Kouoh stated that she determined to take the job after many conversations with Black colleagues. “There was a sense that we can’t let this fail,” she stated. “The size and ambition of Zeitz MOCAA is exclusive on the continent and somebody needed to take duty and make this museum dwell as much as its rightful ambitions.”
When she arrived in Might 2019, her first precedence was to reorganize the galleries, which have been scattered over greater than 100 small areas. She took benefit of an already deliberate William Kentridge exhibition to interrupt down partitions, and create extra respiration house, then set about defining “a curatorial articulation by way of what we need to stand for.” Her objective, she stated, was to create a way of the museum “as a format of public engagement, civic engagement.”
Throughout the strict pandemic lockdowns after March 2020, the museum closed for seven months, and Kouoh used the time to restructure its governance and develop the board of trustees, including influential African collectors and philanthropists, and creating a world council of advisers, which incorporates the artists Carsten Holler, Wangechi Mutu and Yinka Shonibare. Kouoh has modified “how the local people see Zeitz,” stated the Cape City-based artist Igshaan Adams, who not too long ago spent eight months in residence there. “My artist mates and I hadn’t felt any curiosity from the museum, however Koyo made me really feel they cared about us, and about new audiences.” Though he was initially immune to the proposition, the residency, he stated, “was an excellent thought,” permitting guests to the museum to significantly interact with an artist’s course of. “Typically over 1,000 individuals a day can be there,” he stated, including that it was the primary time he had skilled that engagement “with individuals who seem like me and communicate like me.”
Since her arrival, Kouoh has emphasised solo retrospectives — Tracey Rose, Johannes Phokela, Mary Evans — which she describes as a pillar of her curatorial imaginative and prescient. “My era of curators have been knowledgeable and motivated by a robust need to unearth as many tales as we may, and make them seen, and all of us did these group reveals,” she stated. “However I imagine there’s a nice lack of finding out particular person voices and the way they communicate to one another inside and throughout generations. What influences come from an artist like Issa Samb or Gerard Sekoto to youthful artists at this time? I feel we African curators haven’t finished this sufficient.”
This doesn’t imply the museum received’t placed on group reveals, Kouoh added, citing “When We See Us,” as an exhibition which “locations figuration in a temporality that’s longer and extra far-reaching than the final 10 years of market frenzy. It premises Black pleasure as a critical, contentious, political, joyful material, and on the Black expertise throughout geographies, the continent, the diaspora.”
Requested whether or not she noticed herself as a bearer of the flame of the influential Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor, Kouoh regarded disapproving. “I don’t like the concept of there being one individual doing this or that,” she stated. “There’s quite a lot of mutual assist, of generosity and care throughout the continent. I’m a part of that era of African artwork professionals who’ve delight and data about the great thing about African tradition, which has usually been outlined by others in so many improper methods. I don’t imagine we have to spend time correcting these narratives. We have to inscribe different views.”
