Koyo Kouoh, Prominent Art World Figure, Is Dead at 57

[ad_1] Koyo Kouoh, one of many world artwork world’s most outstanding figures, who had been slated to develop into the primary African lady to curate the Venice Biennale, died on Saturday in Switzerland. She was 57.

Her dying was confirmed by the biennale’s organizers. The announcement didn't cite a trigger or say the place in Switzerland she had died.

The biennale stated that Ms. Kouoh’s “sudden and premature” dying got here simply days earlier than she was scheduled to announce the title and theme of subsequent 12 months’s occasion. The assertion added that her dying “leaves an immense void on this planet of latest artwork.”

The Venice Biennale is arguably the artwork world’s most essential occasion. Staged each two years since 1895, it at all times features a large-scale group present, organized by the curator, alongside dozens of nationwide pavilions, organized independently.

A spokeswoman for the biennale didn't instantly reply to a request for touch upon what Ms. Kouoh’s dying would imply for subsequent 12 months’s exhibition, which is scheduled to run from Might 9 by means of Nov. 22.

Because the curator and govt director of Zeitz MOCAA, certainly one of Africa’s largest modern artwork museums, Ms. Kouoh constructed a world fame as a torchbearer for artists of colour from Africa and elsewhere, though her pursuits had been world in attain. “I’m a global curator,” she stated final December in an interview with The New York Occasions.

When Ms. Kouoh arrived at Zeitz MOCAA in 2019, the museum was struggling, run by an interim director, Azu Nwagbogu. Its founding director, Mark Coetzee, had resigned amid allegations that he harassed members of his workers.

“The museum was in disaster when Koyo got here on, subsequently compounded by the pandemic” Storm Janse van Renseburg, who was then a senior curator at Zeitz MOCAA, stated in a 2023 interview. “She introduced it again to life.”

The artist Igshaan Adams, who held a residency place on the museum for eight months throughout Ms. Kouoh’s tenure, stated that she had modified the way in which the local people felt about Zeitz MOCAA. “She made me, us, care once more in regards to the museum,” he stated. It was the primary time, Mr. Adams stated, that he had skilled an actual public engagement “with individuals who appear to be me and converse like me.”

Ms. Kouoh stated incessantly in interviews that she by no means anticipated to develop into an artwork world determine. She was born in Cameroon on Dec. 24, 1967, and grew up in Douala, the nation’s largest metropolis and financial capital, earlier than shifting at age 13 to Switzerland, the place she finally studied enterprise administration and banking and labored with migrant girls as a social employee.

The turning level in her profession got here in her mid-20s, when she turned a mom. “I couldn’t think about elevating a Black boy in Europe,” Ms. Kouoh stated within the 2023 interview. In 1995, she moved to Dakar, Senegal, “to discover new frontiers and areas,” and after working as an impartial curator for a number of years, she based Uncooked Materials, an artist residency program that later expanded to incorporate an exhibition house, a library and an academy that supplied a mentoring program for younger artwork professionals.

“I assumed it was superb that she was not only a curator however an establishment builder,” Oluremi C. Onabanjo, an affiliate curator of images on the Museum of Trendy Artwork, stated in a 2023 interview. “A worldwide thinker, rooted in Africa.” She added that Ms. Kouoh “enlivened and expanded a way of risk for a technology of African curators throughout the globe.”

Whereas based mostly in Dakar, Ms. Kouoh expanded her fame as a forceful, visionary voice on the modern artwork scene. She labored on the curatorial groups for Documenta 12 and 13 and curated the academic and inventive program of the 1-54 Modern African Artwork Truthful, the Irish Modern Artwork Biennale in 2016, and different worldwide exhibitions.

Touria El Glaoui, the founding director of 1-54, stated in an interview that Ms. Kouoh was “a very powerful curator of artists from the African continent,” including, “She gave voice to so many skills.”

Within the 2023 interview, Ms. Kouoh stated that she had initially rejected the concept of taking over the directorship of Zeitz MOCAA. However after conversations with Black colleagues, she stated, there was “a sense that we can not let this fail. We don’t have anything like this on the continent.”

All through her profession, Ms. Kouoh pushed to convey African artists to a world that had lengthy both ignored them or typecast them. “I'm a part of that technology of African artwork professionals who've delight and data about the fantastic thing about African tradition, which has typically been outlined by others in so many unsuitable methods,” she stated in the identical interview.

“I don’t consider we have to spend time correcting these narratives,” she added. “We have to inscribe different views.”

Survivors embody her associate, Philippe Mall. Full info on survivors was not instantly accessible.

Ms. Kouoh was a mentor to artists and curators all around the world, “championing folks and concepts that she knew to be essential,” stated Kate Fowle, the director of the Arts Program for the Hearthland Basis, a corporation supporting democracy and collaboration that was based by Kate Capshaw and Steven Spielberg in 2019.

Her appointment because the curator of the 2026 Venice Biennale was welcomed by the artwork group. “She was remarkably deserving,” stated Adrienne Edwards, the senior curator and affiliate director of curatorial packages on the Whitney Museum of American Artwork in New York. She added that it was Ms. Kouoh’s “distinctive potential to be grounded in a spot, in herself, in artists — her moral rootedness — which profoundly and particularly contoured her exhibition making.”

Talking to The Occasions after the announcement of her appointment, Ms. Kouoh stated she needed to create a present that “actually speaks to our instances,” including that she was an artist-centered curator. “The artists will outline the place we go,” she stated.