The Art World: What If…?!, Season 2, 9 Part 1: Koyo Kouoh

Joining us from Cape Town in South Africa is Koyo Kouoh, the chief curator and executive director of Zeitz MOCAA for the first in a two-part special. Originally destined for a career in finance, Koyo talks about her journey into the art world, and from Basel in Switzerland to Dakar in Senegal, where she founded RAW Material Company in 2008. She tells us about her move to South Africa in 2019 to take over at Zeitz MOCAA, a new institution, but one in crisis. “We need to take the time to do the things that are urgent, that are essential, that are necessary,” Koyo says. “And, for me, building out institutions on the continent is a matter of urgency.”

Transcript:

Charlotte Burns: Hello and welcome to The Art World: What If…?!, a podcast in which we imagine new futures. I’m your host Charlotte Burns. 

[Audio of guests]

This time, we’re talking to the chief curator and executive director of Zeitz MOCAA, Koyo Kouoh. The conversation is so good we’re bringing it to you in two parts. In this episode Koyo—originally destined for a career in finance—talks about her journey into the art world, and from Basel in Switzerland to Dakar in Senegal, where she founded RAW Material Company in 2008, and then to her move to South Africa in 2019 to take over at Zeitz MOCAA, a new institution, but one already in crisis. 

Art is something we only know that we don't have when it has gone, Koyo says, like health. Humanity is essentially about connection, and what’s the connector, she asks? Art and all the forms of creative expression. Koyo is building something real and urgent, and I hope you all listen. Here’s part one. 

Charlotte Burns: Koyo. Thank you so much. I have a question for you to start us with, a ‘what if.’ The artist, Tracey Rose has said of you, “There are so few people around that understand the power of art, not financial power, but the resonance it has.” What if people understood the resonance that art has? What do you think that could do?

Koyo Kouoh: Oh, then the art would really be able to change the world. [Laughs] But unfortunately, not as many people who actually should be concerned with art, are concerned with art. What if everybody would really get the resonance of art? I think we would have less wars, [Laughs] obviously, and the kind of living models that humanity created across the globe will be more mindful of the human being, more mindful in terms of, spiritual growth, intellectual growth as opposed to financial and capitalistic growth. Because I strongly believe that art is something that we only know we don't have when we don't have it. It's like health, so to speak. You know it's value when you don't have it anymore. I have a relationship with art that is more or less on the same kind of lines. It's essential to my life personally. It's essential to basically everything I do and how I carry myself through the world. I became the person I am today thanks to the relationships that I built with artists. So the resonance of art is completely underrated regardless of the huge machinery that the art system—I don't like the term art world—but that the global art system has developed and has developed into. I definitely believe that if everybody would really get that resonance and really understand that value, and not financial value, but really spiritual value—because art is a spiritual, social science basically. And I strongly believe that the more we connect to that space of feeling and thinking and writing, the more we will really understand that humanity, it's essentially about connection. And what is the connector? The super global connector is art and all the forms of creative expressions.

So, I wish more people would get that resonance. However, professionals in the art system, we often live in this kind of bubble where we believe that since we are invested in this field, since we are so committed to art and artists, that everybody feels the same or thinks the same, and we've developed such a hermetic language, particularly in the curatorial space of the last 30 years, that is quite daunting for people who are not from the field most of the time. Right? So, I think that it is also our duty and responsibility as art professionals to create spaces and opportunities that allow people who are curious, who are interested, to amplify that resonance that we professionals are so familiar with.

Charlotte Burns: How do you do that? I mean, you've been working in art spaces for decades now, since the 1990s but you didn't begin your career in the arts. You began your career studying banking administration in Switzerland, and you said you were predestined for a career as a trader at Credit Suisse back in the late 1980s before a friendship with a Swiss artist duo opened a different world for you. How did you through that encounter have your life changed, and how were you open to having your life changed in that way?

