Cameroonian-born curator Koyo Kouoh sums up her three-decade career as being at the forefront of impactful and conversational art exhibitions in the Pan-African and international community.
Kouoh, one of the leading black female art curators in Africa, has in the past orchestrated meaningful and timely exhibitions such as Body Talk: Feminism, Sexuality and the Body in the Works of Six African Women Artists, first shown at Wiels in Brussels, Belgium in 2015.
The executive director and chief curator of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA) based in Cape Town assumed her role in May 2019. She held an intimate public opening of new season exhibitions: Past Disquiet, Seismography of Struggle: Towards a Global History of Critical and Symposium titled The Poetics and Politics of Archival Practice, which ran from last week Thursday to this past Saturday.
The exhibition experience also saw the launch of Zeitz MOCAA’s latest publication, Radical Solidarity: A Reader.
Kouoh studied business administration and banking in Switzerland and cultural management in France before building an impressive international curatorial career. She was named “one of Africa’s pre-eminent art curators and managers” by the New York Times in 2015. She explained that what kept her going over the years was her love for storytelling in different types of forms but mainly art.
“There are multiple ways to tell a story. Through music, cinematography, literature and art. As Africans, there are multiple ways to tell our stories, which I don’t think we tell enough of hence I made it my mission to curate an experience that exhibits our stories,” she told Sowetan ahead of the much-awaited exhibition. “With these exhibitions, we are able to unearth history and bring art into the conversation in society... these conversations create spaces of learning, contemplation and self-discovery.”
As a female exhibitor, Kouoh understands the importance of providing guidance to young female curators entering the art exhibition space. “Young professionals in the continent who might have the desires and knowledge often lack opportunities to enter the field,” said the 56-year-old seasoned exhibitionist.
“Before I came to SA years ago, I set up an organisation that is a material company, which is a centre for art, and knowledge and society and one of the flagship programmes was an educational programme, which we call the academy that is ran twice a year. We bring ten young professionals from various fields of art and criticisms from various practices together for two months of exposure to a faculty that they can engage with.
“This programme helps these young professionals see the numerous options and avenues to solidifying and securing their spot in this field– they are able to see what kind of careers they can aspire to.”
In the last three years, Kouoh has also developed a fellowship programme at the Zeitz MOCAA where seven young professionals, from Pan-Africa, are part of a 12-month postgraduate programme that’s in collaboration with the University of Western Cape’s Centre of Humanity and Research where they learn how to work in the museum.
“They do research, curating, communications marketing and how to run a centre,” she said. “To me, it’s really about creating opportunities for those coming after us. I’ve also noted that in our field, the GenZs don’t know how to go about getting these opportunities which can be detrimental to their admission in this field. It’s mainly about how dedicated they are in their pursuit.”
Being one of the leading African female curators in her field, Kouoh explains that though a huge scale of art is done by women, the registrar or key person is usually male which hinders the visibility of women.
“People outside our industry often know about the commercial gathering and artists but our industry is far larger than that. There are more women in this sector that should be given key roles,” she explains.
Having curated numerous exhibitions in her impressive career, the founding artistic director of RAW Material Company from 2008 to 2019 expressed that The Past Disquiet is a documentary and archival exhibition based on research conducted by Lebanese curator-writers duo, and long-time collaborators, Kristine Khouri and Rasha Salti.
“For over a decade, they explored four seed collections of art that were intended to be ‘museums in solidarity’ or ‘museums in exile’, that incarnated the engagement of artists with a particular political cause,” she said. “It is an exhibition of stories told with documents, photographs, pamphlets, press clippings, posters, interviews, and videos. The research began as the two curators explored how the International Art Exhibition for Palestine, which took place in Beirut (Lebanon) in 1978, was meant to become the nucleus for a museum in solidarity with the Palestinian people’s struggle.”
She also added that the Seismography of Struggle brings to life the power of publishing and its revolutionary impact on social movements. “Zahia’s dedication to researching and bringing together a publicly accessible database with its particular geographical and cultural focus is legendary, and at its core fundamentally political. While leaning into the aesthetics of the archival object’s seductiveness, the meditative nature of the installation also allows for new connections to be made between these historic documents,” said Kouoh.
“Together, these two exhibitions speak to rich and radical histories of art and culture as integral to political struggles for democracy, equality, and sovereignty.”
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