Koyo Kouoh, the groundbreaking Swiss-Cameroonian curator who was to become the first African woman to head up the Venice Biennale, died suddenly on Saturday, the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa announced.
“It is with profound sorrow that the trustees of Zeitz MOCAA announce the sudden passing of Koyo Kouoh, our beloved executive director and chief curator, on Saturday, 10 May 2025,” said the museum in a statement on Monday.
Kouoh, 57, had been put in charge of the 61st edition of the Biennale Arte, which will take place in Venice from April to November 2026.
Born in 1967 in Doula, Cameroon, but educated through her teens and 20s in Zurich, Kouoh had been executive director of MOCAA in Cape Town, South Africa, since 2019. It holds the continent’s largest collection of contemporary art.
She was previously the founding artistic director of Raw Material Company, an art centre in Dakar, Senegal, which had a big impact on her. “It’s the place I came of age professionally, where I really became a curator and an exhibition-maker,” she recently told the Financial Times. “Dakar made me who I am today.”
As curator of the Biennale she was due to present the exhibition’s title and theme in Venice in a week’s time, on 20 May.
In a statement, the management of the Venice Biennale said they were “deeply saddened and dismayed to learn of the sudden and untimely passing of Koyo Kouoh”.
They said Kouoh had “worked with passion, intellectual rigour and vision on the conception and development of the Biennale Arte 2026”.
The statement added: “Her passing leaves an immense void in the world of contemporary art and in the international community of artists, curators and scholars who had the privilege of knowing and admiring her extraordinary human and intellectual commitment.”
The Biennale confirmed it was “likely to hold the press conference on 20 May”, which would also be livestreamed from its headquarters.
Zeitz MOCAA said it had closed its doors and suspended all programming until further notice.
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Kouoh moved to Switzerland at 13 and studied business administration and banking before starting a literary career. In 1994, she co-edited Töchter Afrikas, which was inspired by the groundbreaking Daughters of Africa (1992), an anthology of writing by women of African descent.
She was regarded as a transformational leader at Zeitz MOCAA, where she built “an explicitly Pan-African, world-class programme”, according to the New York Times, which credited her with turning around an institution that had experienced several scandals.
In one of her final interviews, Kouoh discussed her view on mortality. “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.
