Koyo Kouoh: Not a Footnote, but a Shift in Power
The art world loves grand gestures. Grand halls, grand names, grand egos, grand budgets — and, when convenient, a thin layer of progressiveness on top.
And then came Koyo Kouoh.
Not as a decorative “diverse choice.” Not as a polite correction to a white, male canon. But as someone who entered the centre of power with knowledge, precision, international authority and an entirely different compass.
Koyo Kouoh was born in Douala, Cameroon, in 1967. She grew up between Cameroon and Switzerland and later worked from several worlds at once: African, European, international, but never neatly reducible to one identity. That also shaped her way of seeing. She did not think from one centre. She thought through networks, voices, histories and shifting lines of power.
Before becoming one of the most influential curators of her generation, Kouoh studied business administration and banking in Switzerland. But her real field became art: not as decoration, but as system critique, a form of knowledge and a site of institutional power.
In 2008, she founded RAW Material Company in Dakar: not a polite gallery, but a centre for art, knowledge and society. A place for exhibitions, residencies, critical education and debate. This matters because Kouoh understood that representation is not enough if you do not build your own structures. If you only wait to be invited by existing institutions, you remain dependent on their taste, their timing and their power. RAW Material Company was therefore not a side project, but an act of institutional independence.
Her influence then became increasingly international. She contributed to documenta 12 and documenta 13, was for many years the curator of the educational and artistic programme of 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair in London and New York, and curated exhibitions such as Body Talk: Feminism, Sexuality and the Body in the Work of Six African Women Artists, Still (the) Barbarians for EVA International in Ireland, and Dig Where You Stand within the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh.
In 2019, Kouoh was appointed Executive Director and Chief Curator of Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town, one of the most important museums for contemporary art from Africa and the African diaspora. She did not simply bring a new programme. She brought a different attitude: more depth, more artistic seriousness, more space for artists from Africa and the diaspora, and less dependence on the way the West is used to looking at “African art.”
Her earlier work shows the same line of thinking. In Body Talk, shown at WIELS in Brussels in 2015, she brought together work by Zoulikha Bouabdellah, Marcia Kure, Miriam Syowia Kyambi, Valérie Oka, Tracey Rose and Billie Zangewa. The exhibition examined feminism, sexuality and the body in the work of African women artists — not as an identity label, but as a political, artistic and embodied field of research.
At Zeitz MOCAA, she worked on in-depth projects around artists such as Otobong Nkanga, Johannes Phokela, Senzeni Marasela, Abdoulaye Konaté, Tracey Rose and Mary Evans. That says a great deal about her eye: Kouoh did not look at art as isolated objects, but at bodies, archives, memories, raw materials, diaspora, ritual, migration and the question of who has the right to tell history.
When Kouoh was appointed curator of the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, the Biennale Arte 2026, it was historic. She became the first African woman to take on this role. But with her, “the first” does not feel like a polite diversity moment. It feels more like an embarrassingly late moment of recognition. How is it possible that an art world that constantly congratulates itself on being progressive took so long to arrive here?
The title Kouoh chose for the Biennale was In Minor Keys. According to La Biennale di Venezia, this was her own title, and she sent her curatorial text to the President of La Biennale on 8 April 2025. The exhibition runs from 9 May to 22 November 2026 in the Giardini, the Arsenale and various locations across Venice, with pre-opening days on 6, 7 and 8 May.
That title matters. In Minor Keys may sound soft, but that is precisely the trap. Softness is often misread as weakness. In Kouoh’s hands, it seems to become another form of power: not the power of volume, muscle and canonical victory music, but the power of undertone, memory, mourning, spirituality, intimacy and collective energy.
Not art as a fanfare.
Art as resonance.
The Venice Biennale is not just another exhibition. It is one of the oldest and most powerful stages in the international art world: a place where countries, museums, collectors, curators, artists and politics collide. This edition therefore still operates within a powerful system of national pavilions, cultural diplomacy and international visibility — but Kouoh’s project seems to place another tone right through that structure: less flag, less prestige, more body, memory, repair, spirituality and undertow.
