Editor’s Note: This article was initially printed by The Art Newspaper, an editorial associate of NCS Style.
NCS
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The curator Koyo Kouoh, an enormous of the up to date artwork world who tirelessly championed African artists and have become the first lady from the continent to curate the Venice Biennale, died on Saturday, age 57.
Her demise, in a hospital in Basel, Switzerland, was introduced in a press release by the Biennale. While the official trigger was not disclosed, her husband, Philippe Mall, mentioned she had died of most cancers following a current prognosis, in response to The New York Times.
Kouoh had been appointed in December to curate the subsequent version of the Biennale, the world’s most prestigious worldwide artwork exhibition. In its assertion, the group mentioned: “Koyo Kouoh worked with passion, intellectual rigour and vision on the conception and development of the Biennale Arte 2026. The presentation of the exhibition’s title and theme was due to take place in Venice on May 20.”
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.”
Giorgia Meloni, the Italian prime minister, said in a press release: “I express my deep condolences for the untimely and sudden death of Koyo Kouoh.”
Asked how her demise would possibly have an effect on the subsequent Biennale, a spokesperson instructed The Art Newspaper: “We’ll know on May 20.” The spokesperson clarified that the convention was nonetheless scheduled to happen on that date.
The Biennale is scheduled to run from May 9 to November 22, 2026. The group had forged Kouoh’s appointment as reinforcing its cutting-edge repute. In December, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, the Biennale’s president, praised her “refined, young, and disruptive intelligence” in a press assertion.
In the similar announcement, Kouoh referred to as her appointment a “once-in-a-lifetime honor and privilege,” describing the Biennale as “the center of gravity for art for over a century.” She expressed hope that her exhibition would “carry meaning for the world we currently live in — and most importantly, for the world we want to make.”
Kouoh was born in Douala, Cameroon, in 1967, and moved to Switzerland at 13. After finding out administration and banking, she labored as a social employee helping migrant girls earlier than immersing herself in the artwork world and returning to Africa in 1996.
In Dakar, Senegal, she based RAW Material Company, an unbiased artwork middle. In 2016, she joined the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA) in Cape Town, serving as curator and executive director. There, she grew to become a number one advocate for Black artists from Africa and past, curating, amongst different initiatives, a significant retrospective of the South African artist Tracey Rose in 2022.
Beyond Africa, she gained popularity of exhibitions resembling “Body Talk: Feminism, Sexuality and the Body in the Works of Six African Women Artists,” which opened at WIELS Contemporary Art Centre in Brussels in 2015, and “Still (the) Barbarians” at the 2016 Ireland Biennial in Limerick, which explored Ireland’s postcolonial situation in the context of the 1916 Easter Rising centenary.
“Kouoh did not leave a title for the Biennale, but she did leave a grammar: the urgency to rewrite the rules of the curatorial game,” wrote Artuu, an Italian artwork journal, in its obituary. “Koyo Kouoh’s theoretical legacy… does not propose new aesthetic models to frame, but undermines the very foundations of cultural hierarchy. It does not offer easy solutions, but asks uncomfortable questions: Who decides what is ‘art’? Who has the right to tell? What is left to say when language itself has been historically colonized?”
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