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

For the second part of our interview with Koyo Kouoh, the chief curator and executive director of Zeitz MOCAA, we hear about how she has worked to overhaul the infrastructure of the institution internally as well as better connect the museum externally within Cape Town. Koyo talks about how “colonialism as an enterprise, as a model of global relating, has done a lot of harm that we are still mending and attending to.” She says: “That is a field of thinking, a space of emotion and knowledge that I am deeply passionate about. And that is why my investment in the space of Black geographies is so profound.”

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 is part two of our conversation with the chief curator and executive director of Zeitz MOCAA [Museum of Contemporary Art Africa], Koyo Kouoh. She talks about how she has worked to overhaul the infrastructure of the institution internally as well as to better connect the museum externally within Cape Town, and she shared her commitment to art education and nurturing future art professionals. And Koyo talks about how, as she says “the whole colonial enterprise continues to shape the world in such a profound way,’ causing “a lot of harm that we are still mending and attending to.” 

For Koyo, time itself is one of the most important materials we have and we need to take the time, she says “to do the things that are urgent, that are essential, that are necessary.” And “for me,” she says, “building out institutions on the continent is a matter of urgency.” So, let’s get back to Koyo and I as we talk about the beginning of her journey with Zeitz MOCAA and some big decisions.

Charlotte Burns: So when you were appointed, you overhauled how Zeitz MOCAA was run, and then of course you went straight into the pandemic. You used the lockdown when the museum was closed for seven months to restructure its governance. You also built out a global council as part of that governance. Can you talk us through the changes that you made immediately—some of them internal, some of them external—how you went about doing that, that kind of overhaul and where you are in the process now?

Koyo Kouoh: It's a long process. The process is not over. Of course, it's still going on. As you said, the museum started to talk with big fanfare, advertising itself as the museum with 100 galleries—I never understood what that meant. And the striking architecture of Thomas Hetherwick who transforms the grand silo is of course absolutely breathtaking. I have to say, no museum or gallery can only live off of its architectural beauty. It's important because it generates interest, it generates conversation but at the end of day, a museum's work is museum's work. It's about curatorial, it's about research, it's about publication, it's about writing new chapters of art histories. 

And my very urgent kind of was to bring in a curatorial program that is credible. The second part was, of course, to reorganize the spaces of the museum for them to be more accommodating to the kind of art that we wanted to bring. So, I broke a lot of walls because the museum was extremely intricated and the third part of course was governance. You know, because this is all the invisible work. 

So the work on governance took about two years to transform the whole board of trustees, to transform the different reporting systems, to transform the stakeholders, patronage, relationships and of course to bring more resources to the institution. There is this very weird kind of association that is made most of the time, particularly with museums that carry a name—people or assume that the name giver bankrolls the museum which is never the case. I mean, you have the case in the US with the Pérez [Art] Museum in Miami. I mean, Jorge [M.] Pérez doesn't completely bankroll Pérez Museum so why do people expect that or think that Jochen Zeitz is bankrolling the whole museum and on top of it, you know, I mean Jochen Zeitz is the name give of the museum and our seed collection was a gift from his family collection. But the museum is a real association between the [Victoria & Alfred] V&A Waterfront and Jochen Zeitz. And the V&A Waterfront is, as everybody knows, a real estate company that is in charge the transformation of the Cape Town harbour, so where the grand silos are and where the museum is. So the governance work and the curatorial exhibition program were really the first two urgencies.

But of course now, after five years, two of which, during Covid and a very difficult Covid time and lockdown in South Africa, I mean, how do you make a museum when you are closed for like nine months? You know? Because museum work is the quintessential work of, you know, convening and gathering and bringing people together. So, it was a very, very difficult time to think through the museum, but I'm Cameroonian, every challenge is like an opportunity. 

So, during that time that I could really spend a lot of time with my senior managers, the head of departments to really take the time to think about what kind of museum we want to make. 

Charlotte Burns: What if we had the time to think about the museum we wanted, what did you decide? What kind of museum did you want? How did you decide you wanted it to be run? What have you adopted from other museums? What are you doing differently?

Koyo Kouoh: I mean, there is no rocket science, in a lot of things. You cannot reinvent the wheel every time. There are certain practices that work and we thought very, very carefully about audience, audience development. What is audience? Do we owe something to the audience or not? And how in a city like Cape Town, which is a very, very particular city from its history, from geographic location from its, being, you know, at a southernmost tip of the continent, where two oceans come together, and also be the kind of point of entry for Dutch and Portuguese and British colonization into the continent in many ways. And of course, the more contemporary history of South Africa that is quite complex, problematic, and difficult, up to today. 

