Cameroonian curator Koyo Kouoh will become the first African woman to oversee the 61st Venice Biennale in 2026, The organization announced yesterday (December 3).
Since May 2019, Kouoh has served as Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town, South Africa, one of the largest contemporary art museums on the African continent. During her tenure, she organized solo exhibitions featuring African and African diaspora artists such as Otobong Nkanga, Mary Evans and Tracey Rose.
Prior to this, she was the founding artistic director of RAW Material Company, an artist residency, exhibition space and experimental research institute in Dakar since 2008. When first launched in 2013, 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fairs in London and New York played an important role in its development, leading the way. Curated for eight consecutive editions. She was also the curator of the 37th EVA International Biennial of Irish Contemporary Art in 2016; titled still a savageThe exhibition focuses on postcolonial legacies and the lasting impact of colonialism.
In addition to his curatorial work, Kouoh has authored several books on art criticism and history centered on Pan-African and Black art, including word! word? Word!: Issa Sam and the Undecipherable Form (2013) and When We See Us: A Century of Black Figures in Painting (2022), to accompany the exhibition of the same name she curated at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art.
Kouoh said in a statement that it would be a “once in a lifetime honor” to lead the next edition of the Venice Film Festival Biennale.
“Artists are visionaries and social scientists who allow us to reflect and project in ways that only this profession can offer,” she added.
Founded in 1895, the Venice Biennale is the longest-running contemporary art exhibition in the world. Attendance at the festival peaked in 2022, attracting more than 800,000 visitors, and this year’s festival, curated by Brazilian museum director Adriano Pedrosa, once again attracted nearly 700,000 visitors. But in its roughly 130-year history, the Biennale has only had one African-born artistic director: the late Nigerian Curator Okwui Enwezor hosted the event in 2015.
Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, President of the Biennale, said: “The appointment of Koyo Kouoh as Director of the Visual Arts Department is a recognition of the broad horizons at the dawn of a day full of new words and new perspectives.”
