Koyo Kouoh

(Lard Buurman, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons) On the 10th of May, the Camerioonian-Swiss curator Koyo Kouoh unexpectedly passed away at the age of 57. She served as executive director and chief curator of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town, South Africa, and was recently appointed to serve as the 2026 Venice Biennale's artistic director until her sudden death.

Kouoh was raised in Cameroon and later Switzerland. As an adult, she moved to Dakar, Senegal, to build an art career, working as an independent curator and founding an artist's residency and exhibition space, the RAW Material Company. In 2019, she was appointed the director of the recently opened Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa. From 2014 to 2022, Kouoh was annually named one of the 100 most influential people in the contemporary art world by ArtReview. Another recent exhibition mounted under Kouoh's leadership at Zeitz MOCAA was When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting, which traveled to BOZAR, Brussels.

In December 2024, Kouoh was appointed curator of the 61st Venice Art Biennale, the exhibition's title and theme being scheduled to take place in Venice on 20 May 2025, with the opening set for 9 May 2026. She was the first African woman to have been chosen to curate the Biennale. Kouoh died suddenly on 10 May 2025, at the age of 57, in a hospital in Basel, Switzerland.

(Source: Wikipedia accessed on 16 May 2025)