La Biennale decided, with the full support of Kouoh’s family, to realise the exhibition according to the project she had conceived and defined. That makes this edition charged. Not only because Kouoh occupied this historic position, but because her vision is not being replaced, softened or neatly “completed” by another ego. The exhibition is being carried out on the basis of her theoretical framework, her artist selection, her choice of catalogue authors, graphic identity, exhibition architecture and the team she had assembled.
The exhibition includes 110 invited participants: individual artists, duos, collectives and artist-led organisations from a wide range of geographical contexts. La Biennale writes that Kouoh selected them on the basis of resonance, affinity and possible connections between practices, even when those practices are far apart. That is crucial: this is not a tidy world map of representation, but a relational map of voices, practices and histories.
That artist list reads like a network of undercurrents. It includes well-known names such as Laurie Anderson, Kader Attia, Nick Cave, Wangechi Mutu, Otobong Nkanga, Walid Raad, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Tabita Rezaire, Cauleen Smith, Billie Zangewa, Sammy Baloji, Alvaro Barrington, Alfredo Jaar and Carsten Höller. But just as important is the fact that Kouoh also includes collectives and artist-led organisations such as RAW Material Company, blaxTARLINES KUMASI, G.A.S. Foundation, Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute, lugar a dudas, Denniston Hill and fierce pussy. In doing so, she is essentially saying: art does not only emerge in the studio of the individual genius, but also in infrastructure, collectivity, education, conversation and shared space.
The performance programme makes this shift concrete. In the official programme for 6 to 11 May 2026, the body is placed at the centre: as a site of knowledge and memory, but also as a political vehicle for collective resistance, healing and joy. That is essential to Kouoh’s thinking. Knowledge does not only live in books, archives and institutions. Knowledge also lives in voices, breath, movement, rituals, mourning, care and bodies that refuse to be pushed aside.
One of the most telling elements is the Poetry Caravan, inspired by Kouoh’s own journey in 1999, when she brought together nine African poets for a journey from Dakar to Timbuktu. In Venice, that journey is honoured through poets and musicians moving through the Giardini, in the tradition of griots: carriers of stories, history, rhythm and collective memory.
Other performances strengthen the same line. Guadalupe Maravilla works with sound meditation as a form of care, repair and bodily resonance. Victoria Idongesit-Udondian activates her installation around second-hand clothing, migration, women’s labour and invisible burdens. Hagar Ophir uses a séance-like setting around objects that have carried colonial displacement and violence. Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons and Kamaal Malak work with a multisensory performance in which sound, colour, breath, scent and body flow into one another.
These are not side programmes. They are keys to the exhibition. They make tangible what In Minor Keys means.
Here, Kouoh’s strength may be at its clearest. She turns softness not into decoration, but into a method. Listening not into politeness, but into a political act. Care not into a feminine cliché, but into a form of knowledge. And performance not into an extra, but into a way of literally making the art world breathe differently.
For Artivisme Féminin, Koyo Kouoh matters because she shows exactly what is at stake now: not adding women to an existing story, but changing the story itself.
Not: “Look, a woman is allowed to join in.”
But: who writes the tone?
Who defines the centre?
Who builds the institutions?
Who changes the language of power?
Kouoh did not do this through bravado for the sake of bravado. She did it by building infrastructure, taking artists seriously, refusing to reduce African and diasporic histories to identity politics, and treating curating as intellectual work.
That is the real shift.
Not shouting louder than the system.
But forcing the system to listen in another key.
Image Credit
Image: Koyo Kouoh
Photo: © Mirjam Kluka. Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia.
Sources
La Biennale di Venezia — Biennale Arte 2026: In Minor Keys
General information on the title, dates, locations, concept, team and continuation of Kouoh’s exhibition.
La Biennale di Venezia — Biennale Arte 2026: The Invited Artists
Official list and context for the 110 invited participants.
La Biennale di Venezia — Performance Programme 6–11 May 2026
Official performance programme.
Universes in Universe — Koyo Kouoh
Biographical information and image credit.
Zeitz MOCAA — Koyo Kouoh Appointed Executive Director and Chief Curator of Zeitz MOCAA
Information on Zeitz MOCAA, RAW Material Company and Kouoh’s curatorial work.
e-flux / WIELS — Body Talk
Information on the exhibition, artist list and themes.
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