“People are like the five fingers of your hand,” Koyo Kouoh, executive director and chief curator of Cape Town’s Zeitz MoCAA, reflected when speaking to ArtReview in 2017, recounting a nugget of her grandmother’s wisdom: “Some are stronger, thicker, taller, but they are ultimately equal and interdependent. Lose one and you’d know.” Kouoh, named today as the artistic director of the 61st Venice Biennale, will no doubt – come April 2026 – feel similarly about the artists she chooses to display.
At this juncture, as another Venice Biennale cycle begins, it is fair to say that Kouoh (and the curatorial profession more broadly) occupies a complex position in the current climate. Mostly, that’s because the art being produced today purports to be a zone of justice (ArtReview won’t bore you with why; just read any one of its more-than-fairly-priced magazines). One way of resolving, or denying, that complexity manifested at this year’s recently closed Biennale, where curator Adriano Pedrosa made a point of emphasising the fact that he was choosing artists who hadn’t previously been picked for the biennial as a result of (it was implied) racism, sexism, colonialism, ableism, homophobia and various other prejudices. His Foreigners Everywhere exhibition might have come across like a salon des refusés for our contemporary times. A diatribe against conformity. The decision to leave the parameters so open-ended can also, perhaps conveniently, disarm critique. ‘Who, in the face of such plurality,’ J.J. Charlesworth posits in his review, ‘could possibly write anything about it?’
Contemporary perspectives on curating, though, actually tend to relate to how artworks can be massaged into arguments. Operating, if you like, at some sort of nexus at which theory becomes practice: saying, these are the issues that art is supposed to care about. Then combine that with the circumstances we presently find ourselves in – on one side, an urgent need (both ethical and commercial) to address things within the context of an exhibition that otherwise may be overlooked, ignored or silenced; and on the other, a time of widespread cancellations on both sides of the political spectrum, as the spaces for presenting alternative points of view are becoming few and far between. Kouoh herself is no stranger to controversy in this respect: in June, the artist Tracey Rose lambasted her and Kunstmuseum Bern, claiming that a work about Palestine had been censored in her solo show, curated by Kouoh, at the Swiss institution.
Yet Kouoh has consistently advocated for the role of art in facilitating change when it comes to issues not only in the artworld but in the real one. Indeed, she established her name through the Raw Material Company in Senegal, which she founded in 2008 as a mobile art initiative for artist talks and lectures on topics such as urban living, literature, film, diasporic identity and politics, with the long-term goal of establishing a living archive of contemporary artistic practice in Africa at its subsequent permanent address in Dakar. Just how much she will succeed in bridging that gap in Venice, which she has described as “more as a flocking point than a meeting point”, will depend not only on the state of the world at that time but on how willing an ever-more polarised audience will be to listen. “What’s necessitated by the multiple socioethical and political crises we’re facing in our current era is an injection of empathy, openness and understanding,” Kouoh told ArtReview, “and that means relating to and communicating with others around us, even where difficult.”
This is an extract from the ArtReview Newsletter, first published on 3 December 2024. Sign up here.
