The Venice Biennale has for the first time appointed an African woman as the curator of its contemporary art festival, wrong-footing those who expected the world’s oldest and biggest cultural exhibition to take a more nationalistic course under the right wing Meloni government.
Swiss-Cameroonian curator Koyo Kouoh has been put in charge of the 61st edition of the Biennale Arte, which will take place in Venice from April to November 2026.
Born in 1967 in Cameroon but educated through her teens and twenties in Zurich, Switzerland, Kouoh has since 2019 been executive director of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (MOCAA) in Cape Town, South Africa, which holds the continent’s largest collection of contemporary art.
A self-described “fundamental pan-Africanist”, she was previously the founding artistic director of Raw Material Company, an art centre in Dakar, Senegal.
The late Nigerian art critic Okwui Enwezor became the first African-born curator of the Biennale in 2015, though he was at the time working mostly in Europe, as director of Munich’s Haus der Kunst.
Kouoh follows in the footsteps of Brazilian curator Adriano Pedrosa, whose 2024 Biennale, entitled “foreigners everywhere”, drew mixed responses. Described by Pedrosa as a celebration of migration and non-belonging, it was feted by some for exploding the Western canon, while critics described it as preachy and erratically hung.
With a change of political climate in Italy, the 60th art Biennale was widely expected to be the last hurrah of a school of art curation that castigated eurocentrism and championed voices from the global south.
Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, the Sicilian journalist who took over as the Biennale’s new president last November, is an open supporter of far-right prime minister Giorgia Meloni, and was feared by some to turn the cultural exhibition into a vehicle for Meloni’s brand of populism.
Gennaro Sangiuliano, the former culture minister who has since resigned over appointing an ex-lover as his aide, had agitated for a turn away from the internationalism of previous festival iterations, insisting the Venice Biennale was “a fundamental element of Italian imagination”.
Yet with Kouoh’s appointment, Buttafuoco seems to live up to his reputation as a more idiosyncratic and free-thinking conservative, with a penchant for the mystical.
“The appointment of Koyo Kouoh as the artistic director of the visual arts department is the recognition of a broad horizon of vision in the rising of a day rich with new words and eyes,” he said in a statement on Tuesday. “With her, here in Venice, La Biennale confirms what it has offered to the world for over a century: to be the home of the future.”
Kouoh described the Venice Biennale as a “mythical site”, where artists, collectors and the public converge every two years to “feel the pulse of the zeitgeist”.
