Koyo Kouoh, the celebrated Cameroonian-born curator behind some of the most significant exhibitions of African contemporary art in recent decades, has died unexpectedly at the age of 57.
Kouoh’s death comes just months after being appointed curator of the 2026 Venice Biennale—making her the second African-born curator to lead the storied exhibition, following Okwui Enwezor’s groundbreaking edition in 2015.
The Venice Biennale announced her passing on Saturday, describing her as a figure of “passion, intellectual rigor, and vision.” The theme and title of her exhibition, which she had been developing since her appointment in December 2024, were set to be unveiled in Venice in less than two weeks.
Kouoh was widely admired for her commitment to expanding the global narrative of contemporary art beyond the the US and Europe, and in particular for her focus on African art. Since 2019, she had been executive director and chief curator of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art (Zeitz MOCAA) in Cape Town, South Africa—an institution that she helped shape into a critical platform for artists from across the continent and its diaspora.
She helped the institution gain international attention with shows such as 2022’s “When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting,” which has been widely regarded as the defining show on its subject. Three years on, the show is still traveling. Having journeyed far beyond South Africa, it can currently be seen at the Bozar arts center in Brussels.
Kouoh was also committed to fostering art scenes within Africa, most notably within Senegal. In 2008, she founded RAW Material Company in Dakar, an independent art center that is now considered one of the top art spaces within West Africa.
“I wanted to really reflect on art, on artistic practice, and to contribute to the understanding of artistic practice as its own system of thought and as a mechanism for participating in visual culture, society, politics,” she told Artforum in 2016, describing her choice to open RAW Material Company. “I wanted to think of it as a means for proposing, speculating, investigating, exploring, experimenting. As a curator, I’m interested in critical artistic practices and how they play out in society, particularly societies like ours. I believe that context defines pretty much everything that we do.”
She was acutely attentive to the ways that prevailing narratives for African art have been defined—and of who has defined them. In her Artforum interview, Kouoh described herself as part of a “second generation” of African curators that rebelled against what she described as “advocacy curating” seen in the West. Though she praised the work done by Okwui Enwezor, Olu Oguibe, and others in the US and Europe, she wanted to create shows of African art for African people.
“For me,” she said, “working in Dakar, it is important to engage with the ideas and issues that concern our region here first—to reflect on them and research them, write about them, show them—and to share them with the world only secondarily.”
And yet, she did just that, working on two editions of Documenta (in 2007 and 2012), organized Ireland’s EVA International biennial, and doing a show-within-a-show for the 2018 edition of the Carnegie International, an esteemed recurring show that takes place at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
All of this work, whether taking place within Africa or beyond it, was a form of institution-building. “It is very important to build institutions as opposed to careers,” she told ARTnews in 2019, “because those institutions will leave a legacy that promotes knowledge.”
Koyo Kouoh was born in Douala, Cameroon, in 1967. Though she moved to Zurich when she was 13 and would go on to spend more than decade in Switzerland, studying banking and business administration there. But she never forgot her roots in Cameroon. She spoke in interviews of the women in her family who had preceded her: her grandmother, a seamstress whose work gave her “access to creativity”; her great-grandmother, who was forced into a polygamous marriage when she was still a teenager.
“My great-grandmother only had her hands and her intellect to raise her four children,” Kouoh told ARTnews. “This is the family I come from. That is the essence of my feminism.”
During the ’90s, following a divorce and the birth of her son Djibril, she began to shift her attention to a new field of work. Inspired by Margaret Busby’s Daughters of Africa, a 1992 anthology of writings by women of African descent, she started—“in a very shy way,” she once said—to undertake editorial work. She edited Töchter Afrikas, a German-language anthology of her own, and she initiated longstanding connections with African artists of all kinds. One even took her to Dakar, the city with which she launched a longstanding commitment: the Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène, whom she was assigned to profile. She relocated to Dakar for good in 1996.
In Dakar, she met artist Issa Samb, who cofounded the art collective Laboratoire Agit’Art with filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty, painter El Hadji Sy, and playwright Youssoupha Dione. “But apart from the work Samb did, and the discourse he supported at his studio,” Kouoh told Artforum, “there was really nowhere to discuss art the way I think it should be discussed—which is to say, in an analytic and social way.” She wanted to change that, though she never forgot the work undertaken by Samb, whose art she surveyed for the Office for Contemporary Art Norway in Oslo in 2013.
Kouoh became known internationally in part thanks to the two editions of Bamako Encounters, the Malian photography biennial, that she organized with Simon Njami. Njami told ARTnews in 2019, “She had a will, a driving force to change things, and all the choices she made were right—without compromising. She’s not a complainer type. When something is wrong, she tries to find the way to fix it.”
RAW Material Company was established in 2008 as a riposte to the state-run art spaces in Senegal. It was independent, and most of its staff was women. Progress came slowly: RAW Material Company did not inaugurate a brick-and-mortar location open to the public until 2011. Today, it has galleries, a library, studios, a residency program, and countless other resources for the local art scene. It has been a crucial space within Senegal and a model for art spaces that have cropped up elsewhere.
Her death is a profound loss for the art world—particularly for the many artists, curators, and institutions who looked to her as both mentor and model. It remains unclear what the future holds for the 2026 Biennale, but Kouoh’s absence will be deeply felt.
