Koyo Kouoh to curate the Biennale Arte 2026

Koyo Kouoh, director of Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town, has been appointed curator of the Biennale Arte 2026, the 61^st International Art Exhibition, to be held in Venice between April and November 2026.

"The appointment of Koyo Kouoh as the director of the Visual Arts Sector is the acknowledgment of a broad horizon of vision at the dawn of a day profuse with new words and eyes", states Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, President of the Venice Biennale. "With her here in Venice, La Biennale confirms what it has offered the world for over a century: to be the home of the future".

Born in Cameroon and raides in Switzerland, Koyo Kouoh lives and works alternately in Cape Town, Dakar, and Basel. Active in the critical field of the arts community in a pan-African and international scope, she is the first African woman appointed curator of the Art Biennale. Since 2019, she has directed the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town.

Previously, she was the founding Artistic Director of RAW Material Company, a centre for art, knowledge and society in Dakar, Senegal, as well as part of the curatorial teams for documenta 12 (2007) and documenta 13 (2012), among the most important international contemporary art events in Europe. 

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, the centre for Contemporary Art in Brussels, in 2015. She has a remarkable list of publications under her name, including When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting, published in 2022.

Kouoh is the recipient of the Grand Prix Meret Oppenheim 2020, the Swiss Grand Award for Art that honours achievements in the fields of art, architecture, critique, and exhibitions. 

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