The Venice Biennale named Swiss-Cameroonian curator Koyo Kouoh as the artistic director of its 61st International Art Exhibition. It set aside expectations that the showcase might move toward a more nationalistic tone under Italy’s right-wing government. Kouoh, who will lead the Biennale Arte from April to November 2026, is the first African woman to be given the prestigious task.
Born in Cameroon in 1967 and educated in Zurich, Kouoh has been executive director of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (MOCAA) in Cape Town since 2019. She is responsible for the continent’s most extensive collection of contemporary art. Formerly the founding artistic director of Raw Material Company, a Dakar-based art centre, she describes herself as a “fundamental pan-Africanist.”
Her appointment comes after Adriano Pedrosa, the Brazilian curator of the 2024 Biennale, whose edition, Foreigners Everywhere, received very polarized responses. Though some praised its celebration of migration and challenges to Eurocentrism, others criticized it as ideologically heavy-handed.
The decision to trust Kouoh with the Biennale comes as speculation continues over how Italy’s political climate under Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni will shape its cultural institutions. Last year, the Sicilian journalist and literary figure Pietrangelo Buttafuoco was appointed Biennale president, leading some observers to worry the festival could take a nationalist turn. A close supporter of Meloni and her populist project, Buttafuoco was expected to pivot the exhibition from its more recent internationalist course.
Gennaro Sangiuliano, the former Culture Minister who resigned earlier this year over a personal scandal, publicly stated that he wanted the Biennale to highlight Italian heritage, which he called “a fundamental element of Italian imagination.”
But Buttafuoco seems to have taken a different tack, presenting Kouoh’s appointment as a symbol of Venice’s continued place at the centre of the world. The appointment of Koyo Kouoh as artistic director of the visual arts department testifies to a vast horizon of vision in the rising of a day full of new words and eyes,” he said. “With her, here in Venice, La Biennale reaffirms that with which it has enriched the world for over one hundred years: to be the home of the future.”
Kouoh, for her part, spoke of the Biennale in tones of respect: “a mythical site. where artists, collectors and the public converge to sense the pulse of the zeitgeist.” Her appointment signals one of those rare moments in an organization that balances the scales of its historical weight with the winds of globalism to keep the city of Venice as the torchbearer for modern-day art.
The next edition of the Biennale is in 2026, and all eyes will indeed be on Kouoh as to how her pan-African perspective reshapes the narrative of the world’s most celebrated art festival.
Koyo Kouoh has organised meaningful and timely exhibitions such as Body Talk: Feminism, Sexuality and the Body in the Works of Six African Women Artists, first shown at Wiels in Brussels, Belgium, in 2015. She curated Still (the) Barbarians, 37th EVA International, the Ireland Biennial in Limerick in 2016. She participated in the 57th Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States, with the deeply researched exhibition project Dig Where You Stand (2018), a show within a show drawn from the collections of the Carnegie Museums of Art and Natural History. She was curator of the Educational and Artistic Programme of 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair in London, UK and New York, US, from 2013 to 2017. She initiated the research project Saving Bruce Lee: African and Arab Cinema in the Era of Soviet Cultural Diplomacy, which she co-curated with Rasha Salti at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, Russia, and Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, Germany (2015-2018). Active in the critical field of the arts community in a pan-African and international scope, Kouoh has a remarkable list of publications under her name, including When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting (2022), which accompanied the eponymous show that opened at Zeitz MOCAA in November 2022; Shooting Down Babylon (2022), the first monograph of 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! To name a few, Issa Samb and The Undecipherable Form (2013) and Condition Report on Building Art Institutions in Africa (2012). While at Zeitz MOCAA, her curatorial work focuses on in-depth solo exhibitions by African and African-descent artists. As such, she has organised exhibitions with Otobong Nkanga, Johannes Phokela, Senzeni Marasela, Abdoulaye Konaté, Tracey Rose, and Mary Evans.