Curator Koyo Kouoh, the first African woman tapped to helm the Venice Biennale, died overnight. Her home institution, the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA), in Cape Town, South Africa, where she was executive director and chief curator, confirmed her passing in an Instagram post but did not mention a cause of death, only indicating that it was sudden.

Kouoh, the Venice Biennale said in a statement, had “worked with passion, intellectual rigor, and vision on the conception and development of the Biennale Arte 2026.” It added: “Her passing leaves an immense void in the world of contemporary art and in the international community of artists, curators, and scholars who had the privilege of knowing and admiring her extraordinary human and intellectual commitment.”

Kouoh, born in Cameroon in 1967, was tapped to curate the 2026 edition of the Venice Biennale in December. She was raised in Zurich, Switzerland and lived between Cape Town, South Africa; Dakar, Senegal; and Basel, Switzerland. In 2007 and 2012, she joined the curatorial teams for documenta 12 and 13 in Kassel, Germany. She was also on the search committee that chose Polish curator Adam Szymczyk as artistic director for documenta 14. Between 2013 and 2017, Kouoh was curator of the artistic program of 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair. Since 2009, she was the co-founding artistic director of Raw Material Company art center in Dakar.

“Over the last two decades Ms. Kouoh has become one of Africa’s preeminent curators and art managers through a combination of a relaxed demeanor, a sharp eye, a gift for languages (she is fluent in French, German, English and Italian, and knows some Russian) and a keen interest in all aspects of the arts,” wrote the New York Times in 2015, on the occasion of her exhibition “Body Talk,” which included six African female artists, at Lund Konsthall in Sweden.

Koyo Kouoh at the closing ceremony of the 69th Berlinale International Film Festival Berlin in 2019. Photo: Matthias Nareyek/Getty Images.

Her landmark achievement at Zeitz MOCAA, wrote Artnet News’s Jo Lawson-Tancred on the occasion of her Venice appointment, was the 2022 exhibition and publication “When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting.” It spotlighted a century of work by artists from Africa and the global African Diaspora and was the biggest exploration of Black self-representation and subjectivities to date.

She also served on the boards of the German Academic Exchange Service, the Vera List Center Prize for Art and Politics at the New School in New York, and the Celeste Prize, an international contemporary arts prize, reported the Times in 2015.

 

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If she was seen as a champion of the contemporary African art scene, said the Times, she was not necessarily at ease in that role.

“I am interested in working, in making this practice recognized, respected, acknowledged, seen,” she said. “I do not necessarily think the heightened visibility of African contemporary art is due to a heightened interest in the West. It is just due to an increased savviness of African art professionals. There are more professionals in the fields, doing amazing things. And ultimately, this is the cause for attention.”