Koyo Kouoh, one of Africa’s most renowned curators, has been selected to organize the 2026 Venice Biennale, the world’s largest recurring art exhibition.
She will now become the second African-born curator to organize a biennale and the first after Okwui Enwezor, who History was made while curating the 2015 Biennale.
Cuo, who was born in Cameroon and later became a resident of Switzerland, currently serves as executive director and chief curator of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art in Africa, a museum in Cape Town, South Africa that ranks among the continent’s grandest institutions by its size. There she participated in exhibitions such as 2022’s When We See Us: A Century of Black Figures in Painting, considered a defining survey of one of today’s defining art trends, and has also contributed to Tracey Rose, among others Artists held solo exhibitions, Otopan Nkanga and Abdoulaye Konate.
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Before coming to worldwide attention for these exhibitions, Kouoh was credited with founding RAW Material Company, which she founded in 2008 in Dakar, Senegal. At a time when Senegal’s art system had few independent spaces, Kouoh designed it to provide local audiences with the opportunity to discuss art as freely as elsewhere.
She is also a familiar figure on the biennial traveling exhibition scene, having served on the curatorial team for Documenta in 2007 and 2012. In addition, she organized exhibitions as part of EVA International in Ireland and the 2018 Carnegie International Fair.
Commenting on her latest appointment, Kouoh said in a statement: “It is a once-in-a-lifetime privilege to follow in the footsteps of illustrious predecessors as artistic director and create an exhibition that I hope will carry the day.” The world means a lot and, most importantly, it means a lot to the world we want to create. Artists are visionaries and social scientists who allow us to reflect and project in ways that only this profession can offer. “
Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, president of the Biennale, said in a statement: “Her perspective as a curator, scholar and influential public figure is at odds with the most sophisticated, youngest and most… Disruptive intelligence meets. With her arrival in Venice, the Biennale confirms what it has offered the world for more than a century: to be the home of the future.”
Some worry that Buttafuoco, a journalist with no management training before taking the helm at the biennale, could have a disincentive to the storied institution. Buttafuoco’s right-wing politics have been divisive in Italy, and his support for the Brothers of Italy party has some worried he could botch the biennale.
The 2024 Biennale, the first under Buttafuoco’s leadership, focuses on queer perspectives and the Global South, and there seems to be no sign that Buttafuoco has tampered with the exhibition. But the 2024 show was also conceived before Buttafuoco took the helm, meaning Kouoh’s 2026 show will be the true test of this show.