So I was very much interested in understanding how the museum relates to Cape Town itself, not even to South Africa as such but to Cape Town itself because when I came in 2019, I had the sense that the museum hadn't landed yet with Cape Town or in Cape Town. It is there but was not there yet. It was physically there, but it was not emotionally and intellectually there with the people who live and work in and around Cape Town and I really wanted to connect the museum to the people because I think that any arts organization is only as valid as its relationship with its immediate environment.

Charlotte Burns: So you established a couple of things, a local residency. You had the exhibition Home Is Where the Art Is, Art is Where the Home Is coming out of the lockdown. That's not the kind of exhibition that you are so known for doing. How did that change the way you think about the museum and exhibition-making?

Koyo Kouoh: When I came here, I wanted to bring process and experimentation to the museum. It was key to me that we bring this level of unfinished, this level of messiness, and this level of exploration, experimentation as a matter to engage with by the audience. And we launched the Atelier, the museum residency program to provide artists with space to experiment, to engage with the public while they are experimenting, to provide the visitors some form of insight into the process of art making. 

The Atelier project is very dear to me because I think that there is this kind of disconnect that a lot of visual arts spaces globally have with the audience or with the public that a lot of people say, “I don't understand it. I don't get it. It's too complicated” and the language that we use in it's so hermetic. People don't get it and nobody wants to look stupid, right? Because of all the concepts and ideas that we play with in our work. I always find it extremely…how can I say? Not sad, but unfinished, so to speak. When you don't see the process of art making in the museum, you already see the finished product. And I love commissions. I love developing ideas with artists. So I wanted to bring that to a way that provides the artist or the artist collective that we invite with possibilities and opportunities and space and time. But at the same time also providing the visitors with some form of understanding and insight into an artistic process.

So the Atelier is a dedicated space of some 500, 600 square meters. It's an entire wing of level two galleries at the museum where we invite an artist—at this point that focused on artists who live and work in Cape Town. And it's a massive studio that you get for six to nine months to develop new ideas, to experiment with other forms, to produce new work, to engage with the public in a way that you wouldn't necessarily in a non-public space and we have had an insane, incredible resonance for that program from the artists, from the visitors. 

The first artist who we invited Kemang Wa Lehulere who's an incredible Cape Town artist whose work is very much around the kind of transformation and translation of the educational history of South Africa. Unfortunately, Kemang, his Atelier period was supposed to be December 2019 to June 2020 and Covid came in and his residency transformed very radically, followed by Haroon Gunn-Salie, who's also of course a Cape Town artist whose work is very much also around memory, history, politics, and followed by Igshaan Adams, an incredibly talented artist who is gaining a lot of acclaim recently, deservedly so.

The connections that you can build by providing that space for artists. A lot of other museums have some form of residency program, but they are usually somewhere in the 15th floor, in the basement, or somewhere. It's not in the space. Like, we are putting it in the space like that. So I think that that is transformation, that is different.

[Musical interlude] 

The other thing that I'm very, very, invested in doing is also bringing art education to underserved communities, communities that don't necessarily have access to art education. We are starting a mobile museum very soon that will go to a whole network of community art centers and normal schools. With the stratification of South Africa and the legacy of segregation, of course, that is still very fresh in South Africa, there are various levels of access. The curriculum that is always scrapped everywhere so our Center for Art Education that is led by I think arguably one of the best education director that any museum can dream of is works very, very closely with, for instance, the Western Cape Education Board to supplement material to our teachers. All our exhibitions are always translated into kind of a compendium for art education in schools. 

I'm very committed to transmission. I'm very committed to, you know, passing the batton, as you say, passing the knowledge, producing the knowledge, and passing that knowledge. And I always say that I feel extremely privileged, lucky, honored to be from a continent that has created humanity, but also a continent that basically has created forms and aesthetics for the world in many ways. So we will never be short of brilliant artists, but we are short of mediators, and I see exhibition-making as a mediating practice. It's a translating practice. It's a generative practice. It's a space of transition to something else. 

