2026 Biennial coordinator in Venice dies from cancer in 57

Cameo Cuuwah, a Cameroonian -born secretary behind some of the most important exhibitions of African contemporary art in recent decades, died unexpectedly at the age of 57.

the New York Times I mentioned On Sunday, she died the previous day in a hospital in Basel, Switzerland, and that the reason was cancer. Her husband, Philip Mall, said, Times She had recently received her diagnosis.

The death of Couh comes a few months after her appointment as a coordinator in the Venice Biennial for 2026-which makes it the second birth of Africa from Africa to lead the exhibition, in the wake of the pioneering OKWui Enwezor version in 2015.

Biennial in Venice announced her death on Saturday, describing her as a “passion, intellectual accuracy, and vision.” The subject of its exhibition and address, which was developing since its appointment in December 2024, was to be disclosed in Venice in less than two weeks.

Couh was widely respected for its commitment to expanding the world narrative of contemporary art outside the United States and Europe, especially for its focus on African art. Since 2019, she was an executive director and head of the Moche Museum of Contemporary African Art (Zetz Moka) in Cape Town, South Africa – an institution that helped form it on a critical platform for artists from all over the continent and expatriates.

The Foundation has helped gain international interest in offers such as “When Narna: A century of black design in drawing”, which was widely considered the specified display in its subject. Three years later, the offer is still traveling. After I traveled away from South Africa, it can be seen at the Boosar Art Center in Brussels.

Kouh was also committed to strengthening art scenes inside Africa, most notably inside Senegal. In 2008, Raw Mateial Company was founded in Dakar, an independent art center that is now considered one of the best art spaces in West Africa.

“I wanted to really think about art, about artistic practice, and contribute to understanding artistic practice as its own thinking system and a mechanism to participate in visual culture, society and politics.” He said Artforum In 2016Describe her choice to open the raw material company. “I wanted to think about it as a way to propose, speculation, investigation, exploration, experimentation. As a coordinator, I am interested in critical artistic practices and how they play in society, especially societies like our societies. I think the context greatly determines everything we do.”

It was completely aware of the methods that were defined as the prevailing novels of African art – and who identified it. There Artforum An interview, Coah described herself as part of the “second generation” of African values ​​who rebelled against what she described as “coordination of the invitation” in the West. Although it praised the work done by Okwui Enwezor, Olu Oguibe and others in the United States and Europe, she wanted to create offers of African art for African art.

She said: “For me, it is important to deal with ideas and issues that relate to our region here first – to think about them, search for them, write about them, and show them – and share them with the world only.”

However, I did this, by working on the bands of two editions of Documenta (in 2007 and 2012), organizing every two years IVA in Ireland, and making a show due to the 2018 offer of 2018 from Carnegie International, a frequent repeated show that occurs in the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

All this work, whether it is happening inside or outside Africa, was a form of institution building. “It is extremely important to build institutions instead of professions,” she said to ARTNEWS In 2019, “Because these institutions will leave a legacy that enhances knowledge.”

Coyo Cuuwa was born in Dalla, Cameroon, in 1967. Although she moved to Zurich when she was thirteen years of age and will continue to spend more than a decade in Switzerland, she studied banking and business administration there, she did not forget her roots in Cameroon. She spoke in interviews with women in her precedent family: her grandmother, a sewing that gave her her work “access to creativity”; Her great grandmother, who was forced to marry polygamy when she was still a teenager.

“My great grandmother had her hands and thinking only about raising her four children.” ARTNEWS. “This is the family that I came from. This is the essence of feminism.”

During the nineties of the last century, after the divorce and the birth of her son Deepberl, she began to turn her attention to a new field of work. (Djibril was raised as a single mother and will continue to adopt three other children.) Inspired by Margaret Bossby African girlsShe once said: “In a very shy manner,” she once said – to do a written job. Edited Töchter AfrikasA pillar of its German language, and long -term prayers with African artists of all kinds began. Someone even took it to Dakar, the city with which she launched a long commitment: the Senegalese director Othman Simbin, who was appointed to the profile. She moved to Dakar forever in 1996.

In Dakar, she met the artist Issa Sam, who founded the team of artistic work with director Devil Diop Mambi, painter El Hagi C, and theatrical writer Yusufa Dion. “But regardless of the work that Samb did, and the speech he supported in his studio,” Cuuoh said Artforum“There was no place to discuss art the way I think it should be discussed – this means, in an analytical and social way.” She wanted to change this, although she never forgot the work of Samb, who surveyed his art for the contemporary Norway office in Oslo in 2013.

Kouhh has become partly known internationally thanks to the two versions of BAMAKO meetings, the financial photographic, which I organized with Simon Najami. Najami said ARTNEWS In 2019, “she had a will, a driving force to change things, and all the options she made were right – without bargaining. It is not a kind of complaint. When there is something wrong, she tries to find a way to fix it.”

The raw material company was established in 2008 as the Riposte for the technical spaces managed by the country in Senegal. She was independent, and most of her female employees were women. The progress came slowly: The raw materials company did not open a brick site and mortar shells open to the public until 2011. And today, it has exhibitions, library, studios, and other resource and resources program for the local art scene. It was a decisive space inside Senegal and a model of the artistic spaces that appeared elsewhere.

The raw material company said in a statement today that Koma is “a real power, a source of warmth, generosity and intelligence.” “I have always emphasized that people were more important than things and today we are deeply absent.”

I arrived at Zeitz MoCAA, the Cape Town Museum founded by Jochen Zeitz and David Green Mosque, in 2019 where the Foundation faced controversy. Its former director, Mark Kotzi, was expelled amid allegations of racist notes and sexual harassment. Cuuwa was determined to circumvent the museum’s reputation, and she did so.

“There was a feeling that we could not leave this failure,” she He said New York Times. “Zettz and Mocha’s ambition and ambition is unique on the continent and someone had to bear responsibility and make this museum rise to the level of its legitimate aspirations.”

It reorganized the entire collection and rethink the museum programming, with a new focus on the past. Accordingly, she organized shows such as 2022 retroactively for Tracey Rose, and her friend for a long time, and “When we see us”, she was surveyed on the black photographic painting in the same year. Both these two offerings gained widespread praise, especially “when Narrana”, which created ambitious proportions of painters between generations and sexual transmission. This composition included Moco, a self -artist, is known for drawing Kinshasa’s hustle and bustle; Amy Sherrad, an American, is widely known as the image of Michelle Obama. And Thebe Phenogo, the young Botsuanan artist who critically took the idea of ​​black character in paintings made of polishing shoes.

Couh’s death comes because she would face the Venice Biennial, in what was her greatest project so far. She was the second of Africa’s second secretary to organize the largest art gallery in the world, after Enwezor, and one of the few women ever to coordinate it. The future of her Biennial was not clear from Saturday; The topic has not yet been detailed to display.

In recent interviews, I talked about the desire to continue to bring African art to the rest of the world. In 2020, I thought about the launch of the Contemporary African Art Gallery 1-54 in 2014.

But she was carefully harmonious to the needs of the African continent. There Artforum She described the interview “First and Fuel”, which she described as: “Whenever an African person achieves something, we always hear that he is the only African or is the only African, or is the first African or is the first African. It is always unusual.” She said that the syndrome has been officially “challenged”, adding: “This means that we are talking to ourselves now, as real discussions begin.”

Update, 5/11/25, 11:55 AM: This article has been updated to include Kouoh’s reported death.