Koyo Kouoh, one of the most prominent figures of the global art world, planned to become the first African woman to compile the Biennale of Venice, died in Switzerland on Saturday. She was 57.
Her death was confirmed by the organizers of the Biennale. The announcement quoted no cause or said where she had died in Switzerland.
The Biennial said that Mrs. Kouoh’s death ‘sudden and early’ death came just a few days before she was planned to announce the title and theme of next year’s event. The explanation added that her death “leaves an immense emptiness in the world of contemporary art.”
The Venice Biennial is perhaps the most important event of the art world. Started since 1895, it always includes a large -scale group show, organized by the curator, in addition to dozens of national pavilions, independently organized.
A spokeswoman for the Biennale did not immediately respond to a request for comment on what the death of Mrs. Kouoh would mean for next year’s exhibition, which is planned from 9 May to 22 November.
As a curator and executive director of Zeitz Mocaa, one of the greatest contemporary art museums in Africa, Mrs. Kouoh built up a global reputation as a torch wire for artists of color from Africa and elsewhere, although her interests were in reach worldwide. “I am an international receiver,” she said last December In an interview with the New York Times.
When Mrs. Kouoh arrived in Zeitz Mocaa in 2019, the museum struggled, run by an interim director, Azu Nwagbogu. The founder, Mark Coetzee, had resigned in the midst of accusations that he had harassed members of his staff.
“The museum was in crisis when Koyo came up, then exacerbated by the Pandemie”, Storm Janse van Renseburg, who was then a senior curator at Zeitz Mocaa, said in an interview in 2023. “She brought it back to life.”
The artist Igshaan Adams, who held a residence in the museum for eight months during Mrs. Kouoh’s term of office, said that she had changed the way in which the local community had changed about Zeitz Mocaa. “She took care of the museum again,” he said. It was the first time, Mr Adams said, that he had experienced a real public engagement “with people who look like me and as I speak.”
Mrs. Kouoh often said in interviews that she never expected to become an art world figure. She was born in Cameroon on December 24, 1967, and grew up in Douala, the largest city and economic capital of the country, before moving to Switzerland at the age of 13, where she finally studied business administration and banking and worked with migrant women as a social worker.
The turning point in her career came in her mid -twenties when she became a mother. “I couldn’t imagine that I was parenting a black boy in Europe,” said Mrs. Kouoh in the interview of 2023. In 1995 she moved to Dakar, Senegal, “to explore new boundaries and spaces”, and after having worked as an independent curator for a number of years, she founded a raw material, an artist residence that later expanded with an exhibition, and an exhibition room that expanded with an exhibition, and an exhibition room that expanded with an exhibition, and an exhibition spare room and an exhibition spare room and a library room and an exhibition spare room, and a library room and a library room and an exhibition spare room and a library spare room, and that was a library room that expanded and that was a library spare room. offered young art professionals.
“I found it amazing that she was not only a curator, but an institution builder,” said Olureemi C. Onabanjo, an associated curator of photography in the Museum of Modern Art, in an interview in 2023. “A global thinker, rooted in Africa.” She added that Mrs. Kouoh “loved and expanded a sense of possibility for a generation of African curators around the world.”
While he was established in Dakar, Mrs. Kouoh expanded her reputation as a powerful, visionary voice about the contemporary art scene. She worked on the curatorial teams for Documenta 12 and 13 and closed the educational and artistic program of the 1-54 Contemporary African art fair, the Irish contemporary art biennial in 2016 and other international exhibitions.
Touria El Glaoui, the founder of 1-54, said in an interview that Mrs. Kouoh “was the most important curator of artists of the African continent” and added: “She gave voice to so many talents.”
In the 2023 interview, Mrs. Kouoh said that she had initially rejected the idea of hiring the Zeitz Mocaa board. But after conversations with black colleagues, she said, there was “a feeling that we can’t fail. We don’t have something like that on the continent.”
During her career, Mrs. Kouoh insisted to bring African artists to a world that she had long ignored or Typecast. “I am part of that generation of African art professionals who have pride and knowledge about the beauty of African culture, which has often been defined by others in so many wrong ways,” she said in the same interview.
“I don’t believe we have to spend time correcting those stories,” she added. “We have to register other perspectives.”
Survivors are her partner, Philippe Mall. Full information about survivors was not immediately available.
Mrs. Kouoh was a mentor for artists and curators around the world, “defend people and ideas that she knew were important,” said Kate Fowle, the director of the director of The art program for the Hearthland FoundationAn organization that supports democracy and cooperation that was founded in 2019 by Kate Capshaw and Steven Spielberg.
Her appointment as curator of the Biennale of 2026 was welcomed by the art community. “She deserved remarkable,” said Adrienne Edward, the senior curator and associated director of curatorial programs in the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. She added that the Mrs. Kouoh’s “unique ability to be based on a place, in itself, in artists – her ethical rotness – who has formed her exhibition deeply and specifically.”
Speaking of the Times after the announcement of her appointment, Mrs. Kouoh said she wanted to make a show that “really speaks to our time”, adding that she was an artist -oriented curator. “The artists will define where we are going,” she said.
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