Koyo Kouoh, one of many international artwork world’s most outstanding figures, who had been slated to grow to be the primary African lady to curate the Venice Biennale, died on Saturday in Switzerland. She was 57.
Her dying was confirmed by the biennale’s organizers. The announcement didn’t cite a trigger or say the place in Switzerland she had died.
The biennale mentioned that Ms. Kouoh’s “sudden and premature” dying got here simply days earlier than she was scheduled to announce the title and theme of subsequent 12 months’s occasion. The assertion added that her dying “leaves an immense void on this planet of up to date artwork.”
The Venice Biennale is arguably the artwork world’s most vital occasion. Staged each two years since 1895, it all the time features a large-scale group present, organized by the curator, alongside dozens of nationwide pavilions, organized independently.
A spokeswoman for the biennale didn’t instantly reply to a request for touch upon what Ms. Kouoh’s dying would imply for subsequent 12 months’s exhibition, which is scheduled to run from Might 9 by means of Nov. 22.
Because the curator and government director of Zeitz MOCAA, one among Africa’s largest up to date artwork museums, Ms. Kouoh constructed a worldwide repute as a torchbearer for artists of colour from Africa and elsewhere, though her pursuits have been international in attain. “I’m a global curator,” she mentioned final December in an interview with the The New York Occasions.
When Ms. Kouoh arrived at Zeitz MOCAA in 2019, the museum was struggling, run by an interim director, Azu Nwagbogu. Its founding director, Mark Coetzee, had resigned amid allegations that he harassed members of his workers.
“The museum was in disaster when Koyo got here on, subsequently compounded by the pandemic” Storm Janse van Renseburg, who was then a senior curator at Zeitz MOCAA, mentioned in a 2023 interview. “She introduced it again to life.”
The artist Igshaan Adams, who held a residency place on the museum for eight months throughout Ms. Kouoh’s tenure, mentioned that she had modified the way in which the area people felt about Zeitz MOCAA. “She made me, us, care once more concerning the museum,” he mentioned. It was the primary time, Mr. Adams mentioned, that he had skilled an actual public engagement “with individuals who seem like me and communicate like me.”
Ms. Kouoh mentioned ceaselessly in interviews that she by no means anticipated to grow to be an artwork world determine. She was born in Cameroon on Dec. 24, 1967, and grew up in Douala, the nation’s largest metropolis and financial capital, earlier than shifting at age 13 to Switzerland, the place she ultimately studied enterprise administration and banking and labored with migrant girls as a social employee.
The turning level in her profession got here in her mid-20s, when she grew to become a mom. “I couldn’t think about elevating a Black boy in Europe,” Ms. Kouoh mentioned within the 2023 interview. In 1995, she moved to Dakar, Senegal, “to discover new frontiers and areas,” and after working as an unbiased curator for a number of years, she based Uncooked Materials, an artist residency program that later expanded to incorporate an exhibition house, a library and an academy that supplied a mentoring program for younger artwork professionals.
“I assumed it was wonderful that she was not only a curator however an establishment builder,” Oluremi C. Onabanjo, an affiliate curator of images on the Museum of Trendy Artwork, mentioned in a 2023 interview. “A world thinker, rooted in Africa.” She added that Ms. Kouoh “enlivened and expanded a way of risk for a technology of African curators throughout the globe.”
Whereas based mostly in Dakar, Ms. Kouoh expanded her repute as a forceful, visionary voice on the up to date artwork scene. She labored on the curatorial groups for Documenta 12 and 13 and curated the academic and inventive program of the 1-54 Modern African Artwork Honest, the Irish Modern Artwork Biennale in 2016, and different worldwide exhibitions.
Touria El Glaoui, the founding director of 1-54, mentioned in an interview that Ms. Kouoh was “a very powerful curator of artists from the African continent,” including, “She gave voice to so many skills.”
Within the 2023 interview, Ms. Kouoh mentioned that she had initially rejected the concept of taking up the directorship of Zeitz MOCAA. However after conversations with Black colleagues, she mentioned, there was “a sense that we can not let this fail. We don’t have anything like this on the continent.”
All through her profession, Ms. Kouoh pushed to carry African artists to a world that had lengthy both ignored them or typecast them. “I’m a part of that technology of African artwork professionals who’ve satisfaction and information about the fantastic thing about African tradition, which has typically been outlined by others in so many unsuitable methods,” she mentioned in the identical interview.
“I don’t consider we have to spend time correcting these narratives,” she added. “We have to inscribe different views.”
Survivors embody her associate, Philippe Mall. Full data on survivors was not instantly accessible.
Ms. Kouoh was a mentor to artists and curators all around the world, “championing individuals and concepts that she knew to be vital,” mentioned Kate Fowle, the director of the Arts Program for the Hearthland Basis, a company supporting democracy and collaboration that was based by Kate Capshaw and Steven Spielberg in 2019.
Her appointment because the curator of the 2026 Venice Biennale was welcomed by the artwork neighborhood. “She was remarkably deserving,” mentioned Adrienne Edward, the senior curator and affiliate director of curatorial packages on the Whitney Museum of American Artwork in New York. She added that it was Ms. Kouoh’s “distinctive capability to be grounded in a spot, in herself, in artists — her moral rootedness — which profoundly and particularly contoured her exhibition making.”
Talking to The Occasions after the announcement of her appointment, Ms. Kouoh mentioned she needed to create a present that “actually speaks to our instances,” including that she was an artist-centered curator. “The artists will outline the place we go,” she mentioned.
