatorial advisor for Documenta 12 and 13 (2007 and 2012), and curator of the 38th edition of EVA International in Limerick, Ireland, in 2016. Titled Still (The) Barbarians, the biennale featured more than 50 artists and explored ‘how we deal with our histories, the imperatives for contemporary revolution, and what the future might hold,’ wrote Gemma Tipton in her review for frieze.

Kouoh gained global recognition in 2019 when she was appointed to lead Zeitz MOCAA. Widely credited with turning around the scandal-plagued museum, she built ‘an explicitly Pan-African, world-class program’, according to Roslyn Sulcas for The New York Times, who profiled the curator in 2023. While at Zeitz MOCAA, she oversaw several large-scale travelling exhibitions, including ‘When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting’, currently on view at Bozar in Brussels.

In 2024, Kouoh was selected as the artistic director of the 61st Venice Biennale – the first African woman to hold the position. In a statement posted on the biennale website following her passing, the board of directors praised the ‘passion, intellectual rigour and vision’ she brought to this edition's ‘conceptualisation and development’. The presentation of the exhibition’s title and theme was scheduled to take place in Venice on 20 May.

Since the announcement of her death, there has been an outpouring of tributes on social media by artists and arts professionals. On Instagram, South African artist Candice Breitz described Kouoh as ‘magnificently intelligent, endlessly energetic and formidably elegant,’ while Otobong Nkanga wrote, ‘Kouoh was a source of warmth, generosity and brilliance, she always stated that people are more important than things and we feel her absence greatly today.’

_{Main image: Thenjiwe Nkosi, Ceremony (detail), 2020, oil on canvas, 1.2 × 1.5 m. Courtesy: the artist}