Cameroonian art curator aged 57 at height of career

Koyo Kouoh, who has died aged 57, was one of the art world’s leading figures and a fierce advocate of African creatives.

A Cameroon-born curator, Kouoh had been at the height of her career.

She was due to become the first African woman to lead next year’s Venice Biennale, one of the world’s most prestigious contemporary art events, and led one of Africa’s largest contemporary art museums.

The cause of Kouoh’s unexpected death has not yet been made public. The curator passed away in Switzerland, according to reports.

South African artist Candice Breitz described Kouoh as “magnificently intelligent, endlessly energetic and formidably elegant”.

Otobong Nkanga, a Nigerian visual artist, called the late curator a source of warmth, generosity and brilliance”.

Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni also spoke of Kouoh’s impact, saying her passing “leaves a void in the world of contemporary art”.

Kouoh’s colourful life began in 1967, when she was born in Cameroon, a Central African country with a rich artistic heritage.

She grew up in the country’s largest city, Douala, before moving to Switzerland aged 13.

There, she studied business administration and banking but, in a pivotal moment, chose not to pursue finance as a career.

“I am fundamentally uninterested in profit,” she explained in a 2023 interview with the New York Times.

Rather than building on her degree, Kouoh assisted migrant women as a social worker and began to immerse herself in the world of art.

She gave birth to her son in Switzerland during the 90s, an experience she described as “profoundly transformative”. She would go on to adopt three other children.

Fed up with life in the Swiss city of Zurich, Kouoh returned to Africa in 1996.

She worked as a curator in Senegalese capital city Dakar, before founding Raw Material Company, an expansive, independent art hub.

Just last week, and six years into her role as the director of South Africa’s Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Kouoh reflected on her love for Dakar.

“Dakar made me who I am today,” she told the Financial Times.

“It’s the place I came of age professionally, where I really became a curator and an exhibition-maker… I’m in Cape Town now but, mentally, I live in Dakar. It’s the one and only place for me.”

When Kouoh took the top job at Zeitz, Africa’s biggest contemporary art museum, the institution was in crisis.

Founding director Mark Coetzee had been suspended in 2018 following allegations of staff harrasment and later resigned.

Kouoh has been widely credited with turning Zeitz’s fortunes around, leading it through the scandal, as well as the Covid pandemic.

“For me, it became a duty to salvage this institution,” she told The Art World: What If…?! podcast.

“I was convinced that the failure of Zeitz, if it had failed would’ve been the failure of all of us African art professionals in the field, somehow indirectly.”

As Zeitz’s director and curator, Kouoh oversaw a number of acclaimed exhibitions, including When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting. The show, which brings together works by black artists from the last century, is currently on display in Brussels.

In a statement announcing Kouoh’s “sudden” death, Zeitz expressed its “profound sorrow” and said that, out of respect, the museum would be closed “until further notice”.

In her Financial Times interview last week, Kouoh challenged the idea that death would bring an end to her endeavours.

“I do believe in life after death, because I come from an ancestral black education where we believe in parallel lives and realities,” she said.

“There is no ‘after death’, ‘before death’ or ‘during life’. It doesn’t matter that much. I believe in energies – living or dead – and in cosmic strength.”