BBC Information, London & Yaoundé
Koyo Kouoh, one of many artwork world’s main figures and a fierce advocate of African creatives, has died aged 57.
A Cameroon-born curator, Kouoh had been on the peak of her profession.
She was because of turn out to be the primary African girl to guide subsequent yr’s Venice Biennale, one of many world’s most prestigious modern artwork occasions, and led one among Africa’s largest modern artwork museums.
The reason for Kouoh’s sudden dying has not but been made public. The curator handed away in Switzerland, in response to studies.
South African artist Candice Breitz described Kouoh as “magnificently clever, endlessly energetic and formidably elegant”.
Otobong Nkanga, a Nigerian visible artist, known as the late curator a supply of heat, generosity and brilliance”.
Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni additionally spoke of Kouoh’s influence, saying her passing “leaves a void on this planet of latest artwork”.
Kouoh’s vibrant life started in 1967, when she was born in Cameroon, a Central African nation with a wealthy inventive heritage.
She grew up within the nation’s largest metropolis, Douala, earlier than shifting to Switzerland aged 13.
There, she studied enterprise administration and banking however, in a pivotal second, selected to not pursue finance as a profession.
“I’m essentially tired of revenue,” she defined in a 2023 interview with the New York Instances.
Fairly than constructing on her diploma, Kouoh assisted migrant girls as a social employee and commenced to immerse herself on this planet of artwork.
She gave start to her son in Switzerland in the course of the 90s, an expertise she described as “profoundly transformative”. She would go on to undertake three different kids.
Fed up with life within the Swiss metropolis of Zurich, Kouoh returned to Africa in 1996.
She labored as a curator in Senegalese capital metropolis Dakar, earlier than founding Uncooked Materials Firm, an expansive, impartial artwork hub.
Simply final week, and 6 years into her position because the director of South Africa’s Zeitz Museum of Modern Artwork Africa, Kouoh mirrored on her love for Dakar.
“Dakar made me who I’m at the moment,” she instructed the Monetary Instances.
“It is the place I got here of age professionally, the place I actually grew to become a curator and an exhibition-maker… I am in Cape City now however, mentally, I reside in Dakar. It is the one and solely place for me.”
When Kouoh took the highest job at Zeitz, Africa’s largest modern artwork museum, the establishment was in disaster.
Founding director Mark Coetzee had been suspended in 2018 following allegations of workers harrasment and later resigned.
Kouoh has been broadly credited with turning Zeitz’s fortunes round, main it via the scandal, in addition to the Covid pandemic.
“For me, it grew to become an obligation to salvage this establishment,” she instructed The Artwork World: What If…?! podcast.
“I used to be satisfied that the failure of Zeitz, if it had failed would’ve been the failure of all of us African artwork professionals within the subject, by some means not directly.”
As Zeitz’s director and curator, Kouoh oversaw plenty of acclaimed exhibitions, together with When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Portray. The present, which brings collectively works by black artists from the final century, is at the moment on show in Brussels.
In a press release asserting Kouoh’s “sudden” dying, Zeitz expressed its “profound sorrow” and stated that, out of respect, the museum could be closed “till additional discover”.
In her Monetary Instances interview final week, Kouoh challenged the concept that dying would convey an finish to her endeavours.
“I do consider in life after dying, as a result of I come from an ancestral black training the place we consider in parallel lives and realities,” she stated.
“There isn’t any ‘after dying’, ‘earlier than dying’ or ‘throughout life’. It does not matter that a lot. I consider in energies – dwelling or useless – and in cosmic power.”
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