Koyo Kouoh, a giant of the contemporary art world who tirelessly championed African artists and became the first woman from the continent to curate the Venice Biennale, died on Saturday, aged 57.
Her death, in a hospital in Basel, Switzerland, was announced in a statement by the Biennale. While the official cause was not disclosed, her husband, Philip Mall, said she had died of cancer following a recent diagnosis, The New York Times reports.
Kouoh had been appointed in December to curate the next edition of the Biennale. In its statement, the organisation said: “Koyo Kouoh worked with passion, intellectual rigour and vision on the conception and development of the Biennale Arte 2026. The presentation of the exhibition’s title and theme was due to take place in Venice on 20 May.”
It 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”.
Giorgia Meloni, the Italian prime minister, said: “I express my deep condolences for the untimely and sudden death of Koyo Kouoh”.
Asked how her death might affect the next Biennale, a spokesperson told The Art Newspaper “we’ll know on 20 May.” The Biennale’s website still lists a press note indicating the conference will take place on that date. The spokesperson did not clarify whether it will go ahead as planned.
The 2026 Biennale is scheduled to run from 9 May to 22 November. The organisation had cast Kouoh’s appointment as reinforcing its cutting-edge reputation. In December, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, the Biennale’s president, praised her “refined, young, and disruptive intelligence”.
In the same announcement, Kouoh called her appointment a “once-in-a-lifetime honour and privilege,” describing the Biennale as “the centre of gravity for art for over a century”. She expressed hope that her exhibition would “carry meaning for the world we currently live in—and most importantly, for the world we want to make”.
Kouoh was born in Douala, Cameroon, in 1967, and moved to Switzerland at 13. After studying administration and banking, she worked as a social worker assisting migrant women before immersing herself in the art world and returning to Africa in 1996.
In Dakar, Senegal, she founded Raw Material Company, an independent art centre. In 2016, she joined the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town, serving as curator and executive director. There, she became a leading advocate for Black artists from Africa and beyond, curating, among other projects, a major retrospective of the South African artist Tracey Rose in 2022.
Beyond Africa, she won acclaim for exhibitions such as Body Talk: Feminism, Sexuality and the Body in the Works of Six African Women Artists, which opened at WIELS Contemporary Art Centre in Brussels in 2015, and Still (the) Barbarians at the 2016 Ireland Biennial in Limerick, which explored Ireland’s postcolonial condition in the context of the 1916 Easter Rising centenary.
“Kouoh did not leave a title for the Biennale, but she did leave a grammar: the urgency to rewrite the rules of the curatorial game,” wrote Artuu, an Italian art magazine, in its obituary. “Koyo Kouoh’s theoretical legacy… does not propose new aesthetic models to be framed, but undermines the very foundations of the cultural hierarchy.”
