AFP | Cameroonian curator Koyo Kouoh, the head of the top contemporary art museum in Africa and first African woman appointed to lead the Venice Biennale, has died Saturday, the Zeitz MOCAA museum said.
Born in 1967, Kouoh had headed the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA), in South Africa’s Cape Town, since 2019.
She was chosen last year to curate the next Biennale — one of the world’s most important contemporary art shows — opening in May 2026.
The Zeitz MOCAA “received news in the early hours of this morning, of the sudden passing of Koyo Kouoh, our beloved Executive Director and Chief Curator”, the museum said on social media.
“Out of respect”, the museum’s programming will be “suspended until further notice”, it added.
The Venice Biennale said in a statement it was “deeply saddened and dismayed” to learn of Kouoh’s “sudden and untimely passing”.
Only the second African to head the legendary art show after the late Nigerian art critic Okwui Enwezor, Kouoh had been working “with passion, intellectual rigor and vision” on the conception of the 2026 edition, it said.
She had been due to present the title and theme in Venice on May 20 this year.
“Her passing leaves an immense void in the world of contemporary art,” the Biennale said.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni expressed her “deep sorrow” for the curator’s “premature” death.
Brought up between the Cameroon coastal city of Douala and Switzerland, Kouoh set up a cutting-edge art centre — the RAW Material Company — in Dakar, Senegal.
On Saturday, the centre paid its own tribute to her, describing Kouoh as a “source of warmth, generosity and brilliance” who “always stated that people are more important than things”.
As head of the Zeitz MOCAA, she positioned the museum at the cutting edge of contemporary art by championing Pan-Africanism and promoting artists from the continent and its diaspora.
Focusing on African art was a “no-brainer” as the narrative around the continent was still largely “defined by others”, Kouoh told AFP in an interview in 2023.
“Africa is for me an idea that goes beyond borders. It’s a history that goes beyond borders,” she said.
When announcing her appointment to the Biennale in December last year, its president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco had hailed her as a “curator, scholar and influential public figure” who would bring the “most refined, young and disruptive intelligences” to the sprawling 130-year-old exhibition.