So, young art professionals on the continent need more opportunities to learn, to grow professionally. And this is why we started the museum fellowship program in collaboration with the University of the Western Cape, which is the traditionally Black university of Cape Town. Young professionals are selected for a 12-month fellowship at the museum. It's like a postdoc and postgrad, get an degree from the center humanities research and they work towards a thesis. It's unique on the continent to have something like that at the museum. And we want to develop it on a Pan-African. It's already Pan-African, now we are in our third year and we take five to seven fellows every year. And the program is supported by the amazing [Andrew W.] Mellon Foundation that there so many miracles for so many institutions across the globe. And the idea is to expand it, of course to a pan-diasporic programs. So, eventually we will also welcome young fellows from the US, from Brazil, from Cuba, from the complex, the multitudes of Black geographies. 

Charlotte Burns: You've said that Zeitz is unapologetically and decisively a Pan-African pan-diasporic museum’ “I'm adamant about it. We are building our own voice, our own language,” and I wanted to talk to you a little bit about geography. I'm really interested in your sense of geography, I was really interested, for instance, in your curation of Ireland’s contemporary art biennial [EVA International], and you talked about Ireland as being a post-colonial country and how it could be read as a laboratory for the consequences of imperialism. My family's Irish, I'm born in Britain, I lived in America. So I obviously am interested in what you have to say about that, and I was interested in that biennial. I know you recently took a long trip through the American South, and I was curious how that changed your perspective or informed your perspective about thinking about the African continent and its history with the US. You've obviously spent a lot of time in Europe, and when you did the Ireland biennial, you talked about the links between Europe and Africa and thinking about that. 

So geography is obviously something you are so specifically in dialogue with through your practice, and through your life and where you've lived. And this idea of in your work of where you live now, you've said your status in South Africa as a foreigner, a condition central to your identity ever since you left Cameroon might be useful in terms of the conversations you are able to have and think about and introduce to locals. And so your sense of geography seems so specific to your work, to your practice, and to your identity. So I wanted to talk to you about geography in terms of your practice and the way you think about it and then moving from there to this idea of diaspora and a kind of Pan-Africa identity that you bring that I know is so inspiring so many other people. 

Koyo Kouoh: I, of course I am curious about the world. I…how can I put it? I wonder…It's a very interesting question actually. I wonder whether my interest is really geography as opposed to race and colonialism that is very much entangled with geography as well. And I think that it is more colonialism that of course, feeds into the different kind of understanding of locations, geographical kind of movements, and the whole colonial enterprise, how it has shaped the world and continues to shape the world in such a profound way. And at the same time, the sort of discrepancy between the effects of colonialism on different geographies and how the former colonizing spaces, so adamantly reluctant to recognize what the colonial enterprise is, was, and continues to be and what and how it's so profoundly affecting the lives of people. We see it currently live on TV for three months. 

So that's just one example. And this is also how when I was invited to create an Irish biennial in a year that was celebrating the centenary of Easter Rising, I was just like, how many people know about Easter rising and how it relates to the world and how it relates to the entire British colonial enterprise? How many people are really actively conscious that Ireland was the first laboratory of everything that the British Empire did in the world to people? And this is also why I conceptualize the biennial exactly around Ireland as a post-colonial space, Ireland as a kind of primary laboratory of colonial experience and how Ireland as a country is interestingly, completely somehow erased from the global post-colonial discourse, whereas the global post-colonial discourse should always start in Ireland somehow. 

This was my take on this. And I believe, I believe in movement of… how can I put it? Of spirits and of emotions and of energies, let me call it energies. And these are spaces and frames of references that very often are not taken seriously, very often are relegated to lesser important kind of thematic or ideas. But if you look at the Atlantic space for instance, that is so important to the narrative of Blackness of the continent and not just of Blackness, but I mean the Atlantic in general, which is so important to all the countries that are related to that space. I believe the very fact that 500 years later, after all the atrocities, we are still grappling with the very essence of who we are as Black people in the world. Even after Barack Obama being president of the United States for eight years says a lot about the very fact that colonialism as an enterprise, as a model of global relating or global relationships has done a lot of harm that we are still mending and attending to. And that is something that I'm passionate about, that is a field of thinking, a space of emotion and knowledge that I am deeply passionate about and that is why my interest…is not the right word, but my investment actually in the space of Black geographies is so profound, and it's so continuous because I strongly believe that of course, Blackness is different everywhere. That it exists and manifests. The history of African Americans is not a history of Afro-Cubans. It's not a history of Afro-Brazilians. It's not a history of Afro-Colombians is not a history of Senegalese and Nigerian, the Kenyan or South African. But at the end of the day, we are all Black and we are subjected more or less to the same conditioning that colonialism and whiteness has established. And we are all struggling to unpacking and disentangling all of that in many ways. 

