Venice Art Biennale, Koyo Kouoh director of the 2026 edition

Koyo Kouoh, Cameroonian by birth and raised in Switzerland, 57 years old, is the new director of the Visual Arts Sector of the Venice Biennale, with the specific task of curating the 61st International Art Exhibition in 2026. This was decided by the Board of Directors of the institution, on the proposal of president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco. The appointment was approved on Tuesday 5 November and was made known today, about ten days after the closing of the 2024 Art Biennale curated by the Brazilian Adriano Pedrosa.

Koyo Kouoh (Cameroon/Switzerland) has been executive director and chief curator of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA) in Cape Town, South Africa since 2019. She was the founding artistic director of RAW Material Company, a center for art, knowledge and society in Dakar, Senegal. He was part of the curatorial team of Documenta 12 (2007) and Documenta 13 (2012) in Kassel, Germany. In 2020 he received the Grand Prix Meret Oppenheim, a prestigious Swiss award that recognizes achievements in the fields of art, architecture, criticism and exhibitions. He lives and works between Cape Town (South Africa), Dakar (Senegal) and Basel (Switzerland).

“The appointment of Koyo Kouoh as artistic director of the Visual Arts Sector is the recognition of a broad horizon of vision in the dawn of a day full of new words and eyes – declared the president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco -. Her gaze as a curator, scholar and protagonist on the public scene meets, in fact, the most refined, young and disruptive minds. With her here in Venice, the Biennale confirms what it has been offering to the world for over a century: being the home of future”.

Koyo Kouoh commented on the new assignment with these words: “The International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale has been the center of gravity of art for over a century. Artists, art and museum professionals, collectors, gallery owners, philanthropists and an ever-growing audience gather in this mythical place every two years to catch the pulse of the Zeitgeist It is a unique honor and privilege to follow in the footsteps of illustrious predecessors in the role of artistic director and create an exhibition that I hope may have meaning for the world we currently live in and, more importantly, for the world we want to build. Artists are the visionaries and social scientists who allow us to reflect and project in ways that only this profession allows I am grateful to the Board of Directors of the Biennale and in particular to its President, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, for entrusting me with this important mission and I look forward to working with the entire team.”

Koyo Kouoh has organized significant exhibitions such as “Body Talk: Feminism, Sexuality and the Body in the Works of Six African Women Artists,” first presented at Wiels in Brussels, Belgium, in 2015. She curated “Still (the) Barbarians”, the 37th edition of Eva International, the Irish Biennial in Limerick in 2016 and participated in the 57th Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (United United), with the widely documented exhibition project “Dig Where You Stand” (2018), an exhibition within an exhibition, drawn from the collections of the Carnegie Museums of Art and Natural History. She curated the Educational and Artistic Program of 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair in London and New York from 2013 to 2017. She was the initiator of the research project “Saving Bruce Lee: African and Arab Cinema in the Era of Soviet Cultural Diplomacy “, co-curated with Rasha Salti at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, Russia, and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, Germany (2015-2018).

Active in the critical field of the artistic community in a pan-African and international perspective, Kouoh boasts a long list of publications, including “When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting” (2022), released on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name opened at Zeitz MOCAA in November 2022; “Shooting Down Babylon” (2022), the first monograph on the work of South African artist Tracey Rose; “Breathing Out of School: RAW Académie” (2021); “Condition Report on Art History in Africa” (2020); “Word!Word?Word! Issa Samb and The Undecipherable Form” (2013); and “Condition Report on Building Art Institutions in Africa” (2012), to name a few. From 2013 to 2017 she held the role of Curator of the Educational and Artistic Program of the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair in London and New York, the first and only international art fair dedicated to contemporary African art and its diaspora. During his tenure at Zeitz MOCAA, his curatorial work focused on in-depth solo exhibitions of African and African-descended artists. In this context, he organized exhibitions with Otobong Nkanga, Johannes Phokela, Senzeni Marasela, Abdoulaye Konaté, Tracey Rose and Mary Evans.