On the port of Cape Town, at the southern tip of Africa, a contemporary art museum is the envy of many: the Zeitz-Mocaa, taken over by the ambitious Cameroonian curator Koyo Kouoh, showcases the continent’s art and of its multiple diasporas. “For me, Africa is an idea, a story that transcends borders,” explains this elegant 56-year-old woman with long green braids and lively eyes.
“I often tell our American visitors that the United States is also an African country. They don’t like to hear that,” she laughs, a bit provocative but yet very serious. Just like Brazil, Cuba or Haiti: “What makes a country is the aggregation and combination of cultural expressions and influences. However, the African influence in the United States, as in these other countries, is undeniable. This is why I like to talk about black geographies more than African diasporas. Where black culture, black bodies, black people have influenced society. »
Arriving at the head of this museum four years ago, Koyo Kouoh, raised between Douala and Zurich and who notably set up a cutting-edge art center in Dakar, completely rethought its contents. She remodeled this first major African art museum, with which major New York and European institutions now want to collaborate.
In this old wheat silo, graphic and refined, which evokes a beehive with multiple cells, she inherited a “broken” institution where the urgency was, according to her, “to provide a programmatic structure” to forge a identity, a particularity. She sought to “examine the needs, the type of added value that the museum can bring to the understanding, contemplation, appreciation” of contemporary art from Africa and its diasporas.
“Pan-Africanism is obvious to me, it is necessary: ??the continent’s narrative has been largely defined by others and this is still the case today,” she believes. Decades after the end of colonialism, during which “yet many voices emerged and gained authority” in Africa, “stigmas are still extremely active, whether you embrace them, whether you internalize them or not.”
“Take ownership of the space”
The striking exhibition “Researchers, Seers and Diviners”, currently presented to visitors, explores, via photo or video projections on the walls or various textile installations, a spiritual and even supernatural sphere. “It’s absolutely necessary to bring other stories to the table. And not as a means of correction. I have no interest in correcting, I do not own or internalize the erroneous story. But you have to appropriate the space,” judges Koyo Kouoh.
In the urgency of bringing out stories from the continent, African curators have tended to put together group exhibitions. “We wanted to tell stories with multiple voices. » Today, she prefers to favor spaces devoted to one or only one artist. “It’s a very rich format. When we design a group exhibition, we hope to create a symphony, but most of the time we create a cacophony. » With the solo exhibition, “you have a real symphony of experiences and universes,” she notes. Even if she doesn’t forbid anything.
For example, the recent exhibition “When we see us”, which showcases a century of African figurative painting, is due to leave Cape Town to be shown in Basel, Switzerland. The museum is now recognized globally for its pan-African and pan-Diasporic work. “He’s the only one who has this ambition,” insists Koyo Kouoh in the panoramic elevator which offers a bird’s eye view of the entrance hall of the imposing industrial building.
She now wants to focus on three priorities: exhibiting emerging talents alongside established artists, but also offering a major platform to women artists and celebrating “practices which have not received the recognition they deserve”. “We are the only museum to have exhibited so many African women artists,” she emphasizes, defending herself from any activism but saying she is determined to “strongly promote” them.
