The next Venice Art Biennale, including the 61ste edition will take place in 2026, will have as general curator the Swiss-Cameroonian Koyo Kouoh, 57 years old, director and chief curator of the Zeitz Museum Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA) since 2019. After studying economics, Koyo Kouoh quickly turned towards arts and culture: at the end of the 1990s, she moved to Senegal and worked on the artistic programming of the Gorrée Institute until 2002. She was then co-curator of the Rencontres Africaines de la Photographie in Bamako and collaborated on the Dakar Biennale in the early 2000s. Living between Cape Town (South Africa), Dakar (Senegal) and Basel (Switzerland), Koyo Kouoh was a member of the curatorial teams of documenta 12 in 2007, then of that of documenta 13 in 2012. In 2008, she founded the RAW Material Company art center in Dakar. Koyo Kouoh has organized numerous exhibitions, such as “Body Talk: Feminism, Sexuality and the Body in the Works of Six African Women Artists”, first presented at Wiels in Brussels (Belgium) in 2015. She participated in the 57e Carnegie International in Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania, United States) with the “Dig Where You Stand” exhibition project (2018) and was curator of the educational and artistic program of the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair in London (UK) and New York (USA) from 2013 to 2017. In 2020, Koyo Kouoh received the Meret Oppenheim Grand Prix. The president of the Biennale Pietrangelo Buttafuoco welcomed this appointment, explaining that with Koyo Kouoh in Venice, “the Biennale confirms what it has offered the world for over a century: to be the house of the future.” Koyo Kouoh, for her part, affirmed that it was “a unique honor and privilege to follow in the footsteps of distinguished predecessors in the role of artistic director and to compose an exhibition that I hope will be meaningful for the world we currently live in and, more importantly, for the world we want to create. Artists are visionaries and social scientists who allow us to think and plan in ways that are only possible in this industry.”
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