Koyo Kouoh: The artist duo is Dominique Rust and Clarissa Herbst, a German and Swiss duo of conceptual artists that work in performance and theater and in installation and these two people are at the real origin of my complete transition from finance to arts and culture in the mid-eighties. They just opened a space for me that I didn't know in that way. Of course, I've always been interested in art. Literature was kind of my go-to place. As a kid, I was an avid reader because I loved fiction novels, every novel is a was a space for me to escape. And later cinema, which like most people is a very strong driver. And music of course. So visual arts was kind of less so much it was there, but it was not the great kind of excitement. And it's really beginning with my interest in impressionism, and fascination with Vincent van Gogh somehow, funny enough, yeah, that I really started understanding more what is there and also, as a young 20-something African woman in Western Europe, I was also looking at finding myself in the space. You know, when I say finding myself, it's kind of meta-metaphorical and parabolical but I was trying to see myself in the environment that I was living in. And of course, very sadly, there was very, very few instances and occasions where Black cultural folk or Black artistic expression was presented in Switzerland. It's not just in Switzerland, even in France and in the UK in the eighties and nineties, it was really, it was a desert in terms of, you know, and I don't like to say inclusivity, it's a stupid word, but in terms of consideration. So, by trying to find myself in those environments, I came to visual arts very quickly because of friendships, apprentices. 

I was living in Zurich back then in the mid-eighties in an environment that was extremely regulated. I mean, Switzerland as most people know, is a very organized country, but at the same time also very policed, you know, lots of restrictions and so on in terms of,  even the very sense of notion of relationship to enjoyment and pleasure, you know, the Calvinistic kind of puritanism. We were a group of people who sort of felt like, “No, life cannot be this,” you know? We need more zest, we need more spices in our lives. So we started organizing all sorts of different things, but of course, a lot of things was organized around the bar and the party. I think the bar is the best convener and still the best convener ever in terms of bringing people and ideas together. 

So, and that's how it started. And then it became a kind of a loose, unclear collective of different people from graphic designers to dancers to bankers to lawyers to, I mean, really a very eclectic group of people who were determined to bring more zest to the city. And how do you bring more zest to the city? You have a popular culture, of course. You have convening, eventing, you have, of course, exhibitions and all of that. So this is really how it all started for me. 

In the late eighties in Switzerland, you couldn't go out later than midnight because everything was closing at midnight. Night owls, like myself and my friends back then, it was not acceptable. So we managed with to our activities, we managed to change the law…

Charlotte Burns: Wow. 

Koyo Kouoh: …of how long do bars and restaurants open, for instance. So during that time, when I started being involved with artists and exhibition making and writing, I was constantly looking for myself. Where is the young woman who has Koyo’s identity and background in this mix, except for Koyo herself? And that's when, of course, representation, visibility, all these questions started to really form in a way that, fast forward, just sent me back to the continent.

Charlotte Burns: So just to stay in that moment in Switzerland, that switch when you started thinking that you were still in a career in finance, was it that you started to sense a sort of freedom in this ability to change laws and come together in a collective way?  Obviously, from there you start going to the continent and your life takes you in a new direction in the nineties, but you were still on a different career path. What was the catalyst? What was the feeling you had that you wanted to hold onto?

Koyo Kouoh: I think, you said the key word, I think is ‘freedom.’ I think the space of art offers a level of freedom and ideation and conceptualization that is quite unique in any line of work. And a level of liberty in terms of, you know, self-starting and caring into a field that really nourishes yourself as much as it nourishes whoever benefits from your work or whoever engages with your work. So I think it's that combination of freedom or liberty and nourishment that really got me hooked. And poetry. The poetry of the outspace, of course. The incredible people and minds that you come in contact with and incredible practices that you get the privilege to be associated with. And, of course later now, after 30 years, the relationships that you build, people will become family, like real family and the work that you produce, at the end of the day and what it says around a specific environment, a specific topic, and so on.

That's what a lot of art professionals do. I mean particularly exhibition makers. This is really our work. We want to not only show a practice and mediate it, but we also want to win new people into the field. It's really the unearthing, the space of art is a space of proposals. It's a space of endless propositions that are possible. So it's a space of possibility that I didn't see in banking in the same way and that I didn't see in social work either in the same way—because I also had this thing for a couple of years as a social worker working with migrant women in Switzerland. For me, curatorial practice provided that, and that was, I was really very much more interested in this nourishing aspect. How do we feed each other? How do we feed ourselves and what do we feed ourselves with?

Charlotte Burns: I think we should go to the visit to Dakar you took in the mid-1990s, which is a sort of life-changing trip that you took but you ended up packing and moving the following year.

Koyo Kouoh: Mhmm. Exactly.

Charlotte Burns: And you later said, “I didn't wanna continue to look at a play in which I had no real part in which I was just a fixer.” You said you chose Dakar because of its care for arts and culture, its openness, its Sufi Pacific and Islamic traditions and you would go on to found RAW Material Company first as a mobile site, and then later in 2011 establishing a permanent space. Dakar continues to be a space, a geographic space, of endless possibilities, which has nourished you and which you have nourished back in return. Can you talk a little bit about what it was about that trip in the mid-1990s that proved to be so generative?

