Koyo Kouoh has been appointed the curator of the 61st International Art Exhibition to be held in 2026. The Board of La Biennale di Venezia met on Tuesday the 5th of November 2024 and upon the recommendation of President Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, Koyo Kouoh was appointed as Director of the Visual Arts Department and was given the specific task of curating the 61st International Art Exhibition to be held in 2026.
Kouoh is a Cameroonian-Swiss curator who has served as the Executive Director and Chief Curator of Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA) in Cape Town since 2019. Prior to this appointment, she was the founding Artistic Director of RAW Material Company, a centre for art, knowledge and society in Dakar, Senegal, as well as part of the curatorial teams for documenta 12 (2007) and documenta 13 (2012). Kouoh is the recipient of the Grand Prix Meret Oppenheim 2020, the Swiss Grand Award for Art that honours achievements in the fields of art, architecture, critique and exhibitions. She lives and works alternately in Cape Town, South Africa; Dakar, Senegal; and Basel, Switzerland.
Kouoh has organised meaningful and timely exhibitions such as ‘Body Talk: Feminism, Sexuality and the Body in the Works of Six African Women Artists’, first shown at Wiels in Brussels, Belgium in 2015. She curated ‘Still (the) Barbarians’ at the 37th EVA International, the Ireland Biennial in Limerick in 2016 and participated in the 57th Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the United States, with the deeply researched exhibition project ‘Dig Where You Stand’ (2018). Kouoh has served as Curator of the Educational and Artistic Programme of 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair in London, UK and New York, US, 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’, which she co-curated with Rasha Salti at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, Russia and Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, Germany (2015-2018).
Active in the critical field of the arts community in a pan-African and international scope, Kouoh has a remarkable list of publications under her name, including ‘When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting’ (2022), which accompanied the eponymous show that opened at Zeitz MOCAA in November 2022; ‘Shooting Down Babylon’ (2022), the first monograph of 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?Word! Issa Samb and The Undecipherable Form’ (2013); and ‘Condition Report on Building Art Institutions in Africa’ (2012), to name a few. During her tenure at Zeitz MOCAA, her curatorial work focuses on in-depth solo exhibitions by African and African-descent artists. As such, she has organised exhibitions with Otobong Nkanga, Johannes Phokela, Senzeni Marasela, Abdoulaye Konaté, Tracy Rose and Mary Evans.
