Lecture: Koyo Kouoh

Hunter College presents a lecture by Koyo Kouoh, Executive Director and Chief Curator, Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town, South Africa.

Koyo Kouoh is the Founding Artistic Director of RAW Material Company. For the 57th edition of the Carnegie International in 2018, Kouoh organized Dig Where You Stand, an exhibition within the exhibition based on the Carnegie Museum of Art’s collection. With Rasha Salti, she co-curated Saving Bruce Lee: African and Arab Cinema in the Era of Soviet Cultural Diplomacy at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. Previously, she was the curator of 1:54 FORUM, the educational program of the Contemporary African Art Fair in London and New York, and served on the curatorial teams for documenta 12 (2007) and documenta 13 (2012). Kouoh was the curator of Still (the) Barbarians for the 37th EVA International, Ireland’s biennial in Limerick (2016); and has curated numerous exhibitions internationally. Her publications include Word!Word?Word! Issa Samb and the Undecipherable Form (RAW Material Company/OCA/Sternberg Press, 2013), the first monograph dedicated to the work of seminal Senegalese artist Issa Samb; Condition Report on Building Art Institutions in Africa, a collection of essays resulting from the eponymous symposium held in Dakar in January 2012; and Chronicle of a Revolt: Photographs of a Season of Protest (RAW Material Company and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2012). Besides a sustained theoretical, exhibition, and residency program at RAW Material Company, she maintains a critical curatorial and advisory activity and regularly takes part in juries and selection committees internationally. In March 2019, Koyo Kouoh was appointed Executive Director and Chief Curator of Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz Mocaa), in Cape Town, South Africa. She lives and works in Dakar, Cape Town, and Basel, and is consciously addicted to shoes, textiles and food.

The Foundation To-Life, Inc. Arthur and Carol Kaufman Goldberg Curatorial Workshops are designed to bring curators of international stature to the Hunter campus to work with students in the MA program in Art History and the MFA program in Studio Art for an extended period of time. Previous Goldberg Curators have included Ann Goldstein of the Art Institute of Chicago; Hamza Walker of LAXArt in Los Angeles; Fabrice Stroun, an independent curator based in Switzerland; Valerie Cassel Oliver of the Virginia Museum of Fine Art; Omar Kholeif of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Pablo Helguera of the Museum of Modern Art; and Lynne Cooke of the National Gallery of Art, Washington D. C. The Foundation To-Life Curatorial Workshop program recognizes the curatorial interests and ambitions of Hunter students and the Hunter College Art Galleries’ longstanding commitment to exhibitions whose themes, theses, and checklists have been developed and honed by our students. Recent faculty-initiated, seminar-based exhibitions have included Stephen Mueller: Orchidaceous; Acts of Art and Rebuttal in 1971; and Copy, Translate, Repeat: Contemporary Art from the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (all 2018); Framing Community: Magnum Photos, 1947–Present (2017); and Critical Gestures/Contested Spaces: French Art and Politics in the 1960s and Boundless Reality: Traveler Artists’ Landscapes of Latin America from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection (both 2016).