So, my sense of geography stems actually from that. And the more I think about it, the more I work in that space, the more I also understand it as a structure of, of course, of oppression as a structure of exploitation, as a structure of traction that continues today, and how it has related not only and has it has played that not only on the continent of Africa, but also in Southeast Asia. You know, I work with a lot with artists in Vietnam and Bangladesh and in India, and of course in the Middle East as well. And when you start having a comparative look of the multiple manifestations of colonialism, geography is central to that. 

So, to make a long landing to the American South, I've always loved the south of the US as a place. I love the air in the South. I love the low country. I love the food. I love, I love the light. I love everything about the South of the United States and it's a place that I always visited, but I haven't been there for a while. And this recent kind of research trip that I did with my dear colleague from the New York Times, Siddhartha Mitter, it was really for us a way to, how can I say it? To reconnect with those relationships and flows of Blackness that are not necessarily tangible. You cannot necessarily put your finger on it. You can only feel it. You can only see it when you know all the other spaces. So for instance, arriving in South Carolina, visiting the low countries, driving and visiting throughout the entire Gullah Geechee corridor and each time you felt like I'm somewhere in Senegal, or you felt like I'm somewhere in Cameroon, or arriving in the middle of Alabama, going to visit the Gee’s Bend ladies and realizing that they all look like your aunt or your cousin from Cameroon. These are things that we don't take enough time to deal with and this is a pity. We need to deal with that. We need to deal with that immaterial, intangible space of connection that is intersectingly and even somehow inherent to Black culture everywhere. And that's my interest in that.

Charlotte Burns: So I wanted to ask you, what is the ‘what if’ that keeps you awake at night? And what is the ‘what if’ that gets you out of bed in the morning?

Koyo Kouoh: I think everything keeps me awake. I'm not a big sleeper. I sleep very badly anyway. [Laughs] So there is no ‘what if,’ whatever, I'm just an insomniac. 

I think what gets me out of bed every morning is the joy of of serving art and artists because, I think that fundamentally that is what I do. I like to see myself as someone who serves artists first and foremost, and art of course. And I think that it is of course, extremely urgent. We all need more art, more poetry, more music, more dance, more food, more time in our lives and I am honestly extremely, extremely concerned and even worry about how the system has developed, even though we are all part of it in some way. And I think that what if everybody would really understand the importance and the urgency and the value of art in our lives to make it integral and not accessory and only integral for the professional. And when you think of it from a Negro African perspective of artistic practice, it has always been total and always multidisciplinary, and always part of daily life in a cyclical way, in an intentional way in terms of artistic practice and transmission and so on. 

So, I really would love a place where art or artistic practice is less commodified. And I know that museums participate very much in the commodification, but I think that the kinds of museum formats that can be developed, here and there, can contribute to this less understanding of art as a commodity, because it's not, it shouldn't necessarily be. And I really wishfully, hope that more people will come to the party in ways that sustained arts institutions, in ways that sustained artistic practice, in ways that encourages a young person somewhere on the continent—or anywhere else for the matter—to pursue an artistic or a creative career without thinking that it's kind of useless or that there are too fewer opportunities out there for that and become a marketing and a communication specialist and a manager. I mean, how many managers are out there who have been brilliant artists? We don't know, but they are out there. So I think that that is my ‘what if.’

Charlotte Burns: Thank you enormously. I could keep you all day selfishly. But I won't. I'm so thrilled you made the time for us. Thank you very, very much. It's been a wonderful conversation.

Koyo Kouoh: Thank you.​

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: My huge thanks to Koyo Kouoh. What an interesting and inspiring conversation. Next time we’ll be talking to our very first repeat guest, Kemi Ilesanmi, the former executive director of The Laundromat Project—who’s just returned from a year spent travelling the world and who’s holding her promise to come back and tell us all about how it’s changed her ‘what if’s.

Kemi Ilesanmi: I'm actually looking for freedom of movement and freedom of ideas and freedom of manifestation of those ideas, and right now, it feels like I can only find that by working outside of any singular institution.

Such a frank and revealing conversation to come. That’s next time on The Art World: What If…?! 

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.