Black Arts & Culture Feature:
- Founded RAW Material Company in Dakar (2008), a research, publishing, teaching and exhibition centre building Africa’s own critical art infrastructure.
- Transformed Zeitz MOCAA (from 2019), stabilizing governance, curatorial programme, collection strategy and restoring international credibility.
- Appointed Artistic Director of La Biennale di Venezia, she defined title, framework, 111 participants, catalogue authors and scenography for In Minor Keys.
- Advocated art’s emotional, sensory habitat; argued against obliging artists to perform their Africanness, valuing opacity, refusal and relational geographies.
Koyo Kouoh trained in banking administration. It is the sort of biographical detail that gets mentioned once in an obituary and then dropped, and it is in fact the key to everything that followed.
The art world produces curators in reasonable quantity. What it produces far less often is a curator who understands that an exhibition is a budget, a lease, a payroll and a governance structure before it is an idea — and who can therefore build institutions that outlast their founder. Kouoh built two. She died on 10 May 2025, aged 57, twelve months before the Venice Biennale she had conceived opened without her.
From Douala to Zurich: An Unorthodox Route Into Curating
Kouoh was born in Cameroon in 1967 and raised in Zurich, where she studied banking administration. She came to culture sideways rather than through the art-historical pipeline, and the outsider’s route shows in the work: a persistent impatience with institutions that mistake discourse for infrastructure, and a corresponding respect for the unglamorous machinery that keeps a building open.
Her international profile was built through contributions to documenta 12 and documenta 13, and through her role shaping the programme of the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair — the fair that did more than any other single commercial platform to normalise African contemporary art in London, New York and Marrakech.
RAW Material Company: Building an Institution in Dakar
In 2008 Kouoh founded RAW Material Company in Dakar, a centre for art, knowledge and society. It is not large. It has been, by a considerable margin, one of the most consequential art institutions on the African continent.
The significance lies in what it refused to be. RAW was not a kunsthalle importing a European model into Senegal, nor a gallery, nor a residency programme with a gift shop. It was conceived as a place where research, publishing, teaching and exhibition-making occupied the same building and the same conversation — on the premise that African contemporary art needed its own critical infrastructure rather than better access to somebody else’s.
A generation of West African curators passed through it. When Kouoh needed to convene her Venice team for the decisive planning meeting on In Minor Keys, in April 2025 and weeks before her death, she did not convene them in Venice or Zurich. She convened them at RAW, in Dakar.
Zeitz MOCAA: Repairing a Museum
In 2019 Kouoh became Executive Director and Chief Curator of Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town, arriving at an institution in genuine difficulty. The museum had opened in 2017 in Thomas Heatherwick’s spectacular grain-silo conversion to enormous international attention, and had then endured a founding period turbulent enough to raise real questions about whether it would survive as a serious institution at all.
She spent six years answering that question. By the time of her death, Zeitz MOCAA had a coherent curatorial programme, functional governance, a collection strategy and international credibility — which is a duller list than the architecture deserves and a far more valuable one. Rescuing an institution is less photogenic than founding one, and considerably harder.
The Venice Appointment and What She Left Behind
Kouoh was named Artistic Director of the Visual Arts Department of La Biennale di Venezia in November 2024 — the first African woman ever appointed to the role, and only the second African-born curator after Okwui Enwezor in 2015.
She had roughly six months. In that time she settled the title, wrote the theoretical framework, selected all 111 participants, appointed Wolff Architects of Cape Town to design the scenography, named the catalogue authors and defined the exhibition’s architecture. Her curatorial text reached the Biennale’s president on 8 April 2025. She died on 10 May.
The framework she left is not what most people expect from a curator with her politics. In Minor Keys explicitly declines to be a commentary on world events. It proposes instead a return to what Kouoh considered art’s actual habitat — the emotional, the sensory, the subjective — structured less like a thesis than like a free-jazz ensemble, with recurring motifs of procession, rest, and the Creole garden running through it. The argument, made by a woman who had spent her career on the political economy of African art, is that African artists should not be obliged to perform their Africanness for Western consumption in order to be taken seriously, and that opacity and refusal are legitimate artistic positions.
Her chosen team — advisers Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Hélène Pereira and Rasha Salti, editor-in-chief Siddhartha Mitter and research assistant Rory Tsapayi — carried the exhibition through with the support of her family. The Golden Lions for Lifetime Achievement went unawarded this year, because Kouoh had not named recipients and the Biennale declined to choose on her behalf.
The Kouoh Line, Visible on the Walls
Her curatorial biography is legible in the exhibition if you know where to look. Godfried Donkor shows works first made for a 2017 Gallery 1957 exhibition Kouoh curated. The late Senegalese artist Issa Samb — founder of Laboratoire Agit’Art and Kouoh’s own mentor — appears as one of the show’s two lodestar figures. Wolff Architects came from Cape Town. The planning happened in Dakar.
An exhibition of 111 artists assembled in six months by someone who knew she was working against a clock is, inevitably, a map of a life’s relationships. Kouoh described her selection as a relational geography of encounters with artists over a lifetime. It is difficult to read that phrase now without hearing something else in it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who was Koyo Kouoh?
A Cameroonian-Swiss curator, born in 1967 and raised in Zurich, who founded RAW Material Company in Dakar in 2008, led Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town from 2019, and was appointed Artistic Director of the 2026 Venice Biennale in November 2024. She died on 10 May 2025.
Was Koyo Kouoh the first African curator of the Venice Biennale?
She was the first African woman to hold the role. The Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor was the first African-born curator to direct the exhibition, at the 56th edition in 2015.
How much of the 2026 Biennale did she actually design?
Effectively all of the curatorial substance: the title, the theoretical framework, the full artist list, the catalogue authors, the scenography team and the exhibition architecture. What she did not do was oversee the physical installation.
What is RAW Material Company?
A centre for art, knowledge and society founded by Kouoh in Dakar in 2008, combining research, publishing, education and exhibitions. It hosted the decisive planning meeting for the 2026 Biennale in April 2025.
Why were no Golden Lions for Lifetime Achievement awarded in 2026?
Kouoh died before nominating recipients, and the Biennale left the category unawarded rather than select in her place.
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