Remembering Koyo Kouoh, one of the most influential curators in the global art world, and one of its most original thought leaders

Koyo Kouoh was one of the most influential curators in the global art world, and one of its most original thought leaders: a compelling, precise speaker with an understated wit and elegance of personal style; a lover of good food and drink; a convener of people, an opener of doors; and a builder of institutions through academic, philosophical and curatorial rigour.

For the past six years Kouoh had been a transformative executive director and chief curator of Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz Mocaa), in Cape Town, one of the largest museums in Africa. She turned a fledgling institution into one that enjoys both local community engagement in South Africa and international attention for promoting a complete and nuanced understanding—founded on critical seriousness—of the work of artists from Africa and the African diaspora.

In December 2024, Kouoh was appointed curator of the international exhibition at the 2026 Venice Biennale—the first African woman to be offered the commission—and her death, at the age of 57, came just 10 days before she was due to announce the biennale’s title and themes. Speaking to the New York Times at the time of her appointment, she said: “My professional background is certainly rooted in an African space, but I’m an international curator. It’s not going to be an African biennale. It’s going to be an international biennale—as it always is.”

In a posthumously published article in The Guardian she indicated that her plans for the biennale went beyond art to “people, societies, and the ways in which our histories and futures are intertwined. What happens in Dakar resonates in Kuala Lumpur, just as shifts in Kuala Lumpur will echo in Seoul.” Following Kouoh’s death, Venice Biennale organisers said they would make an announcement about exhibition plans on 27 May.

The challenge of Zeitz Mocaa

Kouoh first took a role at Zeitz Mocaa in October 2018 as a member of a curatorial advisory group. She had no ambitions to be a museum director and felt some misgivings about taking on the permanent leadership role when it was offered to her five months later, but accepted the challenge because, as she later said, she could not let such an important venture fail.

“I’m a fixer,” Kouoh told The Art Newspaper last year. “I like to take complicated institutions and make them sustainable.” The situation at Zeitz Mocaa in March 2019 was certainly complicated when she took charge of the 18-month-old museum—launched in September 2017, with a wave of publicity, in a towering converted grain silo site on Cape Town’s waterfront—10 months after its first executive director and chief curator had been suspended by the museum’s trustees following allegations of staff harassment.

Kouoh’s first fix was to present a business plan and then to persuade the museum’s co-founder and chair, Jochen Zeitz—the German former chief executive of the Harley-Davidson motorbike firm and the Puma sportswear brand—to donate his important collection of African contemporary art to the museum. It had previously been on loan. She enlarged the board of trustees, turned it into a paying board, and set up a global council and an American Friends organisation to promote the museum’s work overseas. The global council, founded in 2022, had grown from five to 15 members by 2024, with artist members including Yinka Shonibare, Carsten Höller and Oscar Murillo.

In successfully setting Zeitz Mocaa back on course, while dealing with the existential disruption of daily life brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic, Kouoh put a clear, confident, curatorial mark on the institution. A radical first step, designed to build a strong relationship with the locality, was Home is Where the Art is (2020-21), an exhibition where Cape Town residents were asked to bring—using seven pick-up points around the city because of pandemic restrictions—anything that they wanted to see exhibited in the museum. At the same time, Kouoh hosted an online summit, Radical Solidarity, to bring, as she put it during a talk give in 2024 at Astrup Fearnley Museet in Oslo, on institution building, some “humility to the museum. To put the hubris in check”. “We could not go back and reopen the museum,” she said, “without acknowledging what we were going through in Covid and in the city.”

In 2022 Kouoh put on Tracey Rose: Shooting Down Babylon, a full-scale monograph exhibition on the radical South African artist, spread across all three floors of Zeitz Mocaa’s exhibition space and addressing race, identity and the post-Apartheid development of South Africa through multiple media. In 2024 Kouoh referred to this exhibition as an example of how her generation of African curators had escaped the obligation felt by their predecessors from the 1970s to the 1990s to employ “advocacy curating”—something she admitted to doing earlier in her career—designed to show “that there ‘is’ contemporary art in Africa”. “I am part of the third generation,” she said, “who turned the gaze towards ourselves, rather than trying to prove things to others.” The Rose exhibition reflected her determination to mount African single-artist exhibitions and her focus on female artists, on Black feminism and Black female artists. She was, she said in 2024, a “fundamental PanAfricanist. I belong to the entire continent, and the continent belongs to me.”

When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting (2022-23)—inspired by Ava DuVernay’s 2019 miniseries When They See Us, based on the miscarriage of justice in the 1989 Central Park Jogger rape case—was mounted soon after the Rose monograph. It enabled Kouoh to show 200 works of art from 74 institutional and private lenders located in 26 countries that explore Black joy, its political power, and Black emancipation, through a rich historical and theoretical continuum. The show—which brings together paintings by artists from South Africa with those by practitioners from Cuba, Brazil and the United States to explore experiences shared across Black geographies around the globe—is at present on tour at Bozar, Brussels (until 10 August).

Liza Essers—founder and owner of the South Africa-based Goodman Gallery, with additional galleries in London and New York—speaking on The Art Newspaper’s podcast The Week in Art, reflected on Kouoh’s ability to “bring people along” as a curator and museum director. “If one reflects on what she did for Zeitz [Mocaa] particularly and the whole African and South African art community, the amount of attention that we receive from the international art community, whether it be foundations of Japanese museums or major artists like Julie Mehretu, everyone came along and [Kouoh] shone a light for us both on South Africa and on the African continent. [The] light that she shone as a result of bringing everyone along is something significant.”

