The Cameroonian curator Koyo Kouoh has been appointed the first African woman to lead the Venice Biennale, one of the world’s most important contemporary art shows.
The 57-year-old has headed the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA) in Cape Town since 2019 and will curate the next biennale in 2026.
Biennale president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco hailed her Tuesday as a “curator, scholar and influential public figure” who would bring the “most refined, young and disruptive intelligences” to the sprawling 130-year-old exhibition, which draws hundreds of thousands of art lovers to the Italian city every two years.
Before running Zeitz MOCAA, Africa’s top contemporary art museum, Kouoh founded the RAW Material Company in Dakar, Senegal. She was brought up between the Cameroon coastal city of Douala and Switzerland.
Kouoh said it was a “once-in-a-lifetime honour” to be asked to lead “this mythical site to feel the pulse of the zeitgeist”.
She said she hoped her show would “carry meaning for the world we currently live in — and most importantly, for the world we want to make.”
Only the second African to head the Biennale after the late Nigerian art critic Okwui Enwezor, who took the reins in 2015, Kouoh is a champion of Pan-Africanism.
She quickly made her mark in Cape Town with a daring programme that showcased the works of artists from the continent and its diaspora.
“Africa is for me an idea that goes beyond borders. It’s a history that goes beyond borders,” Kouoh told AFP last year.
“Americans don’t like to hear this but I always tell them that America is another African country.”
Brazil, Cuba and Haiti could also be considered part of the African continent, she argued.
“The African diasporic influence in the US is undeniable. That’s why I like to talk about black geographies, more than African diasporas. Where black culture, black bodies, black people have influenced society,” she said.
The Biennale said Kouoh was appointed “upon the recommendation” of Buttafuoco, a Sicilian intellectual, named to head the Venice board with the support of Italy’s hard-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