Koyo Kouoh: Oh yes. Thank you for that question. I mean, I can speak endlessly about this Dakar trip that completely changed my life. I was a cultural journalist back then writing for a few magazines in Switzerland and I was commissioned an article on Ousmane [Sembène,] the very famous Senegalese filmmaker, because I was engaged back then in Zurich with an organization that was promoting cinema from the continent. And every two years there would be a focus on a major filmmaker. And that year it was Sembène and I went to visit but Sembène was notoriously unfriendly, a non-friendly man, and notoriously wouldn't give interviews. I landed in Senegal, went to Sembène’s office, and he just couldn't care less about me. Interestingly, I had met a few artists before and one of them literally the very day that I arrived, took me to a performance of Issa Samb at his studio, courtyard, home, gallery, arts institution site in the center of Dakar. And meeting Issa has been a profound, transformational encounter for me in a way that I think I was ready to receive that kind of inspiration. And Issa and I hit it off immediately as interlocutors, people who speak to each other, we exchange ideas. I spent over 10 years just speaking and exchanging with Issa before the very first project that we did together. And, to go back to that year in late ‘94, ‘95, I decided right then that I'll move to Senegal and that my time in Europe is up. And that's what I did. And I never regretted that. And after the birth of my son is the most profound transformation I've ever made for myself by living Europe and moving back to the continent in ‘96.

Charlotte Burns: Can you talk a little bit about that? It sounds like a gift you gave yourself.

Koyo Kouoh: Yeah, it's the most profound. Back then, I didn't know I was giving myself a gift. It was not conscious. It's only in retrospect that you can see the profundity of certain actions that you do. But I didn't just get up and go. I'm a Capricorn. We are very organized people. We are not that spontaneous. We plan. I think that I was ready. My son was born in ‘92 and it was very clear for me that I didn't want to raise a Black boy in Western Europe in the late 20th century because of all the odds that he will be confronted with as a young Black boy and I always thought that my strength comes from my upbringing on the continent. My upbringing in Cameroon. That is where culturally I am. I was grounded and I was kind of formed in ways that gives me the strength to be the Black woman in the world that I am. As a young mother, I felt like, “No, there is no way I can give my son the tools and the weapons that he needs as a future Black man in this space, in the world,” and particularly in Western Europe. That was not the place. So I moved back on the continent not only, of course, because of the call of curatorial practice but also for really educational purposes of my son.

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: So let's talk about RAW Material Company. It started life as a mobile site in 2008 and then you established a permanent space in 2011. It's a center for knowledge, art, and society and it's been called a connection point across the world. You've said, “I work pretty much out of necessity, meaning that I do things that need to be done and that I haven't been done.” Why did you found it and what did you hope?

Koyo Kouoh: Well, I started RAW Material company because I felt very lonely as a curator or exhibition maker, and particularly with the kinds of practices that I was interested in back then, I'm still interested. I'm a faithful disciple of Issa Samb and, so conceptual art, process-based art is very much part of what fed me as a young curator, young exhibition maker. And I started RAW because I basically just felt hungry for criticality that brings back artistic practice into a solid, independent, valued social science that it is. 

So let me explain. I'm saying this because the hunger that I felt for that criticality, for that engagement with process-based, social practices because I was in Senegal with its beautiful history, you know, with Sango and the arts and all the narratives that we all know now with the 40% budget for education and culture, that [Léopold Ségdar] Senghor himself a poet, himself a super exhibition making curator of the national collection. And there was still, for me, not really a place for intense criticality and theoretical discursive work, except for it's a sound studio again that was looking and speaking to artistic practice from the perspective of society making, as opposed to just art for art's sake. So, RAW started to form in me in the early-2000 it took many years for it to materialize. We started with making theory and analysis and criticality available and a very simple contemporary art library that was open to the public. I collaborated a lot with the art school in Dakar and with young cultural journalists, so this is how RAW developed as a site for thinking, reading, writing, discussing art from a political and historical and critical perspective as opposed to, you know, the very poetic and lyricism which is very beautiful, but which is just not enough for me in terms of translating and mediating art.  And then we added a residency. We added a publication publishing program. We added a small exhibition program. And now I think that like any process of institution building, it takes time for any young arts organization to come to embody what they are meant to be for the society.  And RAW has come to its identity now, which is really to educate the next generations of young art professionals across the globe, of course, with a very particular focus on African diaspora. But I believe in global conversations. We've decidedly, you know, very clearly Pan-African stand but it's about the world and it's about us in the world. When I say ‘us,’ it's about humanity in the world.

