Koyo Kouoh, art curator due to lead 2026 Venice Biennale, dies at 57

Koyo Kouoh, the groundbreaking Swiss-Cameroonian curator who was to go the archetypal African pistillate to caput up the Venice Biennale, died abruptly connected Saturday, the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa announced.

“It is with profound sorrow that the trustees of Zeitz MOCAA denote the abrupt passing of Koyo Kouoh, our beloved enforcement manager and main curator, connected Saturday, 10 May 2025,” said the depository successful a connection connected Monday.

Kouoh, 57, had been put successful charge of the 61st variation of the Biennale Arte, which volition instrumentality spot successful Venice from April to November 2026.

Born successful 1967 successful Doula, Cameroon, but educated done her teens and 20s successful Zurich, Kouoh had been enforcement manager of MOCAA successful Cape Town, South Africa, since 2019. It holds the continent’s largest postulation of modern art.

She was antecedently the founding creator manager of Raw Material Company, an creation centre successful Dakar, Senegal, which had a large interaction connected her. “It’s the spot I came of property professionally, wherever I truly became a curator and an exhibition-maker,” she precocious told the Financial Times. “Dakar made maine who I americium today.”

As curator of the Biennale she was owed to contiguous the exhibition’s rubric and taxable successful Venice successful a week’s time, connected 20 May.

In a statement, the absorption of the Venice Biennale said they were “deeply saddened and dismayed to larn of the abrupt and untimely passing of Koyo Kouoh”.

They said Kouoh had “worked with passion, intelligence rigour and imaginativeness connected the conception and improvement of the Biennale Arte 2026”.

The connection added: “Her passing leaves an immense void successful the satellite of modern creation and successful the planetary assemblage of artists, curators and scholars who had the privilege of knowing and admiring her bonzer quality and intelligence commitment.”

The Biennale confirmed it was “likely to clasp the property league connected 20 May”, which would besides beryllium livestreamed from its headquarters.

Zeitz MOCAA said it had closed its doors and suspended each programming until further notice.

Kouoh moved to Switzerland astatine 13 and studied concern medication and banking earlier starting a literate career. In 1994, she co-edited Töchter Afrikas, which was inspired by the groundbreaking Daughters of Africa (1992), an anthology of penning by women of African descent.

She was regarded arsenic a transformational person astatine Zeitz MOCAA, wherever she built “an explicitly Pan-African, world-class programme”, according to the New York Times, which credited her with turning astir an instauration that had experienced respective scandals.

In 1 of her last interviews, Kouoh discussed her presumption connected mortality. “I bash judge successful beingness aft decease due to the fact that I travel from an ancestral Black acquisition wherever we judge successful parallel lives and realities,” she said. “There is nary ‘after death’, ‘before death’ oregon ‘during life’. It doesn’t substance that much. I judge successful energies – surviving oregon dormant – and successful cosmic strength.