The Board of La Biennale di Venezia has selected Koyo Kouoh, one of Africa’s most prominent curators, to lead the 61st edition of the Venice Biennale, in Venice, Italy from April to November 2026. Kouoh is the first African woman to be appointed to this role. The upcoming Biennale will consist of a large, themed group show to be curated by Kouoh and several independent national pavilions. Kouoh succeeds Brazilian curator Adriano Pedrosa, the artistic director for the 60th edition of the Venice Biennale held earlier this year, which STIR covered comprehensively.

Kouoh is a prominent figure in the international art world—she has been the executive director and chief curator of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA ) in South Africa since 2019. She curated the 37th edition of the Ireland Biennale (EVA International) in 2016 and was part of the curatorial teams for documenta 12 (2007) and documenta 13 (2012). Early in her career, she garnered acclaim for founding the RAW Material Company, a trans-disciplinary art centre in Dakar, Senegal. She divides her time between Cape Town, Dakar, and Basel.

Kouoh’s artist-forward curatorial practice reinvigorated Zeitz MOCAA, which holds Africa’s largest collection of contemporary art, propelling it to the forefront of international art conversations and garnering the acclaim of fellow artists and curators. Her approach to curation is political, often dealing with feminist, post-colonial and racial themes, seeing art as a vector to affect thought and change. Her 2022 show, When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting, was widely regarded as a landmark exhibition. It travelled to the Kunstmuseum Basel in Switzerland and was eventually exhibited at Art Basel. One of her most acclaimed shows is the research investigation/art exhibition Dig Where You Stand (2018), exhibited at the 57th Carnegie International, which recontextualised art and objects from the museum’s own collection to prompt critical assessment and reevaluation of the Western canon.

Kouoh’s appointment came via the recommendation of the President of La Biennale di Venezia, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, who said in the official press release, “The appointment of Koyo Kouoh as the director of the Visual Arts Sector is the acknowledgement of a broad horizon of vision at the dawn of a day profuse with new words and eyes…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.”

At Zeitz MOCAA, Kouoh organised solo shows for artists like Tracey Rose, Otobong Nkanga and Abdoulaye Konaté. Kouoh explained her curatorial vision for the museum in a 2020 interview with ArtNews, saying, “We are convinced that when it comes to contemporary African art, there have been so many ideas and positions lumped into group shows, and not enough work has been done on individual voices.” This is seen in shows like WORD! WORDS? WORD! Issa Samb and the Undecipherable Form (2013), in which Kouoh brought the experimental and political art of the Senegalese artist to a European audience for the first time.

She plans to bring this artist-forward approach to her tenure as the artistic director of the Venice Biennale 2026, saying, “It is a once-in-a-lifetime honor and privilege…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.”

The theme for the Venice Biennale 2024 was Foreigners Everywhere (Stranieri Ovunque). The theme for the 2026 Venice Biennale, selected by Kouoh, is expected to be announced sometime next year. A handful of countries have already announced the artists who will be representing them at the Venice Biennale’s national pavilions in 2026—Abbas Akhavan for Canada, Li Yi-Fan for Taiwan and Yto Barrada for France.

(Text by STIR intern Srishti Ojha)