Charlotte Burns: It's a really interesting model because it came out of need, your personal hunger, and then that translated into a much broader need, obviously, and is a much broader need. And I think there's a kind of ‘what if’ there, which is what if one person's need has a resonance that's much, much broader and deeper. And what if we have the patience and time to allow those complex conversations to unfold and turn into much larger institutions that can hold that space? If you could take anything from RAW, if someone is listening to the show and they feel that hunger. What advice would you give them? If they're thinking there's a ‘what if’ out there for them, what if they have a hunger that they wanna fill?

Koyo Kouoh: I would say that your desires are valid, that you are the other, the other is you. That the personal is public and the public is personal. So it's really what matters to you, matters to others as well and to believe in time. I learned many things with Issa Samb, but the most important matter that I dealt with in my life and work is time. To allow ourselves time to build those institutions, to allow ourselves time to dream those dreams, to allow ourselves time to make those projects that can take time sometimes, to allow ourselves room and time to spend time together. Advice that I give young practitioners, be them artists, aspiring curators, writers, the whole gamut, take the time. It's easier to say as to do but really, and the other thing that I also think is, we don't say enough in our field and we spend stupid energies competing and what have you, is that you're never too late. You're never too early. Whatever you do, you are always on time when it comes to art. Even if whatever you bring to the table has already been brought to the table by others, but the very fact that you bring it to the table at the moment that you bring it, makes it different, makes it unique, makes it on time. And this is something that nobody teaches anyone at art school or at whatever humanities, faculties. Time.

Charlotte Burns: As a Capricorn, I feel like you're probably quite good with time. You plan your time well. You mentioned the birth of your son as a transformative event. Was being a parent something that changed your approach to time and your career in that way?

Koyo Kouoh: Oh, completely, of course. Becoming a parent, it's a profoundly transformative phenomenon that can happen in someone's life. Definitely, it gives you completely sense of time because the very fact that you have to care for young humans, people who are completely dependent on you for such a long time until they can fly away themselves. So, yeah, time management, it's a skill that you need to learn, but I don't see it as rigorous as I am speaking now because the beauty about time as a matter of practice, like Issa used it is also the fact that it can be elastic. African philosophies have understood from since a very, very long time, times immemorial, that time is something elastic. As much as it's precious in terms of having it and using it wisely, but it's also something extremely malleable. It's also something extremely relatable, you know, relational. Now of course, that I'm getting older and can kind of look back, looking back is longer than looking forward. 

What I want to say is really that we need to take the time to do the things that are urgent, that are essential, that are necessary. And for me, building out institutions on the continent is a matter of urgency. And as much as it's urgent, it's also a space and a time space that provides so many possibilities.

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: So when people say that Zeitz MOCAA is the first major museum on the continent, what does that mean?

Koyo Kouoh: I call it the first and only syndrome. When it comes a lot to non-Western geographies, there is always the first and only African this, the first and only Brazilian this. You know, you never hear that about Western Euro America, so I always find it a little bit problematic. There is a problem there, but at the same time, Zeitz MOCAA is a groundbreaking initiative. It's one of the most important art initiatives on the continent over the past seven years. And I was saying that even before I became museum director. I mean, I didn't even think that that would become museum director because it was absolutely not in my plans and to go back to why Zeitz MOCAA is important—beyond, all these kind of PR kind of phrasing that we all read all the time—I think that Zeitz MOCAA is the result of 20 years of very intense, savvy, smart, systematic dynamic, curatorial practice and exhibition making and arts institution building work that has been done on the continent over the last 20 years before Zeitz MOCAA opened. So Zeitz MOCAA didn't come about, like my grandmother used to like to say, it didn't fall from the sky. Nobody falls from the sky. We all come from somewhere be it institution, be it people. We are all engendered in a specific way and I like to think of institution arts organizations as living bodies. So this cry for this museum has been there for a long time. If you look at, for instance, the work of an artist like Mescha Gaba. Mescha, a Beninese artist from Cotonou, in 1997 to 2001 has developed a project that was called The Museum of Contemporary African Art. It's a sprawling artwork made of multiple pieces. It's a huge installation piece that is a museum and that was his cry for a museum of contemporary art on the continent somehow. 

So yes, of course, Zeitz MOCAA is important. It's groundbreaking and unique, but it didn't fall from the sky. It came about because the time was ripe. The resources came together and the conversation was already felt and fueled by artists, writers, curators, a lot of different people from across the continent. People don't have this kind of insight around the landscape of art institutions on the continent and how they generate each other.

