Koyo Kouoh, artwork curator because of lead 2026 Venice Biennale, dies at 57

Koyo Kouoh, the groundbreaking Swiss-Cameroonian curator who used to be to change into the primary African girl to go up the Venice Biennale, died unexpectedly on Saturday, the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa introduced.

“It is with profound sorrow that the trustees of Zeitz MOCAA announce the sudden passing of Koyo Kouoh, our beloved executive director and chief curator, on Saturday, 10 May 2025,” mentioned the museum in a observation on Monday.

Kouoh, 57, were installed price of the 61st version of the Biennale Arte, which is able to happen in Venice from April to November 2026.

Born in 1967 in Doula, Cameroon, however trained thru her teenagers and 20s in Zurich, Kouoh were government director of MOCAA in Cape Town, South Africa, since 2019. It holds the continent’s greatest choice of fresh artwork.

She used to be up to now the founding creative director of Raw Material Company, an artwork centre in Dakar, Senegal, which had a large affect on her. “It’s the place I came of age professionally, where I really became a curator and an exhibition-maker,” she not too long ago instructed the Financial Times. “Dakar made me who I am today.”

As curator of the Biennale she used to be because of provide the exhibition’s name and theme in Venice in per week’s time, on 20 May.

In a observation, the control of the Venice Biennale mentioned they have been “deeply saddened and dismayed to learn of the sudden and untimely passing of Koyo Kouoh”.

They mentioned Kouoh had “worked with passion, intellectual rigour and vision on the conception and development of the Biennale Arte 2026”.

The observation 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.”

The Biennale showed it used to be “likely to hold the press conference on 20 May”, which might even be livestreamed from its headquarters.

Zeitz MOCAA mentioned it had closed its doorways and suspended all programming till additional understand.

Kouoh moved to Switzerland at 13 and studied industry management and banking earlier than beginning a literary profession. In 1994, she co-edited Töchter Afrikas, which used to be impressed through the groundbreaking Daughters of Africa (1992), an anthology of writing through girls of African descent.

She used to be thought to be a transformational chief at Zeitz MOCAA, the place she constructed “an explicitly Pan-African, world-class programme”, in line with the New York Times, which credited her with turning round an establishment that had skilled a number of scandals.

In one in every of her ultimate interviews, Kouoh mentioned her view on mortality. “I do believe in life after death because I come from an ancestral Black education where we believe in parallel lives and realities,” she mentioned. “There is not any ‘after death’, ‘before death’ or ‘during life’. It doesn’t subject that a lot. I consider in energies – residing or lifeless – and in cosmic power.