A daughter of Cameroon

Kouoh was born in Douala, Cameroon’s main port and commercial centre, in 1967. At the age of 13 she moved to Switzerland to join her mother, and studied business administration and banking before becoming a cultural writer and working on grass-roots arts events, including the showing of African films in Zurich. In 1995 she travelled for the first time to Dakar, the capital of Senegal, after being commissioned to interview the leading Senegalese film-maker Ousmane Sembène. She got as little out of Sembène as every other would-be interviewer, but on that visit had a life-changing meeting with the artist Issa Samb—an actor in theatre and cinema, a writer of poetry, essays and novels, and engaged in installing, performing, painting and sculpting and social work. In 1974, Samb had been one of the co-founders—with the filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty, the painter El Hadji Sy and the playwright Youssoupha Dione—of the influential art collective Laboratoire Agit’Art. Samb was, Kouoh said, a total artist, impossible to categorise.

Meeting Samb inspired Kouoh to move in 1996, with her young son, to Dakar, the city that became her spiritual home and the place that made her professionally. In 2008—after more than 10 years in Senegal, but in search of a forum for holding discussions on art in an analytic and social way—she became founding artistic director of the RAW Material Company Center for Art, Knowledge and Society. Under her leadership, RAW has grown into a ground-breaking institute that, since acquiring a permanent base in midtown Dakar in 2011, has become home to exhibitions, artist residencies, an academy and research programmes, with a library of books and film.

Without Samb and Laboratoire Agit’Art, Kouoh said last year, RAW would not exist. People who come to follow seven-week courses at the RAW Academy, she said, start by unlearning everything they have learnt, before learning afresh how to think. One of the RAW publications she was most proud of was her book Word! Word? Word! Issa Samb and the Undecipherable Form (2013). The following year she curated Samb’s first solo UK show, From the Ethics of Acting to the Empire Without Signs (2014), at Rivington Place, in London.

Before joining Zeitz, Kouoh had built an international name over more than two decades as an independent curator from her base in Dakar. She worked with the curatorial team for documenta 12 (2007) and documenta 13 (2012) in Kassel, Germany, and led the 1-54 Forum, the educational programme of the contemporary African art fair, in London and New York. She also curated international exhibitions including the group show Body Talk: Feminism, Sexuality and the Body in the Work of Six African Women Artists, first shown at Wiels, in Brussels, in 2015, before touring. She was also curator of Still (the) Barbarians, the 37th EVA International, Ireland’s biennial, in Limerick (2016).

A mentor with a light style

Kouoh was a figure of distinctive personal style, who was “consciously addicted”, as she would put it in conference biographies, “to shoes, textiles and food”. She understood the importance of personal connection, and of conversations held at the bar at art events; all part of her full professional life—lived latterly between Basel, Cape Town and Dakar—as curator, adviser and member of international juries and selection committees. The art historian Thomas Girst, responsible for the BMW Group’s global cultural engagement, remembered Kouoh, in an article for the German magazine Monopol, as someone approachable, brimful of humour, who often referred to her conversation partners, in Swiss-German, as “Schätzli” (or “sweetheart”).

Kouoh saw the importance of mentorship, not in a hierarchical sense, as she wrote in The Guardian, but in “fostering environments where younger professionals feel seen, supported and empowered”. The Zambia-born artist Nolan Oswald Dennis, speaking on The Week in Art, reflected on how Kouoh made him feel seen. She was, he says, “a huge presence, a huge personality, but working with her, she was incredibly light. She would come into conversations and listen and maybe say one or two things, which would disturb the whole room and we’d have to think about it for a few weeks.”

Dennis—whose exhibition Understudies is on at Zeitz Mocaa until the end of July—reflects on how Kouoh “brought people along”, of the importance she placed on structures that enable change, and of “the way that people are invited into spaces, not just the spaces themselves, but the practices of welcoming and of just sitting and talking and having tea”. He tells of how her concern with fashion helped form a personal connection when both were at the Liverpool Biennial in 2023: “We’re talking about the work and Koyo really latched onto my shoes and kept returning to these shoes and took a picture of these shoes … There’s the art world and the artwork and the work of putting on an exhibition. But I think Koyo was also always conscious and paying attention to the person she was speaking to, you know, the kind of minutiae of your presence around her. And I think it made the exhibition feel for me both this huge honour and this incredibly nerve-wracking experience [and], at the same time, something really light and familiar and easy.”

‘Decolonisation as a practice of reconstruction’

Kouoh’s work addressed tough, complex subjects, not least that of decolonisation. At EVA International in 2016 she showed her global view on the subject as Still (the) Barbarians—drawing on Constantine Cavafy’s 1898 poem Waiting for the Barbarians—marked the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland and reflected on that country’s colonial past. For Dennis, Kouoh’s approach to decolonisation was “to build decolonisation as a practice of reconstruction and building new structures. And I think part of this practice of building is a deep concern with who you build with and the importance of building together.”

The cover image for the Bozar iteration of When We See Us is Kudzanai-Violet Hwami’s An Evening in Mazowe (2019), lent by the leading Miami collector Jorge M. Pérez. The painting, from the Repose section of the exhibition, shows a woman who is relaxed, watchful, grounded but wearing a half-smile. A caption in the original Zeitz Mocaa installation read: “Repose … This is the dreamscape for the slow wondrous living, for radical self-preservation, for mind-body-soul connection, and for unapologetic rest.”

That image of “radical self-preservation” and the themes of the exhibition—“The Everyday, Joy and Revelry, Repose, Sensuality, Spirituality, and Triumph and Emancipation”—feel like metaphors for the rich, unforgettable qualities, a mix of lightness, wit and rigour, that Koyo Kouoh brought to the art world and to all who encountered her.

Marie-Nöelle Koyo Kouoh; born Douala, Cameroon, 24 December 1967; executive director and chief curator, Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz Mocaa), Cape Town 2019-25; died Basel, Switzerland, 10 May 2025