Remembering Koyo Kouoh (1967 - 2025)

Last year we were honoured to welcome Koyo Kouoh to deliver a keynote address at the AWITA annual conference. We asked her to speak of her dreams for the future. Below are parts of her address.

Koyo Kouoh, Keynote Address at Build Your Own Art World at Christie’s. Image by Jennifer Moyes

“I have dedicated my work and my life to educate other generations of young practitioners, curators, writers, and all of it on the African continent. I believe that one of the things that an institution like Zeitz MOCCA can do is to pave the way for the next generation beyond making exhibitions and publications. I always like to joke that we will never be short of artists and thinkers, but we are short of everybody else that holds that together and translates and mediates it for the general public.” 

“So that leads me to ask you and ask myself, what is a museum? What is a museum of art? Is it a fancy location in New York, in Hong Kong, in Cape Town? Or is it a concept, a project, an idea? Is it maybe even an organic body, something that is alive, reflexive, generative, or is it dead? Some are. It takes a continent and their allies to make a museum. I am more and more convinced that art institutions are not only products of their environment, but also active and invaluable agents capable of shaping societies in return.”

“For the greatest part of human history, objects have been our most important documents. They have propelled our physical and mental development. However, the way we interact with objects has continuously changed over the course of time. First to drawing, then to photographic reproduction, and now to digitization. For centuries, museums have collected and interpreted objects and images as bearers of artistic statement and culture.  The fact that these holdings meet in a museum, that they are in fact made to talk there as testimonies of human history indeed, in humanity's memory, that they preserve and protect history against private or political interests is one of the most important legitimizations of museums.”

“I was growing more and more wary of curating exhibitions and was not interested in doing another show, lining up the usual suspects of our system that have been widely promoted over the past 20 years or so. So in my thinking, I gravitated towards the question of how the African continent, after 50 years of independence, is really determining its artistic landscape. I figured that independent art institutions have altered and shaped the art scene a great deal, and I invited seven arts institutions, to present their modi operandi, their strategies and their ideas in progress. The art institution became the artworks and their directors became the artists, so to speak. So while art centers across the globe, in the West mainly, were buckling down under the strains of budgets, these spaces set themselves apart from state-affiliated institutions and commercial art markets, with many of them addressing an artistic and critical void in their local environments.”

“I quote my brother Ntoné Edjabe ‘Unless we push form and content beyond what exists, then we merely reproduce the original form, the colonized form, if you will. It requires not only a new set of questions, but its own set of tools, new practices, and methodologies that allow us to engage the lines of flight, of fragility, the precariousness, as well as joy, creativity, and beauty of contemporary African life.’ “

“Convening is essential. Convening women in the arts is imperative. The more we connect our respective networks and interests, the more we can transform the field. To all of you in this room who are art professionals, who are women, who care for plurality, who care for inclusivity, who care for the multiple layers of translating society and history and politics, will you care for equality, will you work for anti-racism? I really would like you to think about what you do in your field that on a daily basis contributes to the advancement of the world, of humanity, what is it that you do that really participates in making the next day better.”

“This poem Let Our Voices Ring by Efe Polazino I think, can be repositioned to serve the purpose of female voices, but also, of course, always of blackness, which is always the premise from which I speak and I look at the world.”

Let Our Voices Ring by Efe Polazino

Let our voices ring
soft and strong
a million rainbow tongues
pushing our songs through the wind
let our stories dance out in step with the moon
let them boom from hamlets in Soweto
rise through the sprawls of Cairo
straddle the contradictions of Lagos
let them tell of sweat and fear:
of backs bent to carry dreams too heavy for legs to bear
of old men whose visions of the future tether us to the past
let our voices come accompanied by Djembes, talking drums and all that jazz
let our stories speak of sex:
of probing tongues & grinding thighs against the Nairobi heat
of love that rises from the ashes of defeat
in Kigali
tapestries of our humanity
woven into beautiful colors of difference and diversity
this is who we are
children of histories punctuated by conferences
divided by cartographers in Berlin
defended by storytellers in Makarere
united by this struggle to prove, and be
something more than the soft underbelly
of a world perched on the edge of a knife
and it's to these voices we turn, time and again
to remind us that we get past the pain
that we have once chiseled out beauty from mountains of self-doubt
through the dark tunnels of despair these stories will lead us out
in Twi, in Swahili, in Yoruba
whatever the languages of our imaginations
let our voices never stop ringing
let our feet dance up spirits
let our pens conjure the ancient wisdom of the ancestors
excavate memories to find the civilizations we once built
before the barbarians barged through the doors
for we are a people too,
a universe of multiple dreams written into history
written out of war
written to the sound of thunder,
written in lightning
written, by million rainbow voices that never stop ringing