Cameroonian curator Koyo Kouoh will be the first African woman to oversee the Venice Biennale for its 61st edition in 2026, the organization announced yesterday, December 3.
Since May 2019, Kouoh has served as the executive director and chief curator of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA) in Cape Town, South Africa, one of the continent’s largest contemporary art museums. During her tenure, she has organized solo shows centering on African and African diasporic artists like Otobong Nkanga, Mary Evans, and Tracey Rose.
Prior to this role, she was the founding artistic director of RAW Material Company, an artist residency, exhibition space, and experimental study academy in Dakar, since 2008. In addition, she played a significant role in the development of the London and New York-based 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair when it initially launched in 2013, leading its curation for eight editions in a row. She was also the curator of the 37th EVA International, Ireland’s biennial of contemporary art, in 2016; titled Still (the) Barbarians, the exhibition centered on post-colonial legacies and the enduring impact of colonialism.
Beyond her curatorial work, Kouoh has authored several books of art criticism and history centered on pan-African and Black art, including Word! Word? Word!: Issa Samb and the Undecipherable Form (2013) and When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting (2022), which accompanied an eponymous show she curated at Zeitz MOCAA.
In a statement, Kouoh said it was a “once-in-a-lifetime honor and privilege” to lead the next Venice Biennale.
“Artists are the visionaries and social scientists who allow us to reflect and project in ways afforded only to this line of work,” she added.
Established in 1895, the Venice Biennale is the world’s longest-running contemporary art show. Its attendance peaked in 2022 when the festival drew over 800,000 visitors, and this year’s edition, curated by Brazilian museum director Adriano Pedrosa, saw another strong turnout of nearly 700,000 visitors. But in its roughly 130-year history, the Biennale has only had one other African-born artistic director: the late Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor, who led the event in 2015.
“The appointment of Koyo Kouoh as the director of the Visual Arts Sector is the acknowledgment of a broad horizon of vision at the dawn of a day profuse with new words and eyes,” the Biennale’s President Pietrangelo Buttafuoco said.
