Koyo Kouoh

“Curatorial practice is a field of proposition and negotiation.”

Koyo Kouoh has been the Executive Director and Chief Curator at The Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA) in Cape Town, South Africa, since March 2019. Prior to that, Kouoh was the founding Artistic Director of RAW Material Company in Dakar, Senegal, a center for art and critical education as well as a renowned residency program founded in 2008. She considers her curatorial practice as aligned with aspects of storytelling, mediation, and understanding what artistic practice does in the society. “I also understand the practice of curating as a practice of enabling, of making possible, unearthing, opening, and channeling ideas and energies toward a culmination of issues that can be political, historical, social,” she adds. “Curatorial practice is a field of proposition and negotiation. I rather call this work ‘cultural producing’ because I really believe that the multiple layers and fields that a curator can invest in are far bigger than what we have learned to consider the space of the exhibition”

In her independent curatorial practice, she has organized timely exhibitions such as Body Talk: Feminism, Sexuality and the Body in the Works of Six African Women Artists, first shown at Wiels, Brussels, in 2015. She curated the 37th EVA International, the Irish Biennial in Limerick in 2016, titled Still (the) Barbarians, and, more recently, she participated to the 57th Carnegie International in Pittsburgh with the deeply researched Dig Where You Stand, (2018)—a show within a show drawn from the collections of the Carnegie Museums of Art and Natural History. Kouoh was the initiator of the research project Saving Bruce Lee: African and Arab Cinema in the Era of Soviet Cultural Diplomacy, co-curated with Rasha Salti at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow and Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin (2015–2018).

“Education, knowledge production, transmission, and grooming young professionals has been an integral part of my practice for more than twenty-five years,” she says, “so being part of Forecast to follow, work with, travel, think, and dream with an up-and-coming curator is an incredible privilege.” As a mentor, she is looking for applicants who are “curious, engaged, obsessed, dedicated, and unflinching in their pursuit of mediation and translation of what artists do and who are not shy of disrupting the established order.”