Cameroonian Swiss curator Koyo Kouoh, the first African woman chosen to curate the Venice Biennale, died on May 10 at the age of fifty-seven. Kouoh was known for her transformative leadership of Cape Town’s Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (MOCAA), one of the continent’s largest contemporary art museums, and for her unflagging efforts in promoting the work of African artists. In 2023, Kouoh organized “When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting” at Zeitz MOCAA, bringing together works by over 150 Black artists from across the globe, including Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Cassi Namoda, Sungi Mlengeya, Zandile Tshabalala, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye; the show later traveled to Kunstmuseum Basel. This week, Artforum celebrates Kouoh’s life and work by revisiting her reflection on that exhibition and the power of Black self-representation, published just last year.
 
“I see curatorial work as a practice of mediating, a practice of unearthing, of translating,” Kouoh told Artforum contributor Phoebe Roberts. “I see my role as being at the service of artists first and foremost; I’m fascinated by the minds of artists, what drives them, what preoccupies them, what makes them think and do what they do. It’s about humanity at the end of the day,” she concluded. “It’s about people.”
—The editors

“In this Artforum Dossier, we have gathered texts that focus on artistic practices that reflexively engage with the specific materiality of celluloid—the transparent plastic that served as the most common substrate for moving images before the advent of analog and digital video. These practices typically focus less on storytelling than on the aesthetic possibilities of directly manipulating celluloid film stock, creating sequences of celluloid film frames, or running celluloid film strips through projectors. The results usually emphasize our perceptual experience of light, color, sound, pattern, movement, and space—that is, those elements that provide the language of all moving-image experiences.”
—Tina Rivers Ryan