The Cameroonian-Swiss museum director Koyo Kouoh has been appointed the curator of the 2026 Venice Biennale, making her the first African woman to organise the event.
The 57-year-old, who grew up in both Cameroon and Switzerland, has been the executive director and chief curator of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town since 2019.
She described the famous Venice festival as “the centre of gravity for art for over a century” and said that the art world converged “on this mythical site every two years to feel the pulse of the zeitgeist.” She continued: “It is a once-in-a-lifetime honour and privilege to follow in the footsteps of luminary predecessors in the role of artistic director, and to compose an exhibition that I hope will carry meaning for the world we currently live in—and most importantly, for the world we want to make. Artists are the visionaries and social scientists who allow us to reflect and project in ways afforded only to this line of work.”
Kouh was recommended by La Biennale’s president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco. Buttafuoco, the former leader of the youth wing of the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement party, is seen as an ideological ally of Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni. Earlier this year Meloni’s right-wing government appointed ten new leaders of major museums around the country, with home grown applicants favoured over people from outside Italy.
Many were expecting the decision on the curator of what is the Biennale’s 61st edition to continue this nationalist trend, however this isn’t the first time Buttafuoco has surprised observers. In 2015 he converted to Islam, which, according to the Guardian, led to Meloni using her veto to block his candidacy for governor of Sicily.
Of the appointment of Kouoh, Buttafuoco said it is “the acknowledgment of a broad horizon of vision at the dawn of a day profuse with new words and eyes. Her perspective as a curator, scholar, and influential public figure meets with the most refined, young, and disruptive intelligences. 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.”
Previous exhibitions organised by Kouoh include Body Talk: Feminism, Sexuality and the Body in the Works of Six African Women Artists, first shown at Wiels in Brussels in 2015. She curated Still (the) Barbarians, at the Ireland Biennial in Limerick in 2016 and is the author of When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting, which accompanied the eponymous show that opened at Zeitz MOCAA in November 2022.