Koyo Kouoh, the Cameroonian-Swiss director of Cape Town’s Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA), has been named curator of the 2026 Venice Biennale, becoming the first African woman to hold the position.
The appointment was announced by Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, president of La Biennale. Kouoh, who has led Zeitz MOCAA since 2019, described the role as an extraordinary honor, calling the Biennale “the center of gravity for art for over a century” and a platform where the world comes together “to feel the pulse of the zeitgeist.”
She added that the event offered a rare chance to compose an exhibition reflecting the present and imagining a better future. “Artists are the visionaries and social scientists who allow us to reflect and project in ways afforded only to this line of work,” Kouoh said.
Her selection comes as a surprise to many, given the nationalist trend in recent Italian cultural appointments under Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s government. Buttafuoco, known for his diverse ideological journey, described Kouoh’s vision as a meeting point for “refined, young, and disruptive intelligences.”
Kouoh’s career includes curating Body Talk: Feminism, Sexuality and the Body in the Works of Six African Women Artists in Brussels in 2015 and Still (the) Barbarians at the 2016 Ireland Biennial. She is also the author of When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting, which accompanied an exhibition at Zeitz MOCAA in 2022.
