Koyo Kouoh, one of Africa’s most high-profile curators, has been picked to organize the 2026 edition of the Venice Biennale’s, the world’s biggest recurring art exhibition.

She will now become the second African-born curator ever to organize the Biennale, and the first to do so since Okwui Enwezor, who made history when he curated the 2015 edition.

Kouoh, who was born in Cameroon and later became a Swiss resident, is currently executive director and chief curator of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art, an institution in Cape Town, South Africa, that ranks among the continent’s grandest institutions by scale. There, she has worked on shows such as 2022’s “When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting,” which has been regarded as the defining survey of one of today’s defining artistic trends, and solo shows for artists such as Tracey Rose, Otobong Nkanga, and Abdoulaye Konaté.

Before gaining worldwide attention for these exhibitions, Kouoh received acclaim for creating RAW Material Company, which she founded in Dakar, Senegal, in 2008. Senegal’s artistic system had few independent spaces at the time, and Kouoh designed it to provide local audiences with opportunities to freely discuss art as one might anywhere else.

Within the biennial circuit, she is also a familiar figure, having served on the curatorial teams of two Documentas, in 2007 and 2012. Moreover, she has organized one edition of Ireland’s EVA International and an exhibition held as part of the 2018 Carnegie International.

Of her latest appointment, Kouoh said in a statement, “It is a once-in-a-lifetime honor 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.”

Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, president of the Biennale, said in a statement, “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.”

Some had feared that Buttafuoco, a journalist who had no managerial training before taking the reins at the Biennale, would have a dampening effect on this storied institution. Buttafuoco’s right-wing politics have been divisive in Italy, where his support of the Brothers of Italy party has led some to fear that he could run the Biennale into the ground.

With its focus on queer perspectives and the Global South, the 2024 edition of the Biennale, the first held under Buttafuoco’s leadership, seemed to show no signs that Buttafuoco had tampered with the exhibition. But the 2024 edition was also conceived prior to Buttafuoco taking the helm, which means that Kouoh’s 2026 exhibition will be the true test for this exhibition.

– Alex Greenberger Senior Editor, ARTnews, Published courtesy of Art News.