There can be no coming to terms with the calamity of Koyo Kouoh’s untimely passing mere days before she was set to announce her plans for the 2026 Venice Biennale. Not yet. Among the many art communities Kouoh was part of, there is the feeling that a colleague, mentor, and friend was snatched away in her prime – like the two ancestors, Bisi Silva and Okwui Enwezor, who preceded her. Somewhere under the grief, fond memories and deep gratitude are slowly emerging, but for now, the pain lingers.

Kouoh was born in Douala, Cameroon, on Christmas Eve in 1967. Independence euphoria was still fresh, the air saturated with optimism. Her mother was ambitious and young – only 19 years of age when Kouoh was born – and Kouoh was immediately coddled in the care of her maternal lineage, by her great grandmother and her mother’s sisters.

As a young teen, Kouoh reluctantly moved to Zurich with her mother in 1981. She would spend the next one and a half decades in Europe, where, after leaving school, she studied business, banking, and cultural management in both Switzerland and France. A career in banking was what was expected of her, but she quickly found it to be unfulfilling. She quit and tried her hand supporting African migrant women as a social worker in the city of Zurich and for an organization called Women of Black Heritage. This was a defining time for Kouoh. She gained an initial interest in social design and dabbled in independent self-organized cultural work. Together with some friends, she began creating radically inclusive spaces of community and conviviality, which were still few and far between in 1990s Zurich.

At the time, she was also consciously reconnecting with her first love: literature. As a budding writer and editor, she worked through self-doubt before accepting herself as an arbiter of African stories in her immediate German-speaking environment, where she was confronted with an acute lack of engagement with African and Afro-diasporic imaginaries in literature and beyond.

Kouoh’s first edifying project was not an exhibition but a book. In 1994, she published Töchter Afrikas. Schwarze Frauen erzählen (Daughters of Africa: Black women speak), coedited by Holger Ehling, which featured 30 stories by African and Afro-diasporic women writers – including Edwidge Danticat, Bessie Head, Flora Nwapa, and Alice Walker. That seminal anthology came only two years after Margaret Busby’s trailblazing Daughters of Africa (1992) and enabled German-speaking audiences to read more than a dozen Black and African women writers in German for the first time. The project – the only one of its kind in the German region to date – lit a fire that coincided with the “renaissance” of her becoming a mother. Kouoh actively sought a more direct engagement with the worlds she had read about and the worlds she had left behind as a teenager. By 1995, she had packed up and left Switzerland for Dakar, Senegal, ostensibly to interview filmmaker Ousmane Sembène for a film festival she was co-organizing in Zurich.

Dakar’s eloquence of spirit captivated Kouoh, now in her mid-20s, instantly. But there was something else: “I survived Switzerland because I was born and raised in Cameroon,” she recalled. [1] She wanted to give her son the same “head start,” to fortify him from the projections he would be confronted with in Switzerland as a Black boy and then as a young Black man. Professionally, she encountered many artists, notably Issa Samb (1945–2017), a painter, philosopher, actor, sculptor, playwright, and writer. Together with the Laboratoire Agit’Art, Samb had abandoned strict formalism in the early 1970s to embrace experimentation and even agitation as primary modes of artistic production, drawing from sociopolitical ideas rather than purely aesthetic ones. For Samb, the process, however ephemeral, was more important than the permanence of the resulting object. Kouoh spent the next decade working with and alongside Samb, including presenting a solo exhibition of his work in both London and Dakar in 2014. Through Samb, Kouoh understood the immateriality of art, and that life itself was a durational performance, ultimately forging the steadfast, quasi-religious dedication to artists she is now remembered for. Other long-term collaborators include the artists Otobong Nkanga and Tracey Rose. Rather than referring to herself as a curator or cultural worker, Kouoh preferred the term “worker of the spirit.”

Between 2000 and 2004, she was a close interlocutor of the Dak’Art Biennale during a period of organizational restructuring. In 2001, and then again in 2003, she cocurated Les Rencontres de la Photographie Africaine in Bamako with Simon Njami, establishing herself as one of the most formidable Pan-African curators at work on the continent and beyond. In Dakar, Bamako, or indeed anywhere else on the continent, she could speak to artists, curators, and other arts professionals in French and English, and if dignitaries and the media happened to be around, she had German and Italian on hand, too. Language was thus almost never a barrier, and numerous testimonials about her warmth as a peer, colleague, friend, or mentor abound after her death. She considered Africa her home and traveled voraciously on the continent.

In 2008, Kouoh founded RAW Material Company, conceived as an institution from the very beginning. She was interested in curatorial work that went beyond the limited temporalities of an exhibition, a biennial, or project-making, as it were. For Kouoh, RAW was an anchor and a generative space, an institution centering knowledge transmission and genealogy of professional practice. Acutely aware of the need for more “workers of the spirit,” RAW has become a non-school, offering the RAW Académie and curatorial residencies to train emerging cultural workers, especially Africans. Ever since RAW moved into a permanent space in 2014, it has hosted a biennial symposium series titled “Condition Report” and published all proceedings in English and French. Alongside her unwavering commitment to artists, education and professional development remained a key commitment for Kouoh throughout her career.

Kouoh was called to Cape Town at a time when African artists, art professionals, and cultural workers had a stronger vision for Zeitz MOCAA than the museum’s own leadership seemed to have. She was initially unsure about taking the position as director and consulted her peers, including Enwezor. Convinced in the end that an institution like Zeitz MOCAA could not be allowed to fail, she took on the challenge, arriving in May 2019, mere months before the first Covid-19 lockdowns, which caused the museum to close for eight months, providing time to do the invisible behind-the scenes institutional rebuilding required to turn the museum’s credibility and reputation around after the unceremonious departure of the previous director. After the pandemic subsided, she was keen to explore the relationship between the museum and its city, eventually positioning the museum as a civic space. Despite the challenges of the pandemic, she presented a jam-packed program of exhibitions and events in Cape Town, adding to her already impressive list of programs, exhibitions, and publications from Dakar and all over the world. Her penultimate exhibition, “When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration,” cocurated with Tandazani Dhlakama, was committed to centering many artists that had been ignored by art history. But Kouoh remained critical of how large-scale group shows have come to define how African contemporary art is seen and received. In her view, big group shows of African and Afro-diasporic artists could not undo decades of neglect and underinvestment in artists and art infrastructures. Even so, “When We See Us” was one of the biggest exhibitions ever made on the African continent, and it traveled to Basel and is on view in Brussels until August 2025.

Her last exhibition, “In Minor Keys,” will open in May 2026 at the Venice Biennale. It was the one she was preparing to announce days before her death. It will now be delivered across the finish line by her curatorial team, an edifying conclusion to the great career of a woman whose vision for contemporary art and commitment to African artists was undeniable. “I am certain that, at 54, my work is done,” [2] she told Emeka Okereke in 2022. We must take her at her word.

Eric Otieno Sumba is a freelance writer, independent researcher, and editor at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin.

Image credit: Photo © Andile Buka