Koyo Kouoh, one of Africa’s pre-eminent curators, will oversee the 61st edition of the Venice Biennale, the organizers of the world’s longest-running contemporary art exhibition announced on Tuesday.
Kouoh, who was born in Cameroon, is currently the chief curator and executive director of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town, known as Zeitz MOCAA. She will be the first African woman to curate the Biennale.
In a telephone interview from Miami, where she is attending the Art Basel fair, Kouoh, 56, said she was “ecstatic” about the appointment.
She wants to create a show that “really speaks to our times,” she said, “and particularly speaks to where we want to go.” Although she already had “multiple ideas” about what the exhibition could look like, Kouoh said she was an “artist-centered curator” who would be guided by conversations with the show’s exhibitors.
“The artists will define where we go,” she said.
First held in 1895, the Biennale is one of the art world’s most important events. It includes a large-scale group show, organized by the curator, and dozens of national pavilions, which participating countries stage independently.
This year’s edition, whose main exhibition was overseen by the Brazilian museum director Adriano Pedrosa, attracted almost 700,000 visitors before it closed last month. But Pedrosa’s show, which drew attention to overlooked queer and Indigenous artists, received mixed reviews.
Many art world observers had expected the Biennale to appoint a conservative figure to lead the 2026 edition, after Italy’s right-wing government named Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, a contrarian journalist, as the president of the organization that stages the Biennale. Kouoh said Buttafuoco clearly “did his homework” before appointing her, adding, “This is what counts.”
The Biennale has “always been kind of progressive,” Kouoh said, adding that the makeup of Italy’s government — which funds most of the exhibition and appoints the Biennale president — seemed to make little difference. It always gave the Biennale the “autonomy to really be at the cutting edge,” she said.
Kouoh has been one of Africa’s most prominent art world figures for over a decade, though she started out studying business administration and banking in Switzerland. In 2008, she founded Raw Material, a residency program and exhibition space, in Dakar, Senegal. Eleven years later, she was tapped to lead the Zeitz MOCAA, one of Africa’s largest contemporary art museums.
There, Kouoh staged major shows including “When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting” and a Tracey Rose retrospective that traveled to the Queens Museum in New York.
Outside those projects, Kouoh has also worked on the curatorial teams of several biennials as well as two editions of Documenta, the major art show held every five years in Kassel, Germany.
Touria El Glaoui, the founding director of the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, where Kouoh has also curated education programs, said Kouoh was “a shaper of opinion” who cared about bringing attention to the “next generation” of artists. Whatever Kouoh curates in Venice “will surprise,” El Glaoui added.
So to anybody expecting her to prioritize African artists, Kouoh had a message. “My professional background is certainly rooted in an African space,” she said, “but I’m an international curator.”
“It’s not going to be an African Biennale,” Kouoh added. “It’s going to be an international Biennale — as it always is.”
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