Charlotte Burns: You are taking the job is almost a kind of ‘what if’ too. A what if it can't fail? I read that you decided to take the job after conversations with Black colleagues. There was a feeling that we cannot let this fail. You said the scale and ambition is unique on the continent. Somebody had to take responsibility and make this museum live up to its rightful ambitions. And when you took it, you were interviewed and you said, “The challenges are high. I'm not naive,” and the reason it was in a crisis when you joined it, it opened to great fanfare. It was enormous support. People were very excited. And it was open to show the holdings of a private collector in a former grain silo in the city's harbor district. But just months later, faced crisis when the first director, Mark Coetzee was suspended for alleged misconduct in 2018, he was ultimately sacked.

He recently died. By the time you joined in 2019, the institution was suffering. There was a lack of funding, a lack of morale, a lack of staff, a lack of urgency, and a sense of goodwill that had been squandered and you made a joke saying, “Even though I was born on Christmas Day, I'm not a messiah.” [Laughs]  And so you joined this job that you didn't know you wanted, but that people had wanted you to take. And it was a sort of what if it cannot fail? It needed not to fail, and you needed to take this on. Talk me through what you were thinking at that time. It sounds like a lot.

Koyo Kouoh: Oh, it's a lot. And it's still a lot. I never had the ambition to be a museum director. I always saw myself as a very independent person pursuing ideas, and practices. I never wanted to be confined to these huge organizations or museums and, the bureaucracy and the heavy fundraising. I mean, I was really not attracted to that. I've received many proposals to run institutions and I always turn them down. However, Zeitz MOCAA was different, and this goes back to what I say, I do things that are urgent and necessary. 

The difference with Zeitz MOCAA was that its ambition, its scale, its location, its political surrounding and the fact that it was 2019. We are not talking 1975, we are not talking 1966 or any other time where the critical mass of art professionals, curators, writers, exhibition makers, critics, art historians, was not there on the continent, but it's here now. For me, it became a duty to salvage this institution. I was convinced that the failure of Zeitz MOCAA, if it had failed would've been the failure of all of us African art professionals in the field, somehow indirectly. So, that's one aspect. The other aspect was also that we cannot be thinking and talking about, you know, museum-making and wanting a contemporary art museums on the continent and not be part of the hard effort of making these institutions. After the early birthing pains, to use the term that my dear friend used around the early two years of Zeitz MOCAA and during birthing pains, people do all sort of erratic stuff. And I really felt that it is our responsibility. And I was asked, I thought about it very carefully because it meant a lot for me. Did I really want to move from Dakar to Cape Town? I loved Senegal, I loved Dakar, and I had a great life in Senegal. Do I want to live in South Africa, a very complex, country in our geography? So it meant a lot of transformation. Leave RAW? As a director and as a board member but all of that sort of came together in a very beautiful way for me because first of all, I always consider myself as an institution builder. The other point was that I had already started thinking is what is after all?  I'm really interested in setting infrastructure, setting organizations, art organizations on the continent that outlive the different generations of people and professionals that can work there. It was also for me very much a way to work against the project culture that was very prevalent in the African space when it comes to art. “Oh, I have a project here. I have a project. I have a project here.” It's kind of, you know, advantageous. And I really wanted to break that and to really open up the space more towards a more sustained activity towards arts and artists in a way that eventually, you know, lives or live beyond the idea of a project. We could not let this fail. We could not let the idea of that Zeitz MOCAA fail because we need this institution in our landscape. We need more Zeitz MOCAA. They don't necessarily have to have the same format but we need more of these institutions. So having one Zeitz MOCAA on the continent with 54 countries, over a billion people, it's like people are celebrating it as it's extraordinary. Yes, it's extraordinary, but it's still not enough. It's one, you know, so I have a very complex relationship to this idea of the only, the first. I say no, we need more. 

If we could have many more museums like this on the continent in every country, that's when we would start speaking a different language. But for now, I'm invested in making sites more the civic space that it ought to be.

[Musical interlude] 

Charlotte Burns: Thank you so much to Koyo. Join us next time for the second part of this episode where we delve much, much deeper.

This podcast is brought to you by Art&, the editorial platform created by Schwartzman&. The executive producer is Allan Schwartzman, who co-hosts the show together with me, Charlotte Burns of Studio Burns, which produces the series. 

Follow the show on social media at @artand_media.