BOEMO DIALE IN VOGUE

When I met Koyo Kouoh earlier this year, the Investec Cape Town Art Fair had flooded the city with curators, collectors,artists, and admirers. At Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA), where Kouoh had reigned as director since 2019, she was in the middle of hosting, chairing, and orchestrating a week that pulsed with creative momentum.

She arrived a few minutes late—unsurprising, given her high demand. Still, she walked in like someone who knew exactly what time it was. No wasted movements, no small talk. There was a cadence to her focus that felt boardroom sharp, perhaps a holdover from her former life in finance. The conversation opened like a ledger: direct, deliberate, and structured.

But then we spoke of art, and the edges softened.

When we reached the subject of community, artists on the continent, and the work happening in Cape Town, Dakar, and across the African diaspora, her posture shifted, her voice warmed, and her eyes brightened. You could feel it then: the depth of Kouoh’s love for this world she helped build, not just as a curator or cultural gatekeeper but as someone who had devoted her life to creating room for others to thrive.

We spoke about the need to celebrate artists locally before seeking recognition abroad (as she put it: “We have to see ourselves first”); about staying rooted, even when the winds of relevance and ambition try to lift you off the ground; and about the importance of keeping hubris in check—how one must always remain focused on the work, not on the noise that surrounds it.

It struck me that day—and still does, in the wake of Kouoh’s sudden death, at just 57, over the weekend—that for someonewho had ascended to the most visible heights of the art world (she had recently been named curator of the 2026 VeniceBiennale), Kouoh moved with the soul of someone who never forgot why she started. She didn’t chase legacy; she nurtured it. “There are so many urgencies,” she said. “You just have to do the work.” 

South Africa and the artists working within it became one of the mirrors Kouoh helped to polish. Through Zeitz MOCAA, she nurtured not just an institution but an atmosphere, one that let artists go inward and create not merely for spectacle but truth.

Kouoh felt that physically having the room to make art was effectively as vital as the creation itself. “The artistic space,” she said, “is a space of freedom, of the imaginary. It gives you room to breathe, reflect, and project.”

That ethos lives on in the artists she championed, like Zizipho Poswa, whose work is sculpted in silence and spirit. In herstudio, the sacred becomes architectural, shaped by the Xhosa concept of umsamo. Poswa’s ceramics rise like offerings—monuments echoing the feminine, the ancestral, and the ceremonial.

The world-building of Kamohelo Blessing Rooi is just as reverent. Though newly arrived to the practice of painting, Rooi carries with him a clarity of purpose, each of his figures encased in a universe of vivid patterns and purposeful silhouettes. “Fashion is the armour we wear to face the world,” he tells me. “In these spaces, I envision my work as a mirror.”

During her Zeitz MOCAA residency—realized under Kouoh’s direction—Berni Searle opened her own process to the public. Modelling vulnerability, she made her body a canvas, turning her photographic lens on herself as an invitation to examine what’s inherited and buried and what remains.

Igshaan Adams, another program alum, reflects: “I make art because I have the impulse to do so. The impulse is there, and it wants to happen.” To work is to surrender—a process echoed in Boemo Diale’s paintings, themselves shaped by memory, lineage, and the quiet codes of the domestic. “I watched women beautify, sulk, and laugh,” Diale says. “That’s what I paint.”

Each of these artists draws a thread back to Kouoh; to the belief that the interior is political, that the private can be profound, and that to see oneself is to begin to change everything. Kouoh also believed that institutions should facilitate development and growth. Through the Atelier program and residencies like Adams and Searle’s, she created frameworks where process mattered as much as outcome and where artists could settle without the pressure to perform.

Yet in Kouoh’s philosophy, an artist’s presence should not be confined to the gallery. You see this in the work of Elise Wessels, whose mural for Rooi (a restaurant at the handsomely appointed One&Only hotel on the V&A Waterfront) does not hang in hushed reverence. Created with designer Inge Moore, it lives amid wine glasses and the patter of conversation.“We wanted something with an African rhythm,” Moore says. Wessels delivered it with delicate line work and a layered story.

“I create for those who enjoy looking just below the surface,” Wessels tells me. And that’s what Kouoh asked of us too. To look deeper. To stay longer. To honour the art that does not ask for attention but deserves it. And in her absence, the artists she championed continue—to create not for applause but for alignment, to build spaces that nourish, and to tell stories that begin at home.

We return to her words: “We have to see ourselves first.” Because what we see from within is the only vision that doesn’t blur with time.

In this story: Styling, Alexander-Julian Gibbson. Photo assistant, Jesse Jewels. Fashion assistants, Nkosazana Heshu and Lesedi Seleke. Location, Zeitz MOCAA. Special thanks to SmartFlyer.