By Saul Molobi (Photo by ©Mirjam Kluka)
The world of contemporary art is in mourning following the passing of Koyo Kouoh, the visionary Cameroonian-Swiss curator who devoted her life to amplifying African voices, narratives, and aesthetics on the world stage. Her death on 10 May 2025, at the age of 57, silenced a powerful force of cultural insurgency — one whose influence has irrevocably reshaped the contours of global art.
Koyo Kouoh was more than a curator; she was a cartographer of Black geographies, mapping a vibrant, intercontinental, postcolonial consciousness that traversed Dakar, Cape Town, Brussels, Bamako, Basel, and beyond. Her life’s work was a call to witness — to see Africa and its diaspora not through the borrowed gaze of the West, but through a multiplicity of African lenses sharpened by historical depth, intellectual rigor, and fierce aesthetic integrity.
From her formative years as a cultural officer at the U.S. Consulate, to co-curating Les Rencontres de la Photographie Africaine in Mali, Kouoh embodied a practice grounded in place, politics, and people. She was a builder of institutions and ideas: founding RAW Material Company in Dakar, reimagining the Dakar Biennale, serving as a curatorial adviser for Documenta, and ultimately taking the helm at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (MOCAA) in Cape Town in 2019. At each juncture, she used curatorship not as a job title but as a radical tool for cultural transformation.
Under her leadership, Zeitz MOCAA became a sanctuary of contemporary African expression, where Pan-African narratives were not only celebrated but also interrogated. Her landmark exhibitions — such as When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting and retrospectives of Tracey Rose, Mary Evans, and Johannes Phokela—reflected her belief in the power of the solo retrospective to anchor artists’ stories within the larger tides of history, trauma, memory, and renewal.
Kouoh’s work was bold, often controversial, always necessary. Whether defending Personal Liberties in Dakar or challenging colonial legacies in European biennales, she faced resistance with grace, intellect, and unyielding conviction. She brought the marginal to the center and made it impossible to look away.
That she was appointed as the first African woman to curate the Venice Biennale — scheduled to open in 2026 — was both a milestone and a mirror. In her final published words, Kouoh resisted the narrative of exceptionalism. “The real measure of progress,” she wrote, “is not in being first but in ensuring the door remains wide open for those who come next.”
In this, Koyo Kouoh has not passed; she has transitioned into the lineage of ancestors who widened the path for others. Her legacy is one of daring visibility, of unflinching articulation, and of a radical reordering of whose stories get told and how. The void she leaves is vast — but so too is the field she ploughed for future generations.
To her husband Philippe, her children, and the global artistic community who called her mentor, comrade, and friend — we extend our deepest condolences.
Rest well, Koyo Kouoh. You curated the soul of a continent. May your spirit continue to illuminate the galleries of memory and the archives of liberation.